Amy put down her heavily engraved silver fork. ‘May I remind you, Uncle Bertrand, that I myself am half French?’
Uncle Bertrand had little sense of tone or nuance. ‘Never mind that, lass,’ he replied jovially. ‘Your pa was a good chap for all that he was a Frenchman. We don’t hold it against you. Eh, Derek?’
Derek smirked across the table at Amy. In his Nile green frock coat, he looked like a particularly foppish frog, thought Amy disgustedly.
‘If you feel the need to move about more, Amy, dear, you’re always welcome to call on us!’ chirped Derek’s mother from Uncle Bertrand’s right. Her double chins bounced with enthusiasm. ‘I’m sure Derek can find the time to take you for a lovely turn in the rose gardens – properly chaperoned, of course!’
She waved a plump hand at the obvious proper chaperone, Mr Meadows’ maiden sister, commonly known as Miss Gwen. Miss Gwen responded in her usual fashion: she glowered. Amy supposed that if she had to live with Mrs Meadows and Derek, she would glower, too.
‘Oh, my love is like a red, red rose…’ Derek began, making sheep’s eyes at Amy.
He was drowned out by his father. ‘None of your rose gardens! They’ll go riding,’ barked Mr Meadows, from the opposite end of the table, next to Aunt Prudence. ‘Survey the land. Kill two birds with one stone. Derek, you’ll call for the girl tomorrow. Need you to take a look at the fences near Scraggle Corner.’
‘I’m sure she’d much rather see my roses, wouldn’t you, dear?’ Mrs Meadows sent what was meant to be a meaningful glance at her husband. ‘They’re so much more…romantic.’
Turning to her left, Amy caught Jane’s eye and grimaced.
She sent a look of appeal to Aunt Prudence at the foot of the table, but there was no help forthcoming from that corner. Aunt Prudence’s one passion in life was covering all surfaces in Wooliston Manor with miles of needlepoint, and she was blind to all else.
Amy launched into plan B. She squared her shoulders and looked directly at her uncle. ‘Uncle Bertrand, I am going to France. If I cannot leave with your assent, I shall leave without it.’ She braced herself for argument.
‘Feisty one, ain’t she!’ Mr Meadows declared approvingly. ‘Would’ve thought the French line would weaken the blood,’ he continued, eyeing Amy as though she were a ewe at market.
‘The dam’s line bred true! You can see it in my girls, too, eh, Marcus? Good Hereford stock.’ It was highly unclear whether Uncle Bertrand was referring to his niece, his sheep, his daughters, or all three.
‘Bought a ram from Hereford once…’
‘Ha! That’s nothing to the ewe I purchased from old Ticklepenny. Annabelle, he called her. There was a look in her eye…’ Uncle Bertrand waxed lyrical in the candlelight.
The conversation seemed on the verge of degenerating into a nostalgic catalogue of sheep they had known and loved. Amy was mentally packing for a midnight flight to the mail coach to Dover (plan C), when Jane’s gentle voice cut through the listing of ovine pedigrees.
‘Such a pity about the tapestries,’ was all she said. Her voice was pitched low but somehow it carried over both the shouting men.
Amy glanced sharply at Jane, and was rewarded by a swift kick to the ankle. Had that been a ‘say something now!’ kick, or a ‘be quiet and sit still’ kick? Amy kicked back in inquiry. Jane put her foot down hard over Amy’s. Amy decided that could be interpreted as either ‘be quiet and sit still’ or ‘please stop kicking me now!’
Aunt Prudence had snapped out of her reverie with what was nearly an audible click. ‘Tapestries?’ she inquired eagerly.
‘Why, yes, Mama,’ Jane replied demurely. ‘I had hoped that while Amy and I were in France we might be granted access to the tapestries at the Tuilleries.’
Jane’s quiet words sent the table into a state of electric expectancy. Forks hovered over plates in mid-air; wineglasses tilted halfway to open mouths; little Ned paused in the act of slipping a pea down the back of Agnes’s dress. Even Miss Gwen stopped glaring long enough to eye Jane with what looked more like speculation than rancour.
‘Not the Gobelins series of Daphne and Apollo!’ cried Aunt Prudence.
