Page 8 of His Haunted Duchess
“What if—” she tremored, “what if she really is cursed? Ought we to prod her so?”
The other two turned back to the lady.
“You see? Look at the damage you’ve caused merely by your presence.”
“You’ve set Blanche all a quiver—she looks as though she might drop ill at any moment.”
“Leave, before you put all of us in danger.”
Frederic stepped into the shadows just outside the circle of their perception. Three ladies, as they called themselves, surrounded the solitary figure clothed in diaphanous blue silk. Their abusive tone carried across the square in which they stood, adjacent to a flowing fountain.
“I repeat,” one of them claimed, “you’re an abomination—a curse to society. You had better stay home. Who invited you to this assembly in any case?”
The other two ladies cackled like crows in a murder.
“If you had come to a ball in any one of our homes, we would have thrown you out.”
The solitary lady turned her face from them, heavenwards, towards the moon. Frederic’s voice, dark and harsh, cut through the shadows.
“That would presume, of course, that she had accepted your invitations.”
He stepped forward into the moonlight. The ladies whipped around. With no small pleasure, Frederic savored the horror in their eyes as they realized who he was. He raised his chin and stared at them levelly. They withered and lowered their gazes. He waited until the anger that would infuse his voice subsided to a rumble.
“It would seem,” he said, slow and deliberate as the nell of a bell at a funeral, “that the dance inside has been too long deprived of your participation.”
The ladies shifted nervously like colts in a stable. The tallest, orange-clad lady opened her mouth then shut it again.
“I suppose,” he said, “I expected at least a show of good breeding from educated ladies, but I find myself disappointed.”
The tallest lady blushed and raised her head indignantly, her eyes sparking. Her gaze met his, however, and—in a fit of rare wisdom—she said nothing. The other ladies, likewise, were silent, staring with fixed attention at the grass or shrubbery.
“Leave,” he ordered. The shortest one dabbed her eyes with a lace handkerchief. “Now.”
The ladies scattered, skirts trailing after them as they fled back inside like sheep before a wolf. He shook his head. Would that they would find enough idle entertainment inside to keep them diverted from further harassment. He turned back to the solitary lady and bowed.
“I hope, my lady,” he said, his voice as gentle as it had been coarse, “that you are none the worse for your experience.”
The woman, who had turned her face to the ground at his entrance, raised her face to him. Frederic caught his breath. The contours of her silhouette crept over him like an embrace from along-lost friend. The moonlight quivered in her eyes, framed by an entrancing twine of dark brown curls.
“I hope,” she said, “I haven’t inconvenienced you.”
He held on to the timbre of her voice, savoring each tone like a melody. It sounded—to his starstruck fancy—like one he had heard before.
“Not at all,” he replied, with a short bow. “There is no inconvenience.” Her answer echoed around his mind, and he strove to focus on it. “But are you quite well? Un—unscathed?”
She smiled—painfully, wistfully.
“Oh—” she said, “As to that—don’t trouble yourself unduly, sir. I suppose I am used to it.”
Frederic clenched his teeth. Now, only as he returned to himself, did he notice a long, lurid scar stretching from one corner of her eye almost down to her jawline. So it was she—the cursed lady about whom Felicity had so glibly gossiped. Even so, he shook his head.
“No one ought to be used to it.” He turned back towards the house, watching the candlelight dance on the windows. “You ought to have said something in your own defense, at least, instead of letting them torment you.”
The lady’s blush heightened, and she looked at the ground. The nerve of idle tongues! His angry gaze searched out the three fleeing ladies. He had half a mind to drag them back and insist on an apology. The lady raised her eyes. They sparked oddly.
“I have no reason to deny the obvious,” she said. “Ill-timed, perhaps, their comments might have been and not quite good natured but not wholly untrue.”
Frederic raised his eyebrows. So, she did have a spark, at least, of spirit, beneath her modest silence.
