3. Dressing the Part
3
DRESSING THE PART
He’d brought their dirty dishes down to the hotel’s kitchen, even though the waiter who’d wheeled the cart of food up to Deborah’s — Devynn’s — room had told him he could just leave them in the hallway. But the small task gave Seth an excuse to get away, to let himself be alone with his thoughts for a while.
He’d known she was from the future…but he could never have guessed she was a Wilcox.
Looking back, he could now detect some little inconsistencies in the things Devynn had said to him, how she’d done her best to use the excuse of amnesia to hide her ignorance of what the world was like in 1926. He supposed he’d been so utterly entranced by her that he hadn’t stopped to question any of those minor discrepancies, finding all sorts of ways to make excuses for her.
And now he had to decide what to do next. Forgive her? Tell her in no uncertain terms that the way she’d lied to him about her true identity was unforgivable and he never wanted to have anything to do with her again?
The second option didn’t seem very likely, for a variety of reasons. Yes, he knew he was still angry…but he also had to admit that he had no idea how he would have reacted if he’d been lost in a decade…a century…not his own.
Although, he thought, with a grim twist of his lips, he was finding out that very thing now.
Back in his room now, with only a wall separating him from the chamber where Devynn slept. Or at least, he hoped she was sleeping, doing her best to regain her strength. Emma’s magic had brought her back from the brink, but still, she had some recovering to do. He hadn’t been lying when he’d said she looked better after eating, some color beginning to return to her cheeks, and yet she still appeared far too pale for his liking.
And he knew he wasn’t in the same position Devynn had been in when she traveled back to his time, because they were in this together, for better or worse, whereas she’d had to navigate being in a new century all on her own. Also, it seemed as if they had stumbled onto an entirely unexpected ally in Jeremiah Wilcox, who appeared ready to offer whatever help he could, possibly out of some obligation to a woman who was his grand-niece at least five or six times removed.
At least, Seth couldn’t see any other reason why he’d decided to lend a hand. Somehow he doubted that Jeremiah would have been quite so helpful if Devynn hadn’t turned out to be half Wilcox.
And it seemed as if their situation wasn’t quite as unprecedented as he’d thought. Once — either more than a hundred years ago or just the other week, depending on how you looked at the situation — the Wilcox primus had helped Devynn’s mother and father escape this time and get to a place where they would be safe.
Could he manage the same feat again?
Seth honestly couldn’t say for sure. It sounded as though Danica Wilcox possessed much greater control over her time-traveling gift than her daughter did. Jeremiah had lent his strength so Danica and Robert Rowe could return to her time, but he didn’t have any inherent powers of time travel. And with Devynn’s talent being so unreliable, it might not be that good an idea to have Jeremiah help out. They might be sent back to ancient Greece — or into an unimaginable future where people flew in rockets and visited other planets, like in those books his cousin Freddie was always ordering from New York, and which eventually joined Seth’s library once Freddie had tired of them.
We’ll figure that out when we have to, he told himself. For now, you’re safe.
What an odd thing to think when he was trapped in the heart of enemy territory. And yet, although he still wasn’t sure whether he could allow himself to trust Jeremiah Wilcox, he had to admit that the man had handled the situation admirably — had made sure Devynn was healed, had gotten them accommodations that were certainly much better than he otherwise might have expected. From the sound of it, Jeremiah intended to put them up here at the Hotel San Francisco for as long as necessary, so it wasn’t as if he and Devynn needed to fear being homeless.
No, what they really needed to worry about was whether they would be stuck here forever.
And he couldn’t also stop himself from fretting over his parents’ reaction to his disappearance. Even if Charles had tried to sweep the whole thing under the rug, no one would be able to deny that Seth McAllister and Deborah Rowe had gone missing without a single clue to explain where they might have gone.
Certainly no one would ever think they might be living in the past.
He pulled his covers up to his chin and told himself he needed to stop stewing over this mess, if only because staying up half the night wouldn’t help his current situation. Whatever happened the next day, he needed to face it as rested as possible.
Whether he’d be able to accomplish such a feat was an entirely different question.
But after tossing and turning for a bit, he’d managed to sleep through the night, and to wake when the sun was already up and daylight doing its best to peek past the heavy linen draperies at the windows. Like the room Devynn occupied, this one had been furnished comfortably without being elaborate, quite unlike Jeremiah Wilcox’s heavy, handsome house, which looked like something out of a museum.
No private bathroom, of course; he had to wait his turn to use the facilities and the bathtub, although at least they had actual plumbing here and he could rinse out the tub and fill it again without having to worry about sharing the bathwater. In fact, he’d just gotten back from the bath and was buttoning his shirt when he heard a timid knock at the door.
They didn’t have room service here, and he somehow doubted the maid would be coming by this early.
Frowning, he went to the door and opened it — only to see Devynn standing outside, a frilly robe tied around her and spots of color burning high in her cheeks.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, and if anything, her flush only deepened.