‘But, of course, Aunt Prudence,’ Amy plunged in. Amy just barely restrained herself from turning and flinging her arms around her cousin. Aunt Prudence had spent long hours lamenting that she had never taken the time before the war to copy the pattern of the tapestries that hung in the Tuilleries Palace. ‘Jane and I had hoped to sketch them for you, hadn’t we, Jane?’
‘We had,’ Jane affirmed, her graceful neck dipping in assent. ‘Yet if Papa feels that France remains unsafe, we shall bow to his greater wisdom.’
At the other end of the table, Aunt Prudence was wavering. Literally. Torn between her trust in her husband and her burning desire for needlepoint patterns, she swayed a bit in her chair, the feather in her small silk turban quivering with her agitation. ‘It surely can’t be as unsafe as that, can it, Bertrand?’ She leant across the table to peer at her husband through eyes gone nearsighted from long hours over her embroidery frame. ‘After all, if dear Edouard is willing to take responsibility for the girls…’
‘Edouard will take very good care of us, I’m sure, Aunt Prudence! If you’ll just read his letter, you’ll see – ouch!’ Jane had kicked her again.
‘You know I don’t hold with gadding about with foreigners,’ Uncle Bertrand was saying with a forbidding shake of his wineglass. ‘Why your sister ever…’
‘Yes, yes, dear, I know, but that’s all past, and Edouard is our nephew.’
Amy clenched her hands in her lap. It took all of her willpower not to speak; she could feel her chest heave with the effort of containing the angry words. Noticing, Jane gave her a small, warning shake of the head. Noticing something else entirely, Derek leered at Amy’s décolletage. Amy glared at Derek. Derek failed to notice. His eyes, after all, were not on Amy’s face.
‘…just for a few weeks.’ As Aunt Prudence’s words drifted past her, Amy realised she had missed a couple of rounds of the conversation. ‘It’s not that terribly far, and we can fetch them back if there’s any trouble.’
Uncle Bertrand, Amy noticed, with the dawning of delight, was visibly weakening. He was regarding Aunt Prudence across the table in a rather bemused way. In a younger man, Amy would have called the look besotted. As for Aunt Prudence, if she had been a younger woman, Amy would have termed her expression positively coquettish! Her head was tilted at its most becoming angle, and she was smiling fondly at Uncle Bertrand. Amy’s twelve-year-old cousin Ned looked horrified.
So did Derek. His head swivelled anxiously back and forth from one to the other. ‘You can’t mean to let them go!’ he yelped, adding belatedly, ‘sir,’ as Uncle Bertrand dragged his eyes away from Aunt Prudence.
Mrs Meadows’ lips narrowed into a tight line. To Aunt Prudence, she said, ‘You won’t be able to send the girls off for months, anyway, I suppose. You’ll have to hire a proper chaperone, and that can take quite some time. Good duennas are so hard to find these days.’
‘I’m sure Edouard has a chaperone waiting for us in Paris,’ Amy said hastily. ‘If we left immediately—’
‘But who is to travel with you?’ Mrs Meadows drew herself up and cast a censorious eye across the table at Amy. ‘You and Jane cannot think of travelling alone! Two delicate young ladies at the mercy of ruffians and highwaymen!’
‘You could send a manservant with us, couldn’t you, Uncle Bertrand?’ Amy asked her uncle. ‘To fight off all the highwaymen?’
Derek slumped down in his chair, an unattractive pout blowing out his thick lips.
Mrs Meadows redoubled her efforts. ‘Think of your reputations!’ she howled.
‘I suppose I shall have to advertise,’ sighed Aunt Prudence.
‘You shall have to,’ Mrs Meadows declared officiously. ‘There’s really no other alternative.’
Amy wondered if she would be able to make the midnight mail coach if she crept out of her r
oom by eleven.
‘I shall chaperone them.’
Ten heads (Ned was still involved in coaxing the remains of his vegetables down Agnes’s back) turned to stare at Miss Gwen in astonishment. Ten mouths opened at once.
‘When can we leave? I can be finished packing by tomorrow morning!’ Amy shouted gleefully above the din.
In the hullabaloo, nobody even noticed when Agnes clapped a hand to the back of her neck, shrieked, shook Ned by the collar until he turned a rich shade of purple, and fled from the room scattering small green blobs.
