he didn’t like them, but maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe she just hadn’t liked herself when she was with them.
She looked up. Mr. St. Clair was leaning back in his seat, his face looking a little bit bored, a little bit amused—that sophisticated and urbane sort of expression men across London sought to emulate. Mr. St. Clair, she decided, did it better than most.
“You look rather serious for an evening of bovine pentameter,” he remarked.
Hyacinth looked over at the stage in surprise. “Are we expecting cows as well?”
He handed the small leaflet back to her and sighed. “I’m preparing myself for the worst.”
Hyacinth smiled. He really was funny. And intelligent. And very, very handsome, although that had certainly never been in doubt.
He was, she realized, everything she’d always told herself she was looking for in a husband.
Good God.
“Are you all right?” he asked, sitting up quite suddenly.
“Fine,” she croaked. “Why?”
“You looked…” He cleared his throat. “Well, you looked…ah…I’m sorry. I can’t say it to a woman.”
“Even one you’re not trying to impress?” Hyacinth quipped. But her voice sounded a little bit strained.
He stared at her for a moment, then said, “Very well. You looked rather like you were going to be sick.”
“I’m never sick,” she said, looking resolutely forward. Gareth St. Clair was not everything she’d ever wanted in a husband. He couldn’t be. “And I don’t swoon, either,” she added. “Ever.”
“Now you look angry,” he murmured.
“I’m not,” she said, and she was rather pleased with how positively sunny she sounded.
He had a terrible reputation, she reminded herself. Did she really wish to align herself with a man who’d had relations with so many women? And unlike most unmarried women, Hyacinth actually knew what “relations” entailed. Not firsthand, of course, but she’d managed to wrench the most basic of details from her older married sisters. And while Daphne, Eloise, and Francesca assured her it was all very enjoyable with the right sort of husband, it stood to reason that the right sort of husband was one who remained faithful to one’s wife. Mr. St. Clair, in contrast, had had relations with scores of women.
Surely such behavior couldn’t be healthy.
And even if “scores” was a bit of an exaggeration, and the true number was much more modest, how could she compete? She knew for a fact that his last mistress had been none other than Maria Bartolomeo, the Italian soprano as famed for her beauty as she was for her voice. Not even her own mother could claim that Hyacinth was anywhere near as beautiful as that.
How horrible that must be, to enter into one’s wedding night, knowing that one would suffer by comparison.
“I think it’s beginning.” She heard Mr. St. Clair sigh.
Footmen were crisscrossing the room, snuffing candles to dim the light. Hyacinth turned, catching sight of Mr. St. Clair’s profile. A candelabrum had been left alive over his shoulder, and in the flickering light his hair appeared almost streaked with gold. He was wearing his queue, she thought idly, the only man in the room to do so.
She liked that. She didn’t know why, but she liked it.
“How bad would it be,” she heard him whisper, “if I ran for the door?”
“Right now?” Hyacinth whispered back, trying to ignore the tingling feeling she got when he leaned in close. “Very bad.”
He sat back with a sad sigh, then focused on the stage, giving every appearance of the polite, and only very slightly bored, gentleman.
But it was only one minute later when Hyacinth heard it. Soft, and for her ears only:
“Baaa.
“Baaaaaaaaa.”
Ninety mind-numbing minutes later, and sadly, our hero was right about the cows.