Her Ladyship's Companion (7 page)

There was a wide view from the windows of the Mirror Salon: the lawn, the cliffs, the broad arms of the bay, then the ocean. Vinton Manor had been placed—perhaps unwisely considering the number of storms that had blasted it in the last four or five centuries—at the height of a great headland. There were those who pointed out that its original site had been chosen less for aesthetic reasons than for a clear sight of ships breaking up on the Shark’s Jaw, the ragged rocks that scraped the water deceptively at the horizon and accounted for the ancient foundation of Tarsin wealth. The Tarsins always replied, tongue in cheek, that their ancestors had built there for the view. Considering the strength of the sullen fortress that occupied the heights, there had always been few who cared to argue with them.

The original ugly stone pile had been wholly replaced in Elizabeth’s time by a long brick building, paid for, some said, by booty from the Spaniards. Ralph Tarsin, setting up as a respectable gentleman, had preferred to claim that his fortune arose from “clipping the backs of sheep.” That was one way of putting it.

The new north wing had not been added until a more civilized generation of Tarsins, listening to the complaints of their guests and the occasional bewildered and freezing Tarsin bride, decided that there was something to be said for snug little rooms that would need less than a score of candles to dispel the gloom and would have fireplaces that were not necessarily suitable for the preparation of entire oxen. The Tudor wing had rapidly emptied. Not even the servants could be induced to crouch in picturesque cubbyhole attics or descend into the great cavelike basement, inexplicably preferring the air and light of their mundane quarters on the ground floor of the new section.

As the candles were being lit, footmen decorously closed out the ocean and the twilight from the crowded glittering room. The mirrors glowed more brilliantly than ever, catching the light of a sapphire bracelet here and a diamond parure there.

Anna and her partner danced into sight. Melissa sighed. At least for the duration of the party there was no trouble the girl could get into.

“I see Anna has condescended to dance with the Bellingham boy,” Mrs. Armitage remarked.

“I spoke to her about it beforehand, of course. She may yet acquire manners,” the dowager said, but not with confidence.

Lady Dorothy had chosen the Mirror Salon for her party, she’d told Melissa the day before, because “when your partner gets too tedious, you can always look over his shoulder at your own reflection. People like to look at themselves.” To her annoyance, Melissa found herself scanning the room and noticing dancer after dancer doing just that.

Anna, for instance, all too obviously had her attention riveted on her own pale blue image. She’d been ordered at last into pretty azure sarcenet with the bodice cut gently
en coeur
and plunging no farther than would interest a young man without turning his mother pale with apprehension. Perhaps, Melissa conceded as she watched, Anna was merely checking that everything was firmly anchored aloft.

Mrs. Armitage was also watching her. The quizzing glass was busy.

“Anna also seems to have acquired bosoms since I last met her,” she commented mildly.

Melissa gulped and raised a hand to cover her twitching mouth.

“From your gloating, Lavinia, I can only assume Anna has done something more than usually asinine. Drat these eyes of mine anyway. What is it this time, Miss Rivenwood?”

Melissa choked, trying to conceal her laughter.

Lady Dorothy poked her furled fan into Melissa’s ribs. “Stop screwing up your face, Miss Rivenwood. You’ll get wrinkles. Tell me what Lavinia is croaking about. What is my infinitely annoying niece up to this time?”

“I’m very much afraid Anna has taken the opportunity to ... ah ... improve on the bounty of nature a bit. She’s stuffed something into the bodice of her dress since we last saw her. Two somethings. Probably handkerchiefs. That’s what the girls at school used. Though you can buy—”

 “I’m well aware of the versatility of the London market, Miss Rivenwood.”

“But I think it’s handkerchiefs.”

Lady Dorothy expelled breath in annoyance and slapped the folded fan hard against her palm. Lavinia Armitage shook with laughter, which was rather in the nature of jiggling a set pudding.

“What are you so jolly about, you halfwit?” Lady Dorothy demanded. “Damn girl’s made a fool of herself again. Why I ever appointed myself nursemaid to this—”

“Oh, Dorothy.” The fat woman was unrepentant and not the least cowed. “Oh, Dorothy. It’s just like ... Do you remember? That time at Bath? With Susan Rushsteader—”

“I do not!” Lady Dorothy snapped.

