“Can you hail me a cab before you go?”
He paused between donning one glove and next. “A cab? We’ve no cabs in Ballater village, miss. You can wait in the pub for your people to fetch you, but in this weather, nobody would make a decent beast loiter about in hopes of custom. I can lock up your bags for you, if that would aid matters.”
Joan’s bag or the oxen and horses were due more consideration than she was herself, and she had her own ignorance and folly to blame for this.
“I can wait in the pub,” she said, though she’d never entered such an establishment without a male escort before. “Will I be able to hire a vehicle in the morning?”
“Depends on the weather,” the fellow said, blowing out one candle after another. “And depends on where you’re going—and how much coin you have.”
Joan had no idea whether Tye’s house party was two miles from the station or twelve. She left the station with the stationmaster, and for the first time allowed that velvet might be more pretty than warm.
The stationmaster toddled off, nipping from a flask, leaving Joan standing before the dark station. A team approached, harness bells jingling, and her spirits lifted. Somebody was willing to hire their conveyance despite the weather, and she would find her way to her brother’s temporary household.
She’d come this far safely, and in this season of Christian fellowship—
The dray trotted past, and because Joan had been in anticipation of hailing it, she’d approached the street more closely than was wise. Frigid slush splashed up her cloak to the knees, ruining the fabric and dashing Joan’s spirits.
“So much for Christmas.” Joan clenched her jaw against the possibility her teeth might start to chatter, and took stock of her surroundings. Not a soul walked along the streets; not a beast of burden was in sight.
And she had no clue where the pub might be.
***
“Are you lost?” Hector asked.
Yes, Dante was lost—or his common sense had gone begging. “Nobody was at the station to meet Lady Joan.”
“The train was on time,” Hector said from Margs’s other side. “Nobody expects the trains to be on time.”
“Dante’s right,” Margs said from the depths of her scarf. “We should not have left her there alone.”
Margs’s support had the feel of an opportunistic swipe at Hector, and yet, Dante was grateful for it.
“I liked Lady Joan,” Charlie volunteered from Margs’s lap. “She’s nice, and she shares her chocolates.”
She shared her favors too, or believed she had. She’d spoken as if she hadn’t been forced, but inebriating a lady was the opposite of gaining her consent.
He turned the team back into the oval before the train station, the baggage sleigh following behind, and at first saw nobody.
Well, more fool he. “Her ladyship must have found accommo—”
A figure emerged from under the eaves at the station’s door. Tall, clad in a cloak far too light for the weather. For Dante, genuine relief replaced the feigned variety, despite a niggling unease that rescuing the same damsel twice in one day could not be a positive trend. He passed Hector the reins and leaped down, the cold sending a hard ache up his legs.
“You daft woman, have you nobody to take you in out of the weather?”
She wiped at her cheeks with her fussy purple glove. “Don’t scold me. I was about to ask a passerby where the pub was.”
Dante whipped off his scarf and wrapped it around her fool neck. “A fine plan, as long you don’t mind freezing to death in the next quarter hour.” When she might have offered some genteel retort, he wrapped the scarf directly over her mouth.
“You,” Dante barked at the coachy driving the baggage sleigh. “Trade with me. Charlie and Phillip, mind your aunt and Hector.”
“Or we’ll get lumps of coal for Christmas,” Charlie yelled.
“Into the damned sleigh,” Dante said to the shivering bundle of womanhood beside him. She managed it, despite the folds of her cloak, and Dante soon had hot bricks under her feet and thick wool lap robes layered over them both.
“Budge up,” he said, taking up the reins. “We’ve only a few miles to travel, but a little Highland cold goes a long way.”
“Th-thank you.”
“Keep your damned manners, and pray God you don’t get a lung fever for your holiday treat.”
***
Joan tucked herself under the heavy lap robes and reviewed a day that had been a series of revelations, starting with the awful realization of how precarious a woman’s good name truly was. In a few hours, Joan had laid waste to a lifetime of decorous behavior and risked her family’s standing too.
