Kat, Incorrigible

by Stephanie Burgis

I gulped. Five minutes ago, I would have argued. But now …

  “Nonsense,” said Lady Graves. “A girl of her age can hardly miss dinner. Isn’t that so, Miss Katherine?”

  “Well …”

  “There, now.” She patted my arm. “Never mind, dear. Once you have a little wine, you’ll think nothing of a mere headache, I can promise you that. But in the meantime …” Her smile broadened as she turned to Elissa. “There is someone who is particularly anxious to meet you, Miss Stephenson. And all your family, of course.”

  Lady Graves swept us with her, and the crowd moved aside to make way—whether in honor of the hostess in our midst, or out of fear that I’d go mad and attack them as well, I couldn’t be sure. I was glad of it, though. If it had been up to me, I wouldn’t have come face-to-face with another guest for the rest of our stay at Grantham Abbey.

  All too soon, though, Lady Graves drew us up before an enormous painting of a morose-looking old gentleman in a really startling long red wig. In front of the painting stood two tall, dark-haired men in black coats, their heads turned away from us as they studied the painting—or, perhaps, just marveled at the painted wig. I couldn’t believe anyone had ever been willing to wear such a monstrosity.

  Lady Graves coughed delicately, and both gentlemen swung around to face us.

  “My dear Sir Neville … and Mr. Collingwood,” she purred. “May I have the pleasure of presenting my cousin, Mrs. Stephenson, and her daughters? Miss Stephenson, Miss Angeline, and Miss Katherine.”

  We all curtsied. But I was so busy peeking up under my eyelashes at the gentlemen, I nearly toppled over as I did it.

  They looked very alike, both with hawk noses, dark eyes, and glossy black hair. But the older brother—Sir Neville—had harder eyes. I could actually feel the power vibrating off him as his gaze swept across us. The younger brother, Mr. Collingwood, smiled with what seemed to be real, friendly interest. Sir Neville looked as if he were measuring each and every one of us for a contest of strength. My skin prickled under his gaze, and I didn’t like it. Worse yet, I felt a telltale heat against my leg as the mirror awakened inside my reticule.

  Just perfect. If I had to guess the single thing most calculated to send Stepmama into a screaming, uncontrollable rage, even at the best of times, it would be exposing the shame of Mama’s magic in front of an eligible bachelor. And to do it right now, just after publicly humiliating the entire family on the very first night of our visit … I gritted my teeth and closed my hand tight around my damaged reticule to keep any hint of golden glow from leaking out.

  “Charmed,” Sir Neville said, and smiled. It looked like a predatory snarl.

  Elissa looked as if she might faint from sheer panic.

  I stiffened my back and returned Sir Neville’s smile with interest. His eyes widened.

  “I say,” said Mr. Collingwood. “Are you perfectly well, Miss Stephenson? You look a bit under the weather, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “No, no,” Elissa murmured faintly. “I’m fine, truly.”

  “Are you sure?” He started forward, one hand held out as if to catch her arm.

  “She is perfectly well,” Stepmama said. “Honestly. Young ladies these days.” She gave a trill of laughter. “I’m sure you gentlemen both understand. The honor of attending such a grand party as this, for an innocent young girl …”

  Angeline looked sardonic. Elissa looked ready to swoon again, but this time from humiliation rather than nerves. Mr. Collingwood blinked and flushed and tugged at his cravat. He stepped back hastily.

  “Of course,” he said. “So sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

  “We are all delighted that she could be here,” Sir Neville said. “And her charming sisters as well, of course.” But his hard eyes were fixed only on Elissa now. “Will you do me the honor of allowing me to escort you into dinner tonight, Miss Stephenson?”

  “Of course,” Elissa murmured. Her eyelashes fluttered down to cover her eyes, and color rose on her pale cheeks. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Oh,” said Mr. Collingwood. He looked like a little boy who’d just found out he couldn’t have a puppy after all. “Erm.” He set his shoulders. “Miss Angeline, would you—?”

  “Thank you,” Angeline said. “I would be delighted.”

  “Mm,” said Mr. Collingwood, and gazed wistfully at Elissa.

