The other guests were all terribly old. Lady Whitmore she had already met. Her husband was a gloomy man whose vest strained over a protuberant belly and whose nose was prominently veined. Annis had to pinch herself to keep from staring at it. The Hyde-Smiths were a gray-haired pair with a startling resemblance to each other, with thin, arching noses and vanishing chins. The Derbyshires were even older, and rather withered, like plants that hadn’t had enough water.
The flame of resentment toward Frances for forcing her to endure such an afternoon burned lower in Annis’s breast than she might have expected. She sat quietly, letting the innocuous conversation drift around her in bits and pieces. She repressed her yawns and tempered her usual bluntness out of respect for the advanced ages of the company.
As they climbed the stairs to dress for dinner, Frances remarked in an undertone, “You were charming with all those ancient people, Annis! I think the dowager marchioness was impressed. You surprised me.”
Annis cast her a sidelong glance. Frances didn’t look surprised at all. She wore her cat-who-drank-the-cream look, her lips curling, her eyes glowing beneath lazy lids.
Annis said, “Four days of this, Frances? Is that really what you want?”
“Oh yes,” Frances said. She had reached her room, next door to Annis’s. Her cat’s smile broadened as she put her hand on the latch. “Yes, this is exactly what I want.” She pulled the door open and spoke over her shoulder as she went in. “Do wear those pearls of yours, Annis. See to it you look your best.”
In the cavernous dining room of Rosefield Hall, candelabras glowed on a long table laden with silver and crystal. Their yellow light glimmered on half a dozen sideboards but left the corners of the room in shadow. An enormous fireplace dominated one end of the room, with what looked like a small tree burning in it. The ceiling was decorated with creatures Annis couldn’t identify in the gloom.
Lady Eleanor saw her gazing upward and came to join her. “It’s Tudor,” she said. “They’re lions and griffins, heraldic figures, the same as the stone figures on the roof. The plaster paneling is even earlier, sixteenth and seventeenth century. It’s all a bit dim in the candlelight, I’m afraid. One of these days we’ll have electric lights so you can see them properly. A bit of a barn, this room, isn’t it?”
“I love barns.”
“Do you indeed, Miss Allington?”
Even in her bemused state, Annis recognized the humor in Lady Eleanor’s voice, and her cheeks warmed. It had been an inappropriate response, born out of the odd feelings she had been having since yesterday. “I’m sorry, Lady Eleanor. That sounded silly. The mention of barns made me think of the beautiful horses in your pasture, the ones I saw when we arrived. I love horses.”
Lady Eleanor smiled. “How fortunate. Horses are one of Rosefield’s passions, too.”
Annis wasn’t certain who Rosefield was. She was afraid she was supposed to know, so she didn’t ask.
Her hostess gestured to a chair at one end of the glittering table. “Here, Miss Allington. You’ll sit here, on the marquess’s right.”
A uniformed servant hurried forward to pull the chair out, and Annis sat down. A heartbeat later, she realized no one else had taken their seats. They were all standing in front of their chairs, and several were watching the door. Her cheeks burned again. The servant behind her, who could hardly be much older than she, whispered, barely moving his lips, “They’re waiting for His Lordship, miss.”
“Oh,” Annis whispered. “Thank you.” She came to her feet, resisting the urge to cover her red cheeks with her gloved hands. She glanced at the other guests and caught the eye of Mrs. Derbyshire, just across from her. The lady wore an evening dress of rather rusty black silk and an enormous diamond brooch. Both looked as if they belonged to a different age, just as Mrs. Derbyshire did. Annis was startled when the old lady lowered one eyelid in a wink and her wrinkled lips twitched.
Annis grinned, then ducked her head to hide it. It was a small gesture on the part of Mrs. Derbyshire, but a kind one. It seemed the old lady understood Annis’s discomfort. Perhaps she even sympathized. The heat in Annis’s cheeks subsided, and she was glad she had been patient during the interminable afternoon.
Annis’s dress seemed embarrassingly bright compared with Lady Eleanor’s mourning black. Her gown was cream silk, with pink embroidery on the sleeves and on the neckline. Pink beads crusted the bodice and the hem of the skirt. She wore her mother’s pearls, and they felt cool and smooth against the bare skin of her throat.
