Isabelle had jumped to her feet at the arrival of the men and was standing in front of Stephen, holding up her arms. He laughed and lifted her high onto his shoulder. She sat there chuckling and clinging to a fistful of his curls.
“I am delighted to meet you, Miss Daniels,” he said. “And I am delighted that you have come again, Miss Wrayburn.”
“I came for a very particular reason,” Miss Wrayburn said, flushing and moving forward to the edge of her seat. “I am going to be eighteen in August. Jasper has said I may have a house party for the occasion at Cedarhurst Park-it is in Dorsetshire. He has told me I may invite as many guests as I wish-for two whole weeks. Miss Daniels and I have made all sorts of plans for everyone’s entertainment-picnics and excursions and wilderness walks and croquet and dances and boat rides and riding and… and charades and cards and… Oh, and all sorts of things. It is going to be the most wonderful time I have ever had in my life.”
She smiled eagerly from one to the other of them.
“And the most wonderful time everyone else will have had too, of course,” she added.
Miss Daniels looked pointedly at her.
“And, Charlotte?” she said softly, making a beckoning gesture with one hand. “Of what concern is this to Miss Huxtable and her sister and brother?”
“Oh.” Miss Wrayburn looked mortified and then laughed too-a light, youthful sound. “I want you to come, Miss Huxtable, and you too, Miss Katherine, and you if you will and if you do not have other more exciting plans, Lord Merton, though I daresay you do. I want you all to be among my houseguests. Will you? I would like it of all things, I do assure you. Please say yes.”
Jasper has said I may have a house party…
Was he deliberately luring her to a place where he would have plenty of opportunity to be tete-a-tete with her?
How very clever of him.
Or was she reading too much into this invitation?
“It sounds very delightful,” Margaret was saying. “But are you quite sure you wish to have us among your guests, Miss Wrayburn? Your aunt did not appear to consider us suitable companions when she saw us with you yesterday.”
The girl flushed.
“She did not even know who you were,” she said. “She wants to have me live with her now that I am almost grown up and no longer a nuisance of a child. She wants to control my fortune and have me marry Clarence. I would rather die.”
“Charlotte, my dear,” Miss Daniels said reproachfully.
“Well, it is true,” the girl said. “And you yourself said, Danny, that it was quite unexceptionable for me to walk in the park with the Earl of Merton and his sisters and Jasper himself. Besides, this party is to be held in the country. At Jasper’s home and mine. Nothing could be more respectable. Aunt Prunella has nothing to say in the matter. Please come.”
She looked as if she were almost in tears.
Elliott had turned from the window-Sam was fast asleep against his shoulder, his mouth open.
“Stephen is no suitable escort for Miss Wrayburn?” he said. “In a public park with her brother and his sisters in attendance? How very peculiar.”
“It is because I am not yet out,” Miss Wrayburn explained. “My aunt believes that I ought to remain hidden in the schoolroom until my presentation to the queen.”
“Well,” Stephen said, swinging Isabelle to the floor at her insistence-she came to sit on Katherine’s knee. “I do have exciting plans for those weeks in August, Miss Wrayburn. I plan to spend them at Cedarhurst Park in Dorsetshire-as the guest, I believe, of Baron Montford, my friend. And by happy chance it seems that you are to have a birthday while I am there.”
“Oh.” The girl clasped her hands to her bosom and beamed at him. “Oh, how splendid. Jasper will be so pleased. And I am too.”
“I believe,” Margaret said, “it is quite proper for Kate and me to accept your invitation, Miss Wrayburn. We would be delighted to come, would we not, Kate?”
The decision had been taken from her, then, had it? Katherine did not know if she was glad or sorry.
“Absolutely,” she said, smiling at Miss Wrayburn. “I shall look forward to it.”
And she knew she would even though she really ought not.
Miss Wrayburn beamed at them all.
“I am so glad,” she said. “Oh, thank you.”
A few minutes later Miss Daniels rose, and Miss Wrayburn followed suit and took her leave of them all.
“She is indeed a delightful girl,” Vanessa said when they had gone. “It is very kind of her brother to arrange a party in the seclusion of the country for her. It is a ridiculous notion that girls ought to be left in the schoolroom until the very moment of their come-out. Then, of course, they know no one and are gauche and blushing and uncomfortable. Miss Daniels told me which other guests have been invited to Cedarhurst. Most of them-both ladies and gentlemen-are very young indeed. Stephen is going to seem like an elder statesman. But of course it is right too that a few older guests be invited-for Lord Montford’s sake.”
She looked pointedly at Katherine and laughed.
Katherine busied herself with amusing Isabelle and pretended not to notice.
Mr. Seth Wrayburn lived in London all year long, even during the heat of the summer when the beau monde deserted it en masse for the greater comforts of the countryside or the relative coolness of the seaside.
He lived on Curzon Street, which was in a fashionable enough neighborhood for a gentleman of his rank. He had nothing to do with fashions, however, and nothing to do with the beau monde either. Or with anyone else for that matter except his valet and his butler and his chef and his bookseller.
The best company a man could ever desire, he had always said-when forced to say anything at all, that was-was his own. At least a man could expect a little intelligence and sense from himself.
He was not pleased to be presented with a visiting card the very day after being bothered with another. He had been forced to admit Clarence Forester the day before because that fool had sent up the verbal message with his card that it was a matter of life and death concerning Charlotte Wrayburn, who happened to be not only Seth’s great-niece, but also his ward. He had never been pleased with that latter connection, but he had not contested the terms of his nephew’s will when he might have done so with some success immediately after his death-a man surely could not be forced to take on the guardianship of a girl in whom he had no interest whatsoever, after all. But it was probably too late now.
He had admitted Clarence, albeit reluctantly, expecting to have his ears assailed with an affecting story about how his great-niece was at her last gasp on her deathbed or a lurid tale about how she had eloped with the groom after climbing out of the schoolroom window down knotted sheets while her governess slept-or some other such dire event over which he supposed he would be expected to exert himself.
Though what he could be expected to do to stop the girl from dying or to set her back in the schoolroom when she had been wed and bedded by the groom he could not imagine. Nor did he want to imagine.
As it turned out, Clarence had bored him exceedingly and at great length and had confirmed him in his long-standing conviction that he himself had been born into the wrong family-and a parcel of nincompoops at that-more than seventy years ago and had been made to suffer for it ever since.
But since Clarence had demanded action in that pompous way of his and had raised some issues that probably could not be ignored much longer, Mr. Wrayburn sighed deeply when he lifted Jasper’s card from the butler’s tray and read the name written there.