Matters had deteriorated from there, for Joan had the lowering suspicion that her maid had suffered from an attack of self-preservation rather than a bilious stomach. If Bertha had pieced together the details of Joan’s previous evening, then the maid’s search for another post was already under way.
Then had come the lowering news that despite an uncommonly competent grasp of economics for a lady, Joan wasn’t very familiar with money.
What did a meal cost?
A train ticket?
A plain wool cloak ready-made?
She knew even less of train schedules, or she would never have debarked halfway to Aberdeen to ensure passage back to Edinburgh for her ailing maid.
Small shocks had followed: How did a lady unlace herself without aid at the end of the day? What food was safe to eat at a train station? Did pickpockets frequent such locations?
After overimbibing, did memory never fully return? How did men endure the frequent occasion of overimbibing?
“Are you falling asleep, my lady?”
“I’m thinking.”
“About?”
Brave fellow, or perhaps Mr. Hartwell was simply bored.
“This day had some positive aspects.” Joan was tucked up against one of them, and Mr. Hartwell’s sheer animal warmth featured prominently among his winning qualities.
“Always a good day when one doesn’t die of exposure in the Highlands. If you’d like a wee nip, my flask is in my hip pocket.”
He thought she was an idiot, and Joan agreed with him.
“Drinking spirits is part of how I nearly died of exposure in the Highlands.” She fished in his pocket nonetheless, a curiously intimate undertaking.
“Firstly, if we share that flask, there’s not enough to get either one of us drunk. Secondly, it’s too damned cold to tarry by the roadside, even for the pleasure of sampling a lady’s charms. Thirdly, if we do not appear at our destination directly behind my family, a searching party will soon come looking for us.”
Joan took a very wee nip, cautiously, for she was stupid but could learn from her mistakes.
“This tastes of…sherry? I find it odd that the same spirits that authored my social downfall now serve to warm my insides.”
And warm them agreeably. She did not find it odd that her charms were no temptation to Mr. Hartwell, despite his references to the weather.
“Good whiskey goes down with all manner of subtle glories, and it wasn’t the spirits that authored your downfall, if indeed you’ve fallen.”
As the road climbed, the sleigh ahead marked the path at a greater distance. The baggage sleigh didn’t sport harness bells, giving Joan the sense of all gaiety and light receding from her life the farther they traveled from the village.
She burrowed closer to Mr. Hartwell. “I authored my own downfall, and I have the sorry premonition that the consequences are only beginning to manifest.”
“Then you’ve nothing left to lose, have you?”
Mama would kill her, Tiberius would lecture her within an inch of her life, and Papa would shout.
“I have nothing to lose but my good name, my welcome in my own family, my self-respect, and my dreams of designing clothes that make a woman feel pretty without beggaring her pocketbook.”
“If your family turns their backs on
you now, then they aren’t much of a family.”
Joan passed him the flask, and after he’d taken a considerable swallow and handed it back, she capped it and tucked it into his pocket. She kept her hand in his pocket too, for warmth.
Or something.
Because Mr. Hartwell’s observation about Joan’s family turning their backs on her was the most lowering of the entire miserable day.
“Are you crying, my lady?”
She had the oddest conversations with him. “Would you mind I if were?”
“A cold wind can bring tears to the eyes, but mine host would likely take it amiss if I showed up with a blubbering female among my baggage. Charlie will be enough of a trial to the man’s hospitality. Hector and Margs’s feuding will add a cheery note to the festivities too.”
A shaft of insight struck, every bit as warming as the whiskey. Mr. Hartwell was teasing her, or riling her, distracting her. In any case, he was trying to help with a problem so much larger than a mere awful day.
“You are a nice man, Mr. Hartwell. I like you quite well.”
“No more whiskey for you, Lady Joan.”
His tone was gruff, which Joan suspected meant he might like her a little too.
