Goddess of the Hunt (The Wanton Dairymaid Trilogy #1)

Jeremy took a breath and began again, slowly. As though speaking to a cow. “Lucy knows Toby is planning to marry Miss Hathaway.”


Felix let out a low whistle. “That is a problem.”

“Which one of you told her?” Toby asked, sounding faintly peeved.

“It wasn’t me,” Felix said.

“Icertainly didn’t.” Henry frowned. “Are you sure she knows, Jem?”

Jeremy paused. He couldn’t very well tell them how he knew that Lucy knew. There was no good way to tell Henry that his sister had visited his bedchamber in her dressing gown. There was no way at all to explain what had happened next. “There are four ladies in the house,” he said with a shrug. “You know how ladies talk. She must know. And now that she knows—”

“She’s jealous,” Felix finished.

“Exactly. She’s jealous.” Jeremy took a triumphant swallow of brandy, pleased to finally hang that label where it rightly belonged.

“So she’s jealous,” said Henry. “I don’t see why there’s any call todo something about it.”

Jeremy shook his head. Could there be another man so thick-skulled in all England? How Henry had managed to get through Eton and Cambridge, Jeremy couldn’t guess. Actually, the answer was obvious. By sticking close to Jeremy. Not that Jeremy had begrudged him the assistance. Since their first year at Eton, Henry had been a friend.

Jeremy’s choice of friends had given his father fits, if one could call the slight twitch of the jaw that preceded a monotone lecture a “fit.” He could still hear the cool disdain in his voice.Warrington , he had intoned after Jeremy’s first year at Eton,it escapes me utterly why you should choose to surround yourself with that collection of miserable, low-born scamps. Who are their fathers? Tradesmen? Farmers? Not a title among them, save a mere baronet. You are in every way their superior, and if you tolerate their company at all, you should at least insist they address you by your title .

But that was just it. Jeremy had not wanted to consort with other boys of his rank, nor be addressed as “Warrington”—the title that, in Jeremy’s ten-year-old mind, still belonged to his older brother. Why should he suffer constant reminders of Thomas’s death, when he could play with boys who knew nothing of it? Boys like Henry, Felix, and Toby.

Good friends, the three of them, but Henry most of all. Henry didn’t allow him to sit brooding in his club when there was a prizefight to see, any more than he allowed him to stew at home over a failed wheat harvest when there were trout to be netted. Without stooping to methods so grating as cheerfulness, Henry simply refused to indulge his darker moods. But the same qualities that made him a valued friend made Henry a miserable excuse for a guardian. Now that Jeremy began to see what that blithe irreverence was costing Lucy, his humor was growing black indeed.

“You know how persistent Lucy can be when she sets her mind to something,” he said testily. “She’s going to throw herself at Toby at every opportunity. This afternoon she missed and hit the river instead. She’s like to do herself in, and take a few of us with her.”

“And what, precisely, do you recommend I do?” Henry asked.

“Not you,” Jeremy said. “Toby.”

“Oh, no.” Alarm flared in Toby’s eyes. “I’m not havingthat conversation with Lucy. I take no pleasure in breaking young ladies’ hearts.”

The other three stared at him.

“Well, I don’t,” he said defensively. “Of late.”

“You don’t have to break her heart.” Jeremy was becoming exasperated. “At least, not to her face. You just have to propose to Miss Hathaway. Once you’re engaged, Lucy will be forced to give up this absurd notion of seduc—distractingyou.”

“I shall be perfectly happy to propose marriage to Miss Hathaway,” said Toby. “At theend of our holiday.”

“Why the end?” asked Felix. “Kitty’s been after me daily, asking when you’re finally going to propose to Sophia. She thinks you’ve got the gout, you’re so reluctant to bend a knee.”

“I may as well be infirm, for all the fun I’ll have once I’m engaged,” Toby said. “I can’t very well bag a bride in the morning and a pheasant that same afternoon. Once I’ve asked for her hand, I’ll have a hundred things to do. Go apply to her father in Kent. See my solicitor in Town. Make appointments with my tailor. Retrieve my grandmother’s ring from Surrey. I’ll be running all over England like a Norman invader, and that will spell the end of all amusement.”

“What rot,” Henry said. “Felix and I are both married, as you see, and we manage a bit of sport despite it.”

“Yes, but you’remarried,” Toby replied. “A married woman likes nothing better than to be left alone. A betrothed woman won’t leave a man be. I’ll be obliged to take ambling strolls in the garden and read poetry over tea, when I ought to be tramping through the woods, taking nips off a flask of whiskey.”