Chapter Nineteen
James hated tea. He liked strong, bitter things—coffee in the morning, beer, if he indulged at all. He didn’t like things overly sweet, either. He and his mother had rarely had sugar when he’d been a child—now, for him, a little went a long way.
But when Lady Sarah offered, he decided to partake. He felt like a distaste for something as expensive and coveted as sugar might show his origins.
So he drank the saccharine tea and tried not to grimace.
He liked the wall hangings in the drawing room—expensive striped silk in pale green. He glanced at the Wedgewood cup, white and red and covered in bucolic scenes, and wondered how much it cost. It looked fragile in his hand. He felt clumsy.
Oddly, he hadn’t felt clumsy at the Townsend residence. But then, they hadn’t been staring at him quite as intently as Lady Sarah’s mother was, as though they were just waiting for him to slip.
“How do you know the Townsends?” the woman asked, like she could read his mind.
For a second, he wondered what the reaction would be if he told the truth—Eleanor Townsend occasionally dresses as a man and I coerced her into introducing me to your daughter, lest I reveal her secret. It made him sound like the villain of this tale. He didn’t think of himself as a villain, and he wasn’t certain he liked it.
“I met Robert Townsend at a bookshop,” he said, with a straight face. “We found we both have a mutual fondness for Walter Scott.”
Lady Sarah’s mother lifted her eyebrows. “Indeed.”
The truth was, the only thing James could read without being bored senseless was prizefighting accounts. He’d tried out Walter Scott because he thought it might be useful to his goals. And when he’d heard Walter Scott wrote poetry, he assumed they would be short poems. They were not.
The man used far too many words—The Lady of the Lake had taken him hours to finish. He now harbored a burning hatred of the man, which probably wasn’t fair, but really, poems weren’t supposed to take up more than a page or two in a book.
“Indeed?” Lady Sarah asked, but when she said it, it sounded like indeed, not like a challenge. “I adore The Lady of the Lake.”
“Yes, that’s one of my favorites, as well.” He smiled over his teacup, hopefully winningly.
“Tell me about your boxing saloon,” Lady Sarah’s mother said, with a smile that was just as winning. It seemed an impolite question, based on Eleanor’s lessons about avoiding anything regarding money, or money making, but Lady Sarah’s mother said it with such charm that the faux pas was barely noticeable.
He had to hand it to her, she was good. “There’s not much to tell, I’m afraid. I’ll be adding trainers soon. I shall be the owner in name only.”
The words tasted bitter in his mouth. Boxing had been his life for so long. But he’d known this would happen if he courted Lady Sarah. It had always just been one more step on the ladder, it had never been his end goal. It shouldn’t taste bitter to give up something he hadn’t wanted to begin with.
“Such a brutish sport,” the woman said with a delicate shudder. “I don’t know how you can involve yourself with it at all.”
Lady Sarah cast her mother a pleading look.
“I disagree,” he said politely. “It is a sport of gentlemen. Even the prince partakes. I’ve done all I can to move away from prizefighting, which I agree is quite brutish and unnecessary, to the elegance of gentlemanly practice, the art of the form in its purest sense.”
Good God, he was nearly putting himself to sleep. Gentlemanly practice? Who was he trying to fool? He’d been a prizefighter. And it hadn’t mattered that it was brutish—he hadn’t been satisfied until he’d tasted blood.
And the gentry and aristocrats, who looked down on prizefighters from their coveted circles, certainly had no problem with watching and placing bets.
But Lady Sarah smiled at him, and even her mother looked impressed with his answer. The older woman shot her daughter a look then that said maybe he wasn’t completely hopeless.
His heart surged. For the first time, it truly felt like victory was in his grasp.
…
The next week progressed surely and steadily, a slow march to the end of his goals. The beginning of a new life. As the weather grew colder and snow threatened more often, he called on Lady Sarah several more times, once taking her in a curricle ride around town, and was invited personally to a ball her family was hosting.
His first thought was a question—would Eleanor be there? But he didn’t ask.
He hadn’t seen her since the night he’d told her about his father, but he found himself wondering about her. Mostly, he just wondered what she was doing. Had she come across anything interesting in her readings? Had she submitted anything new under Cecil’s name? Had she been sketching? Had she sketched him?
He was a bit obsessed with the idea of her sketching him. He wanted to know how she saw him. Had she been telling the truth when she mentioned his strange proportions or had that been a lie?
Did she like his body?
That last thought earned him a quick jab to the jaw during practice, which was just the thing to shake him awake. His mind was quickly becoming his enemy. Any time it lulled, any time it wasn’t focused, it inevitably drifted back to Eleanor.
He shouldn’t care if Eleanor liked his body. Other women liked it. And he thought Lady Sarah liked it well enough—not that he would know—he’d been the perfect gentleman with her, and anyway, her mother was always in the room, which was quite a deterrent to scandalous behavior. He didn’t like to admit that even if her mother had been gone, he might not have been able to work up much enthusiasm about kissing her.
Which meant something was wrong with him, not her. She was beautiful and charming. There was nothing not to like. It was probably only because she was so perfect…she seemed untouchable to someone who’d grown up in the gutter. Once they were married, and they knew each other better, he was sure he would be positively thrilled about bedding her.
Maybe. Well, that didn’t matter much anyway, in light of other things.
He threw himself into the sparring match, but a softer, pleasanter image kept flickering in his mind, of Eleanor sitting by an open window in the Townsend drawing room, sketching by the diffused winter sunlight, lips pursed as she concentrated, hair ruthlessly pulled back. Until someone softened her lips with theirs…or unpinned her hair with careful fingers.
He let himself take a hit that time, literally wanting someone to knock some sense into him.
By the time his students had left, and he’d washed and changed into clean clothes, he was feeling more relaxed, the way he always did after a good sparring session.
James straightened his shoulders as he glanced in the mirror to tie his cravat. His fingers paused on the fabric, gaze taking in the bold color of the waistcoat he’d chosen. He realized, all at once, that he’d never shown it to Eleanor.
He also realized, all at once, that he missed talking to her, even though it had only been a few days. She was the only person he’d ever opened up to about his past, about his father. They had a bond he couldn’t deny.
Why hadn’t he gone to see her? What did he think he was doing? Courting Lady Sarah didn’t mean he couldn’t still speak to Eleanor. They were friends, weren’t they? They could conduct a perfectly pleasant, platonic relationship. That they’d kissed once was completely irrelevant.
He nodded to himself and smirked slightly as he wondered if Eleanor would say anything about the waistcoat.