Lady in Lace: Regency Timeslip

by Joanna Maitland

  That was a very great concession for a Regency man to make.

  She broke off a morsel of bread and put it in her mouth, chewing slowly. Eventually she swallowed and said, "I would want a greater degree of independence than you might be willing to allow."

  "You are a rich widow so that is understandable. I would ensure that you had quite as much financial freedom as you have now. I would replace your jointure with a similar provision."

  Emma had no idea how much her late husband had settled on her, but it must have been generous, given the extravagant way Lady Emma lived. Normally, a remarried widow would have only pin money from her new husband, since he would assume responsibility for all her living costs. Will was offering her vastly more than pin money.

  But independence was not only about money. If she made her conditions too onerous for him to accept, she would be able to refuse his offer without telling him the real truth. He would be disappointed. He might even be hurt. But, with the passage of time, he would come to understand that Emma would have made him an impossible wife.

  "As my husband, would you expect to know where I went and whom I met? Would you expect to dictate where I lived and how I behaved?"

  He stroked his chin thoughtfully. "Are you saying that you would require the freedom to do exactly as you liked without any restrictions at all from me?"

  Put like that, it sounded extraordinary. And, for a Regency marriage, unacceptable. Emma ploughed on. What choice did she have? "I am saying that, yes. I value my independence a very great deal. I cannot give it up. And…and I can see that it makes a marriage impossible between us. I am sorry, Will."

  He smiled wryly. "I have not said that I reject your conditions, Emma. Perhaps we both need a little more time to think?" He leaned across the table to touch her hand briefly. "Shall we sleep on it?"

  Oh. She felt herself reddening.

  "I do not mean what you are thinking, sweetheart. I shall escort you back to the blue bedchamber and leave you there to sleep alone. This decision is too important for us to allow it to be clouded by, er, emotional entanglements." He grinned suddenly. "I fear I am become incredibly pompous this evening. Forgive me. May I ring for Sanding to serve our supper? It is very late and you have had only a crumb of bread."

  Emma nodded gratefully. If they could talk of mundane things while they ate, she might be able to get her swirling thoughts into some kind of order. Will Allmay wanted to marry her. It seemed he loved her as much as she loved him. But it was an impossible dream. If she married Will, she would have to stay in the Regency for good. And she couldn't do that, could she? She had seen too much, and knew far too much about what was to come. How could she possibly keep up the pretence?

  Sanding served them a light and tasty supper. The man seemed to materialise exactly when he was needed and then vanish again. For an "uncouth" fighting sailor, he was an exceptional servant.

  Will kept up an easy flow of conversation, never once mentioning the matter of his proposal. Emma asked him about his time in the Navy but the stories he told her were pretty innocuous. He probably thought that a description of his battles would have been too much for her feminine sensibilities.

  He needed to learn that females were not nearly as weak and pathetic as Regency men seemed to think.

  "I should like," Emma began musingly as they rose from the table, "to see something more of the world. I might travel to Africa, perhaps. Lions and giraffes and elephants. It would be exciting to see them in their proper habitat."

  "You would be terrified, surely? Think of a great bull elephant leading his herd through the bush. You could be trampled in the stampede."

  "Actually, elephant society is matriarchal," Emma said quietly. "The oldest, wisest females lead."

  He stopped dead. "Females as leaders? Emma, you are a remarkable woman and capable of many things, but leadership is a man's role. Always has been. Always will be. Could you imagine a woman leading an army? Or leading a country like England?"

  He looked so cocksure, so armoured in his belief in natural male superiority, that modern Emma broke through Regency Emma's shell. "There will be a woman leader, I promise you, Will. Less than two centuries from now. What's more, she'll take your beloved England to war. And win!"

  Will began to chuckle, shaking his head at what he clearly thought was fantasy.

  "You may laugh, sir. But you will laugh on the other side of your face when I tell you that she is– was– will be a grocer's daughter."

  For a second he looked utterly astonished. Then he burst into a peal of laughter that went on and on. Eventually he was laughing so much that he collapsed back into his chair, holding his aching sides.

