Gabriel was amused. “I have no intention of abducting Lady Jessica or of taking her anywhere inappropriate for a delicately nurtured female,” he said. “But even if I did, I doubt very much she would allow it.”
“Quite so,” Netherby said agreeably, standing back and turning to watch his sister come down the steps, pulling on one of her kid gloves as she did so.
She was wearing a long-sleeved, high-waisted carriage dress of dark blue velvet, with a high-crowned, small-brimmed bonnet of pale silver gray. She looked startlingly lovely. Also haughty and perfectly self-possessed. She stopped on the bottom step to look over his rig.
“Impressive,” she said. “I am happy to see that it is a sporting curricle, Mr. Thorne. I like to be high enough off the ground to see the world when I am on a pleasure excursion.” She turned to her brother. “I suppose you are threatening Mr. Thorne with dire consequences if he veers as much as an inch from the beaten path, Avery?”
“You do me an injustice, Jess.” Netherby raised his eyebrows and the quizzing glass he wore on a black ribbon about his neck. “Have you ever known me to have to resort to threatening anyone?”
She appeared to give the matter some thought. “Not in words, no,” she said, and smiled so dazzlingly at her brother that Gabriel was almost rocked back on his heels. Good God! But the smile disappeared without a trace as she crossed the pavement and turned her haughty gaze upon him.
“Your hand, if you please, Mr. Thorne,” she said, stepping up to the curricle and gathering her skirts in one hand as she prepared to climb to her seat.
“Good afternoon to you too, Lady Jessica,” he said.
She gave him a measured look before setting her hand in his, but she did not comment upon his veiled reproof. She climbed to her seat and arranged her skirts about her. A servant who had followed her from the house handed up an umbrella. Or was it a parasol?
They were on their way a few moments after that, while Netherby stood on the pavement, his hands clasped at his back, watching.
“I suppose,” Gabriel said, “I ought to have applied to your mother for permission to drive out with you.”
“No,” she said. “You ought to have applied to me. As you did.”
“It is not easy, I daresay, to assert one’s independence when one is a lady,” he said as he turned his curricle out of Hanover Square.
“But one must persist,” she said, “or at the very least choose one’s battles. I suppose you could not avoid noticing the ridiculous cavalcade of carriages and servants and outriders my brother deemed necessary to convey me from my cousin’s home in Gloucestershire to London a few weeks ago.”
“I might have failed to do so had it not been for the livery,” he said. “It was, er, eye-catching, to say the least.”
She turned her head to look at him with a gleam of something that might have been amusement in her eyes, but she did not smile as she had at Netherby.
“Why did you ask me to accompany you all the way to Richmond Park?” she asked him.
“I might say it was because I would not enjoy making the journey or seeing the beauties of nature alone,” he said. “But instead I will answer your question with one of my own. How else am I to get to know you?”
Her eyebrows arched upward. She kept her head turned his way for a long, silent moment. “Most gentlemen who wish to pursue an acquaintance with me dance with me at balls or engage me in conversation at soirees and garden parties or ask to drive me in Hyde Park during the fashionable hour of the afternoon,” she said.
“They join your court, in other words,” he said. “It is an impressively large one, if Lady Parley’s ball is anything to judge by. Has Rochford been added to the number?”
“Ah,” she said. “You can read, then, can you, Mr. Thorne? Yes, he drove me in the park yesterday afternoon. Avery uses the same word you chose to describe my admirers. Court, that is. Time will tell if Mr. Rochford chooses to become a part of it. Will you?”
He looked at her appreciatively before giving his attention again to maneuvering his horses through the busy streets of London. “The answer is a resounding no,” he said.
“Indeed?” She sounded more amused than chagrined as she watched a young crossing sweeper scurry out of the way of the curricle and scramble to pick up the coin Gabriel tossed down to him. “I suppose that explains why you did not ask me to dance two evenings ago. It would also explain why you did not invite me to drive in Hyde Park yesterday, where the whole world—and at least one newspaper reporter—would have seen you pay court to me. But why, pray, did you have Lady Parley present you to me? She did say, if I recall correctly, that you asked for the introduction. And why did you call upon me yesterday? Why did you ask me to drive to Richmond Park with you today?”
