Elisabeth Fairchild (15 page)

“And why did you not?”

“Silly, really.” She shook her head, voice dropping. “I--I did not wish to eat alone.”

His brows rose, as if he had never considered that she ate alone.

And now she tripped over her words, fearful he might think too much of her mention of loneliness, that he might misinterpret her meaning. “There were always so many of us at table. At home. At the girl’s school.”

Felicity, slid under his arm, glass of water in hand. “One could not feel lonely with so many people to talk to. Not for long.”

For a moment he stared at her, as if seeing the ache of her loneliness, for the first time.

A savory smell announced the arrival of the promised broth. He fell back from the door to allow Mrs. Olive entrance.

“Here is a bite to eat, my dear. And faint with hunger you must be by now. Did no one think to feed you?”

A last look in her direction again, a quick look, no emotion perceptible, and Valentine Wharton—her knight in armor---was gone---no more dragons to slay.

Felicity ran to stop him. “No story tonight, papa?”

Elaine could hear the thin reed of her voice over the clatter of crockery and silverware, as the tray was arranged on her lap. She saw him shake his head, but did not catch his remark.

Something about being ready to go in the morning, and Elaine silently rejoiced to see sign of progress in how close the child stood to her father. Her charge began to feel more comfortable in his company.

Again he shook his head, and she could not make out the low rumble of his voice until her own name caught her ear, and in his turning a little more in her direction she heard him say, “Miss Deering must have time to repair. Now go and keep her company.”

How kind he is! How unexpectedly considerate!

On the following day, Miss Deering assured Val that she was perfectly able to continue in their travels.

“I would not in any way cause us delay,” she assured him over breakfast.

Val tipped his head to regard his neat, tidy, dark-feathered bird of a governess. Her cheeks were no more wan than usual, but then, it occurred to him, that the black she wore completely overpowered any pale color her cheeks might possess.

I’ve no intention of testing your stamina, my dear Deering.

“Of course you would not,” he said. “But you see, it is not really your doing that we are delayed. A dressmaker arrives at Caxton today, from Chester. She comes highly recommended by the Biddington sisters. It has been brought to my attention that Felicity is fast outgrowing everything in her traveling trunks.”

“Indeed, she is.”

“I did not think you would argue the point, for I am told that you and Mrs. Olive have let out hems and seams as far as they may be taken.”

“We did.”

“You need not have troubled yourselves. I have every intention of seeing my daughter adequately clad.”

Her chin dropped a notch. “Yes, my lord.”

“Too brusque.”
His father’s voice in his head offered reprimand.
“You wound all that is tender, Val.”

He made an effort to soften his tone. “You will bring her along to the sewing room when she is summoned?”

“Of course, my lord.”

Monosyllables. You reduce decent young women to monosyllables.

“I trust you will not find it too fatiguing to give the woman your measurements as well?”

“My measurements?”

Fear in her eyes.
I have grown accustomed to its absence.
“I mean to see you newly clothed, Miss Deering.”

How severe the set of her mouth.
She means to argue against it. I knew she would. She thinks of Palmer again, and I would not have that. That is not why I would see her better clothed. Is it?
“I outfit all of my servants in fresh livery when they enter my employ, Miss Deering.”

“I am not a servant, my lord, and it is customary for a governess to provide her own clothing.”

Ah, she would have him believe it pride then, not fear? Pride was easily addressed. Perhaps even undressed. “Turn back your cuffs, Miss Deering,” he bade her brusquely.

She stood a moment, unmoving, before she thrust out her hands and did as he asked.

He knew they were worn. He had noticed her wrists too often not to note the fact that she tried to hide their frayed condition with discreetly stitched lines of black, grosgrain ribbon. He took her hands in his, hands that trembled a little at his touch, that telling sign rocking him with sudden surging desire, a roaring heat that flamed low in his groin.

He took a deep breath, turning those delicate hands, delicate wrists, examining more closely her handiwork, not so much because he required a closer look, but because he wished to hold onto the feeling inside himself, to feel the flutter of her pulse. “Tidily done. A fine, even stitch. I see you’ve a mind for economizing.” He released her, the tension between them palpable. “But worn, nonetheless.”

