Bewitched

by Cullman, Heather;

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  Bewitched

  Heather Cullman

  For my parents, Robert and Barbara Gordon, for teaching me the joy of reading, and showing me the magic in everyday life. I must have done something very right in a past life to have been blessed with such wonderful parents in this one. I love you.

  Chapter 1

  Oxfordshire, England, 1828

  Whatever am I to do about Michael? Adeline Vane, dowager duchess of Sherrington, mused, absently stirring the dye vat before her. It was a question that had plagued her all morning long, one she had turned over and over again in her mind, twisting and examining it from every possible angle. And like the first few thousand times she’d belabored it, she was still no closer to finding an answer.

  Desperate to vent her frustration, she gave the length of merino in the vat a particularly savage churn. It gyrated wildly, splattering dye across her skirts. The sight of those splotches, a drab, sickly yellow among the kaleidoscopic assortment of red madder, blue woad, and purple umbilicara stains that currently dappled the gown, served only to exacerbate her vexation.

  Botheration! As if matters weren’t irksome enough, the dye she’d worked so hard to concoct was the color of dog piddle, not at all the bright lemon yellow she’d envisioned for the tunic robe she intended to make from the cloth.

  For several tense moments she continued to glare at the spots, silently berating herself for her failure. Then reason took over and she shook her head. There was no sense in frazzling herself over off-hue dye, not when she had the more pressing problem of Michael to fret over. Besides, unlike her grandson, she at least had hope for the cloth. Shaking her head again, this time in despair at Michael’s lot, she bustled across what had once been the manor washhouse to act upon her hope.

  Crudely built of local limestone and roofed in Stone-field slate, the weathered old washhouse now served as a haven for Adeline’s favorite pastime, textile arts. It was a passion shared by her best friend, Euphemia Merriman, Dowager Viscountess Bunbury, who even now sat at a dye-stained worktable, chattering away as she wielded a copper printing plate. Though the six casement windows behind her friend had been flung open, the room remained stifling, the early July heat intensified by the low-burning hearth fire and made humid by the evil-smelling steam that billowed from the dye vats simmering over it.

  Hoping to create a cooling cross breeze, Adeline opened the door as she passed by it, revealing a garden as bright and beautiful as a heaven-sent dream. The garden, in which only pigment-yielding plants were cultivated, was another of her and Euphemia’s pet projects; one that served not only to ensure a ready supply of dyestuff, but to provide a respite from the heat and fumes on sultry days like today.

  Though tempted by the garden’s fragrant invitation to linger, Adeline continued purposefully on her mission, stopping only when she reached the cupboard near the hearth. Mopping her inelegantly sweating brow with the back of her hand, she eyed the jumble on the shelves before her.

  Jars, boxes, and powder-filled papers were strewn across every available surface, carelessly tossed like debris in streets between the towers of haphazardly stacked books. To her right was a mortar of partially pestled annatto seeds, from which would seep a striking orange dye when mordanted with alum; to her left lay a cheesecloth pouch of logwood chips, one guaranteed to produce violet when simmered with tin.

  Tin? Hmmm, yes. A sprinkle of tin crystals was just the thing to brighten the merino. If she were to—

  “Addy!”

  Adeline jumped, startled from her preoccupation by Euphemia’s indignation-peppered voice. Noticing—really noticing—her friend for the first time that morning, she smiled and rather shamefacedly inquired, “Yes, Effie, dear?”

  “Ha! Just as I suspected. You haven’t heard a word I’ve said,” Euphemia accused.

  “Of course I have,” Adeline lied, not about to admit that her friend was right. To do so would only wound her feelings, and hurting Effie was the last thing in the world she ever wished to do.

  Euphemia eyed her skeptically. “Indeed? Then what, pray tell, was I talking about?”

  What the devil was Effie twaddling about? Adeline had been so absorbed in the problem of her grandson, Michael, that …

  A-ha! Grandson! No, no … not son … daughter. Granddaughter. Yes, that was it. Effie had been going on about her granddaughter, the American one who was being sent to England … what the devil was the gel’s name? She glanced back down at the table, making a show of righting a box she had toppled in her startlement at her friend’s voice as she scrambled to recall the girl’s name.

