SWNOVELS A Spinster for the Earl: Chapter 5
Isaac leaned back in his chair, bringing his cigar to his lips and releasing a puff of smoke. The past few days had been a nightmare in terms of retaining any focus whatsoever. He had been spending most of his time lost in thought of Miss Lucy Hale. He hadn’t stopped thinking about her since the auction. In fact, he’d imagined the taste of her lips and the feel of her curves more than he’d wanted to admit.
Usually, he was very certain that the women he pursued wanted him, but she was difficult to read. She had seemed flustered around him at times, but she had acted so differently than any of the other women he’d flirted with before. She had been generally calm and collected, and she had often had something thoughtful to say. Isaac had always been thought of as athletic and always ready for celebrations. He missed having an intellectually stimulating conversation.
“So, at this point,” Adam continued, gesticulating wildly with his hands, “Victory Lap, the bay, picks up speed and advances from last place to third! And I told you that Sunday Striker doesn’t like mud, and it had just rained, so he slows down!”
“Uh-huh,” Isaac mumbled, watching the smoke leave his mouth. His tongue tingled with tobacco, and his chest felt light and airy. On his lips, he savored the sweet and earthy aftertaste of the rum-soaked leaves.
“And then, all of a sudden, the white horse, West Wind, he rolled his ankle, causing him to slow, and—” Adam stood up, raising a victorious hand in the air “Victory Lap took the win! It was absolutely—” He cut himself off.
Isaac glanced up at him, cigar positioned against his lips. “Mhm?”
“You are not listening. You love to hear about the races,” Adam said, looking disappointed. “Are you getting tired? You need another drink.”
“I am sorry,” Isaac mumbled, rubbing a palm across his face. “Just distracted.”
Adam made a noise at the back of his throat. He sat down and took a sip of his brandy. He set it on the end table beside him with a thud. “Does this have anything to do with spending five hundred pounds on a few chaperoned strolls through the park?”
“I am happy to donate to education, thank you,” Isaac grumbled. “I would have done it either way, but the promenades with Miss Lucy were definitely an attractive offer.”
Adam crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes at his friend. “So, I assume you have taken her on that first promenade, then?”
Isaac shook his head. “You know how it goes. I have to keep her waiting just a bit. Women want men they cannot have. You know that.”
“I do, but I also know Miss Lucy Hale,” Adam pointed out. “She is not impressed by games. In fact, she has never been impressed by much of anything. If you actually want to court her, then you just have to speak to her. The only way you could impress her is by being intelligent and articulate.”
Isaac puffed on his cigar. He was unsure of himself for a moment. Was this really such a good idea? Adam even thought that his interest meant he wanted to court her, probably because it would be loutish to seek any other connection with a woman of such good social standing.
Lucy didn’t want to marry. She’d been very clear. And even so, it was probably much safer to marry someone he wasn’t infatuated with. Passion like that had a tendency to fade once the novelty did.
Isaac leaned out of the leather chair and reached across to the end table. He snatched Adam’s snifter of Brandy and tipped it back. The liquid burned his throat.
“Fine, Adam, I will go over there and speak with her, tomorrow.”
Adam paused, eyeing the empty snifter disappointedly. He raised a hand toward one of the servers to ask for a refill. “Does that mean that you will not be attending the theater with me tomorrow?”
Isaac frowned and shook his head. “Not anymore.”
“I am surprised,” Adam said. “I didn’t realize you were so eager to take her out that you would be willing to pass up on your last affair. Could Miss Lucy have really changed you?”
Isaac laughed, staring into the bottom of the snifter. He swirled the alcohol around. Adam seemed like he would never support the truth if he knew it.
“Maybe,” he replied. “Sometimes, I manage to surprise even myself.”
Isaac handed his coat off to a footman and stumbled over to the staircase. He reached for the banister when he heard a familiar noise. Immediately, his chest bubbled with annoyance, and he stopped, one foot on the floor and the other on the first step of the staircase.
