The Misguided Matchmaker

by Nadine Miller

  “Just a friendly bit of banter,” Tristan said vaguely.

  “Friendly, eh! I couldn’t help but notice how friendly the two of you had gotten on the trip—enough so as to be calling each other by your given names.”

  He paused. “But not too friendly, I trust. Man for man. I’d take you over your half-brother as a son-in-law any day, you understand. But he has the title, and I’ll not settle for less where Maddy’s concerned.”

  Tristan felt a sudden urge to plant the rag-mannered old tyrant a facer, even though he knew his anger was occasioned as much by his own sense of guilt as by Harcourt’s insensitive remark. “Damn your eyes, Harcourt,” he snarled. “Thanks to you, your daughter and I found ourselves in a very dangerous situation in France. We managed to survive it and, as a result, formed a fast friendship. I resent your implication that I abused that friendship in any way or that she is the kind of woman to inspire such base conduct on my part. For your information, sir, the fact that I am a bastard does not preclude my having principles.”

  Harcourt blinked. “Simmer down, lad. I meant no offense. I’ve nothing against bastards. Truth is, I’m one myself in every sense of the word, which is why I want something better for my daughter. I saw what being tarred by my brush did to her mother. I’ll not have those biddies in the ton barring Maddy from their fancy doings like they did Clarisse.”

  “I can accept that. I’d probably feel the same If I had a daughter,” Tristan said stiffly. “If there is nothing more you wish to discuss, sir, I shall take my leave of you. I’ve a good two-hour drive to Winterhaven and both I and my nags are near exhaustion.”

  “You’re not to go to Winterhaven.”

  “Sir?”

  “Lady Ursula asked me to tell you the earl’s London townhouse has been refurbished and the family will be staying there for the balance of the Season. She had your clothes and other belongings brought up from Winterhaven.

  Tristan couldn’t believe his ears. He had stayed at the townhouse the two nights prior to leaving for France and couldn’t imagine the family being in residence there. The staff had all been let go months before; furthermore, most of the furniture and all of the paintings and artifacts had been sold by the Fourth Earl to raise money for his gambling habit. He could only assume that Caleb Harcourt had already begun to replenish the empty Ramsden coffers in anticipation of his daughter’s marriage into the family.

  He had known all along this had to happen, had even convinced himself he accepted it. But his palpable proof that Maddy would soon be his brother’s wife bore the terrible finality of a death blow.

  Without further ado, he rose and prepared to take his leave before Maddy awoke from her nap and he had to face the agony of seeing her again.

  Caleb Harcourt insisted on shaking his hand and offering his heartfelt thanks for delivering his daughter safely under such difficult circumstances. “Give us three or four days to get Maddy properly outfitted before you and your brother call on her,” he said as he walked Tristan to the door.

  Tristan’s heart skipped a beat. “Call on her?”

  “It was Lady Ursula’s suggestion. Fine woman that, with a keen sense of what’s right and proper. She believes the best way to get Maddy and the earl together, natural like, is for you to introduce them, seeing as how you’re the only one who knows them both.”

  Harcourt’s smile was infuriatingly complacent. “I agree with her completely, for even though the deed is as good as done, I’d not want Maddy to think her marriage to the earl was anything but a love match. Women, especially young ones like Maddy, put great store in such things, if you take my meaning.”

  Tristan nodded stiffly and with a curt bow escaped to his waiting carriage before the cunning old man could guess that a gaping hole had just opened in his heart, and his lifeblood was seeping out drop by painful drop.

  Maddy woke from a sleep so sound, she felt as if she had been drugged with laudanum. Disoriented, she lay perfectly still, trying to determine where she was and how she had gotten there. Then all at once she remembered. She was in her father’s house, and this was the bedchamber to which his strange butler had led her.

  “This be yer cuddy, Miss Maddy,” the old fellow had said as he opened the door to the small chamber. “Though ‘tis not as grand as ye’d find in one of the Mayfair townhouses, I hope ye find it to yer liking. Cap’n himself picked out the curtains and such.”

