Her Ladyship's Companion Read online

  “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 resis
tance sound stupid.

  Melissa discovered immediately that waltzing with the young ladies in the music room at school bore not the least resemblance to dancing with a man. Not that it was difficult. If she hadn’t been so flustered, it would have been the most natural thing in the world to be moving with music in the circle of this man’s arms.

  It was a totally, completely impossible thing to be doing. “Mr. Tarsin. I can’t do this.”

  “You do this very well,” Giles murmured.

  He was right. It was easy, easier than she’d dreamed. After the first embarrassing minute waltzing was as natural as walking.

  The music slid smoothly across the hall and filled the parlor. The soft Aubusson carpet whispered beneath their feet. The green room was washed in gold and silver light.

  Sometimes music is magic, fire in the veins, honey in the mouth. If the august patronesses of Almack’s had not dried up to wizened husks decades before, they would have known better than to allow such a dangerous dance as the waltz within their doors.

  As Giles Tarsin whirled Melissa around the room, she discovered that the world can narrow to the distance between two people.

  His coat was blue-black. The cravat was tied in a more complicated arrangement than he usually wore. His eyes were deep gray, almost blue-black like his coat. And how full of laughter! Had he been laughing like this, with such a warm glow behind his eyes, when he danced with the heiress?

  But there was no comparison, of course. He danced with the tin mine heiress in the ballroom in front of everyone. He was dancing with her in a shabby, dim green room across the hall. And in another measure or two the footmen would finish their work in the ballroom and would come in here to light the candles. She couldn’t be found like this.

  Melissa stopped, dropped her hands, and stepped away from him.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “But the music hasn’t stopped,”

  “I have.”

  The smile that had been hovering behind Giles’s face broke through. “Do you ever do anything you’re not supposed to?”

  “Not often.”

  “I should have known. Do you think Dorothy will eat you for three minutes of dancing? She won’t, you know.”

  Melissa gave the question more serious consideration than it merited. “I wasn’t thinking about Lady Dorothy,” she said with painstaking honesty. “I was thinking about the footmen.” There was a glint of grim humor. “I’ve never done anything the footmen might disapprove of.” She curtsied formally. “Thank you, though. It was kind of you to take pity on me.” Her sudden laugh flashed out, really amused. “Ridiculous, isn’t it, making such a fuss over a minute’s harmless pleasure?”

  “Perhaps.” Giles watched Melissa leave the room and close the door after her. “But it may not have been as harmless as you think.”

  Chapter 7

  ... write letters. Later in the morning, if it’s fine, I take Robbie out and gabble French to him for an hour or so. This does him no harm and may possibly do some good. Early in the afternoon I finish the letters, read French to my lady till teatime, run errands ...

  Excerpt from the letter of Melissa Rivenwood to Cecilia Luffington, July 17, 1818

  One warm July day Melissa was installed at a round table of glowing mahogany in the yellow parlor and set to answering tradesmen’s complaints. This was quite the usual thing. Lady Dorothy looked upon the mercantile community much as Wellington looked upon the French, as an enemy to be routed. There was still a lot of pirate in the Tarsin strain.

  “This to Jarvis in King Street. Tell him I’m displeased with the red cushions and I want the work redone.” Lady Dorothy was fierce as if the unhandy Mr. Jarvis were within earshot instead of safe in London. “There will be no payment until the task is finished to my satisfaction. Ashton has orders to admit the men to the town house for this purpose. As to that carrier fellow, where did I put the letter? Ah, here it is. Refer him to my lawyers. The address is in the leather book under Biddle, Bundle and Redshaw. And add at the bottom of the letter that I am still,” she repeated awfully, ‘‘still, I say, awaiting the decision on the removal of the ruins of the old island summerhouse. I have heard more than enough shilly-shallying about major changes in entailed property. Poppycock. I expect action.”

  Melissa sat with bowed head, writing in her beautiful, painfully acquired copperplate. It was more translation than straight dictation. She wished Lady Dorothy would approach these things more calmly. She’d grown fond enough of the old lady in the last weeks to have a genuine fear for her health.

  For a time there was no sound but the scratch of quill on paper. Then the dowager interrupted Melissa’s reply to the irate upholsterer to have her write, as she dictated, a long chatty letter to “Cousin Sarah” in Bath. It was concerned mainly with giving a charitable account of Anna’s activities. Lady Dorothy closed the letter with a snort. “That should satisfy the damn fool for another week or two.”

