Corset Diaries

by Katie MacAlister

  “No,” she said, dabbing at her eyes and blowing her nose discretely. “If I had, I wouldn’t have bothered you with the situation.”

  “It’s no bother. Well, I’ll think about it. Maybe Max will have an idea. In the meantime, just keep telling everyone there’s only eleven more days left, and only four days until the servants’ ball.”

  “I will, but I’m not sure even that will keep people from walking out.”

  It didn’t help that we had four extra people staying the weekend, which dumped even more work on the servants. I didn’t have time to think very hard on the problem before I had to go downstairs and play hostess to the ladies while the men were out shooting innocent birds.

  I didn’t have a chance to remind Max this morning that although I would not be a demanding and domineering wife, if he killed so much as one bird I would never speak to him again. So it was with much trepidation that I joined Barbara, Jean, and Mademoiselle and Melody in the open barouche, to be driven out to join the men for an al fresco luncheon (a.k.a. picnic).

  Jean stared hard at Alec as he jumped down from the coachman’s seat and flipped down the steps, holding the door open for us to climb into the carriage. “That’s the coachman?” she asked in a whisper as Barbara (still ignoring me except when the cameras were pointed at us) grandly ascended the three metal steps. “Yeah. Isn’t he dishy?”

  “You can say that again. He’s just stunning.” Jean breathed, and I knew that unlike her predecessors, I’d like her.

  We rode out in style to the north edge of the estate, where the men had tramped out earlier to slaughter the bird life. Melody rode up front with Alec, and Sam sat facing back across from me, with Wilma clutching her sound equipment and hanging on for dear life to the groom’s seat at the rear of the carriage.

  Although I’d been to town twice for church, it was a bit strange riding along in a carriage while cars zoomed around us. Many of them tooted their horns politely and waved. We all waved back, smiling and nodding at the people who stopped to stare. A few people pulled over to take pictures of us. Barbara loved that.

  Most of the road was paved, but after fifteen minutes, Alec turned off onto a dirt road and we rattled our way down it until we reached the designated picnic spot.

  The servants, of course, had been out since the return from church, setting up the picnic. This was no simple blanket and a basket of goodies picnic; this was a proper Victorian picnic, and that meant green velvet cushions, lots of rugs, pillows, two small tables covered in beautifully snowy-white tablecloths, several folding chairs for those people who didn’t care to lounge on the rugs, and huge, copious amounts of food. The main part of the picnic consisted of cold roast beef, two roast chickens, a duck, ham, two pigeon pies, salad, tomatoes and cucumbers, a large cheesecake, two fruit pies, blancmange, and jam puffs. Of course, there was champagne, wine, and lemonade to wash it all down, and tea and coffee in flasks for the less libationary souls. As if laying all that out on a table wasn’t enough, Alice (acting in the passed-out Palmer’s stead) also oversaw the arrangement of wineglasses, tumblers, silverware, plates, teacups, and saucers, as well as all the condiments and spirits (so the gentlemen might refill their hip flasks, because everyone knows it’s thirsty work shooting sweet little innocent birds).

  “What a very elegant setting,” Jean said as she stepped out of the carriage. “This is utterly fantastic. I can’t believe how authentic it looks. It’s like stepping through a magic door and finding yourself a hundred years in the past.”

  “It is pretty fantastic, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, goodness, just see where they’ve set that table— that won’t do at all. Alice! You must move it, it’s below a tree. Any number of horrid things could fall out of the tree into the food. No, to the right, that way. Oh, I see I shall have to take charge once again. I can’t imagine allowing my servants to get away with murder the way yours do,” Barbara said, shooting me a nasty look as she hustled off to have the table moved two feet to the right.

  I gave Jean a look that fell just short of being an actual eye roll. A little giggle slipped out of her lips.

  “How do you keep from laughing?” she asked behind her hand, one eye on Sam as he filmed Barbara overseeing the table move.

  “It’s not easy, let me tell you, although sometimes . . .” I looked out over the lovely green meadow, dotted with wildflowers and sunny dandelions, butterflies dancing on the afternoon breeze. “. . . Sometimes, it’s very easy to forget that this is all just a temporary life. I can see why people fought to retain the privileges of the upper class. It has its discomforts, but for the most part, it is a very easy lifestyle to fall into.”

