The conversation that had reached a steady hum as the soups were brought in faltered abruptly when the first spoonfuls reached unsuspecting lips. Potage imperatrice was a thickened bouillon. Potage fontanges was, if one must be blunt about it, a soup made from pureed peas. But the looks of amazement on his guests’ faces would have one believe that they’d been given sips from the Fountain of Youth.
She’d outdone herself. He didn’t know how it was possible, but the flavors of the soups were more fierce and more seductive than anything he’d ever tasted. He was robbed of speech, almost of thoughts altogether. The only thing left to him was a hot, brutal grief, and a relentless wish that it didn’t need to end this way—swift and merciless.
His guests’ silence was the one small mercy of the evening. Beside him the dowager duchess ate carefully, soundlessly, the expression on her face halfway between pain and bliss.
Toward the end of the course, the conversation tentatively resumed. No one spoke of the food—the experience was too strange, too unnerving for a roomful of good, solid Englishmen and -women who’d never had their attention commandeered by mere dinner. Instead, they murmured distractedly of the weather and the deteriorating congestion of the roads.
That fledgling conversation ground to a halt each time a new course landed on the table. The hush that descended was half-astounded, half-reverent. There were startled gasps when the paté chaud came around. Even something as mundane as an ice to clear the palate between the courses received solemn, undivided attention.
By the time Madame Durant’s variation of the bombe glacée arrived on the table, layered, in deference to the weather, not with ice creams but with vanilla custard, chestnut cream, and chocolate mousse, all the good breeding and restraint represented at Stuart’s table were barely enough to hold back his guests from launching themselves face-first into their desserts.
He held himself together only with the training of a lifetime.
When they had demolished the bombe glacée, Lizzy, at the far end of the table, came to her feet. One by one, the other ladies left their seats, slow and dazed. The last person to follow Lizzy’s lead was the dowager duchess. She remained where she was and gazed into her empty plate. For a shocked moment, Stuart thought there were tears in her eyes.
Then she rose, straight and regal, and departed the table.
In the drawing room, while she waited for the gentlemen to join them, Lizzy had to dance attendance on the dowager duchess.
She’d once tried to ingratiate herself with the duchess—then not yet dowager, as her husband still had been alive. To say she was unsuccessful was to call the Thames somewhat muddled. The duchess had let her have it with an icy majesty that had infuriated, humiliated, and impressed her all at once.
The duchess was not a chatty woman. After scant minutes, Lizzy had already exhausted her own limited capacity for monologues. Since she’d received countless unsolicited advice concerning her married life from women who barely knew her, she thought perhaps the duchess might warm up to a request for instructions.
“I’m to be married soon, Madame. I should dearly love to hear your wisdom on the subject of marriage—and husbands,” she said.
“You are not me, Miss Bessler, and you are not marrying my late husband,” said the dowager duchess. “I do not see how my experience could be of any relevance to you.”
“No, indeed,” Lizzy murmured. At least let it be said that she was dressed down by the best.
But then the dowager duchess regarded her a minute. “I have not congratulated you on your impending marriage, have I?”
It was the first time the duchess had ever expressed any kind of interest in Lizzy’s person. She was flustered in spite of—or precisely because of—her fear and awe of the old woman. “No, Madame, I do not believe so.”
“Since you accepted Mr. Somerset’s proposal before his brother passed away and left him Fairleigh Park, I see you’ve finally gained enough sense to appreciate a good man for what he is.”
“I certainly hope so,” said Lizzy, not quite sure whether she’d been praised or insulted by the peeress.
The dowager duchess smiled. “You still believe that I refused to let my son marry you because your father had no title.”
“That was what you yourself told me, Madame.”
“That was a reason you could understand. I forbade the match because you did not care enough for my son. He is kind and gentle. And as such, he deserves a woman who loves him, rather than one who merely sees him as a means to an end.”
Lizzy could say nothing in her own defense. It was exactly how she’d seen Tin, a sweet, malleable chap and the perfect conduit of her own ambitions.
“I imagine I’d have done the same were I his mother,” she said.
The door to the living room opened. The gentlemen had arrived. Her fiancé, after a moment of almost obvious hesitation, came toward them.