“But she’ll be too busy helping you and your mother with your hair,” protested Carolina—although the chance to wear the loveliest ballgown in Reba’s wardrobe was very tempting for she had often yearned over it at school.
“Oh, no,” said Reba in a jaded voice. “She’ll make time for it! And when I remind her that I saw her slip the gold mourning ring Mamma got at Uncle Micaw’s funeral into her pocket—later she declared the ring to be lost—she’ll be afraid not to do it.”
Carolina stared back at her, speechless.
“Well, don’t just stand there—you can’t wear that!” Reba gave the blue gown a look of vast distaste. “Here, I’ll help you choose.”
Minutes later Carolina found herself wearing sheer gray silk stockings with embroidered clocks that seemed to flash silver (“because you have good legs and you must make sure you show them as you climb out of the coach or whirl about the dance floor”) and a new and delicate chemise frothing with lace. (“Because the lace will spill out at your elbows and it must be beautiful if it is to attract attention to how good your arms are”—adding carelessly, “You can keep the chemise, Carol. I have two more just like it.”) Her dancing slippers were a pair of Reba’s that were two years old. (“My feet were smaller then so they’ll fit you perfectly, and although these aren’t new, at least they are gray satin and have high red heels!”) Her petticoat with its small train was a marvel of gleaming gunmetal satin heavily embossed with a lattice of silver embroidery. (“It’s my best petticoat and it’s new—mind that you lift it high as you get out of the coach. I wouldn’t want it to get wet or splashed!”) And her gown was Carolina’s favorite of all the gowns Reba owned, so lovely she had yearned to wear it. It was daringly cut of thin rippling dove gray velvet with a burst of brilliants at each shoulder. It had a breathtakingly low décolletage that showed to advantage the flawless expanse of Carolina’s white bosom, the pearly tops of her breasts. Its tight pointed bodice molded her round breasts and clasped her tiny hand-span waist and then burst forth into a great full skirt with an impressive train. Reba gathered that skirt—which was split down the middle for the purpose—into wide panniers at each hip to show off that miraculous silver-encrusted petticoat. “And you need not worry about Mamma knowing the gown is mine because she has never seen it. I bought all my own clothes in London—and Papa pays for them.”
Marveling at the elegance of her own reflection, Carolina practiced before the mirror, turning and kicking aside that train so that it would not trip her—and looked back to admire it following her with rippling grace across Reba’s red Turkey carpet as she walked.
“A fan—you’ll need a fan,” cried Reba, absorbed into making Carolina over into a fashion doll.
“But I already have a fan,” protested Carolina, meaning the small ivory one she had been given three years ago for her birthday.
“You must have a better one.” Reba rummaged, then turned triumphantly to place in Carolina’s hand a sculptured ivory fan trimmed in silver lace and set with brilliants. “There,” she said contentedly. “That will look well with the silver lace at your elbows.” Carolina gave the fan an expert wave (for at least she had practiced wafting a fan gracefully back home in Virginia) and the deep frilled cuffs at her elbows seemed to melt into the edging of the fan.
“Now these gray kidskin gloves—don’t worry if you ruin them, they’re too small for me anyway, I was going to throw them away. And with your hair piled up as only Mamma’s maid can do it,” said Reba contentedly, “you’ll look quite nice.”
Nice was certainly an understatement when all this had been accomplished. Carolina’s silver-gold hair was piled high and gleaming and there were fetching little curls dancing at her ears from which dangled a pair of perfectly matched teardrop pearl earrings. Other curls rested lightly against her white neck or seemed to float, feather light, over her gleaming shoulders. Her face was flushed with excitement, her high winglike brows arched over luminous silver eyes, and to crown it all Reba had placed a tiny bit of black court plaster near the corner of her mouth “like a dimple—it will show how fair your complexion is and how perfect!”
“Now, take a look at yourself,” Reba told her. Carolina stepped to the mirror and looked in wonder at this new silver vision of herself.
“How am I to know him?” she asked, conscious of her mission.
“Oh, we’ll be introduced at the outset, I would imagine—unless he’s late. In which case Mamma will be furious, because she’s eager to get on with it.” Reba laughed.
