A Rogue Walks into a Ball Read online

  A Rogue Walks into a Ball

  The Hallaway Family Series, Book 2

  Emily Greenwood

  Copyright © 2018 by Emily Greenwood

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  A Note From Emily

  Preview of Once Upon a Ball Chapter One

  Also by Emily Greenwood

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  “The theater ought to challenge the mind and improve the moral sense, and this critic sees no benefit in sinking to the predictable levels we’ve come to expect from author John Smith-Jones.”

  Lord Jack Hallaway put down the newspaper from which he’d been reading aloud and lifted a questioning eyebrow at his younger sister Alice, who had just expressed a desire to see the play in question, She Knew She Was Right, which had opened that week.

  The Hallaway family was taking afternoon tea in the sitting room at the home of their mother, Lady Fiona Boxhaven, where Jack, a bachelor who had his own town house a few blocks away, came most days. The Hallaways had grown into the custom of gathering for tea in the sad days after the unexpected death of their father, Lord Boxhaven, six years before.

  Begun in solace, teatime had become over the years the one time everyone in the family was likely to gather, breakfast being far too early for some, and dinner being a time when the family members were often scattered. Even Jack’s older brother, Marcus, the Marquess of Boxhaven, who had married the year before, generally made time to be at tea, as he did that day while his wife, Rosamund, was visiting a friend.

  Alice grinned. “Well, now I definitely want to see She Knew She Was Right.”

  “You’d pay a visit to a rubbish bin if someone warned you off it,” her older sister, Kate, observed from behind the book she was reading on a settee that stood under one of the room’s tall windows.

  “It seems very hard for this poor play to be compared to a rubbish bin,” Jack said and popped a biscuit into his mouth. His mother’s cook was the cook of Jack’s childhood, and he maintained that no one’s biscuits were as good as hers.

  “Pass over those biscuits before you eat the whole plateful,” Marcus said.

  Jack passed the plate, but not before giving his brother a gleefully insolent look as he took another biscuit.

  “I’m hardly saying the play will be rubbish,” Kate said and put down her book to take a sip of tea. “I’ve adored everything John Smith-Jones has written. It’s just that as soon as Alice thinks something is sordid, she’ll want to investigate it for that reason alone.”

  “Oh, Kate, really,” their mother, Fiona, said mildly, lifting the top of the teapot to see how much was left before refilling her cup.

  Alice sighed as with deep satisfaction. “I am delighted to be thought sordid.”

  “Not you,” Kate clarified, “just your taste. You are completely un-sordid.”

  Alice sniffed as though offended, and Jack hid a smile. To the untrained ear, his sisters might have sounded as though they were bickering, but he knew their conversation was a form of affection, not that either of them would have agreed to term it that. The Hallaway family was given to a great deal of teasing, but it was never mean-spirited.

  “Moving on from all this talk of sordidness,” Fiona said firmly, “we really ought to discuss a few last-minute details for the ball, being that it is tomorrow. The days before an event do race by so quickly, one can hardly fit in everything that needs to be done.”

  Jack and Kate, the oldest unmarried Hallaway offspring, shared a look that they both understood as resignation. Fiona, who was adored by all her children, was convinced that all the Hallaway siblings were destined to find love at a ball because she herself had met their father the marquess at a ball, and she’d known a blissfully happy marriage with him until his untimely death in a carriage accident.

  To that end, the family hosted a large number of balls, in addition to attending multitudes of balls hosted by other families, which Fiona also urged and sometimes implored her children to attend. Jack and Kate had a running competition as to who had attended the most.

  Jack, at twenty-nine, had had more years in which to attend balls. But Kate, twenty-four and thus edging close to the figurative shelf that awaited all unmarried ladies, was a more urgent case, particularly because she had become engaged the Season before to a man her family had quite liked, and then she’d broken the engagement.

  Kate was too kind, when her mother urged her to attend yet another ball, to point out that she had, in fact, met her former fiancé at a ball, and he had not turned out to be her true love. Fiona believed it was best to look toward the future, and she continued to urge Kate not to miss any opportunity to meet eligible gentlemen.

  Alice, at seventeen, had been out for only a year and had yet to attend anywhere near too many balls, as far as she was concerned.

  “Oh yes, we certainly do need to discuss the ball,” Alice said. “I think we ought to reconsider the pink roses. I shall be wearing my new pink gown, and I don’t want to blend in with the flowers.” She cocked her head. “Though I suppose it would be lovely to be taken for a flower.”

  Jack popped a final biscuit into his mouth and stood up. “This is where I leave you, ladies.”

  “Trust Jack to leave whenever talk of balls comes up,” Kate said.

  “It’s really more the pink talk I object to,” he said over his shoulder as he made for the door, though this was not entirely true. But not for the world would he have offended his mother by suggesting he wasn’t looking forward to the ball she was planning.

