Page 15 of Lady Like

Emily flees the pergola, face hot and dress plastered to her with sweat.

Her heart is pounding in her ears, so loud she can hardly think through the din.

She wants away from here. She wants to be back in Sussex, in her small room in her small house years in the past, on the Night That Ruined Everything.

This time, she’ll stay beneath the covers.

She’ll ignore the stones against her window.

This time, she’ll do everything right. She will not be the sort of woman who calls a stranger a twat and throws her shoes.

What had come over her? She has not lost her temper in years.

She long ago barricaded that door, jammed it, locked it, and threw away the key, papering over that darkest, most unladylike piece of her.

She feels suddenly light-headed and stops to steady herself with a hand on a Grecian statue.

Years of anger at the unfairness of life had exploded from her, Pandora’s box flung open in the smug face of that woman.

It feels like a rotted tooth finally pulled from her head, but the relief doesn’t negate the pain.

The nerve of her. Anyone, Emily assures herself, would have lost their head in the face of such a…well.

Even had she not been commanded to depart, she can’t bear the thought of returning to the party.

Surely Violet will work out what’s happened if she returns home.

Emily is nearly to the drive, prepared to make her escape on her own two bare feet if she can’t find a cab, when she hears someone call her name.

She turns, and there, of course, is the Duke of Rochester, and she is shoeless and her hair is down and she can’t decide if she’s actually crying or simply so angry it feels like it.

He diverts his course from the pergola and jogs across the lawn toward her with a broad smile.

“I was afraid you had left,” he calls, “and I had missed my waltz.”

Emily blots at her forehead, trying to sound as poised as she had earlier that evening, when lemonade and the crowded dance floor loomed largest in her mind. “Not yet, my lord. Should we have it now?”

“I think there’s about to be a recess for supper.” Alexander stops before her with a smile, which Emily fails entirely to return. “Are you well?” he asks, his eyes drifting to her slippers clenched in each hand.

“Quite.” She can think of nothing else to do, so she holds up her slippers and says, with light hysteria, “Just resting my feet.”

“Of course. You were quite the sought-after dance partner this evening.”

“I was lucky to share the company of so many excellent men.”

“And a few undesirables as well, I’m sure,” he says with a conspiratorial wink.

Every piece of etiquette Emily was ever taught flits around her brain like flies trapped in a jar.

Do not frown, it puckers the skin. Do not laugh, it creases the eyes.

A smile is a lady’s best weapon. A scowl is as good as a chink in the wall, and to speak ill of others is to only speak ill of oneself.

Do not mention the man who smelled of fish or the one who stuck his finger up his nose before taking her hand or the one who said her dress made her look rather wan.

“All the men were lovely and kind,” she says.

Rochester looks again at her shoes, and Emily wonders if she should put them back on. What had she been thinking taking them off? That vile woman had goaded her—had she? Emily can hardly remember anymore.

“Were you meeting—” she says at the same moment Rochester asks, “Would you care to sit with me? Oh—you first.”

How to ask now without sounding jealous? But also how to continue this acquaintance if he has his sights set upon that woman under the pergola? “Were you meeting…someone else?”

“A gentleman—for business talk, nothing for you to mind. Come, sit with me a spell. I was going to suggest a turn about the garden but if your feet are aching—”

“I’m happy to take a turn,” Emily says, resisting the urge to hurl the damned shoes into a nearby hedge. “Whatever you wish, my lord.”

She knows she’s working too hard to compensate for actions Rochester didn’t witness, but she’s worried that if she lets herself slip even for a moment, she’ll fly at him the same as she did that horrible woman. She cannot falter. Not now, not with him.

But the duke insists they rest, and Emily lets him lead her to a stone bench at the lip of a lily pond where they sit a chaste foot apart.

Rochester smiles, and he is very handsome, she thinks. Or at least pleasant looking. Or wealthy, which can often be mistaken for handsomeness. “Tell me about yourself, Miss Sergeant,” he says. “I’d like to make better acquaintance.”

“I am quite a simple creature,” she replies, a deviation memorized from The Lady’s Book of Etiquette. “But if you tell me what you enjoy, I will endeavor to make your interests mine.”