  Lady Dorothy resumed pacing. A long morning of complaint to tradesmen and malicious gossip to friends had, if anything, revived her rather than fatigued her. Perhaps, Melissa thought, the doctor was quite mistaken, and the only thing wrong with Lady Dorothy’s heart was its textural similarity to granite.

  “I’ve a treat in store for you,” Lady Dorothy announced suddenly. “You remember Amelia Edge-water?”

  “Lady Amelia. You sent her grapes.”

  “More grapes ahead. She’s been stricken with another of these minor ailments with which she amuses herself. Anna will take her something—Spanish oranges, I think—as my deputy. Good training for her. Giles has to make the trip anyway. Some estate business. You will go and see that he doesn’t murder Anna.”

  “Thus my treat. I see.”

  “There’s more. Robbie goes with you. If I recall correctly, the youngest Edgewater is of an age. In the absence of a governess Robbie will also be your charge.”

  “Delightful,” Melissa assured with a straight face.

  “You will abominate it, as you well know. Amelia is so high in the instep you’ll probably find yourself eating belowstairs. I tell you in advance, you see, to spare your feelings.”

  “Thank you,” Melissa said meekly.

  “I must be near my dotage. I nearly apologized to you for the trouble. You will enjoy the drive, I think. And keeping Anna out of mischief will allay any pangs of boredom you might feel.”

  Melissa flicked the quill feather back and forth across the bridge of her nose, a nervous habit she indulged in during heavy thought. As if on cue, Anna fluttered into the parlor. She wore a morning dress of resplendent turquoise, trailing ribbons, and carried a ridiculous little pagoda-shaped parasol tucked under one arm. A lozenge-shaped reticule dangled from her wrist, more than completing the outfit. For a seventeen-year-old girl in a lonely country house, this was certainly attention to dress on a grand scale.

  “If that’s to my cousin Sarah,” she said breezily, pointing to the letter on the table, “tell her I send my love and all that.”

  “You’d do better to write her yourself, Anna,” her aunt replied mildly enough. “You owe her more than one letter, you know.”

  “She’s so unbearably dull. Don’t be tedious, Aunt Dorothy. Anyway, I can’t this morning. I’m off to town to look at silks. Anything to get out of this musty old house. If I’m cooped up any longer, I shall go mad.”

  “Waste of a good morning,” Lady Dorothy replied coolly. “You’d do better to take that dock-tailed gray of yours out for a run. This is market day. So crowded you can’t move, and the streets full of sheep. Not the day I’d pick for shopping. Go out riding with Giles. He wants a look at the preserves anyway.”

  “He’s out already,” Anna said. “He went off with Adrian to devastate the wildlife in the park again. He probably misses the chance to shoot people.”

  Lady Dorothy laid a letter aside. “That’s a most unseemly way to talk.”

  Anna pouted prettily. “It’s only logical that after b
eing in the army for so long he would have got used to shooting things. I suppose it’s a hard habit to break.”

  “Giles’s service under Wellington bears little resemblance to hunting in the north preserve, Anna. The less said about subjects of which you know nothing, the better.” The dowager’s voice was more than tart.

  Anna fidgeted under Lady Dorothy’s basilisk stare. She began to pull the flower arrangement in the middle of the table out of its careful, intricate symmetry, crumbling the petals between her gloved fingers.

  “Harold will drive you to town, I suppose,” Lady Dorothy said.

  Anna laughed lightly and unconvincingly. “La, what does that have to say to anything, I’d like to know? As if I couldn’t go driving with Harold anywhere I liked in broad daylight in an open gig. Too Gothic by half, Aunt Dorothy.”

  The dowager snorted. “No business of mine, chit, if you choose to make a cake of yourself over a man old enough to be your father. There’s no chance of your marrying him, you know.”

  Anna sputtered. “It’s no such thing! Can’t I carry on a perfectly normal friendship with a man who is, after all, a member of my family without being accused of ... of setting my cap for him in the most vulgar way possible?”

  “I’m relieved your interest is so platonic,” Lady Dorothy said dryly. “You would please me by demonstrating your tepid feelings in a slightly less public place than the seat of a gig in the middle of town.”

  “If you’ve been listening to gossip ...”

  “You mistake me, child. I never listen to gossip.”

  “Oh, no,” Anna replied bitterly. “You may cause it, certainly. But listen to it? Never. All the same, you’re willing to believe the worst possible of me for no reason at all.”

  “If I believed the worst possible, Anna,” Lady Dorothy said quellingly, her face rather pale, “you’d be under lock and key in a fortress in Northumberland.”

  “If you cared at all about my feelings—”