The Miss Mirren Mission

by Jenny Holiday

  Emily pasted on a smile as she curtsied. It wasn’t enough that she had to contend with Lord Blackstone and Mr. Bailey, now she would have to listen to this beautiful woman proclaim her devotion to the saintly Captain Mirren, too.

  Mrs. Burnham, surprisingly, did not mention Emily’s father. “I’m delighted to meet you, Miss Mirren. Lord Blackstone tells me you’re a devoted reader. I just finished Amelia de Beaucler’s latest. Tell me, have you read it?”

  Nodding, Emily’s cheeks grew warm. It was one thing for this woman, who was married and probably a half dozen years her senior, to admit to having read the Gothic novel, but quite another for Emily do so.

  Mrs. Burnham clapped her hands in delight. “Splendid! Come sit with me!” She towed Emily toward a green damask sofa. “We have much to discuss!”

  Emily enjoyed the evening after that. Mrs. Burnham and her husband were warm and friendly. She was surprised to learn that they ran a school for pauper children in London. It was hard to imagine the humorless Earl of Blackstone socializing with such reformers. How she wished she could tell Mrs. Burnham her secret. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a fellow reformer to talk to?

  Along with Mrs. Talbot, the guests included Lord Blackstone’s neighbor, Mr. Leighton, with whom Emily had grown acquainted on the journey from London. Also from Essex was a local landowner by the name of Smythe, his wife, and their twin seventeen-year-old daughters, just out. From London there were a half-dozen aristocrats, a group of sophisticated ladies and bored-looking men whose names Emily feared she would not remember.

  So many guests, but the most important one was missing. She suppressed a sigh. At least she hadn’t told Mr. Todmorden about her scheme. He would be expecting her column as usual, but he wouldn’t know that its intended subject would have to be changed because of Mr. Manning’s absence.

  Still, it was essential that Mr. Manning come to the party. It wasn’t just the column riding on his arrival. If he didn’t come, how would she ever find Billy? Sally was depending on her, and failure was not an option.

  …

  “If Manning doesn’t come, I may not survive the rest of the week,” Blackstone whispered to Bailey as the men joined the ladies in the drawing room the next night after post-dinner cigars and brandy.

  They were a mere day into the party. It was only his second night playing the attentive, gracious host, and he was ready to send everybody packing—or at least to bed early.

  The London ladies were the worst. He might even go so far as to characterize them as vultures. It was to be expected, though. He couldn’t suddenly open his estate, which hadn’t been seen by anyone in years, without raising a few eyebrows. The ladies would assume he was finally turning his mind to the succession, and for that reason, he purposefully hadn’t invited anyone who was—or was the mother of—a marriageable woman. Unless one counted the Smythe twins, which, given that they were barely out of the schoolroom, he hadn’t. He was beginning to realize that didn’t mean their mother shared his point of view on the matter. She seized every opportunity to place one of her daughters, clad in identical dresses that differed only in color, in his path.

  And of course there was Miss Mirren. But he hadn’t invited her.

  “Buck up,” Bailey whispered. “I happen to know that you’ve endured much worse for the sake of a mission. Starvation, near death at the hand of enemy abductors, et cetera.”

  Blackstone dipped his head to acknowledge Mrs. Smythe, who was waving at him with great enthusiasm from across the room. How did men who actually cared about preserving their family lines make it through a London season? “I’m not sure those were worse,” he said, steeling himself. “Let us just pray the ladies don’t have a mind to roll back the rug for dancing.”

  “Lord Blackstone,” said Lady Hastings, a forty-year-old harpy who was the daughter of a duke and the wife of the Marquess of Hastings. Her much-older husband had not made the trip from London with her. “Mrs. Talbot was just enlightening us as to your connection with Miss Mirren.”

  He glanced at Miss Mirren, who was using one hand to worry the fingers of the other. Poor thing—caught in Lady Hasting’s talons, and probably she had little practice navigating the social minefield that was the ton. The girl’s penchant for saying what she meant would only get her into trouble here.

  “Yes,” he said mildly. “I was quite devoted to Miss Mirren’s father.”

