“I’m the size of a barn,” Lillian said flatly, puncturing his attempt at diplomacy.
Swift’s mouth firmed as if he was fighting to suppress a grin. “Not at all,” he said mildly, and glanced at Annabelle and Evie. They all waited for Lillian to make the introductions.
Lillian complied grudgingly. “This is Mr. Swift,” she muttered, waving her hand in his direction. “Mrs. Simon Hunt and Lady St. Vincent.”
Swift bent deftly over Annabelle’s hand. He would have done the same for Evie except she was holding the baby. Isabelle’s grunts and whimpers were escalating and would soon become a full-out wail unless something was done about it.
“That is my daughter Isabelle,” Annabelle said apologetically. “She’s teething.”
That should get rid of him quickly, Daisy thought. Men were terrified of crying babies.
“Ah.” Swift reached into his coat and rummaged through a rattling collection of articles. What on earth did he have in there? She watched as he pulled out his pen-knife, a bit of fishing line and a clean white handkerchief.
“Mr. Swift, what are you doing?” Evie asked with a quizzical smile.
“Improvising something.” He spooned some crushed ice into the center of the handkerchief, gathered the fabric tightly around it, and tied it off with fishing line. After replacing the knife in his pocket, he reached for the baby without one trace of self-consciusness.
Wide-eyed, Evie surrendered the infant. The four women watched in astonishment as Swift took Isabelle against his shoulder with practiced ease. He gave the baby the ice-filled handkerchief, which she proceeded to gnaw madly even as she continued to cry.
Seeming oblivious to the fascinated stares of everyone in the room, Swift wandered to the window and murmured softly to the baby. It appeared he was telling her a story of some kind. After a minute or two the child quieted.
When Swift returned to the table Isabelle was half-drowsing and sighing, her mouth clamped firmly on the makeshift ice pouch.
“Oh, Mr. Swift,” Annabelle said gratefully, taking the baby back in her arms, “how clever of you! Thank you.”
“What were you saying to her?” Lillian demanded.
He glanced at her and replied blandly, “I thought I would distract her long enough for the ice to numb her gums. So I gave her a detailed explanation of the Buttonwood agreement of 1792.”
Daisy spoke to him for the first time. “What was that?”
Swift glanced at her then, his face smooth and polite, and for a second Daisy half-believed that she had dreamed the events of that morning. But her skin and nerves still retained the sensation of him, the hard imprint of his body.
“The Buttonwood agreement led to the formation of the New York Stock and Exchange Board,” Swift said. “I thought I was quite informative, but it seemed Miss Isabelle lost interest when I started on the fee-structuring compromise.”
“I see,” Daisy said. “You bored the poor baby to sleep.”
“You should hear my account of the imbalance of market forces leading to the crash of ‘37,” Swift said. “I’ve been told it’s better than laudanum.”
Staring into his glinting blue eyes, Daisy chuckled reluctantly, and he gave her another one of those brief, dazzling smiles. Her face turned unaccountably warm.
Swift’s attention remained on her for a moment too long, as if he were fascinated by something he saw in her eyes. Abruptly he tore his gaze from hers and bowed to the table again. “I will leave your to enjoy your tea. A pleasure, ladies.” Glancing at Annabelle, he added gravely, “You have a lovely daughter, madam. I will overlook her lack of appreciation for my business lecture.”
“That is very kind of you, sir,” Annabelle replied, her eyes dancing.
Swift returned to the other side of the room while the young women all busied themselves, stirring unnecessary spoonfuls of sugar into their tea, smoothing their napkins on their laps.
Evie was the first to speak. “You were right,” she said to Lillian. “He’s absolutely horrid.”
“Yes,” Annabelle agreed emphatically. “When one looks at him, the first words that come to mind are ‘wilted spinach.’”
“Shut up, the both of you,” Lillian said in response to their sarcasm, and sank her teeth into a piece of toast.
Lillian insisted on dragging Daisy out to the east lawn in the afternoon, where most of the young people were playing bowls. Ordinarily Daisy wouldn’t have minded, but she had just reached a riveting part in a new novel about a governess named Honoria who had just encountered a ghost in the attic. “Who are you?” Honoria had quavered, staring at the ghost who looked remarkably like her old love, Lord Clayworth. The ghost had been about to answer when Lillian had decisively torn the book from Daisy’s hands and pulled her from the library.
