Only Enchanting: A Survivors' Club Novel

by Mary Balogh

  And how was he feeling?

  He was feeling safe with the wife of his own choosing. His headache had done an about-turn and was marching away into the distance without him.

  “Agnes,” he whispered, and sighed with contentment.

  16

  Life then changed more radically than Agnes could possibly have expected it would.

  Her mother-in-law recovered by dinnertime on that first day from the worst of her shock and dominated the conversation. It was not difficult to do, for Marianne and Lord Shields had returned to their own town house, Flavian chose to be sleepy, and Agnes could not seem to marshal her thoughts well enough to initiate any social talk.

  It was a very good thing Easter was late this year, the dowager commented, and it would be a couple of weeks yet before the ton descended upon London in any great numbers and the Season began in earnest. They would have those weeks in which to assemble a wardrobe at the very least. She had taken one look at Agnes’s lavender evening gown earlier, and her expression had become pained.

  Agnes must be made to appear more like a viscountess, the dowager said quite bluntly. She would summon her own modiste to the house tomorrow and her hairdresser within the next few days. That way there would be no chance of Agnes’s being seen by the wrong people before she was ready to meet anyone at all.

  Flavian exerted himself at that point.

  “The wrong p-people may go hang if they do not like Agnes as she is, Mother,” he said. “And I will take Agnes to Bond Street m-myself tomorrow. The best dressmakers are to be found there.”

  “And you know exactly who they are, I suppose?” his mother said. “And you know all the latest fashions and the newest fabrics and trims, I suppose? Really, Flavian, you must leave such things to me. You cannot want your viscountess to look a frump.”

  “I do not believe that would be p-possible,” he said, leaning to one side so that a footman could refill his wineglass.

  “And now you are being quite deliberately foolish, Flavian.”

  It was time to intervene. Agnes was beginning to feel like an inanimate object over which mother and son were wrangling.

  “I would be very happy,” she said, “to go to Bond Street or anywhere else reputable dressmakers may be found. Perhaps you will both accompany me there tomorrow. I would appreciate your escort, Flavian, and I am sure your mother would too. And I will certainly appreciate your advice and expertise, ma’am.”

  Flavian pursed his lips and raised his glass in a silent toast to her. His mother sighed.

  “You had better call me Mother, Agnes, since I am your mama-in-law,” she said. “Tomorrow morning, then. We will go to Madame Martin’s. She dresses at least one duchess that I know of.”

  Flavian’s eyes—what could be seen of them beneath his eyelids—gleamed, but he refrained from commenting. He must have recognized a compromise when he heard one.

  “I shall look forward to it, Mother,” Agnes said.

  She was going to have to be presented at court, the dowager went on to say, and to society, of course, since she was an unknown. They were going to have to put on a grand ball at Arnott House early in the Season, but before that she must take her daughter-in-law to call upon all the best families. And after the ball there must be frequent appearances at all the most fashionable parties and soirees and breakfasts and concerts, as well as visits to the theater and the opera house and Vauxhall. There must be walks and drives in the parks, most notably Hyde Park during the fashionable hour in the afternoon.

  “You will certainly not wish anyone to suspect you are hiding your viscountess away because she is not up to the position,” she said to Flavian.

  He considered, crossing his knife and fork over his roast beef and picking up his wineglass by the stem. “I am not sure, Mother,” he finally said, “that I would wish to c-control anyone’s suspicions. People m-may believe what they wish with my blessing, even an asinine thing like that.”

  She tutted.

  “The trouble with you, Flavian,” she said sharply, “is that you have never cared. You do not care about either your responsibilities or the pain you cause others. But you can no longer honorably avoid caring about either. You have made an impulsive marriage to Agnes, who is a gentlewoman by birth but without any connection to the beau monde or any experience whatsoever of the sort of society into which she has married. You must care, for her sake even if not for mine or Marianne’s. Or your own.”

  His expression was mocking as he cut into his beef again.

  “Ah, but I do care, Mother,” he said. “I always have.”

