Lady in Green by Bárbara Metzger Read Free Book Online

picture. That way you can use your imaginations, if you have any, even if you haven’t much skill. You have one hour. On your mark…”
    Soon there were naked ladies with roses in their teeth, naked ladies draped creatively across gilt chairs. Ballerinas had remarkable flexibility, surprising even the connoisseur earl. One dancer was wearing the gauntlets from a suit of armor and nothing else; one was en pointe on a plaster pedestal. There were more chuckles than concentration on the other side of the makeshift easels.
    “Drawing class was never like this,” Lord Inwood laughed as the earl made his way around the room, straightening a line, adjusting a pose. He offered a suggestion here, a bit of gauze there, a kiss or a pat of encouragement to all the models. Ah, the joy of Art.
    “Cholly, you’ve given her three arms! Nice pose, Lockhart, but you’re not supposed to be in the picture with Chou-Chou; get back to your drawing. Hello, Mother. No, Nigel, you’re supposed to draw on the paper, not on the model.” Hello, Mother?
    More lightskirts went home in Holland covers that night than in the entire history of British shipping. Someone had the presence of mind to extinguish most of the candles. They were just a tad too late, however, to prevent some of London’s choicest spirits from witnessing the Dowager Countess Gardiner, five feet from the tips of her embroidered slippers to the curl papers in her silvered hair, attack her six-foot-plus son with a fireplace poker.
    *
    By way of remorse, Gard sat through three lectures about not fouling one’s own nest and two secondhand visitations from his father’s uneasy spirit. In the end, just to win a modicum of peace for his aching head, he even agreed to accompany Lady Stephania to a few tonnish parties and to consider—consider, mind!—looking around for a suitable countess.
    The balls were as awful as he recalled, too hot, too crowded, too many rules. The refreshments were more fashionable than filling, the table stakes were low, the dance floor stakes were high. He no sooner asked a young lady for a dance than her name was linked to his in the morning’s papers. Her mother was calling him “dear” and her father was telling him when he could call. And the debutantes were as insipid as the lemonade they drank, while their older sisters, the established Beauties, were as cold as the ices from Gunther’s every hostess served. Raspberry, lemon, the only difference was in the color of their dresses. As for the dresses themselves, those low necklines and dampened skirts did nothing to reconcile Lord Gardiner to leg shackles. A fellow didn’t choose his wife from a row of Covent Garden whores, and the whores at least provided what they promised. The price for these highborn high flyers was too costly.
    Those same clinging gowns and plunging bodices did arouse a bit more than Lord Gardiner’s ire, however, so he picked up a few of the hankies dropped at his feet by dashing widows and daring wives. He gathered his rosebuds where he may.
    A sennight or so later, he hobbled into White’s.

Chapter Six
    Deuce take it, man,” his friend Cholly asked, “what happened? Did Lady Stephania light into you again? I thought you were reformed.”
    Gard carefully lowered himself into one of the leather chairs and signaled for a waiter. One ankle was strapped, one eye was blackened, and, most unfortunate of all in his lordship’s opinion, he had a fiercesome rash where he sat. He did not bother answering Cholly’s remark about the dowager: less said, soonest mended. Not soon enough for his battered skull.
    Cholly was observing him through a quizzing glass. “Can’t believe you turned your curricle over, nonpareil whip like you. Does the Four-Horse Club know?”
    “Cut line, Cholly. You look like one of those blasted dandies. Put that silly thing away and I’ll tell you what happened.” Ross leaned his head back against the cushions and sniffed at the aged cognac the