Miss Wonderful

by Loretta Chase

  There wasn’t. She had searched and searched. Her only hope of defeating the canal scheme was to get rid of Mr. Carsington.

  It would be better for everyone if he were gone. Better for her heart, certainly.

  She had not expected to see him this day. She’d come early on purpose to forestall that possibility—or so she’d persuaded herself.

  Liar, liar. She was still pretending, making excuses. Had she not come herself instead of sending servants with the boxes? Obviously she’d been hoping to hear his voice or catch one last glimpse of him.

  And she’d made everything worse. A word, a glimpse, wouldn’t suffice. She wondered what would. Nothing within the realm of possibility, certainly. The longer she remained near him, the harder she made it for herself.

  She must turn away, go on about her business, her pretend business.

  She looked up into the strongly chiseled countenance, into the burning gold of his eyes.

  “I have not been to the petrifying wells in a long time,” she said. “I wonder if my glove is still being incrustated.”

  Fourteen

  LONG before he came, Alistair had been aware of the resort’s various natural phenomena. The famous waters from Matlock Bath’s mineral springs, for instance, offered other excitement besides baths.

  The water was known for depositing a calcareous encrustation upon objects over which it flowed. At the petrifying wells, the results were displayed for the edification of visitors.

  Miss Oldridge’s glove had either long since been removed or had, over time, resolved into an anonymous lump of calcified matter. Still, other marvels remained. The keeper of the place was delighted to show Lord Hargate’s famous son a petrified broom, a wig, and a bird’s nest. Miss Oldridge persuaded Alistair to sacrifice his gloves, which, she whispered, would be of immense interest to tourists in the months and years to come.

  “Duke Nicholas of Russia paid Matlock Bath a visit two years ago, in February, no less,” she told Alistair after they left the place and started back toward Wilkerson’s. “Being Russian, he probably thought the weather balmy. The year before, we had Archdukes John and Louis of Austria. They are mere foreigners, however. Your visit the well keeper will boast of till his dying day, and your gloves will be pointed out to visitors with hushed reverence. When word gets out that a petrifying well in Matlock Bath is in possession of your gloves—not merely one, but the pair—tourists will flock to the place to view these holy relics.”

  Alistair looked down at her. She was smiling, and mischief twinkled in her far-too-blue eyes, and he longed to draw her into his arms and kiss her witless.

  “Those were exquisitely made gloves,” he said with feigned sorrow. “I shall never be able to replace them, and Crewe will never forgive me. But if the sacrifice improves trade, I must not repine.”

  “You may be sure that any business you patronize will make the most of it,” she said. “Foreign noblemen are as common as flies these days, but such a heroic personage as Lord Hargate’s son—”

  “I’m not heroic,” he said, careful to keep his voice light. “It’s utter nonsense.”

  She stopped and turned to him. “It isn’t nonsense. How can you think it is?”

  They stood upon the South Parade, close by Wilkerson’s and in full view and hearing of a number of interested passersby. Alistair knew he should return to the hotel and let her go on her way, but he wasn’t ready to let her go. Not yet. She of all people needed to understand.

  He remembered what she’d said about his wounded leg: that the odds had been against him either way. She’d shown him that he’d had as good a reason to say no to the surgeons as he had to say yes. He only wished he’d said no because he’d weighed the odds, not because he was terrified. He’d never forgive himself for that fear.

  That, at least, was his own secret.

  His alleged heroism was public, a difficulty he encountered almost daily. It was a thorn in his side, digging deeper and deeper as time passed. Perhaps if one person in the world—the one who meant the most to him—knew the truth, he could bear it better. He wished he could tell her all, but he couldn’t. Still, he could tell her a part.

  He looked about, but there was no place in the picturesque resort where they might be private without stirring gossip.

  He was not entirely surprised when she, evidently guessing what he wanted, came to his rescue.

