Kitty. Elizabeth Bailey

if you asked him. Whereas Claud—’

      ‘Has more gumption than you give him credit for!’ he interrupted, incensed. ‘Only it ain’t a particle of use thinking the Countess would take notice of anything I said, for she won’t.’

      His sister clasped both hands fondly about his arm. ‘That’s what I meant to say, Claud. I know you can’t be blamed if she won’t listen to you. Why, she calls you a nincompoop and says you haven’t a brain in your head.’

      Claud removed her hands from his arm. ‘Obliged to her! And I’ll thank her to keep her insulting opinions to herself, the insufferable witch!’

      ‘Hush!’ warned Kate, leaning close. ‘She is coming out of the ballroom.’

      Lady Barbara promptly left them, slipping through two groups of guests to enter the drawing room by a door around the corner of the gallery and diving out of sight among a coterie of chattering maidens.

      ‘She has seen us!’ uttered Kate, sotto voce. ‘She is coming this way.’

      Wishing he might follow his sister’s example, Claud turned to confront his formidable mother, unable to suppress the inevitable rise of mixed emotions that invariably attacked him in her presence. Defiant he might be, but no weight of years had served to subdue the tight knot of apprehension that settled in his stomach, overlaid with—in his own view—a justifiable sense of outrage. Such derogatory remarks as that relayed by his sister had been commonplace throughout his life, hedged about as he had been by rules and shibboleths that would have driven a saint into rebellion. Transgressions against which had been summarily, and painfully, dealt with.

      On this occasion the Countess, as he immediately divined, was disposed to be lenient. She was attired in the grand manner, in an open robe of white muslin spotted in her favourite blue, with a draped sash trained to the floor at the back, epaulettes to her sleeves and a turban headdress from which rose three tall plumes. But there was approbation in the strongly aristocratic countenance, with the high wide brow, the straight nose—the only feature bequeathed to Claud who otherwise favoured his sire’s pleasant looks—and the thin-lipped mouth, which in Claud’s memory was usually pinched in disapproval. Lady Blakemere actually smiled as she reached him.

      ‘Well, children?’ The perfectly modulated voice was the epitome of good breeding. ‘I am glad to see you enjoying one another’s company. I hope you have saved a dance for your cousin, my dear Katherine?’

      This last did not fail to fan Claud’s irritation. Alone of their elders, the Countess refused to use the pet names that served to distinguish her niece and her own eldest daughter. Lady Blakemere instead addressed her child as Lady Katherine in public, just as she spoke of her sister as Lady Silvia, raising her over the despised Rothley, mercifully deceased, who had been ‘a mere baron’.

      Claud watched Kate curtsy as she answered, ‘I believe we are engaged for a country dance later in the evening.’