Elizabeth Beacon - A Less Than Perfect Lady

‘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. ‘I’m probably beneath your touch, as well as us being connected to you only in the third or fourth degree.’

‘And it would make such a change for your branch of the family to note the existence of mine, would it not?’

She covered her bemusement at his peculiar statement with a social smile, for Grandfather had been rebuffed in the harshest of terms when he tried to send his cousin Bevis Alstone’s son and daughters to school instead of settling Bevis’s vintner’s bill as demanded.

‘Are we to celebrate our newly established kinship, or mourn it, do you think?’ she asked lightly.

‘I shall withhold judgement.’

‘Shall you indeed, cousin? How very refreshing to meet a gentleman who refuses to rely on the prejudices of others to form his opinions.’

‘You can be certain of one thing, Cousin Miranda, I long ago made it a rule to trust my own prejudices ahead of any others.’

There was no mistaking the heat in his dark gaze as he let it dwell on her discreetly displayed curves for a little too long, but she chose to pretend ignorance and gave him a sweetly insincere smile. ‘How unenlightened of you,’ she said lightly, ‘so pray excuse me while I look up prejudice in my grandfather’s copy of Dr Johnson’s famous dictionary, Cousin. Does it come before or after proof, I wonder?’

‘Oh, dear, that tutor of yours really wasn’t very good, was he? Before, of course.’

‘Then should I not appeal to Mr Poulson? I believe it is customary to present all the evidence before the court forms a judgement?’

‘Or so we are told,’ he replied sardonically.

‘Then I rest my case, my lord,’ she told him.

‘Cousin,’ he corrected abruptly.

‘Very well, but Cousin what, pray?

‘I suspect you know very well my name is Christopher,’ he said and silently dared her to remark on the fact that it was a very common Alstone forename, and probably given to him in defiance of his father’s family rather than to please them.

She felt a sneaking compassion for the little boy he must once have been, forced to live with the consequences of Bevis Alstone’s drinking, gambling and whoring. Cut off by his family, Bevis must have been an appalling parent. Miranda forced herself not to look for the vulnerable boy in the hard man his son had become. It was far simpler to think of him as just another man of the world, not the complex creature he really was.

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