The Stepsister's Triumph (20 page)

But instead, Helene was conscious of a distinct lowering of her spirits. She found herself looking again through the crowd. Although she knew it to be entirely ridiculous, she had been hoping to catch another glimpse of Lord Windford. She'd seen him earlier, talking with Benedict Pelham, and once talking with Miss Sewell. Now, the crowd had shifted and wherever he might be, he was hidden entirely from her view.

She had not cherished anything so ridiculous as the hope that Marcus might ask her to dance. A duke did not dance with a jilted bluestocking. But he was her host, and so no one would take exception to them exchanging a word or two. He had the most extraordinary eyes. She would like to see them again. She would like to tease him again, just a little, and hear his answers. She'd had so few chances to speak with a sensible man lately, especially one with an agreeable sense of humor . . .

Stop it, Helene,
she instructed herself firmly.
This is pointless.

“They're coming over,” Madelene laid a hand on her arm.

Helene pulled her attention back to her friend, and the ballroom, to see Madelene was right. M. Beauclaire was leading Lady Adele through the crush as expertly as he'd led her in the dance. When the couple reached Helene and Madelene, M. Beauclaire bowed to them with perfect aplomb.

“Good evening, Lady Helene. James Beauclaire, at your service. We met last year, at Lady Pritchard's, I think it was.”

Helene met his gaze coolly, but curtsied politely. She also introduced Madelene.

“
Enchente, madamoiselle
.” M. Beauclaire bowed smoothly over Madelene's hand, but something clearly caught his eye. His mouth moved silently and Helene had the distinct feeling that what he said was anything but polite.

The reason for it was not at all hard to discern. Before any of them could speak another word, Adele's sister, Lady Patience, and her aunt, Mrs. Kearsely swept up to them all. Helene, mindful of Madelene's anxieties, did her best to draw the girl aside and shelter her from Patience's contemptuous glare and cutting remarks.

Of which there were plenty. Mrs. Kearsely and Patience's clearly did not believe that M. Beauclaire could be permitted to show any interest or kindness toward Lady Adele, who was, after all, socially awkward and not pretty or “quite the thing.”

All this time, Helene was conscious of a mounting pressure inside her. It was not
fair
. There was nothing wrong with Adele. There was nothing wrong with any of them.

M. Beauclaire eventually either took the hint, or was aware of how very uncomfortable Adele was being made. He tossed off a laughing remark to Lady Patience that ended with, “It is our dance, is it not?”

“Why yes it is, I had quite forgotten.” Patience said carelessly, but took his arm just the same. As her youngest niece was escorted to the dance floor, Mrs. Kearsely cast a weary glance toward Adele that said they would continue this conversation later, then sailed away to speak with another set of guests.

It was utterly, completely and entirely
unfair.

Adele faced Helene and Madelene, her fingers knotted together around her fan. Helene grit her teeth. So. Here they all were, three wallflowers, alone, disregarded, at best pitied, not because of their character, but because of their dresses, their figures, their manners.

It was not unfair. It was worse. It was unjust.

But there was nothing to be done.

Was there?

*   *   *

For Marcus, the New Year's ball proceeded as it did every year. The decorations were applauded and admired. Even Marcus had to admit that Benedict Pelham had done a magnificent job on the mural for the floor, and said so. There were hands to be shaken, girls to be danced with politely, Mamas and their meanings to be ignored, or escaped from, also politely.

As he moved about the room, Marcus found his mind more than half occupied by his conversation with Rutherford. Damn the man, it was too intriguing to be entirely ignored. When he'd written his paper on pattern detection, it had been entirely an intellectual exercise. Now, Rutherford was offering him the chance to take his theories and test them in the real world. That idea excited him, whether he wanted it to or not.

“Marcus!”

“Eh?” Marcus glanced around and down, to see Aunt Kearsely glowering up at him.

“You are woolgathering and ignoring your guests. It is time for supper, and I want you to escort Lady Augusta Beale in.”

