“Yes, I shall!”
His feet not quite steady, Percy elbowed aside the people in his way and leaped onto the stage. He shoved away the actors; they stumbled back to watch, as Percy planted himself in the center and thumped his chest.
“It was me!” he yelled.
“Don’t let Percy forget about you,” Thea whispered to Francis, who nodded and ran unsteadily for the stage.
“It was a good trick, wasn’t it, how I ruined Miss Knight?” Percy called out to the spectators, who were watching and whispering and watching some more. “It was my idea.”
“It was my idea too,” Francis whined from beside him. “Don’t forget me, Percy.”
Rafe was watching from the other side of the stage, Martha and Sally by his side. Martha wore that impassively curious look she got during experiments. Sally’s hand was plastered over her mouth, her eyes wide with horrified amusement. Rafe’s gaze shifted and found Thea’s. She shrugged and he grinned.
Then her attention was caught by a man pushing to the front of the audience, recognizable by his long white hair and long black walking stick.
“Get down from there, boy,” Lord Ventnor hissed at Percy. “You’re drunk. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Look, it’s Father.” Percy brayed his donkey’s bray. “Father says I’m not clever, but I fooled him, I fooled you all. We told you tales about Thea Knight, and you believed us.”
“Silence!” Ventnor demanded from the floor.
“You pair of disgusting oafs will stop this now,” ordered another voice, as cold and crisp as a winter’s night. The voice belonged to an elderly man, who was not tall but had such presence he did not need to be: the Duke of Sherbourne.
“What’s that?” Percy said.
Francis squinted. “It’s a duke.”
“A duck, you say.”
“I said duke.”
“I said duck.” Percy opened and shut his hand, miming a duck’s beak. “Quack, quack, quack.”
And, of course, Francis did too.
“Will you make this family a laughingstock?” Ventnor brandished his walking stick, cheeks red, spittle gathering around his lips. “Do not speak thus to the duke.”
Percy and Francis made no sign of stopping. Instead, they bent their elbows to make flapping wings, stuck their bottoms in the air, and quacked.
Thea dragged her eyes off their ridiculous antics to study the spectators. The members of the ton were staring at Percy and Francis with disgust and disdain and amused scorn.
Just as they’d stared at her.
“Get down!” Ventnor appeared on the verge of tears. Thea recalled how he had misused his power to hurt others, and she cared nothing for his troubles. “Do not expose this family to further ridicule!”
“Expose!”
“Stop this farce!”
“Farts!”
Percy and Francis looked at each other and giggled. Turning their backs to the crowd, they flipped up their coat tails and fumbled for the fastenings on their breeches, while Ventnor yelled, “No, Percy, not again!” Ladies gasped and men groaned. Some turned away, some covered their eyes—or pretended to—while others stared openly, because this was not a sight they often saw.
As Percy Russell and Francis Upton dropped their breeches and exposed their round, white buttocks to the ton.
A quartet of brawny men hauled Percy and Francis away, while the ballroom erupted into a genteel uproar. The pair were unlikely to recover from their thorough disgrace. Thea pressed her lips together to hold back her cheers.
And then Lord Ventnor’s voice once more cut through the hubbub. “This is an outrage!”
He had taken center stage, controlled and dignified, addressing the crowd in his practiced speaking voice. The noise faded and died. When he had the room’s attention, he added, “These claims concerning my son are nothing but falsehoods and fibs.”
“And yet,” responded the Duke of Sherbourne, who easily commanded attention even from the floor, “your son brazenly confessed to telling malicious lies to falsely ruin Miss Knight. I do believe he admitted that right before he called me— What was it? Oh yes. A stupid, quacking duck.”
“Your Grace, I must apologize. My son…”
Ventnor’s narrowed eyes roamed over the audience, coming to settle on Thea. His gaze bore into her. Faces turned to see. Bodies shifted. A circle opened around her, an empty circle with her at its center, alone.
“It was Miss Knight herself who peddled this humbug about my son,” Ventnor declared. “I’ll wager she put something in my son’s drink to alter his behavior. Why, she is nothing but Luxborough’s harlot!”
Thea’s skin prickled with cold, even as her blood ran hot. She straightened her spine and held her head high. It was happening all over again: the narrowing of eyes, the lifting of brows, the shoulders turning away. A plague on them. Faster than a heartbeat, they passed judgment.
The same length of time it took Rafe to bound onto the stage.
“Careful, Ventnor,” Rafe said loudly. Hundreds of costumed heads swiveled toward him. “I’ve warned you before not to speak thus of my wife.”
“More lies!” Ventnor pointed at her with his stick. “This woman is your—”
“Wife.” Rafe loomed, his face hard and unflinching. “That lady is the Countess of Luxborough, and you will show her due respect.” He eyed the audience menacingly. “You will all show her due respect.”
Then he looked at Thea; his expression softened, and the world faded away. Her senses perceived nothing but this man, her man, publicly claiming her as his own.
Ventnor was still yammering. “You didn’t marry her. You married the wrong woman.”
Rafe’s gaze didn’t waver. “She is definitely the right woman.”
The confusion of the audience was palpable, and through it sliced an imperious female drawl, the crisp voice rising easily above the murmurs.
“Of course they are married.”
Thea dragged her eyes off Rafe, to where Arabella was gliding toward Thea as confidently as if she were indeed a warrior goddess, the crowd parting for her like water.
“I witnessed the wedding myself,” Arabella added, as she reached Thea. “Would you call me a liar too, Lord Ventnor?”
“And I officiated at the wedding,” declared the bishop, also planting himself at Thea’s side. “Would you call me a liar too, Lord Ventnor?”
“No question of it at all,” said another man. Thea was not acquainted with this speaker, but given his features and the fact that Helen held his arm, she deduced that this was Beau Russell. “Would you call me a liar too, Father?”
They were all liars, of course, but as lies went, this one was very nearly true. That gleeful half smile curved Rafe’s mouth, and Thea did not even try to repress her grin. A true aristocrat would never show her feelings this way, but she didn’t care. If any aristocrat wished to judge her poorly, they could do it from a nice warm seat in hell.
On the other side of the stage, Sally and Martha were waving at her. By her side stood Arabella and the bishop and Helen and Beau, and Rafe had claimed her. What cared Thea for anyone else? She caught the Duke of Sherbourne studying her. When their eyes met, he bowed, and she responded with her most refined curtsy. With such an influential leader of society acknowledging her, everyone else would have to follow.