“Already promised to Mr Julian Narfield, and after that to Mr Edward Redpath. But there is to be a waltz later, and I shall not be standing up for that, so you may bear me company on the wallflowers’ seats if you wish.”
“Do you disapprove of the waltz, Miss Milburn?”
“No, but I don’t know the steps, and I don’t wish to expose my ignorance to the company.”
“That suits me very well, for I have never attempted a waltz either,” he said, with a smile. “We shall be preserving the company from my ignorance, too.”
The day of the ball saw no excursions planned, for the ladies felt the need to spend the day resting and choosing their gowns and jewels. The gentlemen went shooting as usual, and for once Charles was free to go with them, enjoying tolerable sport. There was some relief in being only with gentlemen, and finding no need to be careful of his language or even to talk at all, if he had no mind for it. Even though he was learning to be more adept at dealing with ladies, he still felt more at ease with his own sex.
Dinner was a lively affair, for everyone was in eager anticipation of the ball. Even those who would not dance looked forward to a wider range of company. Charles wished he might be among their number, for dancing was not one of his favourite occupations. He always felt awkward and ungainly in the dance. However, it had been impressed on all the young men that there would be an excess of ladies, so he knew he must do his duty.
He had not yet secured a partner for the first set, and had thought perhaps he would observe just at first, but the sight of Will leading Miss Milburn onto the floor infuriated him. Instantly he looked about him for someone not otherwise engaged. The first young lady to catch his eye turned out to be the younger Miss Wynne, but as a distraction she was not a success. She was so busy minding her steps that she had nothing to spare for conversation, so that Charles had nothing to do except to glower at Will. After that, he danced with a Miss Smythe, and then with the youngest Miss Redpath, but although these two were happily able to talk and dance at the same time, they too failed as distractions, for there was Miss Milburn smiling brightly at her partner, and seemingly enjoying herself tremendously.
“Why are you not dancing with Miss Milburn?” his step-mother hissed at him, during a lull in proceedings.
“She was already engaged for half the evening.”
“There you are, you see! You will lose her if you are not careful. Oh, I knew this would happen!”
“Have no fear, I have secured her for the waltz.”
“Oh… the waltz… that is good, very good. Well done, Charles.”
“Why are you so keen on her?” he said, suddenly curious. “Here are young ladies enough to please far more fastidious men than I am, all with better education and connections and fortune than Miss Milburn, yet you have never wavered in your support of her cause. Despite her unequivocal refusal, you continue to encourage me in that direction, and I cannot for the life of me understand why.”
Her smile wavered and then vanished, to be replaced by a look of pure anxiety. “Charles, I shall be happy to see you settled, whomever you may choose, you know that. Even with Mildred, if your thoughts had run in that direction. If you should prefer another young lady above Miss Milburn, I should never dream of dissuading you. But…” She paused, chewing her lip nervously. “Consider my position, dear. I am five and thirty years old, and… and… let us be realistic… your father is almost twice my age, and therefore I am likely to be a widow before too many years have passed. I brought nothing into the marriage beyond my own self, and although your father has very generously settled a small sum upon me, it will give me only a tiny income, and I cannot bear to—” She gulped, then took a deep breath. “I cannot face the prospect of moving out of Starlingford into a tiny cottage with only a cook general and a maid of all work and no comforts at all, or else going to live with one of your sisters.”
“That will never happen, Mama,” he said gently. “I shall never force you out of your own home.”
“But that is just the trouble,” she said sadly. “It will not be my own home. It will be your wife’s home, and naturally she will want to be mistress of it, and not have the former mistress underfoot, and I completely understand that. It is the way the world works, that the old mistress moves out when the new mistress moves in. All these young ladies here tonight understand that perfectly well. They see you as the future master of Starlingford, and themselves as its future mistress, and give no thought to me at all. But Miss Milburn is not like that. She has no notion of how our world works, and she will need me to advise her and guide her for years and years. She will not expect me to leave Starlingford, in fact, she will most definitely want me to stay.” She heaved a sigh. “I am a selfish creature, Charles. You said it did not matter to you whom you married, so long as it were not Mildred. In which case, it might as well be someone who would suit me. Do you see?”