  "Now that, my sweet," he spluttered when he had recovered some command of his voice, "is your best yet." He went off into another peal of laughter. "I swear you are quite wonderful. The things you say. And with the utmost seriousness, too. Almost as though you believed you were telling the truth."

  "I am telling the truth," she replied, frowning crossly down at him.

  "Of course. I'm sure your visions of the future are quite as real to you as…as this supper table. But a grocer's daughter. Why, I—" Laughter overcame him once again.

  Emma could see the case was hopeless. She was challenging his innate world view, not only about gender but about class as well. He would never believe a word of it. And, to be fair, it was ridiculous to expect him to. If she had been confronted by a person from the twenty-third century, telling her the future, she wouldn't have believed it either. Nonetheless, Will could have been a little more polite about listening to what she said.

  She continued to frown down at him. He was still convulsed in mirth. Impossible man. With a snort of anger, she turned on her heel and marched out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

  It was only when she reached her bedroom that she remembered the lace gown. If she removed it herself, she would not be here in the morning when Will came for the answer to his proposal. If she wanted to stay, she would have to ask for help. From Will? Or from Sanding?

  She shook her head crossly.

  From neither of them. After that little lecture about female fantasy, she had no intention of staying another minute.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Emma had an attack of conscience the moment she arrived back in the museum research room. Will would come for her answer in the morning and find her gone. Neither Sanding nor any of the stable hands would be able to throw any light on how she had left the house. Would Will start scouring the fields around, in case she was lying injured somewhere? Or dead? What would he do when he found no trace of her?

  She should at least have insisted that he drive her back to her London house.

  But it was too late to do anything now. The time window for travel to the Regency had closed for another day. She was stuck in the twenty-first century.

  Perhaps, if she made the transition again the very next night, she would be able to retrieve the situation somehow?

  She shook her head at her own indecision. Fickle? That was putting it mildly. So much for her resolution never to make the transition again.

  But things had changed between her and Will. He had proposed marriage. She owed him an answer, even though it would have to be a refusal. Marriage, for them, was impossible. She was convinced of that. But she knew her refusal would hurt him. She couldn't disappear into the æther as well.

  Other arguments were bubbling up, arguments about love and trust and the possibility of happiness. Troubling arguments. She pushed them back below the surface. She was too distraught, and much too tired, to deal with them. She needed to go home. To sleep.

  ~ ~ ~

  She did sleep, but not well.

  She kept half-waking because something was nagging away in the back of her brain, but she could never quite catch hold of it and so she would fall back into the same restless sleep. At about six, she woke up properly and had it at once.

  What a fool she'd been. Last night, she had be
en in the museum, with access to all its resources, and she had completely forgotten to search the records for Lady Emma Gjrorsitester, with the new, unpronounceable spelling. She wouldn't be able to do it today, either, because Owen Evans, the charity assessor, was to meet her at the Lamb House, first thing. Emma had carefully arranged the visit for a day when Geraldine would be off site, so that Emma herself would be able to show him around. Emma would be the only paid member of staff on site, which made her the obvious choice. She thought she'd done rather well there. She'd decided Owen was by far the best person to stumble across the loose floorboard by the fireplace in the blue bedchamber. No one would dream of suggesting there was anything fraudulent about a discovery made by someone as respected as Owen Evans.

  She made herself a soothing cup of tea – she really needed that – and fired up her computer. Maybe Wikipedia had something about Lady Emma, with the new monstrous spelling? She found she was hesitating. Did she really want to know about Lady Emma? Who was also herself?

  Yes, she really did. She carefully typed in the incredible name and hit the Return key.

  Nothing.

  Well, perhaps Lady Emma was not important enough to warrant a page on Wikipedia? Emma tried again, with a Google search. That produced nothing, either.

  She sat back in her chair and stared accusingly at her screen. It stayed resolutely blank. So what had she learned? She pieced together what she knew. It seemed that the house was real, and the bath house was real, but the past that she and Will were living was not real, because neither Lady Emma nor Will Allmay had existed. She sighed deeply. What a disappointment.