  “Have you seen the view of Matlock Bath from farther up the hill?” she said. She nodded toward the road next to Wilkerson’s, which led to the Heights of Abraham. “There is an excellent outlook but a short way up.”

  She started that way, and he went with her.

  When they were out of the spa’s earshot, she said, “I don’t know why you must fight the battle of Waterloo night after night. I wish I knew of a posset or syrup to help you sleep peacefully. My father thinks the remedy is laudanum. Perhaps you might consult an apothecary about a small dose. Perhaps if the battle didn’t haunt your dreams, you would not be so tetchy about the subject.”

  The battle wasn’t all that haunted him, but he mustn’t speak of the rest: how he longed for her, how he missed the sound of her voice, her scent, her touch.

  “I am tetchy about being made out to be hero,” he said. “I’ve borne it for a long time because I couldn’t remember what happened that day. I had to take others’ word for it. Now that I do remember, I can’t bear your having the wrong idea of me. I value your good opinion—oh, and your affection, though I should not speak of that—I value these too much to have them under false pretenses.”

  She stared at him, blue eyes wide with disbelief. “What are you saying? False pretenses? There were eyewitnesses to your many acts of bravery.”

  “Others did as much and more,” he said. “My actions were nothing extraordinary. There were men who’d been with Wellington for years, who acted with surpassing courage and gallantry. If you knew their stories, you would understand how demented it seems to me to be singled out as the hero.”

  She walked on, saying nothing. Alistair ached to tell her all. The full truth. What had happened at the surgeon’s tent. Perhaps in time he would. Perhaps in time, if she would give him time, he would find the courage.

  One step at a time down from the hero’s pedestal.

  He limped on with her in silence, glancing from time to time at her profile, wondering if she was reassessing him, and if her affection would survive the process. She was frowning. Oh, why had he not held his tongue?

  “Last week, I had a letter from my Aunt Clothilde,” she said. “It described in detail your tumultuous love affairs. Aunt never expurgates on my account, you see. She wrote about the riot at Kensington Gate, the pamphlets, the sponging house, the lawsuits, and the rest. Then I better understood why the Earl of Hargate said you were expensive and troublesome to keep.”

  Alistair felt the old weight descending upon him, the sense of pointlessness and weariness he hadn’t felt in weeks. His past was like an albatross round his neck. It would cost him her affection, canal or no canal.

  “I suppose this is the price one pays for having a forceful and exciting character,” she went on. “You attract the press. The newspapers made you famous, not solely because of your deeds—though you are entitled to be proud of them—but because you made a grand story.”

  He heard the lilt in her voice and dared another glance at her face. A hint of a smile played at the corners of her soft lips, and humor danced in her blue eyes.

  He remembered her bursting through the doors of the drawing room that first day, eyes sparkling, face lit…and the sunny smile wrapping about him and warming him…and all the shades and variations of that smile he’d seen since.

  He remembered how the sight of her had lightened his heart, as the smallest change in her expression did now.

  “A grand story?” he repeated.

  “There was the scandal in London, the broken engagement, and the courtesan,” she said. “Then the outraged father, sending you abr
oad. As a diplomatic aide. Lord Hargate never meant for you to be fighting, did he?”

  “Certainly not. My sire deems me undisciplined and rebellious and altogether unfit for military service.”

  “But you were not the sort of man to sit tamely in Brussels while the others went to war,” she went on. “Few know how you managed it. Those who do know won’t say. Most of us know only that you somehow wangled a place for yourself and ended up in the thick of the fighting.”

  “At such times, the commanders are glad to have every man they can get,” Alistair said. “I had friends from school who put in a good word for me, and I was persistent—attached myself like a barnacle. It was easier to let me in than to get rid of me.”

  “However it was done, you proved your mettle in battle,” she said. “At risk of your own life, time and again, you rescued injured men of every rank. You fought bravely. You endured, even after you’d fallen. Then there was the dramatic tale of Lord Gordmor hunting through the darkness for you among the dead and dying, and the miracle of your recovery from grievous injuries. You see? It is a grand story, Mr. Carsington.”

