Mr. Wrightman guided her back to the bed, settling her on the mattress, which seemed to be stuffed with hay.
Mrs. Crescent came and sat so close to Chloe that the pug licked her arm. Chloe scooched away.
“Mr. Wrightman did not bleed you, my dear. Look at your arm. Do you see any open wounds?”
She checked both arms. “No.”
Fiona swung open the wardrobe doors and hung a yel ow gown, then a green one, and then another white, each one more exquisite than the last.
Chloe bit her lip and stared at the leeches, slurping and slithering in blood, gorged and happy as caffeine addicts after a few triple espressos.
“Whose blood is that, then?” she asked as politely as possible as she slid to the side of the bed farthest from the jar.
“It’s pig’s blood,” said Mr. Wrightman. He picked up the jar of leeches as if it were a glass of red wine. “I’l take them away.”
“Why did you tie my arm, then?”
“It’s what any apothecary would do when a lady who didn’t faint pushes away the smel ing salts. But luckily, it wasn’t necessary to do a bleeding.
This time.” He winked at her.
She clenched her fists. The pug was now in the bed with her, nudging her arm with his slimy nose to get her to pet him.
Mr. Wrightman held up the jar to the camera. “Don’t you find it fascinating, Miss Parker, how leeches cure everything from melancholy to deadly fevers?”
“I find it fascinating you diagnosed me with a fainting spel when in fact it may have been something much more serious, considering the gunfire.
And what am I, some sort of guinea pig? How could you even pretend to bleed me with leeches? As if I’m part of some kind of experiment here?”
Mrs. Crescent rubbed her pregnant bel y and whispered to Chloe. “Mr. Wrightman is a doctor at the finest hospital in London, dear. Truly, you were never in any danger.”
The piano downstairs stopped.
Chloe looked over at him leaning against the doorjamb. “Oh,” she said.
He put the leeches into his medicine bag. “The carriage ran into a rock and the wheel broke at the very moment that Lady Grace happened to fire her pistol—in the opposite direction.”
Chloe wanted to believe him.
He bowed. “If you wil excuse me, Miss Parker, you seem to be quite recovered. Al that’s required now is a bit of rest. If you need leeching, or any other medical assistance, I’m happy to oblige. Pleasure meeting you, welcome to Bridesbridge.” His coattails swished behind him.
Something sank inside her when he swooshed out the door. She hadn’t even thanked him. Worse, she implied that he was incompetent. Worse yet, she didn’t even let him know how happy she was to be here, despite the gunfire and leeches. But come on, he feigned bleeding her with leeches.
A woman laughed in the hal way. “Real y, Mr. Wrightman, you flatter me.” Grace sauntered into Chloe’s room without knocking, chin in the air.
“He’s such a good man,” she said. “So observant. So intel igent. So kind of him to even notice, much less compliment, my pianoforte playing while he has a patient in the house.”
Fiona and Mrs. Crescent curtsied while Chloe glared.
“Don’t bother curtsying on my account, Miss Parker,” Grace said. “Are we feeling better?”
Chloe looked at the camera. “Infinitely. Much obliged that her ladyship would inquire.”
“You do look rather piqued. Fiona, do get us some tea and a proper meal. I’m starved. And no doubt Miss Parker and Mrs. Crescent are, too.”
True, Chloe was famished.
Fiona waited until Chloe nodded in approval.
Grace lounged on Chloe’s settee in front of the window. “With al this fuss over you, Miss Parker, it seems the staff entirely forgot our breakfast.”
“The audacity. Perhaps they’l whip up a bul et pudding in your honor for dessert tonight.”
Grace looked confused and her blond sausage curls bounced as she slid the turban off her head.
Chloe smiled. Grace didn’t get the obscure reference to the festive Regency parlor game in the guise of a dessert that included a real bul et and Chloe made a mental note to have it served up here sometime very soon.
Mrs. Crescent anchored herself in a scrol -armed chair beside Chloe’s bed, hand on her bel y, Fifi curled at her feet.
“I’m here to make amends,” said Grace as she looked outside. “I do apologize, even though it was a misunderstanding. It seems a bul et never hit your carriage. Your wheel crashed into a rock.”