He took her hand, and gently kissed it. “I see perfectly, Mama, but I promise you this — I shall never marry anyone who would force you out of Starlingford. When I settle upon the female I should like to marry, I shall make my offer conditional upon it.”
She laughed, and said, “Now you are being absurd! No rational woman would ever accept you on such terms.”
“Then it will just have to be Miss Milburn,” he said equably.
The next dance began, and he moved off to find some neglected female who would not despise his company for half an hour, but during the quiet moments of the set, he considered his step-mother’s words. It was a relief to know her true reasons for preferring Miss Milburn, and their conversation left him unaccountably light-hearted.
22: A Waltz
Charles had the annoyance of seeing Will taking Miss Milburn into supper. He cursed himself for his stupidity in participating in the supper dance himself, for it meant he was obliged to accompany his partner in to supper. Fortunately, he spotted a free seat beside Miss Milburn, so he steered his partner in that direction and claimed the place for her. Supper was very convivial as a result. Will was in good form, Miss Tomkins laughed heartily at Charles’s every feeble joke and Miss Milburn… Miss Milburn was delightful. Charles had to admit, rather grudgingly, that she was indeed perfectly amiable with Will. She smiled and teased him in a manner that, in any other woman, might be called flirtatious. Will was right in another way, too — she looked remarkably well. She wore only a simple topaz cross around her neck, and her dress was less elaborate than most, but the lace trimming was exquisite, even to his inexpert eye, and Mama’s maid had dressed her hair charmingly. And those dancing eyes! For a fleeting moment, he wished she would direct her teasing at him instead of at Will.
When the musicians could be heard warming up again, Will said, “Miss Milburn, may I escort you to your next partner? Or sit with you if you are not dancing?”
“Thank you, Mr Leatham, but I believe this is the waltz, and therefore I am engaged to your cousin.”
“Oh.” For a moment, Will was disconcerted, throwing Charles a questioning glance. But he recovered quickly. “Then I shall leave you in Charles’s care. Miss Tomkins, might I have the honour of this dance, if you are not otherwise engaged?”
She blushingly agreed to it, and Will led her away, with one last frowning look at Charles.
“Do you wish to watch the dance?” he said to Miss Milburn.
She shook her head. “It is so crowded and close in there,” she said.
“True. These improvised ballrooms are always too small, are they not? Every house should have a proper ballroom, large enough for fifty couples, at least, do you not agree?”
She smiled at him, in a way that warmed him inside. “And have it standing unused for all but two or three days in the year? That would be wasteful indeed. The saloon and music room combined make a perfectly adequate ballroom, except that it is very hot and stuffy, and that is just a natural consequence of holding a ball in the summer.”
“Indeed. Winter is a far better season for dancing, and
with luck one might be snowed in and the ball could last for a fortnight.”
She laughed, merely shaking her head at this sally.
“Shall we go out onto the terrace?” he said. “The air will be cooler and fresher outside.”
“Oh yes! That would be very pleasant.”
There were doors from the dining room opening directly to the terrace, so he offered his arm and led her outside. The terrace ran the full length of this side of the building, lit by lanterns. Although there were shadowy corners, Charles led Miss Milburn to a brightly lit spot where they were clearly visible from within, should anyone happen to look. She had not thought of it, but he was all too aware of the propriety of being alone with her.
She leaned against the balustrade, gazing out into the darkness of the garden, and for a while he chose not to disturb her reverie, content merely to watch her profile. Tendrils of hair curled round her face, and he was struck with the urge to reach out and touch them, winding them around his fingers. Such foolishness! Yet the urge was almost irresistible. Say something… he must say something… anything to break the silence.
“Are you enjoying your stay here?” It was a mindless question, but she turned to him with a ready smile.