“It’s these damn — darn — clothes,” she replied, speaking in a fast murmur. “Can you come help me?”
Seth wasn’t sure how much help he could be — he’d had a difficult enough time fussing with the puff tie that completed his outfit — but he also didn’t want to leave her stranded.
Even if the mere thought of having to help her get dressed was enough to send a blush of his own to his cheeks.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said, and she released a breath of relief.
“Thank God.”
He followed her into her room, where he quickly shut the door behind them, glad that no one had seen him and Devynn go in there together. True, they were posing as brother and sister, but he couldn’t think of too many men who would have pitched in to help their sisters get dressed in the morning, especially not in 1884, when he guessed people were even stricter about such things than they were in his own time.
“It’s this thing,” she said, lifting a white silk brocade corset from a nest of paper wrapping. “Jeremiah had it delivered this morning, along with some extra underthings. I suppose I should have thought of that — my mother told me once that she only brought the one corset with her to 1884, and obviously, she would have been wearing it when she went back to the future.”
“Can’t you just not wear it?” Seth asked. In his own time, women had dispensed with those kinds of constricting undergarments, so he didn’t know how much help he could even be.
Devynn’s nose wrinkled. “I wish. But these clothes won’t fit right without one, and besides, if I’m trying to look like a proper young lady, I need to wear a corset. We’re supposed to be acting respectable, aren’t we?”
He supposed so. While he had absolutely no idea of what the Landons had been like, most witch families were fairly prosperous and did whatever they could to fit in with the nonmagical population. And that, he guessed, meant not running around town without a corset, not when doing so would have made Devynn look like one of the loose women he guessed must work in the brothels and saloons here. Even during Prohibition, his hometown of Jerome was wild enough, and he had to believe that a budding frontier city like Flagstaff would have had its own collection of prostitutes.
The very last thing Devynn should be doing was trying to look like one of them.
Still, he knew he was less than eager to help her into her undergarments. True, she was wearing some kind of chemise and petticoat under her lace-trimmed robe, and was fairly well covered, but still….
However, she didn’t give him any time to hesitate and instead popped open the busk at the front of the stays, saying, “At least my mother told me how these things work. I can fasten it up the front, and then I need you to tighten the lacings until I tell you to stop.”
Well, that sounded a little less fraught.
She pulled off the robe and tossed it on the bed. Although she was very much dressed, the combination of chemise and petticoat still left her arms bare, and he found himself marveling a little at their slender grace…and at the faint hint of muscle he glimpsed in her biceps as she fastened the metal hooks at the front of the contraption.
Did all the women of her time display that kind of strength?
No time to ask, because she backed up toward him, saying, “Okay, start pulling.”
This close, he thought he could sense some faint perfume emanating from her damp hair, which lay around her shoulders. Clearly, she’d gone to use the bath much earlier than he had, guessing that she would need as much time as possible to let her long locks dry before she started her day in earnest.
His body wanted to respond to her nearness, but he gritted his teeth and told the troublesome parts of his anatomy that they had much more important matters to deal with right now, no matter how intoxicating she might be.
Forcing his gaze toward the laces at the back of the corset, he saw how they had been loosened enough so she could easily fasten the front on her own. Now he started tugging at the heavy cords, tightening them from the bottom and moving toward the top.
She was already slender, but it was impossible to miss the way her waist grew even smaller, more defined.
“How much?” he asked, and her shoulders lifted.
“I don’t know for sure,” she replied. “Is there a gap at the back?”
“A little bit,” he said. “Maybe not quite an inch.”
She scooted a bit to the left so she could grab the nearest bedpost. “Try pulling it in a little more.”
Seth wanted to shake his head — her waist certainly looked small enough to him — but he went ahead and did as she asked, tugging on the laces again until he’d achieved the tiny gap she’d requested. “How is that?”
“I think that should be good,” she said, now sounding somewhat breathless. “Honestly, if I can’t fit into those clothes now, then I’m just going to have to ask Jeremiah to get me some different ones.”
She spoke so blithely, as if it were no great thing to reach out to the Wilcox patriarch and put in an order for more clothing. Maybe it wasn’t.
After all, Devynn was also a Wilcox and part of his clan, even when removed by multiple generations.
Seth still wasn’t quite sure what to think about that. Yes, she’d told him basically the truth about her father and the clan he’d come from, but she’d never really mentioned her mother, and he’d just assumed she must also be a member of the Winfield family.
A sin of omission, he supposed, but still….
After delivering that comment, she hadn’t waited for him to reply, but instead went over to the trunk of clothing Jeremiah had sent over and pulled out an odd contraption, one that looked vaguely as though someone had chopped a hoopskirt in half.
“What in the world is that?”
“A bustle cage,” she said as she placed it at her waist and fastened a series of hooks on its waistband to hold it in place. “Bustle skirts were the style in the 1880s, according to my mom.”
Another petticoat went on top of the bustle cage, one that had a series of flounces going down the back — to hide the outline of the wires, he assumed. Then there was an underskirt, an overskirt with lots of elaborate draping, and finally a tight-fitting bodice that fastened down the front with a row of velvet-covered buttons to match the velvet of the gown’s high collar.