  “Excellent,” said Lady Graves, and nodded to the butler who stood in the corner of the room, waiting.

  He rang the bell with a jangle, and everyone formed into pairs to enter the dining room. I, of course, had to walk next to Stepmama. But still, I had an excellent view as Sir Neville led Elissa forward like a man claiming his latest and least important possession. Just like a milch cow, as Angeline had said earlier. My mouth twisted at the thought.

  Just before they disappeared into the dining room, Sir Neville looked back at the rest of us. His gaze went straight to me.

  I lifted my chin. He smiled and turned away. And the mirror in my reticule burned hotter than ever.

  Just to make the evening complete, I ended up sitting directly across from the fish-faced woman, who wore a new and different gown, probably also from Paris, and hadn’t let her change of gown change her mind about me. Of course, Stepmama had drilled it into me beforehand that I was only allowed to converse with my neighbors on either side and was never, ever to be so rude as to speak across the table, so Fish-Face and I wouldn’t have had a chance to talk anyway. But sitting only a few feet away from me gave her plenty of opportunity for disdainful looks and sniffs whenever I picked up the wrong fork or knife or actually spoke to my own lawful neighbors. Luckily, that didn’t happen often, as I was squeezed between two middle-aged gentlemen who were both completely intent on their own dinners and their gallons and gallons of red wine.

  But Fish-Face surprised me by having a much more interesting conversation of her own across the table. The moment I heard the word “highwayman,” I gave up even pretending not to listen.

  “It is too shocking for words,” she said to her neighbor, a pallid, thin young man who looked far too fashionable to move or even speak. “Lady Graves may tell us all she likes not to concern ourselves, but how can we help but worry with a dangerous highwayman on the loose?”

  The pallid young fashion plate’s only reply was a languid, “Um.” He seemed more concerned with lifting the food on his plate and then gracefully replacing it, uneaten, than with any nearby highwaymen, dangerous or not. I wondered how he managed to survive without eating. Was he powered entirely by fashion?

  Fish-Face’s other neighbor, though, harrumphed loudly and shifted in his seat to glare at her. “Nonsense, nonsense! Only dangerous at night, Mrs. Banfield, no danger to you in the day. Just don’t drive out at night and you’ll be perfectly well. No need for flights of fancy here!”

  “How ever can you say so?” Mrs. Banfield’s fish face pursed with irritation, and she tossed back a glass of wine, emptying it to the dregs. I watched, fascinated. “One cannot remain forever confined to one small house for an evening. One would go mad!”

  Small? I thought, and blinked. But she kept going.

  “We can hardly let ourselves be trapped here, can we? And the miscreant might well take to harassing innocent travelers in the daytime, too, if we all stay safely hidden away from him at night.”

  “Then give your footmen a pair of pistols each,” the harrumphing neighbor said. “Tell ’em to shoot the devil down at first sight. Only in danger then if you drive on a night without moonlight so you can’t see him. You can bear to stay inside only on moonless nights, can’t you?”

  “There is no need for the moon to be hidden for him to hide from us. With that dreadful forest hanging over the road, no wonder he manages to stay hidden until the final moment every time! I should never feel safe for an instant—and my footmen are hardly trained shots, you know.”

  “Better stay inside, then,” the harrumphing man said, and turned back to his veal and mutton as the twelve ne
w dishes of the second course arrived.

  “Well!” Mrs. Banfield said. “I never.”

  The pallid fashion plate beside her smiled dreamily, perhaps in sympathy, or perhaps just in a world of his own. Mrs. Banfield looked at him, gave another impatient sigh, and then looked across the table at me. I smiled in as friendly a way as I could manage. She shuddered and turned back to the lobster on her plate, her massive silk turban rustling with frustration.

  Since her conversation seemed to have dried up, I decided to try again for my own. I turned to the man beside me, whose attention was focused intently on his plate of beef. “Is there really a highwayman in the area, sir?”

  “Eh? What?” He blinked at me as if I’d only just appeared beside him. “Highwayman, you say? Deuced odd thing for a young girl to talk about, I must say.”

