Lord Severn continued to frown. It was possible. In the two months since he had been in London, having completed his year of mourning for the old earl, who was a second cousin of his father’s, and whom he had not known, he had met numerous relatives—almost all of them poor, almost all of them with favors to ask. Dealing with them was one of the burdens of his new position that he had not expected.
He hesitated. Should he merely instruct Watson to pay the woman off? But no. She would doubtless be back again the next week, palm extended. He must speak with her himself, make clear that whatever gift he gave her would be for that one occasion only, that her claim to kinship did not make him responsible for supporting her for life. He sighed.
“If she is prepared to wait,” he said, “then wait she must. I will speak with her after my bath, Watson.”
He turned without further ado and ran up the stairs to his room. He was still feeling depressed after his mother’s letter of the day before and after his evening with Gerald. And he was tired after his night with Jenny. Miss Abigail Gardiner would leave the house if she were wise, and not risk facing his morose mood.
He frowned in thought. Gardiner. Were there relatives of that name? If there were, he had never met any of them. But doubtless the woman would be armed with a family tree to prove his obligation to give her charity.
Almost an hour passed before he was back downstairs, nodding to his butler to open the doors into the yellow salon. If earldoms and all they brought with them could be hurled into the ocean and drowned, he thought grimly, he would row to the deepest part of it he could find and tie granite rocks about his before tipping it overboard.
Miss Abigail Gardiner, he saw at a glance, was younger than he had expected. From her name he had expected a thin and elderly and sharp-nosed spinster. This woman was no older than five-and-twenty. She was dressed decently but plainly in brown. There was a faint hint of shabbiness about her clothes. Certainly they had not been made by a fashionable modiste.
She was a very ordinary-looking young lady, her brown hair smooth beneath her bonnet and almost the same color as it, her features quite unremarkable. She had no maid or female companion with her.
She was standing quietly in the middle of the room, her hands folded in front of her. He wondered if she had stood there the whole time or if she had sat on one of the chairs for a while.
She looked remarkably, he thought—and the thought afforded him the first amusement he had felt for more than twenty-four hours—like the ideal woman he had described to Gerald the evening before. Except that the ideal did not look quite as appealing when it was standing before him in real flesh and blood.
He set one hand behind his back and raised his quizzing glass to his eye with the other. He favored the woman with the look he had acquired in the past two months as the one best suited to dealing with would be dependents and hangers-on.
She curtsied to him but did not, as several of her predecessors had done, continue to bob up and down like a cork.
“Miss Gardiner,” he said. “What may I do for you, ma’am?”
• • •
“YOU MUST DRESS PLAINLY,” Laura Seymour said. “Not shabbily, of course, but not too prettily either, Abby.”
Abigail Gardiner chuckled. “That should not be difficult,”she said. “The only clothes I possess that might be described as pretty are at least ten years out-of-date. Will my brown do, do you think?”
“Admirably,” her friend said. “And, Abby, remember what we decided last night. You must act demurely. You really must. I cannot emphasize it enough. He will not be impressed if you are bold.”
Abigail grimaced. “Bobbing curtsies and directing my gaze at the toes of his boots and not speaking until I am spoken to and all that?” she said. “Must I really, Laura? Can I not be merely myself?”
“One curtsy,” Laura said. “And I think you may look him in the eye, Abby, provided you do not stare at him boldly as if daring him to gaze back without being the first to drop his eyes.”
“As I did with Mr. Gill the day before yesterday,” Abigail said, and both young ladies exploded into smothered mirth.
“His face, Abby, when you spoke to him as you did in the schoolroom!” Laura held her nose in an attempt to contain her laughter.
“Sir!” Abigail allowed her bosom to swell, placed her hands on her hips, and glared coldly at an imaginary Mr. Gill at the other side of her small bedchamber on the second floor of that gentleman’s town house. “Your behavior is quite, quite intolerable.” She sucked in her cheeks in an effort not to laugh and ruin the reenactment of the scene that had taken place in the schoolroom two days before when she had entered the room in order to save her governess friend from molestation, the children not being in there at the time.