Chapter Eight
"I say, Robert, what happened to that rather splendid stallion you used to ride? What did you call him – Thunder?"
The Baron Northmere had no idea how sorely his question ruffled Robert's pride. "Thunder has not been perfectly healthy of late," he said, kicking the brown thoroughbred he was riding into a trot. "The stablemaster advised me to give him a rest."
"I wouldn't have thought a horse like that would be prone to illness," said Northmere. "Let me send my man round to take a look at him."
"I'm quite happy with my own stablemaster, Northmere." Robert did not wish to be harsh with his friend, but he could not bear the shame of revealing that his horse had been stolen by a chit of a girl. The gentlemen had given him enough grief over his "heroic" rescue of Lady Cecily as it was.
The day she rode off, Robert had followed the horse's tracks as far as the river which separated his lands from her father's. At first, he had been unable to believe what the tracks told him. Surely there was no possible chance that a young woman riding side-saddle would be able to make that jump?
But the evidence was before his eyes. Once Robert had ascertained Cecily was safely back on Balfour land, he had no choice but to return home and ruminate on her insolence. Her sharp tongue. Her wilfulness. Her beauty.
In point of fact, Robert had done rather too much ruminating on Lady Cecily than was proper. It was the horse, he told himself. He could not abide the theft of his horse. Once it was returned to him, which, in time, it surely would be, he could forget all about Cecily and her blue eyes and her fierce temper.
"Ought we to turn back, Scarcliffe?" asked Beaumont, catching him up. Beaumont sat his horse with an elegant grace that Robert would have envied, if he was the sort to envy any man. It simply wasn't right that a man should be handsome, even-tempered, a fine sportsman, and a Duke. There were few men in the world as blessed as Beaumont. "You must have an awful lot of preparations to make for this masquerade business."
Robert groaned, not bothering to disguise it. "I must apologise again, Beaumont. My father's stubbornness…"
"Oh, don't think of it!" laughed Beaumont, though Robert knew he was inwardly displeased. "Anything to satisfy the old man."
Balls were a source of endless torment for the Duke of Beaumont. Although no man made his enjoyment of a bachelor's lifestyle clearer, the thought of a dance with the Duke was enough to send most girls clean off their heads. Beaumont would endure a swarm of swooning women that evening. It did not matter how often he expressed his distaste for fortune-hunting young Misses. The thought of an unloving husband was not nearly enough to deter them from the dream of becoming a Duchess.
"It's all for a good cause, after all," Hart chimed in. Jonathan was probably the best horseman of the four of them, though you wouldn't know it to look at him. He lounged atop his horse as though he were relaxing on a chaise longue with a whisky in hand.
"How's that?" asked Robert.
"Why, to make our family the most well-thought-of in the region, naturally. Even you can't argue with that, Robert. Those blasted Balfours have monopolised local society for too long."
"I thought we did not come here to enjoy society," said Robert curtly. "We came to escape it."
"It's only one ball, Scarcliffe," said Beaumont soothingly. "If I can bear it, so shall you."
It was not the ball itself that irritated Robert so, but its motive. His father's obsession with outdoing the Balfours ought to have burned itself out years ago, but the constant irritation of having them as neighbours had kept the flame burning brightly. Now, Robert found it interfering with his own pastimes.
Would it one day be his role to keep up the bitter rivalry with the Duke of Loxwell? Who would even be Duke, by that time? Some cousin of Cecily's who Robert had never even met! Why on earth should he hate a man whose name he did not know?
Why on earth should he hate any kin of Cecily's at all?
Robert gritted his teeth and did his best to fool himself that it was only natural to think of Cecily under the present circumstances. It meant nothing. Better still, his thoughts of her would soon be driven away by any number of beautiful, suitable women who would be attending his masked ball.
"You are quite right, Hart," he said to Jonathan. "It's a fine idea of father's to give the Balfours a taste of their own medicine."
"Back to the house, then," said Hart, wheeling his mount around in a lazy circle. "We must be sweet-smelling and properly attired to greet the ladies."
"I would rather meet them smelling like a horse," commented Beaumont.
"In your case, even that would not put them off," laughed Northmere. "If only we all had your problems!"
As they rode back to the house, each man occasionally kicking his horse into a gallop to demonstrate his might to the others, Robert listened with half an ear to their teasing chatter. Northmere, despite his protestations that he was not a ladies man, had recently been caught in a compromising position with a young lady that the others would not soon let him forget. Beaumont's good looks and fortune were repeatedly punctured with ribald comments, and Hart, for his part, was thoroughly mocked for his notorious secrecy when it came to the fairer sex.
Robert fell behind the others, uninterested in their racing and their ribaldry, and let himself think over, for one last time, the fact that the one woman he most wished to see at the ball was the one who had not been invited.