Page 4 of Clarity
N ot expecting his aunt to still be awake, Alex was surprised when she’d greeted him at the top of the stairs and invited him into her sitting room for tea.
“I’ll have brandy,” he told their butler, despite noticing how the man was already pouring him a cup of tea without asking. For an irritating second, Mr. Berard looked to Alex’s aunt for permission, then recalling who his employer was, he nodded and went for the brandy.
“Tell me how you fared tonight. Did you find a wife?” Aunt Elizabeth questioned him.
Alex wasn’t the least taken aback by her interest. They both knew it was the sole reason he had attended. Briefly, he told her about a few of the ladies with whom he’d danced.
Some were suitable, some even attractive. One had a hair coming out of her nostril, and he’d been unable to stop looking at it, but he didn’t mention that to Aunt Elizabeth. She would disapprove of his silly fixation on something that could be easily plucked and remedied.
He was disappointed in himself for even noticing it and for the slight tickle of amusement that had feathered through him. How asinine!
When he mentioned the Diamonds, his aunt perked up.
“An earl’s daughter would be a good match. And you already have a prior association with the family. Your mother held Lady Diamond in great esteem, as you may recall.”
Aunt Elizabeth spoke as if she hadn’t shrieked in anger in the presence of Lord and Lady Diamond and demanded that all the children be whipped on more than one occasion.
He remembered only too well how she’d chastised his father for allowing him to befriend the eldest of the children.
“I thought you would be against any such alliance,” Alex said.
“Whyever would you think that?” his aunt asked, bemused. “Preposterous! You were all children, misbehaving, disobedient brutes, but you have changed for the better and turned out as well as can be expected. I must assume the Diamond girls have also matured.”
Clarity’s beaming smile came to mind when she had rushed forward and called him Alex in front of everyone. Moreover, her intrusive questions with which she’d peppered him throughout the meal had nearly given him indigestion. She’d even laughed loudly at his dancing lessons. He doubted whether his aunt would consider her to have changed.
“Lady Purity was demure, reserved, polite,” he said. “You would undoubtedly approve.”
“What of the eldest? I believe you cannot court the younger when the eldest is as yet unmarried. And they look as alike as two peas in a pod, or they did last time I saw them. Thus, it can be no matter to you which sister.”
She was wrong. Once he’d paid attention, they looked nothing alike. Purity was all polished, smooth, and cool in manner and looks, while Clarity was ... wildly alluring with an engaging and open manner. The former was preferable to the latter, as far as he was concerned, unless he wanted his home to be a circus with Clarity as the ringmaster.
Perhaps that was a harsh judgment, but she’d slurped her soup and stabbed at a roasted carrot with such vehemence it shot off her plate, causing her to laugh with her mouth uncovered. When they’d risen from the table, she’d carelessly let one of her gloves drop to the floor, and after he’d picked it up and handed it to her, he realized she had a dab of custard on her upper lip.
Desire strong and potent — had surged through him. He’d almost reached out and wiped it off with his thumb before recollecting where he was. Instead, he’d handed her a napkin and explained the situation.
It hadn’t bothered her at all to dab at her mouth while standing next to the table. He had a feeling it wouldn’t have been beyond her to reach over and take another forkful of food or pick up her wine glass for a last sip.
No, she hadn’t matured at all, except from a scruffy, fubsy girl to a radiant woman with perfect curves.
“I would prefer to court Lady Purity,” he insisted.
To that end, he sent around his calling card the following morning, requesting to visit the day after if acceptable. There was no rush, and he wasn’t the type to behave impetuously.
“I guess Hollidge saw something he liked,” Lord Diamond remarked over dinner when Clarity’s mother mentioned the card brought by the viscount’s footman earlier that day. They’d sent an affirmative reply.
“I have to confess,” Lady Diamond said, “I am bewildered he is my friend’s son. If he didn’t have the same look that he had as a youth, I would declare him an impostor. So stern and lacking all mirth.”
Clarity remained silent on the matter, continuing to fold a piece of paper she’d brought to the table with her into what she hoped would be a dragon. She refused to judge her old friend based on the interaction at a ball, an unnatural event at the best of times. And Alex seemed never to have attended one before.
