Definitely Not Mr. Darcy

by Karen Doornebos

  Once outside, she stopped only for a moment at the top of the wide, palatial stone staircase glimmering in the moonlight. Just the other night a footman had handed her out of a chaise-and-four and she’d waltzed up these stairs in her gown, gloves, and dancing slippers. Down she went now, taking three steps at a time. One of her calfskin shoes fel off, but she didn’t stop. Stockinged foot and al , she hopped into the gig and looked around for the driver.

  She could almost hear the proverbial crickets.

  The stable boy handed her the reins, because there wasn’t a driver.

  “Damn! Of course there’s no driver! I’m a footman! I’m the driver!” Chloe whispered to herself.

  The stable boy cocked his head at her, like a dog who knew he was being spoken to but was unable to understand the words. He hung two glowing oil lanterns on the front of the gig. “Just have it sent back in the morning,” he told her.

  The seat felt cold and hard. The stable boy stuck the whip into her hands. The horse breathed out of his nostrils and snorted. Terror whipped through her. She’d never driven a horse and buggy! She looked back toward the blazing torches flanking the great front doors at Dartworth Hal . The doors swung open. Two video cams and a boom boy appeared. Henry sidestepped down the stairs and swooped down to pick up her shoe as one of the cameramen barreled down the steps.

  “Can you, would you, drive me back to Bridesbridge?” she asked the stable boy. “I’m new and not used to these gigs.”

  The stable boy shrugged his shoulders and hopped in next to her. With a flick of his wrist the horses lurched forward, and it wasn’t long before the camera crew was wel behind them.

  The moon was floating high in the night sky now, in what would’ve been a perfectly romantic night if she weren’t crouched in front of a horse’s butt dressed in men’s clothes. She was torn between men and money, past and present, bending the rules and breaking them.

  They approached Bridesbridge in silence.

  “Thanks for the ride. I real y appreciate it.”

  The stable boy shrugged his shoulders again, but as soon as Chloe climbed out, she saw the camera crew catching up to her on an ATV.

  Just as she thought her little venture in deception was about to blow up in her face, the scul ery door creaked open, Cook held a candlestick into the night, and cal ed out, “Come in, footman! Teapot’s on!”

  Cook held the door open wide and Chloe stumbled toward the candlelight and the vague thought of hot tea. She slunk into the kitchen, where a teapot was steaming on the range. The smel of potato peels and yeast enveloped her.

  “Nothing to see here,” Cook told her, bolting the door so the camera crew couldn’t get in.

  Chloe col apsed into a chair at the pine table. In her wet stockinged feet, the stone floor felt cold.

  Cook grimaced at her. Her face looked as ruddy as a new tomato, and Chloe knew she was about to get gril ed but good.

  “I should blow the whistle on you right now.” Cook yanked the glasses off Chloe’s face. “You stole my spectacles. Do you know how much spectacles cost an underpaid cook like me?” Chloe’s eyes slowly readjusted to being without the glasses. “Do you know how long it takes to have spectacles made? I’m sure you don’t. And I’m sure you don’t care. You’re just an uppity Yank without a thought in the world—”

  “I am not!” Chloe interrupted, sinking in her chair. “I’m sorry about the glasses. Real y. It’s just—”

  “You don’t fool me for a minute.” Cook popped up and, with her bare hands, pul ed the steaming kettle from the range and set it on the table. The rising steam helped clear Chloe’s head. Cook reached up to retrieve a wooden box of used tea leaves from a shelf, which she had to do because only Grace held the key to the caddy with the fresh tea leaves. Servants had to use sloppy seconds. She darted a blue eye at Chloe. “You don’t fool me, dressed up as a footman either.” She mixed the tea leaves, set them in a perforated spoon atop a ceramic teapot, and poured the boiling water over them. “And you don’t fool me when you’re upstairs dressed in your gowns and gloves and baubles.”

  Chloe bowed her head. Cook was right, she was a total fake and could never be an heiress, not even an industrial heiress, from America.

  Cook plopped a teacup on the table in front of her. “You’re just un upstart Yank with lots of sil y ideas and no right. No right to an English blue-blood fiancé.”