  “But if there really is a highwayman loose near Grantham Abbey—”

  “Stories,” he said dismissively. “You’re perfectly safe here. The devils never come near the houses themselves. They’d be fools to risk it.”

  “But—”

  But he had already turned back to his beef. I sighed and took a sip of my wine. It was a deep, rich red, and it tingled against my tongue. I’d never drunk unwatered wine before, and it made me a little nervous. I decided not to try flinging it down my throat yet, the way Mrs. Banfield had done, even though I was sorely tempted. After my misadventure earlier, it would be hard enough to convince Stepmama to let me downstairs again tomorrow night, even without spilling red wine all over Lady Graves’s tablecloth now.

  Maybe later tonight, safe in the privacy of my own bedroom, I would practice flinging a glass of water down my throat until I had the movements perfected.

  By the end of the final course, my stomach was so burstingly full I couldn’t even think about drinking more wine, or anything else that might shift the horridly delicate balance of my digestion. I watched my plate be taken away with pure relief and stifled a macaroon-flavored burp. Mrs. Banfield had finally drawn the pallid young fashion plate into, if not a real conversation, at least one that seemed to moderately interest him. She spouted her opinions on the latest fashions, and he roused himself enough to make noises that might have almost been taken to be encouragement whenever she paused. Her other neighbor’s face had grown redder and redder with every refill of his wineglass. He was bellowing about hunting methods to the poor woman on his other side.

  The noise levels had risen all along the long table, actually, into a not-so-civilized roar that bounced off the walls. Together with my over-full stomach, the din made me feel dizzy and a little nauseated. I swallowed hard and fixed my eyes on Lady Graves at the head of the table. Thank goodness, she was already starting to rise. As soon as she signaled, all the ladies would have to follow her out into the drawing room for tea and coffee, and then—

  A footman approached Lady Graves and whispered into her ear. She frowned and looked at Stepmama, signaling down the table with her eyebrows. Stepmama was too engrossed in conversation to notice.

  I saw Lady Graves’s lips move in recognizable words. “What does he want?”

  The footman’s head was turned to her, so I couldn’t make out his reply. But I heard the doors crash open, and I turned with everyone else at the table to stare at the intruder who hurried inside, cravat disarranged and hair disordered, panting from exertion. His own dark blue eyes, of course, went straight to Angeline, ignoring everyone else in the crowded room.

  It was Frederick Carlyle, more agitated than I’d ever seen him.

  “Miss Angeline,” he said. “Thank God I’ve found you. Your house has been burgled!”

  Ten

  “Burgled in broad daylight!” Even half an hour later, Stepmama could not stop repeating it.

  She sat in one of Lady Graves’s most elegant drawing-room chairs with a bevy of older women gathered around her solicitously, plying her with tea and sympathy. For all their fussing, though, I could see the avid speculation in their eyes. Our family was providing plenty of fodder for gossip tonight.

  “Did you hear to whom he addressed himself?” Mrs. Banfield murmured to her companion as they passed my corner of the room, on their way to refill their cups at the tea urn. “It was Miss Angeline he’d come to tell—not Mrs. Stephenson. I wonder if his mother knows how thoroughly he is being dragged into their toils, buried in that little country vicarage?”

  Her companion giggled. “It is too delicious, isn’t it? Perhaps a judicious letter really ought to be sent to Mrs. Carlyle’s sister to pass on the hint….”

  I glared at both of them, but they didn’t notice. They were too busy savoring the moment.

  “But what could they even have wanted?” Stepmama moaned piteously to her supporters on the other side of the room. “We have nothing—that is …” She blinked and drew herself up, suddenly speaking more cautiously under the weight of so many measuring eyes. “We think of our possessions as absolutely nothing, of course, despite what some people might call their vulgar monetary value….”

  I curled in tighter upon myself in my corner. Elissa was holding off her own interrogators in another part of the drawing room, while Angeline, cheeks flushed, was held as captive audience by Mr. Carlyle, the only gentleman in the room, under the interested gaze of all the other ladies. But none of them knew as clearly as I what must have happened.

