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“Very sensible of you, but could you not wear one of Mama’s old high-waisted gowns?”
“Or stay home and wait for the Miss Throckmortons of the world to visit me.” She cast Emily a questioning look.
“It is Miss Throckmorton, I take it, who reports my every misstep?”
Roz nodded. “Did you really dangle your ring for everyone in the park?”
“I did, but oh, Roz, it was only...”
“A little bit shocking?” Roz plucked at the blue coverlet. “Do you think it would be fun to be an opera dancer?”
“Fun? I should think it must be a most uncertain and very brief career.”
“But a career. I think that if I didn’t have Phil, I would like to be an opera dancer. You know, to be doing something.”
“Roz, you are doing something. You are making a child.”
“It’s just that being on my own so much, I realize that I’ve never done anything shocking, and now I probably never will.”
“That’s because you are a woman of calm good sense. Besides, you may grow up to be as outrageous as your elder sister.”
Roz laughed. “You are not so terribly outrageous, Em. Nothing like Lady Wingfield.”
“Did Miss Throckmorton report on her, too?”
Roz nodded. “Lady Wingfield invited everyone to see her four-poster bed. Each of the posts is a gilt statue of Hercules with all his male parts displayed.”
Emily laughed. “Then you are doomed to respectability, Roz. With your taste in furniture, you’ll never get yourself talked of that way.”
Roz laughed and threw off her coverlet. “Thank you, Em, you’ve cheered me.”
Emily stood. She was the one who should be doing the thanking. Fifteen minutes of her sister’s company had lifted her spirits. If her engagement had seemed briefly real, she had remembered in time that it was merely part of her scheme to take charge of her life. “Roz, if you want something to do, would you consider giving a small dinner for Lynley and me? For a few close friends.”
“Of course, and soon.” Roz gently cupped her round middle, holding her unborn child.
Chapter Eleven
In the mind of a young person, convention appears as the fossilized remains of a former age, as absurd as powdered wigs and beauty patches. Convention, our modern miss declares, is the enemy of feeling and worthy only of contempt. This writer must disagree. The conventions of a fourteen-week Season are no more to be disdained than the conventions of the fourteen-line sonnet. Like the genius of our island, the husband hunter must express depth of feeling and true sincerity within the bounds of convention.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Emily tried to banish thoughts of Lynley as she prepared to mount Circe for a morning ride, but a picture of him waking on that green sofa intruded. She worked to imagine him elsewhere in some sedate, gentlemanly set of rooms, but the effort led to an image of him lying sealed in an envelope of warm sheets, a valet hovering solicitously near, waiting to minister to his every need. She told herself with some satisfaction that his first utterance this morning would likely be a groan.
The clop of hooves on the cobbles interrupted the thought, and she glanced away from Circe. There was Lynley on a handsome chestnut with a white blaze from forehead to nose.
“Why are you here?” She blinked at the vision of him, the perfectly turned-out gentleman from his polished top boots and buff riding breeches to the slight tilt of his hat.
“To get started on our...case,” he answered.
She blinked again. He was there. Real. No injuries apparent except for the yellowing bruise on his jaw above the white linen of his neckcloth. “You’ll have to settle for the tamest walk.”
“Not a gallop?”
“You don’t think I gallop in the park? It would be against all propriety.”
He grinned at her and dismounted. “You ride at this hour precisely to defy propriety. In any case, your horse will tell the truth of your morning rides, if you won’t.”
He was right. Circe would react to any deviation in their familiar routine, and he would notice. Her fiancé was no imbecile after all.
