“I hadn’t realized that’s what they were calling it now.”

“We, my dear Dovedale, are men of the world. Why call a spade anything but what it is?”

“Because by another name it might smell sweeter,” countered Robert.

Medmenham pursed his lips, an expression that made him look disconcertingly like Charles II, only without the long wig.

“An interesting point. Our senses are so often led by our expectations. Take the red-haired chit over there.” His glass angled towards Miss Deveraux, who was dancing down the line with Lord Frederick Staines. “Her features are commonplace enough, but she has flash and flair. We expect beauty from her and therefore we find it.”

Robert didn’t, but if Medmenham chose to redirect his attentions to Charlotte’s friend, that was perfectly all right with him. From what he’d seen of Miss Deveraux, she could take care of herself. She already had poor Tommy on a very short string, following along after her looking like a whipped dog hoping to be tossed a treat. Personally, Robert didn’t see the attraction.

“And then there’s the little Lansdowne. When you look at her closely,” said Medmenham, suiting actions to words, “she’s not an unattractive thing. But she lacks élan. And there is that unfortunate grandmother of hers.”

“The Duchess comes as part of the deal,” said Robert quickly. If anything could kill passion, it was the thought of the Duchess lurking behind the bridal bed.

Medmenham brushed the Duchess aside. “She must be eighty, if she’s a day. I give her another five years, at most.”

Robert forced out an incredulous laugh. “The Dowager Duchess? She’ll outlive us all, and kick the Devil in the shins when he comes to fetch her.” With feigned nonchalance, he raised an eyebrow at his companion. “Besides, wouldn’t marriage rather put a damper on your subterranean bacchanals?”

Medmenham looked at him with genuine surprise. “I don’t see why. Fidelity is too, too crushingly bourgeois.”

If that was the case, then Robert was a bourgeois at heart. His father’s amorous adventures had brought him no happiness; only an empty purse, an emptier hearth, and a whopping case of the French pox. “Infidelity doesn’t seem to quite do the range of your activities justice. What does one call philandering on an epic scale?”

Medmenham raised his quizzing glass, turning it slowly in the light so that it winked like the star the wise men followed to Bethlehem. “Divinity.”

“I’ll vouch for that once I’ve met some of your divinities,” retorted Robert. “From my experience, fallen women tend to be more earthy than divine.”

“It depends on how one defines the divine. Some of the pagan goddesses were notoriously earthy jades. Venus herself was a tired old tart.”

“Is it Venus you worship, then?” The last time Robert had looked, the attribute of the goddess had been a dove, not a lotus.

Medmenham smiled blandly. “We are ecumenical in our devotions. And in our appetites.”

Robert bit down on a sharp retort as Medmenham’s gaze once again strayed towards Charlotte. To show irritation would be a fatal mistake; Medmenham controlled his followers by probing at their weaknesses.

Instead, Robert assumed an aggrieved expression. “Damnation. Duty calls. I promised this set to my cousin.”

Medmenham raised one well-groomed eyebrow. “And you mustn’t disappoint her.”

Robert pulled a wry face. “I mustn’t disappoint her grandmother. If the Dowager doesn’t come after me, her little dog will.”

As he had learned during his brief stay at Girdings, all the young blades of the ton went in mortal terror of the Dowager’s little yipping dog, which she employed to great effect among their ranks, like a capricious goddess unleashing plagues for her own amusement. It was said her dog could shred a new pair of pantaloons in about three seconds flat.

“If you’ll excuse me, Medmenham . . .”

Medmenham’s eyes glinted with his usual diabolical amusement as he waved a languid quizzing glass.

“Carry on, old chap, carry on. I’ll be here. Waiting my turn.”

Chapter Five

We went to the local pub for dinner. In the interval since my last relationship, I had forgotten that strange alchemy by which moonlight and roses turn into dropped socks and empty take-away cartons. Not that I was complaining, mind you. I liked take-away. I also liked pubs. Besides, how much more English could you get than ye olde country pub with ye not so olde local landowner? It was the sort of thing impressionable Anglophiles dream about. Admittedly, when I’d dreamt about it in the past, ye olde landowner had been looking a lot like Colin Firth and had been wearing knee breeches, but I had no complaints to make.

I had had more than my fair share of living in the past that afternoon as I read through Charlotte’s letters to Henrietta from Girdings. Henrietta’s arrival at Girdings had entailed a predictable gap in the correspondence, but I had been sufficiently caught up in the story by then to dig around in the wainscoting like a research-minded mouse until I found Henrietta’s journals.

As Colin maneuvered the Range Rover along a twisty country lane, I asked something that had been puzzling me all day: “How come all of Henrietta’s papers are here, instead of at Loring House?”

“Probably,” said Colin, expertly navigating around a rut, “because that line died out. No male heirs. One of Henrietta’s great-granddaughters married back into the Selwick side.” He frowned at the windshield. “Great-great-granddaughter?”

I did some hasty mental math. If a generation is generally considered to be about thirty-five years . . . “So that would be your grandmother?”

“Great-grandmother,” he corrected, braking briefly to avoid hitting a wayward rabbit.

“So you’re descended from Miles!” I exclaimed delightedly.

Colin was less excited than I was. “And monkeys, too, if you go back far enough.”

“I could tell that,” I said, with an exaggerated eye roll. “It’s just . . . It’s a bit like finding out that the characters in one of your favorite books are actually real.”

“Eloise, I hate to tell you this, but they were real. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”

“I know. But . . .”

