Cynthia Bailey Pratt (2 page)

Stung by the smile she heard but did not see, Danita said, “This is a small hotel, sir. We have no host of servants. If you require such attentions, you may after all go down the hill. I think perhaps you should in any case, if you cannot keep to your room, as I asked you to.”

“If I were to do that, I should not be able to eat your good cooking. Miss Wingrove. Now what is that I smell? Tarts? Strawberry?” He took in the large, warm room, turning his head to admire the grey stone of the fireplace and the shining copper kettle hanging above the embers. “You know, the cook in my father’s house kept a kitchen like this. Neat, clean, and homelike. The hours I spent there! She spoiled me, rather.” He sighed and looked her way.

“If you remember so much. Sir Carleton, kindly remove the tarts from the oven.” Stuffing the letter she’d been reading into her open pocket, Danita looked about for her cap. In the heat of baking, it was all she could do to keep her head covered like a proper maid. While putting the cap on, she cast a worried look at the door behind her. If she could hear the whispers of her employers in the hall, might they hear the rumble of a masculine voice in the kitchen?

Snatching up a dish towel, he did as she bid him. “Just in time; the edges have only just begun to discolor. You’ve a light hand with pastry, Miss Wingrove. Where did you learn it?” Hearing no answer, he slid the tray on top of the stove. The pastry rounds were too hot to touch, but their steam rose rich with the smell of the fruit.

Turning around, he felt a slight pang of disappointment. The riot of escaping curls had been ruthlessly dispatched beneath a plain white cap. The sparkle had all but died in eyes that were neither grey nor blue, but something in between. Sir Carleton was bored, a thing not unusual in him, and nervous, which was. Upon entering the kitchen, hope had stirred that he might beguile some of the time until morning in conversation with the mysterious Miss Wingrove. He thought it might be beguiling to bring that sparkle back.

He walked over to her on the pretense of looking out the window. Danita leaned back to avoid his nearness. Without warning, he seized her hand. “Sir Carleton!” she protested immediately.

“Hush,” he said. “I’m going to tell your future.” By grasping her elbow in his other hand, he ended her attempts to pull her fingers free from his warm touch. Her position on the high stool made it impossible to scramble down without all but clinging to him, so Danita sat and fumed while Sir Carleton studied her palm with every appearance of pleased interest. His own hands were large with long fingers and short, clean nails. In the end, her sense of the ridiculous, suppressed by trouble, asserted itself and her hand lay docilely in his own. How romantic they would appear to anyone passing!

“Well, Gypsy,” she said at last. “What have you to tell me?”

“What do you want to know?” He laid her hand on her lap and stood looking down at her, his hands loosely clasped behind him.

“Oh, what every woman wants to know. Shall I marry? Shall I have seven children or eight? What about wealth?” She paused and then asked more seriously, “Shall I travel?” Danita met his laughing eyes and saw that they were amber in color, which went well with his hair, chocolate-brown now that it had dried.

“Are those your only questions?” he asked.

“They are questions every woman asks a gypsy, or so I should think.” Danita returned to her jesting tone, but was slightly unnerved. Could this gentleman out of the night truly foretell the future? It was nonsense of course, but with the rain lashing against the window and the faint, eerie moaning of the wind it was almost possible to believe in the uncanny.

Sir Carleton made his voice sound from deeper in his wide chest and said with a trace of Romany overlaying his other faint accent, “So, you are skeptical. Very well. That you may believe what I shall tell you of your future, I shall first tell you your past.”

“My
past?”

“You have been, I think, a teacher. But not a governess. A schoolmistress, yes?”

“Yes,” she replied, frowning.

His light eyes studied not her hand but her face. With a return to his former voice, he said, “Not art or music, I think. Mathematics? Perhaps history. Cold facts and dry figures. In that case, you must have had a partner, someone to teach the accomplishments. I don’t think it could have been a big school. No, don’t tell me,” he said in reply to her start. “Let me concentrate. I see ... a wedding. Yes, your confederate married.”

“Sir Carleton! Have you been reading my letters?”

“So, I’m right?”

Danita’s lips pressed firmly together. “Yes,” she said at last. “But how...?”