  Alistair did see the full picture at last. He stopped and, leaning on his walking stick, stared at the ground while his mind played out the scenes in his head, like the scenes of a play. At the finale, he saw his family descend en masse and bear away the prodigal son to England.

  And he laughed—from embarrassment or relief or perhaps simply because of the ridiculousness of his life.

  Then he raised his head—a moment too late to discern the worried glance she cast him—and gazed at her, and said, “It is as you said that time when you came to Wilkerson’s. You are the only one who would say such things to my face. Even my best friend…” He trailed off, grinning. “Poor Gordy. But why should he enlighten me as to the true nature of my fame when even my brothers—who are never in the least shy about setting me down—held their tongues?”

  “They should have told you,” she said. “But perhaps they didn’t realize how deeply the matter distressed you.”

  Alistair shrugged. “My family never talks about it, at least not in my presence.” After a moment, he added, “And I’ve done everything possible to discourage them and everyone else from discussing it.”

  He straightened, and it was then, for the first time since they’d set out, he noticed his surroundings.

  What he saw robbed him of speech.

  Immense rock formations thrust out from the hillside. Massive, stony obelisks lay strewn about, like ninepins. Upon them grew the lichens and mosses that so fascinated Mr. Oldridge. Trees and shrubs wedged in the spaces between rocks, and a sampling of braver and hardier wild plants hinted at the profusion that must appear in warmer seasons. Alistair heard water dripping from somewhere in the mountain, the same water that trickled through the petrifying wells.

  The trees and rocks shut out everything else. He and she might have been on some fairy-tale island. He turned slowly round, gazing in wonder like a child.

  “This site is called the Romantic Rocks,” came her cool voice from a distance. “In the height of the season, it is overrun with tourists.”

  He looked at her.

  She sat on one of the obelisk-like stones, her hands folded. Her dull grey bonnet and cloak blended into her surroundings, drawing all the attention to her glowing countenance and the fiery curls framing it.

  “You love this place,” he said.

  “Not simply this spot,” she said. “I am a part of the Peak, and it is part of me. My mother told me she fell in love with this part of Derbyshire when she fell in love with my father. Some of my earliest memories are of walking with her up to the Heights of Abraham. We often came to these rocks. We visited the caverns, too. We went to the baths and the petrifying wells. We took a boat across the river to the Lovers’ Walks. We even made trips to Chatsworth and the other great houses. We never grew tired of the sights.” Her voice softened with nostalgia. “Sometimes on our expeditions, we would sketch and paint. Sometimes my father came along. In those days, he was fascinated with botany, but in a more rational way. Mama made him wonderfully detailed paintings of plants and flowers.”

  Alistair walked to her and sat down beside her, thinking no more of his expensively tailored coat and the effect of moss and lichen upon it than she did of her unfashionable cloak.

  “Your father loved her very much,” he said.

  She nodded. Her eyes glistened.

  “If she was at all like you, I can understand your father’s shutting himself off from the world for all these years,” he said. “It is only a few days since last I saw you, yet to me it has seemed a dark and wearisome eternity.”

  She stood abruptly. “You are not to make love to me,” she said in clipped tones. “I should not have taken you here. I should have stopped at the first picturesque viewpoint, as I meant—or thought I meant. I seem to persist in doing the exact opposite of what I ought to do.”

  Alistair rose as well, though more stiffly, for the rock was chilly and his leg had not forgiven him for the visit to the cold, damp petrifying well. “Love makes people behave strangely,” he said.

  “I am not in love with you,” she said. “It is an infatuation. I have heard of such derangements happening to elderly spinsters.”

  “You are neither elderly nor deranged,” he said. “Perhaps you are merely infatuated with me, but I am over head and ears in love with you, Mirabel.”

