My Sweet Folly (8 page)

He looked at Folie with a cool lift of his black eyebrows. “Why?”

Melinda made a faint sound, but then pressed her lips together tightly, looking to Folie with anxious eyes.

“She must have a wider circle of acquaintance, of course,” Folie said.

“Oh, fancy!” he said sarcastically. “Is she not happy with the available gossip now?”

The mocking sting in his voice startled Folie. She simply looked back at him blankly.

After an instant’s stare at one another, he dropped his eyes and said in a distracted tone, “I did not mean that as it sounded.”

Folie said carefully, “An abundance of gossip is not our desire. London society is.”

“But why?’’ he asked in a more reasonable manner, lifting his hand to beckon Lander.

“It appears that I must be unpardonably blunt,” Folie said. “We are on a hunt for eligible bachelors.”

He paused in mid-gesture. His fingers curled. His eyebrow lifted again, a cool disapproval. “Indeed!”

“I’m sorry to have to mention it so forwardly, but yes— ‘indeed!’“

He sat still and straight. “You wish to marry again?” he asked frostily.

Folie opened her mouth to retort, and closed it. She thought she heard Melinda make another faint noise, but when Folie looked at her, her head was bent demurely over her plate.

“I’m sure that my intentions are none of your affair, sir,” Folie said stiffly. “It was my stepdaughter’s prospects to which I referred!”

He transferred his wintry gaze to Melinda. “I see.”

“Then you will understand why a season in the city is required at this time.”

“I’m afraid that I do not.”

“Perhaps things are done differently in India—I have no doubt they are, but here a girl’s coming out and her first London season are essential, in particular for a girl like Miss Hamilton, whose—presence and breeding—recommend her more than her fortune. I need not scruple to mention this to you, as you are her guardian.”

“I am aware of Miss Hamilton’s circumstances,” he said slowly. “But if it is money that makes London a necessity, then I can see no difficulty. I shall settle forty thousand on her myself. Will that suffice?”

Melinda’s head lifted, her blue eyes growing wide.

“Forty!” Both of them stared at him in astonishment. “I beg your pardon!” Folie murmured.

“I think it will,” he said, calmly answering himself. “Things may be done differently here than in India, but not that differently.”

Melinda watched in a bewildered silence as Lander placed a dish of vegetables beside her. She did not even move to serve herself. The high color in her cheeks made her extremely lovely, the candlelight gleaming on her yellow hair and bright skin. Folie saw their host observe her stepdaughter for a long moment, his attention fixed upon her as if he could not tear it away.

A novel thought dawned upon Folie. Surely he could not, would not...would he want Melinda for himself? Her dower was modest, her connections the same as his.

Why—but that she was beautiful; and young and gay and everything he was not?

He turned, catching Folie staring at him. “I wish for you and Miss Hamilton to reside here. Permanently.”

By now he could hardly surprise her any more. She tilted her head. “I beg your pardon, sir. Are you quite serious?”
 

“Yes,” he said.
 

“This is certainly sudden.”

He merely made a faint shrug. “I believe it is for the best.”

“And are we to have any preference in the matter?”

“You would not like it?”

“I have not had time to consider it.”

“You said that your rooms are pleasant.” He gave her plate a glance. “I’ll change the chef if you like. You’ve hardly touched your food.”

Folie belatedly took a bite of the trout that had been set before her. “I beg your pardon. I have been—so disconcerted.”

He did not answer that. For a few minutes, they all ate in silence. Folie noticed that he took very little food himself. Melinda kept her face properly turned down to her plate, but Folie could see the hot pink emotion still burning in her stepdaughter’s cheeks, the fierce arguments stopped on Melinda’s tongue.

“Are you not apprehensive to live alone?” he asked at length, while the fish was removed. “Two young ladies?’’

“I daresay you mean it very kindly,” Folie said, a little mollified by being considered a young lady along with Melinda. “Perhaps things are done differently in India, but here it is quite acceptable.”

One corner of his mouth tilted up in a wry grimace. “It’s perfectly true that things are done differently in India. They burn their widows, for one thing.”

“How unprincipled of them!” she said lightly.

“It is in regrettable taste.” He smiled slightly at her, which gave a strange new lightness to his arctic eyes. “My dear Folly. How fortunate that things are done differently here.”

THREE

“I will not endure it!” Melinda exclaimed, flinging her shawl across the bed in Folie’s room. Her stepdaughter had said nothing all the way out of the dining room and up the stairs, past the dragons and wyverns and carved beasties of all descriptions. It was no surprise when Melinda pursued Folie into her bedchamber.

“I will
not
be cheated of my season, not after we have scrimped and saved and—”

“Not even for forty thousand pounds?” Folie interjected, lighting another candle. It cast a pretty glow on the creamy gathers and folds of the bed canopy.

“What good will forty thousand pounds do me, if I must live upon it as a spinster all my life?” Melinda sat down hard upon the dressing table bench, bouncing the stray curl that she had pulled artfully down on her cheek. “Besides, I don’t believe a word of
that!
You are perfectly right, Mama, the man is mad!”