“Suppose he doesn’t like blondes?” worried Carolina. “Suppose he prefers brunettes? Or worse yet, redheads like you?” She gave her friend’s auburn tresses an uneasy look. “Suppose he has an aversion for Colonists and prefers English girls, born and bred?” Her gaze came back again to Reba’s thick gleaming locks, her brassy-bright russet eyes, the faintly insolent air of challenge—not quite nice but very sexy—that she exuded. “Worst of all”—her voice dropped to a nervous whisper—“suppose he likes you? Suppose he takes one look and says, ‘I have to have her!’ ”
“He won’t.” Reba shrugged all that away. “Not the way you look in that dress!” Her critical russet gaze scanned the blinding loveliness that was Carolina’s own, the charming regular features, the cloud of fair hair light as the wind, those wide luminous silver eyes with their tarnished setting of darker lashes and above them the delicate high riding wings of her brows. She took a step forward and seized Carolina by the arms.
“Make him fall in love with you!” she entreated in a voice pulsing with intensity. “Oh, do this for me, Carol—remember I would do the same for you.” Carolina stopped waving her fan and fixed her friend with a gaze as steady as any that ever looked over the battlements of an English castle. “I will try,” she promised earnestly, remembering all that Reba had done for her. “I will somehow divert his attention so that at least he cannot ask for your hand tonight— indeed I will do my very best to win him.”
Although what she would do with him once he was won was a matter to which she had so far given no thought. . . .
WILLISTON HOUSE, ESSEX,
THE SECOND DAY OF CHRISTMAS
* * *
Chapter 15
It was with a feeling of intense relief that Carolina —muffled to the ears in Reba’s French gray velvet cloak trimmed with fluffy black fox—arrived at Williston House in the company of Reba and her overdressed mother, and learnt that Lord Gayle’s third son had not yet arrived. Indeed, they were told, he probably could not be expected to attend “in this uncertain weather, with the roads in such an icy condition that it has kept half our guests home!” Well, now that that had been established, she could set herself to enjoying her first ball on English soil!
Williston House was a fairly typical Jacobean manor house, of blackened timber and wattle construction, with high-ceilinged drafty rooms and great banks of brick chimneys and tall casement windows. The dancing was held in its great hall, smaller and cozier than the great hall at Broadleigh, which had been transformed from its normal gloom into brilliance by a forest of candles.
Sir Kyle, their host, was a florid smiling gentleman of middle size and middle age. He greeted them warmly in an out-of-date plum coat with worn gray velvet cuffs. One knee of his velvet breeches also showed a trace of wear. But he had a Yule Log burning merrily on his hearth, Carolina noted, his wine flowed as freely as his easy conversation, and his house was ablaze with holly and mistletoe. With his warm courtly manner, he could have been a Virginia gentleman. She felt at home in his company.
Lady Williston was something else altogether. She was tall and cool and her face had always been too angular for beauty, but it had weathered well and she had achieved in age what she had never had in youth— distinction. Her clothes too were old and somewhat yellowed about the hem, but the simple cut of her mauve brocade gown with its touches of gray lace provided a perfect setting for the handsome antique jewelry she wore—all family pieces, Carolina guessed. She
greeted the Tarbells with cool civility although a vestige of surprise passed over her face when she looked at Carolina—and was quickly gone when Mistress Tarbell explained that Carolina was not her daughter but her daughter’s friend from school. By contrast Lady Williston’s very plainness made Reba’s effusive mother in her amber and green cut velvet with its overlying layers of bronze lace ruffles and endless brooches and bangles seem expensively frumpish.
As if to make up for his wife's coldness, Sir Kyle showed them great attention. Carolina guessed that he felt he should notice his neighbors, no matter what his wife’s feelings in the matter. He showed great interest in the Colonies and for that Carolina was grateful. It was a refreshing change to have somebody ask intelligent questions.
Carolina’s advent into the room created quite a sensation among the young bucks (more men had made it over the icy roads than women) and she was shortly surrounded by such a crowd of them that her hostess looked scandalized and Reba’s mother frowned darkly that her own marriageable daughter should be so eclipsed.
Carolina found the attention a heady wine. She danced with first one and then another as a succession of young men vied for her favor. None of them stood out very clearly because all the time she was thinking, If only Thomas could be here, if only I could be dancing with him. . . .
She looked over the latest masculine shoulder at Reba, handsomely garbed in auburn velvet that exactly matched her auburn hair which had been dressed with spangled ribands. Reba was dancing with Sir Kyle himself and very obviously flirting with him. Carolina’s gaze sought out Lady Williston and saw that she was watching Reba too and that her thin lips had tightened.
