Miss Wonderful (The Dressmakers 1)

“If Miss Oldridge is satisfied, I suppose I must be,” Alistair said stonily. “I collect I must invite you to the wedding now.”

“It would be the nobly forgiving thing to do,” Gordmor said.

“I am not that noble,” Alistair said. “The trouble is, if you don’t come, one of my brothers will stand up for me. You are a fraction less tedious than the older ones and a degree less annoying than the younger ones.”

THE following morning found Alistair in Lord Gordmor’s dressing room as the latter was preparing to go out.

His lordship, who was working on his neckcloth, did not look away from the mirror when his friend entered. “I am trying to invent a new style,” he said. “Primarily because I have such an infernally difficult time arranging the ones that have already been invented. I am not sure I shall be able to concentrate properly, however. I am all agog to learn what tore you from your bed at this early hour. The noon bells have hardly ceased tolling.”

“I want to talk to you about a railway,” Alistair said.

Gordy gave up on his neckcloth, turned away from the mirror, and looked at him. “A railway,” he said.

Alistair explained the plan he’d discussed with Mr. Oldridge when he’d sought his blessing for the marriage. Mr. Oldridge had approved of both tramroad and wedding plans.

Instead of building a canal, they’d lay down rails directly from the mines to the lime burners and others to the north. They could install stationary steam engines to draw the carts up steep inclines. They wouldn’t need to follow level ground. They wouldn’t need locks or aqueducts. They would need only enough water to run the steam engines. It would cost less than building a canal, and take less time. It would carry the coal, cheaply and speedily, from their stony piece of Longledge Hill to the nearest customers. They wouldn’t need to go through the Oldridge property, or any of their neighbors’ lands.

“A tramroad,” Gordy said when Alistair had finished.

“Why didn’t we think of that in the first place?”

“Because Finch, your trusty overseer, suggested a canal, and we got the idea fixed in our heads,” Alistair said. “And because I failed to exercise my imagination sufficiently.”

Gordy considered. “I take it Miss Oldridge approves of this plan?”

“It’s to be a surprise. A wedding gift. I did not want to tell her about it until I was certain you would cooperate.” He’d promised Mirabel he’d solve the problem, and he had.

“Of course I’ll cooperate. I’m grateful that she didn’t hold my idiotish behavior against you.” Gordmor tore off his neckcloth, tossed it aside, and picked up another from the stack of neatly folded linen placed on a table near the mirror. Then he put it down again and turned to Alistair.

“Car, I must beg your pardon,” he said.

“You already did. Yesterday, in Hyde Park.”

“No, I begged Miss Oldridge’s pardon. But all the trouble began because I did not believe in you. My sister harped ceaselessly on how much you’d changed since Waterloo, and had me half-convinced you were non compos mentis. She was prating about pernicious melancholia, and I didn’t know how to argue with her. You seemed to have lost all your passion and energy since Waterloo. You hardly noticed women, though they were throwing themselves at you, left and right.”

“Perhaps she was not far wrong,” Alistair said. “It was a melancholia of some kind, apparently, though I have never heard it called ‘pernicious.’ And it did come upon me after Waterloo. I am told that such things are not unheard of among former soldiers and sailors. Some don’t recover. But my case could not have been so very pernicious.”

Gordy studied him for a moment. “No, today you are like the Car I always knew, not the stranger who came home from the Continent.”

“I don’t understand how I came to be that way, or why, exactly,” Alistair said.

“I should think that time in the surgeons’ tent would be enough to disorder any man’s mind,” Gordy said.

“I was terrified,” Alistair said. It was the first time he’d admitted it, aloud, to anybody. He had not even told Mirabel yet. He would, though.

Gordy did not even blink. “You covered it well,” he said. “I had no idea. But then, I was too terrified myself to pay close attention to you. I knew I must stand by you, Car, and I should have done it, too, but I should have disgraced us both, and been sick—and probably swooned dead away. I know it will sound mad and inexcusably selfish, but I was vastly relieved when you declined the surgeon’s kind offer to amputate.”

