"Your Grace." Gideon's quiet voice cut across her mother's rush of speech. "I'm afraid that Ada is not increasing. She's merely suffering a lung complaint."
"Oh."
Eleanor knew she should feel sorry for fragile little Ada, who always seemed to be in her bed or on a settee, coughing delicately. But try though she might, she still resented her. Ada's father had paid for Gideon, had sewed him up in a marriage contract when Gideon was only eight years old.
Which meant that Ada had the one thing that Eleanor had ever wanted in the world.
"Please sit down and tell me all about it," her mother said, patting Gideon on the hand. "That poor angel. Did she take a chill?"
The worst of it was that Ada didn't even care for Gideon, as far as Eleanor could tell. She had paid Ada dutiful visits over the past three years and seen the polite, uninterested manner with which Ada greeted her husband.
If she had been Gideon's wife, she would have leaped from the settee to greet him when he walked into the drawing room. In the first year or so after he married Ada, it was all Eleanor could do to keep herself frozen in a chair when he entered a room, and to stop a besotted smile from spreading across her face.
But Ada just held out her hand to be kissed and then turned away.
And Gideon... Gideon had gone from being Eleanor's closest friend, the confidant of her heart and the lover of her body, to bowing as if she were nothing more than a remote acquaintance.
"The duchess's cough has taken a turn for the worse in the last few weeks," he was saying now. He was endlessly solicitous of his sickly wife. It was admirable. Really.
Perhaps it was just as well that they hadn't married. She could never be as punctilious as Gideon, not even if a dead father's will required it of her. She would have fought bitterly to marry him. She would have climbed a balcony in the middle of the night and lured her beloved into a clandestine elopement, and be damned with the consequences.
She would have...she would have gone anywhere with that lovely, golden boy. In fact, now that she thought on it, she came perilously close to giving up her whole life, remaining unmarried, and never having children merely because he wasn't free.
What's the good of being Juliet when Romeo shows no sign of killing himself for love, but instead prances off with Rosalind?
She felt as stupid as Oyster.
There was an audible hum of interest in the room, just as she sensed someone at her shoulder.
"Astley," came the drawling voice of the Duke of Villiers. "Your Grace." He was bowing before her mother.
The duchess held out her hand to be kissed, doing a magnificent job of pretending that Villiers's appearance meant little, and that every pair of eyes in the tent wasn't focused on their little group. "I understand that we might well see each other in the country," she said, dimpling. "I'm not certain that I can spare the time for such frolicking, but I always try to please my daughters."
"London is so tiresome at the tail end of the season," Villiers said. "And you are so much in demand, Duchess. You must long to escape the throngs of your friends and admirers."
Since her mother loved nothing more than an admiring horde, Eleanor thought he was overdoing his praise. But her mother giggled, and might even be blushing underneath the permanent blush she had painted on earlier in the day. "That is so true," she agreed, fluttering her fan madly.
"You're planning a trip to the country, Duke?" Gideon said in his measured, formal tones.
"I have some business in Kent." Eleanor held her breath. She was hoping to break the news about his motley family to her mother at some later date. Preferably after the duchess had drunk two brandies. But Villiers said nothing further.
She caught sight of Gideon's still-clenched jaw out of the corner of her eye. "We are meeting at a house party," she said, favoring the three of them with a huge smile.
"I expect you'll be busy in the House of Lords," Villiers said to Gideon. "Such a pity; the countryside is beautiful at this time of year. But there you are... we grasshoppers will frolic, and the ants must needs keep slaving." There was a trace of scorn in his voice. Just a trace.
A second stretched to twenty before Gideon said, "Exactly so."
"What a pity you've never taken up your seat, Duke," Eleanor's mother said to Villiers, showcasing her profound deafness to conversational undercurrents.
"I can't imagine why I would," Villiers said lazily. "I don't see myself in a room full of bantam roosters strutting and squawking at the dawn."
"One could describe them as caring for the business of the country," Gideon snapped.
"Nonsense. The business of the country is shaped by two forces: the king and the market. As it happens, I know a great deal about the market. I can assure you, Astley, that quite frequently the market trumps the king."