“Mamma vows she will not let me wear this gown again,” Reba whispered when the two girls made a brief escape from the dancers and went upstairs to resurrect the damage so much skipping across the floor had done to their coiffures. “She swears you eclipse me! Indeed she drew me aside a few minutes ago and asked me severely why you’d been wearing plain brown woolen when you had gowns like this one. I told her it was the custom in the Colonies to arrive simply gowned and to step up the elegance as the visit wore on! And do you know, I think she believed me?” Reba shook her head.
Carolina guessed that Reba enjoyed outwitting a mother who kept such a heavy hand on the reins. Under the circumstances she could hardly blame her!
“ Tis as well she does not know this is your dress I’m wearing,” laughed Carolina. “She might demand we exchange gowns here and now!”
“Yes, had I known Lord Gayle’s son wouldn’t be coming”—Reba peered into her hostess’s dressing table mirror and artfully dabbed Spanish paper across her cheeks to give herself more color—“I’d have worn the dress myself!”
But you wouldn't have looked as good in it as I do, thought Carolina with amusement, for these are my colors! In the tall pier glass they had passed in the hall she had observed with satisfaction how the gray and silver of her gown somehow brought out the freshness of her complexion and the silver-gold gleam of her hair and made her gray eyes seem to flash the brighter in the dark tarnished frame of her long thick lashes.
“Have you learnt anything more about your marquess?” she asked as she patted a stray strand of blonde hair back into place.
Reba turned an excited face toward her. “Yes!” she cried. “He is—” She stopped as a bevy of ladies surged into the room to renew their makeup and tuck hairpins into stray locks that had come loose in the dancing. “I’ll tell you later,” she said hastily. “And by then I may have learned more about it.” She jumped up. “I hear the music striking up again and this next dance is promised to someone who may know. I’m going on downstairs, Carol.” She dashed away through the oncoming ladies, leaving Carolina with her comb still poised.
Left alone, Carolina could not help but notice the cool envious looks the other women gave her, or how they pointedly chose not to include her in their conversations. Obviously her popularity with the gentlemen had not endeared her to the female contingent!
Carolina told herself she did not care. This whole Christmastide stay in Essex was but an interlude, after which she would go back to London and Lord Thomas. And fortunately Lord Thomas’s family seat was not in Essex but in Northampton. She gave an already perfect coiffure a minute finishing touch, rose with an airy smile at the assembled ladies—who either averted their eyes or gave her baleful looks—and took herself back downstairs.
She made her way at a leisurely pace down the wide Jacobean staircase with its ornate carved balusters. The coolness of the ladies upstairs—to most of whom she had after all been introduced by her host—had brought out the devil in her. She had given her low-cut neckline a downward yank when she reached the head of the stairs and on the top step she took a deep breath that strained her velvet bodice to the utmost. Then she trailed gracefully down the stairs and halfway down paused to look over the assembled dancers, turning her head about to survey the room. She was wickedly aware that the brilliants at her shoulders were catching the light, and that same gleam of candlelight was showing to advantage the pearly luster of her breasts and haloing her pale hair.
Yet she looked out over the dancers without really seeing them individually, but more as a colorful moving mosaic of rainbow-hued silks and satins, swirling in time to the music. Again she was wishing that Thomas was here to swing her out upon the floor.
Still irritated, she gave a coquettish flirt to her light curls and moved on leisurely down the stairs.
When she reached the bottom step the vision of Lord Thomas vanished.
A gentleman who had been watching her descent with interest now stepped forward. A tall gentleman clad more soberly than most of the guests in a charcoal velvet coat, wide-cuffed and edged with silver braid, his long muscular legs encased in gunmetal satin breeches. Frosty point lace spilled from his cuffs and throat as he made a deep bow before her and when he rose from that bow she saw with shock that she was looking into the sardonic face of the man who had locked her into an upstairs room of the Star and Garter!
Before Carolina could more than gasp, he had murmured, “May I have the honor?” then seized her hand and led her, unresisting, out upon the floor.
Her senses whirled. This man could create a scandal if he told what he knew about her. Reba’s mother might be so upset that she would send Carolina back to London to drag through the holidays at an empty school.
She could think of nothing appropriate to say.
The tall gentleman however seemed completely in command of the situation. A little smile played about his mouth.
