The Secret History of the Pink Carnation (5 page)

So did Derek. His head swivelled anxiously back and forth from one to the other. ‘You can’t mean to let them go!’ he yelped, adding belatedly, ‘sir,’ as Uncle Bertrand dragged his eyes away from Aunt Prudence.

Mrs Meadows’ lips narrowed into a tight line. To Aunt Prudence, she said, ‘You won’t be able to send the girls off for months, anyway, I suppose. You’ll have to hire a proper chaperone, and that can take quite some time. Good duennas are so hard to find these days.’

‘I’m sure Edouard has a chaperone waiting for us in Paris,’ Amy said hastily. ‘If we left immediately—’

‘But who is to travel with you?’ Mrs Meadows drew herself up and cast a censorious eye across the table at Amy. ‘You and Jane cannot think of travelling alone! Two delicate young ladies at the mercy of ruffians and highwaymen!’

‘You could send a manservant with us, couldn’t you, Uncle Bertrand?’ Amy asked her uncle. ‘To fight off all the highwaymen?’

Derek slumped down in his chair, an unattractive pout blowing out his thick lips.

Mrs Meadows redoubled her efforts. ‘Think of your reputations!’ she howled.

‘I suppose I shall have to advertise,’ sighed Aunt Prudence.

‘You shall have to,’ Mrs Meadows declared officiously. ‘There’s really no other alternative.’

Amy wondered if she would be able to make the midnight mail coach if she crept out of her room by eleven.

‘
I
shall chaperone them.’

Ten heads (Ned was still involved in coaxing the remains of his vegetables down Agnes’s back) turned to stare at Miss Gwen in astonishment. Ten mouths opened at once.

‘When can we leave? I can be finished packing by tomorrow morning!’ Amy shouted gleefully above the din.

In the hullabaloo, nobody even noticed when Agnes clapped a hand to the back of her neck, shrieked, shook Ned by the collar until he turned a rich shade of purple, and fled from the room scattering small green blobs.

Still calmly cutting her meat, Miss Gwen stared down the various speakers one by one. ‘You may be assured, Prudence, I shall keep a close eye on Jane and Amy. As for you, Miss Amy,
you
may be packed, but
I
am not.’

Miss Gwen speared a pea with military precision.

‘We leave in two weeks.’

Chapter Four

A
t the sound of the door cracking against the wall, Richard automatically whirled towards the entrance, his whole body tensing for trouble. Blast it all, nobody was supposed to be on the packet from Dover to Calais but him. Ten crowns he had pressed into the hands of the rather oily-looking captain, ten crowns of good British sterling, with another five promised upon arrival. The captain had assured him that the boat would be his alone and would set sail at the next promising gust of wind, instead of lolling about for a week, waiting for passengers.

So who was banging doors? The sound of oak bashing oak, in his experience, generally preceded flying chairs, toppling candlesticks, snarled oaths in three languages, and, if one were really unlucky, the acrid smoke of powder from a pistol. The cabin of a Channel boat was a damnable place to be ambushed. The ceiling was too low for a man to stand and fight properly. And if the bloody boat began swaying… Richard winced at the prospect. It could lend a whole new aspect to fencing. Richard whirled towards the door in a grim frame of mind.

The figure in the doorway nearly made Richard tip his chair over backwards in surprise. In the place of the burly oafs he had expected, he saw one rather agitated young lady, planted indignantly in the middle of the entrance. ‘But why not?’ she was arguing with someone in front of her.

‘Harrumph,’ said Richard. The girl’s back, clad in a narrowly cut
yellow frock, was quite as pleasing a back as one could hope for, but this was
his
boat, blast it, and no one else had any business being on it, not even young ladies with fetching backs.

The young lady paid no attention.

‘Really, Miss Gwen! The captain said the wind won’t be right for
hours
yet! We could just stop in at the Fisherman’s Rest for a lemonade. I’m sure there can’t possibly be anything improper about stopping for a lemonade.’

Richard
harrumphed
again. Very loudly. The girl in yellow half-turned, affording Richard a momentary view of a pert nose, a determined chin, and one large blue eye. The eye settled briefly on Richard and as rapidly dismissed him. With a toss of her mahogany curls, she continued pleading with her invisible chaperone.

‘And Jane agrees with me, don’t you, Jane?’ the girl went on.

‘Just
one
lemonade, Miss Gwen!’

Could anyone really be that thirsty? Richard failed to see the earth-shattering importance of a lemonade. Unless, of course, the girl had some unfortunate medical condition which could only be soothed by constant application of lemonade. From the energy with which the girl was arguing her case, and the enthusiastic way she bounced on her feet, like a prizefighter waiting to be let into the ring, Richard rather doubted she was suffering from any weakening, wasting malady.