“And that very handsome dragoon. The one with the mustaches. Do you remember? What was his name? Ferguson? MacPhearson? No, that wasn’t it. The one Susan walked away with. I haven’t thought of that evening in years. Do you remember?”

“I don’t remember in the least. Miss Rivenwood, when this set is over, you will take Anna to the powder room and see that any extraneous material is removed from her upper story. I will not have the girl cut a figure of fun.”

Mrs. Armitage was still chortling. “Oh, I wouldn’t do that, Dorothy. After all, however odd it may look at the moment, imagine how it would appear if she came back without ’em.” A gargantuan laugh. “People would wonder if it was something in the punch.”

“Lavinia, you are a coarse old bat,” was Lady Dorothy’s response. But she made no more suggestions for correcting the situation. There was even a very reluctant twitch of the lips that might have been a suppressed smile. “Thank God we’re not in London at least,” she added fervently.

“Aye, who cares what a bunch of provincial nobodies thinks? Eh, Dorothy?”

“Exactly. It was Macclesfield.”

“What?”

“The dragoon’s name. It was Macclesfield.”

Lavinia Armitage stretched both legs out full in front of herself, leaned back on the sofa, raised her face to the heavens, and laughed till tears came into her eyes. The dowager watched her with a surprising lack of censure.

“Miss Rivenwood, Mrs. Armitage is overcome by the heat. Fetch her some lemonade.”

“Make that brandy punch,” Mrs. Armitage corrected.

“Some brandy punch,” Lady Dorothy commanded, “in a lemonade glass.”

“A
large
lemonade glass,” Mrs. Armitage called after her.

So Melissa sought the buffet table, erected in the anteroom. It was splendidly arrayed, having taken, as she knew all too well, the better part of the morning to prepare. Edwin and George, deftest of the five footmen, had been chosen to serve the pâté
,
puff pastries, and little cakes. Charlie, who was large, strong, willing, intelligent, and remarkably clumsy, carried trays of replenishment from the distant kitchen. Melissa had already been called upon to give her educated opinion of every article offered, first to Cook, then to the rabbit-like kitchen maid who helped with the fillings, and then upstairs under Bedford’s anxious eye. It
was entirely possible she would never willingly eat puff pastry again in her life.

Bedford was pouring liquors at the sideboard. He complied with her request without a flicker of curiosity. So speedily, in fact, did he procure the potent but disguised brandy punch that Melissa was left wondering how many of the stately ladies and demure maidens in the room were similarly supplied.

The last measure of the quadrille was completed. The level of noise in the room suddenly increased, while everyone sorted out for the next bout of frivolity. Melissa fought her way upstream toward Lady Dorothy against a tide of the starving and desiccated.

As she handed the putative lemonade to Mrs. Armitage, the worthy lady was saying, “Worse than scandal if it’s not stopped. After the Coburn affair ...”

That sounded intriguing, but Melissa had no chance to indulge her curiosity. Two pairs of ancient eyes stared at her in silence. For the first time that night Lavinia Armitage left a remark unfinished.

“I can always go away,” Melissa offered defensively.

Mrs. Armitage accepted her drink cordially.

Lady Dorothy said, “So you can. Excellent idea, Miss Rivenwood. Please go and fetch me my ... Let me think. What should it be? The worst of these summer parties is that one hasn’t an unlimited number of shawls to manipulate back and forth.”

Melissa suggested helpfully, “A bottle of smelling salts? A glass of warm milk from the kitchen? A little cushion for your back?”

“That’s enough of your tongue, miss. You may go into the green parlor across the hall. There’s a candy dish on the table with wrapped mints in it. You may bring me one of those.”

Melissa inclined her head obediently.

“It will take you about ten minutes, I think, to do a proper job of it.” The dowager waved her away and continued her low-voiced tête-à-tête with Lavinia Armitage.

The green parlor across the hall from the Mirror Salon had been allowed to become slightly shabby. Deliberately, Melissa thought. Men retired here in twos and threes to talk or smoke, and men are never really comfortable in a room until the decor begins to deteriorate somewhat. The parlor was also used for storage of the odd inebriated guest during parties. The wrapped mints were available in the hope—probably vain—that any gentleman whose breath spoke too strongly of alcohol or tobacco would try one before inflicting himself upon some hapless young lady. With ten minutes to select one, Melissa saw no reason to start at once.

