Page 27 of How to Lose a Lord in Ten Days

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Lady Phoebe allowed them only half an hour at the refreshment table before moving them briskly on to the next activity.

‘Lawn billiards!’ she declared, springing to her feet as if there was not a moment to waste. An hour before, Lydia would have shared such an attitude, but now she rose to obey Lady Phoebe’s chivvying rather reluctantly. She did not wish to play billiards. She wished to think.

‘Goodness,’ Lady Morton said, fanning herself vigorously, sending wafts of red tendrils fluttering around her face, ‘I am far too fatigued to participate.’

‘Truly?’ Lady Hesse said rather derisively. ‘I have always thought you so … robust a woman.’

‘I slept uneasily,’ Lady Morton said.

‘Uneasily? Or … guiltily?’ Pip wondered, picking up his pencil and flicking his notebook to a fresh page.

‘Pip,’ Lydia entreated softly. Ought she bid him discontinue with this notebook business? It was certainly proving his eccentricity, but was he now going too far?

‘Lady Morton does not deserve such insolence, sir!’ Lord Hesse glared at Pip around another giant collar. ‘I have a good mind to call you out!’

‘Don’t be silly, darling,’ Lady Hesse said.

‘Mother!’ Hesse said through gritted teeth. ‘I am not silly.’

‘Was I being rude?’ Pip asked Lady Morton, as if this had never occurred to him. It probably had not. Pip had many qualities, but self-awareness could not be counted as one of them. More than once it had fallen to Lydia to extricate him from a social misstep.

‘Oh, I do not mind in the least,’ Lady Morton said, appropriating herself of Pip’s arm. ‘Let us take a turn of the gardens together, and you may satisfy all your curiosity.’

The billiards pitch had been laid out on one of Hawkscroft’s rolling lawns, with seats and parasols and several footmen to attend to them. Lady Phoebe divided them into pairs for the game, and Lydia was relieved to be given Hesse for a partner. Had she been placed with Ashford, she could not have wasted such an opportunity to perform more incomprehensible stupidity for Ashford’s benefit, but after their tour, however, she was not sure she had the stomach for such tricks. It had been a great deal easier to plot Ashford’s downfall before she had come to know him a little better.

‘Are we ready?’ Lady Phoebe said. ‘Waldo, I think we shall begin!’

But Waldo was not attending. Reeves was speaking quietly in his ear and gesturing back towards the house.

‘… he wishes for an audience.’

‘Waldo!’ Lady Phoebe called again, holding out a mallet towards him.

‘I am afraid you will have to do without me for a moment,’ Sir Waldo said. ‘I have to attend to some business.’

‘What business?’ Lady Phoebe said, a tiny frown appearing between her eyes. ‘We have guests, Waldo.’

‘I warned you of this,’ her husband replied.

‘Did you?’

‘Yesterday. You are so forgetful,’ he said, reaching out to pinch her chin, and they gazed at one another so caressingly that Lydia had to look away.

Her eyes, almost against her will, sought out Ashford. As if sensing them, he looked up and smiled. Lydia shifted uncomfortably in her riding habit, and not merely because the thick wool material was too hot for such activities as this. She had forgotten, a little, how very pleasing he was to look at.

‘Reeves, you will have to hold Waldo’s place,’ Lady Phoebe declared, holding out the mallet towards Reeves who took it after the tiniest beat of hesitation. Was this not just classic behaviour from Lady Phoebe – to change the rules on a whim, and then change them back? Was this a trick?

‘I think not,’ Ashford said firmly, and yes, of course, Ashford would not wish to play a game with a servant, because he was far too high and mighty to. Then, ‘I hear Reeves was one of Wellington’s best riflemen, which constitutes unreasonable advantage,’ he said.

‘The 95th regiment, wasn’t it?’ Dacre said, once again proving his exceptional manners. To have remembered such a thing about his brother’s butler – not even his own – was quite remarkable.

‘Are you a very good shot?’ Brandon asked.

‘I wouldn’t go as far as that, my lord,’ Reeves said modestly. However, by the end of his turn, he was receiving joking curses from all the gentlemen, even Ashford. What was happening, here? The man who had used the word ‘Cit’ was comfortable playing billiards with a butler?

Ashford and Miss Hesse took to the field next. Miss Hesse had not played before, and Ashford had to spend a little time talking her through the rules of the game. He did so patiently, of course, because apparently everything he did was patient. Patient and calm and unexpectedly kind and it was so irritating Lydia could scream. Where had this version of him been, during the Season? Or had he always been this person, and she had just been blinded by his poor first impression? Perhaps his words to Mr Brandon, in that corridor long ago – perhaps she had misunderstood them, remembered them for worse than they were? She had been frustrated, that day, hadn’t she? Perhaps it had led her to judge him too harshly?