Page 101 of How to Lose a Lord in Ten Days

One by one the party handed their horses to the grooms and began to trail towards the house, leaving only Ashford and the Hanworth siblings in the yard.

‘Goodness,’ Miss Hanworth said, face stricken and eyes very wide. ‘Goodness.’

She sounded just as Ashford felt, entirely winded. He had had his fair share of arguments with Waldo – but he would never have expected such violence from him.

‘That was awful,’ Miss Hanworth said.

‘Fact is,’ Mr Hanworth said, staring after Sir Waldo, a frown gathering upon his face, ‘suspicious.’

For once, Ashford found himself in complete alignment with them both.

22

The atmosphere was strange that evening. Not subdued, for that would have been natural after such an afternoon. Instead, the party maintained a continuous patter of almost incomprehensible merriment that Lydia found profoundly unsettling.

Lady Phoebe and Sir Waldo led the way, as ever: Sir Waldo’s brash cheer entirely restored as if nothing had occurred to upset it in the first place, and Lady Phoebe’s frequent trills of loud laughter communicated quite clearly to all that she would rather not dwell. The rest were perfectly willing to comply, laughing and chattering, eating and drinking, generally brushing the afternoon’s events firmly under the rug.

But for the first evening since Lydia’s arrival, she remained quiet. She had never seen such a grand display of falsity in her life, and the overall impression was entirely depressing. She caught Ashford’s eye across the table and, without quite knowing why, gave a little grimace – not, as it had been in days past, to communicate rampant dislike, but rather solidarity. For he alone – aside from Pip, who was taking furious minutes in his notebook – was not participating in the false cheer. Even Prett, for all his chatter about authenticity, was happy enough to pretend nothing had gone on.

To her surprise, Ashford had neither returned Sir Waldo’s grins nor laughed at his jests. He did not aid Lady Phoebe in maintaining an easy flow of polite conversation, as he had worked hard to do when it was Lydia upsetting the status quo – merely observed proceedings with sharp eyes and a set jaw.

It was all very discombobulating.

After dinner, they retired to the drawing room, and Lady Phoebe, with new heights of effervescence, began corralling as many people as possible into a kind of choir, while Prett demonstrated his mastery of Himalayan throat singing.

‘It sits deeper in the chest,’ he explained to anyone who would listen. ‘One projects from the diaphragm as so … ’

‘Lovely!’ Lady Phoebe said. ‘Do you think you could do it to the tune of “The Jolly Young Waterman”?’

Lydia’s eyes travelled over to where Ashford stood by one of the great windows. Though the hour was late, the sun was just only setting, and the fading light had turned the rolling lawns of Hawkscroft pink. After a moment – feeling unaccountably nervous and hating herself for it – she crossed the room to stand next to him, following his gaze out into the gardens.

‘You do not wish to join them?’ she asked quietly.

He shook his head. Behind them, Sir Waldo launched raucously into the first verse.

‘Has he … apologized?’

There was no need to clarify to whom she was referring.

‘No, of course not,’ Ashford said. ‘To do so would be to admit something untoward occurred – if anything, he probably expects me to apologize to him.’

‘How can he?’ Lydia said. ‘After he behaved so?’

Ashford lifted his shoulders in a tiny shrug. ‘I perhaps could have handled the whole with a little more elegance. I was not thinking.’

‘Well, I think it suits you,’ Lydia said. ‘Not thinking.’

She kept her gaze resolutely fixed upon the lawns as she said it, yet still felt it when he turned his head to look down at her.

‘Does it?’

‘I think was … admirable, what you did,’ she said, maintaining a light tone by sheer force of will; somehow, she felt quite as exposed as if she had been cut open.

‘Was that a compliment?’ Ashford put his hand to his chest in a mockery so much gentler than all others they had hitherto shared that she found herself blushing.

‘Well, you need not be so smug about it,’ she said tartly, reaching for irritation as an armour.

‘As I live and breathe,’ Ashford marvelled. ‘Well, that is kind – but I do not deserve such abject admiration—’