Miss Wonderful

by Loretta Chase

  Not that Alistair remembered. He only pretended to. He’d assembled the general picture from others’ remarks. He wasn’t sure it was all true. Or if it was, it might be greatly exaggerated. He was sure Gordy knew or at least suspected that something had gone awry with Alistair’s brain box, but they never spoke of it.

  “My father could have let me continue serving King and country,” Alistair said. “Then he could not complain of my frittering away my life in idleness.”

  “But a gentleman is supposed to be idle.”

  “Not this one,” Alistair said. “Not any longer. I must find a way to earn my keep by the first of May.”

  “Six months,” Gordmor murmured. “That should be time enough.”

  “It had better be. If I haven’t found an occupation by then, I must woo and win an heiress. If I fail to do either of these—he punishes my younger brothers!”

  This had been Lord Hargate’s coup de grâce.

  The earldom and all its other titles, honors, and privileges, along with most of the family properties, would go to Alistair’s oldest brother Benedict when their father died. Great estates were usually entailed this way, to keep them intact over generations. But this only shifted the younger sons’ upkeep from father to eldest son. To spare Benedict this burden, his lordship had acquired certain properties, intended to be wedding gifts for his boys.

  Today he’d threatened to sell one or both of the younger men’s properties and arrange an annuity for Alistair from the proceeds, if Alistair failed to find an occupation—or a well-dowered bride—in the stated time.

  “Only your inscrutable father could devise such a scheme,” Gordmor said. “I think there is something Oriental about his mind.”

  “You mean Machiavellian,” Alistair said.

  “I daresay it is uncomfortable to have so forceful a character for a parent,” Gordmor said. “Yet I can’t help admiring him. He’s a brilliant politician, as all in Parliament know—and tremble, knowing. And even you must admit his strategy is excellent. He struck precisely in your tender spot: those great louts you think of as your baby brothers.”

  “Tender spots have nothing to do with it,” Alistair said. “My brothers annoy me excessively. But I cannot let them be robbed to support me.”

  “Still, you must admit your father succeeded in unnerving you, which is no small accomplishment. I recall that when the surgeon proposed to saw off your leg, you said, ‘What a pity. We had grown so attached.’ There was I, blubbering and raving by turns, and you, trampled nearly to pulp, as cool as the Iron Duke himself.”

  The comparison was absurd. The Duke of Wellington had led his armies time and again to victory. All Alistair had accomplished was to endure long enough to be rescued.

  As to his cool demeanor, if he’d taken it all so calmly, why wasn’t it plain and clear in his head? Why did the scene remain shrouded, out of his reach?

  He turned his back to the window and regarded the man who’d not only saved his life but made sure he kept all his limbs. “You lacked my training, Gordy,” he said. “You’d only the one older sister, where I had two older brothers to beat and torment me from the time I could walk.”

  “My sister finds other ways to torment me,” Gordmor said. He shrugged into his coat and gave his reflection a final scrutiny. He was fair-haired, slightly shorter than Alistair’s six-plus feet, and a degree burlier in build.

  “My tailor does his best with the material at hand,” Gordmor said. “Yet spend what I will and do what I will, I always contrive to be a shade less elegant than you.”

  Alistair’s leg was twitching for rest. He left his post at the window and limped to the nearest chair. “It’s merely that war wounds are fashionable these days.”

  “No, it’s you. You even limp with address.”

  “If one must limp, one ought to do it well.”

  Gordmor only smiled.

  “At any rate, I must do you credit,” Alistair told his friend. “If not for you, I should be lying very still at this moment.”

  “Not still,” said his lordship. “Decomposing. I believe it is an active process.” He moved to a small cabinet and took out a decanter and glasses.

  “I thought we were going out,” Alistair said.

  “Presently.” Gordmor poured. “But first I want to talk to you about a canal.”

  One

  Derbyshire, Monday 16 February 1818

  MIRABEL Oldridge left the stables and started up the gravel path toward Oldridge Hall. As she was turning into the garden, the footman Joseph burst out of the shrubbery and into the footpath.