“Oh yes! How could anyone not enjoy it? Although Lady Narfield’s invitation to me was not entirely altruistic. She had discovered a whole chest full of lace from her mother-in-law’s day… no, it must have been even earlier. Anyway, she wanted me to look though it all and tell me what I thought. So I had a very pleasant morning sorting through some exquisite pieces… the finest Bruxelles lace, and Flemish… some Italian convent lace… so beautiful!” She sighed. “If I could make anything half so fine, I should call myself a lacemaker. But we don’t have the quality of flax now. Or at least, I can’t get thread so fine.”
“Your lace is beautiful,” he said, with the utmost sincerity.
“You are very kind to say so. My lace fan has been much admired, it is true. I could have sold it a dozen times over.” Another sigh. “I suppose I don’t need to sell my lace any more, do I? But I can’t quite get out of that way of thinking. Your step-mother has been so kind to me, explaining how I should behave, and letting Cresset do my hair. I can’t imagine how I’d have managed otherwise. I’m so grateful to her, although I have no idea why she should take so much trouble over me.”
“She still hopes we will make a match of it,” he said, with a deprecating lift of one shoulder. Then, his mind still on his last conversation with his step-mother, he went on, “Poor Mama! She wants me to marry, and yet she is so afraid of it, too.”
“Afraid? Why?”
“Because when Papa dies, there will be a new mistress of Starlingford and Mama will have to leave her home.”
Miss Milburn turned to face him, quivering with indignation. “That is abominable! This world we live in is so cruel to widows. When her husband is alive, a woman is a person of consequence but as soon as he is dead and buried, she becomes nothing — less than nothing! Poor and alone and neglected, and quite beneath notice. It is the greatest injustice.”
“You speak warmly on the subject,” he said. “Are you thinking of your own mother?”
“Yes, for once Papa died it was as if she shrivelled away, becoming so small and… and insignificant. The world saw her as nobody, so she became nobody. And poor! We had never been wealthy, but there was always enough money. Life was comfortable, even though Papa worried about it constantly. But then, after his death, suddenly we were poor and everything was a struggle and poor Mama could not cope with it.”
“But you could,” he said softly. “You became the head of the family.”
“Someone had to,” she said fiercely. “Someone had to decide if we could afford beef or not, or new boots, or whether we could afford to replace an old kettle. I was eighteen when Papa died, Mr Leatham, and the most difficult decision I’d made until that moment was whether to wear the green silk or the sprigged muslin for an evening party. I grew up very quickly, I can tell you. It was the physician’s bills that finished us. Poor Papa was so sick at the end, and the physician came every day. How were we to know how much that would cost? And then, within months, poor Mama grew sick as well, and how could we deny her the care she needed, and the medicines? Lord, the leeches she endured! And it did no good in the end, for she grew worse and worse, and nothing helped, yet we still had to pay for it. What little money Papa left us went into fattening those leeches. We ended up in two rooms with only one servant, and the lace I’d made as a pleasant diversion was all that kept us from starvation.”
“Had you no relatives to turn to?” he said.
“Several who came and tutted over us and offered useless advice and then went away again. None who had any real help to give us. One elderly aunt offered a home to one of us, as an unpaid companion, but we agreed that we must stay together at all costs. I worked it out that we could survive on Mama’s tiny portion and our earnings for a few years, just until Lin should marry. She is so pretty, it was inevitable that she would marry sooner or later, and save us from penury.”
“And now she is indeed to marry, although you are already saved from penury,” he said, smiling.
“Yes! Although it is so hard to get used to the idea of not counting every penny,” she said. “Perhaps one day I might even view the loss of fifty pounds on a wager as a mere trifle, and not panic quite so dreadfully. I was very bad company that day, Mr Leatham, was I not?”
He lifted her gloved hand to his lips. “To be wholly truthful, Miss Milburn, I enjoyed that day enormously.”
“Even though you were never introduced to the duke?” she said suspiciously.
