Vision in Blue

by Nicole Byrd

“I’m afraid it’s more complicated than that.” The other girl took another sip of her wine and avoided Louisa’s gaze. “But I do have a brother who lives in London. If you have been in company there, you may have met him?” There was the slightest question in the way her voice rose.

  Curiosity inflamed once again, Louisa looked up. “Perhaps, though I did not go about in Society last year as much as I would have liked. What is his name?”

  The other young woman hesitated, then said slowly, “Lord Gabriel Sinclair.”

  Louisa gave a start of surprise. “But I do know him! In fact, my aunt is newly married to his older brother. He’s a most charming and devilishly handsome man, and his—your—family is most well connected. No wonder you looked familiar—the shape of your eyes and that unusual dark shade of blue, and your fair skin and dark hair. Oh, how nice to meet another one of the Sinclairs!”

  She hesitated, suddenly remembering that the stranger had given her surname as Smith. Fortunately, before the pause became too awkward, a serving girl approached with a large tray full of dishes. She pulled a table closer to them and set down the food. No one spoke as the table was laid.

  But Louisa’s ready interest was again at full alert. Was there some mystery or intriguing family scandal here? When the servant retreated, Louisa added, as delicately as possible, “I admit, I did not know Lord Gabriel had a sister.”

  “Actually—” Again, Miss Smith did not quite meet Louisa’s eye. “Actually, he doesn’t know it, either.”

  Two

  Louisa almost clapped her hands. Only at the last moment did she realize that the other lady might take her gesture in the wrong spirit. But although she was able to hide her first intent by gesturing instead toward the serving dishes, saying, “I believe we are to help ourselves. We need not wait for Sir Lucas. He takes the welfare of his horse, and my team, very seriously,” inside, she was aglow with delight.

  A mystery indeed! And here she’d thought that the evening, stuck in a small inn with little congenial company, would be boring. The trick was in getting Miss Smith—it was obvious now that the name was a mere ploy—to unburden herself to Louisa. And since Louisa was almost family, it would only be fitting for her to know what twist of fate had given Lord Gabriel a sister of whose existence he was unaware.

  But she knew the value of timing, so for now she simply filled her own plate, and the three women ate quietly of the roasted chicken and shepherd’s pie, the potatoes and peas and hearty brown bread, that their landlord had provided. It was simple fare but tasty, and after a long day of travel, Louisa was empty enough not to complain about the unfashionable menu.

  Conversation during their meal was dilatory. By the time they had worked their way to the apple crumble, cheese, and basket of nuts, Louisa felt as full as a hen fattened for tomorrow’s dinner. But she felt better for the meal, and surely Miss Smith did, too; the other woman had gained a better color and no longer looked blue with cold. Miss Pomshack was yawning behind her hand. Perhaps Louisa could convince her companion to go up to bed and allow the two younger women the chance for a more intimate conversation.

  But though she suggested it, Miss P was too true to her responsibility to consider leaving her charge unchaperoned in a common taproom. True, the men across the room seemed more absorbed in their shepherd’s pie and their ales than in plotting any unseemly approaches to the young women, but, judging by Miss P’s suspicious glance, a brazen seducer might yet lurk beneath one of those stout, wool-covered breasts. And anyhow, Lucas at last reappeared, damp and smelling a bit of horses.

  The innkeeper was once again summoned and brought in a new platter of chicken and a tankard of ale to add to the other dishes on the table. Lucas bowed in response to the introduction to their new friend, which Louisa performed, and then set at once to his much-delayed meal.

  “Don’t believe the horses will come to any harm,” he told Louisa. “They were wet and tired, of course, but we’ve rubbed them down well—don’t trust the ostler here; the man looks ham-handed to me—and your coachman has them covered in blankets. I’ll check on them again before I turn in. Hmm, not bad. I’m as hollow as a drum.” He took another bite of his chicken, and Louisa, leaving him to his meal, gave up trying to make conversation.

  When Lucas had finished, he suggested retiring.

