by Rose Lerner
“Nor should you.”
“Then I’ll give you one: you’re a sorceress.”
Mrs. Gilchrist blushed, but she didn’t argue. “Thank you.” She’d pulled Sukey’s hair into a high, tight twist, pinning her curls smooth along her temples to dangle in a row over her ears and neck, no ringlet allowed to overlap its neighbor. Now she deftly pinned Sukey’s cap flat and dainty and settled it on her head. Stepping back, she eyed her critically. “Something’s missing.” She raised her voice. “Reggie?”
Mr. Gilchrist popped his head through the door like a jack-in-the-box. “You called, soul of my soul?” His eyes lighted on Sukey, who squirmed for fear he’d think she looked ridiculous.
Mr. Gilchrist pressed both hands to his heart. “And who is this vision of loveliness? Alas, I married too young!”
His wife laughed. “I just told her she looks exactly like herself, you bufflehead.”
“Only more so,” Mr. Gilchrist concurred at once. “Good evening, Sukey. Marriage suits you, and if I may say so, so does that dress.”
It was impossible to feel self-conscious in the face of such silliness. “Thank you, sir.” She swept him a curtsey, the blue wool swishing like a dream.
“There’s something missing,” Mrs. Gilchrist told her husband, waving an urgent hand in her direction.
He looked Sukey over with a more critical eye, kindly not remarking on her boots. She supposed she could change them for slippers at the ball, but if she did her toes would be black and blue tomorrow.
“Blue ribbons on the cap, I think, to tie it together.”
Mrs. Gilchrist’s eyes widened. “Reggie, you’re a genius.” She beamed at him.
“I’m glad I could help,” he said with unabashed sincerity, dropping a delicate kiss on his wife’s cheek as if it still amazed him that he was allowed. Sukey felt jealous of such open adoration; even if John wanted to, which she didn’t think he did, he couldn’t behave like that at the vicarage. “Unless you need anything else, I’ve got to deliver oranges to the workhouse for the Cahills.”
Mrs. Gilchrist shooed him out, already fastening two bands of blue velvet to Sukey’s cap and tying them behind her ears.
“Thank you,” Sukey said. “I don’t know how to begin to thank you.”
Mrs. Gilchrist smiled. “Have a good time at the dance, and tell me your husband swooned at your feet. And bring back my pins. You’re currently wearing thirty-seven of them.”
Sukey’s heart swooped inside her. Did she mean…? “I’ll return the pins with the dress next Saturday,” she said, testing. “That’s my soonest half-holiday.”
Mrs. Gilchrist’s smile widened. “Return the pins, the necklace, and the ribbons. Keep the gown.”
Sukey fingered the blue wool. “Are you sure?”
“You love it, don’t you?”
Sukey nodded, smoothing over her hips. They didn’t feel like hers. They were too graceful and sleek.
“A dress should be with someone who loves it. And—thanks for keeping my secret.” She put a hand to her belly, her smile nearly as exuberantly joyful as her husband’s.
“Now I know how you repay favors, come to me if you ever need a murder covered up, do you hear? Mr. Toogood’s wonderful with stains.” But Sukey’s eyes stung. The baby hadn’t been a happy secret a few months ago, and now it was. It was nice to know things did sort themselves out in life sometimes.
* * *
John was early to the servants’ ball. He generally was early when he went places on his own. At the servants’ dances he’d been accustomed to in London, that was the best part of the evening. He could help mix the punch and talk with friends before it became too loud and crowded for conversation. But tonight he didn’t know a soul. Not wanting to ruin the line of his gold-buttoned coat, John hadn’t even brought a book.
In previous years he’d worn his beloved set of evening clothes, but that was too fine for his new station. He saw that even his Sunday suit overshot the mark. Slipping off his kid gloves, he eased them flat into his pockets.
When he’d traveled here at Christmas with the Tassells, he’d attended this ball, but talked mostly to the Lenfield party, who didn’t seem to have arrived. John shifted uneasily, remembering his extremely pleasant liaison with the undercook, spanning two or three Christmases. He’d broken it off when she’d started to hint at marriage. He prayed seeing her wouldn’t be awkward.
