‘To friendship,’ he said, raising his glass to the three men sitting round the table with him.
‘And marriage,’ said Ashe, lifting his glass in response.
‘Let’s not get carried away,’ said Lord Chepstow, his glass stopping a mere inch from his lips. ‘To Havelock’s marriage, perhaps. Not the institution as such.’
‘Havelock’s marriage, then,’ said Ashe.
‘Havelock’s bride,’ said Morgan, downing his own drink in one go and reaching for the bottle.
‘Yes, don’t mind drinking to her,’ said Chepstow. ‘Your bride, my friend.’
And let’s hope, thought Havelock as he carefully folded the list and put it in his pocket, that the woman who possesses at least the most important of these attributes will be at the ball tomorrow night.
‘Can you really do nothing better with your hair?’
Mary lowered her gaze to the floor and shook her head as Aunt Pargetter sighed.
‘Couldn’t you at least have borrowed Lotty’s tongs? I am sure she wouldn’t begrudge them to you. If you could only get just a leetle curl into it, I am sure it would look far more fetching than just letting it hang round your face like a curtain.’
Mary put her hand to her head to check that the neat bun, in which she’d fastened her hair earlier, hadn’t already come undone.
‘No, no,’ said Aunt Pargetter with exasperation. ‘It hasn’t come down yet. I am talking in generalities.’
Oh, those. She’d heard a lot of those over the past few months. Generalities uttered by lawyers about indigent females, by relations about the cost of doing their duty and by coach drivers about passengers who didn’t give tips. She’d also heard a lot of specifics. Which informed her exactly how she’d become indigent and why each set of people she’d been sent to in turn couldn’t, at present, offer her a home.
‘Now, I know you feel a little awkward about attending a ball when you are still in mourning,’ Aunt Pargetter went on remorselessly. ‘But I just cannot leave you here on your own this evening to mope. And besides, there will be any number of eligible men there tonight. Who is to say you won’t catch someone’s eye and then all your problems will be solved?’
Mary’s head flew up at that, her eyes wide. Aunt Pargetter was talking of marriage. Marriage! As if that was the answer to any woman’s problems.
She shivered and lowered her gaze again, pressing her lips tightly together. It would solve Aunt Pargetter’s problems, right enough. She hadn’t said so, but Mary could see that keeping her fed and housed for any length of time would strain the family’s already limited resources. But, rather than throwing up her hands, and passing her on to yet another member of the family upon whom Mary might have a tenuous claim, Aunt Pargetter had just taken her in, patted her hand and told her she needn’t worry any longer. That she’d look after her.
Mary just hadn’t realised that Aunt Pargetter’s plan for looking after her involved marrying her off.
‘You need to lift your head a little more and look about you,’ advised Aunt Pargetter, approaching her with her hand outstretched. She lifted Mary’s chin and said, ‘You have fine eyes, you know. What my girls wouldn’t give for lashes like yours.’ She sighed, shaking her head. And then, before Mary had any idea she might be under attack and could take evasive action, the woman pinched both her cheeks. ‘There. That’s put a little colour in your face. Now all you need to do is put on a smile, as though you are enjoying yourself, and you won’t look quite so...’
Repulsive. Plain. Dowdy.
‘Unappealing,’ Aunt Pargetter finished. ‘You could be fairly pretty, you know, if only you would...’ She waved her hands in exasperation, but was saved from having to come up with a word that would miraculously make Mary not sound as though she was completely miserable when her own daughters bounced into the room in a froth of curls and flounces.
Aunt Pargetter had no time left to spare on Mary when her beloved girls needed a final inspection, and just a little extra primping, before she bundled them all into the hired hack they couldn’t afford to keep waiting.
‘We have an invitation from a family by the name of Crimmer tonight,’ Aunt Pargetter explained to Mary as the hack jolted over the cobbles. ‘They are not the sort who would object to me bringing along another guest, so don’t you go worrying your head about not receiving a formal invitation.’
Mary’s eyes nevertheless widened in alarm. She hadn’t any idea her aunt would have taken her to this event without forewarning her hosts.
Aunt Pargetter reached across the coach and patted her hand. ‘I shall just explain you have only recently arrived for a visit, which is perfectly true. Besides, the Crimmers will love being able to boast that their annual ball has become so popular everyone wants to attend. But what is even more fortunate for you, my dear, is that they have two sons to find brides for, not that the younger is quite old enough yet, and I’ve heard rumours that the older one is more or less spoken for.’
As Mary frowned in bewilderment at the contradictory nature of that somewhat rambling statement, her aunt explained, ‘The point is, they have a lot of wealthy friends with sons who must be on the lookout for a wife, as well. Especially one as well connected as you.’
‘What do you mean, Mama?’ Charlotte shot a puzzled glance at Mary. It had clearly come as a shock to her to hear there might be anything that could possibly make Mary a likely prospect on the marriage mart, when all week they’d been thinking of her as the poor relation.
‘Well, although her poor dear mama was my cousin, by marriage, her papa was a younger son of the youngest daughter of the Earl of Finchingfield.’
Mary’s heart sank. Her well-meaning aunt clearly meant to spread news of her bloodlines about tonight as though she were some...brood mare.
‘But if she’s related to the Earl of Finchingfield, why hasn’t she gone to him?’ Dorothy, Charlotte’s younger, and prettier, sister, piped up.
That was a good question. And Mary turned to Aunt Pargetter with real interest, to see how she would explain the tangle that had been her mother’s married life.
‘Oh, the usual thing,’ said her aunt with an airy wave of her hand. ‘Somebody didn’t approve of the marriage, someone threatened to cut someone off, people stopped speaking to one another and, before you knew it, a huge rift had opened up. But Mary’s mother’s people still know how to do their duty, I hope, when a child is involved. Not that you are a child any longer, Mary, but you know what I mean. It isn’t fair for you to have to suffer the consequences of the mistakes your parents made.’
Charlotte and Dorothy were both now looking at her with wide eyes. Mary’s heart sank still further. In the few days she’d been living in their little house in Bloomsbury, she’d discovered that the pair of them had a passion for the kind of novels where dispossessed heiresses went through a series of adventures before winding up married to an Italian prince. She was very much afraid they’d suddenly started seeing her as one of those.
Still, since the Crimmers, who were in trade, weren’t likely to have invited an Italian prince to their ball, she needn’t worry they would attempt to push them into each other’s arms. Actually, she needn’t worry that either Lotty or Dotty would push her into anyone’s arms. They were both far too keen on eligible bachelors themselves to let a single one of them, foreign or not, slip through their own eager fingers.
She pulled her shoulders down and took a deep breath. No