  Indeed, it was to her liking, Maddy decided as she looked about her. At least what she could see of it. Except for the pool of light cast by a fragrant beeswax taper on the bedside table, the room was in shadow. But she vaguely remembered noting earlier that the fireplace gracing one wall was of white Venetian marble, and the coverlet on which she lay, fully clothed except for her slippers, was a rich silk damask in pale, leafy green.

  The clock on the mantelpiece chimed softly and Maddy gasped. She had slept more than two hours. Her father must have tired of waiting for her and dined without her. Her stomach growled, reminding her it was as empty as an almsman’s larder, and she suddenly realized it had been a good twelve hours since she’d last eaten.

  Swinging her feet to the floor, she pulled on her slippers and crossed to the small marble-topped commode to splash cool water on her face and finger-comb her curls into a semblance of order before she searched out her father for that long talk he had promised.

  A nearby shelf caught her eye. A rag doll with scraggly yarn hair and black shoe-button eyes rested between a miniature sailboat and a dollhouse complete with tiny hand-carved furniture. Her toys, left behind in the hurried flight to France her mother and she had made fifteen years earlier. Her father had kept then all this time—displayed with the same care as the valuable ship’s model in the entryway. A lump the size of a goose egg rose in her throat at the very thought.

  The house was silent as a tomb when, with candle in hand, she made her way down the curved staircase to the floor below. Where was her father? Or Griggins? Or for that matter the rest of the servants need to take care of the house?

  Then she remembered Griggins emerging from behind the stairwell, muffin in hand. Servants or no servants, if she could find the kitchen, she could find something to eat—or better yet, something she could cook herself. She had little faith in English cuisine, and she prided herself on the culinary skills that, despite her grandfather’s disapproval, she’d learned over the years from an excellent chef.

  As she suspected, a narrow hallway stretched behind the curved stairwell in the entryway, and once she entered it, she could her voices. Male voices.

  She pushed open the door at the end of the hall and found herself in a kitchen much like the one in her grandfather’s house in Lyon. A long pine worktable covered with an assortment of wooden bowls and spoons dominated the center of the room, an open range complete with drip pan, iron cauldron and a huge copper teakettle was set in one wall, and on another hung a row of copper pots, most of which were stained green with verdigris.

  “Maddy, girl! So you’ve finally waked up!” Her father’s booming voice filled the cozy room. She turned to find him still in his shirtsleeves, seated at a round oak table with a plate of steaming food before him. Beside him, drinking a cup of tea, sat Griggins. She tried to picture her grandfather taking a meal in the kitchen with his servants but the idea was too preposterous to be imagined.

  Her father beamed at her, fork in hand. “I’d given you up for the night.” He nodded toward an empty chair. “Sit down. Sit down. You must be famished and Cookie’s had a pot of his tasty stew simmering for hours.”

  For the first time, Maddy noticed the third occupant of the kitchen. Startled, she looked closer. Two snapping black eyes regarded her from a swarthy face topped by a head of curly black hair, streaked with gray. Except for the stained white kitchen apron encasing his thin body, the small man removing a plate from the oven might well have been her benefactor in Lyon, Monsieur Forli.

  “Guiseppi Pontizetti del Florino at your service, Princessa,”
the little man intoned in a heavy Italian accent.

  Her father chuckled. “You can see why we call him Cookie. But the little toad is a genius when it comes to cooking, so Griggins and I put up with him.” He paused while Cookie set a heaping plate before Maddy, the aroma of which made her mouth literally water.

  “Well, this is it my dear,” her father continued as she picked up her fork. “My entire household.”

  “Just three people in a house this size?”

  Her father nodded. “Oh, I have a housekeeper, two maids, a footman, and a pot boy who come in by the day. But I wouldn’t have them for a minute if I could figure out how to get along without them. Never did like a lot of servants knowing my business.”

  He gestured toward the two men facing him on the opposite side of the table. “But I’m used to these two. Griggins was my first mate and Cookie manned the galley on my first ship more than a quarter of a century ago.”

