Thirty-two #2
She teared up and couldn’t finish her thought.
“It’s all right, Mercy. You don’t have to take on so. I know it pleases you,” Lady Georgette said.
Suddenly serious, Mercy cut a glance at her employer. “I wish ye knew what pleases yerself.”
“How do you mean?”
Mercy sighed. She’d broached this subject with milady any number of times with no success whatsoever.
Well, in for a penny…
“This Duke of Cambridge fellow—”
“I believe you’d ought to refer to him as ‘His Royal Highness,’” Lady Georgette corrected.
“Yes, o’ course, ah…him. Ye know next to nothing about His Royal Highness yet ye’re set to become ’is bride.
It don’t seem right, do it? Ye’re as smart a noble lady as ever I’ve met.
” Mercy thought that might be damning Lady Georgette with faint praise since she’d observed no real sense in any of the wellborn women she’d crossed paths with, but she couldn’t very well say that.
“This turn of events can’t be pleasing to ye. Not really.”
Lady Georgette’s lips compressed in a crooked line. “I know I’ve encouraged you to speak your mind, but this time you’re out of line, Mercy.”
“Maybe. But ye’re about out of time. I know ye fancy Lord Nathaniel. I dares ye to tell me different.”
Milady looked away. “You can’t possibly know what’s in another person’s heart.”
“Sure ye can. People are far easier to read than books. Everything they think or feel or think about feelin’ shows on their faces.
Some more than others, to be sure, but it shows all the same,” Mercy said.
“If ye’re not far gone on Lord Nate and have been for some time now, why…
I’ll eat this cunning little bonnet you just bought me! ”
Lady Georgette laughed. “Since it goes so well with your gown, you’d better not.” Then all traces of mirth left her features and she lifted her chin. “Whatever I may or may not feel for Lord Nathaniel makes no difference. Sometimes, we aren’t able to please ourselves, however much we may wish it.”
“But—”
“There is no but. Trust me when I say this is the way things are and the way they’ll stay.
” Lady Georgette’s lips tightened in a hard line, and the chin she’d just jutted upward quivered for a moment.
“In any case, the question is moot. Lord Nathaniel has left Yorkingham House.” Her voice trailed away to a wisp of sound. “He has left…me.”
Mercy could have kicked herself. In her excitement over her own ball and the special evening she was planning with Reuben, she’d completely missed the fact that she hadn’t seen Lord Nathaniel at the house that morning.
“Well, then, the man’s a bigger fool than Mr. Darling ever thought about being, and that’s saying something.
” Mercy linked arms with her employer and put her head down into the stiff wind.
“Come, milady. Let’s forget about men for a bit.
Lord knows they forget about us often enough.
We needs to get ye home and into a nice hot tub for a long soak.
And I don’t want ye out of the water till ye’re good and pruney! ”
***
The way the maid clutched that hatbox told Roger it didn’t contain something for her mistress. Lady Georgette had been as foolishly indulgent as he suspected she was and had bought something brand new for her servant.
Gobberd was right on that score. Such unnecessary generosity did nothing but create a soft underclass that would soon begin to feel itself ill-used if it wasn’t coddled and pandered to.
But Lady Georgette’s largesse played right into Roger’s hand, so he couldn’t find too much fault.
As soon as Lady Georgette and her maid disappeared around the corner, Roger ducked into the milliner’s shop they’d just exited.
Festooned with lace and feathers and a rainbow of ribbons, the place positively reeked of femininity.
Scents of linen and talc, with an undernote of glue and the faint metallic tang of mercury, tickled his nostrils.
“My lord,” the shopkeeper said with a deferential curtsy.
She was a fine-boned, swan-necked woman, and ordinarily he’d be very much interested in her. However, just now he had another woman in his sights. He could always return to this shop on a later date to further his acquaintance with the milliner.
“How may I assist you this day?” she said.
“I require a bonnet,” he said, looking at those he thought might fit in the hatbox he’d seen Georgette’s abigail carrying. “A special one. One very like the bonnet you just sold. Do you by chance make duplicates of your designs?”
“Oh, no, milord,” the shopkeeper said, her wing-shaped brows arched in scandalized surprise. “All my creations are originals. Think how horrified a lady would be to discover another woman had the same bonnet as she.”
Not to mention that the lady would never buy so much as a fichu from that particular milliner’s shop again.
He picked up a simple bonnet. “Yes, quite. But I have in mind a harmless little joke between friends. What if I offered you a ridiculous sum?” He named a price that was easily five times the going rate for ladies’ headgear.
“Could you fashion an exact duplicate of the one you just sold? And it must be exactly the same, mind.”
The milliner nibbled her bottom lip, clearly tempted.
“I promise that your customer will never know you did it,” Roger said, holding a handful of coins before him in an open palm.
“How can you promise that, milord?”
“Because by the time Lady Georgette sees the bonnet, it will be flat as a flitter. This is part of a jest, you see,” he said.
“A harmless prank. But the bonnets must start out identical or the joke will fall”—he gave her his most winning smile and a self-deprecating shrug—“flat. Come. Take my blunt.”
Her eyes flared with longing as she gazed at the handful of gleaming coins. Most shops traded on credit. They were constantly cash-strapped, even if they served the most exclusive clientele, because they had to wait for their wellborn customers to deign to pay their bills.
The milliner snatched the money from him. “Return in three hours,” she said as she escorted him to the door and flipped over the sign, indicating that her shop was closed. “I’ll have it ready by then.”