Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

“ F lora, darling.” Lady Ivers laughed even as she chided. “That’s fine, but let us speak plainly—have you enough money to remain unmarried? It is an expensive thing, an independent spinsterhood.”

“Money?” This Flora had not contemplated. Until this moment, she had never questioned Papa’s wealth. Or imagined that wealth might not continue to provide for her. “I don’t know.”

“Well, you need to know,” Lady Ivers counseled. “I know it is crass to speak of money, but it would behoove you to get an accurate accounting of how things lay.”

Flora had been instructed by her father to visit his bankers on the Mound on a monthly basis for her household expenses while he was away. But she had never questioned the white-haired clerk as to the solvency of said account, nor asked if there were any other accounts her father might have left behind while he went off plant-hunting to India—or wherever it was he was traveling.

How foolish.

Flora was disappointed anew—in herself. “I will do so immediately, my lady. Thank you.”

“We ladies need to look after one another,” was Lady Ivers’s opinion. “The world is not made for us, so we must remake it as and where we can. But as to independence…” She spoke quietly. “Have you considered someone older? Not to put too fine a point upon it, but someone more likely to pass on long before you?” She favored Flora with an ironic smile. “Widowhood has a great deal to recommend it.”

“Independence and the lack of a husband being the chief amongst the recommendations?”

Lady Ivers patted Flora’s hand. “This is why I like you—you’re smart as a whip and have no pretenses about it.” She narrowed her gaze at the assembly. “Now let us see if we can find someone who is well past the spring season of his life. What about the Marques de San Adrian?” Lady Ivers indicated a tall, dark, impeccably dressed gentleman with white hair and black glossy boots, across the room. “He is handsome enough for you, I’ll judge. But do you speak any Spanish?”

Flora tried for a brief moment to picture herself in an aristocratic cigarral in the foothills of sunny Spain. “No.”

“Then perhaps not.” Lady Ivers moved swiftly on. “Ah, the Earl of Knole is newly widowed. But there are the children—four, I believe. And grown.”

“I have no objection to children—in principle.” Flora tried to be polite. “But I do have grave reservations about a man who would make me stepmother to a woman older than myself.” She cast her glance meaningfully at the earl’s eldest daughter.

“Quite right,” Lady Ivers agreed. “One’s own children are one thing, but other people’s children are another matter entirely and ought to be approached with caution.”

“Or not at all,” Flora rejoined honestly before recalling herself to politeness. “I beg your pardon, my lady.”

Lady Ivers took no offense. “You’ll note I have no children—aside from my most beloved niece. By choice, not circumstance, I might add. We never wanted babies, the Admiral and I. I never wanted to share him with anyone besides his first love, the Royal Navy!” Her smile was perhaps a bit misty even as she teased. “But that reminiscence prompts me to think I might tempt you with a career military man. There’s a sort of widowhood that comes from having a husband away on active duty—an admirable situation for an independent spirit.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Flora admitted. “I do find I rather like being on my own.” Mostly. She liked the independence of running her own house and catering to her own needs and tastes, instead of Papa’s. But running the house wasn’t enough. It wasn’t a true purpose.

“Excellent” Lady Ivers encouraged. “Perhaps Colonel Crathie, there? Commands a regiment of horse. Has most of his hair and all of his teeth. Not a bad prospect,” she judged. “He’s perhaps not a great intellect, but he’s likable enough. The right woman will make a better man of him.”

“Lady Ivers, I beg you would not abuse your company this way,” a deep Scots voice from behind them interrupted. “That man is nothing but a bag of pants.”

Flora was astonished—and vastly amused—to find the speaker was a tall, handsome, deeply tanned man with burnished hair. At the sight of him, something within her chest kicked over, like a horse trying to free itself from its harness traces.

But what a strange feeling—and what a strange way to describe it. Flora had never kicked over anything in her life. Avoided, perhaps, tiptoed around, certainly, or even edged by carefully. But never, ever kicked—it was too self-indulgent.

“Hah! Jack, darling,” Lady Ivers enthused, turning her cheek to accept the fellow’s kiss. “Speak of the devil and up he pops, right on cue. Lovely to see you, as always.” Lady Ivers waved her fan in the fellow’s direction before she said to Flora, “You know Jack Balfour, I’m sure. Everyone knows Jack.”

“We are acquainted,” the man acknowledged with a civil bow.

Flora belatedly realized that she had indeed been introduced to the man—at her father’s very first ‘salon’ for the great and good of Edinburgh, last winter. The night she had discovered Maisie in Archie Carrington’s arms. The night everything that had eventually culminated in Papa losing favor as the Lord Advocate had been set in motion.

Flora had clearly forgotten this remarkably attractive fellow in the whirlwind of events that followed. He was Jonathan Balfour, her exacting memory recalled, a captain of the Royal Navy, looking everything cynical but somehow urbane out of his naval uniform.

Yet, despite the cynical smile, there was…something about him. Something sad in the set of his mouth. Something weary in the cast of his gray eyes that drew her attention and gave her pause, all at the same time.

He crossed his arms over his chest, and she found herself staring at his brown hands, for no reason that she could fathom. Perhaps it was the way he held himself—a little stiffly, with a wary sort of attentiveness, as if he had gotten too used to the feel of his ship rising and falling underfoot and now found the solid oak of Lady Ivers’s parquet unsettling.

Not for the first time that evening, Flora wished her sister were there. Maisie would no doubt find Captain Balfour an interesting subject for a portrait—he was fairly bristling with character. And only a portraitist of Maisie’s talent could capture the banked fire of the captain’s steely gaze.

Which he turned on her now. “Miss Conway.” The captain’s look seemed to skate over her in only brief acknowledgment before he turned away. “What are you up to, Augusta?”

“Introducing my dear Miss Conway to some of my other gentlemen guests?—”

“Crathie? Bag. Of. Pants,” he repeated.

Augusta Ivers laughed and shook her head as she turned back to Flora. “Jack is full of these marvelous witticisms. He’s quite the rogue. I don’t know if you’ve heard that our captain is now the Earl of Kinloch, for his sins and for all the good it’s done him. But, I will warn you—as I will also warn him—that you’re not for him. Despite the title—or perhaps because of it. He’s poor.”

Well. Flora was astonished to find she had been wrong—there was at least one poor person at the party, after all.

And she, who had not known about Captain Balfour’s elevation to the peerage—and who could now see that what she thought had been cynicism in the man’s face, was in fact, a combustible combination of rage and grief—was so very much surprised that she spoke, for the first time in the whole of her adult life, without thinking.

“How…regrettable.”