The woman did not care that she was busy with another client. Nor had she seen Carver Danforthe on his hands and knees between skirts, searching for the dropped bead.
A swift hush descended over the room, but if the baroness took note of it at all, she probably assumed they were all in awe at her grand appearance. “I swear you are the slowest, stupidest, most trying seamstress I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter.” She turned to the woman on her right and laughed coldly. “First she tries to drown me in bile yellow, and then stuffs me into a gown that was evidently measured to fit someone else, because she was too lazy to make a new one for me. Thought I wouldn’t notice. I really cannot understand the sudden appeal of this dull, jumped-up lady’s maid. I don’t know why I wasted my money.”
“But you didn’t, did you, Maria?” Carver suddenly stood upright. “It was my money. Or my ancestors’ money, since I’ve never actually earned any.”
Molly thought she would faint. His fingers skimmed her sleeve. She dare not look at him, but kept her gaze on Lady Anne’s white evening glove.
The silence, like the heat, was heavy, suffocating, but no one left the room. This was too interesting now, of course.
***
He saw the spite in Maria’s eyes, glistening like shards of ice forming with unnatural speed over pond weeds.
“You owe Miss Robbins an apology.”
Her pouty, unnaturally red lips parted, and she squeezed out a gasp, part scornful laugh, part sheer outrage. “I most certainly do not. Every word I just said is the truth. She tried to put me in a horrid yellow gown, and I—”
“Enough,” he growled, and the room froze. “Miss Robbins.” He put the last bead into Molly’s hand and watched her fingers gather around it. Standing close to her in that crowded room had a most rousing effect on his body and his senses. There was one particular curl against the nape of her neck that he felt an almost overwhelming urge to kiss. Then he wanted to press the tip of his tongue very lightly to her skin. It was, he supposed, her innocence that drew him in, rejuvenated the lusty spirit in a jaded old rake like him. Pursuit had grown tiresome in recent years, and he was seldom intrigued enough to go to great lengths for a woman. Until the Mouse started scratching at his walls, making her presence known, so he missed her when she was not there.
He liked looking down into her large brown eyes and seeing all the questions spinning and darting about. The ideas swimming through her mind intrigued him.
But hers were the only eyes not watching him now.
“Lady Anne.” He bowed to his friend’s sister. “I will see you when Miss Robbins has put you back together, and we will, I hope, resume our dance.”
“Certainly, your lordship.”
Carver left the room, not looking again at his mistress. He knew she followed him out, her slippered feet rushing along in his wake. “How dare you speak to me as if I’m a child in need of reprimand! And in public!”
Paused at the margin of the dance floor, he spun around to face her. “How dare you speak that way to Miss Margaret Robbins.” Several faces in the crowd looked over at them, forcing Maria to draw herself up, bosom out, earrings dancing with the tremors of her restrained wrath.
“She is a servant,” she hissed, her teeth gritted in a smile as false as the color in her cheeks—a youthful blush he now knew to be the work of carmine rouge. “Perhaps you forget.”
“Yes, I’ve seen how you speak to your servants, Baroness Schofield. It is not how I speak to mine.”
Her eyes flamed, the icicles melting. Soon he suspected she would try tears again. She readied them, like an actress rehearsing her role. “It must run in the Danforthe family, this desire to play below stairs.”
Carver’s hands formed fists at his side, so tightly clenched he almost lost the feeling in them. “I beg your pardon?”
“Just like your sister with her farmyard diversion, you choose to dally with a commoner. I’ve heard that men of a certain age are often drawn to girls like Robbins. It makes them feel as if they have reclaimed their youth, makes them the conquering hero again—looked up to and swooned over by a chit of a girl who owes everything to them. I put up with your other fancies, but now I am supposed to tolerate this perverse dalliance of yours too?”
“By no means would I expect you to tolerate anything, Maria,” he replied tightly. “You are welcome to absent yourself from my company any time you desire. That—as I’m sure you can appreciate, having suffered so many years of your husband’s tiresome company—is the beauty of not being bound in matrimony.” He turned away from her and walked through the guests standing around the perimeter of the dancing.