  Annoyed at his attitude, Louisa glanced at the clock on the wall. “It’s barely nine o’clock.” She was no child to be sent up to her bed just because they had to share the one common room with other travelers.

  “I know, but some of the men are getting a bit deep into their cups,” Lucas told her, with all the authority of a young man who has enjoyed a few drunken sprees of his own. He scanned the other side of the room. The group in front of the fire had begun singing—off-key—a song whose lyrics even Louisa realized were most certainly not the thing. “It won’t do for you to stay here, trust me, Louisa.”

  “Oh, very well,” Louisa agreed, though she still felt cross. “I suppose you will wish to retire, too?” she added, turning back to her new acquaintance.

  The young woman flushed. “Actually—”

  Louisa blinked. “Oh, no. My darling Lucas was taking such good care of me that we have acquired the last bedchamber! My dear, you cannot spend the night down here alone with a group of rowdy men.”

  Miss Smith bit her lip. “I didn’t realize—I expected to be in London before night fell.”

  Now Lucas was looking concerned. “Surely, her maid—”

  “Met with an unfortunate accident a few days ago, forcing her to be left behind,” Louisa put in swiftly before Miss Smith could admit to traveling alone. “Miss Smith, you will simply have to share our bedchamber.”

  “I couldn’t impose upon you,” Miss Smith objected, although she, too, gazed across the room at the boisterous group with obvious misgivings.

  “No, indeed, how could I sleep thinking of you suffering embarrassment, or worse, in such company. That is, I know Lucas would protect you from harm, but still, it would be neither proper nor comfortable.”

  “Certainly not,” Lucas agreed. And Miss P looked scandalized at the very thought of a young woman left alone amid such male company.

  So the lady was persuaded to accept the “very kind offer,” and the three women went up to the bedchamber together.

  The room was small, Louisa thought when she walked through the doorway. But she was committed to her good deed now, so there was no use in fretting. On two sides of the room the ceiling sloped halfway down, and outside in the darkness rain lashed at the panes of a dormer window. But the bed, inspected carefully by Miss P, was pronounced clean and free of vermin, and a cot had been brought in, which the older lady bravely volunteered to take.

  “Will you be comfortable?” Louisa regarded the narrow pallet with doubt.

  “Oh, I shall manage very well,” her companion assured her, coming over to unbutton the tiny buttons on the back of Louisa’s dress. “I can sleep anywhere, Miss Louisa. Don’t concern yourself about me.”

  And sure enough, by the time the two younger women had washed their faces and hands at the china bowl on the dresser and donned nightgowns—Miss Smith’s plain but clean and neat, Louisa’s a cunning concoction of lace and fine linen—the older woman was undressed and stretched out on the cot, covered by a thick quilt and snoring discreetly like a plump cat.

  Louisa climbed into bed. She snuffed out the candle on the table, bade her new friend good night, and turned over to stare at the rough plaster of the wall, but sleep did not come. As the only child of a wealthy father, she was not accustomed to having another person in the same bed, even though the other lady lay as far away as the mattress allowed. It was hard to repose herself.

  Was Miss Smith awake, too? She lay still, but her body seemed stiff. And when a coal popped on the hearth, she started just a little.

  Louisa blinked into the darkness and pulled the bedclothes closer to her chin. The air cooled quickly as the fire died. She wished they were in
London, in her comfortable rented house, instead of this tiny inn. Still, it had led to an interesting interlude.

  “Are you awake?” she whispered into the darkness.

  The other woman shifted a little. “Yes,” she answered, keeping her voice low, too. “It’s hard to rest in a strange place.”

  “For me as well,” Louisa agreed.

  “And I know you would be more comfortable without having me thrust upon you. You’ve been very good, but you . . . you must think my situation very strange,” the other girl suggested.