“Blast,” Daisy complained. “Blast, blast…Lillian, I had just gotten to the best part!”
“As we speak there are at least a half-dozen eligible men who are lawn-bowling outside,” her sister said crisply. “And playing games with them is far more productive than reading by yourself.”
“I don’t know anything about bowls.”
“Good. Ask them to teach you. If there’s one thing every man loves to do, it’s telling a woman how to do something.”
They approached the bowling lawn, where chairs and tables had been set out for onlookers. A group of players were busy rolling large round wooden balls along the green, laughing as one player’s ball, or bowl, dropped into the narrow ditch dug at the side of the green.
“Hmm,” Lillian said, observing the gathering. “We have competition.” Daisy recognized the three women her sister was referring to: Miss Cassandra Leighton, Lady Miranda Dowden, and Elspeth Higginson. “I would have preferred not to invite any unmarried women to Hampshire,” Lillian said, “but Westcliff said that would be too obvious. Fortunately you’re prettier than all of them. Even if you are short.”
“I’m not short,” Daisy protested.
“Petite, then.”
“I don’t like that word any better. It makes me sound trivial.”
“It’s better than stunted,” Lillian said, “which is the only other word I can come up with to describe your lack of stature.” She grinned at Daisy’s scowl. “Don’t make faces, dear. I’m taking you to a buffet of bachelors and you can pick any—oh, hell.”
“What? What?”
“He’s playing.”
There was no need to ask who he was…the annoyance in Lillian’s voice made his identity perfectly clear.
Surveying the group, Daisy saw Matthew Swift standing at the end of the lane with a few other young men, watching as the distances between the bowls were being measured. Like the others he was dressed in light-colored trousers, a white shirt, and a sleeveless waistcoat. He was lean and fit, his relaxed posture imbued with physical confidence.
His gaze caught everything. He appeared to be taking the game seriously. Matthew Swift was a man who could never do less than his best, even in a casual lawn game.
Daisy was fairly certain that he competed for something every day of his life. And that didn’t quite fit with her experience of the privileged young men of Old Boston, or Old New York, the pampered scions who were always aware that they didn’t have to work if they didn’t wish to. She wondered if Swift ever did something just for the enjoyment of it.
“They’re trying to determine who’s lying the shot,” Lillian said. “That means who managed to roll their bowls closest to the white ball at the end.”
“How do you know so much about the game?” Daisy asked.
Lillian smiled wryly. “Westcliff taught me to play. He’s so good at bowls that he usually sits out because no one else ever wins when he plays.”
They approached the group of chairs, where Westcliff was sitting with Evie and Lord St. Vincent, and the Craddocks, a retired major general and his wife. Daisy headed toward an extra chair, but Lillian pushed her toward the bowling green.
“Go,” Lillian commanded in the same tone one would have used to send a dog to fetch a stick.
Sighing, Daisy cast a longing thought to her unfinished novel and trudged forward. She had met at least three of the gentlemen on previous occasions. Not bad prospects, actually. There was Mr. Hollingberry, a pleasant-looking man in his thirties, round-cheeked and a bit pudgy but attractive nonetheless. And Mr. Mardling, with his athletic build and thick blond curls and green eyes.
There were two men she had not seen at Stony Cross before, Mr. Alan Rickett, who was rather scholarly looking with his spectacles and slightly rumpled coat…and Lord Llandrindon, a handsome dark-haired gentleman of medium height.
Llandrindon approached Daisy immediately, volunteering to explain the rules of the game. Daisy tried not to look over his shoulder at Mr. Swift, who was surrounded by the other women. They were giggling and flirting, asking his advice on how to hold the bowl properly and how many steps one should take before releasing the bowl onto the green.
Swift appeared to take no notice of Daisy. But as she turned to pick up a wooden bowl from a pile on the ground, she felt a tingling at the back of her neck. She knew he was looking at her.
Daisy sorely regretted having asked him to help her with the trapped goose. The episode had set off something that was beyond her control, some troubling awareness she couldn’t seem to banish. Stop being ridiculous, Daisy told herself. Start bowling. And she forced herself to listen attentively to Lord Llandrindon’s advice on bowls strategy.