Lady Augusta was eighteen years old and an acknowledged beauty with about as much conversation as a hothouse daffodil, as Marcus learned during his one quadrille with her.

“Must I? Couldn't you give me to . . .” he glanced about the room.

“To whom?” demanded Aunt Kearsely. “Have you a preference? Why didn't you tell me? Who is she, Marcus?”

“Lady Helene,” he said.

Aunt Kearsely's mouth closed like a box lid. “Helene Fitzgerald? Oh, Marcus, what a time to joke!”

“I'm not joking,” he answered, and he realized he meant it. In fact as he'd wandered about the ballroom listening to girl's voices until it felt like he had a chorus of crickets between his ears, he realized he was really listening, and looking, for Helene. He'd caught a brief glimpse of her standing with Adele and a little strawberry blonde creature, but had not seen her since.

He certainly did not see her now. Where on earth had the girl gotten herself to, just when she was wanted?

“Stop it,” snapped Aunt Kearsely. “You should not be so unkind to your old aunt. Besides, Lady Helene's left the ball. I don't seen her anywhere.”

“You haven't even looked.”

She certainly did not look now. “I've promised you to Lady Augusta and
you
promised you would do as I asked this evening, if I didn't importune you about making appearances at any other time during the party. I have, you must acknowledge, kept my end of the bargain.”

She had too, punctiliously, so Marcus couldn't, in fairness, complain.

Although after two hours of Lady Augusta's notion of conversation, Marcus truly, truly wished he could.

*   *   *

It was hours later. Helene stood in front of the library's curved window seat and stared out across the winter-shrouded lawns. Midnight had come and gone. The fire had been banked so that only a dull red glow remained to light the darkened room. Outside, the moon had set and starlight shimmered across the unbroken snow. In the far distance, Helene could still hear the faintest hint of laughter and music drifting from the ball.

The ball. Where something rather extraordinary may have just happened. If she could get it to work. If she could convince the others that it could be made to work . . .

If she could convince herself it could be made to work.

Adele had shared a secret with Helene and Madelene tonight, and that secret had set Helene's mind travelling at speed down a dangerous path. Or perhaps it was a marvelous path. She didn't know, and she might not ever know.

Unless she gathered her nerve.

Unless she was willing to throw the dice not just for herself, but for her siblings, and her newfound friends.

It was a great deal to ask when what she'd been shown was really just some drawings of dresses.

“You have to promise me you won't laugh,” Adele had said as the three of them slipped from the crowded ballroom. “I've never shown these to anybody.”

“We promise,” Helene said, and Madelene nodded.

Adele had led them up to her tidy, if somewhat over-ruffled bedchamber. She'd taken a key out of her jewel case and opened the cabinet table that waited beside her lace-curtained bed.

The inside had been filled with leather-bound scrapbooks, all of them worn and overstuffed and well-thumbed. When Adele opened one to show them, Helene immediately saw why.

Each page held a lovingly rendered and tinted sketch of a different gown.

“These are marvelous!” she cried.

“They're daydreams,” Adele said as she slowly turned over the leaves.

“Where did you get them?” Madelene asked. “You must have spent hours on the copies.”

But one glance at Adele's face told Helene this was a mistake. “She didn't copy them, Madelene. These are original designs. All of them.”

Three shelves full of dresses. Three shelves full of carefully organized and thought out plans of beautiful fashion, the sort of thing Helene would have loved to be able to wear, if only she'd been able to see and understand how all the disparate elements could be made to work properly.

Which Adele evidently could. And yet, with the household budget controlled by her aunt, she was condemned to follow her aunt's taste, which involved buttercup yellow and lace ruffs.

“It's just something I'd do, especially when I first came out,” Adele was saying. “I'd sit and dream about what it would be like when I was finally married—the parties I'd give, and the dresses I would have. I would plan it all out.” She touched the notes that surrounded the gown. “I wrote down names of warehouses and suppliers and modistes and . . .”

