Marquesses at the Masquerade(3)

“Your ideas of a wonderful evening are truly pathetic,” Uncle Piggott said in a peppery voice, but Rosamund thought, for the briefest moment, that she saw a hint of moisture in his sharp old eyes.

*



“It’s the very thing for you, Marcus. I knew the instant I laid eyes on it. Him.”

“Er, you did?” Marcus Hallaway, the Marquess of Boxhaven, said to his mother, Lady Boxhaven, trying to keep any note of dismay out of his voice. But she had just presented him with a small spaniel. A lapdog! She’d brought the dog, concealed in a basket, into the sitting room in Boxhaven House, his London home, when she’d come for tea that afternoon. She’d lifted the top of the basket with the flourish of one offering a wonderful treat.

The dog, released from his confinement, now placed his two front paws on the top edge of the basket and yipped excitedly. With his chestnut and white coloring and enormous brown eyes, he would have looked at home in the arms of a well-dressed lady.

The dog also looked barely past the puppy stage, and Marcus had visions of him tearing through the corridors of his house with servants trailing after him. He wondered dismally whether the creature was housebroken, though he supposed his mother would not give him a gift that would create disgusting messes in Boxhaven House.

Still, he had plenty of dogs at his country houses, not that he was closely acquainted with any of them. Why had she brought him a lapdog, and with all this ceremony?

His mother gave him a shrewd look. Lady Boxhaven was the mother of four grown children, and she was no stranger to parsing the nuances of her offspring’s demeanors. “I know you have dogs at Weldwood and the other estates. But you aren’t often in the country these days, and I hate to think of you... without a companion.”

“A companion,” he repeated. Was the dog meant to be a new salvo in his mother’s longtime campaign to get him to find a wife? If so, he couldn’t comprehend her reasoning, because theoretically, if he now had a “companion,” then might not further companionship become a less pressing issue? As this line of thought in regard to a dog standing in for a wife quickly turned ridiculous, he abandoned it and mentally threw up his hands as to his mother’s motivation. His mother was not averse to eccentricity, but she was infinitely dear to him, and if she wanted him to have this small dog, he would accept her gift graciously, even if it meant the possibility of tooth marks in his best boots.

“Exactly,” she said with a grand smile.

He nodded slowly. “Well, thank you very much, Mother. Extremely thoughtful of you.”

She beamed, and the dog took this opportunity to launch himself out of the basket. Marcus braced himself to save any number of breakable and bite-able objects the animal might make for, but it was not to the divan legs or the rug tassels that the dog made his way.

“Oh!” cried his mother gleefully, “he likes you! I knew the two of you would suit.”

The dog, ignoring even the plate of biscuits perched on a low table a few feet from his basket, had raced over to Marcus and was now at his feet, wagging his tail excitedly.

“See, he’s already realized you’re to be his master.”

“A veritable example of the forces of fate in action,” Marcus muttered.

“Isn’t it?” she crowed.

The drawing room door opened at that moment to admit Marcus’s younger brother, Jack, and their sister Alice.

“Oh!” squealed Alice, who at sixteen frequently found occasion to squeal. She rushed over and dropped to her knees before what Marcus was privately already calling The Creature. “He’s darling! Or is it a she? Is this your dog, Marcus? It must be, why else would it be here? But why did you get a dog?”

“A wonder she ever manages to draw a breath, isn’t it?” Jack observed, apparently not equally overcome at the sight of the dog. But then, Jack was a gentleman of twenty-seven, with interests that inclined toward horseracing and the sort of discreet carousing favored by young men who were beloved by their families and friends as good fellows but nonetheless not immune to the pleasures of, well, carousing.

“It’s a wonder you’re even upright this morning,” Alice said, directing a withering look over her shoulder at Jack as she proceeded after the dog on her hands and knees, “considering—”

“Thank you, Alice,” their mother said firmly. “I don’t think any of us need to entertain such considerations.”

Jack shot Marcus a look that spoke volumes. He had been looking for his own town house to buy and was staying with their mother and sisters in the meantime.

“Is this your dog?” Jack asked as the dog returned to his apparently preferred spot at Marcus’s feet.

“Yes,” Marcus said, restraining a sigh. “Mother has just this morning presented him to me.”

Their mother, standing behind Jack, could not see the way her younger son’s eyes danced at these words. Marcus treated him to the sort of glare that an older brother who was a marquess learned to cultivate at an early age by practicing on his siblings. Jack only grinned.

“The little fellow certainly seems to like you,” Jack said.

“It is rather unfair,” Alice said, sitting back on her heels. “Here I am, prepared to dote on the little thing, and he only has eyes for Marcus, who’s not even paying attention to him.”

“Dogs, much like young ladies, can easily become spoiled by too much attention,” Marcus observed meaningfully.