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himself an intimate supper with a woman he couldn’t have and didn’t want. ‘How finely you two do dance together. It quite put us off our own feeble attempts, did it not, Mr Cromer?’
    ‘Yes, quite,’ poor Cromer replied as if his throat was parched after all the monosyllabic replies he’d made this evening to his voluble companion. ‘Get supper for the ladies, eh, Shuttleworth?’ he managed in a magnificent feat of oratory.
    ‘Quite,’ he replied, apeing his old school friend’s sparse conversational style and they resorted to the groaning supper table to procure enough refreshments to silence even Miss Transome for a few idyllic moments.
    Edmund decided both he and his taciturn friend had been rash to attend a party so obviously organised for the benefit of single ladies who’d survived too many Seasons unwed, before fresh débutantes arrived to outdo and outflank them. It was perhaps the last chance for such ladies to catch the eye of a potential husband before open season was declared on them. One glance at their hostess for the evening and her superannuated eldest daughter should have any sane bachelor saying a hasty farewell and dashing off to his club in order to survive and fight another day. He, of course, had a reason to attend any party where he might meet his elusive future viscountess, but what on earth had led Cromer to risk it?
    ‘She’s m’aunt,’ Cromer explained obscurely and Edmund must have looked almost as puzzled as he felt, because his friend added a brief explanation. ‘Lady Finchley, she’s m’aunt.’
    ‘That accounts for it then,’ he conceded.
    ‘Your excuse?’ Cromer asked morosely.
    ‘Idiocy,’ Edmund replied, borrowing some of his friend’s abruptness.
    ‘Must be,’ Cromer commiserated as they turned back with their booty. ‘Though the Alstone icicle’s a beauty,’ he conceded generously.
    ‘Aye, but is she worth enduring the frostbite for, I wonder?’ Edmund asked in a thoughtful undertone as he watched her nod regally to an acquaintance.
    ‘M’father wants me to wed. Always liked Amelia Transome, but the thing is that she will talk. Much better tempered than my cousin Finchley, though,’ Cromer risked waxing lyrical.
    Scanning the room and finally spotting Miss Finchley seated at a flimsy table with a widower of at least five and forty, who still looked hunted and not very willing, Edmund sympathised. Miss Transome was open and amiable, but the thought of being fluttered at over the breakfast table for the rest of his life must make the strongest man hesitate. Neither female bore the slightest resemblance to his dream wife, so he turned his attention back to Kate Alstone with a sneaking feeling of relief that he didn’t stand in Cromer’s shoes and could at least please himself whom he brought to supper, so long as she wasn’t the woman who pleased him all the way to the altar.
    ‘Oh, how perfectly lovely,’ Miss Transome gushed at the loaded plates.
    ‘Quite,’ Kate said with much less enthusiasm, and Edmund wondered if she’d been talked into a headache by Miss Transome’s busy tongue and dreaded carrying the burden of conversation with her on his own.

    Kate nibbled unenthusiastically at her supper, despite poor Lady Finchley having pushed out every boat she could launch in the hope of netting her daughter a husband at long last by hiring an excellent chef. To be fair, the headache she felt tightening her hairpins and nagging at her temples had nothing to do with Miss Transome’s prattle, so the blame for that must lie at Lord Shuttleworth’s door. Wretched man, she decided, as she surreptitiously surveyed him with a disillusioned gaze. Once upon a time he would have fallen at her daintily shod feet given the slightest hint of encouragement, but now that she’d finally steeled herself to accept a husband, he certainly wouldn’t be one of her suitors.
    She hoped she was too proud to wilfully mistake his indifference to her tonight for a