Miss Wonderful (The Dressmakers 1)

“What difference does it make?” she said. “Now you are here, they will melt away like snow under a hot sun.”

“But that isn’t the way I want to do it!”

She gave him a skeptical look. “Then you shouldn’t have come.”

Alistair turned away and stared unseeingly out the window while he counted to ten. “Miss Oldridge, I must tell you plainly that you make me want to tear my hair out.”

“I wondered what that was,” she said.

Alistair turned back sharply. “What what was?”

“Heavy weather. It felt as though heavy weather were bearing down upon the room. But it is only you. You have a remarkable force of personality, Mr. Carsington. Why do I make you want to tear your hair out?”

Alistair gazed at her in exasperation. The loosened coil had slid to within a quarter inch of her ear.

He straightened away from the window, marched to the table, swept up a handful of pins, and advanced upon her. “You’ve lost most of your hairpins,” he said.

“Oh, thank you.” She put out her hand.

He ignored the outstretched hand, took up the offending braid, coiled it up, set it back where it belonged, and pinned it in place.

She stood rigidly still, her blue gaze fixed on his neckcloth.

Her wild hair was silken soft. His fingers itched to tangle in it.

He quickly finished his work and stood back. “That’s better,” he said.

For a moment she said nothing. Her gaze went from his face to his hands, then back again. Otherwise, she did not move a muscle, only stood regarding Alistair with the same intensity of expression his cousin applied to Egyptian hieroglyphs.

He said tightly, “It was…distracting. Your hair. Coming down.”

Her expression did not change.

“One can’t…think,” he added lamely.

But it was no excuse. A gentleman never took such liberties, except with a very near relative or a mistress. He could not believe he’d done it. Yet he did not see how he could help it.

He set his mind—what was left of it—to composing a suitable apology.

She spoke before he could assemble the words.

“So that was what upset you so much,” she said. “Well, I should not be surprised. A man who will set out in the dead of night in an ice storm—because he lacks a change of clothes—lives by sartorial standards too lofty for lesser mortals to comprehend.” She turned away and began to fold up the maps.

He quickly gathered the shreds of his reason.

“I also have principles, Miss Oldridge,” he said, “whether you wish to believe it or not. I should like to persuade the landowners of the merits of Lord Gordmor’s canal. I wish to find a way to remove the objectionable elements of the plan, or, if this is impossible, arrive at an acceptable compromise.”

“Then go back to London and send someone else to make the case,” she said. “You are either sadly deluded or hopelessly idealistic if you think people will deal with you as they deal with ordinary men, even ordinary peers. My neighbors as well as my father left their estate managers to meet with Lord Gordmor’s agent. They wouldn’t dream of doing so themselves. You my father not only invited to meet with him, but asked to dinner. He even tried to persuade you to stay the night—though Papa is practically a recluse, who would rather talk to plants than people. Sir Roger Tolbert and Captain Hughes, who are more sociable, will call on you and invite you to dine with them. Everyone will ask you to visit and invite you to admire their pets, livestock, and children, especially their daughters.”

While she talked, she was trying to roll and fold the maps, and was doing as well as her maid had done with her hair. She wound the rolled ones into cones and spirals and folded the others backwards and sideways and every way but the correct one. By degrees she became lost in a storm of swishing and crackling paper.

Alistair advanced, extracted the maps from her taut grip, and one by one closed them properly. Then he set the lot down on the table, resisting the urge to keep one to swat her with.

She frowned down at the maps. “I had no trouble opening them,” she said. “But when it came time to shut them up, they developed a life of their own. I suspect they dislike being closed, and it wants a special knack to coax them.”

“No, it wants only simple logic,” he said.

“It must be a different form of logic than I ever learned,” she said. “But you’re an Oxford man, I recall. If only I had gone to university, I, too, should know how to fold a map.”

“I wish Oxford had taught me how to get a direct answer to a simple question,” he said.

She bestowed upon him a brilliant smile, the one she’d favored him with the previous day, before she’d learnt his errand. Since she’d treated him to only a lesser and chillier variety of smiles since, he was caught unprepared, and his brain reacted as though she’d hit him in the head with a cricket bat.

“You want me to tell you why Lord Gordmor’s agent could win no support for his canal,” she said. She collected her coat and bonnet.