There had been no more occurrences like the one in her bedroom in New York, no sudden flashes of understanding, but the pearls felt protective. She touched the center stone as she waited to see who this lordship was and why everyone had to stand waiting for him. She could see the first course already cooling on the sideboard. The butler, a stiff man of middle years, stood at attention beside it, his expression remote, as if the meal’s growing cold didn’t matter in the least.
The door to the dining room opened, and one of the servants hurried to hold it as a tall, slender man came through. He wore a black tailcoat and a high-collared white shirt with a black bow tie. His waistcoat was black, too, buttoned around his lean middle. As he crossed the room to the table, the ladies dropped tiny curtsies, and the gentlemen inclined their heads.
Lady Eleanor said, “Rosefield! At last. Where have you been?”
He said, “Mother, my friends, I do apologize. There is a problem with the roof of the stable block, and I lost track of time.” He nodded to each guest in turn, saying their names. When he came to Frances, he paused, glancing at Lady Eleanor.
She said, “May I present Mrs. George Allington, Rosefield? She is our American guest. Mrs. Allington, allow me to introduce my son, the Marquess of Rosefield.”
Frances curtsied. The marquess bowed. As he straightened, his gaze moved up the table to the place where Annis stood, wide-eyed, her breath stopped in her throat. The marquess stared back, his lips parted in surprise.
Lady Eleanor said, “And this is Mrs. Allington’s stepdaughter, Miss Annis Allington. Miss Allington, my son, the Marquess of Rosefield.”
Annis couldn’t think what to say, so she dropped a curtsy and dropped her gaze at the same time.
His Lordship cleared his throat and started toward his place at the table on her left. When he reached Annis, he bowed. “Miss Allington,” he said, with a hint of irony in his tone she hoped only she could hear.
“M-my l-lord,” she managed, through a dry throat. She straightened and lifted her head to meet his gaze directly. Her heart thudded beneath her pearl-encrusted bodice. She didn’t know what her response should be. Surely it was up to him to reveal—or not to reveal—that they had met. He was her host. He was a Lord Something or Other, for heaven’s sake.
She decided in a heartbeat. It was his house. Let him solve the problem.
She looked away, and he stepped past her to his chair. A servant held it for him, and once he took his seat, there was a rustle of silken fabric and a scraping of chair legs on the tiled floor as the rest of the dinner guests settled into their chairs at last. Annis did, too, the footman sliding her chair neatly in behind her knees, then lifting her napkin from the charger before her. He managed, somehow, to flutter it open and let it drift across her lap without so much as brushing her with a fingertip.
Annis settled herself, smoothing the snowy napkin across her knees as she stole a glance at the young man to her left. His fair hair was carefully brushed, and it shone as if it had been smoothed with a bit of macassar oil. He had taken time to shave, or perhaps his valet did it for him. He looked younger in his dinner clothes, a bit like a boy playing at being a grown-up. Indeed, his shirt collar was ever so slightly too big, and it made his neck look boyish and vulnerable.
He was careful, she saw, to keep his gaze averted from her. As the soup was served, he engaged Mrs. Derbyshire in conversation, leaning toward her as if to emphasize how interested he was in what she had to say.
>
Mrs. Derbyshire spoke with him, but as the first course began, she pulled back a little and turned to speak to Mr. Hyde-Smith. Her message was clear: His Lordship was to speak with the girl on his right. The seating arrangement was deliberate.
Annis glanced down the table to where Frances sat next to Mr. Derbyshire, with Mrs. Hyde-Smith opposite and Lady Eleanor on her right. Frances’s elegantly coiffed head was bent as she respectfully listened to something Mr. Derbyshire was saying, but she managed to cast a sidelong look at Annis. Annis, with His Lordship ignoring her and Mr. Derbyshire engaged with Frances, had no one to speak to.