“So I find you again,” he murmured. “And in rather better case! At least no one is about to shoot you down or run you through with a sword. Tell me, is that sort of adventure usual to you?”
That comment brought a fiery response from his dancing partner.
“Of course it is not! I did it for—for—” She sought for a reason other than sheer wildness that would bring her dressed as a man to a London inn by night. “For a wager,” she finished, using the same story she had told Lord Freddie, for she had no intention of telling this arrogant stranger that she had been skulking around London trying to find her lover!
“For a wager?” He considered her with interest. “Faith, I’m surprised your brothers did not put a quencher on that!”
“I have no brothers!”
“Your parents then. One must presume you have parents?”
“My parents are in the Colonies,” she snapped. “Virginia.”
“Ah,” he said. “So you are far from home. ... A schoolgirl, one would surmise.”
Her chin came up at this implication that she was not far removed from the nursery. “That’s right, I do attend Mistress Chesterton’s school in London.”
“So that is how I missed you,” he murmured. “You found your way back to the school. Faith, you must have run all the way!”
“I was taken into a friend’s coach after I slid off the roof,” she said resentfully, making an intrica
te turn that billowed her skirts. “And I might have broken my neck when I went over the edge—and it would have been your fault for locking me in like that!”
“Oh, I’m well aware of how you departed.” His genial smile rested upon her and she could not help but notice how white his teeth were, against his dark face, or how intent his gaze. “The marks were plain in the snow. What I’m wondering is why? What was so pressing that you could not wait to be taken home in comfort in a hackney coach?”
Her cheeks were reddening uncomfortably as he spoke.
“Ah, I see,” he said softly. “You had decided that, having dragged you upstairs and locked you into a dining room, I would be back to ply you with strong liquor and seduce you?”
She gave him an indignant look.
“You thought worse of me than that?” he mocked, swinging her expertly about. “You expected me to tear off your clothes perhaps and rape you?”
This conversation had gone far enough! There was something steady and reliable in those gray eyes that were studying her so intently that told her he would never have done any of those things. But his insolence drove her to fury.
“I thought you would game away the night and most probably return me in the morning to the school and that I would be promptly expelled!” she told him in a suffocated voice.
“And you did not wish to be sent home to Virginia in disgrace?” he murmured. “Well, that at least is understandable and somewhat lightens the dark opinion I felt you must hold of me.” His dark head bent toward her and the music was suddenly very loud in her ears. She felt herself being swept away by it.
“I hold no opinion of you at all!” she cried, missing a step in her confusion. “I don’t even know your name! And it is most improper of you to ask me to dance before we have been introduced!”
“Indeed?” He considered that, and a shadow of amusement passed across his sardonic face. She was more beautiful than he remembered and entirely feminine, he thought, with those luminous eyes and sooty lashes. She reminded him of a gray kitten he had found as a lad. Long-haired and fluffy and big-eyed and lost, the kitten had spat at him every time he tried to pick her up to remove her from the ruined cellar into which she had fallen. He had chased her around the cellar. She had watched him with big light baleful eyes—dark-fringed like the eyes of the girl before him—and dashed away hissing every time he tried to approach her. She had struck at him and bitten him when at last he pounced upon her. And when he had picked her up she had wailed and set her claws into his shirt, digging like tiny needles into his flesh. But he had carried her out triumphantly. Stroking her outraged fluffed-out fur, he had taken her home—and she had glared at him balefully all the way and made ferocious sounds. Once home and lapping up milk, she had still considered him warily over the edge of the bowl, and then his little sister had come toddling in. She had promptly appropriated the kitten, naming her “Pussy Willow” for the silver gray catkin color of her fur. But “Willow,” as she came to be called, had somehow considered herself his cat, ever since she had come out from behind the chair where she had retreated when first he set her down upon arrival. His sister had fed her and carried her about, had even slept with the cat around her neck. But ever after, the kitten—at first so wary of Rye—would stroll indolently toward him when he came into a room and rub her soft whiskers against his boots and purr and wave her long fluffy tail. Rye would stoop and gently rub her silky ears. They had come to an understanding, he and that cat. He wondered if he would ever come to an understanding with young Mistress Lightfoot, who—as outraged and fluffy as Willow had been—was just now rebuking him about the proprieties. Indeed he wondered if he would even reach a truce!
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