Seeking Celeste Page 3

  Well, she thought. It is fitting. I must remember that I am no longer a lady, merely an upper servant. That is how he regards me and how he came to that ... regrettable lapse of judgment. I must take care, for liberties of that nature are notorious. Perhaps I should tell him that I am not the travelling companion he takes me for.

  “My lord ...”

  “Hush, Miss Derringer. There is nothing more to say. If you need anything, feel free to use this bell. In your condition, I should imagine that even drawing the curtains will be painful. Don’t hesitate, if you please, to ask for help. No doubt Augustus and the house staff will be able to assist you.”

  Anne wanted to scream that she did not want the butler’s assistance; she wanted the lord and master’s. Propriety, however, came to her rescue, so she smiled wanly and offered her thanks for the handsome offer.

  “Good day, then, Miss Derringer. I shall not see you until tomorrow.”

  “Good day, my lord.”

  Why in heavens did she feel so desolate? Would she not have been furious—outraged, even—had he made the smallest push to linger? Always honest, Anne knew she would have been. The knowledge, however, in no way removed the sentiment. She felt bereft. Tomorrow, of course, she would have to renew her journey to Staines and the formidable Dowager Countess Eversleigh. She would have to, in a calm moment, explain the misapprehension his lordship was labouring under... .

  “By the by, Miss Derringer ...”

  “Yes?”

  “My apartments are on the second floor. Your virtue, I assure you, is in no danger at my hands.”

  Anne thought she ought to be grateful for the information. She was not.

  “Excellent, my lord. I shall breathe easier, I assure you.” Had he detected the tartness in her tone? And heavens, what else could she have said? No doubt the eighth Earl Edgemere felt himself very chivalrous to desist from dallying with the hired help.

  Anne stared after him long after his back was turned and his steps could no longer be heard on the elegant footpath on the lawns beneath her window. For the first time in her life, she succumbed to that most dreadful of maladies, a fit of the dismals, and wept.

  Three

  The room was dark when she woke up, although she noted some tallows had been lit and the embers in the grate had undoubtedly been supplemented by some sturdy logs and a good smattering of coal. She wondered how she came to be sleeping on the fine brocade armchair, then remembered with sudden, heart-stopping clarity.

  She must have cried herself to sleep, a peculiarity that she deplored and consequently denounced most vigorously. “Anne, you widgeon! Not two days into service and you are in a most singularly awe-inspiring pickle! Will tears help? I think not. Now go and brush your hair until it gleams. That should take your mind off unmaidenly matters!”

  She was just gingerly testing her ankle to see whether it would stand up to such an exertion, when she heard the tiniest sound from behind the dark, cherry curtains at the far side of the room. Her nerves tensed at once. Not, surely ... but no. Whatever his shortcomings, Anne knew instinctively that the eighth earl was a man of his word. There would be no nocturnal adventures, however depressing she found that excellent fact to be.

  What, then? A whispering and a giggle. Anne allowed herself to breathe. The rapscallions, then, whoever they were. She remembered his lordship referring to his relations as such. At the time, her mind had been fixed on other matters. Her lips twitched. If she were being eagerly watched, no doubt they were up to some dire prank or other.

  Since none could be so dire as those she, herself, had performed not so very long ago, she was not unduly alarmed. Common sense made her check the door frames for suspended pails of water. Nothing.

  She relaxed slightly, yawned and gingerly—for indeed, her ankle was still shockingly tender—made her way to the very inviting bed.

  Yes, there it was. A suspicious little lump wriggling its way under the blankets. She wondered if it was a mouse. Too large for a frog, though the toads had been prodigiously large that year.

  “Good gracious! Someone has been so thoughtful as to provide me with a pet! I wonder, though, whether he or she had the goodness to rip holes in my blanket? I would hate for the poor creature to suffocate.”

  Was it her imagination, or was there an uncomfortable rustle behind the cherry damask? Eyes twinkling, she cast off the bedclothes and flung herself across the bed, for the little animal, whatever it was, would be sure to flee at the first sign of freedom.