  “We came to London immediately after our nuptials, Mother,” Agnes said, “so that I might learn something of what my new status will demand of me. New clothes, I understand, are the mere beginning. And though I was upset earlier to discover that you had come here too before having a chance to learn of our marriage and accustom yourself to the knowledge, now I am glad you are here. For in many ways my mother-in-law and, I hope, my sister-in-law can do far more to help me fit into my new life than Flavian alone can do. I am perfectly willing to do all that is proper and necessary.”

  She hoped she did not sound obsequious. She was actually perfectly sincere. She really had not given enough thought before her marriage to the fact that, as well as being Flavian’s wife, she was also going to be his viscountess. Though in truth, of course, she had not given enough thought to anything.

  Flavian smiled at her with sleepy eyes. The dowager gave her a hard look, in which there were perhaps the stirrings of approval.

  And life became a whirlwind, something so far beyond Agnes’s experiences that she might as well have been snatched away into a different universe.

  She spent much of her first morning and all the afternoon at the Bond Street salon of Madame Martin—pronounced the French way, though Agnes suspected the petite modiste, with her eloquently waving hands and heavy accent, had been born and bred no more than a few miles from her shop. There Agnes was fitted for a dizzying array of garments for every occasion under the sun. And there she was shown book after book of fashion plates, bolt after bolt of cloth, and so many different trims and buttons and ribbons and sashes that she ended up feeling rather like a sponge long since saturated with water.

  Flavian escorted her there, but it was his mother who stayed the whole time while he wandered off after ten minutes or so to destinations unknown and did not reappear for more than five hours. Five. And even then they were not quite ready to go with him. It was his mother who suggested and advised and had her own way more and more as the hours ticked by, even though it was soon obvious that her tastes differed in some significant ways from her daughter-in-law’s. But how could Agnes fight against the combined expertise of a lady who had moved all her life in the world of the ton and of one of London’s leading modistes, who was not shy about proclaiming the fact that she dressed two duchesses?

  It was all very bewildering and rather depressing when perhaps it ought to have been exciting. Or perhaps it was merely exhausting.

  Agnes gave up thinking of the money that was being lavished upon her, especially when, on the second day, she and her mother-in-law and Marianne began a round of other shops on Bond Street and Oxford Street in search of bonnets and fans, reticules and parasols, stockings and undergarments, perfumes and colognes and vinaigrettes, slippers and boots, and goodness knew what else, all of them deemed the very barest of necessities for a lady of quality.

  For that was what she now, was by the simple fact that Flavian had married her. But if she was a lady of quality now, she asked herself ruefully, what had she been before her second marriage? Did of quality have an opposite? It would be very lowering if it did.

  On that second day, after she had returned home exhausted and dispirited, the butler informed her that three candidates for the position of her personal maid were in the housekeeper’s parlor awaiting her pleasure. For once in her life Agnes understood that she was going to need a maid, and she had also quickly
learned that Pamela, the chambermaid who had been assigned to her temporarily, had neither the aptitude nor the ambition for the promotion. But must she see the candidates now? She probably must, if she did not want someone else choosing for her.

  “Let them come to me one at a time in the morning room, Mr. Biggs,” she said, handing him her bonnet and gloves, and feeling thankful that her mother-in-law had stopped off at Marianne’s house to see her grandchildren. Agnes had professed herself too weary to accompany her.

  She decided against the first candidate. The woman came highly recommended by Lady Somebody-or-other, a friend of the dowager’s, but she addressed Agnes as madam in tones of such superior condescension that Agnes felt diminished to half her size. And she rejected the second, who sniffed wetly throughout her interview and spoke in a nasal monotone, but denied having a cold when asked—she even looked rather surprised at the question.

  The third candidate, a thin, rather scrawny-looking girl sent by an agency, told Agnes her name was Madeline.

  “Though Maddy will do nicely, my lady, if you prefer, since Madeline sounds a bit uppity for a maid, doesn’t it?” she said. “My dad give us all big names. If there couldn’t be nothing else grand in our lives, he always said, God rest his soul, at least we had our names.”