These were not just books of fashion then. Helene found herself staring at the three filled shelves with something like hunger. There was a world of practical information in there. Information for parties and entertainments as well as for wardrobes. Years' worth of prices, warehouses.

Possibilities turned and whirled inside her mind. Audacious possibilities. Daring, risky, dangerous possibilities.

And yet . . .

And yet . . .

“Which of these dresses is yours?” Helene had asked. “Yours especially, I mean?”

Slowly, Adele turned the pages to a gown of deep red and rich cream. “This one.” She ran her fingers down the page, but it was clear she wasn't seeing the sketch. She was seeing something far different. Perhaps it was James Beauclaire. Then, abruptly, Adele slammed the book shut.

“But as I said. It's just daydreams.”

“Lovely daydreams though,” murmured Madelene.

Helene heard them, but she wasn't listening, not properly. Thoughts had begun dropping through her mind, like cards falling to the table. They were piling up, making a complex pattern of their very own.

“Maybe they could be more,” Helene said.

Adele laughed bitterly. “Maybe I'll be crowned Queen of England at Almack's next Wednesday. No. I'm twenty-two and my aunt won't hear of me dressing myself. And even if one of you could find a modiste who'd actually make one of these, it wouldn't change anything for you either. I'd still be the dumpling, you'd be the bluestocking, and Madelene . . .”

“I'm the red-headed stepsister,” Madelene muttered.

“And we're all equally doomed,” Adele hugged her notebook to her chest.

Thoughts, patterns, ideas, dreams, possibilities. They all flashed through Helene's mind, one after another.

“I don't accept that,” she said suddenly.

“Then tell me,” Adele gestured at them all with her free hand. “What can
we
do?”

It was the question Helene had been asking herself all evening. What could they do? But now she had an answer. It waited in Adele's books of beautiful gowns. It was contained in Helene's own jewel case, where there was still one precious necklace that she'd kept back through all her family's troubles, so it would be there to sell when the final need arose.

It waited in the fact that like Adele, she's been spending the past several years observing the workings of the ballrooms and salons of London, and writing the results down in her own books. But where Adele had been studying the vagaries of fashion, Helene had been studying the nuances of connection between hostesses, and matrons and ladies, all the women who controlled the ballrooms, and therefore the destinies of their families, especially their daughters.

The answers, or at least the possibilities were there, in Adele's books, and her own. But Helene knew those possibilities contained terrible risks. The cost of failure would be high, ruinously high, in fact, and not just because of the money involved. They would, all three of them, be laying themselves bare to public scrutiny. And in Helene's case, she would be risking not just her reputation, but her sister Susannah's as well. Susannah was fifteen and on the verge of entering society in her own right. That is, she would be if circumstances were different. If there were still money. If Helene hadn't ruined everyone's chances . . .

Maybe circumstances could be made to be different.

“Oh! I'm so sorry!”

Helene whirled around, her heart pounding madly.

A woman's silhouette stood in the doorway. The light was so dim, however, that Helene didn't immediately recognize her.

“I didn't know anybody was here,” the woman said, and now Helene was able to place her.

“You're Miss Deborah Sewell, I believe,” Helene said.

“You believe correctly,” the woman answered. She also closed the door behind her and came forward into the tiny circle of light cast by the dim coals in the hearth.

Helene had been a bit surprised to find Miss Deborah Sewell included on the Windford guest list. Tall and elegant in her bearing, Miss Sewell also openly defied all custom by being a single woman who kept her own establishment. As if this weren't enough, she actually worked for her living. She was known to write articles on art and travel, but far more shocking was that she was also very widely suspected of being the author of the sensational three volume novel
The Matchless
.

“And you are Lady Helene Fitzgerald,” Miss Sewell said. She did not go on to add any of the usual adjectives, for which Helene was grateful.

“I am,” admitted Helene.

They curtsied to each other with ridiculous formality.

Miss Sewell stretched her gloved hand toward the coals, either to warm it or to watch the play of the light across the satin—Helene could not be sure. “May I ask you a question, Lady Helene?”