Playing to Win (23 page)

It was certainly not the first time
Trevor had seen Mrs. Simmons outraged by his introduction of a
female guest into his home, but the quality of her disapproval was
somehow different this time. With a shock, he realized her
condemnation was directed for the first time at
him
, rather
than his guest!

He sought in vain for an appropriate
response to his housekeeper’s reproachful gaze. But while he stood
dumbstruck, Clarissa turned round, glowing with relief. "Mrs.
Simmons! The very person we need!"

Mrs. Simmons perceptibly thawed when
she turned to Clarissa. "Yes, Miss?"

Clarissa carried the velvet riding
habit to her, and the two women immediately bent their heads over
it, clucking and worriting and discussing together, in
incomprehensible female terms, the nuances of propriety,
dressmaking, and God alone knew what. Mr. Whitlatch watched,
fuming, as Clarissa and his housekeeper—
his
housekeeper!—closed ranks against him in that inimitable feminine
way.

"I daresay if I retired to the library,
neither of you would miss me!" he announced
sarcastically.

Clarissa spiked his guns by beaming
radiantly at him. "Oh,
would
you?" she cried, her pleasure
and gratitude instantly deflating his annoyance. "Mrs. Simmons
agrees with me that I ought not to accept the riding habit as a
gift, but she thinks it might not be wrong to
borrow
it —and
I would so love to go riding!"

The sight of her sparkling happiness
floored him. Not only did it enhance her loveliness tenfold, it was
strangely touching. Such a little thing, to thrill her so
completely! He thought, bemusedly, that he had frequently bestowed
far costlier baubles on other women as outright gifts, and none was
received with half the joy that this "loan" of a riding habit gave
Clarissa.

"If you would not mind waiting
downstairs, sir, I will join you after I try it on. But I cannot do
so here!" Clarissa added, looking around the room with a barely
repressed shiver.

"Certainly not!" sniffed Mrs. Simmons,
placing a protective arm around Clarissa. "This is no place for the
likes of you, child. If there’s anything else you need from the
wardrobe, why, you’ve only to ring for someone to fetch it. No need
for you to come in here again." She directed a quelling stare at
her employer. "There was no call for you to bring Miss into this
room in the first place, sir, if you don’t mind my saying
so."

"Thank you!" said Mr. Whitlatch, with
awful sarcasm. "Shall I beg her pardon, or yours?"

"Oh, pray—!" blurted Clarissa,
blushing.

Mrs. Simmons patted Clarissa’s arm
comfortingly, but the severity of her glare did not abate. "Tsk! I
daresay you meant nothing by it, sir, and if Miss has taken no
offense, far be it from me to suggest she should. As for begging my
pardon, I trust we haven’t come to such a pass as that! I hope I
know my place! But this much I
will
say: you hadn’t ought to
have brought Miss to this house alone, and her with no maid to wait
on her, and no decent women to bear her company! Such goings-on!
Why, you should be ashamed, sir, exposing Miss to wicked gossip!
Anyone might look askance at her. I did, myself, though it shames
me now to say it. I
had
thought you might bring some company
back with you from Lunnon, and it fair bowled me over to see you
drive up in that curricle tonight as solitary as when you left this
morning."

Mr. Whitlatch felt his cheeks redden.
"And what business is it of yours, I should like to know?" He
instantly felt the surliness of this response and hastened to add,
"Don’t I generally know what I am about? You may leave Miss
Feeney’s fate in my hands, Mrs. Simmons! I assure you, I will do my
utmost to find her a—a
suitable
situation."

Clarissa interjected in her gentle way,
"Indeed Mrs. Simmons, it is very good of you to champion me, but I
feel sure there is no need."

Mrs. Simmons looked as if she would
like to say more, but contented herself with a sniff. "Well! Do you
hand me that riding habit, then, and I’ll light you to your room.
High time you was in bed! There will be time enough to try this on
in the morning."

"But I wish to take her riding in the
morning!" protested Mr. Whitlatch, sounding lamentably
peevish.