  “That’s right, Miss Maddy, and rough old sea sow she was,” Griggins said. “Nothing like the trim vessels as sails under the Harcourt flag nowadays. Cap’n retired her, and Cookie and me as well, when he come by this house. We’ve been doin’ fer ’im ever since.”

  Maddy smiled to herself. It was plain to see these two men who were “doing” for her father were his longtime comrades as well as his employees. What a strange household for a man who was counted one of the richest merchants in all of England. Yet somehow it fit the plain man he purported to be.

  Her father finished off the last of his supper and placed his fork on his empty plate. His heavy brows drew together in a scowl and a flush darkened his weathered cheeks. “This is not a household that would suit any woman, and well I know it, daughter.”

  “It suits me just fine, Papa,” Maddy said, wondering why he thought he needed apologize for his beautiful little home.

  “Never say so, Maddy. This house and its staff fit my simple needs, but it’s much too small and much too far from Mayfair to be a proper residence for a young lady of marriageable age looking to make her connections in London society.”

  Maddy stared at him in amazement. “But, Papa, I do not care in the least about making such connections.”

  “Of course you do. All women care about such things, and I’ll not be the cause of your missing out on them as I was with your mother.”

  He smiled smugly. “But things will be different this time. I’ve more money than a nabob, and, by all that’s holy, you’ll make your connections if it takes every last farthing I own to see it done. I’ve a plan already set in place, and before another year is past, you’ll have all the things a young girl dreams of: the balls and parties, the voucher to Almack’s—even an invitation to Carlton House itself, I’ll wager.

  She wouldn’t argue with him, not when he seemed to attach such importance to his plan to present her to London society. She could never be so cruel as to point out that if the stories she’d heard of the British haut monde were true, the chance of a merchant’s daughter being accepted as a member of the exclusive body was almost as remote as the chance that men would someday fly like birds.

  Nor was she so foolish as to think that marrying an ex-spy who was the bastard son of an earl would add much to her social prestige. But she didn’t care a fig for the social prestige. Tristan was the man who held her heart in his hands, and marry him she would…as soon as the slow-top got around to making his offer.

  Chapter Ten

  Maddy rose late the following morning to find her father in the second floor salon in serious conversation with a thin, nervous-looking woman with lank brown hair and pale blue eyes. “Ah, Maddy girl,” he said when she stepped through the doorway. “This is Madame Héloïse Blouseau; the French modiste Lady Ursula tells me is all the rage this season. I’ve instructed her to make you enough dresses to hold you over until Lady Ursula can plan an entire wardrobe for you.”

  Who this Lady Ursula was and why she should be put in charge of his daughter’s wardrobe, he didn’t say—and Maddy was loath to ask in front of the modiste in case the lady turned out to be his current mistress. She had made the mistake, just once, of alluding to the aging bird of paradise her grandfather visited every Wednesday afternoon between one o’clock and four. It was the one and only time he’d raised his hand to her, but the imprint of his fingers had remained on her cheek for hours. She would not make the same mistake with her father.

  “Lady Ursula suggested two morning dresses, a carriage dress, and one simple evening dress that could be used either as a ball gown or a theater costume to begin with,” Madame Héloïse said in an accent so atrocious, Maddy instantly knew the woman had never lived a day on the Continent. But though it was all she could do to keep from laughing out loud, she held her counsel. If she exposed this Madame Héloïse for the fraud she was, she could cast a slur on Lady Ursula’s taste in modistes—and her father’s taste in mistresses.

  “From what part of France do you come?” she asked as soon as he left the room. “I have lived in Lyon since I was five years old and am familiar with the accents of most of the provinces, but I confess I have never heard one remotely resembling yours.” She smiled to herself as she watched the bogus Frenchwoman turn brick red, then chalk white.

  “Lord luv us,” the modiste moaned, “my game’s run out.” She stared at Maddy through eyes wide with horror. “I suppose you’re going to twig the old gentleman.”

  “If you mean I’m going to tell my father you’re not French—of course not. Why should I? It’s none of my concern, unless you plan to cheat him.”