Still calmly cutting her meat, Miss Gwen stared down the various speakers one by one. ‘You may be assured, Prudence, I shall keep a close eye on Jane and Amy. As for you, Miss Amy, you may be packed, but I am not.’
Miss Gwen speared a pea with military precision.
‘We leave in two weeks.’
Chapter Four
At the sound of the door cracking against the wall, Richard automatically whirled towards the entrance, his whole body tensing for trouble. Blast it all, nobody was supposed to be on the packet from Dover to Calais but him. Ten crowns he had pressed into the hands of the rather oily-looking captain, ten crowns of good British sterling, with another five promised upon arrival. The captain had assured him that the boat would be his alone and would set sail at the next promising gust of wind, instead of lolling about for a week, waiting for passengers.
So who was banging doors? The sound of oak bashing oak, in his experience, generally preceded flying chairs, toppling candlesticks, snarled oaths in three languages, and, if one were really unlucky, the acrid smoke of powder from a pistol. The cabin of a Channel boat was a damnable place to be ambushed. The ceiling was too low for a man to stand and fight properly. And if the bloody boat began swaying… Richard winced at the prospect. It could lend a whole new aspect to fencing. Richard whirled towards the door in a grim frame of mind.
The figure in the doorway nearly made Richard tip his chair over backwards in surprise. In the place of the burly oafs he had expected, he saw one rather agitated young lady, planted indignantly in the middle of the entrance. ‘But why not?’ she was arguing with someone in front of her.
‘Harrumph,’ said Richard. The girl’s back, clad in a narrowly cut yellow frock, was quite as pleasing a back as one could hope for, but this was his boat, blast it, and no one else had any business being on it, not even young ladies with fetching backs.
The young lady paid no attention.
‘Really, Miss Gwen! The captain said the wind won’t be right for hours yet! We could just stop in at the Fisherman’s Rest for a lemonade. I’m sure there can’t possibly be anything improper about stopping for a lemonade.’
Richard harrumphed again. Very loudly. The girl in yellow half-turned, affording Richard a momentary view of a pert nose, a determined chin, and one large blue eye. The eye settled briefly on Richard and as rapidly dismissed him. With a toss of her mahogany curls, she continued pleading with her invisible chaperone.
‘And Jane agrees with me, don’t you, Jane?’ the girl went on.
‘Just one lemonade, Miss Gwen!’
Could anyone really be that thirsty? Richard failed to see the earth-shattering importance of a lemonade. Unless, of course, the girl had some unfortunate medical condition which could only be soothed by constant application of lemonade. From the energy with which the girl was arguing her case, and the enthusiastic way she bounced on her feet, like a prizefighter waiting to be let into the ring, Richard rather doubted she was suffering from any weakening, wasting malady.
Richard listened to the ridiculous one-sided argument for a few more minutes before reminding himself that, much as he enjoyed speculating on the girl’s reasons and pleasing as it was to watch her skirts sway with every vehement word, the time had come to intervene. He had dispatches to read, and if he tarried too long, he risked the boat setting sail with these noisy interlopers still aboard.
‘I say,’ Richard drawled, loudly enough that they might have heard him say it back in London.
That finally got her attention. The girl turned. In full, her face fulfilled the promise of her profile. It wasn’t what one would call a classically beautiful face; her features lacked the sort of sculpted dignity one expected from a statue in marble. Instead, her face was a talented engraver’s etching, small and decisive, her cupid’s bow of a mouth in constant movement, exclaiming, talking, laughing. No, Richard changed his mind, not an etching after all. Her colouring was too vivid for the stark black and white of a print. The deep brown of her hair glimmered with hidden alloys of red gold, like fire shining through a screen of mahogany. Between dark lashes and fair cheeks, her eyes gleamed startlingly blue.
Her face bore a perplexed look, as if she had only just noticed Richard and wasn’t quite sure what to do about him. To help her along, Richard raised a sardonic brow. It was an expression that had been known to make cardsharps fling in their aces and the secretest of secret agents babble like babes. For a moment, confusion continued to hover in the girl’s narrowed blue eyes. Then she beamed at Richard and bounded into the room towards him.
‘You look like you’ve travelled a great deal! Don’t you agree that there’s plenty of time to stop off at the inn for a lemonade?’
