Based on Charlotte’s puffed-up, smug self-satisfaction, Bella could tell that not only would she be taking orders from Charlotte in the plan they had just devised, but her cousin also had a covert strategy. As usual, Bella wasn’t able to tease out even a hint. Charlotte just denied and denied any machinations until Bella finally had to give up, knowing, at least, that Charlotte’s plans were usually effective and rarely discovered, a miraculous skill built during years of evading her despotic mother. Bella had never been so lucky against Aunt Minerva or anyone else.
With a new pot of hot water and plate of sandwiches delivered, Charlotte asked, “Are you finished with your brooding now or shall I leave you? More enjoyable pastimes are afforded me than listening to you tell me again how ugly you are.”
Bella flounced to the sofa and thumped herself down in a seat.
“I suppose it won’t do to continue, as you have a ridiculous response to everything I say.”
“Indeed I do. Now, with no wish to intrude on more important concerns, the reason for my call was not your whining about Wellbridge. “There have been responses to the advertisements in Ackermann’s. Nurse still needs Peggy's help with the children, and Mrs. Pearson would never say, but the kitchen staff is sorely missed as well.”
Bella sighed and picked at a pill on the arm of the couch. She would have to ask Mrs. Jemison to singe it again. With adequate chambermaids, such botherations might be addressed before she had to bring them to the housekeeper’s attention. Hannah might be dismissed if Bella once more pointed out such an oversight, except there was no one to replace her.
“Very well.”
“Shall we begin with your lady’s maid or the lower orders?”
“Whatever you like.” Bella was out of argument.
“Very good. I have seven qualified responses for your abigail, but only three are French.”
“Why does it matter if she is French?”
As she always had when explaining the inexplicable, Charlotte looked down from the summit of ‘I-will-always-know-better.’
“Every respectable woman prefers a French lady’s maid. They are quite the best with one’s wardrobe and hair, to say nothing of their discretion on the subject of gentlemen.”
Bella knew she was allowing herself to be manipulated, desperate to complete her staff and, therefore, Charlotte’s interference, but argued, “Why would I need discretion on the subject of gentlemen? It is not as though I am hiding a lover in the armoire.”
Charlotte refused to give up her place on top of the mountain of self-regard. “Perhaps because you stomp around screaming like a termagant when you don’t get your own way with your husband?”
“That’s not fair.”
“No? Have you not been screaming like a termagant?”
Termagant was surely an overstatement. It wasn’t as though Myron and Wellbridge hadn’t given her plenty of reason.
Charlotte sipped the last of her tea, and set the dish down nearly hard enough to break the porcelain. “Have a care, Madam. That china might have cost my husband his life.” Bella removed the empty cups to the tea tray and placed it carefully on the marble console table next to the door.
Charlotte began shuffling though papers and laid three letters out on the table.
“This one—Éléonore Renaud—worked for the Comtesse de Barrau in Paris. Before the Revolution, so she is too old to get into any trouble with the footmen. Afterward, she was in Dublin with Lady Ashe, so you know she speaks good English. The only drawback is she hasn’t been in service for five years, but I daresay one doesn’t forget how to draw a bath.”
Bella sighed. “I suppose not. Of course, why one has to force servants to carry buckets when one can do it oneself is another question entirely.”
“Because you no longer live in a wigwam.” Charlotte wrinkled her nose as if the room were carpeted in manure. “Here, read this,” she said, handing Bella another letter. “Janine Denis has been in the employ of the Duchesse d’Angoulême since her exile in Portugal. It would be quite a coup to share a maid with a future queen of France.” Charlotte tapped her index finger on the letter. “The girl makes no reference to her position, so she is probably naught but an ambitious chambermaid, but she is young yet and still trainable… and Louis-Antoine’s wife is said to be a great beauty.”
“She is a great beauty and very intelligent woman, but no abigail will magically erase my ugliness, only keep it to a minimum. Anyone who worked for royalty, even as a chambermaid, will find me a great step down.”