“You were sick? Really?”

“It was worse, infinitely worse, than the actual fighting. Then, at least, one is caught up in the heat of battle. Gad, I couldn’t wait to get us both away from that ghastly place.”

“That saw,” Alistair said, “caked with blood.”

“The surgeons,” Gordy said, “covered with blood and God knows what else. And the stink of the place.”

“If I could have run, I’d have run away screaming, like a girl,” Alistair said, his heart lightening.

“I would have been right behind you,” Gordy said,

“screaming louder and at much higher pitch. I have not your manly basso, you know.”

And in another moment they were laughing at their so very non-nonchalant reaction to that glorious, horrendous day, and Alistair had no trouble remembering why Gordy had always been his dearest friend.

Twenty-one

THE day of the wedding dawned bright, and the groom was wide awake, dressed, and pacing his bedchamber at Hargate House well before the appointed hour.

Crewe had had a Premonition.

“Why did you not have one the day Mr. Oldridge went missing?” Alistair said. “Why must you have one now?”

“I apologize, sir,” his valet said. “Perhaps it does not signify. Perhaps it is merely prenuptial nerves.”

“You are not getting married, Crewe. I am.”

“Indeed, sir, but we are changing our circumstances. Ours is no longer a bachelor household.” The manservant gave a small, anxious cough. “My mind is most uneasy about the linen. Mr. Oldridge and you have different views regarding the starch. He prefers his linen a degree less stiff. And the chief laundress at Oldridge Hall is a singularly forbidding female.”

Alistair ceased pacing to stare at his valet. “You are afraid of the laundress?”

Crewe coughed an affirmative.

“We shan’t be at Oldridge Hall all the time,” Alistair said. “We shall have our own townhouse here, as soon as we find a suitable place. Then I give you leave to choose our London laundress and demand all the starch you wish. I am sure it will not matter to Miss Oldridge one way or another. Perhaps, in Derbyshire, on the other hand, we might be a degree less—er—starched, than in London.”

“Are you sure, sir? It will be—” A very small, deprecating cough intervened. “—an adjustment.?

?

“I am told that married life requires a great number of adjustments, Crewe. And bear in mind that Miss Oldridge must also make certain changes to accommodate a husband. She has been accustomed, these ten years and more, to arrange all matters as she sees fit. Now she will have both a parent and a spouse putting their oars in.”

Not, Alistair thought, that her father had not already put an oar in. He had a growing suspicion that some sort of communication had passed between Oldridge Hall and Hargate House prior to his arrival in Derbyshire last month. Lord Hargate had not seemed the least surprised at the news of the impending marriage. He had looked, in fact, smug—and most especially so when the marriage settlements were being signed.

Alistair was marrying an heiress, just as his father had recommended in November.

“But it was impossible for them to conspire,” he said, half to himself as he studied his reflection in the mirror for the seventeenth time. “Mirabel opened all her father’s letters. It was the merest accident that she did not see mine.”

Crewe coughed.

“Yes, what is it?” Alistair said.

“I only wished to observe, sir, that certain letters have been known to make their way directly into Mr. Oldridge’s hands. They would be enclosed in one addressed to the head gardener. Lady Sherfield used this method from time to time.”

Lady Sherfield, his mother’s bosom bow.

Alistair had left his letter to Oldridge in the tray with the others, for his father to frank.

His father must have enclosed it in one addressed to the gardener.

That was how Mr. Oldridge had received it.

He’d sent a positive, encouraging answer to Alistair, though the botanist had not wanted a canal through his property any more than his daughter did.

Why?

“Matchmaking,” Alistair told his reflection.

“Sir?”

“I was lured there,” Alistair said. “On purpose. They set a trap, the two of them. My father saw the opportunity, and he took advantage. It was Machiavellian.” He turned away from the mirror and smiled. “And exceedingly good of him. I might not have discovered her otherwise.”