  “Got you!”

  Her hand over the lump, she carefully slid the other into the blankets and allowed her fingers to glide to the offending area.

  “Oops! Prickly little devil! Not a toad, I collect, but a very fine hedgehog! Come out, little sweetheart, and let me examine you.”

  Carefully, Anne uncovered the brownish creature and regarded it with fond amusement.

  “What an excellent specimen you are, to be sure! Now, just hold still whilst I extricate the worst of your spikes from my arm. There! That is better; now we can become acquainted. I, of course, am Miss Anne Derringer. I wonder if my friends behind those curtains gave you a name?”

  Was it her imagination, or was the rustling becoming more distinct? Back turned she could only surmise by the briefest of scuffles and the most decided of kicks that some youthful debate was wordlessly ensuing behind her.

  Presently, the damask moved with decision, and she could sense, rather than see, two—no, was it four?—eyes upon her person.

  “Pardon me if I am not quite presentable. You see, I was not expecting company.”

  “Miss Derringer?”

  She turned around to see two vivid eyes confront her. How familiar was the stubborn tilt of the chin, though the curls were feminine and the youthful expression harboured none of the sensuous lines of the older, more intoxicating male version.

  “The same.”

  “I am Kitty. Tom, come out from there at once. She won’t eat you!”

  “Indeed, I won’t. Though I am inclined to wonder whether our little friend, here, has eaten.”

  “Not since noon, when we discovered it. Dreadfully sorry about him, ma’am! Robert usually finds us such ... such deathly governesses.”

  “I infer, then, that you do not immediately consign me to that appalling category?” Ann’s tone was dry, but irrepressible humour lurked at the corner of her rather handsome lips.

  “Gracious, no! You look to be a great good gun!” Tom stepped confidently out of hiding and dusted himself off with the air of a gentleman grown. A quick calculation had Miss Derringer judge him to be around nine, with his older, more worldly wise sister eleven at the least.

  “I am relieved! Kitty, may I have your slipper? It looks delightfully soft.”

  “My slipper?”

  Anne nodded. “I am not sure how much longer our little creature, here, is going to stand for being held. Since I am not, myself, over partial to prickles, I should like to set it down somewhere comfortably. Your shoe will make an excellent nest until we can return it to ... where did it come from?”

  “The herbarium.”

  “Very good. The herbarium, then. Ah, excellent.”

  Anne took the offered footwear and gently released her charge into the base. Tom and Kitty exchanged guilty glances.

  “It did not hurt you overmuch, did it?”

  “No, but I am a hopelessly dull sort of person that way. Dreadfully cautious, you understand.”

  Miss Derringer could have laughed out loud at the baffled faces that digested this piece of very disappointing news.

  Kitty snorted, but Tom proved an unexpected ally, announcing that Miss Derringer must be overstating the case, for she did not look cautious. A quick glance at the cheval mirror confirmed Anne in her worst fears. The child was right.

  Her hair was spilling from her pins in coils, her dress was smeared with mud, her elegant kidskin boot was slit and there was a high and unmaidenly colour upon her cheeks. Worlds away from the prope
r, calm, self-controlled young woman who had set out that morning.

  That young lady had been resigned to the fact that she had come down in the world and was now relegated to a rank only slightly above that of maid servant. True, companions were expected to be genteel, but that was where their similarity with the high ton ended. Companions were not expected to be excited, unnerved, curious or in any way out of the ordinary. They were like pieces of furniture. Elegant, but curiously inanimate. Most of all, they were wholly ineligible for anything but a lifetime of solicitous fetching and carrying, curtsying and withdrawing, needlework and other appropriate but rather unfortunate activities.

  Miss Derringer, redoubtable, stubborn, intelligent beyond her four and twenty years and, regrettably, still single, had little option but to view this destiny with equanimity. True, she had wrestled, at times with tears, with wild defiance, even once, with a priceless Sevres vase that had come to a sudden and rather sorry end upon Lady Somerford’s hearth. But after the storm had come peace and a quiet resignation.