“The middle finger of your right hand has a large callus on the first joint.” Danita looked. There was a rather red and unattractive mark. “You’re but a little past the age of student yourself ...”

“I’m nearly twenty-four.”

“Oh, as old as that. Forty is overtaking me. More rapidly all the time. Ahem. To continue, that callus means you are used to writing. I don’t think you’re a secret novelist because there are no books, pen or ink in your room. Besides, I don’t think Miss Millicent approves of novels, even as I am certain Miss Lucy does.”

Danita had to smile at the aptness and speed of this character reading. Miss Lucy Massingham did indeed smuggle novels past the ever-bright eye of her sister, and Danita had helped her on occasion during the weeks she’d spent at the hotel.

“But how did you guess what I taught?”

Sir Carleton drew himself up. “My dear Miss Wingrove, I do not guess! Anyway, not often. As to your teaching, your face hasn’t the dreaminess of an aspiring artist or musician, and there are no instruments of either art in your room.”

“So you can tell about me not from my hands, but from my furnishings?”

“I confess I took the opportunity to look about me. Though I didn’t pry, I promise you.”

“I have no secrets. Sir Carleton.”

“Oh, but you do.” He saw the flash of some emotion come and go in her fine eyes. He thought it fear, or perhaps defiance.

She shook her head slowly. “No, I have none. None I can hide from one as farseeing as yourself. Gypsy. It is as you have said. At seventeen, I set up an establishment of my own with a friend. Miss Ramsey. We managed to obtain pupils and all went well until Miss Ramsey decided to marry a young clergyman of our acquaintance. I could not run the school alone, especially as Miss Ramsey found it necessary to remove her investment.”

“And did you also wish to marry this curate?”

“He was not a curate, sir, but a bishop’s secretary. And, no, I did not.” Catherine Ramsey, a dozen years older than Danita, had felt that the Reverend Augustus Trenton was her last, best hope for matrimony. Danita had not then envied her friend her bridegroom, for he had rather flabby hands and a repellent tendency to snort two or three times after laughing. He was also a bore on the subject of the druidical monoliths that dot the English landscape. Catherine Ramsey was no beauty but her airy wistfulness was pleasing. It had seemed a shame to link the two of them together, but Danita now knew how important it was to own some measure of real security against the buffets of the world.

“What of your parents?” Sir Carleton asked.

“They have been dead since I was fourteen.”

“I am sorry to hear it.”

She shook her head, refusing his regret gently. “You still have not told me my future.”

“Oh, as to that, I don’t know it yet. Will you return to making dresses?”

“Now, how...? Besides, it wasn’t dresses, it was millinery. I suppose it is these pinpricks that told you? I’m not very skilled at the sewing part, yet, though I can create a passable hat, despite my lack of ‘dreaminess.’ I understand this magic you do now. Sir Carleton. Let me see your hands.”

“Oh, no,” he said, keeping them behind him. “They’d betray all.” He turned quickly and pretended to examine the tarts. While his back was to the girl, he hastily perused the letter he had lifted from her apron pocket. The sense of it was easily gained, for it was brief and to the point. The signature, though, was an unreadable scrawl at odds with the neat scholarly hand of the rest. Written by dictation, he guessed.

“Sir Carleton?”

“Oh,” he said. “I am merely wondering how long before I dare taste one of these without burning my mouth. The crusts look cool but the jam can be treacherous.”

Her letter once more concealed behind his broad back, he crossed the room. Holding out one hand, he opened the fingers of the one still concealed to let the letter drift to the floor, as it might easily have done if a pocket were missed in haste. “There, Miss Wingrove, read what you can of my hand.”

She bent over it, but did not take it, remembering the sudden warmth that had raced up her arm when he’d seized hers. “It’s a well-kept hand. I think you are a gentleman.” But her eye roved up to the sleeve and saw a clever darn. “Perhaps a gentleman of restricted means.”

“How the devil do you know that?”

She did not want to embarrass him by mentioning the dam. “A wealthy gentleman could have bribed the landlord to oust some fellow traveler.”

Sir Carleton laughed and dropped his hand. “Beaten at my own game, and by a nodcock girl. Well, I’ll tell you. Miss Wingrove. I was a gentleman once. Occasionally, I still am. But truth, whatever money I had to my gentleman’s estate is long ago gone. I live by gaming.”

