Victoria and the Rogue by Meg Cabot Page B

though she did not find that memory quite as comforting as Rebecca evidently
    did. She quite fancied that, if only the British Empire would recognize her superior organizational skills,
    she could handily settle a half dozen of its most pressing foreign conflicts by teatime. Still, she stifled her
    protest and said, “You see? If he were in love with me, would he have laughed quite so hard?”
    “No,” Rebecca admitted. “And I once heard the captain telling Mama that he prefers quiet, sensitive
    girls like me. Everyone knows you aren’t in the least sensitive.”
    Victoria, who thought that sensitive was really just a polite way to describe girls who were incapable of
    taking care of themselves, was not surprised to hear that the captain liked young ladies of this particular
    bent. He seemed the type of fellow to prefer a girl who fainted at the sight of blood, as Victoria was
    certain Rebecca would, to one who would calmly stanch its flow with a pocket handkerchief, as Victoria
    had done the time her uncle Jasper accidentally ran his bayonet through his big toe.
    “Er,” she said. “Yes. So don’t you see, Becky? Captain Carstairs can’t possibly be in love with me.”
    “But if that’s so,” Rebecca said with a final suspicious glance, “why is he always looking at you?
    Because he is, Vicky. Whenever he thinks you aren’t looking he stares and stares. He did it at supper,
    and he’s been doing it here all night long. Even when he was dancing with me, he kept looking across the
    room at you!”
    Victoria laid a comforting hand upon her cousin’s puffed sleeve.
    “Of course he did,” she said kindly. “Because he’s wondering how on earth two cousins could be more
    different. I’m sure he’s looking at me and asking himself, ‘Now why can’t Lady Victoria be more like her
    pretty cousin Miss Gardiner? Miss Gardiner would never allow her perfect china-white skin to get so
    brown in the sun. Miss Gardiner would never tell her maid that if she caught her folding instead of hanging
    her silk gowns again, she’d dismiss her. Miss Gardiner would never reduce Cook to tears with her
    scathing indictment of her tureen of beef.’”
    Rebecca’s scowl brightened. “Goodness, I never thought of it like that. You’re quite right, Vicky.
    Captain Carstairs couldn’t possibly be in love with you. You are so very interfering.”
    This wasn’t entirely what Victoria wanted to hear, but at least her cousin had stopped glaring so balefully
    at her, which was a definite relief. “Champion,” Victoria said. “Now let’s go see what your father says
    when Jacob Carstairs asks him why he hasn’t forbidden me from marrying Lord Malfrey.”
    Though Rebecca put up a token resistance—it wasn’t right, she said, to spy upon gentlemen, particularly
    her own father—Victoria managed eventually to drag her across the room, causing quite a stir and no
    small amount of headshaking from the gallery of matrons who observed this unorthodox behavior in the
    hallowed rooms of Almack’s. The general opinion of the matrons—and throughout London—seemed to
    be that Lady Victoria Arbuthnot was rather a handful. The majority of the society matrons felt quite sorry
    for Beatrice Gardiner, who’d been put in charge of the headstrong girl.
    But at the same time they couldn’t help rather envying Rebecca’s mother, because Victoria’s handling of
    the Gardiners’ cook had already become the stuff of legend. The description of Victoria’s ashen
    complexion when presented with tureen of beef a second night in a row had made its way through
    London’s finest kitchens, eventually trickling upstairs from the servants’ quarters and into the boudoirs of
    Mayfair’s finest hostesses. Her quiet request to be excused, her subsequent trip through the baize door
    and down to the kitchen, her polite but firm instructions to the Gardiners’ cook that never—never—was
    she to serve tureen of beef in that household again, or she