‘Well, James?’ he demanded eagerly. ‘Got rid of her yet?’
‘No,’ Radcliffe said regretfully, pouring himself to a glass. ‘She has proven just as stubborn and dangerous as all of my mother’s letters warned – not that Mama remembers any of that now. Miss Talbot has got them all quite wrapped around her finger. Lord only knows what she would do to the family’s good name if I had not returned in time. Luckily, it is little more than a week before the Season starts, and Archie will be nicely distracted by a horde of young women trying to catch his attention. All I have to do is to keep him from proposing to her in the next seven days, for his own good.’
Hinsley looked at him for a moment, and then grinned broadly. ‘Look at you!’ he said, almost proudly. ‘You’re starting to sound like your father, ain’t you?’
Radcliffe looked at him with more than a little disgust. ‘Such things you say to me,’ he said. ‘I most certainly am not.’
‘You are,’ his friend persisted. ‘All this talk of Archie’s own good, the family name. Who’s to say that’s not what the old man was saying about you, before he packed you off to the Continent to take notes for Wellington?’
Radcliffe sent him a cutting look. ‘You know very well that’s not all I did,’ he said.
‘Yes and thank God old Bonaparte did escape, or else you would have been bored to death in Vienna,’ Hinsley said with an irreverent grin.
‘And yet I am not going to banish Archie from the country because I believe him to be over-indulging in alcohol and gambling,’ Lord Radcliffe said, ignoring Hinsley’s comment to return to the original point. ‘I am trying to make sure he doesn’t fall prey to such a person as Miss Talbot.’ He sipped his drink thoughtfully for a moment, then said. ‘You are not totally wrong, however. I may not have agreed with my father on most topics – hell, I spent a lot of my life hating him – but he knew, and I know, that being a part of this family means protecting one another from such vipers. Which is what I mean to do.’
‘You don’t want him marrying a nobody,’ Hinsley said, knowingly.
‘I don’t want him marrying someone that cares not a jot about him,’ Radcliffe corrected. ‘Mark my words, in a month’s time we won’t even remember her name.’
10
Kitty and her sister were already saddled up by the time Lord Radcliffe rode up to Grosvenor Square the next morning, Kitty atop the mare usually reserved for Lady Radcliffe, who – when she could be persuaded to bestir herself – was a surprisingly fine horsewoman. The bay was the most beautiful stepper Kitty had ever seen and polite to a fault, which was all for the better as it had been a while since Kitty had ridden – the loss of Mr Linfield having also taken away the Talbots’ only access to a stable. Lady Radcliffe would not be joining them after all, having come down with a most egregious attack of exhaustion, but neither Kitty nor Radcliffe were surprised or disappointed by this news. Both of them felt the day’s task would be more easily completed without her presence.
Though the dense urban forest of London seemed to Kitty never-ending, they quickly left it behind, cobbled streets giving way to dusty track, busy pavements graduating smoothly to grassy verge. To relax would be dangerous – this day was as essential as any so far at securing her future – but Kitty felt, nonetheless, some of the tension leave her as the land opened up before her. The tension was renewed immediately, of course, when Radcliffe situated his mount to the left of hers early on in the journey. The path only allowing for two horses to ride alongside this left Mr de Lacy jostling along behind them looking a little put out and craning his neck to be able to hear them.
Miss Talbot knew an interrogation of sorts was to be expected after her appearance at Grosvenor Square the day before – but even so, she could not have predicted how direct an approach Lord Radcliffe felt able to take, once finally relieved from the constraints of his mother’s presence.
‘Devonshire, you said your family hails from?’ he asked, apropos of nothing.
‘Dorsetshire, my lord,’ she corrected. ‘Though originally from London. I was born here in the city.’
‘Hmm, and you left for?’
‘The fresh air,’ she said promptly.
‘And yet you returned for?’
‘The company.’
‘Other siblings?’
‘Four younger sisters.’
‘No brother?’