His mother, Arabella, always made herself known with one grating, overdramatic, discontented sigh. He turned his head and spotted her leaning against the archway that led into the drawing room off the foyer.
She was tall like him, slim, and her hair was long and loose. She never fixed it up anymore because she never left the estate. She hadn’t made a public appearance in roughly sixteen years. These days, she felt like a ghost that wandered the Ramsbury Estate, still stuck in a never-ending cycle of mourning. Isaac never imagined he’d share his home with a specter, and yet here she was, more disconcerting than any apparition or phantom breath on the back of one’s neck.
“It is three in the morning,” she said.
“Yes, so why are you awake?”
“Because I have been wondering where you were.”
“I am not sure why,” he attempted to brush her off. “I am a grown man.”
“Are you?” she asked. “Then start acting like it. Do you think I am dense? I know what they say about you. I know about all the women you have had in your bed and all the nights you stay out drinking to excess. A good man, a grown man, looks nothing like you.”
Isaac scoffed, “What do you know? You haven’t been out of the house long enough to see one.”
Arabella crossed her arms. Her skin was paper-white as if even the slightest drop of rain might cause her to disintegrate before his very eyes. She stared at him with sharp, icy blue eyes that bore into him. “Was there any part of you that admired your father? Was there any part of you that wished to be like him?”
“Mother,” Isaac gritted out.
He didn’t like it when she mentioned his father. It was a sore spot for both of them. It was the reason her entire wardrobe had been black for the last sixteen years, and if Isaac was being honest with himself, the same reason he had avoided marriage for so long. It had not been easy being forced to grow up without so much as a warning at the age of thirteen.
Perhaps it was wrong of him to spend as long as he could enjoying all of the things that made life worth living before he succumbed to all the duties and responsibilities of maturity. What was there to look forward to? Might he just have the same bitter relationship with his own child?
“Do what you like. I cannot stop you,” she said. “But do not be surprised if I continue to call you out.”
Isaac’s mouth flattened into a thin line, and he breathed in sharply. “Rest easy, Mother. Soon there will be a new woman to monitor my every move in and out of this house. I will be getting married this season.”
“Wha—” She paused, stepping back into the shadow of the living room.
Isaac had never once given any indication to anyone that he had considered settling down. He wasn’t surprised that his mother was taken aback. No matter how relieving the news was, he was sure it had been a shock to her.
“Do you have someone in mind?”
“Goodnight,” he said, ignoring her question.
There was nothing to say, anyway. He wouldn’t know until the Season started. With that, he ascended the stairs and retired to his bedchambers.
The Grand Dowager Countess, Isaac’s grandmother, sat at the breakfast table, her tongue poking out from between her lips as she attempted to butter a piece of bread with her shaking hands. Eventually, she gave up and dropped it on her plate with a clatter, crumbs flying off her plate.
“How difficult is it to butter the toast before it arrives at the table?” she asked, crossing her arms. “You know, your grandfather would have never allowed such a dismal breakfast spread.” Her finger wagged in the air with indignance.
She was a tiny, thin woman with tan skin and deep wrinkles. Her hair was gray, always put up in a neat little bun.
“No, Grandmother,” Isaac muttered, reading the newspaper with two-thirds of his mind while the remainder half-heartedly listened to his grandmother’s gripes. “He certainly would have never let such wicked acts be committed in our kitchens.”
Isaac never worried too much about her morning discontentments. One of her favorite pastimes was complaining. He saw to it that nothing was ever perfect just so that she could continue to find things unsatisfactory. He assumed once you made it to a certain age, you had every right to complain about whatever you wished.
He would take his grandmother’s complaints over his mother’s any day. The state of breakfast meant nothing in the grand scheme of things, but the comparisons his mother would draw were always hurtful.
Isaac knew he wasn’t anything like his father. He wasn’t as responsible, or as in control of himself. His mother’s reminders felt like salt in a wound that had never been left alone long enough to properly heal. Every time she dug her fingers inside, she opened it up more and more.
