Mistletoe, Marriage, and Mayhem: A Bluestocking Belles Collection

by Mariana Gabrielle

  Mary was in no doubt either. "Aunt Dorothy?"

  Next moment, she was enveloped in an enthusiastic hug. "Fletcher's little girl. It must be. Darling Mary, let me look at you." The woman held her at arms' length, then pulled her in for another hug. "Why, you are the image of my mama. Did your dear papa ever tell you that? He must have. Just look at you."

  Ignoring Rick and the maids, Miss Pritchard proceeded to hug Mary, untie her bonnet, hug her again, help her off with her coat, clucking over her the whole while.

  After a few minutes, she seemed to realize she had spectators. "But what am I thinking! Maudie, dear, look after the baking. Mary, come away into the house, and you—Mary's friend—you come too."

  Rick excused himself after promising to send in Mary's bags and to visit again tomorrow.

  He carried away an image of her looking a little lost. If she isn't happy with her place when I return, he vowed, I'll carry her off and find her a safe berth somewhere else.

  ***

  Mary found herself swept along by a sort of a female tempest to the rear of the hall, avoiding the continuing procession of maids as they went. They came to harbor at the end of the hall in a small, cluttered, feminine parlor.

  "Now then, Mary, my girl. Tell me what you are doing here, and who that gentleman was. Not that I am not pleased to see you, for that I am, and no mistake, but fetching up on my doorstep with no warning, and in the company of a gentleman, with not even a maid to give you countenance! It needs to be explained, my dear. That it does."

  "Aunt Dorothy, that was Lieutenant Redepenning. He served with father, and he was kind enough to escort me from Merroham after the coach broke down."

  Aunt Dorothy eyed her thoughtfully. "Hmm, that explains the young man, I suppose, but what were you doing on the coach in the first place?"

  Mary blushed a little, and looked at the paintings on the wall rather than her aunt. "I found that London life did not suit me, Aunt. And in your letters, you said I would always be welcome."

  "That you are, dear, that you are. Never doubt it. Though if I'd known you were coming… Well, here you are, and I am so pleased to see you, and so Marjery will be." She pursed her lips a little. "And your cousin, Enid, of course." The broad smile returned. "They are making afternoon calls, dear, but will be home soon."

  A maid arrived with a large trolley containing a tea service and a plate tower with different types of cakes and tarts on each layer.

  Aunt Dorothy busied herself with pouring the tea.

  "You will wonder at the bustle here, my dear. We are known for our baking, you know." She puffed herself up, looking for all the world like a contented hen. "We are always called on to supply baking for church fairs, assemblies, and other such things. And, just think, dear, our baking is much in demand at the market!" She deflated a little. "It is not trade, dear, whatever Enid says. Your cousin is a little sensitive." She shook herself, as if to settle her feathers.

  "Now, Mary, tell me the truth. What happened in London? I thought your mother's sister would have found you a husband. Aha! That is it, is it not? She picked someone, and you ran away!"

  Chapter Four

  After his visit to check on Mary, Rick reluctantly left Haslemere, because he couldn't find a reason to stay. He wasn't family, and Mary was an adult, able to make her own decisions. Rick had no right to interfere with her choices.

  That's what this reluctance was; concern she was making the wrong choice. Rescuing Mary Pritchard was the habit of half a lifetime. She was a friend. Just a friend. He wasn't so foolish as to dangle after a girl who showed no awareness of him as a man.

  When he called that morning, Miss Pritchard and her sister, Lady Rumbold, had been as protective of her as they should be. Rick couldn't doubt that Mary was welcome, and that she would be looked after.

  Even so, all the way to his father's house in Portsmouth, where he planned to stay for a month, he felt a nagging sense of loss. He kept turning to Mary to tell her something, and she was never there.

  The hollow ache didn't go away. It followed him around Portsmouth. He visited with friends. He travelled across to Haslar to see a doctor at the naval hospital who recommended leg-strengthening exercises, which he carried out faithfully several times a day. And all the time he missed Mary.