“All three questions have a single answer,” he told her. “It is because I intend to marry you.”
That brought her head snapping his way again. She gazed at him with wide eyes, he saw at a glance. Or perhaps glared would be a more accurate word. And her chin was up. He wondered irrelevantly if young Timms, his groom, was enjoying himself.
“You intend to marry me?” she asked, putting considerable emphasis upon the one word. “You are presumptuous, sir.”
“I suppose I might have chosen a more abject verb,” he conceded. “Hope, perhaps. Or wish. But intend is the most accurate.”
“You do not know me,” she protested. “I do not know you. I believe you must have windmills in your head.”
“But you cannot be sure I do,” he said. “By your own admission you do not know me.”
He seemed to have rendered her speechless. She continued to stare at him for several moments though he did not turn his head again to look at her. Then she laughed unexpectedly, a low sound she probably did not intend to be as seductive as it was.
“I still believe it,” she said. “You, sir, have windmills in your head if you believe I will marry you simply because you intend it. Or even hope or wish for it.”
“You do not intend ever to marry, then?” he asked her.
“That is none of your business, Mr. Thorne,” she said, her laughter forgotten, to be replaced by icy hauteur.
“How old are you?” he asked her.
“Mr. Thorne!”
“Twenty-four?” he suggested. “Twenty-five? Twenty-six? No more than that, I believe. But surely well past the age at which most ladies marry. Yet I cannot believe no man has ever asked or hinted that he would ask with the smallest encouragement. You are the daughter and sister of a duke, after all. I would be surprised if you are not also extremely wealthy. Besides all of which you are easy on the eyes.”
There was a pause. “And you, sir,” she said, “are impertinent.”
“For speaking the truth?” he said. “Do you encourage your court to cluster about you, Lady Jessica, because you do not want to marry? Safety in numbers and all that? It seems altogether possible.”
“If you do not change the subject immediately,” she said, “I must ask that you take me home, sir.”
“My guess,” he said, “is that you have given up hope.”
“Oh really,” she said, sounding severely annoyed. “Are these American manners, Mr. Thorne?”
“It would be somewhat alarming,” he said, “if a whole nation was to be judged—and presumably condemned—upon the words and behavior of one man who has only lived there for a number of years. But back to my point. I believe, Lady Jessica, you have given up hope of finding that one man who can distinguish himself from the crowd and renew your interest in matrimony and a new life, quite independent of your mother and brother—half brother, I believe that is.”
“Well,” she said, “you have certainly distinguished yourself from the crowd, Mr. Thorne. But if you believe that you have also aroused in me any eagerness to marry you, you are sadly mistaken. To put the matter mildly.”
“Perhaps,” he agreed.
“There is no perhaps about it,” she retorted.
They lapsed into silence after that while Lady Jessica faced forward and raised her parasol. It was definitely a parasol rather than an umbrella. It was made of a pale silvery gray lacy fabric that would not offer much protection from rain. She twirled it vigorously behind her head for a few moments before lowering it again with a snap. He had discomposed her, Gabriel could see, though she maintained a stiff dignity and did not carry through on her threat to demand that she be taken home.
When they approached Richmond he directed his horses to one of the gates in the high wall that he had been told surrounded the whole of the park. Perhaps he would find somewhere inside later to leave the curricle so that they could walk. But first he wanted to find and drive along the Queen’s Ride he had heard about, a grand avenue that ran between woodland on either side.
There were other people in the park, enough, anyway, to satisfy the Dowager Duchess of Netherby when she questioned her daughter later, as she surely would. Generally speaking, though, there was an agreeable sense of rural quiet here, a heightened awareness of trees swaying and rustling in the breeze, of birds singing, of blue sky above with small white clouds scurrying across it in a breeze that was hardly apparent on the ground. Once or twice they spotted deer, which apparently roamed free here in large numbers. There were the smells of greenery and soil and fresh air. Gabriel felt an unexpected wave of pleasure at being back in England. He had forgotten . . .