A Less Than Perfect Lady. Elizabeth Beacon

sight of her scapegrace niece dressed so finely and standing at the side of the heir as if she belonged there, so Miranda just smiled blandly under her basilisk glare.

      Celia adhered determinedly to her sofa, while somehow finding the energy to smile a languid greeting at the new Lord Carnwood. She ignored Miranda regally, obviously satisfied that her warning needed no repetition despite Miranda’s position at his new lordship’s side.

      ‘Niece,’ Lady Clarissa acknowledged flatly, ‘you may kiss me now you are not travel-stained.’

      ‘Why, thank you, Aunt Clarissa.’ Miranda placed a peck on the cold cheek offered to her like a royal favour. ‘As I remarked earlier, you look well.’

      ‘I cannot return the compliment, but I suppose it is not possible to live the sort of life you do and not have it show in one’s face.’

      ‘What a fast existence you do credit me with, Aunt Clarissa,’ Miranda replied lightly.

      ‘You know perfectly well what I mean,’ Lady Clarissa barked. ‘I will not put up with your impudence now, my girl, any more than I did six years ago. If I hear any more of it, I shall pack you off back to Nightingale House, and good riddance.’

      ‘I believe it is five years since I lived here, not six, and I am not here now by your invitation, but my grandfather’s, so you will just have to ignore me for the next few hours, will you not? After so many years of practice, I dare say it will come easily enough.’

      ‘Impudent hussy! If I had my way, you would never have darkened these doors again. I cannot imagine what Papa was thinking of, ordering you must be here before a word of that section of his will could be read.’

      ‘Neither can I, but I plan to restrain my curiosity until a more appropriate time.’ Miranda couldn’t be sorry for answering back, even when her ladyship was powered by fury to actually rise and ring the bell herself.

      ‘Mrs Braxton will be taking dinner in her bedchamber,’ she announced as the doors opened too rapidly for anyone to doubt the butler had been well within earshot.

      ‘Don’t trouble yourself, Coppice,’ Lord Carnwood intervened coolly. ‘Mrs Braxton is far too conscious of the extra work it would cause the staff to put them to so much trouble. Lady Clarissa overestimates the tiring effects of her long journey on her niece’s excellent constitution, do you not, ma’am?’

      Lady Clarissa’s chilly grey eyes locked with the Earl’s fathomless dark ones, then fell before a more implacable will than even her stubborn one. ‘Apparently,’ she conceded as if it might choke her. ‘You may go, Coppice, unless dinner is ready?’

      ‘Not quite, my lady.’

      ‘Then you had better find out what is delaying both Cook and our guests, had you not?’

      Lord Carnwood let that ungracious order pass. From the look Coppice sent him and the faint shake of his dark head, Miranda doubted it would be carried out anyway.

      As the doors shut behind Coppice, Lady Clarissa glared at her erring niece with a venom that would have set the gauche Miranda of five years ago trembling in her satin evening shoes. Now she returned her aunt’s hard look with an insincere smile, before subsiding on to a gilt chair at a healthy distance from the roaring fire.

      Celia continued to stare into the fire as if she was lost in a world of her own. Miranda draped herself across the chair in imitation of a notorious beauty she had met scandalising a neighbour’s party she once attended with her grandfather, before she became notorious herself, of course. Having been given a bad name, she might as well hang herself in style.

      Ignoring both Celia and the artistically draped Miranda, Lord Carnwood engaged Lady Clarissa in stilted conversation. Miranda was annoyed to find that she was so attuned to the dark timbres of his voice, even across the formality of this great room, that she missed not a single word he said.

      It was a relief to hear voices in the hall just before the doors opened to admit her grandfather’s middle-aged lawyer, along with a handsome couple possibly ten years older than she was herself. When she was introduced to the Reverend Draycott and his lively wife, Miranda soon decided she preferred them to the stuffy couple who had inhabited Wychwood Rectory when she was a girl. She detected none of the sour disapproval she would have met from the Reverend and Mrs Townley for her sins, so she sincerely hoped they were not ignorant of them.

      The Earl of Carnwood greeted his guests genially, but Lady Clarissa managed only a stiff nod in the lawyer’s direction as Celia pretended to be lost in a world of her own. Unable to watch another greeted as uncivilly as she had been herself, Miranda gave him a warm smile.

      ‘Mr Poulson, I hope you are recovered from your journey?’

      ‘As much as can be expected at my age,’ the rotund little man replied with a self-deprecating smile. ‘Fancy you remembering my name after all these years, Mrs Braxton.’

      ‘Since you used to give us children peppermint drops whenever you came to visit Grandpapa, I was very unlikely to forget it, sir.’

      ‘So I did! Those were happier times for us all, were they not?’

      ‘Indeed they were—would that we had them back again.’

      For a brief minute Miranda allowed herself the indulgence of the might have been. If only her brother had not caught an epidemic fever at school, and come home so weakened he had to be accompanied by a tutor. If only she had listened to Grandfather’s fierce pronouncements on her infatuation with Nevin Braxton, said tutor, and, above all, if only Jack had not died weeks after her defection. Of all her regrets, that was the heaviest of all, she realised now—it far outran the thought that, if Jack had been here, she would not have to steel herself to avoid Christopher Alstone’s eye whenever possible.

      ‘Regrets, Mrs Braxton?’ he questioned her softly now, his deep voice hard with distrust again for some odd reason.

      ‘Memories, my lord,’ she replied briefly, determined not to let his suspicion incise Jack’s wicked smile from her mind.

      ‘A commodity I patently cannot share. How are you, sir? It was an ill day for travelling today, was it not?’

      ‘That it was, my lord. I freely admit that these days I much prefer my chambers to the open road.’

      ‘Maybe one day we will be able to travel like birds instead of it taking us days to get from one side of the country to the other,’ Miranda mused.

      ‘Like flying pigs, Cousin?’ Kit asked impatiently.

      ‘Not quite, but equally unlikely, I am afraid.’

      ‘A pleasant idea though, my dear madam,’ Mr Poulson put in with a fatherly smile of encouragement, seemingly oblivious to the suppressed tension between his companions. ‘It would certainly save a good deal of time on dirty roads.’

      ‘If only we could invent machines to direct all those balloons people spend so much time watching launched, maybe your idea would be possible, Cousin Miranda,’ his lordship admitted.

      ‘Until that happy day, I suppose we will just have to make do with mud and inconvenience like everyone else, my lord.’

      ‘Indeed, and you have had a longer and harder trek than the rest of us, if I am not mistaken.’

      ‘And I doubt that you often are, my lord,’ she replied rather waspishly and felt the lawyer’s shrewd gaze on them both this time.

      He seemed to gauge the undercurrent of awareness that ran between the new earl and his scapegrace cousin and momentarily looked puzzled and then oddly pleased. Miranda ordered herself to be more circumspect in future, but something kept her standing at his lordship’s side, pretending to be sociable all the same.

      ‘I thought we had agreed to be cousins,’ he chided when Mr Poulson’s attention was diverted by the new vicar of Wychwood.

      ‘Do you mean to acknowledge me as such in public then, my lord?’ she asked mockingly.