  “How wonderful,” said Lady Hastings “And why haven’t I seen you in London society, Miss Mirren? Where have you been hiding yourself? You must be…what? Twenty-five?”

  Good Lord, the woman was practically calling Miss Mirren a spinster.

  “Twenty-three, my lady,” Miss Mirren answered.

  Twenty-three, twenty-five, it was all quite on the shelf as far as society was concerned. Blackstone glanced at Miss Mirren, looking for evidence that she’d taken the slight to heart.

  “And I’ve only recently come to London to stay with my grandmother,” Emily added, her face unreadable as she answered the first of Lady Hastings’s questions.

  “And where were you before that?”

  “I grew up as a neighbor to Mrs. Talbot—then Miss Manning. Her family was kind enough to take me in when my father was campaigning. After he died, I went to live permanently with them. When Mrs. Talbot married this past summer, I decided to go to my grandmother.”

  He could see Lady Hastings preparing to ask another round of questions—probably the same ones swirling though his own mind. Just because she’d attained her majority, did she think she didn’t need a guardian? Was her grandmother adequate as a chaperone? Whom did she expect to escort her around town?

  “Miss Mirren and I are as good as sisters,” Mrs. Talbot said. “We shared a nursery, a nursemaid.” At the mention of a nursemaid, Miss Mirren looked up sharply, her expression intense, somehow, but difficult to characterize beyond that.

  “How kind of the Mannings to take you in,” Lady Hastings said in a slightly bored drawl.

  “Oh it was no sacrifice at all, I assure you, Lady Hastings,” said Mrs. Talbot. “I was an only child and positively starved for company.”

  “Yes, I can imagine. The country can be so…unrefined.”

  “I tried and tried to persuade Miss Mirren to remain in Somerset after I married my dear Mr. Talbot,” Mrs. Talbot continued, impervious to the slight. “We would have so enjoyed having her with us. But she insisted on going to her grandmother. She’d been wanting to move to town for some time.”

  “Yes, the company in London is highly desirable.” Lady Hastings no longer bothered disguising the fact that she was looking around the room for more interesting companions.

  “Oh, it wasn’t the company that attracted my friend!” Mrs. Talbot lowered her voice as if she were about to reveal a great secret. “It was the lending libraries! Can you imagine?”

  Lady Hastings picked up her quizzing glass and examined Miss Mirren. “You are something of a bluestocking. How charming,” she said, in a tone that suggested she was anything but charmed.

  Blackstone tamped down a spark of irritation. He had no right to be annoyed on Miss Mirren’s behalf though, did he, given how poorly he had treated her yesterday? He was trying to think what to say to move Lady Hastings off her interrogation when Miss Mirren transformed before his eyes from a quiet slip of a girl into an avenging angel.

  “Yes, I am a bluestocking, and I don’t mind you saying so.” She spoke sharply enough that Lady Hastings nearly dropped her glass. He almost laughed to see a genuine, uncultivated expression on the older woman’s face. “So much of London society is so shallow, don’t you find? People gathered at parties, stuffing themselves and prattling on about meaningless matters when there are so many opportunities to better oneself intellectually.” Miss Mirren gained several inches as she straightened her spine. “Not to mention when there are so many people suffering in the streets, right before our very eyes. It’s unconscionable.”

  “What does everyone say to some dan
cing?” asked Bailey, glancing at Blackstone. “What’s a party without dancing? If one of you ladies could be convinced to grace us with some music, we can just roll up this rug.”

  Bailey succeeded in dislodging everyone’s attention from Miss Mirren. Blackstone was embarrassed that he hadn’t intervened on her behalf earlier. What kind of a host allowed his guests to be so rudely treated? Even as he posed the question in his mind, he answered it. One who treated her equally rudely himself.

  As the ladies began organizing the music, Blackstone couldn’t resist directing a slight eye roll in Bailey’s direction. Anne, one of the Smythe twins—the one dressed in yellow—sat down to the pianoforte. As the guests began to pair up, he moved to a sofa near the edge of the makeshift dance floor.

