Something about his face gave Lady Bumtrinket pause; she pursed her lips and then raised a finger. A footman sprang forward. “Three more coddled eggs,” she said. “More well-browned toast. One would think that Lindow Castle was lacking in funds, given the meagerness of the dish. I’ll have some of those dinner rolls as well, and just a soupçon of creamed spinach. Digestion requires vegetable matter, as I understand it.”
She turned back to Greywick. “What are you doing here, given that the duke hasn’t any unmarried daughters of age?”
Joan succumbed to a mischievous impulse and gave her a sunny smile. “Ah, but I am unmarried—as we established earlier, Lady Bumtrinket.”
The lady narrowed her eyes, and then said to Thaddeus, apparently under the misapprehension that a hoarse whisper couldn’t be heard across the table, “You mustn’t even think of making Lady Joan—do note that I gave her the honorific—your wife.”
Greywick’s jaw was very tight. “I see absolutely no reason why Lady Joan should not be my duchess.”
A surprising response, to Joan’s mind. But then he was not a man who would welcome marital advice.
“I do,” she put in cheerfully. “I hope you won’t mind my comment, since you are discussing my marital fate so openly. Lord Greywick and I would not suit.”
“We would suit,” he replied, showing an unusual obstinacy. Of course, Lady Bumtrinket could inspire that in even the mildest of men. Joan’s own father found her intolerable, and he wasn’t easily enraged.
“Her golden hair isn’t going anywhere,” Lady Bumtrinket said with the vulgarity that only the utterly confident could wield. “Greywick, you’re going to be a duke, sooner rather than later, to my mind. Something’s wrong with your father. He resembled a famished rat, though I didn’t say that to him, of course.”
“I fail to see what my father’s girth has to do with Lady Joan’s hair,” Thaddeus said rigidly.
“He’s throwing down the gauntlet,” Otis muttered in Joan’s ear.
“It’s nothing to do with me; Greywick is the sort of man who can’t tolerate interference,” Joan whispered back.
“I know,” Otis replied, with a sigh. “But Bumtrinket is right that Greywick couldn’t—wouldn’t—marry you. I scarcely know him, but he’s obviously as prudish as a Quaker.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Joan pointed out. “I would never take him.”
As luck would have it, her sentence fell directly into the silence that often followed one of Lady Bumtrinket’s emphatic statements, while listeners sorted out whether they were offended or merely affronted.
Her eyes flew to the viscount, and to her surprise, she found a faintly speculative look in his eyes.
“I assume that the ‘he’ refers to Greywick,” Lady Bumtrinket said. “Hardly relevant, is it, since the man won’t offer for you.” She fixed Otis with a shortsighted glare. “Who are you?”
“Mr. Otis Murgatroyd,” Otis said.
“We both know that,” she snapped. “No, I mean, who are you? I haven’t got the gentry memorized.”
“My father is Sir Reginald Murgatroyd,” Otis told her.
“Second son? Third? Fifth?”
“Second,” Otis said.
She squinted. “I thought he shunted the second into the church.”
“I was not suited to the profession,” Otis said.
Thaddeus cleared his throat.
Lady Bumtrinket whipped her head around with the intensity of a falcon on the hunt. “Are you ill?”
“No.”
“Then don’t cough like that. Gentlemen make their opinions known in words, not guttural utterances.” She raised her finger, and a footman bounded to her side. “I would fancy one of those little squabs that I see on the sideboard. And a fresh glass of milk. This one has cooled. No, I’ll have a glass of wine. And a kidney pudding, if there’s one to be had.”
The footman bowed. The door opened and closed behind him; at the other end of the table, the duke looked up in mild surprise. Generally, Prism’s meals were precisely regimented to avoid footmen to-ing and fro-ing, as the butler described it.
“I suppose it’s an acceptable match,” Lady Bumtrinket said, her eyes resting on Joan and Otis. “Lady Joan’s dowry must have been padded by the duke to make up for obvious . . . deficiencies.”
“Precisely the same as my sisters’ dowries,” Joan clarified.
“Your comment is insolent and ill-bred,” Lord Greywick stated, at the same moment.
“Nonsense,” Lady Bumtrinket said to Greywick, with withering emphasis. “Another example of your insufficient knowledge of your status. Dukes are not namby-pamby about matters surrounding marriage, dowries, and jointures. I shall have to congratulate Lindow. A well-matched pair. A failed churchman and a . . .” Her vocabulary seemed to fail her.
“A lady,” Greywick supplied, his voice hard, his expression stony.
“You’re not a very cheerful type, are you?” the lady said, fishing in her pocket, pulling out a lorgnette with a long diamond-encrusted handle, and peering at him through the glass. “I suppose one might become morose, under the circumstances. That is, your father and the ‘family of his heart’ create a great deal of entertainment for my kitchen maids, but one would rather not find such depravity in one’s family.”
She paused, struck by a thought. “I gather that’s why you made no progress with the two older Wilde girls, Greywick. I do hear that Lindow is an attentive father. One of the girls married a duke, but the other settled for a lord, and I heard he’s a bedbug.”
A moment of stunned silence followed this observation.
“None of my brothers-in-law could be described as a bedbug,” Joan stated, feeling called upon to defend the family.
“Don’t be hotheaded,” Lady Bumtrinket said, pointing her lorgnette across the table. “You know what I mean.”
“No, I do not.”
“Crazy as a bedbug,” Lady Bumtrinket clarified.
“No one in this family is crazy as a bedbug or any other creature.” Joan was rather proud of her tone; in fact, she should probably use it when Hamlet first insists that his father was murdered and no one believes him.
“A good moment to reiterate that I’m not marrying you, Joan,” Otis murmured.
“You’re breaking my heart! You don’t want to join a family of bedbugs?” Joan whispered back.
“Just as you say,” Lady Bumtrinket stated, paying about as much attention to Joan’s protest as Hamlet’s mother had done. “My point is that the Duke of Lindow likely didn’t want your older sisters tied to Greywick for good reason. Madness is hereditary. Do you know what your father said to me?” she asked Greywick.
If anything, his expression grew stonier.
“The Duke of Eversley sang—sang—‘Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,’” Lady Bumtrinket exclaimed. “A mewling hymn when directed at the heavens, and even worse when the singer seems to think that I will sympathize with the idea that his mistress is divine. Imagine that, if you please. Unsurprisingly, the composer of that nauseating drivel was a Methodist!”