Except Lord Matthison, a defiant spark of pride contradicted Madame’s scathing tones.
Ah, well, but he was only drawn to her because she looked a bit like someone he had once cared about, pointed out Madame’s voice with crushing accuracy.
Mary sighed wistfully. She did not suppose she would ever look into those dark, haunted eyes again. Or feel that hard mouth seeking a response from her startled, untried lips.
And that was for the best, she decided, unpicking the knot of the muslin square in which her supper was tied. Far better to sigh over what might have been, than plunge headlong into a course of action that could only be ruinous.
The cloth parted, and she discovered it contained a chicken leg, a wedge of cheese, an apple and a couple of slices of the plum cake she’d had at lunch.
At least eating gave her something to take her mind off the fact that she was shut up in cramped quarters with three complete strangers.
By the time she had finished her supper, two of the other passengers were snoring loudly. With their bodies slumped into their respective corners, hats over their eyes, they had gone right back to resembling nothing so much as untidy heaps of laundry.
That would be the way to cope with them. To think of them as sacks of laundry, rather than men. In fact, if she shut her eyes, not only would it blot them from her sight, but she might even be able to doze a little, too. After all, they all seemed to be managing it.
Men, though, she soon found out, were far less inhibited creatures than women, even when asleep. She had to retreat deeper and deeper into her corner as their lax limbs sprawled all over the place. They produced a lot more unpleasant smells, too, at far greater volume than she had believed the human body capable of emitting. And even if it had not been for the sprawling, and the snoring, and the belching—not to mention the other noxious effusions they all began to produce at regular intervals—Mary would not have been able to sleep for more than a few snatched moments at a time, because the guard blew his horn at every turnpike, loudly enough to rouse even the slender young gentleman next to her, who was the most obviously inebriated of them all.
Mary was the only passenger who got out every time the coach stopped for a change of horses. She welcomed the chance to breathe fresh air for a few minutes, and walked up and down to stretch out her cramped limbs.
By the time they pulled up in the yard of the White Hart, just before ten the next morning, she felt as though she had been through a wringer. She eyed the others with resentment as they unfolded themselves from their respective corners. Though they looked a little crumpled, every one of them managed to collect their luggage, and then disperse, flapping across the yard like washing torn from the line by a gusting wind.
She flopped down the steps, limp and shaky, and would have slithered onto the cobbles if the guard had not grabbed her by the arm, and held her upright until she steadied.
‘Someone comin’ to meet yer?’ he asked gruffly.
Mary hoped he did not notice how badly she wanted him to remove his great meaty paw from her arm. He was only trying to be helpful.
Mustering up a wan smile, she shook her head, explaining, ‘I only have to get as far as Orange Grove, though. I believe it is not far?’
He shrugged. ‘You best ask the landlord.’
To her relief, he let go of her arm then, to point to one of the doors leading off the yard. ‘Get something warm inside you while you’re at it.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, nodding as though she planned to follow his sage advice to the letter. Then she reached into her pocket and handed over the half-crown Madame had provided for her to tip him.
It worked like a charm. With a grin and a nod, he pocketed the money and stumped off towards the posting offices.
Mary lingered on the premises only long enough to get directions from one of the many porters employed there. She did not have any money to buy refreshments, and was besides so weary that all she wanted was to reach her destination, find a horizontal surface that was not bouncing about, and sleep the clock round.
She took the road the porter had pointed out, and the right-hand junction that he said led down to Orange Grove. It came out in the middle of a thoroughfare, which ran as far as she could see in either direction. To begin with, Mary turned the wrong way. She had to retrace her steps before finding Number Eight.
Which was a wig-maker’s.
Puzzled, Mary pulled the letter from her pocket and looked at the address again, in case she had remembered it wrong. But, no. In Madame’s neat round hand, it clearly stated Cleopatra’s, 8 Orange Grove, Bath.
Perhaps, in all the hurry, Madame had put down the wrong number. Perhaps Cleopatra’s was at number eighteen, or eight and twenty. Mary walked all the way up one side of the street, then all the way down the other, but none of the shops bore the name she sought.
Completely perplexed, she made her way back to the wig-maker’s. Perhaps this had been the correct address, but the modiste had moved on. If so, she only hoped the new shopkeeper knew where the former tenant had gone.
To her dismay, the rather forbidding gentleman who came to the counter informed her in extremely frosty accents, when she asked if he had recently taken over the business from a modiste, that his shop had belonged to his father before him, and to his father’s father before that. She left hastily, feeling embarrassed at having offended him, and unsure what to do next.
There had been, she recalled, a milliner on the corner, towards the High Street. She might have heard of Cleopatra’s.
The milliner had not, but when, in a burst of inspiration, Mary further enquired if there was anyone in Bath who might have a connection with Madame Pichot, her eyes lit up.
‘The French émigrée who makes such exquisite gowns for the ton?’ she breathed. ‘I did not know she had ever set foot in Bath!’
Mary frowned. Mentioning feet had reminded her how badly her own were hurting. Her boots seemed to have shrunk during the night, and felt as though they were sawing through the knuckles of her toes. Her head was beginning to ache, too, as she grew more confused and tired.