Annis lifted one eyebrow in Frances’s direction, suppressed a sigh, and began on her soup. An excruciating evening stretched ahead of her, even more enervating than the afternoon had been. If His Lordship—what was she supposed to call him? Not Rosefield, as his mother did, surely? In any case, if he was not going to speak to her, her hopes of visiting the stables and getting close to those magnificent horses in the pasture were going to come to nothing. That was the only activity she could imagine that would alleviate the tedium of this visit.
The soup was taken away, and a small chilled salad took its place. The footman bent close to Annis and asked if he might pour her a glass of wine. She hesitated, then saw that everyone else had accepted. She murmured, “A half glass only, please,” and he obeyed.
She passed the time, when she had finished the salad, watching the butler’s flashing knives at the sideboard, carving a roast of some sort. It was served with a side dish of fresh buttered peas, and when she tasted them, she couldn’t resist a murmur of appreciation. Mr. Derbyshire heard her and turned to speak to her at last. “The Seabeck farms are the best in the county.”
“Are they?” she began, but was interrupted in this first conversational effort by Lady Eleanor, speaking from the far end of the table.
“Rosefield,” Her Ladyship said, her voice echoing under the high ceiling. “I understand Miss Allington has a great interest in horses. You must tell her all about your Andalusians.”
It was not so much a conversational gambit as an order. His Lordship, whose Christian name no one had mentioned to her—perhaps no one used it—cleared his throat. A mannerism, Annis thought. He had done it in Regent’s Park, too, when he was embarrassed—that is, when she had embarrassed him.
Obediently he turned to face her, but he leaned a little to his left, as if supporting himself on the arm of his chair. In truth, Annis thought he was keeping as much distance from her as possible without offending his mother. Perhaps he was afraid of Lady Eleanor. Perhaps he was afraid of women in general.
He cleared his throat again. “Miss Allington,” he said, with an inclination of his head. “It would be my pleasure to show you our stables.”
“Thank you,” she said, and then added, since everyone else seemed to say it all the time, “my lord.”
His cheeks pinked. His mother had turned her attention to the Whitmores, and conversation bloomed at the other end of the table. The marquess said, “I suppose you haven’t brought a riding habit.”
She put out her chin, though she knew it wasn’t her most attractive gesture. “I always travel with a riding habit,” she said.
He blinked, as if she had scolded him. “Oh. Oh, I see.”
“Yes?” she prompted.
His cheeks grew even more rosy, and she experienced a wave of irritation. He really was rather a child, despite being so tall, and having a title and a huge estate all his own. She stared at him, waiting for the invitation he was now obligated to extend.
“Oh,” he said again. “Well, that’s lovely, isn’t it? Perhaps you would like to ride out tomorrow morning.”
“I would like nothing better,” she declared, then withdrew her jutting chin and smiled. “Truly, my lord, I would be thrilled to ride one of your Andalusians, if you will permit it.”
The pinkness of his cheeks receded, and he managed an answering smile. His posture relaxed a little. “Very good,” he said. “I have just the horse, I think.”
“Your own Breeze? She’s glorious,” Annis said. “I would love to—”
“Oh no,” he said hastily. “No, I think Breeze would be hard to handle for a young lady. She can be headstrong, and at the gallop she’s a bit rough. Also, she’s never been under sidesaddle.”
Annis sat up straight. “Sidesaddle! But I only ride cross-saddle, of course!”
He flushed again and cast a rather wild-eyed look toward his mother. Lady Eleanor, it seemed, was deep in discussion with Lord Whitmore and didn’t look up. “I don’t think—That is, ladies of our class—It is hardly genteel to—”
Annis couldn’t resist a little rush of sympathy for him. He was rather like Velma, in a way. He had such difficulty expressing himself. He must be several years older than herself, but in this way he seemed much younger.
She leaned toward him, intent upon her argument. He shrank back, but she persisted. “I’m confident you will understand,” she said, “that the custom of riding sidesaddle should have been abolished long ago. It was a bad idea to begin with, and now, in this age of more freedom for women and more practical considerations for our horses, it’s archaic. Women should ride with the same security and control that men do.”
“It’s just—it’s not decent,” he mumbled, casting a desperate gaze down the table.
“Not decent,” she repeated. The sympathy she had felt evaporated, replaced by a fresh flood of irritation. “So you subscribe, my lord, to the theory that riding astride is a threat to a woman’s virtue?”