Richard listened to the ridiculous one-sided argument for a few more minutes before reminding himself that, much as he enjoyed speculating on the girl’s reasons and pleasing as it was to watch her skirts sway with every vehement word, the time had come to intervene. He had dispatches to read, and if he tarried too long, he risked the boat setting sail with these noisy interlopers still aboard.

‘I say,’ Richard drawled, loudly enough that they might have heard him say it back in London.

That finally got her attention. The girl turned. In full, her face fulfilled the promise of her profile. It wasn’t what one would call a classically beautiful face; her features lacked the sort of sculpted
dignity one expected from a statue in marble. Instead, her face was a talented engraver’s etching, small and decisive, her cupid’s bow of a mouth in constant movement, exclaiming, talking, laughing. No, Richard changed his mind, not an etching after all. Her colouring was too vivid for the stark black and white of a print. The deep brown of her hair glimmered with hidden alloys of red gold, like fire shining through a screen of mahogany. Between dark lashes and fair cheeks, her eyes gleamed startlingly blue.

Her face bore a perplexed look, as if she had only just noticed Richard and wasn’t quite sure what to do about him. To help her along, Richard raised a sardonic brow. It was an expression that had been known to make cardsharps fling in their aces and the secretest of secret agents babble like babes. For a moment, confusion continued to hover in the girl’s narrowed blue eyes. Then she beamed at Richard and bounded into the room towards him.

‘You look like you’ve travelled a great deal! Don’t you agree that there’s plenty of time to stop off at the inn for a lemonade?’

Before Richard could suggest that she do just that – preferably lingering over her lemonade until after his boat had sailed – another figure appeared behind her. Ah, the chaperone, Richard decided. There were, he had come to the conclusion after many tedious evenings at Almack’s, two types of chaperone. Given the number of events he had been forced to squire Hen to, Richard considered he had conducted something of an exhaustive study of chaperones.

Both types were aging spinsters (Richard discounted young widows looking after their younger sisters’ debuts; those tended to need a chaperone even more than the young ladies they were ostensibly supervising), but that was all they had in common. The first was the frumpy henwit. Although of indeterminate age, she dressed in the ruffles of a seventeen-year-old. Her hair, no matter how sparse or grey, was curled and frizzed until it looked like a nest built by a particularly talentless blue jay. She twittered and simpered when spoken to, read the sappiest sort of novels in her spare time, and generally contrived to accidentally lose her charge at least twice a
day. Rogues and seducers loved the first sort of chaperone; she made their endeavours that much easier.

And then there was the other type of chaperone. The grim dragon of a chaperone. The sort who looked like her spine had been reinforced with a few Doric columns. Chaperone number two would sneer at a flounce or a frizz. She never simpered when she could snarl, read forbidding sermons by seventeenth-century puritans, and all but chained her charge to her wrist.

As the woman bore down on him, Richard, using his brilliant powers of deduction, was quickly able to conclude that this chaperone fell into the second type. Grey hair rigidly pulled back. Mouth pressed into a grim line. The only incongruous note was the cluster of alarmingly purple flowers on the top of her otherwise severe grey bonnet. Maybe the milliner confused her order and she didn’t have time to change it, Richard concluded charitably.

At any rate, he decided, here was someone he could deal with sensibly. One of the benefits of type number two was that they were nearly always extremely sensible. Richard darted a quick glance down at her feet. Underneath the grey hem of her skirt, he could just make out two sturdy, thick-soled black boots. Yes, definitely sensible.

Richard opened his mouth to speak, and the tip of a parasol jammed in between his ribs.

‘Who are you, young man, and what are you doing on our boat?’

‘I beg your pardon, madam,’ the words came out somewhat more raggedly than Richard would have liked, but it was hard sounding sophisticated when all the air had just been forced out of your lungs in a most unpleasant fashion. ‘
Your
boat?’

‘Why don’t Jane and I just pop by the inn while you straighten matters out with this gentleman…’ began the girl in yellow brightly, but she was cut off by the forbidding voice of her duenna.

‘You, miss, are staying right here.’ The dragon managed to reach out and snag the girl’s arm without taking her beady eyes from Richard. ‘Yes, sirrah,
our
boat. That greasy-looking fellow who calls himself the captain assured us that we should be the only passengers.
If you are one of the crew – which, judging from your dress and speech, I assume you are not – go about your duties. If not, kindly depart at once.’

She looked as though she were ready to enforce her words with the point of her parasol. Richard judged it wise to move out of range. Who had ever heard of a parasol with a steel tip that sharp and pointy? They were supposed to be dainty, feminine things, not lethal weapons.

