Miss Wonderful

by Loretta Chase

  Alistair did not wait to hear more but strode down the promenade until he had a clear view of the Parade. It was busy today, with vehicles and pedestrians going to and fro. These he barely heeded. He stared in the direction Mirabel had gone, and tried to understand.

  She had dealt them a devastating blow. She had very nearly destroyed them. And yet—and yet…

  “She knew,” he murmured. “She knew we’d win.” Otherwise, why have the carriage packed and waiting for her?

  A minute later, he heard Gordy’s voice behind him: “It seems the lady does not mean to give us time to catch our breath.”

  “She promised to show us no mercy,” Alistair said.

  “Indeed, I have sadly underestimated her, else I should have been packed and ready to leave as well,” Gordy said. “We cannot risk giving her a minute. She has influential friends in London. Do not forget that her father’s sister is Lord Sherfield’s wife, and believed to wield no small influence over him.”

  Alistair turned to his friend. “Sherfield? Aunt Clothilde is Lady Sherfield?” The Countess Sherfield was one of his mother’s nearest friends.

  “Surely you knew they were related,” Gordy said. “Lady Hargate must have mentioned the connection when you told her where you were going.”

  “No.” Alistair continued briskly down toward Wilkerson’s, aware of the puzzled glances Gordy cast his way as they walked.

  “That is very strange,” Gordy said.

  “Hardly,” Alistair said. “When I called upon my mother before I left, I was full of our brilliant plan and the wonders of modern invention we’d bring to a remote outpost of civilization. She couldn’t get a word in edge-ways.”

  “Waxed oratorical, did you?” Gordmor smiled. “Well, I doubt it makes much difference whether or not you knew beforehand. Miss Oldridge has useful friends, true. So do we. Moreover, we have every practical point in our favor, as you so eloquently explained a while ago to the mob.”

  Theirs was to be a relatively short canal in a thinly populated part of Derbyshire, Alistair had reminded his listeners. The route lay along fairly level ground, requiring no aqueducts, tunnels, or long flights of locks. The recently enacted Poor Employment Act of 1817 provided government loans for projects that employed the poor. This reduced the sum they must raise from investors.

  He knew the plan was sound. The many politicians he and Gordy consulted had promised that so simple and inexpensive a canal scheme could proceed from the first committee meeting to the Prince Regent’s signature in two months or less.

  If this hadn’t been the case, he and Gordy could not have undertaken it. They hadn’t the money for elaborate schemes and couldn’t hope to raise such funds, given the sour economic conditions following war’s end. Last year’s poor harvest had not improved matters.

  It was by no means a villainous plan in the first place. In the second, Alistair had added nearly five miles to the route to please his lady love.

  Yet she turned up her nose.

  “At the moment, I’m more concerned about your well-being,” Gordy said. “Do have a care for your heart, Car. I don’t wish to slander your beloved, but you deserve a warning at least. Henrietta says the lady jilted a fellow some years ago and had to leave London under a cloud.”

  “I know about that,” Alistair said. “More than Lady Wallantree does, I’ll wager. There were difficult circumstances. Not that I care if Miss Oldridge jilted a dozen fellows. It was in the past, and my own is nothing to boast of.”

  He would never believe that the girl he’d made love to could be cruel and coldhearted. If anything, her nature was too open, too compassionate. The cool detachment was only on the surface, shielding her true feelings. He understood the need to protect tender places. Still, he did not understand what she was about at present.

  And he was disappointed in himself. In spite of all his efforts, he’d failed her.

  “Car.”

  Alistair came back to the moment, the present crisis. “Her past is irrelevant. The canal is what signifies. I should like to know what troubles her. I was sure my plan addressed her personal objections. If there’s another difficulty, I’d rather know about it before we’re in front of a parliamentary committee.”

  He’d become accustomed to things springing out of the darkness and the sudden metaphorical blows to the head. He found the surprises stimulating, actually.

  This didn’t mean he could let himself be ambushed in Parliament. The thought of being rendered tongue-tied, even for an instant, before his father’s colleagues and minions made his blood run cold.