  “It was while your father and I were on our daily walk across the hills,” Mr. Carlyle had told Angeline at the dinner table, while all the other guests stared and whispered. “Mr. Stephenson’s study was ransacked, and all the other rooms in the house gone over. But we could see nothing that had gone missing, so the burglars must not have found what they were looking for. Mr. Stephenson decided it would be best for me to be the one who came to tell you, as your brother was, ah, indisposed, and your father himself, er, well …”

  Of course Papa couldn’t have come to tell us himself. He was needed to keep an eye on Charles and make sure he came to no new trouble while we were gone. No matter what the rest of Lady Graves’s houseguests thought, all of us in Charles’s family understood that part without needing any further explanation. But as for the rest of it …

  “What were they even looking for?” Stepmama wailed to her audience now. “And what if they should come back? Or come here to find it, whatever it is?”

  “Nonsense, my dear,” Lady Graves said. She cut through Stepmama’s spellbound audience to pat her hand and smile bracingly. “This house is very well protected. A dozen servants would alert us before a single burglar could find his way to your rooms. I promise you, you are entirely safe here.”

  But I knew she was wrong.

  The door to the drawing room opened, and the gentlemen arrived, spilling into the room in a rather unsteady fashion after their session of port swilling. Sir Neville and his brother both headed straight for Elissa; the pallid young fashion plate wandered idly to the rich velvet curtains to look out into the darkness; my neighbor from dinner headed straight to the farthest sofa in the room and promptly fell asleep.

  But I only had eyes for one gentleman in the room.

  Mr. Gregson smiled thinly at me as he seated himself with a neat flick of his coattails by our hostess’s side.

  Apparently Lady Fotherington wasn’t the only ruthless one in their partnership after all.

  I followed Angeline into her room that night, even though her face was still flushed with embarrassment and anger, and her eyes sparkled with a light that meant danger. I ignored all the signs and closed the door behind me.

  “I’m too tired, Kat,” she said, before I could utter a word. “If you want to talk, go find Elissa. I’m sure she’s simply longing to sigh like a martyr in front of an audience right now. Heaven knows, inspiring two gentlemen to passion in one night is plenty of reason to feel sorry for yourself. It’s practically a gothic tragedy.”

  “You’re just annoyed because Frederick Carlyle followed you here and mooned over you in front of all the other guests,”
I said. I sat down on her bed uninvited and looped my hands around my knees. “There’s no need for you to take out your bad mood on Elissa.”

  “I am so glad you decided to visit me tonight,” Angeline said sweetly. “How fortunate I am indeed. Do you wish to spend any more time explaining my own motivations to me, or are you ready to be thrown out yet? Because I warn you, I haven’t the patience to listen to much more of this right now.” She yanked the pins out of her thick, piled-up hair and threw them down onto her dressing table. “Frederick Carlyle be damned,” she said. “He had no reason to come chasing after us only because of a burglary in which nothing was stolen. An utterly pointless burglary, in fact. Perhaps he made the whole thing up. I shouldn’t be at all surprised.”

  “He didn’t,” I said. Then my throat closed up before I could say what I knew I ought to say next.

  “Well, there’s no need to sound so certain about that,” said Angeline. “You may think you’re quite the expert at guessing all my secrets, but you might be surprised to know how often you’re wrong about other people.”

  I thought of Mr. Gregson and didn’t argue. Instead I said, “Where have you put Mama’s magic books?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” She whirled around, scattering hairpins in her wake. “Do you really think that now is the time to pester me for those? Go to bed, Kat. We’ll talk about it in the morning … if I’m in a better mood by then.”

  I didn’t stand up. “Are they safe? Have you really hidden them?”

  She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. “Yes. Yes, yes, yes, they are safe. And no, you still can’t have them. There!” She opened her eyes and glared at me. “Are you satisfied?”

  “No,” I said, but I stood up and left the room anyway.

  When I stepped out into the candlelit corridor, though, I realized I wasn’t alone. I closed Angeline’s door with a jerk. “Mr. Carlyle!” I hissed. “What are you doing here?”

  He jumped back guiltily. “Nothing,” he said. “Only …”

  I stared at him. “You wouldn’t—you couldn’t think of trying to go into Angeline’s bedchamber!”