Cressida by Clare Darcy Read Free Book Online

run across him there.”
    Lord Langmere, appearing somewhat daunted, said, “Oh, ” again, for want of being able to think of anything better to say, which moved Lady Constance to leap into the breach and inform him kindly that it had all been ages ago, before Cressida had ever come up to London, and had lasted only for a week.
    “All the same,” Lord Langmere, who had by this time somewhat recovered himself, said firmly, “it appears to me that he should certainly not have spoken of it to Cressy. A bit of a coxcomb, I gather? Well, I daresay one should have expected it—all these really very odd stories going round about his adventures abroad—”
    “He is not a coxcomb,” Cressida said indignantly. “I may have been excessively green when I lived in Cheltenham and became engaged to him, but I have never been so idiotish as to form an attachment for a coxcomb!
    He is only insufferably rude, and quite selfish, and I can’t see why all this fuss is being made over him! And,” she added dangerously, “if anyone else tells me about his sailing across the Channel in an open boat in impossible weather, they will soon discover how insufferably rude I  can be!”
    Lord Langmere looked slightly apprehensive, and not without reason, for the first words Cressida heard from Lady Dalingridge’s lips, when she trod up the crowded staircase of Dalingridge House a few minutes later to be greeted by her host and hostess, were, “Oh, Cressy, my dear, have you heard? I have Rossiter coming tonight! Yes, actually! He is the man, you know, who crossed the Channel in an open boat—”

CHAPTER 4
    It was impossible, of course, for a young lady of fashion, standing under the blaze of a crystal chandelier at the head of a grand, red-carpeted staircase thronged with dozens of the most illustrious members of London Society, all chattering briskly in an aura of silk gowns, superbly cut evening coats, expensive perfumes, and impressive orders as they awaited their turn to be announced to their host and hostess, to be insufferably rude to anyone; and if she had been, no one would have noticed.
    Lady Dalingridge certainly would not have done, being extremely shortsighted and having momentarily let her face-a-main fall as she imprudently took both of Cressida’s hands in hers. Nor would Lord Dalingridge, who disliked balls and had cultivated, over the quarter-century during which his marriage to an extremely gregarious wife had obliged him to endure them, a habit of not listening to anyone and confining his own conversation to an occasional interrogative grunt or hasty, “Yes, indeed!” while he mentally replayed the more interesting hands of the whist game he had enjoyed that day at Brooks’s.
    Cressida, who was quite aware of all this, seethed, therefore, in secret, but in public performed her duty of making Kitty known to Lord and Lady Dalingridge, and it was not until she had seen her young protégée safely partnered with Lord Langmere, and joining the set just then forming in the ballroom for a country dance, that the opportunity was presented to her to express her opinion upon the attention that was being lavished on Rossiter by the more sensation-hungry members of the  haut ton.
    And even then she did not do it properly, because the opportunity came in the person of the Honourable Drew Addison, who enjoyed the reputation of possessing —always excepting Mr. Brummell, of course-—the sharpest tongue and the most blighting eyebrow in London. He had never, however, quite been able to challenge Brummell’s position of premier dandy, the general opinion being that, while his tailors, inspired by his acerbic demands, provided him with coats of the most exquisite fit, and while his neckcloths expressed the purest of tastes combined with an almost fiendish skill in arrangement, there was a certain rigidity in the man himself that prevented him from attaining the negligent ease of manner