  That was, until the moment of her meeting with Lord Edgemere. Anne pushed the thought of his handsome, woefully beguiling form from her mind. He had overset both her sense and senses quite sufficiently already! It was time for the dull lady of caution to reemerge.

  “I am dull, Tom, but thanks for your confidence in me! Now, children, I intend retiring to bed before the candles have quite burned in their sockets.”

  “No!”

  “No?” Anne allowed surprise to register somewhat disapprovingly in her tone. Truth was, she was enjoying the scamps. They offered a welcome respite from the gloom of her prospects.

  “No! Not before you promise Robert you shall not take me to Miss Parson’s Seminary tomorrow.”

  If the situation hadn’t been so absurd, Anne would have chuckled.

  “I assure you, Kitty, even if I begged to escort you there, his lordship will not countenance such a thing.”

  “But ...”

  “No buts! He assured me so himself, only this afternoon!” Anne squirmed to think of the earl’s sweeping denunciation of her fitness to escort the young Miss Carmichael. Pay her her fee indeed! Over her dead body would she accept a single brass farthing from his top-lofty lordship. She was good enough, it seemed, to dally with. Not so to escort his flesh and blood. The truth smarted more than she cared to admit.

  “But that is famous, Miss Derringer!”

  “Beg pardon?” Anne was out of kilter with the children’s exuberance.

  “You shall stay and be our governess instead.” Kitty’s tone was decidedly firm for a young lady of her tender years. Anne was as much touched by this as she was by the fact that the duo were obviously yearning for something more than the lot Lord Edgemere had so obviously designated them.

  “Kitty, Tom ... I fear that is out of the question. In truth, I must tell you that I am an impostor in this household, for whoever his lordship was expecting, it was not me!”

  Four sparkling eyes turned happily upon her.

  “An impostor! I knew she couldn’t be Robert’s choice! Miss Derringer, you will not credit how stuffy he can be at times.”

  “Never mind that, Tom! Tell us ... oh, tell us, dear Miss Derringer, how you came to pretend to be my travelling companion!”

  “Pretend ... good grief, children, I am not so depraved as all that! I never pretended a thing. Your brother, however, persists in labouring under a misapprehension, and every time I try to set the record straight ...”

  “... he refuses to listen. How very like Robert! Tom! We shall tease him mercilessly over this!”

  Anne was horrified. “You shall do no such thing. I forbid it!”

  The children looked at her with renewed interest. Miss Derringer was not to be trifled with, then. Somehow, they liked her the more for it.

  “Very well, but you will not be such a ... a ... mawworm as to refuse to tell us your story. Nothing exciting ever happens to us.”

  Anne might have pointed out that it was useless, then, to apply to her, for her life could be described as disappointingly uneventful. Truth, however, compelled her to hold her tongue. Lord Edgemere may be described as handsome, annoying, charming, distressingly overbearing, but never, never, never dull. Again, her colour rose as she remembered certain interesting elements of their discourse ...

  “Kitty! I hope you do not mean to tell me that ‘mawworm’ forms part of your every day vocabulary?” Attack, of course, was the best means of defense.

  Kitty grinned. “Oh, my language can be delightfully varied! But bother that ... tell us your story before we die from curiosity!”

  Anne sighed. She supposed it would do no harm to give Miss Kitty Carmichael and her brother, the little Viscount Tukebury, a carefully expurgated account of the day’s occurrences.

  They seemed unusually silent when they realized that Anne was forced, by reason of imminent poverty and self-imposed spinsterhood, to reduce herself to service. It seemed that despite their merry, scapegrace ways, they were not entirely insensitive to other people’s distress.

  Tom broke in on the stillness to ask whether it would not have been better, after all, to have accepted the offers of either Mr. Stokes or Sir Archibald Dalrymple.