“May we all meet him?” asked Radiance who, along with her sister Brilliance, had been far too young the last time Alex had been at Oak Grove to remember him at all.
“Of course,” said their mother. “Let’s inflict the entire brood upon the young man.”
Adam laughed the loudest. “I cannot imagine going to my future intended’s house for a little tête-à-tête and being faced with the lot of you.”
“Future intended?” repeated Purity. “That’s a little premature, isn’t it?”
Their father and mother glanced at one another before the beautiful red-headed Caroline Diamond raised an eyebrow.
Clarity set down the folded abomination that looked more like a lump of coal than a dragon. Along with her siblings, she turned her gaze to her loving parents.
“Is there something you’re not telling us?” she asked.
Her mother’s porcelain cheeks turned ruddy, as they were apt to do with the slightest emotion.
Her father, whose dark hair and blue eyes had been handed down to four of his five children, picked up his wine glass, sipped, and sent his own gaze to his wife to respond.
The countess shrugged. “I had an agreement with my dearest friend, may she rest in peace. Only a verbal one, you understand.”
“What kind of agreement, Mother?” asked Purity, already pursing her lips with disapproval.
Clarity laughed at her sister’s expression, like a prudish headmistress.
“Feeling like sisters ourselves,” her mother continued, “Lady Hollidge and I had a fervent desire to unite our families. Therefore, when Alexander and Clarity got on well together — ”
“Me?” Clarity yelped, no longer laughing. “You arranged for me to marry Alex?”
Purity unexpectedly laughed. “Our Clarity married to that stick in the mud?”
That didn’t sit well. “Sister, please don’t call him that. I imagine last night was a trial for him, not to know anyone and to jump into such an intricately orchestrated event at his age.”
“You don’t have to marry him,” her mother countered. “It was a whimsical wish his mother and I had, nothing in writing. Besides, he won’t even know about it. Poor boy, being raised by that witch.”
“Easy, Caroline,” Lord Diamond soothed. “We should take Clarity’s advice and not judge.”
“If it weren’t for Lady Aston,” her mother began before sharply biting off her words. “Never mind me. Let us make young Lord Hollidge welcome and see how it goes. Shall we?”
“See how what goes, Mother?” Brilliance, the youngest in the family, asked. “Will Clarity actually be allowing him to court her tomorrow? How romantic.”
“There’s also Lord Brennon to consider,” Lord Diamond reminded her. “He seems like a good chap.”
“Not to mention Lord Mansfield,” Purity added. “His cravat was perfectly tied, and he had not a hair out of place at Devonshire House.”
“I wouldn’t be marrying his valet,” Clarity grumbled. She had danced with the man but could scarcely recall what he looked like. “Besides, I’m not as interested in tidy hair as you are.”
This made Ray, who was a year-and-a-half older than Bri, and the lone red-headed Diamond sibling, giggle at the notion.
“I am not interested in tidy hair, either,” she declared. “When it’s my turn to make a match, I want a man who writes poetry.”
“As his livelihood?” their father asked teasingly.
“Oh, no, Father. He shall be exceedingly wealthy, and thus, he can sit around all day and write sonnets.”
With that particular requisite for a mate stated, they all slipped into their private thoughts while finishing their dessert. Afterward, Clarity wandered to her bedroom to work on her paper-folding skills, which she was learning from Friedrich Froebel’s frustrating book, purchased for her by her dear father no matter its great expense.
Although it was in German, she had a passingly good ability to read the language, far better than her aptitude for folding paper crisply and precisely. In any case, when she got muddled by the words, she simply looked at the drawings.
She knew she ought to go back to the beginning and master the Folds of Life and perhaps make a puzzle purse. As usual, she’d gone headlong into the middle of the more amusing looking creations and was in over her head with the Folds of Beauty. Crumpling up the doglike creature, which was decidedly not beautiful, she tossed it onto her glowing hearth.
She couldn’t deny a tiny ember of excitement glowed in her as steadily as the coals before her. And she could only attribute the feeling to seeing Alex again on the morrow.