  My gaze fell onto Alice and Easter, dressed in clean white pinafores over their somber black maid’s dresses, the long white streamers from their caps playing in the wind behind them, as they staggered a little while hauling the heavy table the prescribed distance. “Then again, I can see why the lower class demanded a revolution. It certainly wasn’t a life of ease for them.”

  “That’s true, but I have to admit, I’m enjoying myself greatly. I know I should feel guilty for lolling about, having servants waiting on me, but it is a wonderfully delicious life.”

  I smiled as Max stepped into view, his shotgun broken over his arm in the traditional manner as he chatted with Barry and Neil. “It has its moments.”

  Behind them the two Hs (Harry and Henry) followed, looking rather glum, while trailing them were Michael and Thom, both acting as beaters for the hunters, and three rangy dogs loaned from a nearby sportsman. Michael and Thom, I was unhappy to see, each had a string of dead birds.

  I wasn’t the only one unhappy to see the proof of their day’s sport.

  As Max walked toward us, a smile on his manly lips, a popping noise came from the left. I stared in disbelief as red exploded on Max’s chest.

  “Oh, my God, he’s been shot,” I screamed, and started running toward him. “MEDIC!”

  Max looked down at his chest, his shotgun hanging limply from his hand as he touched the bloom of red on his chest.

  “Don’t move! Don’t touch anything! Stop breathing, you’ll just make the wound worse,” I yelled as I hiked up my skirts in order to run faster.

  Another pop sounded. He jerked as a second blast of red formed on his side.

  “Dear God, someone call the police. Max is being murdered before our eyes!” I yelled.

  “Tessa, no—” he said.

  “Stop talking,” I bellowed. “You’ll just make it worse.”

  “No, stop—” he said just before I threw myself at him, knocking him flat on his back. The impact effectively stripped us both of breath, but I didn’t bother with paltry concerns like breathing when Max was dying in front of me. I fumbled with the buttons on his waistcoat, the blood making everything slick.

  “Oh, God, how badly are you hurt? No, don’t talk, just answer me. Oh, my god. There’s blood everywhere! Dammit, Max, you can’t die on me now! It’s not fair! I’m not going to lose two husbands before I’m even married to the second one! I refuse to let you die! I’ll kill you if you die now, do you hear me?”

  Another popping noise and a shout from behind me warned that the horrible assassin was still out there. I lunged over Max’s body to protect him from any more bullets, my hands now soaked red with his blood.

  “Tessa,” Max said, trying to pry me off his chest.

  “Stop talking! You have to save your strength!”

  “Tessa, I’m not hurt.”

  “Yes, you are. You’ve been shot, Max. Really badly, too. I think your whole chest is gone. You’re delusional. You probably have a fever or you’re in shock or something due to your massive chest wounds. Just stay still. I’m going to make sure you don’t die. You don’t have anything to worry about. I’m right here. I’ll save you.”

  Beneath me, Max’s chest rumbled.

  “Oh, dear God, he’s doing the death-rattle thing,” I shrieked, turning so I could clutch his dear, ador
able head in my bloodstained fingers. I dug my fingers into his hair and shook him. “Max, my love, my darling, hang on. If you see a light, don’t go toward it, OK? Promise me you won’t go toward the light! The same goes for a tunnel. If you see any tunnels, just turn around and go the other way, all right? Max? Max?”

  With remarkable strength considering he’d been shot twice, Max heaved me off his chest. “Tessa, I’m not hurt, I haven’t been shot. That’s paint, not blood.”

  Two more soft pops followed his words, but I ignored both them and the shouting to look down at my hands.

  They were covered in red, a bright red, a really red red, not at all the color of blood. “Paint?” I said, staring down at my hands, then over at his chest. I touched the soaking red spot on the middle of his brown waistcoat. It was cold and wet, almost slimy. “Paint?”

  “Paint,” Max said, his eyes narrowed as he scanned the surrounding trees. “There—see them? They’re in black.”

