Page 56 of To Love and to Loathe
“Some toast and chocolate, Toogood,” Diana said serenely, too pleased with the success of the previous evening to even work herself up about her maid’s typical rudeness.
Toogood, unsurprisingly, ignored her. “Whilst you’re not as bad as Lady Helen, I’ll confess, I still think it a sign of a lack of moral fiber to spend quite this much time in bed.”
Diana’s ears perked up at the sound of Lady Helen’s name. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“You see, if you weren’t so lazy…” Toogood began, with the closest thing to joy Diana had ever seen in her manner. Evidently, the opportunity to expand upon her mistress’s character failings was akin to Christmas come early.
“No, I meant about Lady Helen,” Diana interrupted, waving her hand impatiently. “She’s usually at the breakfast table before I am in the morning.”
Toogood muttered something thatmighthave been, “That’s not saying much,” but followed it up with the information Diana desired before any reprimand could be directed at her. “She’s awake early enough in the morning, but she takes to her room in the afternoon almost every day—some nonsense about becoming overtired, and fromwhat, I ask you?—and she insists her maid remain with her the entire time. Can’t even nap alone! What sort of person can’t nap alone?”
Toogood, having discovered a new target for her irritation, expanded upon this subject with great fervor, and at considerable length, but Diana stopped listening, distracted by what Toogood had just told her.
How odd. Diana wasn’t surprised that Lady Helen rested in the afternoon—it was just the sort of insipid thing society ladies did with great frequency, as though the effort of eating a meal and exchanging conversation over tea was so taxing that an afternoon nap was necessary to recoup one’s strength—but her insistence on her maid remaining present seemed peculiar in the extreme. She supposed the lady wouldn’t hesitate to inconvenience one of her servants, but it still seemed strange to be so desirous of her maid’s company while sleeping.
An idea was slowly beginning to take shape in Diana’s mind—a wild, improbable, utterly scandalous idea—and she was desperate to know if she had the right of it. And, if she did have the right of it, shewas similarly desperate to know who the gentleman was. Langely? Monmouth? Neither of them seemed particularly likely candidates, and yet…
The idea of Lady Helen taking a lover—for would this not perfectly explain why she needed her maid to remain with her during her “naps,” to act as lookout?—was so preposterous that Diana was tempted to reject it as quickly as it had occurred to her. And yet, if there was one thing she loved more than gossip—and make no mistake, she wasexceptionallyfond of gossip, so long as it wasn’t about her—it was secrets so delicious and well-kept that no one even whispered of them. It wasn’t often one was privy to such a confidence, and she was positivelydesperate, all of a sudden, to know if she had been so lucky.
But how to find out? She and Lady Helen were hardly bosom companions—a less likely confidant Diana could scarcely imagine. But if she were correct in her wild supposition, then it was possible that she had badly misjudged Lady Helen, in which case…
Well, she didn’t know quite what.
“My breakfast, please, Toogood,” she said briskly, interrupting her maid’s diatribe, which seemed to have turned to the subject of naps in general, and the loose, reckless nature of those who took them. With a few last muttered grievances—and a very dark look—Toogood departed, leaving Diana alone with her suddenly quite fascinating thoughts. How best to approach this situation? She had nothing but a vague theory—and a wildly improbable one at that.
Although, if it were true, Diana was not at all certain where it left her plans to see Jeremy married. If Lady Helen was liaising with someone else, was her interest in Jeremy entirely feigned—a front to disguise her actual activities? Not that anything Jeremy had saidto her had given her the slightest indication that he now considered matrimony—to Lady Helen, or anyone else—to be an appealing prospect, in any case.
But then, therehadbeen that moment last night, in bed…
Diana lost track of her own thoughts for a moment, remembering. It should have been nothing more than an idle, curious comment, but there had been something in his expression—an intensity, an interest in her response—when he asked her if she intended to wed again that had made her take notice. Which was sufficiently alarming, for reasons she didn’t care to delve into very deeply, that she had wasted no time in shutting down that line of inquiry with one of her typical breezy jokes.
The fact was, her own intimacy with Jeremy did not seem to have given her any great insight into his mind. Did she understand him better than she had a week ago? Undoubtedly—and she liked him a dangerous amount, as a result. Did she know what he was looking for in a wife? Absolutely not—and the idea of such a person existing was suddenly more distasteful to her than she would have liked it to be. Some primal, traitorous part of her whispered,Mine, when she thought of him, and it simply would not do.