“You know I have friends, right?”
Isaac sighed. “Yes, I am aware you are more popular than I am.”
“Good,” his grandmother said. She wrinkled her nose as she looked at her piece of toast. “Will someone butter this for me? My physician says I have something called arthritis. I have never heard of such a thing. Not everything needs an explanation. This is what our physicians are doing nowadays. They are making up all of these words instead of giving me laudanum. I will not stand for it. Call the physician for me later. I wish to have a talk with him.”
Isaac set down his newspaper and held up a hand to stop one of the footmen from coming to butter her toast. It was best she continued to do things. That was what her physician had said, after all. She just didn’t like to hear it.
“Why did you mention your friends, Grandmother?”
“I do not think I did,” she said.
“Hmm.” Isaac shook his head. “You did, I promise.”
Her mouth pursed, and she scrunched her eyes in thought. While Isaac waited, he took a sip of coffee.
“Oh! I heard about the auction.”
Isaac choked, swallowing his beverage before he expelled it. He stood up from the table, coughing, while his grandmother stayed seated, eyeing him with the same disappointed gaze she would offer to a caged monkey that refused to do a single trick.
“Are you dying?”
“No—” He coughed again, his eyes watering after choking so mercilessly on his acidic drink. “It simply went down the wrong pipe.”
“Oh, I see.” She nodded. “Then your surprise would have nothing to do with me knowing about the five promenades you bid on.”
“N—no, of course not.”
She very likely knew he was lying. His desire for Miss Lucy Hale was his own business. It was most definitely not something he wished to discuss with his grandmother. And God forbid his mother found out. She would never stop asking him about Lucy.
“When are you proposing to her?”
“Grandmother, I do not even know this woman. I bid on the promenades to donate to education. If I hadn’t put five hundred pounds in, the bidding would have concluded at two hundred. It was simply a donation.”
She made an irritated grunt in the back of her throat and swatted the air as if to ask him to stop. “When did you go on your first promenade?”
“I have not gone yet,” he replied, sitting back down. “But if it pleases you to know, I will go today.”
“Good,” she said. “You must see this through. There is no reason to spend five hundred pounds for nothing.”
“I spent it on women’s education,” he reminded her.
She stared at him incredulously. “Why?” She huffed and looked back down at her toast. “We are already more intelligent than men, as is. You have wasted your money. I heard that the girl is unmarriageable!”
“She is not unmarriageable, she simply does not see the value in marriage.” He paused. “And I can hardly blame her.”
“You have wasted your money and your time. And to think of mine! I am seventy and nine, and you are acting like I am in correspondence with Ponce de León. I refuse to live forever, especially if breakfast remains this desolate.”
Isaac sighed. “I am fully aware of what you think.”
“This is tragic.” His grandmother frowned. “Well, go on, then. You promised the girl a walk. It is already seven thirty.”
Isaac sighed, balling up his cloth napkin and tossing it on his chair. His grandmother and mother were both right about his duty to marry and leave behind the final pleasure-seeking days of his youth. He just wished that he could connect with his mother better.
Where his grandmother rose with the sun and always had a way of amusing him, his mother was the one hiding in dark rooms and always accusing him of the slightest things. His mother wanted him to get over the pain of his youth, but it never seemed like she was doing anything to break out of her self-imposed mourning period.
No matter. He stepped out into the foyer, accepting his coat from a footman. The easiest thing to do was to move forward with his day. Usually, he would go to his office or call on a business partner. It usually felt better for him to get out of the house. Today, he had his promenade to look forward to, and maybe Lucy would even agree to his proposal. He never felt nervous when he approached women, but for once, he felt there was a large possibility that Lucy could completely reject him.
Would she? If she knew what he could do, if she knew how he could make her feel? Judging from the way she had blushed under the most mundane of words, she’d never even been kissed before. She had to be curious whether he was as good as some of the rumors suggested.