A Regency Match by Elizabeth Mansfield Read Free Book Online

make herself and me the center of attention in a bookstore crowded with people. It took her barely five minutes to embarrass me about my manners and my coat—”
    â€œYour coat?”
    â€œMy coat. And not two minutes later, the girl somehow contrived to overturn a table covered with books. When I last saw her, she was surrounded by a pile of debris and a cloud of rising dust, but managing to hold her head up high.” He laughed at the recollection. “She was not unlike our Mrs. Siddons in that last act, declaring to Coriolanus that ‘Thy valiantness was mine!’”
    Dennis chuckled and shook his head. “Sounds like a Banbury tale to me. Are you bamming me, Marcus?”
    â€œI shall allow you to decide that for yourself. In the meantime, we’d best start back. The crowd has thinned. Intermission must be coming to an end.”
    They turned and strolled back down the corridor, leaving behind a Sophia trembling with fury. How dared that beast malign her so! How dared he take a series of unfortunate mishaps and twist them into an indictment of her character! Was it her fault that the table in the bookstore had fallen over? The manager himself had admitted that the table had a weakness in its structure. And was it her fault that Dilly had made that unfortunate remark about Lord Wynwood’s coat? The remark, embarrassing as it had been, had been made in admiration, after all …
    Approaching footsteps checked her angry brooding. People were returning to their boxes. She slipped from her hiding place and hurried back to Sir Walter’s box.
    â€œThere you are, girl,” her grandmother declared. “Where have you been this age? What did Lady March want?”
    Sophy blinked. “Lady March?” she asked stupidly.
    â€œYes, Lady March, Lady March! Isn’t that where you went?”
    Sophy had completely forgotten her errand. How was she to explain to her irritable grandmother that she’d spent the entire intermission hiding behind a door? Before she could frame a reply, the curtains rose on the fourth act.
    â€œNever mind,” Lady Alicia muttered. “Lady March’s remarks are never of any consequence.” And she turned her attention to the play.
    But Sophy was no longer interested in the tribulations of Coriolanus and his prideful mother. Even Mrs. Siddons’s magnificent bearing and reverberating voice failed to distract Sophy from her brooding over what she’d overheard. He’d called her a shatterbrained hysteric! A ninny! A silly chit! She positively trembled with vexation. Never had she felt so painfully humiliated.
    She turned her eyes to Lord Wynwood’s box. He was watching the play, but his friend’s head was turned in her direction. The great distance between them made his face seem a white blur, but Sophia was convinced that he was grinning at her. She turned her back on him. The detestable Lord Wynwood had evidently succeeded in turning an admirer into a scoffer. She was nothing now but an object of ridicule. But why should she care? Both Lord Wynwood and his friend Dennis Whoever-he-was meant less than nothing to her!
    Sophia was grimly silent on the way home, making it plain to the family that the evening they had planned with such optimism, and which had started with such promise, had failed in the end to give the girl a bit of cheer. Isabel remarked to Sir Walter, after they’d said their good-nights to Lady Alicia and the stormy-eyed Sophia, that she’d been afraid from the first that Coriolanus had been a poor choice of play. “All that ranting over honor and death—it’s enough to give one the megrims,” she complained.
    â€œDon’t refine on it too much, Mama,” Bertie advised callously as he went off down the hall to his bedroom. “Sophy’ll get over it. I’ve never known her to poker up for very long.”
    Lady Alicia, undressing for bed, was having thoughts of a