  It eluded her. She sighed. Oh, well. She would no doubt hear it again soon enough. Indeed, if Effie was performing true to form, she was most probably still rambling on about the chit. Effie was rather like a dog with a bone when it came to conversation: she never let go of a subject until she’d worried it to death.

  Now fairly confident that the discussion still rested upon … well, whatever her name was … Adeline looked back up at her friend and replied, “You were talking about your American granddaughter. You were—” Vaguely recalling Effie clucking over the erratic arrival schedules of American ships, she guessed, “You were wondering exactly when the gel is to arrive.”

  Euphemia sniffed. “Ha! That proves my point exactly. I have already told you twice”—she held up two plump, indigo-stained fingers—“twice!—that she is to arrive three weeks from Thursday. She’s coming—”

  “Because it was her father’s dying wish that you find her a husband,” Adeline finished for her. There! That should prove that she’d been listening … at least as much as it was possible for anyone to listen to Effie when she got into a natter.

  “Well, I don’t mind telling you that I pity the poor girl,” Euphemia retorted, applying pigment to the printing plate before her. “How very terrible it must be for her to be sent from her home and family, especially so soon after her father’s death. Though I dearly loved and am truly devastated by my darling son’s demise, I simply cannot imagine what could have possessed him to have wasted his last breath on such an outrageous request.”

  “It is hardly outrageous for a dying man to charge a relative with the care of his child. Quite the contrary,” Adeline replied. A-ha! The tin crystals. Carrying the earthenware jar back to where the merino soaked, she added, “If you ask me, I think his request perfectly sensible.”

  Euphemia shook her head, making her chocolate brown ringlets—fabric wasn’t the only thing she dyed—bob beneath her beribboned home cap. “It might be sensible to send her all this way if she had no one else. But she has relatives aplenty in America, including her live older brothers. Why he didn’t charge one of them with the duty of seeing her wed, I shall never understand. The boys are all married and settled, and perfectly equal to the task, while I—I am too durned old to flitter about town chasing after a miss and playing matchmaker.”

  Adeline shrugged one shoulder and stirred her scientifically rationed measure of tin crystals into the dye bath. “It could be that her father wishes her to wed aristocracy. Indeed, considering her noble bloodline, he might very well have thought her too fine to waste on a colonial bumpkin.”

  “No, no. He thought nothing of the sort. My Joseph was quite the patriot, though why I simply cannot imagine.” Euphemia sniffed. “Barbaric place, America. Full of ruffians and redskins.”

  “Perhaps the gel agrees with you. Perhaps that is why she is being sent here. It could be that she finds American men not at all t
o her taste and has thus far refused to marry one,” Adeline suggested, frowning down at the dye bath. It had taken on a most peculiar cast.

  Euphemia emitted a noise that sounded suspiciously like a grunt. “I hardly think that the case. Not when you consider that she has already found three men who suit.”

  “Three?” Adeline looked up quickly, her frown deepening. “Whatever are you saying, Effie?”

  “That she has been engaged thrice,” her friend replied, centering the printing plate over the rainbow-hued cambric she’d tied and dyed the week before.

  For the first time since beginning the discussion, Adeline’s interest was genuinely piqued. “Indeed? Do tell.”

  Euphemia pressed the plate against the cloth, then shrugged. “There is really nothing to tell. Things just didn’t work out.” Picking up a small wooden mallet, she began tapping the back of the plate.

  “Didn’t work out?” Adeline repeated, flabbergasted by her friend’s nonchalance at what most members of the ton would consider a disastrous state of affairs. “Didn’t work out for whom? The gel or the grooms?”

  “I am not really certain.” Tap! Tap! Tap! “Joseph never wrote much about the matter, and it would have been indelicate for me to have pried.”