Miss Millicent would be shocked beyond bounds to learn a gamester had been admitted to her house. Danita, while disapproving the means by which Sir Carleton lived, did not wish to display her feelings. The hours between dark and dawn were very long without sleep to hurry the time. She would keep him talking while she could. “And the gaming is not good?”

She saw his dark brows draw together but he laughed again, bitterly. “Not good! Luck is a jade, Miss Wingrove, and she wanders where she will. Like all fools, I thought she was faithful. I live by percentages. For years, I could count on winning eighty percent of the time. I lived very well. Then I began to win only sixty-eight percent. I lived less well. Then fifty percent. Still better than the average flat, but it did not end there.” He lifted his arms wide and let them fall.

“And now?”

“I am soon lost, if my luck does not change.” He looked past Danita, out at the dark window. “I shall bet it all on tomorrow’s race. If I win, I can pay my debts at least and perhaps I shall be lucky once more. If I lose, then the Continent or...” His eye fell on the girl and he paused. “I have always had a fancy to see Russia, you know.”

Danita knew that a gentleman who could not pay his debts could go abroad or could put a bullet in his brain. She did not like to think of such a man contemplating such an end. Somehow, he had seemed too big to ever entertain defeat in his heart.

Danita said, “I know about failure. Sir Carleton. Have I not failed at everything a woman can do in this world? Our school was not profitable, my business all but ruined before begun, and, truth to tell, I am not a very good maid. I believe Miss Massingham regrets taking me in. I never can dust to her satisfaction.”

A light came into his eyes as though discussing someone else was a relief to him.
“Is it for fear of her turning you out that you cannot sleep?”

“No, I am not in the least afraid of that, though I would like to go. You must know that I was staying here while I arranged for the rear of my shop to be made into a small residence. When my creditors discovered I had no one to back my bills, they demanded payment in full before delivery.”

“Ah, you mean they thought...?”

Danita dared not look at him. “They thought I was a cast-off mistress to a wealthy man? Exactly. They were willing to extend me credit until I proved myself to be of good character.”

It was impossible to blame her for becoming hardened. How many men had he known who had set up former lights of love in similar establishments? Some became modistes, some milliners, one had even become an abbess, reasoning that it was better to sell her sisters in shame than to pay out.

Danita went on, “Not only did I lose my shop, I had not enough funds to pay Miss Massingham what I owed her. So she permitted me to work off my debt. It was Miss Lucy’s idea, to save me from the debtor’s prison.”

“How much more do you owe?”

“So much I wonder if I ever shall ...”

“Have you no friends to apply to? This girl you kept school with? Relatives?”

“I cannot ask Catherine. Mr. Trenton would not approve.”

“Clutch-fisted, is he?”

Danita tried not to smile, but she did not succeed in repressing a certain curve in her full lower lip. “A trifle. I don’t know many other people.”

“But you must have some family, even if your parents are dead.” He remembered the coldness of the letter he’d filched from her apron pocket.

“I have applied to my aunt. My great-aunt, in truth. She has offered me a home, but neglected to send any funds that I might reach her.” Her fingers slid into her pocket. “I may have colored my request to her somewhat. I did not wish to seem as though I were destitute. I have a letter ...” she said.

“Is this it?” Sir Carleton stooped and brought up the sheet of paper. Handing it to her, he said, “You still have not told me the dreaded total of your indebtedness. What is it? Fifty pounds? A hundred?”

“Five,” she said.

“Five hundred pounds? Was your shop front plated with silver?”

“No,” she said with an amused shake of her head. “Five. Sovereigns. I owe Miss Massingham a further fifteen shillings, which is why I said I shall not be much longer her maid. Then there is the one pound ten I owe to Mr. Sharpies, the ribbons merchant. And two pounds to the straw dealers. And I require eighteen shillings to travel to my great-aunt’s house.”

“You have no money of your own?”

“I have given it all to my creditors as soon as I earn anything. Sometimes a departing lady will give me something for any trouble I’ve been to. It is never very much, however. The ladies who stay here are all independent, but not so wealthy they can keep their own establishments. So you see, Sir Carleton, you are not the only person Luck has deserted of late.”