  “Very wise,” Gordy said. They had reached the entrance of Wilkerson’s, and he lowered his voice. “Do you go on ahead and learn what you can from the lady. I’ll settle matters here and catch up with you as soon as I can.”

  AN hour later, Jackson was staring in dismay at the motionless figure stretched out upon a mossy piece of ground in a wooded part of Longledge Hill.

  “What have you done?” he demanded of Caleb Finch. “Didn’t I tell you what his lordship said?”

  “He’s all right,” Finch said. “I only give him some medicine.”

  “What kind of medicine?”

  “Some of that Godfrey’s Cordial. Told him it were my dear old auntie’s elderberry cordial.”

  Opium was one of the main ingredients of Godfrey’s Cordial.

  Jackson stepped closer. The old gentleman seemed to be slumbering peacefully. His dreams must be pleasant ones, because he smiled. He had a sweet smile, did Mr. Oldridge. Quite a harmless fellow. Jackson did not like seeing him lying on the cold ground. He also didn’t like Finch’s failure to wait for orders, and said so.

  “And if I waited, like you say, until tomorrow or the next day,” Finch said, “what do you think was the chance I could talk him into coming away again? As it was, he was on fire to run back to the meeting, even when I told him it was close onto noon, and it’d be long over by the time he got there. Besides, his lordship wants him to disappear, don’t he? Well, it’ll be easier now. We’ll just load him onto a cart and take him away.”

  “We don’t have a cart,” Jackson said.

  “Yes, we do,” said Finch. “I borrowed it from the colliery. And a horse to pull it. They’re down that track a ways.” He nodded toward an ancient, overgrown packhorse trail. “I told you Miss O had a hundred tricks up her sleeve, didn’t I? And wasn’t I right? You let her get going in London, what with her lord and lady relations, and she’ll grind you down to powder. I knew how it would be, and I come prepared. Well, I don’t expect thanks, not a bit, not for doing my duty.”

  It was as well that he didn’t expect thanks, because Jackson was disinclined to offer them. A man was supposed to follow his superior’s orders. A man wasn’t supposed to rush ahead and do whatever he took it into his head to do.

  But Finch had gone ahead and done it, and they couldn’t release Mr. Oldridge now.

  “It’s the same plan as his lordship wants,” Finch said. “It’ll work perfect. Miss Oldridge’ll hurry back from London as soon as she finds out her pa’s missing. While she’s here looking for him, master gets his canal act through Parliament quick and painless. Meanwhile, we’ll have Mr. O in Northumberland, safe and snug. As soon as Lord Gordmor gets his papers signed, we send the old gentleman home. Only think how happy they’ll all be at the house, like he come back from the dead. Like Lazarus.”

  “You’d better make sure he does come back, in the same condition he left,” Jackson warned. “His lordship reminded me several times that the gentleman was not to be harmed in any way. I recommend you be careful with your cordials, Finch. If you give him too much and it kills him, I’ll see you swing for it.”

  Seventeen

  THOUGH they were ladies, encumbered with all the baggage, servants, and outriders deemed necessary for a long journey, Mirabel and Mrs. Entwhistle had covered some sixty miles by the time they stopped for the night at an inn in Market Loughborough.

  Following a fine di
nner Mirabel mainly played with, they adjourned to a sitting room to await their tea.

  When the inn servant carried in the tea tray, she informed the ladies that a Mr. Carsington wished to speak to them.

  “Heavens, he has lost no time,” said Mrs. Entwhistle.

  Mirabel said nothing, merely sat straighter, while her heart performed noisy calisthenics within her bosom.

  “Pray show him in,” Mrs. Entwhistle told the servant.

  He entered a moment later, his countenance marked with lines of weariness and his eyes dark. He was otherwise point-perfect, as usual: every hair neatly arranged to appear romantically windblown, every neckcloth fold precisely in place, and not a crease or wrinkle in sight.