  Why was this woman talking to her like this? she wondered as Cook took down another locked wooden box from the shelf. With another key hanging from her apron she opened this box to reveal a large, cone-shaped loaf of light brown sugar. Dartworth Hal had highly refined white sugar, the most expensive of the times, while here, at Bridesbridge Place, it was light brown. She took the sugar nippers and clipped off two lumps, dropped them into the cup, poured the tea in, and stirred. “Do you know how long the kitchen staff and I slaved over those confections you and Lady Grace bandied about the drawing room like so many tennis bal s?”

  “It wasn’t exactly like that. And, yes, I do know how much effort goes into the cooking here. I made the strawberry tart and the syl abub, remember?”

  Chloe sank lower in her chair. Even the used tea and not-so-refined sugar smel ed fabulous. “I didn’t think—”

  “No, you didn’t think, did you, now? If you were my charge, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  Slowly, guiltily, Chloe stretched out to cup her hands around the warm tea but Cook suddenly whisked the cup away.

  “What makes you believe I made this tea for you?” She plunked the teacup down on her side of the table. Her icy blue eyes scanned Chloe’s face for a response. “You used to help us servants out, but now you’ve gotten used to being waited on hand and foot. You feel entitled.”

  “That’s not true.”

  Cook slammed a cloth bag of flour onto the table and a puff of it rose like a storm cloud. “Do you know that I prepare the dough at this hour for your breakfast toast?”

  “I didn’t realize—”

  “You don’t realize plenty of things. More than eight thousand proper English applicants. And he turned them away for the likes of you.”

  Chloe needed to get out of the frying pan here. “I real y am sorry about the trouble I’ve caused. I blew it by dressing up like this. I just wanted to clear everything up with—Henry.” She looked at the tea caddy and sugar box as if for the last time.

  Cook plunked a big ceramic mixing bowl on the table and sent a puff of yeast into the air. “What do you care about Henry?”

  “I don’t understand why everyone keeps treating him like a second-class citizen. He’s a great guy. There, I said it. I was rude to him earlier and I just wanted to apologize, so I dressed up in footman’s clothes, because women aren’t al owed out after eleven, and I couldn’t write a note—or cal , e-mail, text, tweet, or send a Facebook message! If wanting to apologize is a crime, then I’m guilty, so turn me in.” She held her wrists out to Cook, as if Cook would handcuff her.

  Cook poured some flour and water into the bowl and mixed with a big wooden spoon. “I should turn you in, but I won’t. I, too, have a soft spot for Henry.”

  Chloe stumbled toward the door and looked away from her disheveled reflection in a row of copper pots and pans. She’d said too much.

  “You’d best go to bed,” Cook told her, taking a tin of salt down from the shelf above the washbasin and prying the lid open with her thumbnail.

  “Just do me a favor.”

  “You name it.”

  “Remember the cook.”

  Like she could forget.

  “And remember one more thing. I’m on your side.”

  She was?

  For a long time, Chloe lay in her canopied bed and tossed in her nightgown, unable to sleep. She thought she heard a mouse scuttle from the floor mirror to the writing desk, but there couldn’t possibly be mice running around her bedchamber, could there?

  She wished she didn’t care about Sebastian or Henry, but it was too late for t
hat. She moved over to her half of the bed—making room for—

  someone.

  T he next morning, she woke, unable to do anything except sit on the edge of her bed, even though it was Monday and there might be mail from Abigail. Fiona worked around her while a cameraman filmed. She must’ve been quite drunk to dress up like a footman and go to Dartworth! The very thought of it made her paralyzed with fear.

  “This is how it should be, mum,” Fiona said as she brushed Chloe’s hair with a large, heavy, gleaming silver brush in front of the French bombé dressing table. “It’s much better when you just let me take care of everything like this. ’Tis my duty.”

  Chloe wanted to be brushing Abigail’s hair, braiding it, getting her ready for the day.

  Fiona twisted Chloe’s hair back so tightly that Chloe winced. But she always did a great updo, and when Chloe looked in the mirror, she had to admire the sexy way her hair spil ed out from the knot atop her head.

  “James told me to bring this up to you, miss.”

