Loving Julia (15 page)

“We, uh, we do have a teeny little problem with our French,” Mrs. Thomas stuttered, throwing a sidelong glare at Jewel.

“That’s all right. A few weeks ago she couldn’t even speak English, let alone French.”

“I could too speak English!” Maddened, Jewel let her accent slip again as she speared his lordship with a look of pure venom.

“Indeed.” His tone was dry. With a hasty, alarmed glance at her smouldering charge, Mrs. Thomas said quickly, “Do your curtsy again, Miss Julia. This time, to—to Lady Soames.”

Jewel, feeling very much like a freak in a circus side-show, nearly rebelled. But she realized that a display of temper on her part would only amuse him more. With what dignity she could muster, she grasped her skirt in her hands and bent her knees, dipping only moderately. The board kept her posture militarily erect, but she herself was responsible for the haughty lift of her chin and the graceful extension of her arms. Watching, the earl looked suddenly arrested, as if he were seeing something he hadn’t expected.

“Very nice,” he said when she stood again. The wryness she had come to associate with him was absent from his voice.

Mrs. Thomas, flushed with triumph, put Jewel through her paces. With two spots of indignant color high in her cheeks, Jewel dipped in curtsy after curtsy, just like, she thought, a performing dog. Spurred on by the earl’s watching eyes, she was better by far than she had ever been before with only Mrs. Thomas for an audience. When that lady trumpeted ecstatically, “And now, to the Queen!” Jewel sank down in a deep obeisance that was flawless in execution.

“We may make something of you yet,” the earl said when she straightened and stood regarding him with transparent satisfaction. The patronizing words brought an angry sparkle to her eyes, but before she could ruin the impression she had made with another outburst of Cockney temper, Mrs. Thomas interrupted.

“Now that his lordship is here, perhaps he would like to take tea with us. So that he may evaluate your progress in that area, Miss Julia.”

“Thank you for the invitation,” the earl replied smoothly, his eyes never leaving Jewel’s flushed face. “But I prefer that Miss Julia join me for dinner tonight.”

“Oh yes, certainly, my lord. That would certainly be an excellent test of her abilities.”

“Yes, it will, won’t it?” The earl got lazily to his feet, smiling at Jewel with a charm that she disliked. Why should he be putting on that smarmy look for her? It made her think of apples and serpents…. She frowned after him as he moved toward the door. She was still frowning as he looked back to tell her, “I will see you in the gold salon at seven for an aperitif before dinner.”

Only after he was gone did she remember that he hadn’t even bothered to wait for her acceptance. Takin’ it for granted that she would come running when he called. She didn’t like that notion one bit.

XII

It was just before seven when Jewel, flushed and excited but also faintly recalcitrant, presented herself in the gold salon.

Emily and Mrs. Thomas together had outdone themselves in their efforts to remake both her outer and inner selves. While Jewel had sat at her dressing table, eyes watering at the sharp yanks Emily inflicted on her while trying to force her hair into a style that was “all the crack,” Mrs. Thomas had stood beside her, lecturing Jewel on what eating implement to use with what course, how to sit, what to talk about and what not to talk about, and all the various other intricacies of polite behavior. By the time the woman had finished, Jewel’s first inclination was to go into the salon and do every outrageous thing she could think of.

But the thought of the earl’s amusement if she should do any such thing was deterrent enough. She would go down to the salon and act like a lady if it killed her. Which, she thought as Emily helped her into the whaleboned corset that both Emily and Mrs. Thomas had insisted had to be worn on this occasion, it was very likely to do. She was practically gasping for breath as Emily threw three separate white petticoats over her head and fastened them, and Mrs. Thomas helped with the black silk gown that was different only in material from the one Jewel had worn earlier in the day. Upon finally noticing Jewel’s distress, both Mrs. Thomas and Emily assured her that she was hardly laced at all. The corset was so loose that it could practically fall off her, Mrs. Thomas exclaimed. And I be a chimney sweep, Jewel muttered to herself, but she found that breathing really did grow easier as she got used to the constriction.

