No one bothered to ask which Miss Sheffield he was talking about.
“What about Kate?” Edwina inquired. After all, the curricle could only seat two.
Kate gave her hand a squeeze. Dear, sweet Edwina.
Anthony looked straight at Edwina. “Mr. Berbrooke will escort your sister home.”
“But I can’t,” Berbrooke said. “Got to finish with the curricle, you know.”
“Where do you live?” Anthony snapped.
Berbrooke blinked with surprise but gave his address.
“I will stop by your house and fetch a servant to wait with your conveyance while you escort Miss Sheffield to her home. Is that clear?” He paused and looked at everyone—including the dog—with a rather hard expression. Except for Edwina, of course, who was the only person present who had not lit a fuse directly under his temper.
“Is that clear?” he repeated.
Everyone nodded, and his plan was set into motion. Minutes later, Kate found herself watching Lord Bridgerton and Edwina ride off into the horizon—the very two people she had vowed should never even be in the same room together.
Even worse, she was left alone with Mr. Berbrooke and Newton.
And it took only two minutes to discern that of the two, Newton was the finer conversationalist.
Chapter 5
It has come to This Author’s attention that Miss Katharine Sheffield took offense at the labeling of her beloved pet, “an unnamed dog of indeterminate breed.”
This Author is, to be sure, prostrate with shame at this grievous and egregious error and begs of you, dear reader, to accept this abject apology and pay attention to the first ever correction in the history of this column.
Miss Katharine Sheffield’s dog is a corgi. It is called Newton, although it is difficult to imagine that England’s great inventor and physicist would have appreciated being immortalized in the form of a short, fat canine with poor manners.
LADY WHISTLEDOWN’S SOCIETY PAPERS, 27 APRIL 1814
By that evening, it had become apparent that Edwina had not come through her （albeit brief） ordeal unscathed. Her nose turned red, her eyes began to water, and it was apparent to anyone who glimpsed her puffy face for even a second that, while not seriously ill, she’d caught a bad cold.
But even while Edwina was tucked into bed with a hot water bottle between her feet and a therapeutic potion brewed up by the cook in a mug on her bedside table, Kate was determined to have a conversation with her.
“What did he say to you on the ride home?” Kate demanded, perching on the edge of her sister’s bed.
“Who?” Edwina replied, sniffing fearfully at the remedy. “Look at this,” she said, holding it forward. “It’s giving off fumes.”
“The viscount,” Kate ground out. “Who else would have spoken to you on the ride home? And don’t be a ninny. It’s not giving off fumes. That’s just steam.”
“Oh.” Edwina took another sniff and pulled a face. “It doesn’t smell like steam.”
“It’s steam,” Kate ground out, gripping the mattress until her knuckles hurt. “What did he say?”
“Lord Bridgerton?” Edwina asked blithely. “Oh, just the usual sort of things. You know what I mean. Polite conversation and all that.”
“He made polite conversation while you were dripping wet?” Kate asked doubtfully.
Edwina took a hesitant sip, then nearly gagged. “What is in this?”
Kate leaned over and sniffed at the contents. “It smells a bit like licorice. And I think I see a raisin at the bottom.” But as she sniffed, she thought she heard rain pattering against the glass of the window, and so she sat back up. “Is it raining?”
“I don’t know,” Edwina said. “It might be. It was rather cloudy when the sun set earlier.” She gave the glass one more dubious look, then set it back on the table. “If I drink that, I know it will make me sicker,” she stated.
“But what else did he say?” Kate persisted, getting up to check out the window. She pushed the curtain aside and peered out. It was raining, but only lightly, and it was too early to tell whether the precipitation would be accompanied by any thunder or lightning.
“Who, the viscount?”
Kate thought herself a saint for not shaking her sister senseless. “Yes, the viscount.”
Edwina shrugged, clearly not as interested in the conversation as Kate. “Not much. He asked for my welfare, of course. Which was only reasonable, considering that I had just been dunked in The Serpentine. Which, I might add, was perfectly wretched. Aside from being cold, the water was most certainly not clean.”