  Mirabel experienced a mad urge to leap up and rumple him. She reminded herself that it would be fatal to soften. He would wrap her about his finger. She must pretend he was her worst enemy. Otherwise, she would be lost, and all she’d done these last ten years and more would have been done for nothing.

  She gave a cold nod in response to his bow and greetings and kept her hands tightly folded in her lap.

  She invited him to join them for tea.

  “I didn’t come for tea,” he growled. He threw his hat down and advanced upon her. “I added five miles to my canal, solely to please you, though it inconveniences my partner and increases our costs. I came to find out why you insist upon being so thoroughly unreasonable.”

  “I should ask the same question,” she said. “I fail to understand why you and Lord Gordmor persist, when I have promised to do everything in my power to thwart you.”

  “If you no longer care for me, you had better say so,” he said. “In ordinary circumstances, it would be unsporting to trifle with my affections in this way, but—”

  “I, trifle with a man whose affairs have become the stuff of legend?” she said. “Don’t be absurd.”

  “In this case, my affections are of no consequence,” he went on as though she hadn’t spoken. “You are welcome to break my heart, if this is what you wish. But you must find another way. You cannot know the harm your actions will cause others.”

  “Break your heart?” She went cold inside. Even William had not accused her of toying with him, though everyone else did. After she broke off with him, half her acquaintance became cold and aloof, and those who didn’t snub her held back only so that they could tell her what the rest were whispering behind her back.

  She was a jilt, people said. She’d used William Poynton shamefully. The letters followed her home. People who saw him in Venice claimed he was going into a decline, dying of disappointed hopes. They said he’d scarcely the heart to lift a paintbrush…collapsed after completing the mural…traveled to Egypt…would never survive the journey…vowed he’d never return to England.

  All her fault.

  For a moment memories from those first two dreary years after she’d given up William engulfed her, and she felt the old despair, that her life would never come right again.

  She wanted to sink to the floor and weep.

  And the wish to give up and weep made her angry—with this man, for making her so weak, and with herself, for letting him reduce her to this state.

  She stood up, trembling with indignation. “I have been playing with you, have I? So this is your opinion of me.”

  “That is not what I meant. It is your opinion of me—”

  “I should have realized my forward behavior would lower me in your esteem,” she said. “Yet never in my worst imaginings did I see you casting my errors in my teeth.”

  “My esteem? I am not—”

  “You believe I oppose your canal merely to torment you? You think me so petty, so contemptible?”

  “Of course not. Why do you twist my meaning out of all recognition?”

  Mirabel looked at Mrs. Entwhistle. “Am I off the mark?” she said. “How would you interpret his words?”

  “I haven’t the least idea,” Mrs. Entwhistle said, calmly serving herself a slice of cake. “It has been a long day, and I am far too weary to sort out such complicated matters. If you must dispute, kindly take your quarrel to the dining parlor and let me have my tea in peace.”

  MRS. Entwhistle might have been a stick of furniture for all the notice Alistair had taken of her. All he’d seen when he entered the sitting room was Mirabel. He hadn’t noticed whether the servant had lingered. For all he knew, a crowd of them had gathered upon the stairs to eavesdrop.

  Typical, he thought bitterly. Nine and twenty years old, and he still had no notion of discretion.

  Furious with himself, he followed Mirabel into the adjoining room and pulled the door closed behind him. She crossed to the farthest corner, by the banquette under the windows overlooking the street, as though she could not get far enough away from him.

  He hardly blamed her. He could not believe how clumsily and offensively he’d spoken. He’d been articulate enough at the canal meeting. Why must his brain shrink to pea size when he was with her?

  “I didn’t mean…” he began. Yet even now, he could not string intelligible words together. He didn’t want to talk. He wanted to hold her, beg her pardon, bring the warmth and trust back. She was pale and stiff. He’d hurt her.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “I had wanted so much to please you with the new canal plan, and I failed, and so I was beside myself.”

  “You did not fail.” Her voice was brittle. “You have won the first battle. We must see who will win the last.”

