“Lord Standish,” he announced with dreadful calm, as though the evening could only degenerate further.
Like his sisters, Freddie Standish was very pleasing to the eye. Fair and slim, he was a general favorite with the matrons as long as he made no attempts to seek fortune by marrying one of their daughters. He shared the modest house in Pimlico with Pen and worked—nominally, at least—for a banker who liked the prestige of having a titled gentleman to deal with the social side of his business. Despite the ignominy of his situation, Freddie always seemed good-humored and blessedly unflustered. Isabella loved him for it, though Pen maintained with dry affection that Freddie only had one mood because he was too stupid to have developed a range of them.
“Good evening, Freddie,” Isabella said, tilting her face up for his kiss of greeting. “I was telling Pen that I have managed to stave off bankruptcy for a few months, until the house is sold.”
“Congratulations,” Freddie said, sitting down on the sofa and ungallantly obliging his sister to move up to give him more space. He looked about him. “Never liked the place myself. Far too vulgar.”
“Yes, it is,” Isabella said with a sigh. “I shall be retiring to Salterton instead.”
Freddie looked horrified. “Salterton? In Hampshire?”
“Dorset,” Pen snapped. “I told her it was a foolish idea.”
“Quite right,” Freddie said. He helped himself to one of the buttered scones on the dainty china tea plate. “Dorset is unspeakably dull. Why not try Kent instead, Bella?”
Isabella heard Pen give an exaggerated sigh. Not for the first time she wondered how the bookish and sharp-witted Penelope and the intellectually slow Freddie ever managed to share a house in anything approaching harmony.
“You will not wish to visit me, then,” she said.
“No danger of that,” Freddie said cheerfully. “I would rather work for a living than retire to Dorset.”
“You are already supposed to work for a living,” Pen pointed out.
“Only notionally,” Freddie said with a cheerful grin.
“Unfortunately I do not have that option,” Isabella said briskly. “As a governess or a maid I would earn insufficient money in my entire life to cover Ernest’s debts. And the only other alternative is to become a cyprian. I suppose one may work from home and do hours to suit—”
“Steady on, Bella!” Freddie was so scandalized that his half-eaten scone slipped off his tilting plate. Pen retrieved it.
Isabella patted his arm. “I apologize, Freddie. I was only speaking in jest.”
“So I should hope,” Freddie said, squaring his shoulders. “Head of the family. Couldn’t approve. Sorry, Bella, but there it is.”
“Of course not,” Isabella said comfortingly.
“I would rather you married Augustus Ambridge than contemplate a career as a demimondaine,” Freddie said. “And you won’t hear me say that very often.”
This time it was Pen who intervened. “I cannot agree with you, Freddie. Augustus Ambridge is the most tiresome bore.”
They fell to squabbling like a pair of schoolchildren and Isabella sighed. It was fortunate that one of the alternatives she was not considering was sharing the Pimlico house with her siblings. In that event she would likely run mad within two days. They did not even notice when she slipped out of the room to find her cloak and evening slippers for the ball.
As she came down the staircase, she met Belton in full sail, like a galleon with a following wind.
“Lord Augustus Ambridge has arrived and is awaiting you in his carriage, Your Serene Highness,” Belton announced, with a hint of approval in his voice at long last.
“Thank you, Belton,” Isabella said. She put her head around the library door, cutting through the wrangling of her brother and sister with a crisp:
“Children! Lord Augustus is here to escort us to the ball.”
“Just like the fairy godmother,” Pen said. She rose to her feet. “I am looking forward to this evening, Bella. As it is your first social event in the Ton since your widowhood, you may prove to me just how inconspicuous you can be.”
“I intend to,” Isabella said, glaring repressively at her. “I shall be as quiet and retiring as a nun, I assure you. It will be in no way a night to remember.”
CHAPTER SIX
ISABELLA HAD ALWAYS CONSIDERED royalty to be vastly overrated. The same people who bowed and smiled this evening as she glided along the sumptuous red tartan carpet at the Duchess of Fordyce’s Scottish reception would have cut her dead when she had been little Isabella Standish, without a handle to her name or a feather to fly. In fact they had cut her dead. She recognized plenty of faces from her season as a debutante twelve years before but reflected that it was more likely that she would recognize people’s backs. She could still recall them turning away in disdain and those long-ago whispered conversations:
“Who is that?”
“Nobody, my dear…That jumped up fishmonger’s granddaughter, Isabella Standish…”
“Oh, oh I see…. I thought she looked well to a pass but now I realize that she is nowhere near as pretty as she would have been with a title and a fortune….”
Isabella paused patiently while Lord Augustus halted to receive the greeting of the Duchess of Fordyce herself, flanked by her three unmarried daughters and the bored-looking son and heir to the Fordyce millions. John Fordyce had brightened when he spotted Penelope following behind. Gentlemen did brighten when they saw the angelic-looking Penelope. The good impression generally lasted until she opened her mouth, when everyone else realized what Isabella and Freddie already knew—that she was a bluestocking with a tongue that could flay you alive.
“Lord Augustus!” The duchess was smiling so hard that Isabella feared her rouge would crack. She had heard that Her Grace seldom smiled for fear of the aging effect of wrinkling. Tonight, however, she had evidently granted herself a special dispensation.
“How utterly delightful to have you back with us in London, my lord,” the duchess said. “And with your dazzling companion! Your Serene Highness…” A fulsome curtsy followed. “Thank you for choosing to adorn our event this evening.”
Isabella heard Penelope give a snort of derision that she did not even attempt to turn into a cough. She gave her sister a quelling look.
“It is a great pleasure to be here, Duchess,” Isabella said, adding with scrupulous truth, “Your Scottish exhibition is quite spectacular.”
It was indeed. Ever since the Prince Regent had started a craze for all things Caledonian earlier in the year with his sudden and rather awkward nostalgic attachment to the Stuart dynasty, the Tory hostesses has adorned their houses with tartans and bagpipes and the dancing was all reels and strathspeys. Isabella could hear a fiddler tuning up in the ballroom to the right of them; when the strains of the violin where joined by the wheeze of the bagpipes, several people in the vicinity had the pained expressions of those suffering the earache.
“How marvelous,” Isabella said, as the duchess winced at the sound. She turned to Augustus. “We must certainly dance the reel later, my lord.”
The duchess beamed in relief and Augustus smiled, too, and gave Isabella’s arm a little squeeze of approval, which irritated her with its proprietory overtones. Augustus, whom she had first met when he was a diplomat at the Swedish Court and she and Ernest were in exile there, had never been any more than a useful escort to social events. She suspected that like many men over the