  “I’ll walk out with you,” Marcus said, jumping up and making for the door as well with unseemly haste. He, like Jack, would be kept busy fulfilling dutiful dancing assignments at the ball.

  “You would think, having married, that I would now be spared a little of this ball-attending business,” Marcus said as they walked out to the street.

  “You might have been, if you weren’t a marquess. But married or not, you are still a draw, and as much as Mother hates an overcrowded event, she does want all the most eligible people to be there. Thus the attraction that is you.”

  “If you would hurry up and get married,” Marcus said, “I think she would ease up on hosting balls for a bit, out of triumph that she’d finally succeeded after all these years.”

  “If only Mother didn’t feel this finding-love-at-a-ball business so keenly.” They’d reached Jack’s club, and he paused by the steps. “Coming in?”

  Marcus shook his head. “I’m meeting Rosamund for a walk in the park.” The breeze blew his brown hair off his forehead, hair that was almost the same shade as Jack’s golden brown. The late afternoon sunlight picked up some crinkles around the marquess’s eyes that Jack hadn’t noticed before. They were the kind of lines made by laughing frequently, and Jack could only be glad that his happily married brother now had more reasons to laugh. “Jack, when you find the right woman—”

  Jack held up a hand, cutting hi
m off. “No advice, please, from excruciatingly happily married men.”

  Marcus smirked. “Excruciatingly happily?”

  “Give Rosamund my best,” Jack said, starting up the steps.

  As he reached for the handle of the door, Marcus called out, “I’m not fooled, you know,” and Jack’s hand froze on the knob. He turned and raised his eyebrows as casually as he could.

  “Oh?”

  “You care.”

  “I care?” he repeated, though he felt himself relaxing. “What is it I’m supposed to care about?”

  “Ah,” Marcus said with a grin, “that’s for you to find out.”

  Jack managed not to roll his eyes. He adored his family, but he also knew that however much they loved him and thought him a thoroughly good sort, he would also forever be in their minds the scamp who was sent down from Eton and Oxford, the rogue who loved to play and would never grow up. And his older brother was the worst of them in this regard.

  “Sometimes—in fact, most times—you are insufferable,” Jack said.

  Marcus’s laughter was still ringing in Jack’s ears as he entered the club.

  Later that night in his town house, Jack made for his bedchamber, where he lit the pair of candles that sat on the desk near the window, tugged his cravat loose, and sat down. He might have stayed longer at the club, but while he was talking with his friend Viscount Eastham, he’d had an idea, and he’d found it was best to pursue an idea as soon as possible, lest he lose it.

  He pulled out a piece of foolscap, dipped his pen, and the words began to flow in that deeply satisfying way they sometimes did.

  He’d begun the writing on a whim, after seeing a tremendously boring play with Eastham a few years before and joking that anyone could have done better. He’d still been thinking of the bad play at bedtime, and unable to sleep, he’d begun idly writing down ideas for something better. It had been only a short step to the business of putting words in characters’ mouths.

  Thus had he fallen into writing plays, just as he’d fallen into many of the things in his life. As the youngest son of a marquess and now the brother of a marquess, Jack hadn’t needed to follow a predetermined path, as Marcus had. Jack had always had the freedom to do pretty much as he liked. He knew that this was a great blessing, for which he was profoundly grateful. But the privileged life of a marquess’s younger brother had left him with no particular direction he must take, and he sometimes had the feeling that he didn’t know what the point was of his life.

  Once he’d started writing, though, he’d discovered that he liked having something pressing to do and deadlines by which he must deliver the plays to the director who’d eagerly agreed to produce them without inquiring much into the identity of the author.

  Writing, Jack had soon found, was not all fun. The process of creating a play that might entertain an audience was sometimes hideously difficult. But it had also become a challenge from which he would not shrink, and when he’d finished his first play, he’d known a sense of satisfaction few other things in life had given him.

  His family and friends knew nothing of his writing, although they’d seen all of his plays. He’d been tempted a few times to reveal his identity as the author, especially when he’d finished that first play and known that it was going to be mounted on the stage. But he’d decided that sacrificing the secrecy under which he wrote would cost him a number of things—not least of them, the freedom to write about whatever he liked without repercussions.

  And there was this: Gentlemen didn’t write the kind of plays he wrote.

  He’d tell his family someday. Maybe. But not for a while, particularly because he had, in a way, written She Knew She Was Right for Kate, and her knowing that would spoil his purpose.

  In the meantime, he remained attuned to ideas for new stories, and ever since he’d written The End after the final scene of She Knew She Was Right, he’d been thinking of ideas for a new play. And now he had one.

  Act One, he wrote. Enter a young lady.

  Chapter 2

  Jane: I don’t know if I like Mr. Trevillion, Papa.

  Papa: Nonsense, everyone was singing his praises at the party last night.

  Jane: Oh. I thought that was only the punch speaking.