She nodded. Head bowed, tucking her frayed cuffs behind her back. “Yes, my lord.”

It had not been his intention to shame her, nor to in any way belittle. And yet he knew that the reason she could not meet his eyes had less to do with the energy that coursed between them at his touch, and more to do with what he said. He went on, his tone very gentle, “You will understand that just as I would not have Felicity appear ill-clad, neither would I have it appear that I have in any way cut corners in seeing to her care, clothing, or education.”

“No, my lord.”

“I know it is the fashion for governesses, ladies maids and companions to receive their mistresses cast-offs.”

Elaine Deering looked up at him, her backbone, her shoulders very straight. “I apologize if I have in any way brought disgrace to your household.”

“Disgrace! You are a complete and utter disgrace!”
One of his father’s favored complaints, and he would in no way echo the insult that still pinched him raw.

“Nonsense,” he barked. He closed his eyes, inwardly stilling his father’s unhappy voice, stilling his own impatience. “You are, Miss Deering,” he said carefully, gentling his voice, his tone, “unfailingly neat and tidy in your appearance. A picture of calm, grace and manners. I can only hope my daughter takes note in learning how a lady should present herself. I have no quarrel with your taste, or decorum, but as there is no mistress of my house to endow you with unwanted clothing, I mean to see you clad in the same manner and frequency as the rest of my staff. And in a color other than black, if you please.”

She was not pleased. The tabby with back arched.

“Black is most practical, my lord. It wears longer than any other color.”

“But entirely tedious, Miss Deering. Funerial. I think too much of mourning.”

She glanced down self-consciously at the black of the gown he had begun to detest sight of. She wore a stricken look in saying, “I am very sorry. What color then, would you choose?”

So quietly she asked
. Too quietly. She does not consider my offer a kindness
. Stifling impatience he said, “Your choice. I entrust the cut and color of three dresses to your own discretion.”

“Three, my lord? Surely one is enough.”

“We go to the seaside, Miss Deering.”

Her brows rose, as though she had no idea as to his meaning.

“Sand. Salt. Sun. All unforgiving to fabric, Miss Deering. You will require at least three changes of clothing in order to maintain your customary tidiness.”

She bent her head to him, as any servant would. With the gesture the gulf between them widened, a development he had neither anticipated nor desired.

Dress fittings accomplished, the dresses to be sent by post as soon as they were finished, Elaine saw nothing more of her employer that day. She was not asked to dine in the housekeeper’s parlor. No request was made for her to play the harpsichord.

When music rose from the drawing room it was one of the Biddington sisters who entertained Valentine Wharton.

Elaine felt bruised and forgotten, inadequate, unwanted, her poor mended dress too shabby for such a house, such a company of ladies.

She must remember her place. She, the ill-clad governess who must be fitted for dresses rather than disgrace a nobleman among his peers. How embarrassing. Degrading. To be clothed by a gentleman of Lord Wharton’s stamp. Surely it smacked of impropriety?

And yet, Mrs. Olive saw nothing unusual in it. The dressmaker did not so much as raise an eyebrow. And so, she sat in the muted wash of the music, food growing cold, imagining how different her evening might have been had her father not lost a fortune at cards.

And in imagining thus, a future that might have been, Elaine was moved to rise from the deflated upholstery of the cast-off chair that graced her temporary room, a chair that befit her station, and the transitory nature of her position.

By the meager light of a single flickering lamp, she curtseyed to an imaginary partner, and waltzed about the tiny room assigned to her, in imaginary finery. She danced until the music stopped and she must open her eyes to cold reality, and an even colder night, as she stripped off her dreary, wholly unworthy, oft-mended black dress without benefit of hot water or a fire, and jumped betwixt much mended linens without the luxury of warming pan or hot water bottle.

A
t dawn, dressed again in offensive black, fingers shaking with the cold, Elaine plunged her hands into the welcome warmth of funerial black gloves, breath rising white in the foxed reflection she met in the mirror, and went down to breakfast. There they were met with a great deal of early morning fussing and feeding as their hostesses complained that they should neither leave so early, nor so hastily, on empty stomachs.

