(eng) Mercedes Lackey - Elemental Masters 13 by A Scandal in Battersea

Author:A Scandal in Battersea [Battersea, A Scandal in]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Alexandre ambled up to stand beside another bespectacled bluestocking. This young woman had her hair scraped severely back and balled into a tight, hard knot at the nape of her neck. She did not acknowledge his presence. Together they gazed at a painting of the Downs. It was, he supposed, very fine. Everyone else who had gazed upon it had said so. For his part, he could not imagine why anyone would want a painting of grass and hills. “Have you ever been there?” he said aloud to the young woman beside him. It was an innocent enough remark.

“The Downs? No,” she said, her tone cold.

“I suppose it is very fine, for its type, but this doesn’t do the scene justice,” he persisted. “The light—”

“I daresay,” she replied, her words one step above freezing, and moved off briskly. She clearly wanted nothing to do with him, and there was no sign that the entity had made her more susceptible to him.

So much for the entity helping, he thought, with irritation. It had better do a more competent job of helping me if it expects to get the sort of “witnesses” it wants.

But he remained in front of the painting of grass, as if he had not just been rebuffed. It was in a good, central spot, about halfway through the Gallery. This was where people who were trailing behind their groups tended to get out of sight of them. And where people who wished others to think them “artistic” or “romantic” usually paused to gaze critically, or heave great sighs of admiration. Someone else would be along shortly. He had only to be patient.

And sure enough, after a few single males and two couples, along came a gaggle of girls—beautifully dressed, and obviously here not to view, but to be viewed. And they were trailed at a few steps distance by a wallflower, who was exactly the sort of thing he was looking for. Someone’s cousin, perhaps; painfully plain to the point of being ugly, with a sallow, muddy complexion, untidy hair, with a hat pinned on anyhow. Her dress must have been borrowed; it hung on her skeletal frame, so poorly fitted she was managing to make a very expensive gown look dowdy. She was acutely embarrassed; perhaps by some of the nudes, perhaps by what the other girls were saying, perhaps by the fact that she was here at all, alternately blushing and going pale.

But, to his acute annoyance, as soon as they spotted him, he was surrounded by the butterflies, who begged to know his opinion of the painting of the Downs, and were the Downs like that, and did he know the artist? He realized at that moment he had made himself rather too good a target for girls like that, who were lagging behind their more fortunate sisters in the marriage market. Handsome, young, and without a sign of a wife or a fiancée, well dressed, he was exactly what they were here to find .

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