  She turned away. “I advise you to conquer the passion,” she said in a voice as cold and brittle as ice, “because absolutely nothing will come of it.”

  Whatever Alistair might have expected, it wasn’t this. All the glow had gone out of her in an instant, and all the warmth and trust and affection.

  He stood, chilled and uncomprehending, staring after her as she hurried away.

  IN case her frigid leave-taking failed to discourage him from following, Mirabel made a quick detour and hurried down a well-concealed bypath.

  She would not cry. She could not cry. In a few minutes, she would be back upon the South Parade, and people must not see her with red eyes and nose. If they did, the news would be all over Matlock in an hour, and traveling over the surrounding hills and dales in two.

  She would have plenty of time to cry later, she told herself.

  Alistair Carsington would soon be gone.

  Still, at least this would be a clean break. If she had broken off cleanly with William Poynton in London eleven years ago, he would have stayed away. He would not have followed her here, and tried to change her mind, and made her more miserable than she was already—though he never meant to—and she would not have added to his unhappiness.

  That was what came of trying to break off with someone kindly and gently: You only made it drag on longer and made everyone involved more wretched.

  No, this way was better, Mirabel told herself. It would have been far better had she turned cold and cruel before Mr. Carsington declared his feelings. But she had been weak, wanting another minute with him before they separated forever, then another minute and another.

  Still, she would have hurt him no matter when she did it, and perhaps it was only fair he wound her, too.

  I am over head and ears in love with you, Mirabel.

  Who would have thought those words—the sweetest any woman could wish to hear—could hurt so very much?

  Still, she knew they would both heal. In time.

  Meanwhile, something far more important than her heart was at stake.

  She had no choice. She must get rid of him.

  IT took Alistair only a minute or so to absorb the blow and set out after her, but it was a minute too long.

  Though he went as fast as his leg would let him, he caught no glimpse of the grey bonnet.

  Not until he came out of the walkway into the main road at Wilkerson’s did he see her. It was the back of her, however, upon the curricle, with a smallish groom perched behind. The vehicle was fast disappearing from view.

 
; He hurried into the hotel to order a horse and narrowly missed colliding with a servant hurrying out at the same moment.

  “There you are, sir,” said the servant. “There is a—”

  “I want a horse,” Alistair cut in. “Pray make haste.”

  “Yes, sir, but—”

  “A horse, with a saddle upon it, quickly,” Alistair snapped. “If it is not too terribly inconvenient.”

  The servant scurried out.

  “And where were you thinking of going in such a lather, Car, if a fellow may be so impertinent as to ask?”

  Alistair turned toward the familiar voice.

  Lord Gordmor stood in the doorway leading to the private rooms. He wore a mud-spattered overcoat, and his boots looked as though they’d been dragged through a swamp and chewed on by crocodiles.

  Alistair quickly collected himself. He was growing used to shocks. “You look like the devil,” he told his friend. “I should ask what brings you here, but I am in rather a hurry. Why don’t you have a bath or something? We’ll talk when I get back.”

  “Ah, no, dear heart. I think we must talk now.”

  “Later,” said Alistair. “There is something I must take care of first.”

  “Car, I have come a hundred fifty miles by post chaise,” said his lordship. “A drunken idiot driving a phaeton four-in-hand ran us into a ditch late on Saturday, ten miles from anywhere in every direction. We spent most of the following day trying to find a soul willing to break the Sabbath to repair our vehicle. I have had not a wink of sleep since Oldridge’s express came—which, by the way, it seems his daughter wrote. It broke my repose hours before any cock thought of crowing on Saturday.”

  Alistair had started to turn away, planning to run to the stables and saddle a horse himself if necessary. Gordy’s last sentence brought him back sharply.

  The only express messages Miss Oldridge had mentioned to him had gone out more than a week earlier.

  “An express?” he said. “From Oldridge Hall? On Saturday last? Only three days ago?”