He hoped Gil Plumtree, Lord Tassell’s valet, would be here tonight. One of John’s favorite people since earliest childhood, Plumtree was expansive, cheerful and cosmopolitan, always with five minutes and a lively anecdote to spare for a little boy. Whenever the elder Mr. Toogood had taken the valet to task for idling, he’d shrugged and said, So take it out of my pay.
He heard Sukey laugh behind him. She must have come in at the far door. Turning, he saw her embrace a group of friends, chattering and laughing. She shook her head at something one of them said. “Don’t mind him,” he caught. “Men are beasts.”
She was dressed to the nines in an ice-blue gown she must have borrowed. Men were beasts, or at least John was, because he wanted to rip her out of that knot of happy young people and drag her somewhere they would be alone—to talk to her, to kiss her, or just to sit quietly, he didn’t care which. The crowd already had him on edge. A fiddle tuned up, screeching, and he wanted his wife all to himself with a ferocity that disturbed him.
Instead he pasted on a smile and went to her, holding out his arm. He’d been to balls before. He could drag himself through one more. “Mrs. Toogood.”
“Johnny!” Empty punch cup in her hand, she drew to the side and posed, tilting her chin up and pointing her toe in her worn boot. “Do you like my dress?”
It’s two years out of style, he thought, and hated that his first instinct was always to be unkind. “Wait.” He pulled her to him by her hand, pressing his palm into her wedding ring. She smelled strangely of lavender and starch, but when he kissed her, her mouth was friendly and quizzical. After a moment she sucked in a breath and went up on tiptoe, tasting of lemons and nutmeg and rum.
John drew in a deep breath and let it out. Yes, one could tell the gown was copied from a fashion plate. While the seamstress had got the darts right, the real trick to a seamless waist was how it fastened in the back, which wouldn’t show in a magazine. But that didn’t matter, any more than the boots did. Sukey looked trim and fantastical, slightly out of step with the world as he knew it. The pale wool turned her eyes a pure, clear blue, as if they reflected northern skies.
Beginning just above her nipples, the dress skimmed over her breasts and flowed to her ankles like water. The bodice gaped in the center, held taut with a bit of silk lacing that John guessed to be stronger than it looked.
The illusion of indecency was preserved from the reality by a linen chemisette rising snowily over Sukey’s bosom and curling into a wide collar of pointed lace, one of those fashionable antique touches.
“You look as if you’d wandered out of a faerie ring.”
She touched the starched collar self-consciously. A loop of tiny blue beads nestled in her collarbone, a second falling to the V of her collar. “It’s a bit much, I expect.”
“I love it.” God, he wanted to cup one of her breasts. He’d feel three layers of linen and her stays, but the soft gown tricked him into believing it would be only her under the wool, soft against his palm.
She drew closer. “It’s held together with thirty-seven pins,” she murmured in his ear. “They belong to Mrs. Gilchrist. I’ll need your help getting them out later.”
He put a hand to her shoulder and felt for the head of the first pin. “I’ll start with this one.” He trailed his finger down. The fitted arms of the gown were slashed and puffed, the full sleeves of Sukey’s shift coaxed through three rings of slits in the wool and pinned into place. The shift was yellower than the collar; he’d offer to bl
each it for her later. “Then this one.”
She shivered, biting her lip, and John felt all at once that he could face the party with equanimity, because after it she’d go home with him.
“Come on,” she said. “I want to introduce you to all my friends.”
Her friends struck him as young and rattlepate, but they were nice enough, even if they did try to winkle gossip about the Dymonds out of him. And soon enough the fiddle struck up, and he could lead her out onto the floor.
* * *
Sukey had always mostly danced with girls she knew. There just weren’t enough footmen and grooms to partner all the maids—and if she was honest, she’d avoided dancing much with men. Especially ones she liked, so as not to give them any ideas.
It felt wonderful to take her place on the floor with her hand in John’s, in her beautiful new dress, and see women up and down the set making sheep’s eyes at him.
