‘And I’ll wager the truth is that you are determined to have the vehicle for yourself in order to cut a dash in Hyde Park,’ she said, knowing he was right about her aunt and annoyed that he should have the effrontery to point it out to her. ‘Let us not disappoint you. I dare say we can manage with a barouche.’
‘Why not a park phaeton?’ he suggested, without denying her accusation. ‘It is light enough for you to drive, if that is what you have in mind, and not too dangerous if handled sensibly. If you wish, I’ll undertake to teach you to drive it.’
If this was an effort to placate her, it had the opposite effect; she could drive as well as most men and not even Tom would presume to suggest she needed lessons. ‘I am sure your lordship has more pressing business,’ she murmured, stifling her inclination to tell him so. ‘We would not wish to impose on you.’
Anyone but the Marquis of Longham, she told herself, would have recognised the put-down for what it was, but he simply smiled and said, ‘Not at all.’ Then, deciding he would get nowhere with her, he turned to Tom. ‘How say you, Wenthorpe; will you consider this one? It is wide enough to seat three at a pinch and low enough slung not to turn over in a tight corner.’
Tom accepted the offer of help with alacrity and the two men began a long discussion about the merits of the carriage in question and the colours in which it should be finished, and, the deal being done, arrangements were made to collect it two days later.
‘In the meantime,’ his lordship said, ‘may I offer to convey you home?’
Tom agreed at once without consulting Lydia, who had been silently watching the Marquis’s handling of the transaction and secretly admitting to herself that Tom, left alone, would not have done half so well. Not until they were once more on the street did she realise that the conveyance was the self-same coach which had brought them to London. She had already been ungracious and could not compound that by refusing to get into it, and thus they arrived at Wenthorpe House in the same ramshackle way they had the day before.
The arrival of Tom and Lydia with the Marquis in attendance had not gone unnoticed the first time it had happened. It seemed incomprehensible to the ladies of Society that Miss Wenthorpe, who was so obviously in London looking for a husband, should turn up in that skimble-skamble state and should have for an escort a man whom no one knew. That he was handsome and dressed in the pink of fashion none disputed, but his mount! Did one ever see such a broken-backed mule? And as for the carriage, it was twenty years old if it was a day. Surely Wenthorpe was not that pinched in the pocket? If he was, the tattlers did not see how his daughter could be safely brought out. And to compound everything by driving about town in that self-same vehicle was enough to set the neighbourhood tongues wagging even more furiously.
Servants, tradesmen, not to mention candlestick-makers and chimney-sweeps, were sent far and wide to find out what they could. They returned with the intelligence that the horses had been hired and the carriage belonged to the Marquis of Longham, the only surviving son of the Duke of Sutton, who, like their present monarch, was as mad as a hatter. As for Lord Wenthorpe, as far as could be ascertained, there was nothing wrong with his credit and Miss Wenthorpe stood to come into a considerable portion on her marriage.
‘That, of course, would account for Longham dancing attendance on her,’ they said over the teacups, having heard accounts of the profligate ways of the Duke of Sutton and his elder son and assuming the younger was cast in the same mould. It was their duty to rescue her from this mountebank. And if their informants should be wrong and the Marquis was not a spongeing toadeater but a man of consequence, then all the more reason to detach him from Miss Wenthorpe and speedily attach him to their own daughters. They were prepared to expend any amount of time and energy on the project. And thus it was that so many invitations poured into Wenthorpe House, Lydia and her aunt were hard put to it to decide which to accept.
In spite of this, Mrs Wenthorpe held to her original view that Lydia ought to try her wings at small functions and not come out in a blaze of glory at a high-stepping affair, where one false move, one little slip could ruin all their plans. ‘Besides,’ she said, with a twinkle in her eye, ‘keep ’em waiting, that’s what I say. Make ’em dangle a little.’
Her aunt’s choice of phrase did nothing to make Lydia feel any better about coldly setting out to catch a husband, but if she had to, then she would take her time. Accordingly, they accepted invitations to quiet little suppers and tea parties, drove in the park in the new phaeton, drawn by a pair of greys which, though not up to the Marquis’s bays, were creditable enough to win admiring glances, made up a party to visit Vauxhall Gardens with Tom and Frank Burford as escorts, were seen at the theatre and the opera, were almost squeezed to death in the more popular routs and generally conducted themselves with genteel reserve. In the course of three weeks they had made the superficial acquaintance of almost everyone who was anyone, but no young man had been singled out, so that it became a kind of game to be noticed by the nubile Miss Wenthorpe.
Occasionally the Marquis of Longham was seen in Lydia’s company, but always within a party, and his behaviour gave the tongue-waggers no cause to think he was making any progress with her if that was his intention. Indeed, Lydia herself was inclined to think him too high in the instep by far and, though always polite, she would not go out of her way to show him any favouritism. When he chose to unbend and make himself agreeable, then so might she, but until then she would keep him at a distance.
It was the only thing on which she and her aunt disagreed, for Mrs Wenthorpe had, on closer acquaintance, taken a shine to the young man and enjoyed his company, especially as he did not appear to think her dress anything out of the ordinary. In fact he had, on one occasion, complimented her on her looks. ‘And he was not funning me,’ she asserted over nuncheon one day. ‘He is the very embodiment of good taste and sensitivity.’
‘He’s bought a bang-up rig — prime cattle and a spanking new curricle,’ Tom said enthusiastically. ‘He let me take the ribbons the other day and felicitated me on my handling of them.’
‘You mean he did not go back and buy the high-perch phaeton after all?’ Lydia asked, choosing to ignore the fact that the Marquis had not actually said he intended to buy it.
‘Apparently not,’
‘Then I was right. He pretended to want it only to prevent us from having it.’
‘And glad I am he did,’ Agatha put in with a twinkle in her myopic eyes. ‘Can you imagine me riding as high as the house-tops in one of those?’
‘Do you know his circumstances, Aunt?’ Tom asked. He saw in the Marquis an entry to the ton and invitations to places that young ladies like his sister had no idea existed, or, if they did, spoke of them behind their fans with bated breath and a sense of daring. He liked the cut of Longham’s jib, his self-assurance, his air of command and he had every intention of modelling himself on this aristocrat with the long nose and the haughty bearing. ‘Has he taken you into his confidence?’
Mrs Wenthorpe smiled enigmatically. ‘If he had, I would not break it to satisfy your curiosity, young man. All I know is that he is a soldier, or he was, and highly thought of by Wellington, so I suppose he must have been a good one, but since the peace he has been little seen in Society. His father, the Duke, is a buffle-head without a feather to fly with and his brother was a dissolute rake and he will have his work cut out to bring everything to rights.’
‘Well, I take no note of the gabble-grinders,’ Tom informed them cheerfully. ‘He ain’t one to shout the odds about his affairs, plays his cards close to his chest, but that don’t mean he’s dished up. But if he offered for Lydia…’
‘That would be an entirely different matter,’ his aunt said. ‘Then it would be my duty to make enquiries…’
‘But as he has made no such offer,’ Lydia put in with some asperity, ‘and I would not accept him if he did, we need not trouble ourselves about him.’
Her aunt sighed. ‘He is not likely to offer when you give him so little encouragement.’
‘I am not going to lick boots