“Hush about your ugliness. Not another word. It says here she heard about you in Paris. Sycophantic nonsense in part, but I daresay Myron’s cheques are more reliable than anyone in the French court.”
Bella found another pill on the arm of the sofa. Tugging the loose thread began an unraveling. Much like my silly fantasies about Wellbridge.
Before the new sofa ended with yet another tear, she crossed to the mantelpiece to take up a candle from the inlaid brass holder. With great care for dripping beeswax, and caution against burn marks, she singed off the string, though it was too big a job to be accomplished with Charlotte pushing missives at her. She set the candle aside and took her seat, feigning interest in the next letter.
“This last was with the Baronesse de Montoire since just after Napoleon reinstated the nobility, would still be there if the baroness hadn’t gone to God. They stayed in the country in Alsace—Épinal—so the maid never served at the Emperor’s court, but she does have experience listed from before the Revolution—la Viscomtesse de Châtillon.”
“But with her last mistress deceased, no reference?”
“Of course she has a reference. Do you think I am entertaining applications from women without a character?”
“I think you would hire a Haymarket whore if she can arrange my hair.”
“That is an awful thing to say!” Charlotte looked more closely at the letter. “Lady Montoire’s daughter… let’s see, la Viscomtesse de Gourgue… has enclosed a note. Here, it’s in French. You read it.”
“You still don’t know French after all this time? Alexander is a learned man. Why did he not beat you until you memorized the irregular verbs?”
“Alexander has better uses for me than speaking French.” Bella snorted and Charlotte smacked her across the arm. “That isn’t what I meant. Here, the woman’s name is Michelle Delacroix. I love the name Michelle. It is so romantic.”
“Fine. Hire her. I have no preference, except I would rather no lady’s maid at all. It’s ridiculous. Some woman to sit in my bedroom and poke into my affairs? I wouldn’t do this at all but for you making my life unbearable.”
Charlotte looked like a fox planning its route before a hunt. “Affairs?”
Bella returned the clout to the arm. “You take my meaning.”
“Delacroix is the only one near London, so I’ll have her here sorting your awful hair in no time. If a French lady’s maid cannot move an affair with Wellbridge forward, no one can.”
Chapter 17
“Good afternoon, Sir,” Charlotte said as she curtsied to Nick in his library. While he stepped down the ladder he had been climbing to return a book near the ceiling of the second floor, she moved to a side table to relieve herself of the drawstring reticule that matched her dress, snow-white silk trimmed with black lace and red ribbon. She shrugged off the contrasting crimson silk spencer and draped it over her bag.
“Lady Firthley, a pleasant surprise.” He reached the balcony, and then took the spiral staircase to the lower floor. When he crossed the room to make his leg, he bowed over her hand and offered, “Please, do be seated.” He indicated a clutch of brocaded armchairs and a red horsehair loveseat in a loose semi-circle near the fireplace.
“You are very kind, Sir.” She gracefully took a seat on the loveseat before the fire, spreading the fall of her gown and crossing her legs at the ankle, the tips of her crimson satin shoes poking out from underneath, almost precisely matching the rubies in the hi
lt of his great-great grandfather’s saber, hanging above the hearth.
When last they spoke, Lady Firthley had been adamant Nick take back every offensive word in his ill-fated proposal, and had vowed to give him the cut direct until he knew exactly which they were. Huntleigh had helped untangle the mess, though Lord Firthley, when approached, only took the occasion to laugh, clap him on the shoulder, and ask whether Nick was certain he wanted to be leg-shackled.
Nick tried a compliment, the best technique he knew for relieving female pique, knowing this visit would certainly be rife with that.
“The ribbon is most fetching, especially with the black lace.” He winked at her. “Whoever suggested it must have very good taste.”
“Why yes, he does,” she smiled. Nick released his tortured breath when the gambit worked. “Thank you so very much for noticing. I had the outfit made especially for a certain gentleman.” He coughed as she fluttered her fan.