“Of course,” he said. “Everyone knows that.”
She leaned back in her chair to allow her plate to be removed and another set in its place. When this operation had been accomplished, she bent toward His Lordship once again. “There is not a shred of evidence for that, my lord. Not one bit of science has ever demonstrated that riding astride destroys a woman’s—virtue.”
His face flamed so she thought it must hurt. From the far end of the table, Lady Eleanor, who couldn’t have heard their exchange, called, “So, Rosefield. Have you arranged a tour of the stables for Miss Allington?” On Lady Eleanor’s left, Frances was smiling her cat’s smile.
Annis’s pearls suddenly, inexplicably, tightened around her neck, pressing the moonstone into the soft skin of her throat. A sign? Yes. She had not imagined it.
It was a warning. A warning to tread carefully, to resist the trap they were all setting for her, and for this poor hapless man as well.
It was no wonder this Marquess of Rosefield feared women. His life was being run by them—his mother, Frances, and now, although she had not intended it, herself. Her sympathy for him returned, and she sagged back in her chair, wondering how she had ever allowed herself to be maneuvered into this position.
16
Frances
By the time the guests and residents of Rosefield Hall retired, everyone knew of the argument between Miss Allington and the marquess. The footman who had served Annis at table told the cook, who told the housekeeper when the staff was having their dinner. The housekeeper ordered all the staff to refrain from gossiping, which meant that the ladies’ maids and valets waited until they came above stairs to tell the tale. Even Antoinette, despite her difficulties with English, managed to relate a more or less accurate version of the story to her mistress.
Frances’s first instinct was to storm into Annis’s room and scold her, but she quelled the impulse. Her cantrip must have worn off. She needed to renew it, and quickly, before the rift between the two young people grew too wide to bridge.
She pretended only mild interest in the clash between Annis and Marquess of Rosefield. Antoinette, disappointed in the tepid reception, elaborated a bit, telling her how shocked the staff were by Miss Allington’s assertion that she rode only cross-saddle. “Zey saying,” Antoinette said, as she wielded the hairbrush on Frances’s hair, “zat Miss Annis must be a—hmm—a cowboy. Non, a cowgirl.”
“A cowgirl
? I don’t think such a thing exists. Stop spreading gossip, Antoinette.”
Antoinette fell silent, but she smirked at her mistress in the mirror. They both knew there was little Frances enjoyed more than a bit of gossip, especially about prominent society figures. The maid gathered up Frances’s long hair and swiftly wove it into a thick braid.
When she finished, she moved to the bed to begin folding back the coverlet, but Frances shooed her out. “That’s enough for tonight,” she said. “You can go on to bed. Oh, and I’ll want my white shirtwaist in the morning, to go with the gray silk skirt, the one with the little train. They’ll both need to be ironed.”
When the maid was gone, Frances turned the iron key in the lock of the door. She cleared everything from the surface of her dressing table, putting her brushes, perfume bottles, and jars of cold cream into the drawers. When she had a space to work, she knelt to pull the small valise from behind the wardrobe where she had hidden it.
She took out a lump of unformed wax, a half-used tube of mucilage, and a blank wooden bead of the same type she had used before. From the pocket of her dressing gown she drew out the things she had pilfered from the dining room.
It had not been easy. The ladies had withdrawn to a small parlor to have their coffee while the gentlemen sat on at table with a dusty bottle of port. When she heard the men scrape back their chairs and make a noisy progress to join the ladies, Frances pretended she had lost an earring and went back into the dining room to find it. The servants cleaning the room moved chairs and searched under the table while Frances stood beside the chair the Marquess of Rosefield had sat in.
No one saw her pick up the napkin he had used, which still bore the imprint of his lips in a port wine stain. There were crumbs of cheese on his plate, and she took those, too, folding the bits of cheese into the napkin and slipping the whole into her sleeve while the servants scrambled about under the table. As they began to back out, apologizing for their failure to find the mythical earring, she spotted a treasure, caught on the high back of the chair, gleaming against the purple velvet.
The Age of Witches Page 13