  Madame Héloïse drew herself up proudly. “Never fear. He will get his money’s worth. There is no modiste in London who can match my designs or my workmanship.”

  “Then why pretend you’re French?”

  The modiste gave a snort of disgust. “How long do you think I’d keep my fashionable customers if I was to admit I’m plain Mary Blodgett, born and raised above a gin shop in London’s East End? About the time it takes my old man to draw a pint of ale, that’s how long.”

  “Ah, I begin to understand. A prophet is never revered in his own land.”

  “I don’t know about prophets, but I know plenty about modistes and what makes them popular with the matrons of the ton,” Madame Héloïse grumbled, nervously twisting her measuring tape around and around her fingers. “Ten long years I worked my fingers to the bone for a French tyrant name of Madame Adrianne. I designed and sewed all the gowns; she took all the credit. When the old harridan finally stuck her spoon in the wall, I come out of the back room and set up shop as her niece from Paris. I’d learnt enough French from her to get away with it too—until you came along.”

  “But your secret is safe with me, madam. I swear I will never tell a soul,” Maddy promised.

  The color slowly returned to the modiste’s thin cheeks. “You’d do that for me? Why?”

  “Because I think it is very enterprising of you to make such a fine career for yourself. I have recently come to realize I have great respect for people who rise above their humble origins.” Maddy smiled. “Now, mademoiselle, shall we get on with the fitting? You would not want to disappoint your patroness, Lady Ursula.”

  Two hours later, after taking the necessary measurements and displaying the swatches of material she considered suitable for the planned dresses, Madame Héloïse took her leave of Maddy. Her last words were a promise to have one of the morning dresses completed the following day and the others shortly afterward, and at half the price she charged her titled customers.

  True to her word, she sent a delivery boy around the following afternoon, with a parcel containing a dainty yellow sprigged muslin dress, a chemise, a shift, and a pair of silk stockings, as well as a nightrail, dressing gown, and slippers.

  Maddy immediately asked the day footman to carry a tub of hot water to her chamber so she could bathe and wash her hair. She brushed her curls dry—one advantages of her short hair; her long tresses had taken hours to dry.

  Then dr
essing herself in her lovely silken undergarments and dress, she positioned herself in the window seat of the second-floor salon to wait for Tristan’s arrival. She’d grown accustomed to his company on their trip and his absence left her feeling lost and lonely and anxious for his return.

  He didn’t come. Not that day, nor the next, nor even the next after that.

  When five days had passed and he still hadn’t called on her, she found herself tortured by the insidious thought he might actually have been serious when he’d made that preposterous claim that honor forbade his ever offering for her.

  But she managed to hide her fear behind a cheerful façade whenever her father was near. She was not so lost to pride that she could bear his knowing she had thrown herself at a man who had summarily rejected her…for whatever reason.

  Each morning at half past eight her father left for his place of business, leaving Maddy to fend for herself during the long day ahead. The hours would have been interminable had it not been for Cookie. Once he learned of her passion for cooking, he welcomed her into his kitchen, a thing she suspected a few chefs would do. Under Griggins’ watchful eyes, the two of them chopped vegetables and blended sauces and whipped up desserts that earned her father’s lavish praise—never guessing his daughter had had a hand in the making of them.

  She earned praise from Cookie as well. He even went so far as to claim that if she were not Caleb Harcourt’s daughter, she could earn her living as a chef in any of the finest houses in London.

  She never told her father about her love of cooking, and swore Cookie and Griggins to secrecy as well. Instinct warned her that, like her grandfather, he would not consider it a proper avocation for the lady of the manor.

  Instead, she dutifully donned her newest dress each evening before he arrived home and pirouetted before him, smiling at his admiration as if the only thing on her mind was the fit of a bodice or the swish of a skirt.

  Then, one sunny afternoon when she was standing at the window watching for her father, Tristan came riding across Bloomsbury Square. She scarcely noticed the man beside him as she watched him dismount from a black horse whose flowing mane perfectly matched his own shoulder-length locks.