  Though Miss Oldridge had recently passed her thirty-first birthday, she didn’t look it. At the moment—her red-gold hair windblown, her creamy cheeks rosy, and her blue eyes sparkling from exercise—she appeared quite young.

  Nonetheless, to all intents and purposes she was the senior member of the family, and it was to Miss Oldridge, not her father, the servants turned when difficulties arose. This perhaps was because her parent so often caused the difficulties.

  Joseph’s abrupt appearance and breathless state told her there was a difficulty even before he spoke, which he did in a rush and ungrammatically.

  “If you please, miss,” he said, “there’s a gentleman which he came to see Mr. Oldridge. Also which he has an appointment, he says. Which he does, Mr. Benton says, as master’s book were open, and Mr. Benton seen it plain as day and in the master’s own hand.”

  If Benton the butler said the diary entry existed, it must, impossible as this seemed.

  Mr. Oldridge never made appointments with anybody. His neighbors knew they must arrange social visits with Mirabel if they wished to see her father. Those who came on estate business understood they must deal with Mr. Oldridge’s agent Higgins or Mirabel, who supervised the agent.

  “Will the gentleman not see Higgins instead?”

  “Mr. Benton says it isn’t proper, miss, Mr. Higgins being beneath the gentleman’s notice. A Mr. Carsington, which his father is the Earl of someplace. Mr. Benton said what it was. A something-gate, only it weren’t Billingsgate nor none of them other London ones.”

  “Carsington?” Mirabel said. “That is the Earl of Hargate’s family name.” It was an old Derbyshire family, but not one with which she was on visiting terms.

  “Yes, that’s it, miss. Besides which this is the gentleman what was trampled so heroic at Waterloo, which is why we put him in the drawing room where Mr. Benton says with respect, miss, but it won’t do to leave him cooling his heels like he was nobody in particular.”

  Mirabel glanced down at herself. It had rained off and on all morning. Globs of mud clung to her damp riding dress and, thanks to the walk to and from the stables, thickly caked her boots. Her hair and the hairpins had long since parted ways, and she’d rather not contemplate the state of her bonnet.

  She debated what to do. It seemed disrespectful to appear in all her dirt. On the other hand, putting herself right would take ages, and the gentleman—the famous Waterloo hero—had already been kept waiting longer than was courteous.

  She picked up her skirts and ran to the house.

  DERBYSHIRE was not where Alistair wanted to be at present. Rural life held no charms for him. He preferred civilization, which meant London.

  Oldridge Hall lay far from civilization, in a godforsaken corner of Derbyshire’s godforsaken Peak.

  Gordmor had aptly, if hoarsely, described the charms of the Peak from his sickbed: “Tourists gawking at picturesque views and the picturesque rustics. Hypochondriacs guzzling mineral waters and splashing in mineral baths. Ghastly roads. No theater, no opera, no clubs. Nothing on earth to do but gape at the view—mountains, valleys, rocks, streams, cows, and sheep—or at rustics, tourists, and invalids.”

  In mid-February the area lacked even that degree of animation. The landscape was bleak shades of brown and grey, the weather bitterly cold and wet.

  But Gordmor’s—and thus Alistair’s—problem lay here, and could not wa
it until summer to be solved.

  Oldridge Hall was a handsome enough old manor house, greatly enlarged over the years. It was, however, most inconveniently situated at the end of a long stretch of what was humorously called “road” hereabouts: a narrow, rutted track where dust prevailed in dry weather and mud in wet.

  Alistair had thought Gordmor exaggerated in describing the condition of the roads. In fact, his lordship had understated the case. Alistair could imagine no area in England more desperately in need of a canal.

  Having examined the drawing room’s collection of pictures—which included several superlative paintings of Egyptian scenes—and studied the carpet pattern, Alistair walked to the French doors and looked out. The glass doors gave out onto a terrace, which gave way to a profuse arrangement of gardens. Beyond these lay rolling parkland and, farther on, the picturesque hills and dales.

