Mary Balogh: A Summer to Remember

“Oh, thank you, thank you, your worship,” she cried fervently, “for saving a girl’s virtue. I’m a good girl, I am, and they would of stole a kiss or p’raps worse if you ’adn’t ’appened along to save me. But I’ll kiss you, I will. For a reward, like, being as you earned it an’ all.”

She was plump and shapely and ruddily pretty and drew shrill whistles and admiring, bawdy comments from the spectators. Viscount Ravensberg grinned at her before dipping his head and availing himself of her offer with lingering thoroughness. He tossed her a half sovereign along with a wink from his good eye when he was finished, and assured her that she was indeed a good girl.

There were more whistles as she made her unhurried departure, all dimples and saucily swaying hips.

“Scandalous!” the marquess said one more time. “In broad daylight too! But what can one expect of Ravensberg?”

The viscount heard him and turned to sketch him an ironic bow. “I perform a public service, sir,” he said. “I provide topics for drawing- room conversation that are somewhat more lively than the weather and the state of the nation’s health.”

“I believe,” Mr. Rush said with a chuckle as the marquess rode on, his back ramrod straight and almost visibly bristling with disapproval, “you are barely whispered about by the more genteel, Ravensberg. You had better come to White’s and get a beefsteak on that eye. That rascal gave you one deuce of a shiner.”

“Hurts like a thousand devils,” the viscount admitted cheerfully. “Egad, life should always be so exhilarating. My shirt, if you please, Farrington.”

He looked about him after taking it from the hand of Lord Farrington, to whom his clothes had been entrusted at the start of the fight. The crowd was dispersing. He raised his eyebrows.

“Frightened all the ladies away, did I?” He squinted off in the direction of Rotten Row as if searching for one in particular.

“It is an alarmingly public place, Ravensberg,” Lord Farrington said, laughing with him. “And you were bare to the waist.”

“Ah,” the viscount said carelessly, taking his coat from his friend and shrugging into it, “but I have a reputation for wild living to live up to, you see—though I believe I must have done my duty by it for one morning.” He frowned suddenly. “What the devil are we to do with these two slumbering bodies, do you suppose?”

“Leave them to sleep it off?” Lord Arthur suggested. “I am late for my breakfast, Ravensberg, and that eye is crying out for attention. The mere sight of it is enough to threaten one’s appetite.”

“You, fellow.” The viscount raised his voice as he drew another coin out of his pocket and tossed it onto the grass beside the only one of his opponents who was conscious. “Revive your friends and take them to the nearest alehouse before a constable arrives to convey them elsewhere. I daresay a tankard or two of ale each will help restore you all to a semblance of good health. And bear in mind for the future that when milkmaids say no they probably mean no. It is a simple fact of language. Yes means yes, no means no.”

“Bloody ’ell,” the man mumbled, still holding his jaw with one hand while setting the other over the coin. “I’ll never so much as look at another wench, guv.”

The viscount laughed and swung himself up into the saddle of his horse, whose bridle Mr. Rush had been holding.

“Breakfast,” he announced gaily, “and a juicy beefsteak for my eye. Lead the way, Rush.”

A few minutes later Hyde Park in the vicinity of Rotten Row was its usual elegant, ton nish self, all traces of the scandalous brawl vanished. But it was one more incident to add to the lengthy list of wild indiscretions for which Christopher “Kit” Butler, Viscount Ravensberg, had become sadly notorious.

“I cannot tell you,” the Duchess of Portfrey had been saying to her niece a few minutes earlier, “what a delight it is to have your company, Lauren. My marriage is proving more of a joy than I ever expected, and Lyndon is remarkably attentive, even now that I am in expectation of an interesting event. But he cannot live in my pocket all the time, the poor dear. We were both pleased beyond words when you accepted our invitation to stay with us until after my confinement.”

The Honorable Miss Lauren Edgeworth smiled. “We both know,” she said, “that you are doing me a far greater favor than I can possibly be doing you, Elizabeth. Newbury Abbey had become intolerable to me.”

She had been in London for two weeks, but neither she nor the duchess had touched upon the underlying reason for her being here until now. Elizabeth’s supposed need for Lauren’s company while she awaited the birth of her first child two months hence had been merely a convenient excuse. Of course it had.

“Life does go on, Lauren,” Elizabeth said at last. “But I will not belittle your grief by enlarging upon that theme. It would be insensitive of me, especially when I have never experienced anything to compare with what you have suffered—and when I have finally found my own happiness. Though that fact in itself may be of some reassurance to you. I was all of six and thirty when I married Lyndon last autumn.”

The Duke of Portfrey was indeed attentive to his wife, with whom he was clearly deeply in love. Lauren smiled her acknowledgment of the words of intended comfort. They strolled onward through Hyde Park, as they had done each morning since Lauren’s arrival, except for the three days when it had rained. The broad, grassy expanses on either side of the path looked enticingly and deceptively rural despite the frequent glimpses they afforded of other pedestrians and riders. It was as if a piece of the countryside had been tossed down into the middle of one of the largest, busiest cities in the world and had survived there, untainted by commerce.

They were approaching Rotten Row, from which Lauren had shrunk in some alarm the first time Elizabeth had suggested they walk there two weeks before. The morning gathering was nothing like the crush of the fashionable afternoon promenade in the park, it was true, but even so there were too many people to see and—more significant—to be seen by. She had thought she would never find the courage to face the beau monde after the fiasco of last year.

Last year half the ton had been gathered at Newbury Abbey in Dorsetshire to celebrate the wedding of Lauren Edgeworth to Neville Wyatt, Earl of Kilbourne. There had been a grand wedding eve ball, at which Lauren had thought it was impossible to feel any happier—and how horrifyingly prophetic that thought had proved to be! And then there had been the wedding itself at the village church, which had been packed to the doors with the crиme de la crиme of the beau monde —a wedding that had been interrupted just as Lauren was about to step into the nave, on her grandfather’s arm, by the sudden appearance of the wife Neville had thought long dead and of whose very existence Lauren and his whole family had been totally unaware.

Lauren had come to London this spring because she could no longer bear to be living at the dower house with the dowager countess and Gwendoline, Neville’s sister, while Neville and his Lily lived at the abbey a mere two miles distant. Unfortunately, there had been few avenues of escape. She had grown up at Newbury Abbey with Neville and Gwen after her mother married the late earl’s brother and went off with him on a wedding journey from which they had never returned. She had read Elizabeth’s letter of invitation, then, with enormous gratitude. But she had come on the assumption that since Elizabeth was increasing, they would not be taking part in any of the social activities of the Season. She was right about that, but Elizabeth did like to take the air.