  Papa couldn't get down from London, but he said Rick was to treat the house as his own. The staff had either been ship's crew with Papa or servants at Longford, his boyhood home, when Mama was chatelaine there. Rick had never been better looked after. Or more lonely.

  He came home one day from dinner, with a friend who'd just been raised to commander, and who was about to take his new ship to join the fleet in the West Indies. If it hadn't been for a freak gust of wind, it could have been Rick; he was due his own ship. Who knew how many of his friends and colleagues would jump ahead of him while this stupid leg healed?

  "There is a letter for you, Lieutenant," said Markham, the butler. "From your sister, I believe."

  He pounced on the letter and carried it into the study, where the brandy decanter was waiting on a small table next to his favorite chair. He took a letter opener to the wax seal and was soon settled with his leg up on a footstool, a glass of brandy at hand, and Susan's letter spread before him.

  She must be on an economizing drive again. The feminine loops and swirls were tiny, and she'd used every inch of the sheet of paper, writing on both sides, and crossing the horizontal lines of text with vertical lines, and then writing more on the inside and edges of the enveloping sheet.

  He deciphered the first page: Susan started with an outline of her social activities, interspersed with news of his baby niece, little Amelia, the only occupant of Susan's nursery. Captain Cunningham, Susan's husband, had been posted to the Far East shortly after Amy's birth, more than four years ago.

  Here were a few sentences about their father, who was, Susan said, working long hours at the Horse Guard, but still found time to come and play with his granddaughter.

  Ah. Here's what he'd been looking for.

  You asked after Admiral Pritchard's daughter. Does this mean you know where she is? For I swear, her aunt does not, though she is putting a good face on it.

  After I received your letter, I went to one of the Lady Bosville's afternoons at home. Such a bore, so you owe me the new bonnet you promised me. She does not offer refreshments or any entertainment, so one sits and talks to people one does not know about people one does not like.

  Rick frowned as he read on. Susan said it was an open secret that Mary's aunt had been warning off suitors all season, meaning to keep Mary for her son—or Mary's money, more to the point. When Susan asked after Mary, Lady Bosville claimed she was in the country, recovering from a small cold, and would return soon.

  At the Haverford Ball several nights later, Susan had danced with Bosville in order to interrogate him. Rick's frown deepened as he read.

  I asked him if it was true that he was betrothed to my friend, Mary, and he said his mama had it all arranged, and he would have to comply because they were near rolled up. He really did. And I a near stranger to him, and like to be more so, I can assure you.

  So, I said that she was a sweet thing, and very pretty. Well, he told me that he did not admire pasty skin and red hair, and I would not call her sweet if I had heard her in a temper! But, he said, he could always park her at his country estate, which he never visits, because it is so boring. I know what you are thinking, and I agree with you.

  Susan finished with a few trenchant observations about the Bosvilles and a sisterly farewell. After reading her final admonition to follow the doctor's instructions, Rick refolded the letter. His mind was made up. It was time for him to return to London, anyway. And he would do it via Haslemere. He was sure Mary was in safe hands, but he would not rest easy till he saw for himself.

  ***

  Mary smiled with satisfaction as she placed the last of the little gingerbread ladies into the box. In the four weeks she had been at Aunt Dorothy
's, she had learned a number of recipes, and helped with all kinds of baking, but the gingerbread biscuits, which she had learned from the cook on the Olympus, became her specialty.

  Making them took her back to the galley where Cook ruled with a rod of iron over various helpers, but always had time for a lonely little girl. She could still hear his deep, gravelly voice telling the story of the runaway gingerbread horse, or it might be a dog, or whatever cutter shape he had used at the time. She would be hovering over the tray of hot biscuits, waiting for them to cool enough to ice and eat.

  "And he ran, and he ran," Cook would say, "with all the village behind him: the old lady, the fat squire, the pretty milkmaid, and the hungry sailor. But none of them could catch the gingerbread horse."

  The story would continue, with the gingerbread horse escaping one would-be eater after another, and mocking them all, until Cook had iced the first biscuit. Mary would wait, patient and giggling, for the gingerbread horse to encounter the river, and the fox.