Folie smiled. “He does seem...eccentric.”

“How
am I to meet any eligible gentlemen if I am stuck away here?” Melinda wailed.

“Well, he cannot keep us prisoners, darling. And he could certainly help us—help you—if only he can be brought to see that his ideas are not quite right.”

“I wish you all the luck in the world at that. He appears to be tenacious! And I shall be nineteen, Mama.
Nineteen!
This is my only chance; I’ll be twenty next year!”

“Come!” Folie smiled. “Perhaps other girls find themselves on the shelf at twenty, but your looks are not likely to wither so soon. If you don’t meet a suitable gentleman this season, then the next is soon enough, you may believe me.” At a scratch on the door, she opened it halfway. Their maid stood waiting in the dark passage, squeezing a candle nervously. “Go to bed, Sally,” Folie said. “You must be very tired! We shall take care of ourselves.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Sally whispered with a curtsy. “I aired your bedclothes; the sheets are quite dry.”

“Excellent. Are you frightened to sleep alone?”

“No, ma’am, they gave me a bed with a housemaid, just up the attic.” Sally’s mobcap dipped, a pale shape in the dimness as she looked back and forth. “But I don’t like walkin’ about with these awful creatures, ma’am, that I will say!”

“You’ll soon grow accustomed,” Folie said. “They are only carved wood, and quite exquisite, really. Go on now.”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am!” Sally curtsied again and vanished in the shadows of the hallway.

Folie closed the door and turned, leaning back against it, looking at Melinda. “And I will just give you a hint, my dearest, that an overabundance of anxiety on the matter of a husband is likelier to drive the gentlemen off than anything. They can scent that sort of desperation from a mile away.”

A faint familiar pout appeared on Melinda’s lip, an echo of the mulish thirteen-year-old. For an instant, Folie felt her old helplessness, the dismay of being a parent when she had never really had a parent herself, of feeling as young and sensitive and inexperienced as the girl in her charge. At any moment, Melinda might fling at her the old bitter incrimination, “You’re not my
mother!”

“Of course,” she said to Melinda, “a mile is not such a very great circumference. We’ve only to dig a rather large moat about you, cover it over with branches, and let the bachelors view you from a safe distance. Then as they come charging in your direction, they will drop through, become hopelessly trapped, and you may take your pick at leisure.’’

She could see the threatening lower lip quiver. Melinda looked down at her hands in her lap.

“They may be a bit muddy, of course,” Folie said blandly, “and naturally they will create a great deal of unpleasant racket with their shrieks, but once we have them securely tied, then Sally can turn the laundry tub over them, and you shall have an excellent opportunity to examine your prospects.”

Melinda refused to go so far as a giggle, but she wrinkled her nose, making a face. “Mama, you are quite silly.”

“Lack of sleep,” Folie said, pulling pins from her hair. “It has stupefied my brain.”

“I suppose that is a hint.”

“Well, if you will sit here at the age of eighteen and bemoan your years of spinsterhood, my dear, you must expect people to nod off.”

“Thank you very much!” Melinda stood up. “I shall go and cry myself to sleep in my lonely bed!”

“Don’t forget to rub ashes in your hair,” Folie said pleasantly.

“I vow I shall sleep on sharp nails.
Then
you will be sorry!” Melinda stopped, her hand on the doorknob. She opened it part way and peeked through into the passage. “It is certainly dark.” After a moment’s hesitation, she murmured, “Mama...”

Folie picked up her candle. “I’ll walk you back to your room.”

In her own way, Folie thought, she was as green and fussy as Melinda. She closed the door on her stepdaughter’s room and stood holding her light, gazing unhappily at a Chinese vase in a wall nook. Her light cast overwrought shadows on the peculiar tracery, making leaves and feathers tremble as if they were alive.

It was her own inner vision that had created the Robert Cambourne she had expected, was it not? The Robert that her heart insisted upon. From paper and daydreams she had conjured him—a girl’s invention, really—the perfect gentleman, witty and loving and handsome, someone she could depend upon, someone who cherished her, who thought just as she did and offered just what she needed. A fantasy man.

It was hard to admit that. It was hardest of all to discover that he did not exist, that he had never existed. Easier almost to believe that this Robert Cambourne was an impostor.

Never real, her own sweet Robert. Never real at all.

A lump of something tender and bruised seemed to swell in her throat. He had been real to her. She felt as if he had died; the ache of grief was the same, the anxiety to change it, to wake up and find that it was not true.

She stood in the passage, unafraid of the shadows and grotesque carvings. They seemed insignificant to her, interesting but artificial. She was caught in a different twilight, an uncomfortable place in her mind where truths did not quite conform.

His letters were real; she could walk now to her room and touch the beribboned bundle.
He
was real; he had sat at the dinner table, certainly no dream or illusion. But the man at the table and the man who had written—they were not the same. How could they possibly be the same? Or was it simply that she could not overcome her own illusions? Expecting another face, an honest smile; admitting to herself now that hope and excitement had driven her here as much as any resignation to the inevitable.