  He did not notice any of these landscape features. All he saw was the girl.

  She was racing up the terrace stairs, skirts bunched up to her knees, bonnet askew, and a wild mass of hair the color of sunrise dancing about her face.

  Even while he was taking in the hair—a whirling fire-ball when a gust of wind caught it—she darted across the terrace. Alistair had an unobstructed view of trim ankles and well-shaped calves before she let the hem drop to cover them.

  He opened the door, and she irrupted into the drawing room in a whirl of rain and mud, taking no more heed of her bedraggled state than a dog would.

  She smiled.

  Her mouth was wide, and so the smile seemed to go on forever, and round and round, encircling him. Her eyes were blue, twilight blue, and for a moment she seemed to be the beginning and end of everything, from the sunrise halo of hair to the dusky blue of her eyes.

  For that moment, Alistair didn’t know anything else, even his name, until she spoke it.

  “Mr. Carsington,” she said, and her voice was clear and cool with a trace of a whisper in it.

  Hair: sunrise. Eyes: dusk. Voice: night.

  “I am Mirabel Oldridge,” the night-voice went on.

  Mirabel. It meant wonderful. And she was truly—

  Alistair caught himself in the nick of time, before his brain disintegrated. No poetry, he told himself. No castles in the air.

  He was here on business and must not forget it.

  He could not allow his thoughts to linger, even for an instant, upon any woman…no matter how lovely her skin or how warm her smile, like the first warmth of spring after a long, dark winter…

  No poetry. He must view her as—as a piece of furniture. He must.

  If he stumbled into another disaster this time—and disaster was inevitable if a member of the opposite sex was concerned—he would not merely suffer the usual disillusionment, heartbreak, and humiliation.

  This time his folly would injure others. His brothers would lose their property, and Gordmor would be, if not utterly ruined, then left in greatly embarrassed circumstances. That was no way to repay the man who’d saved his life, not to mention his leg. Alistair must prove himself worthy of the trust his friend had placed in him.

  He must prove as well to Lord Hargate that his third son was not an idle, useless fop of a parasite.

  Praying his face told no tales, Alistair casually drew back, bowed, and murmured the usual polite response.

  “You wanted my father, I know,” the girl said. “He appointed to meet with you today.”

  “I collect he has been detained elsewhere.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “I have considered engraving that as his epitaph: ‘Sylvester Oldridge, Beloved Father, Detained Elsewhere.’ Of course, that would truly be the case, would it not, were he in need of an epitaph.”

  The faint color rising in her cheeks belied the coolness of her voice. It was instinctive to incline toward that hint of a blush, to see if it would grow rosier still.

  Rather hastily she moved away and began untying the ribbons of her bonnet.

  Alistair came to his senses, straightened, and said composedly, “Since you imply he is not yet in need of it, one may safely assume he is detained only in the usual sense, not the permanent one.”

  “All too usual,” she said. “If you were a moss or a lichen or possessed stamens and pistils or any other uniquely vegetative quality, he would remember the smallest detail about you. But if you were the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the eternal disposition of my father’s soul depended upon his meeting you at such and such a time, it would be exactly the same as this.”

  Alistair was too much occupied with stifling inconvenient feelings to absorb her words. Luckily, her attire finally caught his attention, and this promptly purged his brain of poetic drivel.

  The riding dress was of costly fabric and well made, but in a dowdy style and a shade of green unflattering to her coloring. The bonnet likewise was of superior quality, but frumpy. Alistair was baffled. How could a woman who obviously understood quality have no acquaintance whatsoever with taste or fashion?

  The contradiction annoyed him, and this, combined with stifled feelings, perhaps explained why he grew so unreasonably irritated when, instead of untying the bonnet ribbons, she proceeded to tangle them.

  “And so I ask you to overlook my father’s absence as a quirk or ailment of character,” she was saying as she tried to undo the tangle, “and not take offense. Drat.” She tugged the ribbons, which only tightened the Gordian knot she’d created.

