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.
Inevitably there were animals in the room—two cats on the hearth and Hector under the desk. Percy ignored them.
He was pouring himself some port at the sideboard when the door opened and Lady Barclay stepped inside. She had shed her cloak and bonnet and donned a woolen shawl over that fetching blue evening dress of hers. It was not elaborately styled. None of her dresses was that he had seen. They did not need to be, though. She had the most perfect figure he had ever seen. Not that anything could be most perfect or even more perfect, since perfect was an absolute in itself. He could hear that explanation in the voice of one of his tutors.
“Wine?” he asked her.
“Why was Mr. Tidmouth at my house this afternoon?” she asked him. “And why were there six workmen with him? Why has the cost of the new roof dropped in half?”
Ah.
“Wine?” he asked again.
She took a few steps in his direction. She had come to do battle, he could see. She did not answer his question.
“My house?” he said. “As in yours? I still maintain that it is mine, Lady Barclay, though you may live in it with my blessing until your eightieth year if you so choose, or your ninetieth should you live so long. After that we will renegotiate.”
“You went to see him.” She took another step closer. “You ranted at him. You threatened him.”
He raised his eyebrows. She looked rather magnificent when she was angry. Anger put some color in her cheeks and a sparkle in her eyes.
“Ranted?” he said faintly, closing one hand about the handle of his quizzing glass—not the jeweled one—and raising it halfway to his eye. “Threatened? You wrong me, ma’am, I do assure you.”
“Oh.” Her eyes narrowed. “I suppose you just played haughty aristocrat.”
“Played?” Briefly he raised the glass all the way to his eye. “But what is the point of being an aristocrat, ma’am, if one cannot also play at being what one is? I do assure you, it renders rants and threats quite unnecessary. Underlings, in which category I number roofers, quite wilt in the presence of hauteur and a jeweled quizzing glass and a lace-edged handkerchief.”
“You had no right.” She had taken yet more steps closer.
“On the contrary, ma’am,” he said, “I had every right.”
He was rather enjoying himself, he realized. This was better than reading his book, which was the poetry of Alexander Pope of all things.
“It was my battle to fight,” she told him. “I resent your interference.”