He smiled briefly. “I am glad my brother married money, at least. I was terrified he’d make some disastrous love match with an actress, like your poor cousin, Lord Ludham.”
“Lady Ludham was an opera dancer,” she corrected him without rancor. “Pamela was the creature’s name, if you please!” She laughed discreetly.
“How relieved you must have been when the divorce petition sailed through Lords.”
Her violet eyes widened. “I, Sir Benedict? Why should I be relieved?”
“It cannot have been easy watching an opera dancer take your mother’s place,” he said quietly. “Forgive me. It must be a painful subject. I should not have mentioned it.”
“I never met the famous Pamela. I spared myself the degradation of curtseying to her ladyship. As you know, I had no brother, so Felix inherited. I went to live with my sister and her husband immediately after my father’s funeral. Isn’t it curious? When Papa died, I lost my father and my home all in one day. Likewise, when Caroline died, I lost my sister and my home in one fell swoop. It seems to be my lot that, whenever there is a death in the family, I lose…everything.”
“It must be something of an adjustment to live alone,” he hinted blandly.
She replied, “It must be something of an adjustment to find yourself without an heir.”
“I mean to marry as soon as possible,” he said. “I might advise your ladyship to do the same. Then you would not have to adjust to living alone.”
She looked down at her hands. “But I have been single so long that no one thinks of me! I can not compete with these seventeen-and eighteen-year-old debutantes. They seem to be getting younger every year.”
“Quite,” said Benedict.
“I understand you rescued Lady Matlock’s daughter on the road from Chippenham,” she said, smiling. “Naturally, everyone is dying to wish you joy. A very pretty girl, but so young! Too young, I think, to be pitchforked into society. But…very pretty, I grant you.”
“You are wrong when you say that no one thinks of you,” said Benedict.
Serena blushed.
So Fitzwilliam was right, he thought. The lady is on the market.
He stayed with her only twenty minutes, the prescribed time for a social visit. In his view, the call went very smoothly. The ice was broken, at any rate.
Chapter 5
Wednesday passed with nothing more interesting to report than a stroll in the Sydney Gardens, but Benedict began Thursday with a feeling of complacency. If tonight’s ball concluded on a note of accord between himself and Lady Serena, he saw no reason why he could not propose to her on Friday. It was a little soon, perhaps, but not, he thought, too soon for propriety’s sake. After all, he had known Serena before he ever set foot in Bath.
Most of the morning was taken up in grooming. Benedict sat in his black dressing gown wanting a cheroot as his hair was cut and his sideburns were trimmed. His fingernails were trimmed and buffed to a high sheen, and, even though no one but Pickering was going to see them, so were his toenails. Usually Benedict paid little attention to Pickering as he fussed about, but today he watched him like a hawk.
He startled Pickering by suddenly demanding, “What is that foul concoction?”
Pickering had been humming a cheerful little tune as he applied the special nourishing hair tonic to the roots of his master’s luxuriant black hair. It died now. Sir Benedict had never questioned him before. It was disconcerting to hear the special nourishing hair tonic described as a “foul concoction.”
“Foul concoction?” Pickering echoed tremulously.
“You’re dyeing my hair!” Benedict roared the accusation. “Pickering, how could you?”
Pickering clutched the black bottle to his breast protectively. “Now, Sir Benedict,” he said soothingly. “Everyone does it.”
“How long have you been doing this to me?” Benedict demanded furiously.
“I don’t recall the particulars—”
“Damn the particulars! How long?”
Pickering’s memory improved. “It was about the time that Master Cary disobeyed you, and enlisted in the Army as a private, Sir Benedict. You began to go gray at the temples—quite prematurely, of course.”
“Good God!” said Benedict. “I wasn’t even thirty when my brother went to Spain. That was nearly ten years ago! You have been dyeing my hair black for ten years?”
“Master Cary would give anyone gray hairs.”
“You will stop dyeing my hair at once, Pickering,” Benedict commanded, getting up from his chair. “Only fops and old women dye their hair. I am neither, I trust.”
Pickering was apologetic but firm. “It would be most unwise to stop now, Sir Benedict. Your roots are already beginning to show,” he gently explained. “It will be so very noticeable when you bow to the ladies. Not at all the thing when one is looking for a wife. One never gets a second chance to make a first impression, you know.”
“Pickering, I could kill you!”
“You will thank me for this when you are married, Sir Benedict. Ladies always say nay to Mr. Gray. Mr. Gray, go away, they say. Come back, Mr. Black.”
“Oh, shut up!”
Pickering shut up.
Unable to watch the rest of the demoralizing operation, Benedict leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “I’m too old for this,” he muttered. “I should have lived in the Middle Ages. I could have traded a few cows for my neighbor’s daughter.”
“You are not too old for Lady Serena,” Pickering assured him. “Why, she’s thirty, if she’s a day, and clinging to it like a burr. And if that black hair is her own, then I’m the King of France! I’ve seen her maid in the apothecary’s shop.”
“Are you saying that Lady Serena dyes her hair?”
“Not only that, sir, but I have seen her maid buying white lead and belladonna drops.”
“But those are poisons, surely.”
“They are only poisonous if one ingests them, sir,” Pickering said confidently. “Ladies—and some gentlemen—routinely paint their faces with white lead. It’s perfectly safe. As for the belladonna, a few drops in the eye enlarge the pupil, for a more speaking glance.”
Benedict shook his head in amazement. “What else do women do for the sake of beauty? Clean their teeth with bluing?”
“Certainly. And they bleach their skins, too.”
Benedict looked at himself in the mirror. “You haven’t been bleaching me, have you?”
“No, indeed, Sir Benedict,” Pickering assured him. “Fortunately, you are naturally pale, like all true English gentlemen. No one would ever mistake you for a laborer.”
“Heaven forbid,” said Benedict.
The ballroom presided over by Mr. King was one hundred feet in length, supported by Corinthian columns and decorated with neoclassical friezes. Five enormous glass chandeliers hung from gilded compartments in the ceiling, the brilliance of their white candles reflected and magnified by the enormous mirrors at either end of the room.
The right sleeve of his dress coat had been neatly pinned back, and he disdained to wear a glove on his remaining hand, but other than that, he was in correct evening dress. The musicians had already assembled in the gallery when Benedict arrived, but Mr. King had not yet given the signal to begin.
“You will