  Kitty crushed him with scorn, stating that if the gentlemen in question were truly as Miss Derringer had described, she would have had to be “dicked in the nob” to get shackled to either one. Anne had to smile. The analysis, whilst careless and quite deplorably cant, was nonetheless highly accurate. Miss Kitty Carmichael had perceived almost instantly that which she herself had battled with restlessly. Marriage without love was not a release; it was a prison. At least, as a paid companion her savings and her soul would remain entirely her own.

  She smiled cheerfully and said as much. Kitty’s eyes shone at the thought of such great independence, and Tom promised grandly that as soon as he was of age, Miss Derringer would come and live at the dower house.

  Miss Derringer did not laugh at this supreme and lordly gesture. Instead, she thanked him gravely and swept herself into a curtsy that, had her ankle not wobbled precariously, would have been most elegant indeed.

  Dawn broke more swiftly than Anne could ever have imagined. She had been dreaming luxurious dreams that lingered, slightly, in the crisp chamber as she woke. Almost she could smell the scent of apple blossom and soap that had driven her sleeping senses wild and caused such tousled havoc with the bed sheets. She allowed her lips to soften into a lazy, secretive smile before awakening, at last, with a shocked start.

  “Good lord! I shall miss the stage!” She searched for a clock in the unfamiliar room, but found nothing so prosaic at hand. Instead, her glance alighted on a bowlful of cherry red peonies and her second best morning dress laid out neatly at the bedstead.

  “It must be later than I think!” Sun streamed through the damask curtains, still drawn, but nevertheless allowing bright beads of light to escape into the small chamber. Anne groaned as kestrels and humming birds chirped prettily outside her window. The day must be far more advanced than she had anticipated. Dawn would have been a few hours ago at the very least.

  She swung herself off the bed and felt the floor carefully. The hot posset and cold pack must have worked their magic, for the swelling was down and thankfully the pain had eased tenfold. She felt a slight tenderness, but nothing that her serviceable boots, well laced, could not deal with. She hoped the earl had not, after all, unduly troubled the village doctor. If he arrived, she would undoubtedly feel more foolish than she already did.

  Miss Derringer dressed quickly, leaving only her back buttons undone before placing her nightwear and tooth powder back in the sturdy brown bandbox. She pressed this shut and corded it with expert adeptness, resolutely closing her eyes to all stubborn pictures of dreamy-eyed gentlemen with soft golden curls and lips that curved deliciously. They were like ... but no! It was pointless and dangerous to follow that idle path.

  The peonies smelled heavenly. She wondered who had se
t them there and why. Probably a kindness of the bustling kitchen staff. She could do with all the kindness that came her way. Relentlessly ignoring her rising dismay at the day’s prospects, she plucked a blossom and set it cheekily against her creamy skin. It looked delightful.

  She set it down, quickly coiled her lashings of dark hair into a single knot, then thread the blossom through before pinning the whole loosely upon her head. She would have been the picture of elegance had her morning dress not been a drab and serviceable maroon, unadorned by anything more than a single chaste ribbon and the tiny, silver buttons peeping shyly down the length of her preposterously straight back.

  These she struggled with, cursing the lack of a lady’s maid or hand mirror at the very least. No good, no good! It took nimble fingers far too long to get around them. She would have to alter the pattern when she arrived, finally, at Lady Eversleigh’s. Companions were not expected to take overlong over their toilette.

  Finally, it was done. The staid cheval glass did her justice, for her colour was high and she looked softer, less like a prim ice maiden than usual, for her tight coils were loose upon her delicate, oval-shaped face. Good! Tomorrow, no doubt, it would be an unbecoming little mobcap over her head. Today, it was the peony.

  Anne chuckled at the thought, her irrepressible spirits subtly rising. Today she was going to have an audience, once more, with the Earl of Edgemere. Though it was to take her leave forever, she would make the most of the opportunity to learn his face, his gestures, his scent, his smile. Every person was allowed at least one indulgence. Anne’s secret indulgence, she decided, with admirable calm and cool defiance, was to be this.

  Four

  “Robert, you do not understand what a great good gun she is!”