“I hope you will call me Charlotte, and I will call you Wellbridge, if you have no objection. Rude to assume, but we have met more than a few times and are about to have a much closer association.” She dipped her head, peeking at him from the corners of her eyes.
Nick stood abruptly and backed away toward the door to make sure it was open. She sent tiny glances his way, batting her lashes behind her fan. She bit her bottom lip as her hand lifted to her throat, breasts heaving as her breath grew faster and shallower. He sputtered and nearly ran to the open doorway, bellowing down the hall, “Blakeley? Is there tea?”
Once he was entirely unmanned, but not a moment before, she laughed aloud. “Not that type of association, though I am flattered you have now considered it.” She couldn’t help giggles falling out of her mouth at his horror, like minor-key musical notes tripping off their staff. “I do hope you end up my brother. You are ever so much fun to tease.”
“Oh, good Heavens. I thought you meant—”
“It is clear what you thought, and it is quite droll. I shall now be able to say, ‘I spoke of an affair with Wellbridge, but in the end, Lord Firthley won out.’ It is enormously comical, considering.”
“Considering?”
Her laughter stopped as fast as a rolling penny under an urchin’s foot.
“Considering Bella.”
The name was a gauntlet thrown into the center of the room. He startled, nearly backing into the doorjamb as Charlotte expanded, “She’s told me everything now. Well, nearly everything. Whatever she hasn’t, I expect to learn from you.”
“My lady—” There was no way he would be pulled into a conversation with a female on the basis of, I know everything. Tell me more. He wasn’t quite sure he could talk his way out of it, but wouldn’t go willingly. His hip brushed against the door latch and he stumbled on the threshold.
“Please, Wellbridge, do sit down before you walk into a wall.”
“I thought you sorely displeased with me,” he squeaked like a boy in short pants.
She tossed her head and waved her hand. “Oh, that. Of course I wasn’t as upset as I made out. I had to make a scene; Bella would never forgive me if I were to take your side.”
Following her direction, Nick twisted himself into the armchair across the small tea table.
Her amusement took a dark turn when she added, “You should not mistake me, though. She is still very angry, and rightly so.” She shook her finger at him like she were a nurse and he was in dresses. “You and Myron acted abominably. You will be lucky to pull the chestnuts from the fire.”
“Chestnuts?” His head was swimming.
“I’ve always found you intelligent, Wellbridge. Now you are acting downright doltish. You’ve dropped the cat among the pigeons, which you must know. You never, ever should have told her what you were planning. As long as she didn’t know, she might have complied, with the right motivation. Now she’s talked herself into—”
Blakeley came in then and left a pot of tea, staying only long enough to pour and indicate his intention to return with more complete service once Cook had arranged a repast. Finally served, Nick nearly burned his mouth taking a long sip.
Biting his lip and sucking in a breath, he said, “I must admit to considerable confusion. Begin what, exactly?”
She sighed, then spoke very slowly, as though he were the village idiot. “I. Am. Here. To. Help. You.”
He set down his cup, squawking voice finally mastered by the application of hot water, his ducal mien firmly back in place. “You needn’t speak to me like a child. Does Bella know you are here? Does Huntleigh?”
“Of course not,” Charlotte said breezily. “Either would be unproductive. But should you wish to bring about your stated aim, my information will be of far more use than Myron’s.”
The well-meaning discussion of Bella’s future with her husband had been complicated enough. Nick would bet every acre he owned that a well-meaning conversation with a female about Bella’s past would be incomprehensible.
He went to the decanter of brandy and poured a glass. “I find when Bella’s loved ones try to ‘help,’ it ends with me cup-shot before teatime.” To avoid the state, he only half-filled the tumbler before setting the stopper back into the carafe with a clink. He could always come back for more.
Her mouth twisted. “You are no toper, are you?”
He waved the glass at her. “I am not. Can you warrant there will be no need?”
Charlotte sighed, “Pray, continue.”