  “What a lovely thought, Madeline,” Agnes said.

  The girl did not wait to be interviewed. She launched into speech.

  “They said you was going to have your hair cut tomorrow,” she said. They, Agnes guessed, was the housekeeper. “I can see it must be very long, my lady, and it would be a good idea to have it neatened up if you haven’t done so for a while. But don’t let them chop off too much. Some ladies look fine enough all crimped and curled, but you can do better than that, if you’ll pardon me for telling you so when you haven’t asked. You can look elegant and turn heads wherever you go.”

  “And you can style it elegantly, can you, Madeline?” Agnes asked, beginning to relax despite her sore feet.

  “Oh, I can, my lady,” the girl assured her, “even though I don’t look as hoity-toity as her down below, who thinks herself good enough to dress a duchess.” Ah, Finchley, her mother-in-law’s dresser, must have shown herself in the housekeeper’s room too, Agnes thought. “I got six sisters as well as my mum, and I love nothing in the world more than doing their hair. And they are all different. That’s the whole secret, really, isn’t it? To do someone’s hair to suit their faces and figures and ages and hair type, not just to make them look like everyone else, whether they ought to or not.”

  “If I were to employ you, Madeline,” Agnes said, “there would be more for you to do than just style my hair.”

  “You were out at the dressmaker’s all of yesterday,” Madeline said, “and other places today for all the things to go with the dresses. They told us so when we got here.”

  “Oh, dear,” Agnes said. “Were you kept waiting long, Madeline? I am so sorry.”

  The girl looked shocked and then laughed merrily.

  “You are a right one,” she said. “I can see that. No wonder they was sniffing downstairs—well, her, anyway—and saying as how you come from the country and don’t know nothing about nothing. I hope you didn’t let no one talk you into having lots of frills and flounces.”

  Agnes feared she had probably done just that, though in truth she could scarcely recall what she had ended up agreeing to.

  “I ought to avoid them?” she asked. “I must confess, Madeline, that I have never thought of myself as a frilly sort of person.”

  “Nor you aren’t,” the girl said.

  “But dullness is not permitted by the ton, it would seem.” Agnes smiled ruefully.

  Madeline looked shocked again.

  “Dull?” she said. “You? You could knock them all into a tall hat, my lady, with the right clothes and the right hair. But not by outcrimping and outfrilling them. You ought to look elegant. Not in an old-lady sort of way, I don’t mean. How old are you?”

  Agnes was hard put not to laugh out loud.

  “Twenty-six,” she said.

  “Just what I thought,” Madeline said. “Ten years older than me. But not old even so. Not a girl either, though, and I bet they have all been trying to get you to look like all those young things that will be flocking here soon to look for rich nobs to marry. If I had the dressing of you, my lady, I would tell you what to wear, and I wouldn’t let you wear the wrong things. Not that I ought to speak so freely when everyone tells me I’m wasting my time coming here and ought to think myself lucky if I can get a scullery maid’s job. I’m talking too much, aren’t I? I do that when I want something terrible bad.”

  “And you want to dress me terribly badly,” Agnes said, smiling at her, “and my hair.”

  “Yes, my lady, I do,” Madeline said, suddenly looking all big eyed and anxious. “Especially after seeing you. You are lovely. Oh, not in that pretty-pretty way of some, but you got potential. Don’t you love that word? I learned it new a few weeks ago, and I been looking for a suitable chance to use it.”

  “I think, Madeline,” Agnes said, “you had better move your things here tomorrow and get yourself properly outfitted for the position of personal dresser to Viscountess Ponsonby. No scullery maid’s job for you. Your talents would be wasted on a scrubbed floor, I suspect. I will give instructions. And the day after tomorrow you will accompany me to Madame Martin’s shop on Bond Street. I will need to make some minor changes to the instructions I left for the clothes she is making for me. There is no point in having them made and delivered if you will not allow me to wear them, is there?”