The question of why the earl had asked her to join him for dinner when he had never voluntarily paid attention to her presence in the house before drifted continually at the edges of her mind. To her knowledge he himself never ate in the dining room. According to gossip repeated by Emily, Johnson always served the earl his dinner on a tray in the library. More often than not, Emily reported, the meal was barely touched, but great inroads were made on the brandy. Oh well, it was his lordship’s business and not for the likes of them to question, Emily always concluded. While Jewel was not quite sure she agreed with that, she could find no answer for the question that troubled her. As Emily draped a black silk shawl with a foot long fringe over her shoulders, and Mrs. Thomas filled her ears with a barrage of last minute instructions, Jewel dismissed the matter, at least temporarily, from her mind.

The earl was not in the salon when Jewel entered it. She paused uncertainly in the doorway, not sure what a lady should do under the circumstances. Such an eventuality had not been covered even by the very thorough Mrs. Thomas. Her first inclination was to hightail it back to her room and forget the whole thing, but that was a cowardly thing to do and she was no coward. After assuring herself that the earl was definitely not lurking behind a curtain, she wandered aimlessly around the room, admiring the lovely things that graced it.

Gold watered silk covered the walls and draped the tall windows while the carpet was white with an intricate pattern of gold birds and green vines. The furnishings were Egyptian in style, with the satinwood legs and arms of the chairs and settee carved into tiny sphinxes. Jewel was particularly fascinated by an enormous carved wood crocodile fitted out with a green velvet cushion on its back, obviously intended for use as a footstool. The thing was so lifelike she would have feared sitting on it, and she stared at it amazed.

“Admiring Hercules, are you?” The familiar drawling voice came from behind her. Taken by surprise and feeling instinctively guilty as though she had no business in this room or even in this house, Jewel whirled around, clapping her hands behind her back.

The earl stood in the doorway, looking impossibly elegant in black evening clothes, the white linen of his shirt and cravat gleaming in the soft glow of the dozens of candles that illuminated the room. The same candlelight brought his hair to shimmering silver-gilt life. Jewel stared at it, thinking that the halo effect it gave was positively uncanny. Beneath it, his smooth-shaven face with its flawless features was so handsome as to be almost unreal. And those eyes, those sky blue eyes that looked as if they should belong to Gabriel himself, were fixed on her with an expression that made her shiver, though the room was warm.

“ ’er, Hercules?” she repeated uneasily, not quite sure what to make of the way his eyes were moving over her.

He had assured her in the beginning that he had no designs on her person, but she had since been informed by Emily that both before and after milady’s death he had been very much in the petticoat line. Not that he did anything here, where his own daughter was in residence, but the gossip that came down from London was something else altogether! He was quite the rake, Emily had reported with hushed fascination, with ladies of every sort falling all over themselves, some hoping to become the next Countess of Moorland and some just hoping to enjoy the earl’s favor for a while.

Looking at him, Jewel could well believe the rumors. On the strength of his looks alone she would have believed that he had to beat the females away with a stick. But he was rich and well born to boot—he had everything. Then Jewel remembered his dead wife and the daughter he apparently never saw though they lived in the same house, and took that back. Even the Earl of Moorland did not have everything.

“Hercules is what I call that monstrosity of a crocodile,” the earl was saying, and Jewel returned her gaze to the object in question.

“If you think it is a monstrosity, then why have it?” she asked, speaking with great care so as not to lose the proper accent.

“I like it,” he said, smiling charmingly. That glinting smile threw Jewel’s thought processes off again. She stared up at him, quite forgetting what she had been going to say. Blimey, he was a smashin’ lookin’ man.

“I asked you if you would care for a drink before dinner.” His eyebrows were slightly raised as he repeated the question. Jewel hastily got a hold on herself.

“Just a small sherry please,” she answered as she had been taught, mentally scolding herself. If his looks were going to addle her this much, she was better off not looking at him at all. With a decided nod she averted her eyes. Her gaze landed on the painting of demons writhing in hellfire that adorned the wall over the fireplace. The horror of it made her eyes widen.