He knew the steps and performed them competently. A little stiffly, but that was John. She snickered to herself. Later, he’d be competent and stiff as a poker in their bed.
She turned and dipped and came up to take his hand again. Her skirt swirled about her legs, ice blue and fine. She loved dancing, but this was something else again, this flow and eddy of desire. This was the magic of a faerie ring.
The punch she’d drunk warmed her skin, and the room looked friendly and welcoming. The world looked friendly and welcoming, as if tonight she didn’t have to be careful. She didn’t have to watch where she stepped or what she said or how she said it.
Farther down the room, Mrs. Khaleel was dancing with her friends, all of them giggling. It was startling and lovely to see her without the reserve she generally wore at the vicarage. Sukey wondered if she could make John giggle. He laughed sometimes, but she wanted to see him giggle uncontrollably. She’d missed her chance on Boxing Day, when he was bosky on cherry bounce.
“Have you had any punch?” she asked him when next their paths crossed.
“Not yet.”
“Let’s get you some after this set.”
He smiled easily at her, flushed from dancing. “If you like.”
* * *
The punch was well made, sweet and strong, flakes of nutmeg drifting through John’s glass and warming the dark taste of rum.
“John?”
He turned. Blast. “Maria,” he said with a smile. “You look delightful.”
She did, in an olive-green silk with gold beading that brought out the green in her eyes and the gold in her freckled skin. “Thanks. So do you.” She smiled at him, turning her cup round in her hands. Her smile was wonderful, he remembered now. Broad and frank, as if she was about to laugh at some private joke.
He tugged on Sukey’s arm, linked through his. She turned to look at him. “Sukey, I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine from Lenfield. Maria—Miss Granby,” he said, wishing there were some way to soften it, “may I present Mrs. Toogood?”
Maria’s grin faded, her eyebrows going up. Sukey, seeing it, raised her chin.
Maria held out her gloved hand a little unsteadily. John suspected the Lenfield party had begun celebrating before their arrival. “Nice to meet you. I heard John had the banns read.” That was a relief, anyway.
“I own I was surprised,” she continued. Now he could hear the wine in her voice, a touch slower and more tuneless than usual. He would have found it seductive in other circumstances. “I wish you every joy, of course. But John always told me he wasn’t interested in marriage.”
John gritted his teeth. There was no polite way to say, No, I told you I didn’t want to marry you.
Sukey shrugged. “I was never interested in marriage either, until I met John.”
Maria laughed. “No, I don’t suppose you were old enough.”
Sukey straightened sharply, and he remembered that she was not precisely sober herself. “I’m twenty-two!”
“You don’t look it.” She snorted and looked at John. “I should have known that when you said you’d marry once you were settled in your career, you didn’t mean a woman of your own age. After all, you can wait to have children as long as you like.”
“Maria,” he said, “this isn’t necessary. Let me take you back to your friends.”
She put a hand on Sukey’s shoulder. “Let me give you some advice, dear. He didn’t mind bedding me. He loved bedding me. He married a provincial little nobody barely out of her teens because he wanted a wife he could browbeat.”
A wash of red filled John’s vision. “That is not true.” Sukey was a grown woman. He hadn’t taken advantage of her. He hadn’t. And he didn’t browbeat her.
You make me feel small, she’d told him.
Sukey wrenched away from both of them, her eyes glinting dangerously. “No one browbeats me.”
Maria laughed pityingly. “Don’t they? You’ve got maid-of-all-work written all over you.”
Sukey started forward, and stopped. “If I wasn’t wearing a new gown, I’d make you sorry.”
Maria calmly poured her cup of punch down the front of Sukey’s dress.
Chapter Eleven
Sukey made an awful, heartbroken wheezing sound, staring down at the spreading stain. Her hands hung helplessly at her sides. John froze, torn between fetching a napkin and staying to make sure no one did murder.
“You bitch,” Sukey shrieked, and threw herself at Maria. “I’ll kill you!” She went for Maria’s eyes.
Fending her off with one arm, Maria pulled her fist back, clearly about to plow it right into the side of Sukey’s head.
