The Famous Heroine/The Plumed Bonnet Read Free Page B

it was not the thing to wear his heart on his sleeve in quite the manner he was doing. Lord Francis had been ready to challenge Rushford himself, even though Samantha had a husband to look to her protection.
    Discovering, as he had done just after the fight, that Samantha actually loved Carew and had not married him simply for his vast fortune had done nothing in particular to raise Lord Francis’s spirits. Neither had his begrudging admission that Carew was worthy of her.
    “I am thinking of it,” he said now in answer to the duke’s question. “One likes to keep up one’s reputation as a connoisseur of beauty, you know.”
    “For my part,” his grace said, “I would find it unsatisfactory to be merely a part of someone’s court. I would prefer to be the one and only. My pride, I daresay.”
    “But then there is danger in being a one and only,” Lord Francis pointed out. “The danger of finding oneself netted. Or caught in parson’s mousetrap, to change the image but not the meaning.”
    “I have a small favor to ask of you,” the duke said, causing Lord Francis to swing around to look full at him, his eyebrows raised. He felt a flicker of interest.Life had been so desperately devoid of interest for weeks now. He must be impoverished indeed, he thought, if the mere mention of a favor he might do grabbed his whole attention. Perhaps his grace merely wished to know if a lock of his hair was sticking out at the back like a cup handle.
    “My mother has arrived in town,” his grace said, raising his own glass to his eye and beginning a languid perusal of the occupants of the room through it, “with my two sisters—and a protégée.”
    The slight pause before the final words and the almost imperceptible pain in the duke’s voice as the words were spoken alerted Lord Francis to the fact that the small favor had something to do with the protégée. It would hardly concern Lady Elizabeth Munro. She was betrothed to old What’s-His-Name, who was in Vienna, reputedly dazzling the world with his diplomatic genius. And Lady Jane Munro, though young and unattached, was unattached only because Bridgwater had rejected a string of suitors whom he considered unworthy—if gossip had the right of it, as gossip had a habit of not always being. Lord Francis Kneller was the son and brother of a duke, but it was extremely unlikely that he would ever attain the title himself since his brother had already been brilliantly prolific in the production of sons.
    No, it could not be Lady Elizabeth and would not be Lady Jane. It would be the protégée.
    “I trust they are all in good health?” Lord Francis said politely.
    “Ah, yes indeed,” his grace said, his glass pausing for a moment and his lips pursing. Yes, she was pretty, Lord Francis thought as he followed the line of the duke’s quizzing glass to the young lady on whom it was trained. The quizzing glass resumed its journey. “I would appreciate it, old chap, if you would dance a set with the protégée.Miss Cora Downes.” He said the name with something like distaste.
    “Glad to,” Lord Francis said and wondered what was wrong with Miss Cora Downes. Apart from her name, that was. Her two names did not blend together into anything resembling poetry or even pleasing symphony. “Miss Cora Downes?”
    His grace sighed, “It is unlike my mother to act purely out of sentiment,” he said. “But that appears to be what has happened in this case. She has taken the girl out of her own proper milieu and has brought her to town to present to the ton. It is her intention to find the girl a respectable husband.”
    Lord Francis coughed delicately behind one lace-covered wrist.
    “Oh, not you, old chap,” his grace said hastily. “It is just that for all my mother’s consequence and influence, I am still afraid Miss Downes will not take. It would be an embarrassment to her grace as well as to the girl herself, I daresay. And therefore to me.”
    “Her own proper