  It wasn’t mail, but something wrapped in a blue silk scarf that turned out to be her shoe from last night. She sighed. It was a nice gesture on Henry’s part, and as far as that went, her mission had been accomplished.

  Fiona was pul ing back the draperies and sunlight was flooding into the room when suddenly Mrs. Crescent and Fifi came bounding in.

  Mrs. Crescent was almost breathless. “You missed breakfast, Miss Parker. The butler announced that your outing with Mr. Wrightman has been bumped by a group competition at the hedge maze. Can you fathom why?”

  “I can’t.” Chloe was shaky, and needed to eat something.

  Two plump strawberries from the Dartworth hothouse waited in a mortar and pestle bowl to be crushed and made into rouge for Chloe. Red, ripe strawberries. Overcome with desire, Chloe snatched them up and ate them both at the same time. What did it matter if her cheeks had no color today? After last night, she’d surely be sent home, anyway.

  Mrs. Crescent shook a finger at her. “I daresay it’s no wonder Lady Grace always looks so much more polished than you. You’ve gone and eaten your cosmetics again!”

  Chapter 13

  B eing a corn-fed girl from the Midwest, Chloe had seen corn mazes, but never a maze sculpted from eight-foot-tal yew trees. Ever since she arrived, she’d been enticed by the prospect of the hedge maze, and now, it seemed, was her chance to see it, although it did sting that the visit to the maze had trumped her scheduled outing with Sebastian.

  The women and their chaperones were gathering around the entry to the maze while Sebastian and Henry came riding toward them on their horses.

  Chloe had imagined running along the narrow, pebbled paths between the high hedges, dropping red rose petals behind her, Sebastian at her heels. They would meet in the pagoda in the center to kiss, his lips final y touching hers, her fingers final y grazing his squared-off sideburns, nothing but green al around and blue sky above—

  The butler interrupted her reverie. “This morning the three of you wil be competing for fifteen Accomplishment Points. Mr. Wrightman wil be sitting in the pagoda in the middle of the maze. You wil al be sent off into the maze at the same time, and the woman to reach Mr. Wrightman first wins the points and time alone with him until the other ladies catch up.”

  Chloe almost groaned out loud. This, of al the competitions so far, seemed the most demeaning. She crossed her arms and kicked the dust with her walking boots.

  Just then, out of nowhere, George came zipping up in an ATV. George!? Was he here to send her packing?

  Janey was sitting next to him, sipping coffee from a white cardboard cup.

  Chloe had given up drinking coffee here in England. Regency coffee tasted horrid, and the weak tea proved only marginal y better.

  George swung his blue-jeaned legs out of the cart and pushed his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose. A Bluetooth was stuck on his ear. Chloe couldn’t stand those things; Winthrop used to wear his al the time.

  “Girls.” He made guns with his fingers and aimed at Chloe and Grace. “A word?” He whipped off his Bluetooth and raked his hair. The air around him hinted of shampoo and toothpaste. His hair must’ve been loaded with product. How else could it have smel ed of shampoo and looked so much like bed head?

  “Over here.” When he grabbed them by the elbows, their parasols tipped to the sides. Regency men didn’t cal women “girls” and they didn’t yank women around by the elbows. After weeks of Sebastian’s and Henry’s gentlemanly behavior, even Grace seemed shocked at such treatment. In addition to bowing, Sebastian and Henry always stood when a lady entered the room, and a lady could get used to such things.

  George led them, faster than their calfskin boots could carry them, toward the topiary arch at the entrance of the hedge maze. Overhead, clouds were rol ing in.

  “No cameras,” George barked at two of the crew, and they backed off.

  Moments later, Sebastian and Henry arrived and tied their horses to a tree.

  Grace’s chaperone looked intent with concern and Mrs. Crescent sent Fifi on to be with Chloe.

  “Listen, ladies,” George began ominously, “I can be the king of grouchy Brit reality-show judges, you know.”

  Grace folded her arms just under the hem of her spencer jacket, which so nicely accentuated her boobs and tiny waist. “I don’t see what I have to do with al this.”

  Chloe stooped down to pick up Fifi’s leash.

