One Forbidden Evening. Jo Goodman

and four years after that, to see that these sisters found decent partners who could take them in hand but not abuse their generous though silly natures.

      A bloody fortune, he thought.

      “What’s that?” Wellsley asked, drawing another trick toward him. “Did you say something?”

      “Did I?” Ferrin had not realized he might have spoken aloud.

      “We’re not making a wager here, are we? I thought you said something about a fortune.”

      “Can’t imagine what you heard.” Ferrin picked up his tumbler of whisky and sipped. “Your play. Go on.”

      Wellsley’s dark glance drifted momentarily from his cards to a point past his friend’s shoulder. He did not allow his eyes to linger on the doorway but applied himself to choosing a card and schooling his features. He placed a seven of spades on the table.

      “Aha! So it is true! Lady Arbuthnot did not mistake the matter when she said I would find you here!”

      Ferrin was about to make his play when every hair at the back of his neck stood at attention. Many a grown man so neatly caught out by his mother might have dropped the card he was holding over the table, but Ferrin managed to slip it back into his hand and set all the cards down as though nothing untoward was taking place. It was no good reminding Wellsley that he’d agreed to give him fair warning of any family members approaching. This had been done of a purpose. The look he speared his friend communicated that it would have been kinder to allow him to face the Allworthy cousins at daybreak than to have his mother bear down on him unaware.

      “Enjoy your revenge, Wellsley,” he said under his breath. He doubted he’d been heard. Wellsley was chuckling, in every way enjoying himself. With a last sour look in his friend’s direction, Ferrin got to his feet as his mother came to stand beside his chair. “Mother. How good you are to make your way round to the card room. You will perhaps join the play?”

      Lady Marianna Gardner, the former Countess of Ferrin, and now the wife of Sir Geoffrey, regarded her eldest child as if he had the sense of a bag of hair. She had to look a considerable distance upward, as she was a diminutive woman and he stood half a foot taller than most of the men of her acquaintance. This never mattered, of course, as she had once suckled him at her breast before being persuaded to give him over to a wet nurse. The bond that had been forged on that occasion was still very much intact, at least in her mind. “Join the play?” she asked in hushed accents. “Can you really have made such an outrageous utterance?”

      “He did,” Wellsley said. “I heard him.”

      Her ladyship turned a gimlet eye on Mr. Wellsley. “And you will not repeat it, for I have no doubt that it is your unseemly influence at work here. Did I not recently say as much to your grandmother? You are a scapegrace, Mr. Wellsley. I have always thought it unfortunate that I like you so well, but there you have it. I cannot account for it myself.” Before that worthy could answer, her head swiveled sharply to her son. She was supremely unaware that Ferrin had to draw back to avoid being tickled by the long ostrich plume fixed in her turban.

      “You do not mean to spend the whole of the evening in here, do you?” she asked pointedly. “It is not done. I cannot help but think you have forgotten you are the host.”

      “I believe I have provided a great deal of the ready as well as the location,” Ferrin said dryly. “In every other way I am well out of it.”

      “Oh, this is too bad of you. What will people say? And your sister is working so hard to make a success of the evening. It will surely be noticed that you occupied yourself playing cards. Nero fiddled while Rome burned. People remember that.”

      “I will fetch my fiddle directly.” Ferrin observed his mother beginning to push her lower lip forward. This was but the opening salvo. The weapons that she kept in her arsenal included the moue, the tear, the trembling pout, and the tremulous voice. These were generally more effective than her reasoning, which Ferrin found nonsensical and a trial to his gray matter. “You are looking quite splendid tonight. The plume is particularly charming.”

      “Thank you.” She allowed the silver half mask she held over the upper portion of her face to fall away and reveal her full pleasure of the pretty compliment. “You will join us in the ballroom, will you not?”

      “Of course, Mother.”

      “My friends delight in seeing you. I fear they do not know many rakes. They are quite fascinated by your manner.”

      “I see.” He bent forward so there was no danger that he could be overheard. “May I roam freely or will you want to parade me on a leash?”

      This time when her ladyship lowered her mask it was to snap it sharply against her son’s forearm. “You are the very devil,” she whispered.

      Grinning, Ferrin straightened. “You are mistaken, Mother. Tonight I am a pirate.” From beneath his tricornered hat, he pulled down a black silk patch and fixed it over his right eye. “See?”

      “The very devil,” she repeated. There was no censure in her tone, only affection. She touched his cheek and smiled, perfectly content with this outcome. Turning to go, her ladyship paused when she glimpsed Wellsley standing at attention on the other side of the table. “And you, Mr. Wellsley, you are of an eligible age, are you not? Well past it, I should think. As is Ferrin. Do not squander your inheritance in one sitting at the card table with my son when there are so many young women in the next room willing to relieve you of it over the course of a lifetime.”

      Before Wellsley could make a reply, Lady Gardner presented her back to him and made a grand exit for the ballroom. Wellsley sunk back into his chair and looked up at Ferrin. “I need libation.”

      Ferrin nodded, waving over one of the footmen. He finished the last finger of whisky remaining in his tumbler and gave it over. “Two more of the same,” he said. “None of the punch from the fountain, please.” When the liveried servant was gone, Ferrin took measure of his friend. “Will you be all right? I cannot tell whether it is astonishment that put you back in your chair or relief.”

      “Both, I think.” Wellsley tossed his hat on the table and used four fingers to rake back his hair. The effect was to lend him more in the way of a disreputable air than the disheveled neckcloth. “She said she likes me well enough, so that is something, I suppose.”

      “Well, of course she likes you. Why wouldn’t she? You have £12,000 per annum, a townhouse in London, an estate in the North, a family with as few rascals as one can properly hope for, and a countenance that does not stop clocks. God’s truth, Wellsley, I can’t think why I haven’t proposed.”

      Wellsley’s staccato burst of laughter had heads turning in their direction again. He collected himself, straightening in his chair just as the drinks were brought to them. He raised the tumbler, saluted his friend, and drank deeply. “Dutch courage,” he said, setting the glass down. “Mayhap Miss Wynetta will take another turn on the floor with me.”

      “The queen of the Nile? You will have to cut through the throng to get to her. Will you take my cutlass?”

      “No. I do not think that will be necessary.” He returned his hat to his head and relied on Ferrin’s judgment to let him know when he’d achieved the proper roguish angle. With most of his bright-yellow hair covered, it was left to him to disguise his face. He withdrew a scarf from beneath the sleeve of his frock coat, folded it in a triangle, then used it to hide his nose, mouth, and squared-off chin. “Well?” he asked, getting to his feet. He removed the pistol and aimed it at Ferrin’s chest. “Stand and deliver.”

      “Convincing. You will not credit it, but I am quaking in my boots.”

      “Good. Now let us see who—” Wellsley stopped, his attention caught by the figure who had stepped forward and was now framed in the open doorway.

      Seeing his friend’s gaze fixed on the threshold of the card room, Ferrin thought his mother had returned. “Never say she has brought reinforcements to drag us out.”