  “You won’t dance, Lord Blackstone?” asked Gillian, the other Smythe twin. She ducked her head shyly after her question, as if she’d belatedly realized she was being too forward.

  “I’m afraid not, Miss Smythe.”

  “Oh, but you must!” exclaimed Mrs. Smythe, moving toward him with her hands outstretched, as if she meant to physically tow him to the dance floor.

  “I don’t dance,” he said. “The injury, you know.”

  “Oh!”

  Though the missing hand didn’t have to preclude dancing, it was a damned convenient excuse. In London, from time to time while on a mission, he would dance when absolutely forced to. But he’d be dashed if they’d make him do so here in his own house. The injury had forced him to sell his commission and to learn to write—and shoot—with his left hand. It made simple tasks a challenge, and it ached damn near all the time. But the silver lining was that it got him out of dancing. No one would dare question the excuse of a maimed war hero.

  His abstention would leave one woman short a partner, though. He watched as the gentlemen and ladies paired off and realized with a sinking feeling that the unpartnered lady was Miss Mirren.

  And she was headed his way.

  She sat next to him with a cool nod. Only as she watched the Scotch reel gather momentum and the dancers grow merry did her countenance begin to thaw.

  They sat in silence for a few minutes as he grew increasingly uncomfortable. Sneaking glances at her, he thought she did look rather like a bluestocking—or like a very beautiful woman trying to look like a bluestocking. Her pale green silk evening gown shimmered, though it was modestly cut and lacked adornment. A plain gold cross hung around her slender neck. She’d wrestled that luminous hair into submission, scraping it into a severe knot with nary a curl escaping—just as he’d silently exhorted her to do yesterday at the dock. None of the other guests, save perhaps Mrs. Talbot, knew what glory that hair was in its natural, unconfined state.

  A visceral compulsion to apologize for his behavior rose in his chest. Even as the urge overtook him, he marveled at it. He, who had committed all sorts of sins in the name of the cause—he who had betrayed men and women alike in the line of duty—worried that he might have hurt this girl’s feelings?

  No. He should face the truth. He owed Miss Mirren an apology for a great deal more than yesterday’s harsh words. But she would never get that apology, so this one would have to do.

  …

  Goodness, there were certainly a great number of things the Earl of Blackstone didn’t do, Emily mused as she sat beside him, watching the other guests dance. A man with an enormous library who didn’t read. A man with a beautiful lake who didn’t swim.

  The dancing perhaps was understandable. She shifted slightly, angling herself so she could see him in her peripheral vision. The couples had moved onto a country dance that required them to come together and grasp hands, then step away. Anyone who partnered Lord Blackstone would have to be sensitive about his missing hand, but it could be done.

  Looking at him casually, one didn’t notice anything amiss. He commanded such attention with his angular—and often scowling—face that a missing hand hardly signified. Indeed, one had to look closely to notice that one arm of his immaculate black coat did not have a hand poking out of it. But no doubt he noticed it all the time, when he tried to shake a man’s hand or bow over a lady’s. She wondered if it hurt. She’d heard stories of soldiers who experienced phantom pain in missing limbs.

  But, no. He didn’t need her pity. She had no plans to revise her opinion of him.

  “Miss Mirren.”

  She jumped a little. The intrusion felt like censure, as if he could see into her heart. Guilt quickly gave way to defensiveness, though, as she prepared to be insulted.

  He did not look at her as he spoke, just watched the dancers. “Miss Mirren, I must apologize.”

  “You must what?” She couldn’t mask her surprise.

  He turned to her with such intensity in his eyes that she had to force herself not to break with his gaze. “Apologize. You know, express remorse. Beg forgiveness.”

  “Yes, of course, I know what it means, my lord.”

  “I acted poorly yesterday morning. I shouldn’t have spoken to you the way I did. In fact, I shouldn’t have been there at all. I should have left you to enjoy your swim.”

  “It is your lake,” she conceded. “I suppose you had every right to be there.”

  “I hope you’ll make as much use of it as you like while you’re here.”