  He jumped to his feet, pointing to the line of trees bordering the road as he yelled to the others. “They’re over there, in the trees.”

  “He’s not going to die?” I asked my hands, then jerked back as someone punched my shoulder. Only there wasn’t anyone there—Max and the other men were running off toward the trees. I looked down at my front, the lovely blue-and-cream bodice stained red from Max, now also marked with a huge yellow blotch on my shoulder. I touched it. It felt just like Max’s red.

  Someone was shooting us with paint balls.

  “The bastards!” I screamed, furious. How dare anyone shoot us? Didn’t they have the slightest idea of what Ellis was going to do to me when she saw the paint on me? She’d skin me alive! “That’s it, I’ve had it. No more nice-guy Tessa! Melody, stay with Alice. Ladies, get behind something!”

  I grabbed Max’s shotgun from where it had fallen, jerked my skirts up over my knees, and took off running toward where Max and the guys were about to disappear into the woods.

  To the left of them, where the woods tapered out to the verge along the road, a half-dozen people dressed completely in black—black pants, black shirts, black ski masks—ran out of the woods and headed for a Range Rover parked close by.

  “Stop right where you are,” I yelled at them as they ran for the car, stopping to snap the shotgun together. I pointed it at them. “I’ve got a gun and I’m not afraid to use it.”

  “It’s not loaded,” Sam said breathlessly as he raced by me, the camera held tightly to his chest.

  “It’s not?” I snarled and threw the gun to the ground. “Damn!”

  Max and his posse ran at a diagonal angle to off cut the black-clad assassins. I followed Sam, who was heading straight for the Rover, but veered off when I caught sight of something blue in the grass.

  It was one of the paint guns.

  “Bwahahahah,” I laughed. It looked very similar to the kind of paint ball guns my brother used to play with. A dozen or so green balls showed in the little window along the tube atop the barrel. I jumped up on a large rock sitting at the edge of the field and held the gun with both hands, pointing it slightly ahead of the closest person in black. “Listen up, you scumwads! I’m packing heat, so you’d better stop right now or else! Hands up! Spread ‘em and assume the position!”

  No one paid the slightest bit of attention to me. They all kept running for the car, Max and his gang behind them, Sam coming in at an angle. I started firing, missing everything for the first few shots as the gun bucked in my hands, but once I got used to it, I began to hit things. Sam, unfortunately, was the first object I nailed. He stumbled as green paint splashed across his back, turning to look at me.

  “Sorry! Go on, I’ll cover you,” I yelled to him in my best SWAT-team manner, and took aim again. A patch of grass, a fence pole, a tree, and a cow standing across the road were the next victims, but finally I yelled with triumph as green erupted on the side of one of the black figures. I shot two more of the assassins, one on the head (I was aiming for the person in front of him), before I ran out of ammo.

  Max had almost reached them as they piled into the car but wasn’t quite quick enough. One of them yelled something out the window, throwing out a white piece of paper as they sped off in a cloud of dust.

  “Damn,” I huffed as I ran to where Max, Sam, and the guys were clustered around staring at the Rover as it disappeared down the dirt road. “Did someone get the car’s license number?”

  “It was covered up,” Max said, turning toward me. He held up the piece of paper that had been tossed out.

  “Turn the hunters into the hunted.” I read the words printed in big, blocky red letters. “Save our birthright from domination and destruction by the upper-class terrorists who would rape our land!” I looked up. “Huh?”

  “It’s an animal-rights group,” Sam said, peering over my shoulder. “Freedom Against Rural Terrorists—yes, that’s the group. They used to show up at foxhunts and the like. Looks like they’re targeting private hunting parties now.”

  I started snickering. Max looked at me like I was crazy. “They have a heck of an acronym.” He gave me a look he usually reserves for Melody. I stopped snickering and tried to look dignified, despite the fact that I was covered in paint.

  We made our way back to the picnic and tried to clean off as much paint as we could with the hot water carried in for tea. Max, Neil, Barry, and I had all been hit by the animal-rights group, and Sam carried the mark of my paint ball on his back, but no one else had been hit, although a paint ball had smashed into a couple of teacups, breaking one and staining the others nearby.

