Miss Wonderful (The Dressmakers 1)

He had agreed, albeit reluctantly, to make his presentation, and no more. “You are too scrupulous and softhearted,” Gordy had told him. “Nothing gets done in politics without influence and money. As we are not exactly flush of money, we must make the most of influence.”

What this meant, Alistair had learnt last night, was that he was to look handsome and gallant and hold his tongue. He was to leave all negotiating to Gordy.

He would have done this, sat clenching his hands and biting his tongue, if Mirabel Oldridge had not worn the provoking smile—after all he’d done to please her.

She had told him she would fight him with every weapon at her disposal. She had warned him that she was not overscrupulous.

Perhaps she’d assumed he’d chivalrously decline to fight back. Perhaps she thought the only weapon in his arsenal was looking beautiful. Perhaps she believed that overawing the yokels with his fame and family influence—and seducing the one woman who wasn’t overawed—was the only strategy he was capable of executing.

He couldn’t be sure what she thought. It didn’t matter. The look infuriated him. He couldn’t remain mute. Honor, pride, loyalty, and duty all demanded he fight—and fight to win.

He stood up, ignoring his leg, which viciously protested with sharp, burning jabs from hip to heel.

“Gentlemen,” he said. He did not raise his voice. Carsingtons rarely needed to. They needed only to exert the force of their personalities.

His low rumble carried to the farthest corners of the hall, and the noise subsided slightly.

“Gentlemen,” he repeated, “and ladies.” He sent a quick glance up at Miss Oldridge.

The uproar dulled to a buzz, then murmuring, then silence.

“I shall consider it a great honor to address your concerns, one by one,” he said. “Let me begin with the crucial matter of water and reservoirs.”

ABOUT this time, Mr. Oldridge was ambling in the wrong direction—toward Longledge Hill rather than toward Matlock Bath—in the company of his former bailiff.

They had met quite by carefully arranged accident.

Caleb had been strolling casually toward Matlock Bath when he met Mr. Oldridge, also on foot, cheerfully resolved to do his duty, as his daughter had begged him.

He was surprised, but not disagreeably so, to see Caleb Finch. At the time of Finch’s dismissal, Mr. Oldridge had been sunk in the lowest depths of the melancholia from which he’d only recently begun to emerge. His daughter had seen no reason to trouble him with unpleasant details. She’d simply told him that Finch had decided to leave.

Consequently, he greeted Finch affably, asked about his health, his family, his work.

Caleb was vague about his work but very precise about a recent discovery. It was this the two men were discussing while going the wrong way: away from rather than to the crucial canal committee meeting.

“Are you quite sure of the shape?” Oldridge was saying. “Like little cigars?”

“Precious little,” Caleb said. “Smaller than an ant. And brown. At first I thought it was only dirt, but something made me take a closer look. I was sure I seen it before. And now I’ll take my oath I did. My next to last position, in Yorkshire. I had to set the men to scraping it off a wall on account mistress didn’t like it. I thought it was a shame, sir, as it was so interesting-like.”

“It is, indeed,” said Oldridge. “I have never heard of such a moss. And you have encountered it again, you are quite, quite sure?”

“Up on the hill, sir,” Caleb said, indicating the lengthy ridge ahead. “Not five miles away.”

To Mr. Oldridge, who often covered twenty miles in a single day, a five-mile walk up Longledge Hill was nothing. He would be back hours before dinner.

It was a long while before he remembered that dinner wasn’t the only thing he needed to be on time for this day.

And then it was too late.

THE meeting dissolved shortly after noon.

It ended in victory. A majority having voted in favor of the canal, a committee was formed. The members swiftly drafted the petition to Parliament, after which the room emptied.

Only Lord Gordmor and his partner remained.

His lordship was too shaken by recent events to attempt his usual nonchalance.

“That was a near thing, a dreadfully near thing,” he said. “For a time I felt as though I stood upon a storm-tossed ship. I contrived to hold on until the vicar—that sweet, amiable man—chided us. Et tu, Brute? I thought. Then overboard I went, and swiftly sank. Doubtless we must blame the piratical-looking sea captain, in his gleaming uniform and dashing whiskers, for these nautical metaphors.”

Carsington said nothing. He seemed preoccupied with rolling his canal plan into the smallest possible circumference.

“What a fool I was, telling you to hold your tongue and look decorative,” Lord Gordmor went on, eyeing his friend uneasily. “I should have remembered how very different a fellow you are when your fighting spirit is roused. I hope you will forgive me. I had been under the mistaken impression that Waterloo beat the fight out of you.”

Carsington turned sharply toward him. “You thought I’d turned timid?”

What the devil was wrong with him? They’d won a great victory this day, over seemingly impossible odds.

Oh, Lord, was he brooding about the plaguy female?

“Don’t be absurd,” Gordmor said. “And pray don’t mope about Miss Oldridge. Not today. You will bring her round eventually. Meanwhile, you’ve won a great triumph. You have plucked us out of the jaws of—of something. Ah, yes, victory. Snatched from the jaws of defeat. By gad, I’m so relieved, I’m tongue-tied. That letter. That brilliant, cruel letter. I collect it was entirely her doing.”

“She warned you, Gordy.”

“So she did. As did my sister. She told me the lady was dangerous. Who’d have guessed Henrietta could be guilty of understatement?”

“As it

is, I’m amazed we got off so easily,” Car said.

“Are you serious? She all but annihilated us. If you hadn’t stepped in…” Gordmor trailed off. He could scarcely think of it without trembling: Everything, everything on the brink of being destroyed, utterly. All his careful scrimping and saving and planning. And all of Car’s money and hopes: The man had taken the last of his allowance to the gaming tables, then given his winnings to Gordmor to put into their “company.”

If Car hadn’t stood up and done a stunning imitation of Lord Hargate at his most compelling and eloquent, the redhead in the unspeakable bonnet would have ruined them.

“Dangerous” was a laughable understatement. The woman was diabolical. Since Car, clearly, couldn’t manage her, it was up to his friend to solve the problem.

BY the time the two men emerged from the hotel, the meeting attendees had departed. The area, which in the tourist season would have been thick with walkers and gawkers, was deserted.

As they stepped into the promenade, though, a neatly dressed fellow, whom Alistair recognized as one of Gordmor’s agents, hurried up toward them.

Several of these men had followed his lordship to Derbyshire and thrown a bit of his money about to win favor with the locals. It was nothing out of the ordinary. This sort of thing went on at elections, and most certainly had occurred wherever canals were under consideration. Alistair had no doubt that Mirabel’s agents had done the same.

Gordmor had told his men to keep their eyes and ears open as well. Accordingly, this fellow hastened to alert his lordship: Miss Oldridge and Mrs. Entwhistle had set out for London.

“London?” Gordy exclaimed. “Already?”

“They had a traveling chariot packed and ready, sir,” the agent—by name of Jackson—said. “The ladies were the first out of the assembly hall, I was told, and scarcely a quarter hour passed before they were in the carriage and on their way. As soon as I heard of it, I came to tell you.”