Out of his damned mind.
Anwen, the eldest and most practical of his sisters, pushed her too-large spectacles back on her nose. “Good. I would advise against that. This matter is of import.” The round wire rims promptly slid back into the improper place.
Alas, all his efforts at having them replaced were met with outrage and indignation by his sister, who was as loyal to her spectacles as she was to their sisters.
“Very serious stuff,” Daria, the most notoriously morbid of his sisters, murmured.
At her side, her younger twin, Delia, picked up her book and proceeded to read.
“Ahem.”
When the other girl made no attempt to lower her reading material, Daria tried for her attention once more. “I said, ahhem.” Finally, Daria slapped Delia’s fingers and favored her sister with one of those haunting, dark looks Clayton had once caught her practicing in a mirror.
Sighing, Delia lowered the volume to her lap.
Daria returned her attention to the group. “As I was saying . . . very serious stuff.”
Once again, six of the ladies present nodded.
Eris looked confusedly between their mother and her elder sisters. “But we already did that part,” she said on a loud whisper.
“Shh.” Daria and Delia promptly covered the younger girl’s mouth.
Clayton leaned across the elder of the twins and whispered for Eris’s ears only: “It’s all right, poppet. I’ve already determined there’s a play been scripted— Oww.” He winced as Eris brought an impressively strong foot down on top of his own.
She glared back at him with enough fire in her eyes to make him fear the future down the road. “We are talking, Clayton.”
So much for being the loyal, avenging brother. “Very well.” He straightened. “Then why don’t we dispense with all the dr—” All eyes narrowed on him. This time, he was wise enough to edge his foot away from his youngest sister. “Er, that is . . . Why don’t we dispense with all the”—Clayton fiddled with the fabric of his cravat—“dithering?”
“You were going to say ‘dramatics,’” Brenna charged.
The bluestocking of the group, Brenna could recite any of the Enlightened thinkers, and debate a person into forgetting their name. As such, Clayton took several moments to fashion a response. “I—”
“Furthermore,” Delia interrupted, “if I may point out, ‘dithering’ is not much better. It suggests one does not know one’s mind, and we each know our own mind.”
This time, their nods were perfectly synchronized.
Yes, there could be no doubting the Kearsley sisters knew what they wanted and when they wanted it, and Lord help the one who served as a possible impediment to those wishes.
Unfortunately, in this particular instance, it appeared that he was the unlucky one pegged as the “impediment.” “Forgive me,” Clayton said with his best attempt at a suitable-enough-for-them level of solemnity. “If you would be so good as to continue?”
“I will be the one to say it.” Cora, his science-minded sister, pulled back her shoulders. “I am—”
“I am getting marrrried,” Eris cut off.
Silence met the little girl’s announcement.
She smiled, revealing the wide gap between her two front teeth.
Clayton didn’t so much as blink. Of anything the noisy, oft-demanding, but always loving lot of Kearsleys might have said, that was certainly . . . not it. “I . . . ?” He scratched at what he trusted was a thoroughly confused brow. “Whaat?”
Cora frowned. “I was going to say that.”
“Well, in fairness, if we want to be accurate? It was decided that I should be first,” Anwen corrected with a little sniff. “I am just twenty-four.”
A series of protests and challenges went up with sister fighting over sister for that dubious pleasure of—
Clayton sat back in his seat and just took in the scene.
Long, long ago, sometime between Anwen coming to blows with a doctor who’d refused to fashion spectacles for ladies, and Delia crashing upon the stage of a Royal Theatre performance to confront the player delivering his lines from Hamlet—or incorrectly delivering his lines, as she’d pointed out—Clayton had ceased to be nonplussed by anything they said or did.
That was . . . until now.
Because from the bits and pieces he was able to make out of a scene that seemed dangerously close to descending into an all-out brawl, his sisters, each of whom had expressed a distaste at even the mention of the marital state, should now be quarreling over who would have the honor and privilege first.
Their mother clapped her hands once. “Girls!” Her voice, however, was muted by the din of her quarreling daughters. “I said, girls! That is enough.”
Alas, she may as well have been any one of the unsuccessful governesses they’d brought in over the years to tame the wild beasts.
Putting two middle fingers into her mouth, the viscountess whistled loudly.
That “emergency gesture,” as she’d come to refer to it, had the necessary silencing effect. Each of her daughters fell quiet, though they each still took time to periodically glare at their last debate partner.
“Now,” the viscountess went on, “it hardly makes sense for Eris or Delia or Daria to marry first.”
“Yes, as I see it, they still each have at least another year or so before they venture into the bonds of matrimony,” Clayton said dryly.
Eris and the sixteen-year-olds glared his way once more.
“Forgive me,” he murmured, having committed the folly of shifting their ire away from their previous opponent and back toward him.
Their mother cleared her throat. “As I was saying, our youngest girls, despite their offer of sacrifice and their willingness to do so, should not at this time, or at any time within the nearest of futures, be wed.” She drew in a breath and, bringing her shoulders back, looked straight ahead. “It shall be . . . me.”
Oh, good God.
Clayton slumped in his chair and dropped his brow into his palm.
“No other. It should be me . . . I shall do it . . .”
“I am the eldest sister . . .”
“But I am the one who . . .”
There was never a dull day in the Kearsley household. That held true from Clayton’s earliest remembrances of his wild and free family. One that he’d sought very much, as heir to the earldom, to raise himself above. And yet, it hadn’t been until his father died four years earlier, on Eris’s first birthday, and Clayton had stepped in to fill the role of viscount and de facto father to his sisters, that he’d come to appreciate that he’d not had any idea of just how wild his family, in fact, was.
From the overdramatic debates and discussions that frequently ensued, to each sister’s eccentric interest, to all the sisters’ devotions to their respective interests, the Kearsley girls were the pieces upon a chessboard that he still hadn’t been able to make heads or tails of.
“Are you quite through?” he called loudly over the racket.
“What manner of son are you?” Cora cried out. “Have you not heard what Mother said? She said she will be the one to marry. When she loved Papa so desperately, she should be the one to wed another.” The girl sniffled and dabbed at nonexistent tears in the corners of her eyes. “Why . . . why . . . at her advanced age, she is very near the end and should hardly be thinking of marriage.”