  “May I assist you, Miss Oldridge?” Alistair said.

  She retreated a pace. “Thank you, but I do not see why we should both be aggravated by a stubborn bit of ribbon.”

  He advanced upon her. “I must insist,” he said. “You are only making it worse.”

  She clutched the knotted ribbon with one hand.

  “You can’t see what you’re doing,” he said. He nudged her hand.

  She brought her hands to her sides and went stiff as a board. Her blue gaze fastened on the knot of his neckcloth.

  “I must ask you to tilt your head back,” Alistair said.

  She did so, and her eyes focused above and somewhere to his right. Her eyelashes were darker than her hair, and long. A wash of pink came and went in her cheeks.

  Alistair forced his own gaze lower—past her overwide mouth—to the knot, which was very hard and very small. He had to bend close to look for a likely opening in it.

  Instantly he became aware of a scent that wasn’t wet wool, but Woman. His heart gave a series of hard thumps.

  Resolutely ignoring these disturbances, he managed to get one well-manicured nail into a sliver of an opening. But the ribbon was damp, and the knot gave way not one iota, and he could feel her breath on his face. His pulse picked up speed.

  He straightened. “The situation appears hopeless,” he said. “I recommend surgery.”

  Later he would realize he should have recommended she send for her maid, but at the time he was distracted by her lower lip, the corner of which was caught between her teeth.

  “Very well, then,” she said, still looking at the spot above his head. “Rip it or cut it—whatever is quickest. The thing gives more trouble than it’s worth.”

  Alistair took out his penknife and neatly sliced the ribbon. He longed to tear the bonnet from her head, hack it to shreds, throw it down, and stomp on it, then hurl it into the fire—and by the way, have the milliner pilloried for making it in the first place.

  Instead, he withdrew to a safe distance, put away his penknife, and told himself to calm down.

  Miss Oldridge snatched the bonnet from her head, stared at it for a moment, then carelessly tossed it onto a nearby chair.

  “That’s better,” she said, and beamed up at him once more. “I was beginning to wonder if I must wear the thing for the rest of my life.”

  The billowing cloud of fiery hair and the smile knocked Alistair’s thoughts about as though they were a lot of ninepins in his skull. He firmly put them back to rights.

  “I sincerely hope not,” he sai
d.

  “I do apologize for bothering you with it,” she said. “You endured trials enough, I daresay, coming all this way for nothing. Not that I know where you came from.”

  “Matlock Bath,” he said. “Not a great ways by any means. A few miles.” At least twenty it had seemed, on filthy roads, under skies spitting icy rain. “There is no harm done. I shall come another day, when it is more convenient.” When, he fervently hoped, she would be detained elsewhere.

  “Unless it is convenient for you to come as a pawpaw tree, it will be another wasted journey,” she said. “Even if you should happen to find my father at home, you shan’t find him at home, if you take my meaning.”

  Alistair didn’t quite take it, but before he could ask her to explain, a pair of servants entered, bearing trays laden with enough sustenance for a company of Light Dragoons.

  “I beg you to partake of some refreshment,” she said, “while I withdraw for a moment to make myself presentable. Since you’ve come all this way, you might as well acquaint me with your errand. Perhaps I can help you.”

  Alistair was certain it would be fatal to spend any more time alone with her. The smile muddled him horribly.

  “Really, Miss Oldridge, it is no great matter,” he said. “I can come another day. I plan to stay in the area for some time.” As long as was necessary. He’d promised to take care of the problem, and he would not return to London until he’d done so.

  “It will be the same no matter what day you come.” She started toward the door. “Even if you do run Papa to ground, he won’t attend to anything you say.” She paused to direct a questioning look at him. “Unless you are vegetative?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Botanical,” she said. “I was aware you had been in the army, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t another occupation in civilian life. Are you botanical?”

  “Not in the least,” Alistair said.

  “Then he won’t attend.” She continued to the door.