  No, it was much more than disappointment. Emma was bereft, as if someone had cut out a part of her and wantonly destroyed it. Everything with Will had seemed so real, so alive. And yet it couldn't be. He didn't exist. And Lady Emma didn't exist either. So it could only have been some kind of parallel universe that she'd been visiting.

  She took a large swig of her tea. That, at least, was no mirage.

  What was she going to do?

  Last night, she had decided, sort of, that she would go back to the Regency one last time, to say a final goodbye to Will and reassure him that she had not died in a ditch somewhere. He needed to know she was safe and well, in spite of her unexplained disappearance. She would politely refuse his proposal, on grounds that would not hurt his pride too much, she hoped. And then she would be driven back to her Mayfair house. From there, she would be able to return to her own modern time without hurting anyone.

  And if her doppelgänger really existed in that weird parallel universe, it could take over the role with Emma's good will.

  Back here in the twenty-first century, Emma Stanley would have the newly discovered bath house, plus a priceless Richard Cosway miniature with unassailable provenance, and she might even have secured funding for the restoration at the Lamb House. After that huge boost to her career, museums round the country would be competing to get her to work for them. She might even become a professor.

  Her inconvenient internal voice insisted she would be sacrificing the only man she had truly loved for a sterile future in a harsh and unfeeling modern world.

  Emma refused to listen.

  She was cleaning her teeth after breakfast when a new thought struck. If Lady Emma Gjrorsitester lived in a parallel universe, how could her portrait transfer to this universe? Would there be anything for Owen Evans to find under the floorboard?

  She spat viciously into the basin. It was all too convoluted for words. There was only one place to find out the truth. And that was where she was going. Right now.

  ~ ~ ~

  When Emma had so carefully placed the little miniature case under the floorboards of the blue bedchamber in Will's Lamb House, the leather had been new and supple and pristine. The case in Owen Evans' gloved hand was darkened with age and cracking in places. But when he opened it, the ivory miniature looked exactly as it had on the day it was completed. The colours were fresh and the brushwork was stunning.

  "Well, well, well," Owen said in his lilting Welsh accent. "Isn't that beautiful? And wonderfully preserved, too. Miniatures so often fade when they're exposed to light. People should keep them in their cases rather than hanging them on the wall." He peered closer. "This one looks— Actually, I'd say it looks like a Cosway. That background is his signature Antwerp blue, isn't it?"

  "I'm n–not sure," Emma stammered. "I haven't studied miniatures much."

  Owen was beaming. "I've seen quite a lot over the years and I'd say that blue is unmistakable. We'd need an expert to confirm it, though. May I remove it from its case?"

  "No reason why not."

  Owen took his time over extracting the portrait. "I wonder," he said, almost to himself. "There's no signature on the front. Cosway never did that. But on the back?" He turned the ivory over. "Bingo! Yes. This is it, Emma. The real deal."

  "I'm sorry?"

  "When Cosway was in his pomp, he used to sign his works with a flourishing Latin signature. And that's what we've got here. I'll need a magnifying glass to decipher it all, though. The writing is minuscule."

  "And what about the paper? What do you reckon that is?"

  Owen picked it up. "I think perhaps you ought to deal with this. It looks fragile to me. That kind of stiff paper can easily crack when it's been drying out for centuries. And if it relates to the miniature, it wouldn't be any later than about 1820, I'd say. Cosway died around then, I seem to remember."

  Emma put on gloves and very carefully unfolded the letter. She read it aloud, deliberately stumbling over the difficult surname of Lady Emma.

  "It does sound as if it relates to this miniature, doesn't it?" Owen said with a grin. "But we need to decipher the inscription on the back to be sure."

  "I'll fetch a magnifying glass. I won't be a moment." She handed the letter to Owen and left him to it.

