Penelope by MC Beaton

in his arms. He kissed her eyelids and the tip of her small straight nose, and then his wandering mouth suddenly clamped down over her own. Penelope’s last coherent thought before she was carried away on a buffeting sea of emotions, and tremblings and strange, tortured virginal passions was that Sir James Vesey might have had some point in thinking they were a vulgar family. No lady would behave so. No lady would feel so.
    At last he raised his head and the world of sunlight and trees and grass came swirling back. She looked up into his eyes and found them as hard and cold as the winter sea. Why should he look at her like that? It was his fault after all.
    The Earl brusquely summoned his groom and set his horses in motion. “We shall join the fashionables, Miss Vesey,” he said coldly, “and then I shall take you home.”
    Roger, Earl of Hestleton, was furious. The girl had succeeded in awaking a series of emotions he had considered long dead and buried. Had Penelope made some flirtatious remark, he would have snapped her head off. But she sat very quiet and still and rather white-faced. He slowly became aware that he had behaved very badly indeed and set himself to make amends.
    As they joined the series of glittering carriages in the Ring, he asked lightly, “Well, Miss Vesey, here we have the cream of society. What do you think?”
    Penelope looked about her, wide-eyed, her recent distress temporarily forgotten. It was a glittering spectacle as the dandies and their ladies promenaded to display their elaborate toilettes and spanking carriages pulled by the finest horses. Many ladies were driven in a little carriage for two persons, called a vis-à-vis. This gorgeous equipage had a hammer cloth, rich in heraldic designs, powdered footmen in smart liveries, and a coachman who looked as stately as an archbishop. Then she laughed, “I feel like a poor child looking in the window of a pastry cook’s. I suppose I shall always be outside, looking in.”
    “Would you like to attend Almack’s?” asked the Earl abruptly.
    “You have already asked me that question,” said Penelope patiently.
    “I mean—
really
attend.”
    “Of course.”
    “I can arrange it,” he said simply.
    Penelope looked at him, wide-eyed. “How?”
    “Like this,” he said with a charming smile lighting up his austere face. He inched his carriage forward and then began to introduce Penelope to various notables. Names and titles flew about her bewildered ears, hard eyes stared and speculated, jealous female eyes flicked back and forth from the Earl’s face to her own, dandies bowed and simpered, Corinthians stared and leered.
    Obviously the Earl of Hestleton had great social power. When it was discovered she was Augusta Harvey’s niece, though it caused some rapid blinking, it did not seem to make much difference to the polite, if formal, reception given to her by the fashionable set. If the Earl of Hestleton found nothing to disgust him in Augusta Harvey, then neither would they. From being a vulgar, pushing mushroom, Augusta was elevated in their minds to the rank of a tedious eccentric, and after all, there was always some new butt around to receive the barbed attention of society.
    Penelope was then introduced to two of the patronesses of Almack’s and, luckily for her, to two of the most amiable, Lady Sefton and Lady Cowper. Both patronesses decided that Penelope’s behavior was unexceptionable and allowed that she was quite pretty although it was a pity she was so unfashionably fair.
    The Earl’s suggestion that vouchers for Almack’s should be sent to Penelope was met with a pleasant “perhaps” instead of the open horror which would have met such a request had it been made by any other. Such are the fickle vagaries of fashion.
    As they drove from the park, Penelope had forgotten her desire to be free of the Earl’s company and turned a glowing face up to his. “Oh,
thank
you,” she breathed.
    “’Tis nothing,” he said,