  First, he'd put the horse over her back. Then, as the river water rose, on her head. And finally, she would tip her head back, and he would perch the biscuit on her nose, and say the words she had been waiting for: "And bite, crunch, swallow, that was the end of the gingerbread horse."

  Aunt Dorothy had round and star cutters, and cutters in the shape of various animals. When the alderman's daughter asked for gingerbread ladies and gentlemen for her wedding breakfast, Mary had been delighted with the notion, and the cutters the tinker made to her pencil drawings worked very well.

  The icing gave them clothes and features; a whole box of little gingerbread grooms, and a box of little gingerbread brides. The alderman's daughter would be very pleased with this trial run, Mary thought.

  But as she folded tissue over the biscuits to keep them safe, she sighed. She should love it here with her aunts and her cousin. She enjoyed making delicious things to eat. Though Aunt Dorothy and Aunt Marjery thought it improper for her to help at the market, she did join them for meetings with people who were commissioning food for their entertainments, and they were encouraging her to take more and more of a lead in those meetings. For the first time since her father died, she felt she was doing something useful.

  And she had company. Although she was currently alone in the small workroom off the kitchen, she could hear the kitchen staff busily working a few feet away. She and her aunts spent much of their time together, though her cousin Enid was often out visiting friends. Aunt Dorothy was as sweet as the confections she made, delighted to have Mary with her, and eager to teach her all about what was clearly a business, though Aunt Dorothy insisted it was merely a hobby.

  Aunt Marjery was more reserved, but it was only natural for her to be more interested in her own daughter than a niece who was a stranger, except for a lifetime of letters. Mary got on well with the maids, and it was nice to spend time with women near her own age, though their consciousness of the class difference, and Mary's relationship with their employer, stood in the way of close friendship.

  But four things conspired to spoil her enjoyment. First, she missed the sea. She had lived her entire life within the sight, smell, and sound of it, until she first came to London, and as each day passed, she yearned for it more and more. The sea was home, and this land-locked valley, however pretty, was not.

  Second, no matter how sharply she spoke to herself, she could not stop thinking about Rick Redepenning. She couldn't possibly miss a man she had spent less than a day with in the past five years. She was merely worried about his injury, that was all, that he might not be taking care, might not be healing. No matter what excuses she made, she was well aware she was in danger of once again falling in love with Rick the Rogue—if, in fact, she'd ever fallen out of love.

  Third, Cousin Enid did not want her here. At first, Mary had been sure she was just being over-sensitive, but Enid took every opportunity to find fault and to sow discord between Mary and Enid's mother. And all was done with a smile, with poisonous remarks in a voice that dripped treacle, until Mary doubted she'd heard correctly.

  Mary tried to like Enid. They were cousins, after all. But she was impossible to like. She made it clear she did not want to live in this country town, and she resented the enterprise absorbing Aunt Dorothy and distracting Enid's mother, another dumpling of a woman, but a faded shadow of her sister.

  Enid would be leaving, she told her mother bluntly, as soon as she had control of her inheritance. That happy day was still some six years in the future, when she turned twenty-five, unless she found a man of suitable rank and wealth to be worthy of her hand in the country backwater in which her mother insisted they remain. Meanwhile, she refused to have anything to do with the baking for fear the taint of 'trade' might follow her into a life better suited to her consequence as daughter of an esquire.

  As Mary carefully tied the two boxes of gingerbread ready for delivery, the fourth cause of her discomfort came in.

  "Well, hello, Miss Pritchard. All alone, are we? How pretty you look this morning."

  The alderman, Mr. Owens, was a regular and popular visitor to the house, so much so, he wandered freely into the kitchen and its attached workrooms without announcement, as he had today. According to the maids, the widower had set his sights on Miss Dorothy Pritchard for his next wife, and she—Mary was convinced—was not averse to the idea. Recently, however, his heavy compliments had been addressed to Mary, and he seemed to go out of his way to find her alone.

  She inclined her head, the barest minimum politeness required.

  "Have you come to collect your daughter's baking, sir?"