It was hard to explain. As a historian, I found myself all too often treating my historical subjects like fictional characters, malleable entities that could be made to do one thing or another, whose motivations could be speculated upon endlessly, and whose missing actions could be reconstructed and approximated based on assessments of prior and later behaviors. It was one of the hazards of working with a fragmentary source base. You had little scraps, like puzzle pieces, and you put them together as best you could. But no matter how faithful you tried to be to the historical record, there would always be that element of guesswork, of imagination, of (if we’re being totally honest) fiction.

“They lived and loved and died,” said Colin briskly, competently swinging the car onto a road that was mercifully paved. My posterior thanked him. Dirt roads might be picturesque, but they were hard on the backside. “They lost money, they died in wars, they suffered broken hearts. It isn’t all trumpets and glory.”

“I know, I know.” Although I sincerely doubted that Charlotte was heading for a broken heart. Her romance with the Duke of Dovedale was shaping up as prettily as a novel by Georgette Heyer. I wondered if he would propose on Twelfth Night? True, it was all very fast, but when you know, you know. I had a good feeling about them. So did Henrietta, which is probably why I did. That’s another pitfall for the historian, falling prey to the prejudices of our sources. “I think that’s why one sees more happily ever afters in fiction than in biographies. It’s not that the two trajectories are necessarily so different, but in fiction you can take the moment when everyone is happy and just clip off the thread of the narrative there, right at that trumpets and glory moment.”

“Even in fiction, isn’t it more interesting when you look at the whole picture, with the bad as well as the good?” argued Colin. “I’d rather know the whole story, even if it ends on a low note.”

“Warts and all?” I said, quoting the famous phrase about Cromwell. “Perhaps. It may be more interesting. But sometimes it’s less satisfying.”

Every now and then, you just need to believe that everything can be frozen in that one moment where everything is going right.

Like right now. Part of me would have given anything to freeze us as we were at that moment, before the blush could wear off the relationship. It might become something better as it went on, if we made it past the intermediary stages where mundanities take the place of philosophical discussions and shaving no longer seems quite such a necessity, but it would never again be what it was then, new and shiny and perfect.

I didn’t say that, though. What I did say was, “Oooh, is that the pub?”

My stomach grumbled, as if seconding my question.

“The very one,” said Colin, swinging around the side of the building.

Twisting in my seat to stare through the back window, I squinted at the sign hanging from a long pole stuck in the ground in proper ye olde pub fashion. It featured a decidedly potbellied deer. Picture Homer Simpson as Bambi’s fat old uncle (the one who likes to drink and smoke and refuses to go running with the rest of the herd) and you get the idea. The name of the pub was the Heavy Hart.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, pointing at the sign through the car window. “That can’t be the real name.”

“I think the real name was the Hart and Hare.” Colin brought the Range Rover to an expert halt in the anachronistic but very convenient car park that had been laid to one side of the building. “Something nondescript, at any rate.”

“I like it,” I said. “Nice little in-joke there. So is this your local watering hole?”

Aside from the name and the beer signs in the window, it was the very image of an Old World pub, a two-story building of white stucco with a roof that slanted down over chimneys on both sides. White lettering on the bottom of the sign proudly declared, EST. 1682. A chalkboard stuck beneath the inn sign advertised that Tuesday was Quiz Night. Despite living in London for three months, I’d never actually been to a pub quiz. Perhaps Colin would be up for going on Tuesday.

This, I thought smugly as I climbed out of the Range Rover, was the stuff of which real relationships were made. We wouldn’t be one of those couples who had to spend all their time in each other’s pockets. No, we could spend the day happily immersed in our own pursuits and then rejoice at coming together again for a pub quiz or a romantic tête-à-tête over bangers and mash. Because nothing says romance quite like a large pile of sausages.

Trip-trapping merrily along in the three-inch stacked loafers that were the closest thing I owned to sensible shoes, I followed Colin in through the suitably battered door of the pub, into a long room with all the dark wood and exposed beams my little heart could desire. And came to an abrupt halt as vague shapes formed into people, and recognizable people, at that.

What I hadn’t stopped to consider was that if this was the local watering hole, there would probably be locals in it.

“Sorry,” Colin muttered out of the side of his mouth, pasting on a big, friendly smile. “I didn’t know they’d be here.”

“S’okay,” I whispered back, pasting on a fake smile of my own.

I had met a smattering of the locals at a cocktail party my last time there, back in the days when I was still a tagalong American researcher rather than rehearsing for the role of mistress of the house. For the most part, I had found them incredibly friendly and welcoming.

For the most part.

The exception to that was sitting at a round wooden table set into the curve of the bow window. She had angled her chair out, to provide the best possible view of a pair of unfairly long legs tucked into a pair of trim tan slacks designed to put one in mind of riding gear without actually being riding gear. She had had a haircut since I’d last seen her; her straight blond hair was now jaw-length, with a curve at the end. In fact, she had my haircut.

From the nonplussed expression on her face, I could tell that Joan Plowden-Plugge was about as happy to see me as I was to see her.

If you’re wondering how I managed to alienate someone on such short notice, allow me to assure you, quite sincerely, that it wasn’t so much me as it was me-with-Colin. Quite simply, Joan would have hated any reasonably nubile female who appeared in public with the man for whom she harbored a decade-long crush that made Petrarch’s thing for Laura look like chump change. As you can imagine, I felt much the same way about her. It didn’t help that she was fashion-model thin and Revlon-commercial blond to boot.