The Famous Heroine/The Plumed Bonnet Read Online Free PDF Page A

shrieked—in surely the most embarrassing place possible in which to stumble and shriek.
    Not that she ever
chose
to be clumsy.
    She collided with a brick wall, which fortunately saved her from sprawling out flat on the floor and disgracing herself beyond measure. She righted herself, realized that the brick wall had been a gentleman’s chest—the
turquoise
gentleman’s chest—and disgraced herself after all.
    She giggled.
    It was not even honest-to-goodness laughter. It was unmistakably a giggle, occasioned by acute embarrassment. She wondered hopefully if she was exaggerating even ever-so slightly in believing that everyone was watching her. She did not think so.
    “Oops!” she heard someone exclaim in her voice—how
many
times had Miss Graham told her that she must learn to wipe that word from her vocabulary? “I wonder if it is permitted to go back outside onto the staircase and try it all over again.”
    And the same person who spoke giggled—again—at the sadly unwitty joke. And sounded for all the world like a silly twelve-year-old.
    It was only then she realized that his grace was speaking—quietly and courteously and quite as if she had not just held up him and his mother and his sisters to public ridicule. He was, she realized, the perfectly well-bred gentleman. He terrified her and had done so ever since Elizabeth and Jane had first started talking about him in Bath with mutual adoration. He was so perfectly handsome and elegant and gentlemanly and—ducal. If he had had DUKE written in black ink across his forehead, he could not be more obviously who he was.
    She also realized—too late—that he had presented his companion to her and that she had missed his name. She could only smile with facial muscles that suddenly felt unaccountably stiff as he called her Miss Downes and took her hand in his and bowed over it.
    He was taller than she was, she thought irrelevantly—somany gentleman were not. He also did
not
—as so many gentlemen did—have a spot of thinning hair on the crown of his head. His brown hair was of a uniform thickness and was expertly cut so that even when it was windblown it would look just so, she guessed. She also guessed that he spent several hours of each week with his barber—and with a manicurist. She glanced at his perfect hands. It was rather sad that he was so far to the left of true masculinity.
Was
it sad? Perhaps it was not to him. Perhaps he enjoyed looking like a peacock.
    She suffered from another affliction in addition to clumsiness—though she had not really suffered from that since girlhood. She suffered from the inability to be always present when it was essential that she be present. She had gone off now into her own distant world, thinking of trivialities like bald spots and peacocks, and as a consequence a few important details of the present moment had passed her by. Like the man’s name. And the identity of the person whom her grace was describing as a great heroine to whom they would all be indebted for the rest of their lives.
    “Yes, indeed,” his grace said with a grave and elegant inclination of his head in Cora’s direction.
    “Oh, dear,” she said, realizing they were talking about her. “All I did was leap into the river without pausing for thought. It was really quite unheroic. And I ruined a brand-new bonnet.”
    The anonymous gentleman—who would
not
be anonymous if she had only remained present long enough to hear what his grace had named him—pursed his lips and fingered his quizzing glass. It was studded with jewels that looked suspiciously like sapphires, Cora noticed when she glanced down at it. She would wager they were real gems and not merely paste. She wondered if he had a glass to match each of his outfits—and giggled yet again.
    “A bona fide heroine indeed,” the gentleman said in a voice that sounded as languid and bored as his face had appeared when she first looked into it. “One perhaps might find another lady willing