Not Quite a Lady (The Dressmakers 4)

She must turn away from the window and turn her mind away from him. To move closer, to ask questions was asking for grief, no matter what the answers were. Even if he was hers, she couldn’t have him without opening Pandora’s box and bringing trouble to the lives of everyone she loved.

She tried, but she couldn’t keep away.

She murmured a few last commands to the servants, put one in charge, and left the room. She could not stop. The best she could do was keep herself from running.

She was trying not to run down the stairs when she heard Lizzie’s voice above her.

“Have you finished in the gallery, Charlotte?”

Charlotte took a calming breath, stopped at the landing, and looked up at her stepmother with her usual affectionate smile. “There was little enough to do,” she said.

“You’d like to go home, then, and settle down to planning for our guests, I daresay.”

“No, no, there’s no hurry. You really ought to take a moment to look in the gallery, Lizzie. Now that we’ve let in the light and aired it out and removed about a century’s worth of dust and grime, it’s quite beautiful. I only left because I wanted to take a turn in the garden.”

“Oh, dear, those gardens,” Lady Lithby said with a sigh. “I wish I had time—”

“I am sure Mr. Carsington wishes you hadn’t,” said Charlotte.

“I fear you’re right.” Lizzie laughed, then turned away and started down the hall toward the gallery. She said something as she went, but Charlotte didn’t stay to listen. She continued down the stairs, a little faster than before.

Minutes later she was stepping through the French doors of the conservatory onto the terrace. A clump of overgrown shrubbery obscured her view of the parterre. She didn’t run but walked quickly along the neglected pathway. She heard boyish laughter and Daisy’s short, eager bark.

She stepped through an opening in the shrubbery.

Daisy had the stick in her mouth once more and was teasing the boy with it. She would come close, shaking her head, then back away when the boy reached for it.

Charlotte had come to ask questions, but she found that she couldn’t speak, her heart pounded so hard.

An infinity of a moment passed before the boy noticed her. He stopped short then, reached up to doff the cap that wasn’t on his head, realized it wasn’t there, and looked about for it.

Through the strange fog obscuring her vision, Charlotte discerned it lying on the ground but a pace from where she stood. She took the step to it, bent, and picked it up. She looked down at it, turning it over and over in her hands.

She looked at the boy.

Are you mine?

She opened her mouth to speak.

“Wrong hat,” came a deep voice behind her. “I think this is the one you want.”

She turned. Mr. Carsington held up her bonnet.

“I heard Lady Lithby call to you not to go out into the sun without your hat,” he said. “She sent a servant after you, but I was coming in the same direction. In my bountiful munificence, I condescended to bring it to you myself.” His glance fell to the cap in her hand. “Perhaps you will let Pip have his cap back.”

Yes, she’d better. This was wrong of her, so wrong.

Yet her gaze returned to the cap in her hand. A few strands of fair hair clung to it. She stroked the coarse cloth as she would have stroked his hair, if he was hers and if she’d had the right and if what she’d done could be undone.

If, if, if.

“I believe Lady Charlotte fancies your cap, Pip,” said Mr. Carsington. “Perhaps she’s thinking of bringing it into fashion.”

She turned her gaze to meet the boy’s, his strange, beautiful eyes puzzled and wary now.

She made herself smile. “I was woolgathering,” she said. She held out the cap. Cautiously, he approached. Cautiously, he took it, one of his fingers brushing hers in the process.

Her hands shook.

“You are very good with Daisy,” she said through stiff lips.

“She’s a good dog, your ladyship,” the boy said. “Mr. Tyler told me to keep my distance. He says bulldogs grab your nose as though you were a bull, and then they won’t let go. But she isn’t like that, is she, your ladyship?”

“All the same, you’d do well to remember that she isn’t a lapdog,” Mr. Carsington said. “She might be young, and gentler than many of her breed, but bulldogs are bred for fighting. You’d be asking for trouble if you teased her cruelly or hurt her.”

The boy looked shocked. “I wouldn’t ever do that,” he said. “Mr. Welton said I wasn’t to hurt anybody or anything that couldn’t fight back, or was smaller than I was. I asked him, ‘What if a rabid dog came after me, sir? Or what if I was in the jungle and a wild animal was about to eat me?’ He said it wasn’t wrong to defend myself from anything or anybody trying to do me harm.”

Mr. Carsington laughed. “I notice you began debating at an early age. Questioning your master? Looking for loopholes? My brother’s nephew Peregrine is like that. But we keep you from your important dog work. Daisy is far from tired yet. Take her to the home farm and see if the pair of you can help my land steward, Purchase, with his rat problem. I’ll pay you halfpenny a rat, the same as I’d pay anyone else.”

The boy’s face lit. “Oh, yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” He bowed to Charlotte. “Your ladyship.” He looked down at the bulldog, who was gazing up at him adoringly. “Come, Daisy. Let’s catch some rats.”

She watched the lad scamper away, his young mind as untroubled as that of the dog who followed so eagerly.

“I hope Tyler will not punish him for playing with the dog instead of working,” she said. “It seems hard, does it not, to keep a child indoors at labor on such a day.” She swallowed. “But you will say I am sentimental and irrational. Only privileged children may play on fine summer days. All the others must earn their bread, and precious little of it they get.”

“You mistake me for my eldest brother if you think I should say anything so pompous,” he said. “Rathbourne is the philanthropist in the family, and the poor and the criminal classes are his special interests. Do you want your bonnet or not? You are getting red in the neck from the sun. If you don’t look out, you’ll break out in freckles.”

She took the bonnet from him and put it on. “I never freckle,” she said, tying the ribbons. “I go directly from white to red.”

Did the boy sunburn? she wondered. Or did his skin simply darken to a golden tone, as Papa’s did? Her gaze went to the sun-burnished features of the man beside her. He was golden, too. Nature could be so cruel. Though men were not a fraction so dependent on their looks as women, they always seemed to have the advantage, even in that. He would not freckle or break out in ugly red splotches. The sun loved him.

As great numbers of women must have done, she supposed. It would not be so difficult, after all, to succumb to the sweet illusion he created, the small lifetime of happiness.

She looked away in the direction the boy had gone. A wall of overgrown shrubbery shut him out from sight.

“You needn’t fret about the plight of the poor apprentice,” Mr. Carsington said. “I met your father in Altrincham yesterday. Among other things, we talked of the bulldog. We agreed that she was growing fat and lethargic. I mentioned Pip and how well he handled her. Lord Lithby said he’d arrange for Tyler to be paid for the boy’s time.”

This pulled her attention away from the wall of shrubbery. “But when?” she said. “After today, Stepmama and I shan’t be here so much. We must give a little time, at least, to preparing for our guests.”

“Ah, yes, the mating party,” he said.

“It is not…”

But it was.

To her it was a nightmare, a monstrosity.

But his casually blunt assessment conjured a mental image as vivid and comical as one of Rowlandson’s or Cruikshank’s caricatures. Laughter bubbled up inside her, in spite of the ache that seemed to pulse with every heartbeat.

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nbsp; She saw the gentlemen preening and swaggering for the ladies’ benefit and imagining they were so subtle when they were so obvious. How many times had she watched these proceedings? How many times had she stifled laughter, watching the males strut like peacocks, and talk too much and too loudly, showing off? How many times had she watched them hover about a current favorite, jostling for position? And what about the ladies’ maneuvers, more subtle in comparison to the men’s yet equally comical?

She laughed then, out loud, because she could not keep it back for the life of her. Perhaps so much bitter grief filled her heart that it must find a way out, like bad blood, or her heart would burst or break. Laughter was like bloodletting.