  All in all, we had a pretty good time at the picnic (those of us who weren’t waiting hand and foot on the others). We spent an hour eating and talking about what we should do with regards to the attack.

  “I don’t see how we can do anything if we don’t have the number of their car, nor do we know who the people are,” Neil said. “Lord knows I’d like to string them up by their toes—this is a hired suit, and I’ll be damned if I have to buy the blasted thing because someone objects to a little grouse hunting—but what can we do?”

  “I wonder if club soda will take this out?” I asked, trying with a fresh napkin to clean the yellow off my bodice. “How am I supposed to face Ellis?”

  Sam, who’d turned the camera off so he and Wilma could eat lunch, snorted into his champagne. “You’ve got a bigger problem to worry about than your lady’s maid, Tessa.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m going to be dead meat if she sees me like this. She darn near strangled me yesterday when I got a bit of soup on my dress. The rest of you might have a bigger problem, but I can assure you that the only catastrophe on my horizon stands five foot four and has a glare that can strip aluminum siding off a building from fifty yards.”

  “Can I have some champagne?” Melody asked.

  “No,” her father and I both said at the same time. I got a lump in my throat. It was such a family moment.

  “What problem?” Jean asked Sam.

  “Roger,” Max answered, looking a bit sulky.

  “Why not?” Melody asked me.

  “Because you’re just a little squirt, and little squirts aren’t allowed to guzzle champagne.”

  “Surely he can’t be upset about what happened,” Alice said, taking one of the chairs and sinking exhaustedly into it. Once Sam turned off the camera, we declared a time-out for the servants so we could all discuss the attack. Barbara had several snarky things to say about that, but we overruled her and told the servants to help themselves to the lunch. “No one could have foreseen that this would happen.”

  “I’m not a squirt, and I don’t guzzle. Please, Tessa?”

  I handed her my glass. It had about two teaspoons of champagne left in it. She sipped it, her nose wrinkling at the taste (it was very dry champagne). “Ick.”

  “That’s exactly it,” Sam said. “No one outside of you lot, the servants, and the interested persons in the production company—that’s Roger, Kip, and
Roger’s secretary, Sarah—knew that the shooting was scheduled for today. The calendar hasn’t been made public in order to keep crowds away while we’re filming.”

  Alice’s eyes grew round.

  “Oh, lovely, what you’re saying is that someone, probably someone inside the house, very probably one of the four servants who conveniently disappeared this morning—four being the exact number of paint ball assassins—is responsible for the attack?” I asked.

  Max and Sam nodded.

  “Where is Roger?” Harry asked.

  “Off taking an important conference call in town. Kip went with him. They didn’t think there would be any need to be present for the lunch,” Max said. I dabbed at the paint on his waistcoat. Yellow from my shoulder smeared across his red.

  “Sorry,” I muttered in response to his outraged look.

  “If it was one of my girls that did this, I’ll have her head for it,” Alice said grimly. “The same for the lads.”

  “What I’d like to know is who is going to explain all this to Roger?” Sam asked. Wilma, ever silent, nodded and crammed a jam puff into her mouth.

  We all looked at Max.

  “Oh, no, I’m not going to tell him his project is being sabotaged by one of the participants,” he said quickly.

  “Sure you are. You’re the duke—you have to,” I said, cheerfully passing the buck.

  “You’re the duchess; you do it.”

  “I can’t do it. I’m going to be dead once Ellis sees this dress. You’re just going to have to buck up and do it, Max. Where’s all that the sun never sets on the British Empire spirit, eh?”

  “The sun went down on that a long time ago,” Neil said, a bit waspishly to my mind, but I didn’t feel privy enough to British politics to make a comment on it.

  We talked a bit more, then the servants got back on their tired feet and started packing everything up, Sam and Wilma fired up the equipment to film them, and the lazy slobs of the group (that is, the rest of us) patted our tummies and made comments about how a nap was just the ticket for rounding off such a trying day, and toddled off to the two carriages that were waiting for us.