  “Can you not tell me what I’ve done wrong?” he said. “I want to make it right, but I am all at sea. Perhaps I was overhasty, assuming we would wed could I but bridge this one gap between us. You have told me no, but I assumed only the canal stood in the way. Was I arrogant to suppose this? Are your feelings…” He searched for words. “I have cast lures. I have seduced you. It was not honorable of me to try to win you that way, but I did not care very much how I did it. Perhaps I have merely seduced you, not won your heart, after all. If that is the case, I beg you will do me a kindness and tell me so, and I shall stop plaguing you.”

  He would do it, too, and it would kill him.

  Her hair glowed like burnished copper in the candlelight. He remembered it tumbled upon the pillows and his fingers tangling in it. He remembered tearing the bonnet from her head and dragging his hands through the unruly curls, and her laughter when she knocked the hat from his head. He remembered the way she’d kissed the top of his head, the tenderness, the utter trust.

  He remembered what she’d said.

  You make me happy. You make me feel like a girl again.

  But he’d made her unhappy. She stood stiffly, her gaze so dark and solemn, her hands clasped tightly at her waist.

  “That is all I need do?” she said finally. “Tell you I do not care for you? How easy it sounds. How impossible it is. I have told you so, many times, but each time it becomes a bigger lie, and you always know I am lying.”

  “My love.” He started across the room.

  She put up her hand. “If you truly care for me, you will keep a distance. If you touch me, I shall become irrational. That is taking unfair advantage.”

  He wanted to take every unfair advantage.

  He made himself retreat.

  “You are not to speak sweetly to me, either,” she said. “You are too persuasive. This morning, you had me almost convinced that Providence could bestow no greater blessing upon Longledge than your canal.”

  “Only ‘almost,’ ” he said. “That is the trouble. That’s why I came.” He gave a short laugh. “No, that isn’t why I came. It’s the reason I gave Gordmor for hurrying on ahead: to find out where my new plan failed you. I still don’t know. What would you have us do?”

  “Go away,” she said. “Give it up. I cannot believe you are both so foolish or obstinate as to persist. I am not a stranger to business or politics. I know how these matters are conducted. You may win in the end, but it will cost you more than you bargained for, perhaps more than you can af
ford. Certainly, it will be more than what those mines are worth.”

  “My dear,” he said, “as little as they are worth at present, those mines are all we have.”

  Her eyes widened, and color rose in her cheeks. She sat down abruptly on the banquette.

  Alistair remained where he was, wishing someone would do him a favor and cut out his tongue. “I do wish,” he said, “my tongue would consult with my brain now and again. Our financial affairs are not in the least your concern.”

  “Not my concern?” Her expression became exasperated. “No wonder Lord Gordmor has been so infernally obstinate. What a fool I am! When I wrote to Aunt Clothilde, I should have enquired about him as well as about you. It would have been far more useful to have financial details than the catalogue of your amours, entertaining as that was.”

  “Entertaining?”

  “You ought to write your memoirs,” she said.

  “My memoirs?” He had grown so used to being clubbed in the head that he didn’t even blink.

  “It will bring in more money than those paltry mines.”

  Alistair walked to the fire and watched the tiny tongues of flame licking the coals while he debated how much to tell her. At length he turned back to her. She watched him intently.

  “Mirabel, there isn’t time,” he said.

  “You are not yet thirty,” she said. “As exciting as your life has been, the tale is relatively short. If you applied yourself, you could easily write your memoirs in a matter of months, for you do have a way with words.”

  “There isn’t time,” he said. “I’ve only seven weeks.”

  In a few crisp words, he told her: about his meeting in November with his father and the list of Episodes of Stupidity, and the choice his father had given him.

  She listened, her head tipped to one side, as though he were a vastly complicated puzzle. When he was done, she said, “I do not understand what the problem is.”

  Alistair knew he was not as articulate as he wished to be when speaking to her. Still, he’d told the story in terms so simple, a child could not misconstrue them. He tried again: “If Gordy and I fail to get our canal act passed by the first of May, I must marry an heiress.”