Mrs. Simmons ruffled like a disgruntled
hen. "The idea! Miss Feeney has been sewing I dunnamany hours
today. I’ll not have her wearing her fingers to the
bone!"

Clarissa laughed. "I am not such a poor
creature," she told her newfound ally, but meekly allowed herself
to be shooed out the door.

Trevor watched in grim amazement. It
occurred to him that Mrs. Simmons, who had served him for years and
his family before him, and whose fierce loyalty to the Whitlatches
had withstood even the strain of being asked to serve in a house
where he sometimes kept his bits-o-muslin, had just flown in his
face defending a chit she had met only this morning. Clarissa’s
swift conquest of his redoubtable housekeeper was unprecedented,
and oddly disconcerting. It was daunting to picture what life might
be like if, through bedding Clarissa, he incurred Mrs. Simmons’
displeasure. Good lord—what if the Simmonses gave notice?
Unthinkable!

Mr. Whitlatch, unaccustomed to worry,
found it infuriating to have second thoughts about a course of
action he had not only already decided upon, but had been looking
forward to with no common degree of pleasure. He retired in a very
foul mood indeed.

Chapter 15

The next few days were heaven on earth
for Clarissa. All her life she had kept her head down and her voice
quiet, speaking only when spoken to, so that respectable persons
would not be forced into conversation with a whore’s daughter. She
had never considered what it might mean simply to be transported to
a place where
no one knew her
. When she realized that she
had been liberated, at a stroke, from the stigma of her
illegitimate birth and her mother’s notoriety, she experienced a
relief so profound it bordered on exhilaration. Joy quickened her
step and sparkled in her eyes.

Mr. Whitlatch had promised that he
would begin taking steps to find employment for her the very next
week. This made her feel as if a burden was lifted from her and
shifted onto shoulders much stronger than her own. Freed from her
most pressing concerns, freed from the burden of her identity,
freed, for a time, from all responsibilities and encouraged by her
host to do nothing but please herself, Clarissa found herself,
literally and figuratively,
carefree
. Happiness flooded her
heart.

Morecroft Cottage spoke to something in
Clarissa’s starved and homeless soul. Everything about the place
seemed utterly perfect to her. Sometimes, when alone, she would
close her eyes and gently press her fingers against a windowsill, a
banister, a piece of wainscoting—wishing she could leave her
fingerprints on this lovely, peaceful house the way, she felt, it
was leaving its mark on her. She knew these sweet November days
would be short, and an endless winter might follow. It was
important to cherish whatever moments were granted to her here. And
to never, never, forget this place and time.

With the constraints usually imposed
upon her banished, Clarissa’s natural friendliness asserted itself.
She was interested in everyone, from the stables to the kitchen,
and soon made herself so popular with the staff that Mr. Whitlatch
began to grumble. Mrs. Simmons fussed over her, Dawson’s boy
eagerly ran her errands, Hogan labored mightily to find late blooms
among the flowerbeds for her, and one morning Mr. Whitlatch waited
in vain for someone to bring him his shaving water. After ringing
unavailingly for ten minutes, Mr. Whitlatch raged onto the landing
in his dressing gown and set up a shout. Webster, the stalwart
individual who normally performed this necessary task, was
discovered on the stairs, lugging two enormous buckets of steaming
water which he informed Mr. Whitlatch, respectfully but firmly, he
was not allowed to have. Webster was engaged in supplying
Clarissa’s bath. The shaving water would have to wait, in fact,
while Webster made two trips more.

That Clarissa’s wishes should take
precedence over Mr. Whitlatch’s seemed natural to everyone but Mr.
Whitlatch.

This annoyed him, but did not seriously
anger him—partly because it appealed to his sense of the
ridiculous, and partly because he found himself in sympathy with
his besotted staff. There was something endearing about Clarissa.
It was a quality that had nothing to do with her beauty. He was
amazed to see how rapidly her sad primness dissolved; within
forty-eight hours of her arrival at Morecroft Cottage the somber,
strained expression that had seemed her habitual demeanor when he
met her, completely melted away. She lost none of her dignity, but
gained a vulnerable sweetness that seemed to touch the hearts of
everyone around her.

