He shrugged.
“Tell me.”
He dropped the poker into its holder. “I opened a letter from Gerry Pelham just now. He informs me he has become the proud uncle of a baby niece.”
Gerry Pelham, Isabelle Pelham’s brother. It had been little more than a year since Miss Pelham became Mrs. Englewood—and now she had a child. A familiar pain gnawed at Millie’s chest—Fitz had been once again reminded of what he’d lost.
He sat down in his chair. “I’m sorry. I was surprised by the news, that’s all.”
Ambushed by the news, more like it. “Would you prefer that I came another time?”
“No, I’m glad you are here. Help me take my mind off it.”
He used to want to be away from her when he had such news from his beloved. The pain in Millie’s heart was now mixed with a slow, bittersweet pleasure. “Anything,” she said.
He opened a dossier on the desk. “Your father advertised very little. He believed that the quality of Cresswell & Graves products spoke for themselves. When we first began to expand into bottled beverages, my instinct was to advertise, but Mr. Hawkes felt otherwise. He was more concerned with wooing the retailers to stock these new products. Once the products were in view, he believed they’d fly off the shelves.
“I gave him one quarter to prove himself right. When he did not, and our new beverages collected dust in shops, I commissioned an advertising campaign. Since women are responsible for the majority of the household expenditures on food and drink, I thought I’d ask your opinion on these placards.”
She was immensely flattered—and almost as nervous. “I’d be honored to help, if I can.”
He passed the drawings to her. She spread them before her. The designs were black and white. “Are these the finished designs?”
“Yes.”
She hesitated. “You know I have no particular artistic eye.”
He smiled slightly. “In other words, you don’t find them appealing?”
“Not particularly,” she said slowly. She’d hoped to tell him otherwise.
“Don’t look so apologetic. If I thought you’d say yes to everything I wouldn’t ask your opinion. Now tell me why you don’t find them appealing.”
Encouraged, she said, “Well, raspberry soda water, orange soda water, and strawberry lemonade are pretty and vibrant in person. A black-and-white placard does not convey their attractiveness. And the image of a bottle surrounded by words extolling its virtues is too matter-of-fact, almost as if we are selling a tonic when we are doing nothing of the sort.”
“What would you do, then?”
“We want young people to take these bottled drinks on picnics and to the seaside on holidays, don’t we?” she said tentatively. “Then, why not let us suggest that in the advertising itself? Young ladies sitting under the shade of a tree, a nice spread of a picnic, raising our bottles in toast. Or young ladies at the beach, blue sky, blue sea, everyone in white dresses, holding our bottles.”
He jotted down a several lines of notes. “All right. I’ll recommission the artworks.”
“On my words alone?”
He looked up. “Of everyone involved with Cresswell & Graves, you are the one I trust the most. And if I’ve learned anything since we married, it’s that you have good instincts. So yes, Lady Fitzhugh, on your words alone.”
She scarcely knew what to do. It was difficult to remain seated, yet a lady simply couldn’t leap wildly about the room, even if her husband had just told her that yes, indeed, she was his closest advisor.
She swallowed the lump in her throat. “Thank you. Do you need me to look at anything else?”
Her ideas were exactly right. Introduced the next spring, the advertising placards, with their lush, striking contrasts of colors and idyllic images, were so wildly popular that they were stolen wherever they were put up. Fitz, encouraged, sent shopkeepers posters to display inside their stores and ordered tens of thousands of handbills to be passed out by sandwich-board men. The bottled beverages sold and sold.
Fitz, not one to let such excellence go unremarked, bought a set of jeweled hairpins for his wife. He’d taken both of his sisters with him to the jeweler’s, but he’d known, the moment he’d seen the amethyst-and-diamond pins, that they were what he wanted. They reminded him of the lavender at Henley Park, an apt symbol for his wife—handsome, adaptable, and endlessly beneficial.
The first time he saw his gift on Lady Fitzhugh was on the occasional of Lady Knightbridge’s ball.
He attended very few balls. For one thing, his presence was beside the point. The function of a ball was to put into proximity young men and women who might someday forge matrimonial alliances. He, a married man, would waste the young ladies’ time. Also, a man at a ball was expected to dance, as there were always ladies in want of a partner. And he didn’t exactly fancy dancing as the night was long.
But he was at Lady Knightbridge’s ball for a purpose. Venetia, now in a platonic marriage with Mr. Easterbrook, an old family friend, and very much back in Society, wished to present Helena to the elusive Duke of Lexington, whispered to be expected. Fitz, who’d played cricket against Lexington when he was at Eton and Lexington at Harrow, was to make the introductions, as he was the only one in their party already acquainted with their quarry.
Venetia was disappointed: The duke did not attend after all. But the ball did have the piquancy of having in attendance Fitz’s current mistress.
Mrs. Dorchester wanted to dance; Fitz obliged with a schottische. Mrs. Dorchester would have preferred a waltz, but Fitz felt strongly that for a man and a woman already conducting an affair, there was no need to further broadcast the relationship by engaging in any activity that would have them pressed together in public.
The dance done, he walked Mrs. Dorchester back to her friends, and returned to his wife and sisters. Not five minutes later, Mrs. Dorchester sauntered past their group, smiled at him, then shot an utterly superior look at Lady Fitzhugh.
Fitz turned toward his wife. “Did she do what I think she did? On the occasion of your return to Society no less.”
Her year of mourning for her father had excluded her from all the goings-on of the previous Season. It was the first time in nearly two years that she’d attended a London festivity.
“Anne Dorchester knows she has something I don’t. And she has always enjoyed lording over the less blessed of us.”
“I did not know that about her.”
“Some women are very nice to men but not so much to other women.”
“Well, she picked the wrong woman to not be nice to. No one is allowed to disrespect my wife, least of all some woman with whom I am temporarily keeping company.”
His wife shrugged. “What are you going to do? Make her come here and apologize to me for looking at me the wrong way?”
“I will no longer keep company with her.”
She angled an eyebrow. “You cannot do that. It would be kinder to take her out back and shoot her.”
He laughed. She had the driest sense of humor. “Moreover, I am going to dance with you.”
“You can’t dance with your own wife at a ball.”
“Let them arrest me for it, then. Come, the next dance is starting—and Mrs. Dorchester is watching.”
She studied him. Her eyes were a light brown, the color of the hazelnuts beloved by his Alice. And then she smiled—she had a nice smile. “They will call me bourgeois for it, but I have always been proudly bourgeois.”
He led her onto the floor. She promptly stepped on his toe on the first turn. “Sorry!”
He laughed. “Don’t worry. I just might return the favor—I’m completely out of practice. And I can’t remember any of the fancier steps.”
“Better not. Or I might find myself facedown on the floor.”