Chloe leveraged herself out of bed and stood strong this time, smoothing her gown over her legs.
“Can you manage it, dear?” Mrs. Crescent asked, and Fifi lifted his head.
“Yes, I’m fine.”
She slid on her shoes.
“Miss Parker, you real y should have Fiona put your shoes on for you,” Grace said. “What would we do without servants after al ? Life here would hardly be tolerable. Thank God for that bril iant Mr. Wrightman. Any minute that I’m not with him seems like an eternity.”
“Real y?” Chloe asked. Grace was catwalk stunning; she seemed a little beyond Mr. Wrightman’s league.
“Mr. Wrightman is an amazing man,” Mrs. Crescent said. “Charming. Why, I truly was touched when he confided in me . . .”
Mrs. Crescent launched into an anecdote about how much Mr. Wrightman admired mothers like her and how he wanted to be a father. One of his cousins recently had a baby and named it after him, and the moment he held that baby he knew he was ready. Ready to fal in love, marry the woman of his dreams, and have children.
Fiona stepped in carrying a tray with a Wedgwood teapot, teacups, and some sort of bread piled high and set the tray on a table near Mrs.
Crescent.
Chloe couldn’t believe a maidservant was serving her tea in her boudoir, and she leaned in to admire the teapot’s design. Both sides of it had been hand-painted with the ruins of an abbey standing in a field of yel ow flowers and green grass.
Grace sprawled in a chair Fiona had pul ed up for her. “Wel , there is one other thing that makes it exciting. But when you’ve been here for weeks as we have without—”
“Wait a minute. Did you say you’ve been here for—weeks?” Chloe pul ed her own Empire chair to the table.
“We’ve been here, what, three weeks now, Mrs. Crescent?”
Mrs. Crescent nodded. Chloe plopped down in her chair, rattling the teacups in their saucers. “Three weeks?!” She lowered her voice. “I mean—
real y?”
“Real y.” Grace took a skeleton key from her lap, unlocked a wooden box on the tea tray, and scooped tea leaves into a strainer over the teapot.
The cameraman turned his camera on Chloe. The mike dug into her back, her stomach roiled, and her ears burned, she was so upset. The rule book said a Regency lady must never go to emotional extremes. She should never be too happy, too sad, or too angry. Suddenly she didn’t even want tea. She gaped at Mrs. Crescent, who was buttering her bread. Fifi scuttled over to the table, wagging his curl of a tail. George had warned her of surprises, but this? How many Accomplishment Points had the other women garnered in al that time? And they obviously had already gotten to know Mr. Wrightman. She felt the urge to hurl a teacup into the camera. “Mrs. Crescent, wil you pass the knife, please?”
Mrs. Crescent looked up from her plate.
“The butter knife, please. And the butter.” Chloe buttered her bread with vigor then stabbed the butter knife upright into the butter dish. Her first English tea in England—ruined. Stil , she realized that she hadn’t eaten since the breakfast on the airplane. And sheer excitement had kept her from eating then. So she hadn’t eaten in more than twenty-four hours and real y was starved. The bread tasted grainy, though, and too floury, which indicated that the food, too, would be historical y correct.
Mrs. Crescent spoke first. “Miss Parker. We’ve been here three weeks and several women have come and gone. Last
week, my former charge, Miss Gately, had to leave due to a family emergency, and that’s why you were chosen to join us. Miss Gately made the most amazing things out of bits and bobs, didn’t she, Lady Grace?”
“Oh yes,” said Grace. “She was so talented. So accomplished. She took a rather insipid bonnet of mine and made it quite attractive, real y. Pity she had to leave.”
The tea was watery and Chloe looked into her cup. Had she come al this way to drink weak tea and play second string in a posse of women vying for Mr. Wrightman’s attention?
“Something wrong with your tea, dear?” Mrs. Crescent asked Chloe.
“No. Yes. It’s so much different from what I had expected. You can imagine.”
“You wil come to like it, as I have,” Mrs. Crescent said. “Fiona, please put some sugar in Miss Parker’s tea.”
Fiona took a tongslike tool and cut off three lumps of brown sugar from a mound in a dish on the table. She dropped the lumps into Chloe’s tea and stirred for her.