  Louisa held her breath, then said carefully, “Not at all. I’m sure you have good reason—”

  “I only just found out, you see,” Gemma said. Somehow, talking into the darkness, which was lightened only by the faint glow of the fading coals on the hearth, it seemed easier for her to confess her secrets. “When I turned one and twenty last month, I received a letter from the solicitor in London, the one who has been paying my school fees and sending me my allowance. The missive inside was written by my mother—my real mother . . .”

  Her voice shook, and Louisa could sense the strong emotion barely contained.

  “She said that she regretted our separation, my absence from the family. She said I should contact Lord Gabriel, my—my brother—and he would make arrangements for us to be reunited. But although I wrote at once to the estate in Kent to which the letter directed me, he has not—he has not yet replied. And then I read in the London paper gossip about a great ball to be held at the end of April, and Lord and Lady Gabriel Sinclair were among the ‘distinguished’ guests to be expected. So I knew he was coming soon to London, and I felt I must try to see him. . . . See with my own eyes the first person of my family, my real family, that I have ever known. So I made up my mind to travel to town.”

  “You are very brave,” Louisa said, a bit awed. She had jumped into some impulsive adventures, herself, but this—setting out for London to meet a brother who had no notion that his sister was coming—

  “Oh, no, I am quite terrified,” the other young woman said, her voice trembling again. “But I wanted it so badly. I’ve always hoped to find out the secrets about my birth, you see, and I know so little.” She hesitated, then added, “And surely Lord Gabriel will be pleased to see me, even if—the letter said—he has not yet been informed of my circumstance. I am coming at my—our—mother’s invitation, after all. And I must know . . . I just wish to understand. She must have had good reason to send me away at such a young age.”

  Louisa was glad that it was dark; the other woman could not see how Louisa’s eyes widened. My, what a tale! This was as fantastic a story as some of the novels she had read covertly when her aunt had thought her dutifully conjugating French verbs.

  “Don’t you think he will be pleased?” the other girl repeated.

  “Oh, certainly, why should he not?” Louisa said quickly, and tried not to remember Lord Gabriel Sinclair angry. She had seen it occur only once, under unusual circumstances, but it was a memory impossible to forget. He had nearly killed a man that day.

  “But you are courageous, indeed,” Louisa insisted. “Setting out on such an odyssey and all alone, too. Did you not have a maid you could bring with you?”

  She felt the other woman shake her head. “I didn’t need one at school. And although I’ve been saving my allowance, knowing that hotels in London would be costly, I did not think I could manage two coach tickets, two people to feed. And while I hoped that my brother—that Lord Gabriel might invite me to stay, I had to consider that he might not yet be in town when I arrived, or, or that other problems might occur.”

  Not just brave but downright heroic, Louisa thought—even foolhardy—but she did not speak the opinion aloud.

  “My own maid left me just recently to marry her childhood sweetheart,” Louisa said. “I had planned to hire a London dresser after I arrived, a woman who would know more about fashion and the ways of society. And I had Miss P to assist me and travel with me, of course, as well as Lucas.”

  She paused for a moment, aware of a strong curiosity about just how Lord Gabriel Sinclair would react to the appearance of an unknown sister. She heartily wished she could be there. And then it came to her.

  “You must travel with us, Miss Smith!” she said, almost gasping at the simple logic of it.

  “Oh, no, Miss Crookshank, you have done so much already,” the other woman argued. But already, her voice sounded less tremulous, stronger, as if comforted by the idea of feminine companionship and increased safety.

  “You must call me Louisa. Why, we are almost related. Trust me, it will be much more the thing, and I would be remiss indeed if I did not offer to help out Lord Gabriel’s relation. He has been of service to me at a difficult time,” Louisa explained. “I could hardly do less. In fact, you might stay a few days with me in London, if you do not go at once to your brother’s house. He indeed has an estate in Kent, and while I expect he will soon be in town for the Season, it’s possible he and his wife have not yet arrived.”

  “You are very generous,” the other lady said, sighing—this time Louisa thought—with relief. “And please, you must call me Gemma. That at least,” she added with the first spark of humor Louisa had glimpsed in her, “I know is truly my name.”

