Page 26 of The Duke
“That won’t make any difference to her.”
“But now the duke has a young ward to marry off,” Celine said, clasping her hands and fluttering her lashes. “She has to behave in public, no?”
The marquess stilled, unsure, her eyes tightening with the small signs of pain that made Celine think she was enduring a raging headache.
Then laughter lit her face, as startling and sudden as all her moods seemed to be. “I can’t imagine my cousin escorting you from shop to shop. No, I can’t make the picture at all. Will she hold your packages for you, do you think?”
Celine laughed in return at the unlikely image. “Will she put her coat down over a puddle for me, perhaps?”
The marquess leapt from her chair and began to walk about the room in the most preposterous, unnatural manner. “Perhaps she will do the Bond Street roll.” She threw Celine a faux-scolding look, obviously pleased with herself for Celine’s peals of laughter. “Do take me seriously, Miss Genet, I roll without compare.”
Celine wiped moisture from her eye and put her hand out for the marquess’s. “You will come, Lord Royston. You will behave. And you will not ask for even one penny.” She smiled wickedly. “Yet.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Kate couldn’t remember the last time she’d walked down Bond Street. She did none of her own shopping and thought the street’s other purpose—to see and be seen—an inefficient route to a very limited kind of power.
It was crowded, dusty, and did nothing to convince her she’d been missing out.
The fashionable young debutante walking by her side, however, peered enthusiastically in every window and entered every other shop. They’d been into a bookshop, two haberdashers, a jeweller, a shoemaker, and most recently, an oculist, where Celine had insisted on having her eyes tested, as though doing so were a Vauxhall amusement. Kate’s four footmen were becoming weighed down with packages, and they were only a third of the way up the street.
Kate’s presence frightened the shopkeepers half to death. It seemed to amuse Celine.
Celine entered a third haberdasher and Kate must follow. She must stand and watch Celine try on hat after hat, each more gorgeous than the last. Heat rose through her body. She thought again, and more specifically, about what Celine’s face would feel like between her hands. The bone structure, sheathed in warm silk. The delicate pulse of blood. She imagined tipping Celine’s face up towards hers, and how the eyes would reluctantly follow, appearing from beneath the hat’s brim.
The shopgirls held bolts of material up to Celine, unwinding and draping this colour and that texture over her. Celine lookedas though she were born to spend money and would soon die of happiness. The material was shapeless until one of the shopgirls tugged just so.
Warmth became searing heat. It alerted Kate all at once to what she was feeling, and she exerted herself to suppress it.
“Are you hoping to beggar me?” she said. “There can be no other reason to buy that colour, it’s dreadful on you.”
Celine shook her head and smiled (a smile that, because of the way her top lip overlapped the bottom, pulled down rather than up). “And that is a lie I will not believe.”
She proceeded to buy the whole bolt, which was passed into the embrace of one of Kate’s footmen.
If Kate had been hoping for room to breathe outside on the footpath, she was disappointed: It was ostrich feathers as far as the eye could see. She moved out into the slow foot traffic, then looked sharply down. Celine had taken her arm.
Celine was looking elsewhere, however, craning her head around. It seemed to Kate—not for the first time that morning—that Celine was looking for someone in particular. Suddenly Celine’s attention was caught. Kate looked but could discover nothing of interest. Celine continued transfixed for some moments, then she twisted around to look up at Kate. Her eyes appeared from beneath the brim of her hat, shining with discovery. She whispered, “The Bond Street roll.”
Kate looked again and saw a group of young men passing by, walking in the preposterous manner that had come into fashion: an exaggerated strut with shoulders forward, hands hanging in apathetic counterbalance to the active hips. Where Celine had heard of such a silly, specific thing, she couldn’t begin to imagine. She found she was smiling.
They continued up the street at a sedate pace, the sun and noise and even the dust somehow conspiring to be enjoyable, and then abruptly stopped again, the path blocked by a woman coming the other way—elderly, turbaned, and sharp of eye and nose.
Kate suppressed a groan. That’s what you got for frittering awaythe morning on Bond Street. “Lord Seaton,” she said, inclining her head.
The old woman’s colour heightened and she looked fixedly past Kate’s shoulder, her mouth in a hard line. The ostrich feathers in her turban seemed to quiver with outrage.
Had she been alone, Kate would have held her ground and forced Lord Seaton to walk around her. Not wanting to draw undue attention to Celine, however, she stepped out of the path, keeping Celine behind her. Lord Seaton swept past without a single sign of acknowledgement—a shocking and unmistakeable snub.
“My goodness,” Celine said fervently when the whole retinue had passed, “who or ratherwhatwas that? I like her. I love her.”
“Of course you do,” Kate muttered, and continued up the street at a clip. Celine skipped to catch up to her, and then—confound it—took her arm again.
Celine said breathlessly, “What’s the history there? Why wouldn’t she acknowledge you? It shows very good taste, in my opinion, but it’s rather daring, isn’t it, cutting a duke in public?”
Kate didn’t want to answer—she didn’t want Celine Genet to know any more than was strictly necessary. But she also needed Celine to understand why she must be careful not to catch the particular notice of Lord Seaton.
“The Earl of Seaton is a powerful person, particularly in the social sphere. She can ruin a girl’s future with a glance or secure it with a compliment. Where Lord Seaton leads, others follow. She is conservative, prudish. When my aunt was accused of treason, she cut the whole family and hasn’t deigned to acknowledge me since. It would be eccentric in anyone else, but she has the moral standing to carry it off.” Just one more ripple her childhood mistake had sent out into the world.