“Wot’s that?” In her surprise her accent slipped and she never even noticed. The earl, coming up beside her and handing her a small glass of sherry, looked at her revolted face instead of the painting.

“That is Dante’s Inferno,” he said with a slight smile. “A madman’s version of hell. Don’t you care for it?”

“It’s ’orrible,” she said with conviction, then flushed as she realized what she had said. “I mean, I think it is quite terrifying, don’t you?”

He laughed. “I liked your original version better. The truth by all means.”

She shifted her attention from the painting to his face, turning scarlet as she realized that she had forgotten her role so early in their encounter. She wanted to impress him. Why? The answer to that was such a jumble in her head that she couldn’t make head nor tail of it.

Those heavenly blue eyes narrowed as they ran over her from the tip of her elegantly (and painfully!) coiffed head to what he could see of her tiny kid slippers. Jewel knew that she had changed a great deal since coming to live at White Friars. Her skin was smooth, soft, and very white now. Her black hair shone with health and care. She had gained weight from her greedy consumption of all the sumptuous food, and while still slender, her shape had developed soft curves where a woman was supposed to have them. Her hands, which had never before seen any attention, were creamed and cared for by Emily each day, and were now as soft and white as her face. She was clean and she smelled nice, both from the rose scented soap with which she bathed nightly and from the rose petal sachets Emily tucked in with her undergarments. She had no need to feel uncomfortable in the face of the earl’s scrutiny—but she did.

“I’m glad to see that you left the board back in the schoolroom,” he said.

Expecting praise, or at least some comment on the remarkable improvement she knew had been wrought in her appearance, his comment nettled her. Her temper sparked, and almost before she could stop it a Cockney insult rose to the tip of her tongue. But she bit it back. Her head lifted, and she looked at him with only a faint spark at the backs of her golden eyes to betray her annoyance.

“It didn’t go with this dress, you see,” she said sweetly, as if

she were to the manor born. He laughed again, looking surprised.

“Very good,” he answered. “I almost begin to have hopes for you.”

What Jewel would have replied to that was lost as Johnson announced dinner.

They dined in state with five courses and as many wines. Jewel was seated at the earl’s right, and in the face of his constant scrutiny she had to concentrate fiercely not to lose track of what implements to use and what glasses to drink from. But she was a pattern-card of perfection if she had to say so herself. She carefully ran her soup spoon from the front to the rear of the bowl before delicately sipping the subtly spiced chicken broth from the side, not the tip. When the footman brought the main course—a capon in wine sauce—Jewel took the heavy silver fork in one hand and an even heavier knife in the other, managed to cut a dainty piece off the slippery fowl, and transfer it to her mouth without spilling so much as a drop. Pardonably proud of herself, she looked up to find that the earl was looking amused again.

“What are you laughing at?” she demanded with careful restraint when the earl had been served and the footman had moved discreetly out of earshot.

“Was I laughing?” the earl asked innocently. “I was not aware of it.”

“You were laughing at me,” Jewel charged, concentrating on holding onto her newly acquired accent. Her careful enunciation dampened the ire of the words, but her eyes as they sparked at him said what her tone did not. It was impossible, she found, to argue with the earl and attempt to cut her chicken at the same time. So she carefully replaced her eating implements on her plate and glared at him.

“You are mistaken,” he said serenely as he took another bite of the capon.
He
had no trouble eating and talking at the same time, she noticed with resentment. “If I was laughing, it was at

myself. I really didn’t think it could be done, you know.”

“What didn’t you think could be done?” Mystified, Jewel stopped thinking about her dinner altogether and concentrated instead on his cryptic words and on maintaining her ladylike accent.

“I didn’t think the sow’s ear really could be turned into a silk purse.”

Sputtering with temper, she abandoned her accent in favor of defending herself.

“Who you callin’ a—”

He held up one long slim finger. Seething, Jewel nevertheless swallowed the rest of her diatribe.

“I was wrong,” he said quietly. Jewel stared at him, still suspicious that he was insulting her in some way.

“What does that mean?” She recovered her accent along with some of her temper.