Embarrassed was not a strong enough word for how she had felt.
“I will be careful,” she promised.
“It would be an almighty yawn to have the man as a brother-in-law,” he said. “I can only imagine what it would be like to have him for a husband. No, actually, I cannot imagine it and have no intention of trying.”
“Why do you dislike him so much?” she asked.
“Dislike?” he said. “There is nothing either to like or to dislike in the man. He is just a giant bore. You ought to have known his brother, Angeline. Now, there was a man worth knowing. Though I daresay I would not have wanted you to know him—not before his marriage anyway. He might have been the devil of a fine fellow, but he was not the sort to whom one would want to expose one’s sister.”
It was odd, Angeline thought, that he did not want her to marry anyone like himself, and yet at the same time he did not want her to marry someone altogether more worthy, like Lord Heyward. She wondered if she would feel similarly when it came time for him to choose a bride. Would no lady be good enough for him in her eyes?
Or would she be warning every lady in sight away from him?
Would he ever be in love? She doubted it. But the thought saddened her, and the very last thing she wanted to feel tonight was sadness. Besides, the boat was drawing into the bank, and Tresham was vaulting out even before it was quite there and offering her his hand, and excitement bubbled up in her again until she thought she might well be sick.
Then they were inside the gardens and completely wrapped about in magic. They walked along a wide avenue already half crowded with revelers, all of them in high spirits—there was no ennui here. There was conversation and laughter, and there were trees on either side, their branches laden with more of the colored lamps. And though the breeze was a little cool, Angeline was thankful for it, for it set the lamps to swaying slightly, and the colored arc of their lights moved with them and danced among the branches and across the path. And far above, if one tipped back one’s head, there was the blackness of the sky dotted with stars. She could smell the trees—and food. An orchestra was playing somewhere ahead.
And then they came to the pavilion with its tiers of open boxes and its semicircular set of more boxes about an open area used, surely, for dancing. And Rosalie was waving from one of the boxes, and Cousin Leonard was standing to greet them and show them to their seats, and there was everyone else to greet. Angeline and Tresham were, of course, the last of the party to arrive. Her come-out ball was perhaps the only event for which Tresham had been early his entire life. The Countess of Heyward was there and Mr. and Mrs. Lynd, Viscount and Viscountess Overmyer, Ferdinand, Cousin Belinda—though she was not actually their cousin, it was true.
And the Earl of Heyward.
Suddenly the excited anticipation Angeline had felt all day, the wonder and delight of the river crossing, and the sheer glory of her first impressions of Vauxhall all came together to be focused upon the person of one man, the quietest, least fussily dressed of any of them, as he bowed politely and wordlessly to them. It did not matter. She did not see him objectively. Perhaps she never had. She saw him with her heart, and her heart sang with happiness.
But it was a momentary rush of feelings. She would not embarrass herself by wearing her heart upon her sleeve. She was a member of a party. She smiled brightly about at everyone.
She had not seen Lady Eagan for years—probably not since Rosalie’s wedding. She was blond and slightly on the buxom side—though perhaps voluptuous would be a more accurate word. She was also beautiful in a languid sort of way, with full, pouting lips and eyes—or rather eyelids—rather like Lord Windrow’s. Bedroom eyes. If she felt either humiliated or grieved by Lord Eagan’s defection, she was doing an admirable job of disguising it.
Why had Lord Eagan run off with her maid? Now that Angeline had seen his wife, it would seem more believable if she was the one who had run off with his valet. Though looks could be deceptive. However it was, it was all very shocking and therefore vastly intriguing.
Angeline found herself seated, without any maneuvering at all on her part, between Mr. Lynd and the Earl of Heyward, and suddenly the evening air no longer felt uncomfortably cool. In fact, it felt decidedly warm and charged with energy all down her right side, which was, coincidentally, the side upon which the earl sat. She made no attempt to converse exclusively with him, though, or he with her. Conversation was general, and it was vigorous and covered a whole host of topics that included politics, both domestic and foreign, music, art, and gossip. It had none of the insipidity of conversation in the country. Angeline was exhilarated by it. How wonderful good conversation was, and how much there was to learn from it, far more than one ever learned in the schoolroom—a fact that seemed to be a contradiction in terms.
“I do believe,” she said, “that I have learned more in the month since I came to London than I did in all the years I spent with my governesses.”
“Book learning often does seem to be a useless waste of youth,” Mr. Lynd said. “But it gives us the basic knowledge and tools with which to deal with life once we have left it behind.”
“If we do leave it behind,” Ferdinand said. “We can learn a great deal from our daily lives and from our interaction with the minds and opinions of others, but there is no surer way of expanding our knowledge and experience than by reading.”
Ferdinand, Angeline remembered, had done rather well both in school and at Oxford. She tended to forget that and assume that he was only a very handsome but rather shallow rakehell. How dreadful to do one’s own brother an injustice. She stared curiously at him. She really did not know him well at all, did she? They were brother and sister and yet they had lived so much of their lives apart. How sad it was.
“School often seems dull and irrelevant to life,” Lord Heyward said. “But what we learn there gives us the grounding for a richer appreciation of life when we grow up. You are quite right about that, Augustine. How could we appreciate a poem or a play, for example, if we had not learned what to look for as we read? We could hope to be entertained, I suppose, but our minds, our understanding, our souls would remain untouched.”
“Oh,” Angeline said, “then all those tedious, tedious lessons in which Miss Pratt dissected a poem or play line by line and explained the meaning and significance of every word help me to appreciate poetry and drama now, do they? And is pure enjoyment to be despised?”
“Oh, bravo, Lady Angeline,” Lady Overmyer said. “Why read a poem or watch a play if one is not entertained by it? What do you have to say to that, Edward?”
“It sounds to me,” he said, “as though those lessons of yours were merely tedious, Lady Angeline, and were in grave danger of killing your interest in literature for all time. But there is a way of teaching that informs and guides and leads and encourages and excites the pupil at the same time. I was fortunate enough to know a few such teachers.”
“I had such a governess when I was a girl,” Cousin Rosalie said. “But she was a rarity. I have realized that since.”
“Learning was painful enough when I was a girl,” Cousin Belinda said, fanning her face. “Must we now talk about it?”
There was general laughter, and the conversation swept on to something else.
Their supper was brought to the box soon after, and they feasted upon a variety of sumptuous foods, including the wafer-thin slices of ham for which Vauxhall Gardens was famous, as well as the strawberries with clotted cream.