“Fits perfectly,” Devynn said, relief obvious in her voice.
And it did. While Seth had to admit that the silhouette of the period looked outlandish to his eyes, used as he was to the narrow dresses from his own time, he couldn’t deny that the close-fitting bodice hugged her curves perfectly, showcasing a small waist made even tinier by the corset she wore underneath and the ostentatious fall of the skirts as they draped over the bustle.
“My mother told me she had all her gowns made with buttons up the front so she could put them on herself,” Devynn continued, now going over to the mirror so she could start fussing with her hair.
“What about the corset?” Seth asked. It definitely didn’t seem like the sort of contraption anyone could have managed to lace up on their own.
Devynn shrugged and didn’t answer right away, since she held a couple of hairpins in her mouth so she would have both hands free to pull her hair up and away from her face. Once she’d removed them and lodged them somewhere in those chestnut masses, she said, “I guess the person she got the corset from laced it up in a way that it had a couple of loops free in the center. That way, you could tighten it from the middle on your own.” She paused for a second, as if to assess her hair and determine whether it would pass muster, then added, “But the one Jeremiah had sent over from the general store wasn’t laced that way. That was why I needed your help.”
The explanation made some sense, so Seth thought it was probably better to let it go. This Devynn, with the overly stylized gown and half her hair lying loose on her shoulders, somehow felt very different from the one he’d met in Jerome. Most likely, it was the clothing and nothing more, and yet he couldn’t help wondering if the change in her demeanor also had something to do with their location.
Here, he was far more the outsider than she, even if she was separated from her true time by a hundred and fifty years or more.
He also wasn’t sure whether the hairstyle she now wore was truly period-correct — didn’t women in the Victorian era always have their hair up in buns or something like that? — but he decided he probably shouldn’t comment. It was entirely possible that Devynn couldn’t reach all the way up and back to style her hair that way, not with that tight bodice and those tight sleeves.
Besides, she’d always had her hair up when she was in Jerome, and he liked seeing it loose this way. It was lustrous and full, with a pronounced wave, and he found himself wondering what it would feel like to run his hands through it.
Probably not what he should be thinking, not when he still wasn’t sure how he should feel about her at all, but, as he’d already noted once before this morning, his body seemed to have a mind of its own when it came to Devynn Rowe.
“Would you like to go downstairs for breakfast?” he asked. The day before, Jeremiah had given him a wallet filled with paper money and coins of the period, certainly enough to cover any meals they wanted to eat in the hotel’s restaurant and any other incidentals they might encounter. Their rooms, he knew, were being handled by some kind of mysterious credit system, but it seemed as though the Wilcox warlock wanted to make sure his unexpected guests had at least a little autonomy. Seth couldn’t help wondering if the primus expected something in return for his help, but so far, he’d only been helpful in a neutral sort of way.
Although Jeremiah had said he would be in contact sometime today, he hadn’t been very specific about the hour. A lot had depended on how Devynn was doing, but as far as Seth was able to tell, she’d made a full recovery.
Recovered enough to attempt to get them out of here? He had to admit that, before he’d had his conversation with her the night before, he’d hoped they’d be able to get to the bottom of whatever mysterious force had sent them into the past and somehow reverse the sequence of events that had stranded them in 1884.
Now, though, he knew it must have been their powers tangling together and creating a kind of enchantment that had been utterly unwanted and unforeseen, and now he wasn’t sure whether they dared risk any experiments. Not, at least, without a lot of insight and advice from Jeremiah Wilcox. Seth still didn’t know for sure whether he could trust the man, but he couldn’t deny that the primus was the strongest warlock he’d ever met.
If he couldn’t help them find their way out of this conundrum, Seth wasn’t sure anyone could.
It seemed his suggestion had been the correct one, because Devynn’s face lit up at the mention of breakfast.
“That sounds perfect,” she said. “I’m starving.” But then she paused and gave a rueful glance down at her corseted torso before adding, “Assuming I’ll be able to fit anything in here.”
Seth couldn’t quite keep himself from smiling. Yes, it was much more difficult for women in the past than it was for men…in more ways than one. His own borrowed clothes fit well enough, and honestly weren’t much different from what he’d worn in his own time. No, he didn’t go around in a vest and a frock coat, but still, he had a good three-piece suit that he trotted out for family weddings or other important occasions, so it wasn’t as if he didn’t have any experience with wearing something more than just a shirt and pants.
“Oh, you might surprise yourself,” he said. “And it’s good that you’re hungry. It means you’re healing.”
Yes, her entire body was probably working overtime, doing its best to replenish the blood she’d lost from that bullet wound. Working at an advanced rate, thanks to the healing spells Emma had used to bring Devynn back from the brink, but still, it probably needed all the help it could get.
He added, “So let’s get some breakfast, and then we can decide what to do next once we have some food in us.”