The Countess Read Free

important person in my life through an idiotic accident, and no one else cares.”
    â€œHow can someone care if he can’t even find out your name?”
    â€œGood day, sir.”
    This time he didn’t follow me. I was soaked within seconds. The veil stuck to my face like a second skin,and itched like sticking plaster. Blacking out of life. What a ridiculous thing to say.
    And cruel. He’d said it because I’d refused to tell him who I was. Men were hurtful. They thought only of themselves; the important things to them were those things that only they wanted and desired.
    My grandfather had died. I was grieving. Who would not with a grandfather like him? I was not blacking out my life.
    Â 
    The third time I saw him I still had no idea who he was. He was speaking with a friend of my grandfather’s, Theodore, Lord Anston, a gentleman who still covered his bald head with a thick curling coal-black wig, wore knee breeches everywhere—and not just to Almack’s on Wednesday nights. He rode with his hounds in Hyde Park, chasing not foxes, but pretty ladies and their maids. My grandfather had once told me, laughing softly behind his hand, that Theo had even worn black satin knee breeches to a mill held out on Hounslow Heath. One of the fighters had been so startled at the sight that he’d dropped his hands for a moment and stared. His opponent had knocked him flat.
    Lord Anston grinned to display his own surprisingly perfect teeth, patted the man’s shoulder, and thwacked his lion-headed cane on the flagstone. He was wearing black satin shoes with large silver buckles. He strolled, I thought, very gracefully for a man walking two inches off the ground.
    If I’d moved more quickly, the man wouldn’t have seen me, but I was looking at those shoes of Lord Anston’s, wondering how they’d look on me; then I stared at a mud puddle not three feet away,mesmerized, because I knew he was going to step into it, and thus I didn’t move in time. He was on me in the next two seconds, smiling that white-toothed smile of his as he said, “What? No George? Poor fellow, he’ll grow fat with lack of exercise.”
    â€œGeorge suffers from an ague right now. He’s improving, but it is still too soon to bring him out into the elements.” There weren’t really any elements to speak of, it being a bright sunny day, but the man merely nodded. He said, as would a wise man pontificating, “The ague is always a tricky business. I would keep George close until he’s able to stick his tail up straight and lick your hand at the same time.”
    I smiled, damn him, seeing George and that flagpole tail of his at breakfast, wagging wildly when Mrs. Dooley had hand-fed him a good dozen salmon balls, all small and hand-rolled.
    â€œI’ve got you now,” he said, and I took a step back before I realized it wasn’t at all necessary. He cocked his head to one side, in question, but I wasn’t about to tell him that I didn’t trust him or any other man any further than I could spit in that mud puddle some three feet away from me.
    â€œDon’t be afraid,” he said finally, and he was frowning, perplexed, his head still cocked. “What I meant was if a man can make a woman laugh, she’s his.”
    I was shaking my head when he added, smiling again now, “That was a jest, but not really. Lord Anston told me who you were. I told him not to scare you off by calling out to you. And he said, ‘Eh, what, John? Scare off that Jameson girl? Ha! Not a scared bone in that melodious little body of hers. She sings, you know, which makes for a melodiousthroat. Perhaps the melodiousness extends to the rest of her, but I don’t really know anything else about her body. Maybe it’s sweet, who knows?’ Yes, that’s exactly what Lord Anston said. He also said he’d known you since you were puking up milk on his shirt