Again she followed. “Robbins is paid for a service. Is it too much to expect a gown I can wear?”
“You seem to be wearing that one.”
“It is much too tight at the bosom. Look.”
Knowing full well what she was up to, he wouldn’t look at her. “Perhaps you have gained weight, Maria. That, so I hear, happens to women of a certain age.”
That silenced her for a while. She deserved that arrow, he thought angrily. Not only for the way she insulted him, but for how she spoke to Margaret.
“And for your information, madam,” he added eventually, “yellow happens to be my favorite color.”
“Well, how was I to know?”
The same way Margaret had known, he thought. By not being absorbed in herself. By taking note. By caring enough to know.
“Are you going to dance with me?” the baroness demanded.
He stared at her. “No,” he said eventually. “You and I have danced our last. I am clearly not the partner you wanted. If you find yourself obliged to tolerate me, I cannot fulfill your needs, and you, madam, cannot fulfill mine.”
Her face was white with fury.
He bowed. “Good evening.”
***
“That was quite a scene,” Lady Anne Rothespur remarked as the two angry people departed. “She’s very brassy. What does he see in her, I wonder?”
Molly threaded the last bead into place. “A beautiful face, an elegant form, and a very full bosom, no doubt,” she muttered drolly.
“Men can be such tedious creatures, easily distracted by bright objects. My brother is just as bad. I’ve decided I shall marry a bookish man who doesn’t care at all for looks. Then he won’t be tempted to run off or keep a mistress.”
“A sound idea, to be sure.”
Lady Anne looked over her shoulder. “What about you, Miss Robbins?”
“Me?”
“Have you no plans to marry? Frederick Dawes told me you ran away from your groom at the altar. Did he have a wandering eye too?”
“I decided to devote myself to a career instead,” Molly replied, jabbing her needle into the pincushion at her wrist. “There is no place for a husband in my life.”
“But you will be an old maid.”
“Yes, thank goodness. A happy old maid.”
Lady Anne looked doubtful.
“I am content with my choice,” Molly assured her. “Not every woman is made to be a wife.”
“Jumping Jacks, Miss Robbins! To resign yourself to spinsterhood at your age. It’s a mistake.”
Molly merely smiled.
Suddenly Lady Anne spun around to face her fully, the skirt of her gown fanning out. “I wager you have a secret love.”
“Gracious no.” The more aware she became of the heat in her face the worse it felt; the higher her temperature climbed.
Hands on her waist, the romantically inclined young girl surveyed Molly with sparkling blue eyes. “I always knew there was something about you. Something brewing inside. Carver is right. You have a very devious look about you, Miss Robbins.”
“I assure you there is no man in my life. Not in that sense. Goodness it is hot in here.”
“Perhaps he is promised to another, or there is some other awfully tragic reason why you keep him secret. I suppose you have closed your heart to others because it is reserve
d only for him, and you will love him unto death.” She placed a gloved finger to her lips. “Is he young or old? Fat or thin? Dark or fair? Are his teeth evenly spaced? Is he good humored? Does he dance with elegance or charge about like a ram in a field of ewes? Does he ride adequately?” Leaning closer, she giggled behind her fan. “Is he ravishingly reckless in the saddle? Does he drink too much port? Does he have horrendously hairy knuckles? I hope, for your sake, he looks well in knee breeches. There is nothing worse than a bandy-kneed beau.”
She laughed at the young lady’s odd jumble of ingredients for a worthy suitor. Caught up in it for a moment, still giddy about the way Carver defended her before his mistress, she decided to play along. “He is old. Too old and set in his ways, I fear. He is very ill humored, dances badly, and drinks far too much.”
“Gracious!” Lady Anne laughed and then said slyly, “Then you really must be in love with Danforthe to see beyond all his faults.”
Horrified, Molly could only stare dumbly at the young woman before her.
Much to her relief, the teasing was ended almost immediately when Lady Anne’s brother came to the door, looking for her.