“Tea is very expensive, what with the Napoleonic Wars,” Mrs. Crescent explained.
Fiona dropped Chloe’s teaspoon on the floor. “Sorry. So sorry, miss,” she said.
“It’s fine. No worries—not to worry.”
Grace yawned and covered her mouth. “It’s so quiet here one quite forgets al about the wars.”
Fiona was holding on to the fireplace mantel as if to brace herself.
“Are you al right, Fiona?” Chloe asked.
Grace locked the tea caddy. “One great thing about war. Al those gorgeous men in red coats.”
Fiona hurried out. Chloe stood to go after her, but Mrs. Crescent patted the chair for her to sit down. “Since tea is expensive, it’s kept under lock and key here,” she continued. “Perhaps you don’t do that in America. The highest-ranking lady—that would be Lady Grace here at Bridesbridge—
holds the key to the tea caddy.”
Grace hooked the tea-caddy key to a bejeweled thing dangling from the side of her waist.
“Do you quite like my chatelaine?” she asked Chloe. “Only the lady of the house carries one. See? There’s my watch on one chain. My seal on another. And the tea-caddy key. It real y is quite clunky with this thing clanking around al the time. But it is a status symbol, I suppose.”
“I’m glad I don’t have to lug one around,” Chloe said.
Mrs. Crescent cleared her throat. “Often, to conserve supply, we brew the tea weak. Very weak indeed. In lesser houses, tea leaves are reused.”
The tea did taste better with sugar, and al this talk of tea would’ve been more interesting if Chloe had not been so angry that this thing started three weeks ago and they’d obviously added her only to amp up the drama.
Grace stood to leave. “It’s a shame that you can’t shoot pistols with me, Miss Parker. Only titled ladies can shoot. It would be such a diversion.”
With that, she spun to the other side of the room.
Chloe turned to Mrs. Crescent with a smile. “Now, that does sound diverting. But I’m sure we can arrange a duel at dawn with swords or something.” She lowered her voice. “What have I done to her, anyway?”
“Nothing, dear. You’re new, and fresh.”
Chloe hadn’t considered coming in late to the game an advantage until now.
Fiona returned, looking as if nothing had happened, and with a clanking of china and silver, cleaned up the tea things.
Chloe gathered the silverware for Fiona until Mrs. Crescent tapped her wrist and shook her head.
Grace sauntered back over to Chloe. “You don’t have titles in America, do you?”
“Wel , my father always cal ed me ‘princess.’ Which I believe ranks higher than a lady.”
Grace rattled her chatelaine. “We might practice archery together. You needn’t be titled for that.”
Mrs. Crescent curtsied and it took Chloe a while, but she did bow her head. Nevertheless, as Grace turned to walk down the hal way and the cameraman fol owed, she pretended to shoot her in the back with a bow and arrow.
“Might I have a word?” Mrs. Crescent brought a handkerchief to her sweaty brow. She whispered, “I’m glad to see you’re a fighter. I’ve never seen anyone handle her quite like that. We have a chance at winning, you know. A big chance!”
“What do you mean ‘we’ have a chance at winning?” Fifi nuzzled his head under Chloe’s arm and Chloe edged away.
“We’re in this together! Of course you know your father hired me to find a suitable match, and if we get Mr. Wrightman to propose to you, I get five hundred pounds.”
Chloe’s real father didn’t have an English pound to spare, so this must’ve been part of the script. It rang true, because Chloe knew chaperones were often hired by eager fathers during the Regency, and the chaperone would be paid a predetermined amount when she married off her young charge.
This gave Mrs. Crescent a real stake in Chloe’s winning.
Mrs. Crescent whispered, “I get five hundred pounds from your father and ten thousand from the show itself if we win, and I real y need to win.
That’s al I’l say about the game for now.” She looked crushed. “You wouldn’t know how it is when you’re a mother—you don’t have children.”
Chloe looked down at her bal et-flat shoes. Abigail used to take bal et, before she switched to hip-hop.
Another camera came in; this time it was a camerawoman.
Mrs. Crescent changed her tone and spoke up. “So, I have four children, and another on the way.” She patted her pregnant bel y. “Our five-year-old son needs surgery, the physician said.”