  How she wished she could. “You’re very kind, but I’m afraid now that your other guests are here, it won’t be possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “You said it yourself. Ladies don’t swim. At most, they take waters for their health, and then only in ridiculous bathing costumes that weigh so much when wet it’s a wonder they’re not the cause of more drownings.”

  He shot her a skeptical look. “You don’t strike me as a lady who cares about convention.”

  “Not caring about convention is one thing. Tromping into a lake in front of the crème of the ton is quite another. Although…” No. She checked herself. Confiding in the Earl of Blackstone was not wise.

  “Although?” he prompted.

  She sighed, but gave in—she did want to tell him for some reason. “I would very much like to sea bathe. I’ve never been.”

  “You weren’t very far from the shore in Somerset, were you? And you such an avid swimmer. I’m surprised.”

  She hesitated, not sure how much to say.

  “Sea monsters?” He cocked his head, looking thoughtful. “Your instructional manual on swimming didn’t contain a chapter on fending off sea monsters, I suppose. Yes, I can see your dilemma.”

  He was almost—but not quite—smiling. Was he teasing her? Was that even possible? Before she could think how to answer, the music changed, and Mr. Bailey approached.

  “Miss Mirren, would you honor me with the next dance?”

  She opened her mouth and looked toward Lord Blackstone.

  “Unless I’m interrupting?” Mr. Bailey said, looking back and forth between them.

  “Not at all,” Lord Blackstone said, his face returning to its usual austere demeanor. “You’re not interrupting a thing.”

  Chapter Four

  Eric handed the miniature to Captain Mirren. “Jasper is done with the copy. It’s drying now.”

  “Thank you. Excellent idea, that was. I’d hate to lose my only copy in all the chaos. And it makes the boy feel important.”

  “How old is she in this image?” Eric asked.

  “Oh, I should say about thirteen, perhaps fourteen—this was painted some years ago. It’s hard to keep track, isn’t it? Real life recedes when one is perpetually at war.”

  Eric rubbed his hands together in front of the fire. “She’s lovely. You must be very proud. Does she sing? Dance?”

  “Emily? I could only wish—then perhaps she’d have a chance at finding a husband. No, she’s dreadfully serious. Studious, even. I’m afraid she’s on her way to spinsterhood.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “In Somerset. She stays with the family on the neighboring estate. She’s unnaturally attached
to a maid there, an African slave.”

  “A slave?” Eric shouldn’t have been shocked. The trade had been outlawed, but that wasn’t the same as emancipation. “Seems one sees more free blacks in London these days. One doesn’t think about slaves so much since Mr. Wilberforce prevailed.”

  “There aren’t many in England, but that doesn’t mean we don’t prosper from their labor.”

  Eric could not disagree. His mother was mad for the tropical fruits the islands produced.

  The captain laughed. “Can you imagine? I’ve a daughter utterly devoted to an aging slave. She doesn’t sing or play an instrument. She’s exceedingly unbiddable. No wonder her prospects are so poor.”

  “She’ll have to be made to see reason somehow, made to understand that she’ll never marry if she doesn’t present herself in a more flattering light.”

  “Ah, but there’s the rub. The blasted girl doesn’t want to marry. I don’t know what to do with her. Never have. Says she’d sooner cut off her right hand than marry.”

  Blackstone opened his eyes when the library door opened and winced at the onslaught of pain where his right hand had been. He’d grown accustomed—and resigned—to the constant low-grade ache in his lower arm. Harder to cope with were the occasional flashes of blinding pain that made him think for a split second that his hand was still there.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your slumber, sir.” Stanway came forward bearing a note on a silver tray. “But I thought you would want to see this.”

  “It’s all right. I wasn’t sleeping.” It was true. He’d been suspended in one of his waking nightmares, his mind half aware of his surroundings, even as it communed with his ghosts. Blackstone massaged his arm, noting the butler’s frown. He plucked the letter off the tray and broke the seal. At last! “Manning will be here tomorrow. Where have you put Bailey?”

  “On the third floor, across from your bedchamber, my lord.”

  “Right.” Since Blackstone didn’t sleep in his bedchamber, visiting it only when Stanway dressed him in the mornings, he wasn’t acquainted with the specifics of where the guests had been settled.