In the Mirror Salon the musicians struck up another dance, this time a waltz. Lady Dorothy considered this evening a very minor entertainment, but there was nothing second-rate about it. The band was small, but it was excellent and imported from London for the occasion. The fashionable new German dance, the waltz, was played in the Mirror Salon just as it would be in Harforth House, and if half of Wheatcross stigmatized the dance as “fast,” the other half was anxious to try it.

There were no mirrors in the green parlor, for which Melissa was grateful. Yes, she, too, had been watching her appearance in the other room. She was glad to be free of five images reminding her to smile. She let her shoulders sag a bit.

Here the drapes were still open, and the room faced the sunset. It was a silver and gold, not a red, sunset. Melissa crossed to the window. There was singing in the stableyard, laughing, a very muted level of roistering. Lady Dorothy had not forgotten the coachmen! There was a barrel broached between the parked coaches, and not all the cakes had gone upstairs. Hobson, the head groom, could be trusted to see that no one became precisely drunk.

The grounds of the house, the neat kitchen garden, the hay storage, the white-painted coachman’s cottage spread out beneath Melissa’s view. Behind the stable was the dark green vastness of the rhododendron wilderness, with the true woods behind it.

In the middle of the woods was a startling patch, silver as a tossed shilling amid the green, where the river had been dammed to make a little lake. At its center was a tiny island and the ruins of a little white folly that was falling patiently to pieces there. The ladies had once gone to that summerhouse out in the lake, on warm, sweet evenings like this, to drink their tea. That was when tea was still a new and exotic drink. Or perhaps they had walked the few hundred paces from one end of the island to the other, leaning on a strong arm, of course.

Betty, the nurserymaid who straightened Melissa’s room, generally when Melissa was trying to read, had assured her seriously that the summerhouse had been allowed to fall to decay because it was only a “nasty damp swamp of a place anyway, and good riddance to it. Besides being full of vipers, most likely no one would want to get her good silk stockings muddy in such a mucky place.” The complaints had a practiced sound. Melissa wondered who had been trying to convince Betty to walk in the woods with him.

Melissa found herself wishing enviously that she had been one of those silly pretty ladies, risking wet slippers for a walk around the island. Most of all, she wished she were in the other room, dancing.

She turned from the window to find Giles Tarsin standing in the door of the green parlor, watching her. He was returning an unlighted cigar to his pocket. Melissa thought he must have come for a solitary smoke. She was partly correct.

Giles was glad for a respite from the party. He took his duties as a host seriously; that meant dancing with a descending succession of the dullest women in the room. Lady Dorothy surely would not begrudge him a single dance interval to “blow a cloud” in the privacy of the green parlor. Besides, a particular pair of flashing white teeth were beginning to get on his nerves.

So he came in and found Melissa Rivenwood framed in the window of the darkening room with the gold sunlight reflected in those remarkable eyes.

“Are you wishing you were in the other room dancing, Miss Rivenwood?” he asked on an impulse he didn’t understand. He regretted it immediately. The answer in her eyes was yes.

Strange that he knew so clearly what she was thinking.

She smiled to show it didn’t matter. “Lady Dorothy hasn’t given me permission,” she said.

Nor would she. He’d already been treated to Lady Dorothy’s pungent opinion in the matter. “Don’t ask the girl to dance,” had been her order. “Damn tabbies have nothing better to jabber about than you cavorting with my latest possession. Besides, if I let you try it, I’ll have a dozen others to fight off. And every one with a nosy mamma who wants to know the girl’s genealogy back to Adam. Leave her be. There’ll be other dances for her.”

Excellent good sense, as always, Giles thought.

“Would you care to dance?” he asked, looking into her somber eyes.

“Of course not.” She faltered. “Lady Dorothy said—”

“Do you waltz?” he demanded, walking toward her purposefully.

Six years in a London girls’ school and he asks if I know how to waltz, she thought in amazement.

“Yes,” she reluctantly admitted.

“Then do so.” He took her in his arms.

She would have stopped to argue, but by the time she marshaled her thoughts to say no she was already dancing, which made any resistance sound stupid.