“You needn’t worry,” was her tormentor’s parting remark, “I shan’t tell a soul your secret, Miss Robbins. As long as you save all your best, most delicious designs for me.”
Appalled, she watched the mischievous lady exit the room on her brother’s arm. Until that moment, she’d thought Lady Anne quite naive and uncomplicated, a sweet girl but prone to making a vast deal of noise. Alas, it seemed she misjudged the young woman.
She knew other folk in the dressing room eyed her curiously, wondering at the way the Earl of Everscham spoke up for her. Intent on ignoring the incident, Molly replaced her spectacles and tidied her sewing box. But the music filtering in from the ballroom made her feet tap and her petticoats swing in a manner most unusual for her.
It wasn’t long before news of a quarrel and a pair of thrown diamond earrings reached the annex room. The Earl of Everscham, so the eager gossip went, had finished with his mistress, and she retaliated by scoring his cheek with her diamonds.
Of course it was never considered a good party without a little drama, and it was not the first time Carver Danforthe had been the cause of it. Nor was it, so the gossips exclaimed gleefully, the first time a woman had thrown jewelry at him. After all, said one stout lady standing near Molly, he was known to always give his mistresses a piece of very fine jewelry as a parting gift whenever he ended an affair.
***
When Molly eventually went to her bed that evening, after describing the ball in enough detail to satisfy her fellow residents at the house, she expected to sleep almost immediately. It had been a tiring few weeks leading up to the ball. But as she lay down, her mind still raced excitedly, unable to settle. While her body was drained, her head and heart were too full.
Carver Danforthe and his teasing had knotted around her mind like an invasive weed slowly taking over the garden of her good thoughts. You might change me, he’d said at Vauxhall Gardens.
Could she? Did she even want to?
Lying on her belly, Molly hugged her pillow tightly and tried her damndest to cast him out.
It was a futile exercise. When she did finally fall asleep, he was there in her dreams, waiting for her under an arbor of thorny roses. She felt herself smiling, holding her pillow even closer, melting into it and into his strong arms, helpless and losing control. But not nearly as angry with herself as she should be.
Fourteen
When Mrs. Lotterby received news of a windfall coming her way on the death of a relative, it took her several days to recover from the shock. The unexpected influx of coin was enough to pay for repairs to the old leaky roof and provide other much-needed maintenance to the house, so it must indeed be a sizeable inheritance, as well as unexpected.
To celebrate, she organized a picnic in the park, and all her residents attended, except the unpleasant Arthur Wakely, who had apparently packed his bags and left in the middle of the night. Not even his sister knew where he’d gone, and nobody cared enough to find out why. Mrs. Bathurst’s health had taken a turn for the worse quite suddenly, and she would have stayed in bed, had Molly, who thought the lady was simply giving in to a mournful state of mind, not persuaded her to join the party.
“It won’t be the same without you, Mrs. B. Who will entertain us with stories if you don’t come?”
“Quite true, my dear,” the lady eventually conceded. “I suppose the sunlight won’t kill me any faster, will it?”
The weather held out for the excursion to Hyde Park, and Molly anticipated a restful afternoon under a parasol, seated by the lake and sipping lemonade. Frederick made them all laugh and kept young master Slater occupied by threatening to throw him into the Serpentine. Mr. Lotterby fell asleep with his mouth wide open, and his merry wife, in between swiping at flies to keep them away from his face, fussed over her tenants to be sure they ate plenty.
“Miss Robbins, you are in need of sustenance, I’m sure. Do have a tart, and give me your opinion. Take two or three, indeed, for you are all bones and very little flesh. When winter comes, you’ll welcome a few more layers. I know when the cold winds set in, I’m grateful to have my Herbert. At least then he is of use. But you’ll have no one to keep you warm at night.”
It was not a reminder she needed. “I’ll procure a warming pan for coals.”
Mrs. Bathurst leaned over the proffered plate and, ignoring her sister’s chiding, palmed three tarts with the efficiency of a magician. “You need a man, Miss Robbins,” she said.