  When she returned, he was frowning over the writing on the back of the painting. "I think I may have found something odd," he said. "Ah, thank you. Just what I need." He stretched out a hand for Emma's magnifying glass and went back to studying the inscription. "Yes, I thought I was right. Look here, Emma. The name on the letter and the name on the miniature don't match."

  "What? But they must match. Cosway painted the miniature and Cosway wrote the letter."

  "Well, they don't match. Look at the letter through the magnifier. You'll see that the ink for the body of the letter and the ink of the salutation are different."

  "But the handwriting's the same?"

  "It looks the same. Could be a forgery, I suppose," he added, with a grimace.

  "The handwriting on the back of the miniature must be genuine, though?"

  "Oh yes. I've seen it before. There's no mistaking it. But look closely at the description of the sitter. Look at the spelling of her name."

  "Oh. Oh, goodness." The spelling on the back of the miniature was not the same as the spelling on the letter. On the back of the miniature, the name began G-Y-H-R- rather than G-J-R-. When Emma had forced Cosway to add the name to his letter, he had spelled it wrong, leaving out the H. Not surprising, given how complicated it was? And then Emma had compounded the mistake by misreading Cosway's Y as a J. That could certainly account for why Emma had been unable to find Lady Emma Gjrorsitester in the records. She should have been searching on Gyhrorsitester.

  Owen was staring at Emma, waiting for her to say something. "Oh, sorry. I was miles away. That name. It's so very odd."

  "I'm not sure, but I think I may have seen it somewhere before," Owen said. "If it's the name I think it is, it's a sort of Flemish bastardisation of the French 'Grosseteste'. It means 'Large Head', as I'm sure you know."

  "Yes. There was a Bishop Grosseteste at one stage, wasn't there?" When Owen nodded, Emma said, "So this woman, this—" she made a point of checking the paper "—this Lady Emma However-she's-pronounced was Flemish, you think?"

  "I doubt that. It's not the name of any aristocratic English family I've ever h
eard of. It's much more likely to be her married name."

  "Yes, I suppose so," Emma said uncertainly. Inside, she was cheering with glee.

  "May I photograph these items, Emma? I won't use flash." With Emma's ready agreement, he did so. "This will be a wonderful find for the Lamb House. My Board will be sympathetic to making a donation to help with the restoration after this, I think." He beamed at Emma. "Cosway was the finest miniaturist of the time, you know. If the Lamb House trustees wanted to sell this, it would raise a good price. Especially with this provenance."

  "But you said the letter was a forgery?"

  "I said it could be, because of the difference in ink. I do think that the name at the top was added some time after the original letter was written. But, on balance, I'd say it all looks like Cosway's hand. It may well be genuine."

  "Maybe the lady asked for it to be added?" Emma suggested. "The miniature includes her name, but the letter doesn't." She shook her head in assumed puzzlement. "It must have been a very strange commission, don't you think? She certainly wanted it kept a secret. And why did she hide it there? If she did hide it, that is."

  "Perhaps she meant it as a gift? For a lover?" Owen said, entering into the spirit of Emma's game of conjecture. "Perhaps the commission was secret because she was afraid that her husband might find out? Perhaps the lover abandoned her and so she hid the painting away? She couldn't bring herself to destroy it because it was so beautiful."

  Emma chuckled. "That's a very plausible tale, I agree. You're good at conspiracy theories, Owen. If we can find out more about the lady in question, we might find the real answers, too. I'll start on the research as soon as I'm back at the museum."

  ~ ~ ~

  Once Owen had gone, Emma rushed through the rest of her work at the Lamb House. She needed to get back to the museum early. Not because she wanted to make her last transition to say goodbye to Will – although she did – but because she was sure that she would now be able to use the museum's resources to find out about Lady Emma. There had been so many false leads about her surname. But this time, with the spelling from the inscription, Emma must have it right. Her instincts were telling her that, this time, she would find Lady Emma. The woman had not existed in a parallel universe; she was part of the history of this one. There might even be a link to Will. If so, Emma wanted to know about it before she saw him for the last time.