“Even so — although that was an annoyance at the time, I confess. No, our wager forced me to be civil to you for the whole day, and so I found myself with no lapse in temper with which to reproach myself later. Of course, I was ashamed of my inability to escape from the maze and we never did get to the pagoda, but otherwise I had a perfectly agreeable day.”
“I’m very glad, and I enjoyed it too, on the whole,” she said, her smile warming him inside in a most unexpected way. That he should ever be so grateful for Miss Milburn’s approbation! It was an astonishing situation, yet so it was.
“We are rather alike, you and I,” he said, surprising even himself with the thought. “We have both had to make difficult adjustments, which are for the good in one way, yet bad in another. You found yourselves pulled out of poverty to a life of relative ease, yet to a society not at all comfortable for you, and I—”
“—had to leave the army,” she said. “You must miss it so.”
“I do,” he said quietly. “My life was settled, orderly… I went where I was bidden and did what I was told, and knew that it was right. There was a certainty to it that suited me. But all that is gone. We can never go back to the past, no matter how much we may wish to. We must accept the present for what it is, with all its trials and setbacks, all its frustrations. I was useful, once, Miss Milburn. I was of value, in my small way, to my country and my King. Now I do nothing but shoot snipe and make meaningless conversations with people I have no wish to know and who have no wish to know me. One day, perhaps, I shall see this as a better life, but just at the moment it all seems so pointless.”
“You see only the bad, but you have said yourself that such adjustments have both good and bad in them. You have left behind the regularity of army life, but you are also no longer at risk of immediate death, and that is surely a good. Everyone who cares for you must see it so. And then there is the fact that you are now the heir to your father’s estate, you have fine prospects, although to be sure that only came about through the deaths of your brothers.”
His throat tightened at her words. His brothers! His childhood friends, his unquestioning supporters, his most trusted allies… now he was alone. No… not quite alone, for there was one person above all others whom he regarded as a true friend, for she would never tell him false. That, above all, was her most
endearing characteristic, that she would say what was in her mind, and not wrapped up in deceptive language.
The strains of the waltz drifted out from the open windows. To distract himself from such maudlin thoughts, he said, “Come, Miss Milburn, I would have you dance the waltz, for when will you again have such a perfect opportunity?”
“No… I can’t… I don’t know the steps.”
“I shall teach you, but we will not expose my teaching or your learning to the world. We may dance out here, if you will.”
She smiled, and again his insides turned over. What was she doing to him? And what was he doing waltzing with her? Such an intimate dance, and he was already in dangerous territory with her, yet he could not resist. In a little while, he would take her back inside so that Will could flirt with her, but for now, she was his. So he showed her the starting position, and she stepped towards him trustingly, not minding the arm at her waist, the hand holding hers tight, the closeness…
They danced, haltingly at first, as he whispered the steps and the changes into her ear, but then with greater surety as she mastered the intricacies of the movements. They turned this way and that, hands clasping and unclasping, one arm raised and then the other, but all the time with gazes locked. She smiled, she laughed when she went wrong, she laughed again when she executed some tricky movement perfectly. To his utmost delight, she hummed as she danced, so that the music was not merely flowing out from the ballroom, but was right there beside him, held fast in the circle of his arms…
In his heart.
He scarcely knew how it had happened, but in all the time he imagined he had been despising her thoroughly, he had been falling in love with her. Astonishing thought… yet it had happened so slowly, so imperceptibly that it had crept up on him unawares. What a fool he was not to notice it! Even more of a fool to pass her on so casually to Will. Fool, fool, fool…! Now he would have to watch Will court her, and how could he fail to win her? He had all the charm and easy manners that Charles lacked. What woman, even one so set against marriage as Caroline, could resist him? Dear, unpretentious Caroline would never refuse him just because he was only a clergyman with three hundred a year. And so capable a manager as she was, they would live very comfortably on it, and she would never regret the jewels, the carriages, the fine clothes that she might have had as Mrs Charles Leatham.
The Lacemaker (Silver Linings Mysteries Book 2) Page 23