Romantic Rebel by Joan Smith

Author:Joan Smith [Smith, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Regency Romance
Publisher: Belgrave House
Published: 1991-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

I prepared myself for Lady DeGrue’s evening party with only moderate hopes that anything interesting would come of it. Paton’s attending gave hope that he might bring some of his set, who would be considered the ton of sociable Bath. In an effort to win favor, I struck a rather pretty jeweled pin in the shape of a feather in my curls. The bronze taffeta gown that had set Milverton on its ear might still impress Bath. At any rate, I looked as good as a new hairdo, my best gown, and a discreet touch of rouge could make me. It was Annie who had bought the rouge—a great divergence from her usual toilette.

Miss Bonham lived, appropriately, on Quiet Street. The street is only one block long, its chief attraction being that it debouches on to Milsom Street, just a few blocks north of the Pump Room. The house was large but gloomy. The gloom was enlivened on the evening of the drum by lights in every window, and a scurry of carriages in the roadway.

I was happy to see, upon entering, that there was a good crowd present, not all of it gray-haired. It seems an heiress, even if she has no town polish, can get out the bachelors. Isabel looked quite radiant with her sable curls now framing her face. I rather feared Lady DeGrue might take me to task for the transformation. It was no such a thing.

She got me aside early in the evening and said, “I can never thank you enough, Miss Nesbitt. You have contrived in a week what failed me for more than two decades. You have forced Isabel into bloom. It is a wonderful relief to me to know she is able to get about without my company, and still be well chaperoned. I shall hobble over and thank your Miss Potter.”

Her gait was more a prance than a hobble, but she did go to Annie and said something that made her smile. The party gathered in a dark, brown-colored room which Lady DeGrue called the Gold Saloon, and spilled over into an adjoining room. There were forty or fifty people present, which created a pleasant buzz of voices. No sooner was I seated in the Gold Saloon than I discerned the younger set were in the other room. To rise up with no excuse and desert Reverend Morton in the middle of his monologue on the Trinity seemed rude, so I contented myself by just looking through the archway.

I was soon convinced that Paton, the one member of the young ton whom I knew, had not yet arrived. I had already had a word with Lady Forrest, and began to think Paton was not coming. The only reason I mention it, of course, is that I had thought he might bring his bachelor friends along.

But at any rate, there were interesting men there, and Isabel had her share of them. She sat with a handsome specimen, dark of hair and eyes, with pale skin and the languid, wounded air of a poet.

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