Had Madame actually said she had worked in Bath? She shook her head, bewildered. That conversation had grown hazy. She could not remember exactly what she had said. Only that she had mentioned having connections here. She looked down at the letter, which was beginning to look rather the worse for wear, wondering exactly what the connection with this Cleopatra was.
‘If it is a high-class modiste you are seeking,’ put in the milliner kindly, on seeing Mary’s strained face, ‘you might do better looking on Milsom Street.’
‘Thank you,’ said Mary, grateful for any suggestion that might lead her to the elusive salon. And, though her legs felt as though they belonged to a newborn foal, she set out in the direction the kindly woman had pointed with renewed determination.
Milsom Street was full of shops, the pavements thronging with their smartly dressed customers. But none of them, she ascertained by walking all the way up one side, and right back down the other, bore the name of Cleopatra above the door. The only thing she could think of was to go into every one that had anything even remotely to do with fashion, or might conceivably employ workers with a talent for stitchery. None of them could help her. And, as it came on to rain, and her appearance grew increasingly bedraggled, they became less than polite in the way they expressed their inability to be of help.
Cleopatra’s must be somewhere! Why could nobody tell her where it was? Or had she somehow muddled up the directions? ‘Stop and think,’she muttered under her breath. She had to get out of the rain, and try to work out what to do!
Ducking into a doorway out of the worst of the rain, Mary pulled the rather dog-eared letter out of her pocket yet again, and looked at the direction, half expecting it to be completely different from what she remembered seeing the last time she had looked.
But it still said Number Eight, Orange Grove.
It went against all her principles, but she knew t
he only way to get any more information about the mysteriously elusive Cleopatra was to open the letter and read it herself. Setting her bags down on the step, out of the puddles, she tugged off her gloves, turned the letter over, and broke the wafer sealing the single sheet of paper closed.
And her eyes widened in sheer disbelief.
There was nothing written on it at all.
She was holding a blank piece of paper in her hand.
She went cold inside as she realised what this meant.
There was no job. Probably no such person as Cleopatra. She was all alone, in a strange town, without a penny to her name.
For some reason, what hurt her the most was the way Madame had smiled when she had given her money to tip the guard. He was probably tucked up in snug lodgings right now, his belly full of tavern fare paid for with her half-crown, while she…her stomach clenched, feeling completely hollow, yet full of ice at the same time.
And that was when she began to shake.
She had trusted Madame. Molly had warned her what the woman was like, and she had still trusted her. She had got into the coach and actually thanked her for sending her away.
A gust of wind blew rain into the doorway, sprinkling the sheet of paper at which she was still staring in blank horror. And a wave of desolation swamped her, black and sickeningly familiar. She knew she had been alone, and cold and wet and miserable before. Feeling betrayed and deceived…
At that very moment, a shadow fell across the doorway. Even before she lifted her head, she knew who would be standing there. For some reason, she just knew that Lord Matthison would materialise out of the driving rain and deepening shadows to embody her feelings of misery and betrayal. She lifted her head with a sense of inevitability, and held out the blank sheet of paper, where her future security should have been written.
‘It is all your fault,’ she said.
He took it from her, frowning when he turned it over, and saw what Madame Pichot had done to her.
Then he looked straight at her, his expression as blank as the piece of paper he held.
‘Not all of it, Cora. But even so, I shall put it all to rights.’
She did not ask him what he meant. She knew why he had come. Had known the second he called her Cora.
He picked up her valise, and held out his arm.
There was nowhere to run, no other choice she could make.
Head bowed, she laid her hand on his sleeve, and set out into the rain beside him.
Chapter Five
Mary was lost too deep in the maze of her own thoughts to notice where he was taking her. Why had Madame done this to her? Why? How could she have deliberately stranded her in a strange place, with no money, when she knew how badly it would scare her!
She stumbled, as something inside her seemed to curl up, twisting painfully at the thought of how stupid she must have looked, thanking Madame for sending her to Bath, and saying how she would miss her! She clung a little tighter to Lord Matthison’s arm as she imagined Madame chuckling all the way back to the shop. For the price of a ticket on the mail, and half a crown to tip the guard, she had persuaded Mary to leave London quietly, thus averting the scandal the complaining woman had threatened to unleash. By making it look as though she had provided generously for Mary, she had dealt with the prospect of having to preside over workers simmering with resentment, too. Not that there would be much any of them could do, but she knew that if they learned of her current plight, they would all be angry on her behalf. For she had become one of them. Against all her expectations, considering the way they had once intimidated her with their cocksure ways and coarse language, she had forged a place for herself in that workroom.
She pictured them, clustered on the stairs, listening to that final interview she’d had in Madame’s office, with their eyes to the knotholes, taking in the significance of the plum cake and the second-best china. And a cold hand seemed to reach into her chest and squeeze. Could Madame have known they were watching? Was that why she had been so determined to spell out exactly why she was sending her away, even though she was convinced Mary would not understand the half of it?