Observing the action on the green, Westcliff commented softly, “She’s getting on well with Llandrindon, from the looks of it. And he’s one of the most promising possibilities. He’s the right age, well-educated, and possessed of a pleasant disposition.”
Lillian regarded Llandrindon’s distant form speculatively. He was even the right height, not too tall for Daisy, who disliked it when people towered over her. “He has an odd name,” Lillian mused aloud. “I wonder where he’s from?”
“Thurso,” replied Lord St. Vincent, who was sitting on the other side of Evie.
An uneasy truce had come to exist between Lillian and St. Vincent after a great deal of past conflict. Although she would never truly like him, Lillian had prosaically decided that St. Vincent would have to be tolerated, since he had been friends with Westcliff for years.
Lillian knew if she asked her husband to end the friendship he would do so for her sake, but she loved him too much to make such a demand. And St. Vincent was good for Marcus. With his wit and perceptiveness, he helped to bring a measure of balance to Marcus’s overburdened life. Marcus, as one of the most powerful men in England, was in dire need of people who didn’t take him too seriously.
The other point in St. Vincent’s favor was that he appeared to be a good husband to Evie. He seemed to worship her, actually. One would never have thought of putting them together—Evie the shy wallflower, St. Vincent the heartless rake—and yet they had developed a singular attachment to each other.
St. Vincent was self-assured and sophisticated, possessing a male beauty so dazzling that people sometimes caught their breath when they glanced at him. But all it took was one word from Evie to make him come running. Even though their relationship was quieter, less outwardly demonstrative than those of the Hunts or Westcliffs, a mysterious and passionate intensity existed between the two.
And as long as Evie was happy, Lillian would be cordial to St. Vincent.
“Thurso,” Lillian repeated suspiciously, glancing from St. Vincent to her husband. “That doesn’t sound English to me.”
The two men exchanged a glance, and Marcus replied evenly. “It’s located in Scotland, actually.”
Lillian’s eyes narrowed. “Llandrindon is Scottish? But he doesn’t have an accent.”
“He spent most of his formative years at English boarding schools and then Oxford,” St. Vincent said.
“Hmm.” Lillian’s knowledge of Scottish geography was scant, but she had never even heard of Thurso. “And where is Thurso precisely? Is it just past the border?”
Westcliff didn’t quite meet her gaze. “Somewhat more north than that. Near the Orkney islands.”
“The northern edge of the continent?” Lillian couldn’t believe her ears. It took a great deal of effort to keep her voice to a furious whisper. “Why don’t we just save ourselves some time and banish Daisy to Siberia? It would probably be warmer! Good God, how can the two of you have agreed on Llandrindon as a candidate?”
“I had to throw him in,” St. Vincent protested. “He owns three estates and an entire string of thoroughbreds. And every time he comes to the club my nightly profits go up at least five thousand pounds.”
“He’s a spendthrift, then,” Lillian said darkly.
“That makes him even more eligible for Daisy,” St. Vincent said. “Someday he’ll need your family’s money.”
“I don’t care how eligible he is, the object is to keep my sister in this country. How often will I get to see Daisy if she’s in bloody Scotland?”
“It’s still closer than North America,” Westcliff pointed out in a matter-of-fact tone.
Lillian turned to Evie in hopes of enlisting her as an ally. “Evie, say something!”
“It doesn’t matter where Lord Llandrindon is from.” Evie reached over to gently untangle a strand of dark hair that had caught in Lillian’s earbob. “Daisy’s not going to marry him.”
“Why do you think so?” Lillian asked warily.
Evie smiled at her. “Oh…just a feeling.”
In her desire to finish the game and return to her novel, Daisy had picked up the knack of lawn-bowling rather quickly. The first player rolled the white ball, called the jack, to the end of the lane of grass without going over the edge. The object was to roll three wooden balls, called bowls, until they ended up as close as possible to the jack.
The only difficult part was that the wooden bowls were deliberately less rounded on one side, so they never quite rolled in a straight line. Daisy soon learned to compensate for the bowls’ asymmetry by casting a little to the right or left, as needed. It was a fast green with short grass and hard-packed soil, which was a good thing since Daisy was in a hurry to be done and return to Honoria and the ghost.
Since there was an equal number of women and men, the players were divided into teams of two. Daisy was paired with Llandrindon, who was a proficient player.