  George flashed a frown and pointed his iPhone at Chloe. “Official y, Miss Parker, you’re on probation. You haven’t gotten caught on camera, and your antics are great for ratings, and those are just two reasons why I’m not getting rid of you here and now.” He paced around the soft grass, checking his phone.

  Chloe picked up Fifi, who began pushing at her arm as if he wanted her to rub his neck, or what would be his neck if he had one.

  “Suffice it to say that both of you are here, for the moment—with warning. Mr. Wrightman wants you both here because somehow he can picture you both as wife material, although I can’t say I agree with his judgment. Then again he doesn’t know everything I know, although I am tempted to tel him. Condoms appearing in reticules, shagging every footman in sight, going out after curfew—these are serious infractions.” He keyed something into his phone.

  Chloe tipped her wel -coiffed head, which, at the moment, was covered in the unfortunate poke bonnet. “Did you know that the condom was planted on me?”

  “We have no proof the condom was planted on you, Miss Parker, and unless you can produce proof, the jury’s stil out on that one.” George’s phone rang and they were saved by the bel .

  It’d been a while since Chloe heard a phone ring and it actual y sounded pleasant. For the first time in a long while, she didn’t cringe at the sound.

  She watched George as he talked on the phone to someone far away, to people other than this smal crowd, and she marveled at it, as if she real y were from 1812. She felt a sudden urge to snatch the phone from him and cal Abigail, just to hear her voice.

  Chloe watched George slide the phone into his back pocket. She just wanted to hold it, real y. Okay—she wanted to check her e-mail! Surf the Web! Buy toilet paper online! My God, what was happening to her? She clutched Fifi.

  “Now, Miss Parker, we’re on National Trust property at Bridesbridge Place—the key word being trust, okay? Respect it. The clothing, the grounds. Mr. Wrightman would be none too pleased if any damage befel his ancestral home or belongings.”

  “I would never damage anything on the grounds!” Chloe swore off sewing-cabinet vodka right then and there.

  “You must have the common decency not to destroy our English heritage, Miss Parker,” Grace said. When she tossed her head a few of her blond sausage curls fel out of her turban. “You of al people should be concerned for the grounds, what with your last name.”

  Chloe put her hand on her hip. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “I’l tel you what it means,” Grace returned. “
The surname ‘Parker’ originates in the Old French, meaning ‘keeper of the park.’ Your ancestors, Miss Parker, were groundskeepers and gamekeepers. It’s a most dreadful y common last name.”

  Fifi nuzzled under Chloe’s arm. “And your last name means ‘money’ in French, perhaps because your ancestors, not unlike yourself, I might add, were overly preoccupied with it.”

  George took his sunglasses off. “Ladies. I blame you both. Equal y. For everything.”

  Grace pouted. For some reason, her lips seemed plumper than they had been yesterday.

  George’s phone rang again. He smiled and talked as if nothing were the matter. He was the British version of Winthrop. She wondered if he, too, would make the crucial mistake of e-mailing his wife “Happy 35th Birthday” from across the country, without sending flowers, a present, or even bothering to cal .

  George wrapped up his conversation and set his sunglasses atop his head as the sky began to darken. “You’ve both been duly warned.”

  Fifi growled and Chloe forced herself to pet him, just to calm him down.

  George raked his hair. “God knows nothing can happen in a sil y hedge maze, but we have an archery competition slated for tomorrow if the weather holds. Aim for the targets. If so much as an apple gets hit by a stray arrow, the game’s over and you’l be replaced with two beautiful, smart, and eager prospects.”

  “You wouldn’t!” Grace practical y popped out of her spencer. “After al the time I’ve invested in this? Leaving al my clients high and dry? Real y!

  When you know very wel that al this is Miss Parker—Chloe’s doing!”

  Fifi quivered in Chloe’s arms, and at first Chloe thought it was from the rain, the first drops of which had started coming down, but then he snarled at something that looked like a weasel. It was burrowing under the hedge. Al of a sudden Fifi lunged from Chloe’s grip, flinging his hot little body into the gargantuan maze with his leash trailing behind him.

  Chloe held out her arms, as if she somehow expected him to come bounding back. “Fifi!” she cried, clapping as the dog squeezed under the hedge. “Come back here!”