“I’m sure I’ll manage well enough without one.”
“Nothing can take the place of a man in one’s bed. A warming pan does only so much. And it is likely to cause a fire if one leaves it in too long.” She snorted and nudged Mrs. Slater. “A man can cause the same conflagration, but in that case, the fire in one’s bed is welcome.”
The young widow flushed scarlet, and Mrs. Bathurst teased her.
“Now don’t be coy, madam. You know of what I speak. That noisy child of yours was not found under a gooseberry bush.”
In ladylike embarrassment, Mrs. Slater moved away to wipe sticky jam from her greedy son’s cheeks. As the subject of children was raised, Molly glanced at Mrs. Lotterby and then at her sister. She’d given a great deal of thought to the matter of Mrs. Bathurst’s baby and decided something ought to be done about it, before it was too late to manage a reconciliation. Secrets were all well and good—they had their place—but she would not stand by and see her friend fade away and die, never having met her own son.
“Mrs. Bathurst, you said you recently saw your son, now fully grown. Did you never approach him?” She did not believe, even for a minute, that the missing man was now a fine gentleman who traveled in grand carriages with beautiful ladies of high society, but if Mrs. Bathurst had truly seen him, it must have been somewhere not far from their lodgings.
“Goodness, no.” Mrs. Lotterby spoke up for her sister, who still had a mouthful of jam tart. “Why would she approach him? What could she say? How would such an encounter be managed?” She turned to her sister. “You did not tell me you thought you had seen him, Delilah. Why would you think it and not tell me?”
“You took him from me all those years ago,” Mrs. Bathurst replied primly. “I daresay you would keep him from me still. My own child wrenched from me.”
“Nonsense. I did what was best, as you well know.” The landlady seemed deeply wounded by the accusations of her sister. “If the Good Lord wanted such an encounter between you and your child, Delilah, he would arrange it. We must put our faith in the Almighty to know what is best.”
Her sister gave a deeply saddened sigh. “Then he and I shall never know each other. That is my punishment, I suppose, for a life of sin. I’m sure he would not wish to know me as his mother, in any case. Such a disappointment I would be.”
“It was for the good of the child,” Mrs. Lotterby mut
tered, brushing crumbs from her bosom. “We made that choice together.”
Molly thought about the choices people made. Her choice, for instance, had been work and business over marriage and a family. Resigned to the life of a spinster, she had forfeited her chance to be a mother when she ran away from the altar back in April. Had she stayed and married Rafe Hartley, she could be expecting a child by now and eventually given birth to a curly haired, rosy-cheeked baby, who would look at her adoringly while she sang to it.
Now that would never happen. Her choice was to remain alone, unburdened by a husband and children, but one day, she too—like Mrs. Bathurst—could sit by this lake, pondering her past and regretting the things she once gave up. She knew some success with her designs now, and it was a very sweet feeling, but it had not yet made her whole. Perhaps Arthur Wakely was right, and there was something amiss with her because she chose her work over a child.
Or perhaps not. Young master Slater wobbled over to her, snatched the last bite of jam tart out of her hands, and smeared it over his own newly cleaned face. Children, she remembered with a sigh of relief, were not all golden-curled cherubs with pink cheeks.
“Frederick is painting your portrait, I understand?” Mrs. Bathurst asked as they watched the boy toddle off after a butterfly.
“Yes.” She’d finally agreed to it, just for some peace. “I cannot imagine what he wants my picture for, unless to scare crows from a seed bed.”
The lady laughed croakily. “A lack of vanity can be just as bad as too much, you know.”
“I know what I look like.”
“You know what you see in the mirror. When Frederick has completed his portrait, you will know what others see when they look at you. That is what scares you, young lady. And do not frown, Miss Robbins. When you are not aware of being watched, you are in danger of becoming almost pretty, but the moment you feel eyes upon you, out come the spikes—just like a hedgehog.”
She supposed it was an improvement on a mouse. Or was it?
Miss Molly Robbins Designs a Seduction Page 16