  “Indelicate? Indelicate!” Adeline exclaimed, her voice rising in her incredulity at Effie’s obtuseness. “It was indelicate not to have pried, especially considering that the poor gel has been motherless since birth.” She shook her head, clucking her reproach. “I am ashamed of you, Effie. Really, I am. I simply cannot believe that you, of all people, could be such a widgeon.”

  Rather than look chastised, Euphemia positively beamed … not at all the response Adeline had expected. Ceasing her tapping to grin at her friend, she crowed, “Why, Addy! You truly were listening! You had to have been to remember my misgivings about her motherless state.”

  “Of course I was listening. I said I was, didn’t I?” she retorted, taken aback to discover that she couldn’t actually recall Effie airing any such concerns. Hmmm. It seemed that one didn’t have to listen to Effie’s prattle to absorb it. Apparently it was rather like a strong kitchen odor—it crept into your attic whether you wished it to or not. Hiding her astonishment at her discovery,

  Adeline eyed her friend with reproof and pointed out, “Whether or not I was listening is hardly the issue here. Your granddaughter and her difficulty in getting a man to the alter is.”

  “Yes. Of course you are right, Addy, dear,” Euphemia murmured, adopting a properly chastened expression. “It is a matter you can be certain that I shall explore the instant she arrives.” Nodding in affirmation to her purpose, she resumed her tapping. She had tapped halfway across the plate when the mallet froze in mid-air and she gasped aloud. “Oh, my! You don’t suppose that Emily is a jilt, do you?”

  Emily. So that was the chit’s name. Marking it in her mind, Adeline shook her head. “My guess is that the problem is the exact opposite, that it is a lack of feminine guile that has been her undoing. She was, after all, raised in a household of men. Without a mother’s guidance, she most probably never learned the subtle charms of womanhood. Why, I shan’t be at all surprised when she arrives to find her an utter hoyden.”

  “A hoyden!” Euphemia couldn’t have looked more appalled. “Oh, my. Whatever shall I do if she is indeed as you say?”

  “We. What shall we do, dear,” Adeline corrected her, meeting her friend’s troubled gaze with a reassuring smile. “After all the help you have given me with Michael through the years, you don’t honestly think that I would abandon you in this, do you?”

  Euphemia slowly smiled back, her aged face manifesting vestiges of the beauty that had once enchanted an entire generation of men. Her dark eyes growing misty and her voice choked with emotion, she whispered, “Oh, Addy. You truly are the best of friends. Whatever would I do without you?”

  Feeling her own throat strangle on the sentimentality of the moment, Adeline, who prided herself on her rigid control, snorted and poked the merino with her stirring pole. “I suspect that you would do very much as we shall do together,” she crisply countered, deliberately misinterpreting the question. “You would polish the gel’s manners, deck her out like a plate from La Belle Assemblée, introduce her in the proper circles, and let matters take their own course. If she is anywhere near as fetching as you were in your youth, she shall be engaged before the end of her first season.”

  “Do you really think that it will be so very simple?” Euphemia inquired dubiously.

  Adeline nodded and squinted into the dye bath. “Simple for two old she-dragons like us.” Scowling at what she saw, she fished the cloth from the vat.

  “But Addy, what if—”

  “Oh, devil a bit!”

  A cry of dismay escaped Euphemia’s lips as well at the sight of the cloth dangling from the end of the stirring pole. It was a most putrid shade of green, nowhere near the sunny yellow Adeline had hoped to achieve. Setting aside her problem with Emily in the face of her friend’s dire dye disaster, she ejected, “Ecod, Effie! It’s the color of pond scum. Whatever do you think went wrong?”

  “Vitriol, I suspect.” Making a face, Adeline dumped the hideous cloth into the waiting vat of rinse water. “I must have mistakenly put green vitriol crystals into the tin crystal jar when I refilled it earlier. I cannot imagine how I could have done something so harebrained.”