  Louisa giggled. “Oh, what fun we shall have together, and this Season will be a delight, the first for both of us!”

  She was gratified to hear Gemma laugh softly. Louisa was careful not to show the rest of her thoughts. Because together, they could surely decipher the mystery behind Gemma’s clouded past, and who only knew where it might lead?

  Three

  After Louisa’s amazing offer, they chatted for a few minutes—her new friend seemed full of ambitious plans for her first real Season—then Louisa drifted into sleep. The darkness of the chamber was lit only by glowing pinpricks from the dying embers on the hearth. Gemma could hear Louisa’s light, even breathing beside her and Miss Pomshack’s high-pitched whistle from the cot closer to the fire. The sounds did not disturb her; some of the girls at the boarding school had snored more loudly than this.

  Gemma found that she was able to close her eyes at last and allow some of her tension to ebb. Only when she felt the stiffness fade from her body did she realize just how anxious she had been, setting off alone on this audacious journey.

  True, her mother—her real, hitherto unknown mother—had invited her to come. It was this knowledge, this amazing burst of illumination lighting up a childhood shadowed by secrets, that had inspired and sustained her.

  For years Gemma had puzzled over just who, in truth, she was. It was a curious thing not to know your family, your origins, even your true class. Where did she belong, really? She could be an impostor, an intruder, as she sat in class with girls from respectable merchant families and daughters of minor gentry. Should she be outside scrubbing floors with the servants, or milking cows in a farmer’s dairy, or walking the street selling rags, or worse?

  Who was Gemma Smith? The older she grew, the more the enigma of her circumstances hung over her, and recently it had become vitally important that she know that, at the least, her birth was respectable. And then the letter had come, like a gift from the heavens. . . .

  But there was also the fact that the letter was dated shortly after her birth, over a score of years ago. Why had her mother not contacted her since? What if, after writing the letter, she had changed her mind about meeting her daughter? Gemma considered how the missive had come, its wax seal unbroken, from the solicitor, with no explanation about its contents or the long delay. No, she refused to consider such an awful possibility.

  Gemma thought of the wrinkled sheet of paper with its faded ink, which was wrapped carefully in her best linen handkerchief and placed inside her reticule for safekeeping, along with her small store of coins. It was the only thing she had from her mother, the only sign, aside from the quarterly allowance whose source had never been explained, to show that somewhere, someone cared for her, tha
t she was not totally alone in an alien and uncaring world.

  She could not begin to spell out what the letter’s arrival had meant to her. Certainly she could not explain to Louisa Crookshank, as kind as this new friend was. Louisa might be an orphan, might have lost both her parents, but she obviously still had family about her. She had never been adrift on a sea of circumstance, prey to any random current ready to pull her under and drown her in poverty or danger with no one to know that she was imperiled. True, Gemma had the solicitor, but he had been a distant lifeline, appearing in her life only as a name at the bottom of short, formal notes. Gemma had been deeply grateful for the monetary support he had provided, even if the man had refused, when she’d asked, to identify its source.

  Soon, perhaps, she would know the truth. Gemma would meet her mother, learn just why an infant had been sent away, too young to remember her true family and home. It did not have to mean that her parents did not care, she told herself, just as she had repeated the thought so many times since her childhood. There could be, would be, a logical reason for her apparent abandonment. How many times when she was lonely or frightened, or when the other girls had teased her, or during the horrible time at the foundling home, had Gemma repeated that refrain? There was a reason, there had to be a reason, why she had been cast away. Someone had loved her, even from a distance—surely, it must be so.

  Now she would learn the answers, and the emptiness in her heart would be filled. She would meet her mother, receive the loving embrace Gemma had dreamed of so many times, and at last, she would know who Gemma Smith really was.

  She shut her eyes and allowed herself to put away just for a little while the constant watchfulness that was the lot of an orphan of uncertain heritage, the continual sense of being on guard against unknown perils which might swoop down from any direction when one had no one else to count on except oneself. . . .

  Tonight, she was not alone. Gemma slept.