Rochester laughs like she’s made a joke.

Emily waits. Conversation, the book had advised, relies on a lady to originate, and then sympathize. Whatever he says next, she is going to sympathize the hell out of.

Rochester stares at her for a moment, then his eyes widen. “Oh, are you in earnest?” He rubs the back of his neck, glancing from side to side. “Come, surely you can think of at least one thing about yourself I should know.”

Oh God, she can’t. She can’t tell him where she’s from, or the names of her parents or what her father does lest her secret be exposed.

And she has been so dedicated to the hobbies of preparing herself for marriage and trying to reassemble her ruined reputation that she has had little time to cultivate other interests.

She could tell him she enjoys embroidery, but what if he asks her to explain what exactly she likes about it and catches her in a lie, for there is nothing to be enjoyed about embroidery?

Ruining her eyes so she has a plausible excuse for not reading the Bible?

Or prickingher finger hard enough to justify skipping her practice of the pianoforte—is that anything? Is this the nature of an interest?

She could tell him something innocuous to throw him off the scent. Maybe her height, but perhaps he will think her too tall.

“Miss Sergeant,” Rochester says, and she realizes she has been quiet for too long. “Do you enjoy dancing?”

“I…” Why does every question feel like a trap? She wants to pluck at the front of her dress and separate the sweaty shell from her skin. She wants to rip the whole thing off, lie down in the soft grass, and let the earth absorb her. “Do you?”

“It is not my preferred way to spend an evening, but with good company and a few rounds of cards, a dance can be a jolly good time.”

Emily nods. “I agree.”

Silence again. Rochester picks at a loose string on the cuff of his coat. Emily contemplates suicide.

“Do you like horses, Miss Sergeant?” Rochester finally asks, his tone the conversational equivalent of a wild leap for a gangplank being drawn onto a departing ship.

“No,” Emily says, and that, at least, is the truth.

Rochester purses his lips.

“But if you do,” she says quickly, “I could develop an appreciation. Of a sort.”

It is…something, at least. Enough that Rochester accepts the bone she has not just thrown him but positively pressed into his hands and begged him to take— please, just take the goddamn bone!

“Well, I recently purchased a racehorse,” he says.

“Very lean, very fast. I thought I was going to have him running circles at the Downs like his prestigious ancestors. Only to get him home and find he has an unexpected knack for jumping. Can’t keep his feet on the ground. ”

“Perhaps he was a Pegasus in a previous life and remembers he once had wings,” Emily says, so goddamn grateful to be having something resembling a conversation that she realizes too late the reference meant to be a joke may instead make her seem overeducated, and what man would want that in a wife?

Rochester’s brow creases. “What?”

“A…Pegasus,” Emily repeats, then, in hopes of reframing the comment as an opportunity for him to teach her something, adds, “Is that not the winged horse from the Greek myths? I must be remembering wrong.”

“Ah, so you like mythology.”

She swallows. Liking mythology is a bit of a leap from making a single reference to Pegasus, but Emily doesn’t want to contradict him.

What she wants is water—the nearby pond taunts her, for she can neither sociably drink from it nor drown herself in it.

She inclines her head in a way she hopes passes for a nod and will thus close the subject, then asks, “What does one do with a jumping racehorse?”

“Well, he has his first outing next month in the Milton Derby steeplechase,” Rochester replies. “Have you been to a horse race?”

He must truly think her a sheltered country mouse to ask such a thing.

But perhaps if she says no, he will thrill to take her on a new adventure.

She can feign wonder at how fast the horses run, and say daft things like I’ll bet on that one because he’s gold like my hair !

“I haven’t! I don’t think we have them in Sussex. ”

Oh hell. She had not meat to reveal her home county. And before she can hurry the conversation past it, Rochester repeats, “Sussex? Is that where your family is from? Mine as well—perhaps I know your father.”

“I can’t imagine you do,” Emily says. “He’s a simple farmer. And I,” she says, regretting the ridiculous words as they leave her mouth but unable to corral them, “his simple daughter.”

Rochester sighs tightly, then pushes himself up from the bench with his hands on his knees. “Well, Miss Sergeant. It has been lovely to meet you, but I think I should return to the dance.”