  “I can,” Euphemia shot back, resuming her tapping. “You’ve been half at sea all morning long. Indeed, I’ve had the distinct impression that there is something on your mind … something you clearly do not wish to share with me.” This last was uttered with an injured air, for while she freely confided her troubles to Adeline, Adeline dithered about in distraction with hers until Euphemia was forced either to pry them from her or go mad from the annoyance her dithering provoked.

  As she always did when Euphemia commented upon her dithering, Adeline sighed as if beset with the greatest of despairs. “Oh, Effie, it isn’t that I don’t wish to confide in you. It’s just that I hate to burden you with my problems. Especially this one, since there is nothing to be done for it.”

  “I always burden you with my problems, don’t I? Regardless of how impossible they might be.” At Adeline’s nod, she nodded back, logically pointing out, “Then it’s only fair that I listen to yours. Who knows? Being an impartial party, I just might see a solution that has thus far escaped you. You know how short-sighted you can be when you’re too close to a problem.”

  “Well …”

  When she made no effort to continue, Euphemia snorted her exasperation and scolded, “See here, Adeline Vane, neither of us is getting any younger. So do stop wasting what precious little time we have left and empty the bag.”

  “Well …” her friend repeated, this time stretching every letter of the word. Poking the cloth with the stirring pole as she stretched the last l, she finally conceded, “All right, then. If you insist.”

  Euphemia pursed her lips and nodded. “I do.”

  “Well …” Another sigh. “If you must know, it’s The Varlet. He and The Hussy paid me another visit yesterday.” As everyone in Adeline’s set knew, The Varlet was her despicable great-nephew, Owen Pringle, who stood to inherit the duchy of Sherrington should something befall the current duke, her grandson, Michael. The Hussy was Owen’s wife, Beatrice, a vulgar, grasping creature who made no bones about her eagerness to be a duchess.

  At the mention of the Pringles, Euphemia’s mallet struck the printing plate with far more force than the delicate task demanded.

  “My sentiment exactly,” Adeline remarked drily, giving the cloth another jab. “Beastly pair, the Pringles. Had the gall to invite themselves to supper. Quite spoiled my digestion.”

  “They seem to have made a habit of spoiling your digestion of late,” Euphemia observed with a grimace. “I don’t see why you do not simply refuse to re
ceive them and be done with it.”

  “I tried that already, remember? And things were much the worse for it. Instead of annoying me at my home for a few hours every week or so, they haunted my steps in public. I couldn’t so much as walk through my door without being accosted by them. It was a nightmare! Every time I turned around, they were there, yammering and pecking, and making my life an utter misery.” She shook her head, her expression glum. “If only I could think of a way to rid myself of them, permanently.”

  “I already thought of the perfect way,” Euphemia reminded her, giving the printing plate a final tap. “Or have you forgotten?”

  “Of course I haven’t forgotten. How could I? Unfortunately, we cannot really shoot them.”

  Euphemia sniffed and set aside the mallet. “Why the devil not? If you were to invite them for a friendly archery match and we just happened to shoot them, well, what court would convict us? At our age we’re expected to be half-blind and completely dotty. No doubt the Pringles would be judged deserving of what they got for being cork-brained enough to shoot with us.”

  As Euphemia had hoped, Adeline laughed. “Oh, Effie! My darling, dearest friend. You truly are a wicked old fury,” she gasped out between chuckles.

  “Being a fury is a privilege of age,” Euphemia retorted primly. “A privilege, I might add, that you, yourself, delight in exercising from time to time.”

  “Indeed I do, and you can be sure that I take particular delight in exercising it on The Varlet.” A faint snort. “Bloody lot of good it does.”

  “Addy! Language, please.” Wickedness was one thing, cursing was quite another.

  “Sorry,” Adeline muttered, not looking a whit contrite at her use of the word “bloody.” “It’s just that—I mean, every time I think of—ooohhh!” She gave the cloth a vicious shove, splashing water over the edge of the vat and across the flagstone floor.

  Euphemia gaped at her friend, stunned by her rare display of temper. When she at last broke from her shock, she exclaimed, “Why, Addy! You truly are overset! Whatever did The Varlet say to put you in such a pucker?”