Page 18 of Mr. Cavendish, I Presume

Amelia leaned forward, lips twitching. A blush could mean all sorts of things—all of them quite splendid. She felt a rush of excitement in her chest, a heady, almost weightless sort of feeling—the sort one got when told a particularly juicy piece of gossip. “Was he handsome, then?”

Elizabeth looked at her as if she were mad. “Who?”

“The highwayman, of course.”

Grace stammered something and pretended to drink her tea.

“He was,” Amelia said, feeling much better now. If Wyndham was in love with Grace…well, at least she did not return the emotion.

“He was wearing a mask,” Grace retorted.

“But you could still tell that he was handsome,” Amelia urged.

“No!”

“Then his accent was terribly romantic. French? Italian?” Amelia actually shuddered with delight, thinking of all the Byron she’d read recently. “Spanish.”

“You’ve gone mad,” Elizabeth said.

“He didn’t have an accent,” Grace said. “Well, not much of one. Scottish, perhaps? Irish? I couldn’t tell, precisely.”

Amelia sat back with a happy sigh. “A highwayman. How romantic.”

“Amelia Willoughby!” her sister scolded. “Grace was just attacked at gunpoint, and you are calling it romantic?”

She would have responded with something very cutting and clever—because really, if one couldn’t be cutting and clever with one’s sister, who could one be cutting and clever with?—but at that moment she heard a noise in the hall.

“The dowager?” Elizabeth whispered to Grace with a grimace. It was so lovely when the dowager did not join them for tea.

“I don’t think so,” Grace replied. “She was still abed when I came down. She was rather…ehrm…distraught.”

“I should think so,” Elizabeth remarked. Then she gasped. “Did they make away with her emeralds?”

Grace shook her head. “We hid them. Under the seat cushions.”

“Oh, how clever!” Elizabeth said approvingly. “Amelia, wouldn’t you agree…”

But Amelia wasn’t listening. It had become apparent that the movements in the hall belonged to a more sure-footed individual than the dowager, and sure enough, Wyndham walked past the open doorway.

Conversation stopped. Elizabeth looked at Grace, and Grace looked at Amelia, and Amelia just kept looking at the now empty doorway. After a moment of held breath, Elizabeth turned to her sister and said, “I think he does not realize we are here.”

“I don’t care,” Amelia declared, which wasn’t quite the truth.

“I wonder where he went,” Grace murmured.

And then, like a trio of idiots (in Amelia’s opinion), they sat motionless, heads turned dumbly toward the doorway. A moment later they heard a grunt and a crash, and as one they rose (but still did not otherwise move) and watched.

“Bloody hell,” they heard the duke snap.

Elizabeth’s eyes widened. Amelia was rather warmed by the outburst. She approved of anything that indicated he was not in complete control of a situation.

“Careful with that,” they heard him say.

A rather large painting moved past the doorway, two footmen struggling to keep it perpendicular to the ground. It was a singularly odd sight. The painting was a portrait—life-sized, which explained the difficulty in balancing it—and it was of a man, quite a handsome one, actually, standing with his foot on a large rock, looking very noble and proud.

Except for the fact that he was now tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, and—from Amelia’s vantage point—appeared to be bobbing up and down as he floated past. Which cut away significantly at noble and proud.

“Who was that?” she asked, once the painting had disappeared from sight.

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