He took a seat in a Bergère chair across the tea table from his guest. “Thank you for allowing me to indulge in spirits in my own bookroom.”
“At one o’clock in the afternoon,” she sniffed, clasping her hands tightly in her lap.
“Half past,” he argued, taking a long draught. “Now, in what way might I help you?”
Her knees shifted from side to side, the cabinets on the left-hand wall placed under strict scrutiny, her face intermittently tilting, hoping not to miss something important on the right. Like a girl uncomfortable in court dress, trying to rein in nervous energy before being presented in the Queen’s Drawing Room.
“It is difficult to know where to begin.”
She had invited herself, so he made no argument, only sat back, sipped his drink and listened to the snapping of the coal fire and the windy bluster in the chimney, the ticking of the long-case clock. His mind wandered as he waited, resolving to start using apple and cherry wood instead of coal in his house fires, as Bella did, making her home smell like forests and orchards and magical meadows, not miner’s dust and the bitterness of broken men.
Finally, Charlotte began, “While I know you have offered for my cousin, I am not quite convinced of you. You may, in truth, prefer a more sophisticated wife, or no wife at all, should you remain true to form, and you have many times proven yourself dishonorable where holy matrimony is concerned. I would have you know, if you toy with Bella—pursue her as your mistress, then leave when you are finished, or marry her assuming she will turn a blind eye—I will destroy you in any locale where aristocrats gather. You may be a duke, Wellbridge, but I am a marchioness, and unlike you, my reputation is above reproach.”
Now fully grasping the direction of the conversation, he sat forward, elbows on his knees. At least, he thought, this hadn’t started as shrilly as their previous meeting. That could hardly be called a conversation, Charlotte screeching like a madwoman, berating him for a quarter-hour about irreparably insulting Bella. By honorably proposing marriage.
While his immediate inclination was to remind her she had already once treated him to the dulcet tones of a fishwife, he recalled her motivations for threatening him, so replied, “My intentions are so honorable they terrify me, Lady—Charlotte.”
“Good,” she harrumphed. “A man like you can do with some terror.”
He declined to mention his sister had said much the same thing not two nights past over supper. “After the prodigious number of women you have discarded in your lifetime,” Allie had snapped, “you deserve no
thing more than to pace the floors now. I hope she leads you about on a string until Lord Huntleigh dies, and then afterward for two full years of mourning.”
This had all but given Nick heart palpitations, but when he looked to his brother-in-law for assistance, Thad had merely raised his glass and shook his head as if to say, “You wish me to speak against my own wife when she is right?” After supper, Thad had belabored the point as if Nick’s sister had provided a script, though interspersed with considerably more sympathy.
Charlotte continued, “I will take your word as a gentleman you’ve not told me a falsehood.”
“I am honored by your faith,” he said, adding an ironic twist to his voice. “You might have noticed I negotiated a marriage contract, not the purchase of a house, carriage, staff, and wardrobe.”
“Given your supposedly honorable intent,” Charlotte said, her lips pursed against any comment on his mistresses, “if you are to persist, you will need information only I can supply.”
Just as Nick was finally going to get a bit of information on how to make Bella start speaking to him again, he heard Blakeley clearing his throat outside the door, then a sharp knock.
Nick rubbed the bridge of his nose between his fingers as he called out, “Yes?”
When the door opened, Blakeley entered with Nick’s samovar filled with hot water, coals already glowing. Behind him, a footman was pushing a rolling tea cart with a silver tea service encrusted with enough fruit and flowers it took Blakeley two full hours weekly to polish, as well as an assortment of cakes and biscuits.
“Your timing is perfect, Blakeley. I believe we are about to run out of tea.” Blakeley’s sharp eye on Nick’s full cup and empty glass spoke volumes.
“Shall I pour, Sir?”
Charlotte answered, “Thank you, no. I will manage.”
“Very good. Your Grace?” Blakeley’s nostrils flared. “Shall I bring more brandy?”
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