  She Knew She Was Right, Act 1, Scene 1

  Sarah Porter knew that life was not fair. No sensible woman could reach the age of twenty-five and not know this in her bones, though Sarah had had personal proof of this truth from early on, in the shape of a nose that could not be ignored.

  She’d first begun to experience the effects of her singular nose when she was thirteen and it became apparent that her nose was growing far faster than the rest of her features. Her mother had begun to wring her hands when Sarah appeared at the breakfast table each morning, as though startled anew at the sight.

  “Oh, my darling, it’s your father’s nose,” Mrs. Porter would wail, her own button nose sitting unremarkably amid her fine features. “Why should you have been so cursed? If only there were something that could be done.”

  “Don’t pay it any mind,” her father would sometimes be moved to counsel from behind his newspaper. “Having a prominent nose has never bothered me.”

  But as Sarah was to learn, large noses on men were not the same thing as large noses on women. And her nose was growing into the same shape and, she was dismayed to find as the years passed, nearly the same size as her father’s nose. What fate had given her was a hawk’s assertive beak, and the only question was how large it would ultimately be.

  Quite large, it turned out. Large enough that it was the first thing anyone noticed about her, and people were never shy about remarking on it.

  If people knew her family, the remarks were commonly expressed variations of “Oh, you have your father’s nose,” uttered in the tones one might use for a person who’d suffered a great calamity.

  Then there were the ladies who condoled with her: “I know just how you feel—my feet are far too big.” Since feet could be hidden, Sarah could rarely take comfort in such expressions.

  By far the worst were people who thought they were funny, and of these, the most disastrous was the clever shopkeeper who’d handed over Sarah’s purchase with a wink and said, “I nose you will like it!”

  Gideon Grant, the most handsome and popular boy in the village of Scarborough, had heard the comment, and he’d laughed uproariously. He’d followed her out of the store, chanting, “I nose you will like it,” after her as she hurried away, willing herself not to cry. For years after that, whenever he saw Sarah, he found a way to use the hated “I nose” construction. “I nose you don’t want to get wet,” when he saw her with an umbrella, or “I nose you live nearby,” if he saw her on the street.

  By the time Sarah was sixteen, she’d decided that Gideon had done her two favors. The first was that his relentless teasing had taught her to rely on herself. Sarah had always been clever, and she loved to read. She liked novels and poetry, but what she loved best were travel stories and maps. The allure of foreign lands, and the idea of an escape from the narrow world of Scarborough, helped her not to care about the likes of Gideon Grant.

  The other thing Gideon’s teasing accomplished was to demonstrate, in a way Sarah learned to accept very deeply, that people who were attractive were generally shallow. He was helped in imparting this lesson by other mocking boys and several of the lovely young ladies of Scarborough, who tittered appreciatively at the witticisms he uttered at Sarah’s expense.

  These lessons insulated Sarah from the, to her, entirely foreseeable disappointments once she was old enough to go to social events such as parties and balls, where she was an instant wallflower. And while she stood at the edges of dance floors and watched as the gentlemen’s eyes moved past her to rest on prettier women, she consoled herself with thoughts of Constantinople and Paris, of the olive trees of Italy and the fishing villages of Greece. She conjured daring schemes of how she might one day reach these places, and mostly didn’t care th
at her nose made her a nobody.

  Thus it was with a certain bemusement that, having reached an age that effectively nudged her off the Marriage Mart, Sarah found herself attending a London ball with the goal of helping her younger cousin, Miss Annabelle Smith, find a husband.

  “Now, Annabelle,” Sarah said as they stood near the dance floor, “I’ve chatted up some of the matrons and gotten the report on which bachelors to avoid.”

  “Sarah!” Annabelle said in a shocked voice. Annabelle, who had lived an unusually sheltered life with her doting father, was somewhat easily shocked, as Sarah had discovered when she’d come to live with Annabelle and Mr. Smith. Sarah’s own father had died several years earlier, and when Sarah’s mother remarried six months ago and left the country with her new husband, the Smiths offered Sarah a home in England. Sarah and Annabelle, who’d grown up with no siblings, had become as close as sisters.

  “I’m sure you must be wrong about these gentlemen. They are gentlemen, after all,” Annabelle said.

  “You wouldn’t say that if you knew the details. Now, first on the list is Viscount Rothwell.”

  “Is there something wrong with him?”

  “He’s mean. I have it on good authority that he is perfectly pleasant to ladies, but he’s cruel to children and prone to kicking dogs.”

  “Oh,” Annabelle breathed, her blue eyes widening with horror. Annabelle loved children and dogs.

  “Then there are Mr. Thurston, Sir Reginald Cox, and Mr. Barrett—gamblers all, and not lucky. The most interesting thing to them about any lady will be her dowry. And yours being substantial, well, you don’t want to be the victim of a fortune hunter.”