Rising from his chair, Richard sidestepped the gleaming parasol point and executed a small but elegant bow. ‘Forgive me, madam, I have been remiss in my social obligations. I am Lord Richard Selwick.’

The chaperone still looked like she would rather poke him than chat with him, but she obviously knew what was proper. With a bend of the knees that only just resembled a curtsy, she inclined her head and said, ‘I, my lord, am Miss Gwendolyn Meadows. Allow me to make known to you my two charges, Miss Jane Wooliston’ – a girl Richard had failed to notice moved out from the shadows behind Miss Meadows and made her curtsy – ‘and Miss Amy Balcourt.’

The quiet girl in blue subtly took Amy’s arm and tried to lead her away. Squeezing the other girl’s hand affectionately, Amy shook her head and stayed where she was. Richard was so caught up in this byplay that he completely lost track of what the chaperone was saying until the point of her parasol made another sortie at his waistcoat.

‘Sir! Have you been attending?’

As Richard had learnt from his youthful encounters with the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale, the best way to deal with irate ladies of a certain age was to be disarmingly honest.

‘No, madam, I fear I was not.’

‘Hmph. I said that now that the amenities have been served we would be pleased if you would take yourself off our boat.’

‘I was afraid that was what you might have said.’ Richard smiled winningly, while taking care to move himself out of the path of the
parasol. ‘You see, I also paid the captain for the sole use of this ship.’

Miss Gwen’s face darkened alarmingly. Richard watched in some fascination as the flowers on her hat began to quiver with rage. Had she been a man, she would undoubtedly be indulging in strong language. As it was, given the ominous way she was swinging her parasol, it appeared that she was planning severe bodily harm to the captain, Richard, or both.

The quiet girl, Jane, moved forward to put a reassuring hand on the chaperone’s arm. ‘There must have been some mistake,’ she said soothingly. ‘I’m sure we can all reach an amiable conclusion.’

Miss Gwen looked about as amiable as Attila the Hun.

‘The only possible conclusion is for this gentleman to remove his person from our conveyance.’

Richard felt himself beginning to grow annoyed. Watching the chaperone bicker with her charge had been a mildly amusing diversion, but, blast it all, he had real work to do. Important work. War Office work. And, anyway, he had been here first.

That fact seemed like a particularly conclusive one to Richard, so he decided to point it out.

‘Who was here first, madam?’

That argument had failed the Saxons in 1066; it was equally ineffectual with Miss Gwen, who regarded Richard with all the imperiousness of William the Conqueror. ‘You, my lord, may have been here first, but we are
ladies,’
Miss Gwen responded with a most unladylike scowl. ‘And there are more of us. Therefore, you should cede your place.’

‘Why don’t we all go to the inn for a nice glass of lemonade and talk it over?’ suggested Amy hopefully.

Neither of the combatants paid the least bit of attention to her.

Standing back with her arms folded across her chest – highly unladylike, but then, Miss Gwen wasn’t looking – Amy watched the debacle with the avid interest she would have accorded to a duel. As the two sparred, their barbed sentences ended with incongruous civilities, like protective tips on epees.

Lord Richard took a step closer to Miss Gwen, close enough that the chaperone had to tip her head back to see him. Miss Gwen was fairly tall for a woman, but Lord Richard Selwick topped her by nearly half a foot. His blond head loomed over the waving purple flowers on her bonnet, gleaming with its own light in the dim cabin. Unlike the men Amy had known back in Shropshire, who still wore their hair clubbed back with a ribbon, Lord Richard’s was cut short in the new French style. Lord Richard carried himself with an air of easy assurance infinitely more convincing than Derek’s swaggering. From his highly polished boots to his waistcoat embroidered in a subtle pattern in silver, he was dressed with a casual elegance that made Derek and his ilk look foppish and overdone. He had evidently anticipated being alone on the boat, because his black frock coat was tossed over a chair, his waistcoat unbuttoned and his cravat loosened. Where his collar gaped open, Amy could see the strong lines of his throat. He looked, Amy thought, like an illustration she had once seen of Horatius at the bridge, defending Rome against all comers.

Her cheeks flushed a deep, uncomfortable red as she realised that the cords of his throat had gone still, the room was silent, and Lord Richard was staring at her staring at him.

Amy covered her confusion by saying hastily, ‘This is absolutely ridiculous! There’s no reason at all why anybody should be forced to wait for the next boat. After all, there’s plenty of room for all of us.’ With a sweeping gesture, she indicated the four walls of the room.

‘Out of the question,’ snapped Miss Gwen.