  “I got the job?” Madeline looked afraid to believe the evidence of her own ears.

  “You have the job,” Agnes said and smiled. “I hope I will not disappoint you.”

  Madeline jumped to her feet, and for one startled moment Agnes thought the girl was going to hug her. Instead she clasped her hands very tightly to her bosom and bobbed a curtsy.

  “You won’t be sorry, my lady,” she said. “Oh, you won’t, honest. You’ll see. I’ll make you all the rage. Oh, wait till I tell Mum and the girls. They won’t believe me.”

  Agnes had two inches taken off her hair the following day, just enough to tidy the ends. Mr. Johnston, the hairdresser to whom she was taken, was not happy with her. Neither was her mother-in-law. But Flavian approved and said so when he came to her that night and saw her hair down.

  “I expected to f-find a shorn lamb at the d-dinner table earlier,” he told her. “But instead I found Agnes with shining, elegant t-tresses. Is that what the hairdresser d-did for you?”

  “He merely trimmed it,” she told him. “Madeline dressed it—my new maid.”

  “That little s-slip of a thing in her new uniform that looks s-stiff enough to stand up without her in it?” he asked. “The one who f-frowned at me when she passed me outside your d-door, as though she did not think me worthy to kiss as much as your little toenail?”

  “Oh, dear,” she said, “she seems to like me. She persuaded me to leave my hair long and to aim for elegance instead of youthful prettiness in my appearance. I have potential, it seems, and I am not old, though I am ten years her senior and therefore tottering on the brink. I really ought not to try competing with all the young girls who will be making their come-out this year, though.”

  “She is someone to be f-feared despite appearances, then, is she?” he said. “Especially by a m-mere husband? I shall look h-humble the next time I see her. Perhaps she will stop frowning at me and allow me to keep c-coming to your room.”

  Agnes laughed, and he twined his fingers in her hair and drew her to him by the nape of her neck.

  “Thank heaven for M-Madeline,” he said against her mouth. “I hope I am paying her a decent wage. I like your hair l-long, Agnes. And you already are elegant. All those young g-girls would be well advised not to try c-competing with you.”

  “Absurd.” She laughed again.

  And then she abandoned hersel
f to passion.

  She could believe in impossible dreams when he made love to her—and when she made love to him. It was always mutual. Who would have expected that a wife could make love to her husband?

  And why should dreams be impossible just because they were dreams? Didn’t dreams sometimes come true?

  * * *

  Agnes did indeed return to Madame Martin’s the next morning. After three days of unrelenting shopping, her mother-in-law had announced her intention of lying abed until a decent hour of the morning or early afternoon, and it was easy to slip out of the house alone with just Madeline walking decently—and proudly—beside her. Flavian had gone off after breakfast to indulge in some masculine pursuits that included various clubs, and a boxing and fencing saloon, and Tattersall’s.

  Adjustments—most of them minor, a few rather more major—were made to the massive order Agnes had left with the modiste two days before. Two of the designs—one for a ball gown, the other for a walking dress—were tossed out altogether and replaced with simpler, more classic designs. Flounces were sacrificed quite ruthlessly and replaced with delicate embroideries and laces and scallops. Madame Martin, who had looked askance at Madeline at the start and suggested tactfully that perhaps “my lady” ought to bring the dowager viscountess back with her to discuss any proposed changes, ended up regarding the maid with something like respect.

  “My sister-in-law mentioned yesterday,” Agnes said as they were leaving the salon, “that I really ought to take out a subscription at Hookham’s Library. I have taken a look in the book room at home, but the volumes there all seem very ancient and dry of topic. They lean heavily toward sermons and moral treatises.”

  They had surely been purchased by a former viscount.

  “Well, I ask you, my lady,” Madeline commented in some disgust. “Why bother learning your letters if you can’t find something more cheerful to read than sermons? It’s bad enough that you have to sit on them hard pews at church and listen to them once a week. And don’t some vicars go on and on and on?”