She knew it must be a simple result of their physical relationship—she had never taken a lover before, after all, and she had certainly never found so much satisfaction in the bedchamber, despite his early fumbling. She was, in fact, remarkably pleased on that front; she admitted that her own limited experience offered little by way of comparison, but she was certain that the previous night’s activities had been exceptional by anyone’s measure. He had needed a bit of guidance, of course—but Diana suspected this weakness was common to men in the bedroom, just as it was in so many situations outside of the bedroom, too. He had accepted her instructions with remarkably goodgrace, and it in fact did something strange and squirmy to her insides to think of him touching her, listening to her words, working his hardest to bring her release.
He had certainly succeeded spectacularly on that front, she reflected; had she known the marital act could be like this, she would have taken a lover before Templeton was cold in the ground. She, fool that she was, hadn’t even been able to maintain an aura of cool reserve after the fact; she had no idea what the size of Jeremy’s head would be today, but she’d no doubt that the man would be insufferably smug about the entire experience, and the worst bit was that he probably deserved to be.
The long and short of it was, Lady John Marksdale had clearly been exaggerating her complaints. There had been a bit of fumbling at the beginning, it was true, but things had improved considerably from that point. Diana liked to think that she was doing a sort of community service to all the future actresses and opera dancers and merry widows who would make their way into Jeremy’s bed; he knew how to pay a bit closer attention now, and she’d no doubt that women would be reaping the benefits of this lesson for years to come.
This thought was unexpectedly depressing, and she refocused her attention on the matter at hand: namely, that she still had no idea how she was going to get the man married, and the more she felt herself growing attached, the more necessary this goal became. If Jeremy was married to someone else, he was safe; she might be many things, but she was not the sort of hopeless creature to fall in love with another woman’s husband. Her scheme had taken advantage of Lady Helen’s blatant attempts to fling herself at Jeremy to make some other eligible lady look attractive by comparison—but Diana now, all of a sudden, was uncertain as towhy, exactly, Lady Helen was behaving this waytoward Jeremy. If she was liaising with another gentleman, shouldn’t she be attempting to marry him instead?
The entire situation was enough to give her a headache. And while the last thing she needed at the moment was yet another complication to her scheme, she also couldn’t stand being in the dark—and nothing about Lady Helen’s behavior at the moment made sense, if Diana’s suspicion was correct. She was determined to speak to the lady before the day was out—the only question that remained was, how?
As it turned out, fortune conspired in Diana’s favor that afternoon. The gentlemen of the party were absent by the time she had breakfasted, dressed, and made her way downstairs; the fine weather was too appealing for them to remain indoors a moment past breakfast, and a hunting party had departed on horseback in apparently high spirits. The ladies of the party, being forsaken by their gentlemen companions, had gone on a walk after breakfast, declaring that if the gentlemen were going to take advantage of the sunshine, so, too, should they.
Diana, however, made her excuses and absented herself from the party. She gathered her sketchbook and a packet of pastels and took herself to the gardens, settling on the same bench she had sat upon with Jeremy and Lady Helen the day before and beginning a detailed rendition of the roses growing nearby. So absorbed was she in her work that she did not hear the footsteps that signaled the approach of another person, and it was only when a shadow was cast upon the page before her that she glanced up in surprise.
Lady Helen stood above her, peering down at her sketchbook with an expression of surprised interest on her face. “That’s remarkablygood,” she said, a tone of mild astonishment in her voice. “I’d never heard you were an artist.”
“Oh,” Diana said, feeling uncommonly flustered. Having others look at her artwork always made her feel rather as though she were naked and on display, and having Lady Helen of all people being the one staring down at her did nothing to lessen this sensation. “I’m not. I just dabble a bit.”
Lady Helen frowned. “I’m no expert, but this looks like more than dabbling to me. When you compare it to the bland watercolors that most ladies of our class produce… well, it’s astonishing.”
“That’s because it’s a pastel, not a watercolor,” Diana said with what she felt was admirable patience. “They look entirely different—pastels allow you much bolder colors, and to compare them is… well, it doesn’t make any sense at all. They’re two entirely different mediums.”
“You don’t sound like a casual hobbyist,” Lady Helen said, giving her a speculative glance. It was a glance that made Diana distinctly uncomfortable, in part because it was such a far cry from the idea of Lady Helen Courtenay that she had built over the course of her entire acquaintance with the lady. Diana disliked having to revise her assumptions about people—it was so tiresome to have to admit that she’d been wrong. But, she supposed, in this particular case that ship had already sailed.
“Can I help you with something?” Diana asked, shading her eyes against the sun as she gazed up at Lady Helen. Would she never remember a hat? This was why she had those accursed freckles across her nose that never seemed to fade, even in the dead of winter.