They meant to snare him. Elaine observed how intently they watched her employer as he voiced appreciation for their expansive hospitality. When he mounted his horse, he bent to smile at the youngest of the Biddington sisters, Deliah. She stood for some time speaking to him, and reluctantly stepped back from the stirrup she clung to. His future, waving hankie.

If not this wealthy heiress, he would find someone like her to fall in love with, to marry. Elaine found herself melancholy in acknowledging the truth, hopeless of her own bleak prospects where love and marriage were concerned. The mourning black of her clothing seemed all too appropriate this morning. Who did governesses marry? Clergymen or butchers, bakers or bankers? Not a handsome lord. Certainly not this handsome lord. That dream was best forgotten.

Like dreams, they put Caxton behind them and headed deeper into Wales, green hills rising to swallow them, the roads narrower, less cared for, the horses laboring, and yet she found herself content to be once again in the warm confines of the coach, rocking and jolting onward, the sight of Valentine Wharton horseback, powerful thighs gripping the bay’s back, far preferable to another day in the Old Maid’s Tower of Castle Caxton.

It was pretty country, remote and wild, thinly populated but for the green valleys in the midst of soaring cliffs and rocky rises. Purling streams ran in rivulets across the roads and beside them, water that ran and skipped and foamed. There was beauty here, unlike the beauties of England, similar and yet separate, as her own life had grown similar but separate from childish expectation. There was beauty in that, too.

They stopped in the pretty town of Llangollen to buy provisions for a picnic. The lilting Welsh tongue spoken by the innkeeper proved completely unintelligible to all but his lordship. In his seeing completely to their needs there was something just as foreign, just as unsettling. Elaine felt dependent. Too dependent. His direction. His largesse. His sense of propriety. His shadow. Every time Valentine looked her way Elaine felt as if the sun shone, as if she were more brightly illuminated, and when he looked away she fell into darkness.

They went on, through the sunlit valley, across an ancient stone bridge that spanned the River Dee, past the ruins of an old castle on a limestone cliff. By way of the signage along the road Elaine tried to gain some rudimentary sense of the language. Felicity concentrated on her sums, Mrs. Olive on her knitting.

The chuckling Dee ran between steep cliffs at the roadside, thick woods and corn fields hemming them in, as her life was now hemmed in.

“I am curious, why do we go by way of these steep backroads in Wales rather than by better paved, and far less strenuous English ones?” she asked Mrs. Olive as they jounced across a pock-marked bridge.

“We would not gain a view of Snowdon by English roads, now would we?” Mrs. Olive asked brightly, and indeed at that moment, in the distance they gained a fine view.

Felicity looked away from the window. “Papa wanted me to see something of Wales,” she said. “As he did when he was a child and his father brought him here for the summer.”

Elaine clapped her teeth together involuntarily as they passed over yet another pothole in the road. He would do this for the child’s sake!  He surprised her, as much as the landscape, for now they passed a huge stone--as big as a whale--as big as a ship, and now another bridge sounded beneath the horses’ hooves, and beneath them the earth fell away, into a deep gorge where water tumbled milk white.

They rolled through the little market town of Corwen, fish in the streets, the smell of fish in the air: salmon, grayling and trout, and all the while Elaine thought of her own father when she was a child--a man so steeped in drink and debt he had, more often than not, been unable to utter the names of his daughters with either accuracy or the slightest hint of kindness in his voice, much less plan for them a trip to Wales.

They spread a picnic in the shady foothills of the Berwyn Mountains, and when Valentine Wharton stood some distance from them, staring at the view while he ate a meat pie and an apple with the hand to mouth economy of a man used to dining where he stood, Elaine drew upon a broader history to tell Felicity of Owen Glendower, a hero of the 15th century who had led a rebellion against the king of England from these hillsides. She could not help thinking such a topic might interest a gentleman who had led his own men into battle, but he seemed not to hear them, ignored them, in fact.