  "No, no. Ruthie will do that herself. She's just out there in the kitchen with your good aunts. What have you there, eh?" He came around the table to her side. As Mary moved backward to avoid him, her head struck the shelf behind her, upending a canister that struck her a glancing blow as it fell. Mary staggered, and was momentarily grateful for Mr. Owens' steadying hands.

  Until she heard the gasp from behind him.

  Until she opened her eyes to see both aunts, her cousin, and Ruth Owens standing in the doorway, their mouths identical O's of shock.

  Chapter Five

  She should visit her mother's sister, Aunt Theo. That's what Mary told Aunt Dorothy and Aunt Marjery. Like them, Aunt Theo had faithfully written every month of her life, and now that Mary was in England, the least she could do was visit her.

  She didn't tell the aunts Enid had suggested she leave town, unless she wished to break Aunt Dorothy's heart.

  The aunts had accepted Mary's explanation of what looked like an embrace. Even so, Aunt Dorothy had been looking askance at her suitor since the incident, and Mary didn't want to make more trouble.

  Aunt Dorothy and Aunt Marjery raised all kinds of reasons why Mary should stay, but were no match for her determination. However, they put their foot down when it came to Mary's travel.

  "Not in a public coach, Mary," Aunt Dorothy said, "and what the viscountess was thinking when she let you travel that way, I do not know. You'll take a post chaise, and Polly from the kitchen shall go with you."

  Mary was pleased to be persuaded, and on a fine morning in early December, she and Polly climbed into the yellow bounder for the three-day journey to Oxford, where Aunt Theo lived.

  "I wish you would stay for the wedding," Aunt Dorothy said, for the thousandth time.

  Mary shook her head. The wedding was later that morning, but Enid and Ruth Owens had made it clear Mary would be unwelcome. "If I leave it much later, I will not be able to go until after Christmas. I will not be missed, Aunt Dorothy, but you have a wonderful time."

  Soon, they were on their way. Polly was good company, full of stories about people and activities in the village, and endlessly curious about Mary's travels and adventures. The aunts had packed a huge basket of food, enough for the two women, the post rider, and (Polly joked) a small village of hungry orphans. They nibbled throughout the day, rather than stopping somewhere for a meal.


  When Mary ventured a wish that Ruth Owens would have a good day for her wedding, Polly snorted. "Pity poor Thomas Wright, that's what I say. He'll be under the cat's paw, just like her poor father."

  "Miss Owens seems very fond of Mr. Wright," Mary ventured.

  Polly snorted again. "A cat may be fond of a mouse, I suppose, but that is not a benefit to the mouse, is it, Miss?"

  "She will be going to live in Bristol, I understand."

  "She wants her da to move to Bristol with them," Polly said. "She was wild as fire when her da started calling on Miss Pritchard. Wants to keep him for herself, and doesn't like Miss Enid above half. Can't be two queens in the same house, and that's a fact.

  "Stop him, she will, if she can. But he is stubborn, is Mr. Owens. He will outlast her, I reckon. Just keep on sticking where he is, he will, until she goes off to Bristol, and then he will ask Miss Pritchard to walk out."

  "He was very attentive to me," Mary said. What would Polly say to that?

  Polly went off into a peal of laughter. "Oh, Miss, you didn't think…? Why, Miss, he told everyone you reminded him of his own Mary, Ruthie's older sister who died. She would be about your age if she lived, Miss. Mind you, Ruthie didn't like that. No, not one bit. Miss Enid used to rub it in ever-so. Not that Miss Enid is good at sharing, either. Now, Miss, how about another of your stories? Did you ever go to one of them islands with the palm trees? Is it true they don't wear hardly any clothes?"

  ***

  The house was closed for a wedding, one of the elderly gentlemen lounging outside the tavern told Rick. The daughter of one of the local notables was wedding a lawyer's clerk from Bristol, and most of the village was attending.

  Rick arranged a room for the night, ordered a jug of the local beer, and found a seat in the sun to wait for the ladies to return home.

  The sun was setting when Miss Pritchard's aunts and cousin came up the road, surrounded by a bevy of women brightening the evening in their pretty bonnets and hats. But none were Mary.