He turned the horses down a dark tree-lined drive. Up ahead, the outline of a sizable edifice loomed, though ten windows sported a single candle each, in a four-three-two-one pattern. The effect—a rising triangle of illuminated windows—was lovely, rather like a Christmas tree.
Hector and Miss Hartwell had already shooed the children into the house before Mr. Hartwell handed Joan down from the sleigh. She retrieved her bag, which Mr. Hartwell plucked from her grasp, and accepted his escort as a footman held up a lantern, porters tackled the luggage, and a groom dealt with the horses.
“Whose hospitality am I imposing on?” Joan asked, for their arrival was certainly meeting with every courtesy.
“Some earl or other. He’s in shipping and looking to diversify. Lots of interests in the New World and doesn’t socialize much. Supposedly quite wealthy, though I’ve likely offended you by saying as much. Why?”
The day was to end with a small mercy, apparently. “I don’t know any earls with interests in shipping, and if he’s reclusive, then there will be that much less talk about my having to depend on your good offices to see me back to my family.”
Or about her possibly ending up married to Mr. Hartwell, another unfathomable element to this most unfathomable day.
They paused on the front stoop of a house built of mellow gray granite. The footman stood patiently with one hand on the doorknob, suggesting nobody in these surrounds let the night air in for an instant longer than necessary.
“You’re not looking forward to explaining me,” Mr. Hartwell said. “Don’t suppose I blame you.”
The footman opened the door, and a rush of warm, piney air greeted Joan. A small crowd was knotted in the house’s entryway, Charlie’s voice piping above a hubbub of greetings and introductions.
A tall dark-haired man in a kilt detached himself from the group and extended a hand to Mr. Hartwell.
“Hartwell, welcome. This must be your wife.”
Their host was broad-shouldered, and his burr was laced with some subtle accent Joan couldn’t fathom. About the eyes and jaw, he looked familiar, and he was much younger than Joan had anticipated, probably about Mr. Hartwell’s age.
She noted these details with the part of her mind adept at social gatherings, while the part of her that had endured a long, hard, bewildering day scrambled for a reply to their host’s error.
“Lady Joan—” Mr. Hartwell began, only to be interrupted by a cultured, very English baritone from over Joan’s shoulder.
“She is most certainly not his wife, for that lady is my own dear sister. Joan, a pleasure to see you—an unexpected pleasure.”
Joan had always viewed the ladies who succumbed to a convenient swoon with amusement, and yet… A varied diet of whiskey, chocolate, self-recrimination, and anxiety did not make for steady nerves.
Mr. Hartwell’s arm, though, was steady indeed. Joan manufactured a brilliant smile, turned, and faced yet another challenge in this endlessly challenging day.
She also lied—convincingly, she hoped.
“Hello, Tiberius. Delightful to see you too, as always.”
Six
Valerian Fontaine had no sense of fashion, and the only figures that turned his graying head were of the mathematical variety. Edward might have forgiven his uncle these shortcomings, but the old boy had no sense of fun, either.
“If you are to take over this business someday, you will have to learn to work,” Uncle barked, closing a ledger book with a decisive snap. “You must leave off mincing about the ballrooms and leering down ladies’ bodices, and spend more time seeing to business.”
Uncle came from the practical French side of the family, after which Edward did not now and never would take if he could help it. Times were changing, true, but having a hand in trade was hardly a rose on the family escutcheon.
“Don’t scold the boy,” Mama said as she leafed through Edward’s sketches for next year’s ball gowns. “Where do you think all the latest fashions are to be seen, hmm? Edward is an English aristocrat and must be seen comporting himself as such.”
“Those ball gowns are to be seen night after night, the same fashions on the same ladies from the same modistes and the same houses of fashion. The boy needn’t become a fixture in the ballrooms to know that bustles are smaller this year, or larger, or whatever.”
The size of a fashionable bustle was not a whatever, and Edward, at twenty-seven years of age, was not a boy.