Trevor swiftly developed a secret
obsession: making Clarissa laugh. Her laughter was delightful,
unaffected and hearty, but what tickled him was how surprised she
always seemed by it. Her laugh was invariably accompanied by a
sudden, startled, widening of the eyes that spoke volumes about the
rarity of laughter in her short life.

It was deeply gratifying to discover
this new kind of power. He had been able, with very little effort
or expense, to affect a complete change in Clarissa’s drab
existence. None of the charities he had sporadically underwritten
had inspired him with philanthropic zeal, but now he thought he
understood how a man might dedicate himself to that sort of work.
It was a heady feeling, this power to transform another’s
life.

In a matter of a few days, he had
turned a sad-eyed woman into a merry, glowing girl. He did not
preen himself on this overmuch; he knew the transformation was not
entirely his own doing. A man can scrub the grime off a windowpane,
but he can’t take credit for the light shining through it. The
enchanting creature who romped in the garden with Dawson’s spaniel
and laughed out loud at his jokes was doubtless the "real" Clarissa
Feeney. Under Mrs. Simmons’ fond mothering and his own teasing, she
was blossoming like a cherry in spring.

Mr. Whitlatch was unable to abandon his
business concerns entirely merely to dance attendance on Clarissa,
much as the prospect appealed to him. Still, his stature in the
City empowered him to handle his affairs however he chose. He
ordered two or three of his underlings to drive out daily and meet
him at Morecroft Cottage, rather than go, himself, into town. He
was closeted with them for a portion of every afternoon. During
these sessions, he found his attention sometimes drawn from the
droning voices and rattling papers by the sound of Clarissa’s feet
running exuberantly on the stairs, or her distant voice raised in a
brief snatch of song. Her singing always stopped abruptly in
mid-phrase. Trevor would grin, picturing Clarissa guiltily catching
herself and placing a hand over her mouth. But it pleased him
mightily to think that her happiness was so complete, her heart
would overflow in song.

It was fortunate that Mr. Whitlatch
enjoyed Clarissa’s society for its own sake. It certainly gave him
none of the pleasures he had originally anticipated. Every night he
would retire, baffled and out of temper, and berate himself for the
opportunities he had missed that day. Alone in his bedchamber, it
always seemed that he had behaved like a perfect gudgeon. Had he
done
this
differently, or
that
, surely Clarissa would
have responded thus-and-so, and he would not now be lying between
cold sheets alone! Every night he vowed that tomorrow would be
different. Tomorrow he would corner her, kiss her, and find the
magic words to make her his own.

It wasn’t that the opportunity to make
such a move had not yet presented itself. His innate honesty forced
him to admit that. Pacing before his bedroom fire in his stocking
feet, he would recall the myriad opportunities he had had, and call
himself every name he could think of. What was the matter with him?
Lack of nerve? Impossible! Well then, what?

Trevor had no answer for this home
question.

One night he glumly pondered the
possibility that he was losing his mind. Unlikely, he supposed.
There had never been anything like that in his family. But apart
from madness, he really had no explanation for his actions—or lack
of actions—that afternoon.

He had left an unusually dull session
with his hirelings to stretch his legs. Rounding a bend in the
path, he spied Clarissa. The sight of her brought an instant grin
to his face, and an intense feeling of satisfaction.
Ah, there
you are!
he thought—and realized, with an inward sense of his
own foolishness, that his real purpose in leaving the meeting had
been not to stretch his legs, but to seek Clarissa.

She was picking apples. Trevor halted
on the path and watched her for a moment. She was wearing a brown
print dress, very plain and somewhat faded, and was engulfed in one
of Mrs. Simmons’ aprons. The sash, since it contained far more
material than was needed to encircle Clarissa’s slender waist, was
tied behind her in an enormous, lopsided bow. One of the bib straps
was sliding down her arm. The dress was hideous, and the apron
worse. She looked adorable.