Alistair collected his wits. “The agent told us no one was willing even to discuss it. Everywhere he went, he was told no and shown the door. Yes, I want you to tell me, Miss Oldridge, since you claim everyone else will be too overawed by my consequence to tell me the truth.”

She flung on the cloak. “I most certainly will not tell you,” she said. She jammed the bonnet on her head and quickly tied the ribbons. “You have every possible advantage. Everyone will fawn upon you. I do not see your encountering the smallest resistance. The situation is hopeless enough without my giving up to you my single piece of ammunition. Good day, Mr. Carsington.”

She snatched up the maps, and out she went, leaving a vexed and baffled Alistair with nothing to do but watch her go, cloak crooked, bonnet lopsided, and perfect backside swaying.

IT might have comforted Mr. Carsington to know he was not the only one who was vexed and baffled. Mirabel was disturbed enough to travel another two miles, to Cromford, to seek her former governess’s calming presence.

At present they sat in Mrs. Entwhistle’s parlor, which was scrupulously neat, attractively decorated, and comfortably upholstered, like its mistress.

The lady, who was ten years older, had married and moved to Cromford shortly after her then-nineteen-yearold charge set out for London and her first season. Mr. Entwhistle had succumbed to a lung fever three years ago. He had provided well enough for his widow, though, to spare her having to return to her old occupation.

“If only I did have a piece of ammunition,” Mirabel was telling Mrs. Entwhistle. “But Mr. Carsington will soon discover the main objection. All the Longledge landowners believe the canal will cause too much disruption for too little benefit. Otherwise we should have built our own canal decades ago, when it would have cost far less.”

“Men who spend their lives in London cannot conceive of the impact these schemes have on rural communities,” Mrs. Entwhistle said. “Even if anyone had explained the problem to Lord Gordmor, he would probably disregard it as provincial prejudice against change and progress.”

“I cannot blame him entirely,” Mirabel said. “We are at least partly to blame. Had all the landowners made their sentiments clear to his agent, I doubt we should be in this predicament. But none of us took any more notice of him than we have of the others.”

The agent’s status and power was merely the dim reflection of his employer’s, and Lord Gordmor’s prestige, as Mirabel had pointed out to Mr. Carsington, was of a dim variety to begin with. To the denizens of Longledge Hill, his representative was merely one in a long line of agents constantly coming and going, trying to promote one speculation or another.

The gentry hereabouts were conservative folk, however. Even at the height of the canal mania, they had considered Mr. Arkwright’s Cromford Canal a dubious venture, and the Peak Forest Canal downright risky. So far, events—at least from a financial standpoint—had not proved them wrong. While these canals had

greatly improved transportation for the businesses along their routes, neither had yet made substantial profits for the shareholders.

Beyond question the waterways had radically altered both the landscape and the communities through which they passed.

Reaction was even more negative to Lord Gordmor’s canal, which would amount to a public highway through Mirabel’s and her neighbors’ own property.

“You had no way of knowing Lord Gordmor would prove more persistent than the others,” Mrs. Entwhistle said.

“It is not the persistence but his choice of representative that disturbs me,” Mirabel said. “I wish someone had warned me Mr. Carsington was coming. He cannot have written to the other landowners in advance, or everyone would have been talking about it. But I cannot credit his applying only to Papa, the last man in the world to take an interest in a canal—or anything else not possessing roots.”

“I suspect Mr. Carsington and Lord Gordmor were not aware of your father’s preoccupations,” Mrs. Entwhistle said. “They were only aware of his owning the largest property.”

“And Papa has done nothing to enlighten them,” Mirabel said. “Can you credit his answering Mr. Carsington’s letter?”

Mrs. Entwhistle shook her head and agreed it was inexplicable.

“If even my father agreed to meet with Mr. Carsington, you can imagine what the others will do,” Mirabel said. “They will wine and dine the famous Waterloo hero, and say yes to everything he proposes, without question. They will accept whatever negligible financial compensation he offers for use of the land, and nod happily to any route he suggests. If anyone proves so bold as to ask for a bridge to get the cows back from the meadows or a curve to take the canal around a plantation instead of straight through it, I shall be much amazed. Meanwhile, we can be sure they will push their daughters and sisters at him, even though he is merely a younger son.”