Fifi licked Chloe’s arm and Chloe rubbed it off. “For what?”
“To remove a lump in his neck. He’s always been sick and we have no more means to pay. The local physician has a long wait list, and we want to get it done as soon as possible, which means we have to go into town, which is going to cost us.”
Did Mrs. Crescent’s son have a medical issue in real life? Or was this just part of the chaperone’s character sketch? Chloe knew that socialized medicine meant often getting wait-listed for a procedure and thought maybe the Crescents wanted to hurry everything up and pay for it to be done in a private clinic. She tried to catch Mrs. Crescent’s eye, but the worried mother looked away wistful y, toward the window.
“I’m counting on that money.” Mrs. Crescent put her hand on Chloe’s knee. She looked Chloe in the eye. “My whole family’s counting on it.”
Her story had to contain some element of truth. “What’s your son’s name?”
“Wil iam,” Mrs. Crescent said, without hesitation. She opened a locket hanging around her neck and pointed to a miniature portrait of a boy with blond hair and curls.
“He looks like a little Cupid.”
Mrs. Crescent closed the locket, rubbing it with her fingers. “He is a love. It’s hard to be away from him for weeks on end. You can’t imagine.”
Sweat dribbled down Chloe’s back. “It must be hard.”
Mrs. Crescent stood and waddled toward the door. “Having children changes your priorities forever. Right. Tonight you’l meet the rest of the women, but for now, Fifi and I can show you Bridesbridge Place.”
Chloe wanted to know more about little Wil iam, but she soon got swept up in the tour of Bridesbridge. She gushed over everything, from the drawing room and its pianoforte to the kitchen garden thick with dil , lavender, and basil.
“Might you show me the—water closet, Mrs. Crescent? Al that weak tea seems to have gotten to me.”
Without a word, Mrs. Crescent guided Chloe to her boudoir, where, like a statue, she pointed to the bottom shelf of a credenza. On the shelf, atop a linen towel, sat a china pot, shaped like a gravy boat, only slightly bigger. Chloe lifted it by the handle even as her heart sank.
“A chamber pot?”
“Yes.”
“There must be a water closet somewhere.”
“You’l find a basket of rags under your bed. The chambermaid wil take care of ever
ything when you’ve finished.”
The poor chambermaid!
“I’m going to take a little nap.” Mrs. Crescent rubbed her bel y. “I get so tired these days. Settle in. We’l spend the next forty-eight hours working on your accomplishments. Dancing. French. Pianoforte. We have much to catch up on, and the task of the day is mending pens.”
Chloe had to chuckle at the reference to the scene in Pride and Prejudice where Caroline Bingley offers to mend Mr. Darcy’s pen. What fun that would be, but how horrifying the thought of a chamber pot was. She set it on the floorboards. First a chamber pot, then Lady Bootcamp. They were trying to break her, to make her crack on camera, to become the crazy, crying girl that was so good for ratings.
“Come, Fifi.” Mrs. Crescent left.
A cameraman filmed Chloe staring into the chamber pot until she shut the door on him. He must’ve been her designated cameraman because he always seemed to be the one who fol owed her when she went off on her own. He was a lanky guy, in his late twenties maybe. Like the other camera crew, he never said a word.
She set the chamber pot back down under the credenza. The whole thing reminded her of potty-training Abigail. “There’s got to be a bathroom here somewhere,” she said out loud.
She opened the door, and the cameraman fol owed her as she dashed through Bridesbridge, checking every door. The rooms she had found so charming earlier, with the neoclassical clocks and Oriental vases and silver epergnes whizzed by in a blur. Some doors were locked and she was convinced one of them was a bathroom. Grace floated by just as Chloe yanked on the last ornate silver doorknob of the last locked door.
“Looking for something, Miss Parker?” Grace asked in a flat voice.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a key to a water closet, would you?”
Grace smiled, fingering her chatelaine. “I have heard of some extremely wealthy houses instal ing newfangled water closets, as you say, but I cannot imagine you are used to such luxuries in America. We don’t have anything of the sort at Bridesbridge.”
Definitely Not Mr. Darcy Page 6