“But you must go back and fill a plate for yourself,” Percy said kindly, “before all the food is gone. Though there does seem to be an abundance of it. Mrs. Kramer and her daughters have done us proud. I trust you enjoyed the recitals?”
Wenzel looked speakingly at the lady before murmuring something indecipherable, bowing, and moving off.
“Thank you,” Lady Barclay said.
“Oh, it was nothing, ma’am,” Percy assured her. “Procuring you a plate took no effort at all.”
And she laughed.
It was a ghastly shock. It almost knocked him off his chair and onto the floor.
It was a brief laugh that lit up her whole face with amusement, gave an impression of dazzling, vibrant beauty, and was gone without a trace.
And it left him with the shocking realization that he wanted to make love to her.
It was fortunate—very fortunate—that conversation had become general and that Sir Matthew Quentin was asking his opinion on what appeared to be a matter of interest to everyone.
“And you, Hardford,” he said, “what is your opinion on smuggled brandy?”
Since there was no liquor in sight, Percy assumed it was an academic question. “Undoubtedly it is usually of a superior quality,” he said. “However, the fact that it has been brought into the country illegally makes it a forbidden delight.”
It seemed to him that almost everyone smirked as though he had just uttered something witty, and by doing so had been admitted to membership of a secret club.
“Ah, but are not forbidden fruits always the sweetest?” the dandyish young Mr. Soames asked.
His father frowned at him, two of his sisters tittered, and the Misses Kramer looked shocked. The third Soames sister and one of the Boodle girls put their ringleted heads together over by the pianoforte and giggled behind the fan one of them held open.
“Quite so,” Percy said, nodding genially in the direction of the young man, who would undoubtedly be on the receiving end of his father’s wrath later tonight.
Lady Quentin began a determined discussion of the varying merits of Chinese and Indian tea.
Percy, listening with half an ear, was making connections. Smuggled brandy. Smugglers. Cornwall, specifically the southern coast of Cornwall.
“Is there any smuggling activity hereabouts?” he asked the ladies on the way home.
“Not much now,” Lady Lavinia said into a silence that lasted a beat too long. “There used to be, I believe, during the wars.”
“But there still is some?”
“Oh, it is possible, I suppose,” she said, “though I have not heard of any.”
“And there is nothing even vaguely romantic about it,” Lady Barclay added.
“Romantic?” He turned to face her as far as he was able given the narrow confines of the carriage seat. Not that he could see her clearly even then. It was a dark night and the carriage lamp was throwing its light forward rather than back.
“Smugglers, pirates, highwaymen,” she said. “They are often glamorized as rather dashing heroes.”
“Carrying off the swooning heroine lashed to the mast of the ship or thrown over the back of the horse or tossed over a man’s shoulder and carried by superhuman strength to the top of a sheer cliff?” he said. “You are not a romantic, Cousin Imogen?”
Mrs. Ferby snorted.
“Not on the subject of bullies and criminals and cutthroats,” Lady Barclay said.
He continued to look her way in the darkness. There had been real bitterness in her voice.
“But is he not always the wronged son of a duke?” he asked her. “The eldest son, that is, and is he not, through seemingly suicidal acts of great derring-do, setting the world to rights and clearing his name and winning the undying love of the sweet damsel in distress, who is quite possibly a princess, and, as a final reward, being restored to his inheritance and his father’s bosom and marrying the princess and living happily ever after?”
Mrs. Ferby snorted again. “One must give the man his due, Lavinia,” she said. “He has a sense of humor.”
“You ought to be writing for the Minerva Press,” Lady Barclay said.
He wondered if she was smiling, even if only inwardly. It would be a worthy, heroic thing to do, he thought, to make this woman laugh again as she had laughed at the Kramer house, and to make her do it again and again. Perhaps he ought to make it his life’s mission. Would it be an achievable goal, though? He half smiled in the darkness. Sometimes one wondered where such absurd fancies came from. He must still be horribly bored.
According to the older ladies, it was dreadfully late when they arrived home. According to the grandfather clock in its splendid old case in the hall, it was not quite eleven o’clock. Percy bade the ladies good night, ascertained from Crutchley that a fire had been lit in the library, and took himself off there for a read and a drink before going to bed for sheer lack of anything more interesting to do.