“Lord Darleigh,” the butler announced in tones a majordomo in Carlton House might envy.
And in stepped two men, the one with an arm drawn through the other’s before he slid it free and the other took a step back, then disappeared behind the closing door with the butler.
The other man was the burly one who had stepped first out of the carriage this morning.
Sir Clarence and Aunt Martha made a rush for the remaining gentleman and made a great to-do about helping him to a chair and seating him on it. Sir Clarence boomed pompously and Aunt Martha spoke in the sort of voice she might have used to an ailing infant or a harmless imbecile.
Sophia did not notice what Henrietta did in the meanwhile. She herself was too caught up in a personal moment of surprise, and, quite frankly, she stared. It was a good thing he was blind and would not notice.
For Viscount Darleigh was everything she had observed this morning and more. He was not particularly tall, and he was graceful and elegant. He also looked well shaped and well muscled in all the right places, as though he lived a vigorous life and was fit, even athletic. He was dressed for evening with perfect good taste and no ostentation. He was, in fact, really quite gorgeous, and Sophia felt foolishly smitten. And that was just her reaction to what she saw below his neck.
It was what she saw above his neck that caused her to stare in such surprise, though. He had fair hair, a little long for fashion, perhaps, but perfectly suited to him. For it waved softly and was a little disordered—attractively disordered. It looked shiny and healthy. And his face…
Well, it was not ruined after all. There was not even the merest scar to mar its beauty. And it was beautiful. She did not really consider individual features, but the whole was wonderfully pleasing, for it looked like a good-humored face that smiled often, though he surely could not be feeling very happy at the moment about being so fussed. Surely, once he had been shown to a chair, he could have bent his knees and lowered himself safely to the seat without having to be hauled and maneuvered there.
Oh, but there was one feature of his flawless face upon which Sophia’s eyes focused, one feature that raised it above the ranks of the merely good-humored and good-looking and accounted for his almost breathtaking beauty. His eyes. They were large and wide and very blue, and they were fringed with eyelashes any girl might envy, though there was nothing even remotely effeminate about them. Or about him.
He was every inch a man, a thought that caught her by surprise and suspended her breath for a moment, for she did not have any idea what the thought meant.
She gazed at him in wonder and awe and retreated a little farther into her corner, if that was possible. She found him utterly, totally intimidating, as though he were a creature who inhabited another world from her own. She had depicted him in her cartoon earlier as a small man with a bandaged face. She would never do that again. Cartoons were for people over whom she wished to indulge a private and not always kindly laugh.
He looked up at his hosts with those blue, blue eyes. And he looked at Henrietta when Sir Clarence drew her forward to introduce her—or rather re-introduce her.
“You remember our dear Henrietta, Darleigh,” he said with bluff heartiness. “She is all grown up, leading her mother a merry dance and being a naughty puss for her father. She has been taken to town for the past three Seasons and might have married dukes and marquesses and earls by the dozen—enough of them have sighed over her and paid court to her, I would have you know. But nothing will do but she must hold herself aloof for that special gentleman who will come along to sweep her off her feet. And you know, Papa, she says, I am as likely to find him at our own home in the country as I am in the ballrooms of the ton in London. Can you imagine that, Darleigh? Where is she likely to discover her special gentleman in Barton Coombs? Eh?”
He did not often laugh, Sophia reflected, but when he did, everyone else cringed. Aunt Martha cringed and smiled graciously. Henrietta cringed and blushed—and gazed in raptures at the unmarked face of the man she had declared she would never marry if he was the last man on earth.
He really was blind, Sophia decided from her quiet corner of the room. She had doubted it for a moment. It had seemed impossible. But he had got to his feet again in order to bow to Henrietta, and although he appeared to be looking directly at her, in reality he was gazing just above the level of her right shoulder.
“If Miss March is as beautiful as she was six years ago,” he said, “and I daresay she is more beautiful as she was just a girl then, I am not surprised that she has been so besieged by admirers in London.”
He was oily, Sophia thought, frowning in disappointment. Or perhaps he was just being polite.
Everyone sat down and launched into stilted, overhearty conversation—at least, the three Marches did. Lord Darleigh merely made the appropriate responses and smiled.
He was being polite, Sophia decided after a few minutes. He was not oily at all. He was behaving like a gentleman. She was relieved. She felt predisposed to like him.
He had been an officer in an artillery regiment during the Peninsular Wars, she had learned. A very young officer. He had been blinded in battle. It was only later that he had inherited his title and fortune from an uncle. It was a good thing too, for there had been very little money in the family. Recently he had left his home in Gloucestershire after his mother and sisters had tried to force a bride upon him. They had all been agreed that it would be best for him, for any number of reasons, if he had a wife to care for him. Clearly he had disagreed, either with the general principle or with their specific choice. He had stayed away for some time, and no one had known where he was until he had arrived at Covington House this morning, as Mrs. Hunt had predicted he would in letters she had written to various ladies in the village.