Before Richard could suggest that she do just that – preferably lingering over her lemonade until after his boat had sailed – another figure appeared behind her. Ah, the chaperone, Richard decided. There were, he had come to the conclusion after many tedious evenings at Almack’s, two types of chaperone. Given the number of events he had been forced to squire Hen to, Richard considered he had conducted something of an exhaustive study of chaperones.
Both types were aging spinsters (Richard discounted young widows looking after their younger sisters’ debuts; those tended to need a chaperone even more than the young ladies they were ostensibly supervising), but that was all they had in common. The first was the frumpy henwit. Although of indeterminate age, she dressed in the ruffles of a seventeen-year-old. Her hair, no matter how sparse or grey, was curled and frizzed until it looked like a nest built by a particularly talentless blue jay. She twittered and simpered when spoken to, read the sappiest sort of novels in her spare time, and generally contrived to accidentally lose her charge at least twice a day. Rogues and seducers loved the first sort of chaperone; she made their endeavours that much easier.
And then there was the other type of chaperone. The grim dragon of a chaperone. The sort who looked like her spine had been reinforced with a few Doric columns. Chaperone number two would sneer at a flounce or a frizz. She never simpered when she could snarl, read forbidding sermons by seventeenth-century puritans, and all but chained her charge to her wrist.
As the woman bore down on him, Richard, using his brilliant powers of deduction, was quickly able to conclude that this chaperone fell into the second type. Grey hair rigidly pulled back. Mouth pressed into a grim line. The only incongruous note was the cluster of alarmingly purple flowers on the top of her otherwise severe grey bonnet. Maybe the milliner confused her order and she didn’t have time to change it, Richard concluded charitably.
At any rate, he decided, here was someone he could deal with sensibly. One of the benefits of type number two was that they were nearly always extremely sensible. Richard darted a quick glance down at her feet. Underneath the grey hem of her skirt, he could just make out two sturdy, thick-soled black boots. Yes, definitely sensible.
Richard opened his mouth to speak, and the tip of a parasol jammed in between his ribs.
‘Who are you, young man, and what are you doing on our boat?’
‘I beg your pardon, madam,’ the words came out somewhat more raggedly than Richard would have liked, but it was hard sounding sophisticated when all the air had just been forced out of your lungs in a most unpleasant fashion. ‘Your boat?’
‘Why don’t Jane and I just pop by the inn while you straighten matters out with this gentleman…’ began the girl in yellow brightly
, but she was cut off by the forbidding voice of her duenna.
‘You, miss, are staying right here.’ The dragon managed to reach out and snag the girl’s arm without taking her beady eyes from Richard. ‘Yes, sirrah, our boat. That greasy-looking fellow who calls himself the captain assured us that we should be the only passengers. If you are one of the crew – which, judging from your dress and speech, I assume you are not – go about your duties. If not, kindly depart at once.’
She looked as though she were ready to enforce her words with the point of her parasol. Richard judged it wise to move out of range. Who had ever heard of a parasol with a steel tip that sharp and pointy? They were supposed to be dainty, feminine things, not lethal weapons.
Rising from his chair, Richard sidestepped the gleaming parasol point and executed a small but elegant bow. ‘Forgive me, madam, I have been remiss in my social obligations. I am Lord Richard Selwick.’
The chaperone still looked like she would rather poke him than chat with him, but she obviously knew what was proper. With a bend of the knees that only just resembled a curtsy, she inclined her head and said, ‘I, my lord, am Miss Gwendolyn Meadows. Allow me to make known to you my two charges, Miss Jane Wooliston’ – a girl Richard had failed to notice moved out from the shadows behind Miss Meadows and made her curtsy – ‘and Miss Amy Balcourt.’
The quiet girl in blue subtly took Amy’s arm and tried to lead her away. Squeezing the other girl’s hand affectionately, Amy shook her head and stayed where she was. Richard was so caught up in this byplay that he completely lost track of what the chaperone was saying until the point of her parasol made another sortie at his waistcoat.
‘Sir! Have you been attending?’
As Richard had learnt from his youthful encounters with the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale, the best way to deal with irate ladies of a certain age was to be disarmingly honest.
‘No, madam, I fear I was not.’
‘Hmph. I said that now that the amenities have been served we would be pleased if you would take yourself off our boat.’
The Secret History of the Pink Carnation Page 5