John shoved between them, hoping he wouldn’t be badly damaged. “Maria,” he said, taking her wrists. “You’re drunk. You’re going to be mortified in the morning. Go away.”
“You’re right, I should have spilled my drink on you. Walk me to the punch bowl for another?”
Sukey charged around him. He let Maria go to grab his wife by the waist. Kicking his shins, she struggled and fought. “I can get the stain out if we do it now,” he said in her ear. “We’ll get it out. I promise.”
Maria looked greatly cheered. “This is what you get when you marry a child,” she said smugly, and swanned away.
Sukey yelled curses after her, still struggling in John’s arms—but more, he thought, as an outlet for her feelings than because she really wanted to get free. In a few more moments, she sagged against him. Her friends crowded around her, congratulating her and making nasty remarks about Maria.
“It’s ruined,” she whispered. Raising her fingers to her gown, she looked at them as if they were wet with her own blood. “I ruined it.”
“I’ll get it out,” he said again and kissed her ear. “Come into the kitchen with me.”
There, John introduced himself to the Lost Bell’s cook and gave her a shilling. “Hot and cold water, hard white soap if you have it, distilled vinegar and spirits of wine, and as many good clean rags as you can spare.” Another shilling, and the sink was theirs. “Come here.”
He felt for that first pin at Sukey’s shoulder. Not how he’d imagined the moment, but wishes, alas, were not horses. He drew the pins out quickly, sticking them in his lapel. She stood very still and let him do it. She did look young just now, young and lost and trying not to cry.
“Why did I say that? I’m so stupid. She wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t told her it was new.”
“It wasn’t your fault, any more than you fell out of that apple tree because you were clumsy.” John lifted the stained chemisette over her head. “I should have gone to talk to her before now. I didn’t think. I didn’t think she’d care so much.” He unpinned her sleeves.
“You forgot she existed,” Sukey said sadly, and he winced, thinking of her father. Then her eyes narrowed. “You did forget she existed, right?”
He stepped behind her to undo her buttons. “I did,�
�� he admitted—or reassured her, he wasn’t sure which. “I’m sorry.”
Her outer petticoat was stained too. She slipped it off before it could soak through. “Of course, she doesn’t know you only married me for your career.”
He blotted the stain, careful not to press it into the fabric. Carrying the gown to the sink, he trickled water through the wool from the back. The grated nutmeg would be a difficulty.
“You were supposed to contradict me,” she informed him with an attempt at her usual impudence. He glanced up in surprise and saw her shivering by the fire in her single petticoat, hugging herself for warmth.
Taking off his coat, he tried to help her into it, but she grabbed it and thrust her arms in the sleeves, scowling. “I’m not actually a little girl.”
“I know. A man is supposed to do that for a woman.”
“I’ve got perfectly good arms. I don’t need help with my coat. I’m not useless like some stupid lady’s maid.”
John didn’t say, If you don’t want tender consideration, why take the coat at all? He didn’t say that Maria was a cook. Sukey’s curls brushed the dark blue velvet collar of Lord Lenfield’s old morning coat. With those pale blue ribbons in her cap, it almost looked like an ensemble. He’d have let her keep it, but her pelisse was longer and warmer. He gave a penny to a passing scullery maid to find Sukey’s friends and collect her things.
“I’m sorry,” Sukey said when the girl was gone. “I’ll pay you back.” She fished her purse out of her décolletage.
“Sukey, you don’t have to repay me, but you do have to let me work.” He diluted vinegar and alcohol with water and moistened the stain, rubbing the soap in. Then he folded clean rags, dampened them with the vinegar mixture and laid them over the dress. “That will draw it out. In a few minutes we’ll change them out.”
“I was looking forward to this party. I wanted—” Sukey glanced at him. “I wanted it to go well.”
John’s heart smote him. “I’m sure some of your friends would be happy to keep you company. Shall I fetch them?”
She gave him an incredulous look, as if he’d said something obtuse. Then she sighed and shook her head. “You should go back. I’ll stay here and change the rags.”