When he did, candlelight glanced off the silver buttons on his waistcoat.
Ginny saw that they were etched with little galleons.
She went so abruptly still she was nearly bashed in the head by a tureen of peas Mrs. Pariseau was trying to hand off to her.
“If you’ll excuse me, Lord Bolt... ” she ventured. She took the peas and passed them on.
He looked over at her and smiled.
“My brother mentioned admiring buttons similar to the ones on your waistcoat. He said they were etched with satyrs or some such. He’s a lover of mythology, like Mrs. Pariseau. I thought they would make a charming gift for his birthday, but I don’t have the first notion of where to find them.”
All of these things were fundamentally true.
Something glinted in her peripheral vision. She instinctively knew it was Mr. Marchand’s gunmetal gaze. He’d gone still.
“Ah! It sounds as though your brother may have seen the Earl of Sydenham’s buttons,” Lord Bolt told her. “He was wearing a waistcoat of that description a few weeks ago in White’s. My tailor knows someone who knows someone who does the silver etching on buttons. I’d be happy to find his name for you, Miss Woodville.”
Hope went to Ginny’s head so violently she nearly swayed from it.
If you knew who it was, you’d understand, Hogarth had told her.
Her father’s friend and rival. The one who claimed her father had stolen her mother from him, and who had gifted that handsome rifle to him.
Of course. The Earl of Sydenham.
“Thank you, Lord Bolt. I would be much obliged.”
“Miss Guinevere Woodville. Itisyou. My God. I thought my ears had deceived me when Farnham told me you were waiting in the foyer.”
Ginny had in fact been cooling her heels in the Earl of Sydenham’s foyer for nearly ten minutes. She’d slipped out of the Grand Palace on the Thames after dinner in the wake of Mrs. Pariseau, who was off to meet friends at the theater, because widows were allowed to gallivant without men. She’d shared a hack with her as far as Covent Garden.
In parting, Ginny had assured the slightly skeptical Mrs. Pariseau that the friends she was visiting would see her safely home. Then she’d taken the hack the rest of the way to St. James’s Square.
Perhaps the earlwouldsee her safely home, for old time’s sake. One never knew. Just in case, she’d tucked a knitting needle in her sleeve again for protection, in anticipation of needing to hunt alone for a hack later.
Sydenham was the same floridly handsome fellow she remembered from the last time he’d visited her parents more than a decade ago, though he’d gone significantly grayer and ever-so-slightly balder. She knew a fleeting surge of desperate resentment that her father was not alive to go grayer, too. She liked to think her father would have kept all of his hair, just to spite Sydenham.
“I am so very abashed to intrude upon your evening, Lord Sydenham, and in such an unusual manner, but—”
“Who is there, dear?” A woman called from the top of the stairs. “I thought I heard a young lady’s voice.”
The Countess of Sydenham swanned into view. A plume swayed languidly from her purple turban with every step of her graceful descent, and light bounced from the toes of her satin slippers.
“It’s... ah, Miss Guinevere Woodville, dear.” The Earl of Sydenham still sounded a bit dazed. “She seems to have come for an... after-dinner visit.”
He said this last a bit ironically. There really was no such thing as an after-dinner visit among the types of social calls Londoners paid one another. Which was one of the many reasons Farnham the footman had been reluctant to admit Ginny to the town house at all.
The other reasons were the fact that she was a young woman and alone, of course, because heaven forfend.
Ginny didn’t blame him, because she’d had about plentyof time to entertain second thoughts about being there while he’d gone to fetch the earl. She’d ultimately decided she was glad she hadn’t waited until morning. If fortune favored her, she might even be able to return home as soon as tomorrow with good news for Hogarth.
“Guinevere Woodville? As inViscountWoodville?” The countess was amazed, too.
“...and now the Earl of Highgrove,” Ginny prompted. “Perhaps you already know this, but my brother, Hogarth, inherited the title.”
“Yes, I believe we did hear! Oh, MissWoodville.” The countess was in the foyer now. She took Ginny’s hands in hers and studied her fondly. Her wide blue eyes reminded Ginny a bit of Dot’s. “Look at you, a woman grown now! And so very pretty! I remember you so well as a little girl. The freckles were so charming! Not that they still aren’t, of course, but there’s always powder, isn’t there? Your parents were such good fun. Somadcap. We do miss them very much. You have your father’s eyes.”
“Ah—thank you, you’re very kind. And we miss them, too. Very much.”