It all made a horrible kind of sense. If Madame had known her workers were in the habit of spying on her, she had used that knowledge to her own advantage, rather than reprimanding them.
‘As I expected,’ she heard Lord Matthison saying, ‘the journey down has exhausted my wife. I trust you have our room ready?’
Mary blinked in bewilderment at finding herself standing in the foyer of what she had to assume was a respectable hotel, judging from the elegance of its décor.
‘Indeed,’a neatly dressed man she supposed must be the landlord replied. ‘If you would come this way?’
Wife? She frowned. ‘But…’
‘Not now,’Lord Matthison bent to murmur in her ear. ‘You may berate me as soundly as you please once we are in private, but not just yet, hmm?’
He slipped his arm round her waist, and with all the appearance of a solicitous husband supported her up the stairs and along the maze of corridors that led to their room.
Their room. As she crossed the threshold, she took note of the single large tester bed standing at one end of the rectangular room, along with a washstand and clothes press. At the other, set before a cheerfully blazing fire, stood a small table and two inviting wing-backed chairs. A far cry from the kind of opulence she guessed a man of Lord Matthison’s means would be used to. But then, as he led her towards the seating area, she caught the landlord eyeing her dishevelled appearance, then flicking an assessing glance at the plain overcoat that completely concealed Lord Matthison’s exquisite tailoring. To him, they probably looked like any moderately well-to-do couple, who could not afford a suite.
As the landlord made to leave, Lord Matthison turned towards him, and began issuing a series of requests. Mary scarcely took them in. The sight of the fire had reminded her how very cold and wet she was. She left his side, and kept on going till she stood right in front of it. Crouching down by the fender, she held out her hands to the flames. She was not wearing her gloves. That was right, she had taken them off to open the letter. The letter that was no letter at all, but a symbol of the most horrible cruelty, perpetrated by a meanspirited woman on a stupid, gullible fool…
Shaking with the force of her indignation, Mary reached into her pocket where she had shoved the letter after Lord Matthison had handed it back to her.
Molly had been right all along! She ripped the page in half. All Madame cared about was profit! She ripped the pieces in half again. She’d had Kitty packing up a meal, and Molly packing her trunk. Rip. Which, she suddenly realised on a fresh wave of anger, the old miser had no intention of sending on. Rip. Indeed she could not, because she knew very well Mary had nowhere to go. The pieces were now so small that Mary was having a struggle to tear them again. Furious at her inability to even tear the letter to bits small enough to satisfy her, she flung them into the flames with a cry of utter vexation.
‘That’s better,’ said a dark voice from behind her, making her jump. She had almost forgotten Lord Matthison was there, for a moment, so completely consumed was she by the dreadful sense of betrayal she had felt, as she had stumbled through the devious workings of Madame’s mind.
Lord Matthison thanked God he had employed Grit to keep an eye on the comings and goings at Madame Pichot’s emporium. The lad had been bright enough to recognise the significance of the French woman taking Mary off in a cab, laden with luggage rather than carrying the neatly wrapped parcels that one might expect to see coming out of a dressmaker’s shop.
He had known he had no chance of catching up with the night mail, but the amount of money he’d disbursed at the White Hart had soon bought him the information he needed. After securing a room at the Pelican he had made for Orange Grove, all fired up to enquire at every shop until he had located Cora. In the event, he had not needed to. She had been wandering up and down, in a bewildered state, alternately looking at the
letter she held in her hand, and examining the numbers over shop doors. He had not intended to approach her today. The things he had learned from the jarveys had made him wary of frightening her. He just needed to find out where she was going to live before returning to his own hotel where he could work out what to do next.
As the day had worn on, he had witnessed her descent into exhaustion and despair. And eventually realised he could not leave her alone to deal with whatever it was that had so shocked her about the letter she had been clutching like a talisman.
He had crossed the street, all thoughts of remaining concealed from her erased by the conviction he had to help her. He had experienced a flare of triumph when he had perceived that she had no option but to accept his immediate protection.
But that triumph had been short-lived. The moment she had laid her hand on his sleeve in a gesture of weary defeat had been like suffering a blow to his heart. He had thought she looked fragile when he had discovered her in the Flash of Lightning. But it was only a foretaste of how she looked now. He’d had to half-carry her up the stairs, and the dazed look in her eyes had made him wonder if she was on the verge of a complete collapse.
So it was a relief to see a resurgence of some spirit, to see her rip up that damnable sheet of paper, and utter that cry of protest against all that life had flung at her. To know that this latest ordeal had not been the breaking of her after all.
‘You will feel better still, once you have got out of your wet clothing, and had something to eat,’ he said.
‘You have no idea what will make me feel better!’
How could he stand there, so calmly, talking about eating, when her life lay in ruins?
Because he did not care. He had brought her to this. He had betrayed her! Held her in his arms, and kissed her, when all the time…
She lurched to her feet on a wave of anguish and fury. Her fists were already raised before she knew how badly she wanted to hit him. But she did not manage to land a single blow. He caught hold of her wrists, his reactions lightning swift.
Devilish Lord, Mysterious Miss Page 8