“Eddie, where are your new drawings?” As always, Mama was composed and lovely. Mama might not be able to design a pretty dress, but she could still wear one to excellent advantage.
“I believe you’re looking at my most recent drawings, Mama.”
And when would Uncle renovate this shabby, cluttered, dingy office? Customers never saw this part of Salon du Mode, but Edward was spending rather more time here of late than he preferred.
“Not these,” Mama said, setting aside hours of Edward’s work, “the ones you did at home, the ones with the different bodices and all that flouncy business about the hems.”
An image flashed into Edward’s mind, out of context, the way recall of a hard night always popped up unexpectedly. Lady Joan had been so eager to show him her sketches, and not very eager at all to show him her other treasures. She’d prattled on and on about seams, flounces, nap, drape, and all manner of subtleties, while Edward had watched her hands moving on the page and become aroused.
“What drawings?” Uncle asked, for even Uncle understood that a clever design yielded profit, of which there had been too little for too long.
“I have them in my case,” Edward said, because he had spent hours trying to imitate the innovations Joan had tossed off in a few moments of sketching. “Might we have a tea tray sent up?”
“Show them to your uncle,” Mama said, waving her hand languidly. “They’re your best work so far. When you apply yourself, you astonish me, Eddie.”
The hour was late enough that Edward ought to be dressing for his evening’s entertainments—Uncle’s misguided notions of work meant long hours spent on the business premises. Edward was hungry, bored, and—
The sense of his mother’s words registered. “Those sketches you were looking at at home are not mi—”
Between one heartbeat and the next, Edward came smack up against a choice. Lady Joan had left her designs behind in Edward’s parlor, only a few of the many brilliant ideas she was unfairly endowed with. He’d wanted her help without having to ask for it—the reason for the entire debacle—but he hadn’t strictly planned to appropriate her work.
She wouldn’t miss the sketches, and she certainly wouldn’t be asking for them back.
Would she?
A man must take charge of his destiny.
“Those sketches are no
t my best work, though some of them have potential,” Edward said, untying his portfolio. He carried the leather case with him so that all and sundry might know that his contribution to the family venture was artistic, and nothing so pedestrian as arithmetic or ledgers.
That would be ungentlemanly. Also tedious, and in Edward’s case, doomed to failure. Then too, a portfolio was a good place to stash a spare handkerchief, a comb, some mints, and a sheath or two.
“I’m still refining most of them,” Edward said, passing Joan’s sketches across the table to his uncle—and pray God the man would not turn them over to see the signatures.
Uncle dressed like a latter-day Puritan, and his grasp of women’s fashion likely matched Edward’s grasp of ledgers. What mattered was that Mama had liked the drawings.
“Damned lot of fabric involved,” Uncle muttered. “Though they’re quite fetching. Silk, I suppose?”
Silk was expensive; Edward knew that much. “Well, perhaps we might use—”
“Of course, silk,” Mama said, turning the stack to consider a drawing. “Nothing else drapes quite like silk, and it’s warm without being heavy. Spring nights are the very devil for being chilly.”
How could a woman be chilly when wearing all those confounded layers? Lady Joan had certainly worn layers beneath her skirts—Edward recalled that much—and each one had been soft, delicate, and complicated—also mouthwateringly pretty.
“Matching capes and shawls then,” Uncle groused. “More damned silk.”
“Matching stockings,” Edward said. A silly notion, one that had both of his relations peering at him. Joan had worn purple silk stockings, the sight of which on her slender calves had parted Edward from his next-to-last shred of common sense.
“Brilliant,” Mama cried.
“Costly,” Uncle countered. “I suppose we can charge exorbitantly for them if they’re dyed to match.”
Mama nattered on, while Uncle offered a counterpoint in dolorous estimates and dire predictions, and Edward wrestled with what amounted to purloining Lady Joan Flynn’s sketches.
What A Lady Needs For Christmas Page 9
