A scowling, middle-aged man stared back at him in the mirror. He'd never been exactly handsome, but in his prime he'd been quite something to behold, always impeccably coiffed and garbed, always with the most desirable women of the upper echelon draped over his arms.
Fifteen years in the country and suddenly he was a bumpkin. His clothes were a decade out of fashion. He'd forgotten how to pomade his hair. And he was fairly certain that he no longer remembered how to seduce a woman. Seduction was a matter of mind. A man one hundred percent certain of himself had women eating out of his hand. A man eighty percent certain of himself had only pigeons eating out of his hand.
And this eighty percent man, for reasons listed only on the devil's tail, had invited Mrs. Rowland to tea— tea!—as if he were some fluttery little old lady looking forward to a bit of crumpet and gossip.
Or, worse, as if he were some sentimental sap seeking to turn back the clock thirty years.
His valet returned with a deep-green waistcoat, the color of a densely wooded valley. Langford shrugged into it, determined to stick with this particular selection whether he looked a prince or a frog. He looked neither, just a perturbed, confounded, and slightly apprehensive man who hadn't exactly let himself go nor exactly kept himself up.
It would have to do, he supposed.
Her landau pulled up before the manor at Ludlow Court at exactly two minutes past five. Beneath her lace parasol, she looked as dainty and prim as the queen's own teacup. Her choice of attire—an afternoon gown of pearl and pale blue—pleased him. He liked the creams and pastels that predominated her wardrobe, colors of an eternal spring, though had someone asked him during his man-about-town days, he'd have decreed such hues much too pedestrian.
He welcomed her himself, presenting his ungloved hand for her support as she alit from the carriage. She was both pleased and somewhat nonplussed—good, that made two of them.
“I called on you a few weeks ago, Your Grace,” she said, half coyly, half challengingly. “You were not home.”
They both knew he'd been home. But only he knew that he'd watched her from the window of an upper floor, in a mixture of exasperation and fascination. “Shall we to tea?” he said, offering his arm.
By ducal standards, Ludlow Court was more than modest, it was downright humble. A long time ago, in his twenties, Langford had been invited to Blenheim Palace. As his carriage approached that great edifice from a distance, he'd been consumed by an overwhelming sense of inadequacy: Compared to the colossus that was the Marlboroughs' ancestral estate, his own seat seemed merely a glorified vicar's cottage.
Blenheim Palace's facade of grandeur, however, quickly proved just that, a facade, or, to be more precise, an illusion. For as his conveyance drew near to the house, the facade itself turned out to be in a state of advanced ill-repair. Inside the great mansion, the curtains were molded and full of holes, the walls dark from badly maintained flues, and the ceiling water-stained in practically every room—this after the family had sold the famed Marlborough gems to help matters. A few years after his visit, the seventh duke had had to petition parliament to break entail so that the whole contents of the house could be auctioned off to defray family debts.
In contrast, the manor at Ludlow Court was a jewel box, a diminutive but perfect example of Palladian architecture with lucid, elegant lines, beautiful proportions, and an interior that Langford had been able to maintain—and occasionally update—with relative ease.
But as he passed through the anteroom and the grand entrance, with Mrs. Rowland's hand barely touching his arm, he wondered what she thought of it. Her current residence might be little larger than a hunting lodge, but he understood that she'd previously lived in a much grander place, one larger than his own and likely more modern and more lavishly furnished, given her late husband's fortune.
“You have rebuilt the terrace,” said Mrs. Rowland, almost as soon as they entered the south drawing room. One side of the room overlooked the terraced slope at the rear of the house, leading down to the spread of formal, geometric gardens and the small lake beyond. “Her Grace used to fret about it.”
“Did she?” Yet something else he didn't know about his own mother.
“Yes, rather. But she chose not to repair it so as not to disturb your father in his illness,” Mrs. Rowland said. “She was a very good woman.”
That, he'd realized only too late. In his proud adolescent years, he'd secretly thought his mother too frumpy and countrified, possessing none of the regality and glamour befitting the consort of a prince of the realm. Her anxious love he'd borne as if it were a millstone about his neck, little suspecting that he'd be adrift without it.