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The lines on Lady Marpool’s face seemed to deepen with her grimace of distaste.
    “Dreadful, ma’am?” Lucy asked. Her own temerity in questioning her hostess startled her, but she could hardly imagine anyone less dreadful than Lord Selsley of the blue eyes and beautiful horses.
    “I think far too much tolerance has been shown to the old Jacobite families.” Lady Marpool waved her fork in the air, and Lucy braced herself for a tirade. “To my mind, any family who supported the Pretender ought to have been stripped of their lands and transported, if not worse. Barbarians! We’ve too many Scots in the government and the military. I don’t think they’re to be trusted.”
    In her eagerness to look anywhere but at Lady Marpool, Lucy met Portia’s eyes. For once united, they exchanged tight, surprised looks. Bonnie Prince Charlie’s rising had been over sixty years ago. Even if Lord Selsley had a rebel for a grandfather, what did that matter? No one worried about Jacobites now, when they had Bonaparte as a far more present and dangerous threat.
    Naturally, Lady Marpool noticed. “You young ladies think nothing that happened before you were born is of any importance. I remember the rising. I was only a child, but I remember.”
    “Now, now, Augusta,” Lord Almont said. “Whatever his father was, the current earl is as loyal to the Crown as I am myself. Since they’re visiting Selsley along with their niece, I hope you won’t call them barbarians in our own drawing room tonight.”
    Lucy blinked. Apparently Lord Almont had a spine after all.
    Lady Marpool shook her head. “Nabob Selsley could have married a local girl, but those ramshackle Gordons saw him, decided his fortune was just the thing to shore up theirs and threw their spinster daughter at him. So now we must endure the children of that union—indecently rich and too wild by half.”
    Having seen Lord Selsley’s home and his horses, Lucy agreed that they were indecently rich. But she would make her own judgment about their characters. There had been nothing improper in either’s conduct this morning, and she considered them her friends.

Chapter Three
     
    Anna did not precisely don her finery for the dinner at Almont Castle. It was only dinner, after all, and she did not want James to accuse her of setting her cap for Lieutenant Arrington based on nothing more than a sketch. But she did have Sally dress her in a green-sprigged white muslin dress that she thought especially flattered her coloring and figure.
    Because, little as she cared to admit it, James was right. She should marry soon. It wasn’t that she feared being an old maid. Her father had left her a hundred thousand pounds, so she would still have suitors if she were turning forty next month rather than twenty. But she thought she would perish with boredom if she were forced to endure another Season like the last two. It wasn’t that she disliked parties or pretty dresses or being courted. But the social whirl had developed a depressing, distressing sameness. A sameness and a shallowness, as though she and all those around her lived only on the surface of life.
    She wondered if that was why James had avoided society throughout the Season. But no, there had to be more to it than that. As a rising star among the Whig lords, James moved in less frivolous circles. No, it must be something to do with Eleanor Talbot.
    James thought Anna ignorant of such matters, and she supposed she ought to be, but her cousins insisted upon treating her more like a brother than a sister. It had begun when she had first gone to live at Dunmalcolm after her father died. She had turned tomboy because playing with boys was infinitely preferable to sitting alone in the schoolroom while they swam and fished and rode without her. Old habits died hard, and Jack and Donald, the cousins nearest her age, had told her of James’s affairs and their own without any care for her purportedly innocent, ladylike ears.
    In any