Gentleman Jim (Somerset Stories, #2)

by Mimi Matthews

Mattingly had the good grace to look sheepish. He mouthed another apology. St. Clare didn’t regard it. The truth of the matter was that Astrid Mattingly was the least offensive female in the box. The dowager’s granddaughters were a pair of giggling henwits, and the other young lady, a Miss Louisa Steele, had all the charm of a viper that had once crawled into his tent while camping in the Egyptian desert.

St. Clare was silent for a moment. When he finally responded, his words were quiet ones, inaudible to his friend and quickly lost in the noise of the crowded theater. “Miss Honeywell is the pattern card.”

A small woman with snowy white hair and a wrinkled face that put one in mind of a bleached walnut, she shuffled into the room with the aid of her ebony cane. “There you are, my dears,” she said in a warbling voice.

“You have hurt me every day for the last ten years. You have broken my heart.”

Ladies hadn’t much to protect them in this world. Little else but the rules of polite behavior. It was those very rules that made gentlemen treat them respectfully—almost deferentially. Maggie had never valued such deference. Not when it was offered purely on account of her sex. But now…the absence of it left her feeling peculiarly vulnerable.

“Enough of your forked-tongue pleasantries, Lavinia,” Allendale said. “There’s nothing I despise more than a serpent who walks upright.”

“We were soul mates,” Maggie had said. “As essential to each other as light or air. From my earliest memory, I existed only for those moments when I could see him next, and he did the same. Neither of us was complete outside the presence of the other.”