Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
“There now, do smile, dearest. A bride ought not to look so glum upon her own wedding morning.”
The woman worked a last pin into Diana’s hair as she spoke, then stood back to admire her handiwork with the satisfaction of a cook who has iced a difficult cake.
She was a brisk, capable creature, engaged for the morning at the new Viscountess’s particular direction, and Diana had not warmed to her in the three hours she had spent beneath her hands.
One did not, she had found, warm easily to a stranger paid out of Octavia’s purse.
“You will be the loveliest bride the season has seen,” the woman went on, twitching the folds of the gown into place. “A duchess, only think of it. There are a hundred girls in this city who would give their all to stand where you stand this morning, and here you sit with a face like a wet Sunday.”
Diana said nothing. She looked into the glass instead, and a stranger looked back.
The gown was ivory silk, cut fine, finer than anything she had ever worn.
She did not have to wonder whose vanity had paid for it.
Her dark hair had been dressed high and threaded with seed pearls.
Her cheeks had been pinched to a becoming color, and her lips reddened with the least touch of salve, and the whole effect was of a lovely, poised, accomplished young lady upon the happiest morning of her life.
I do not know her, Diana thought, looking at the woman in the mirror. I have never met this woman in all my life.
A soft knock came at the door, and it opened, and Betsy put her head in.
Diana turned from the glass so quickly that the dresser clucked in reproach.
“Betsy.” Her chest eased at the sight of the familiar, careworn face.
“Come in, please.” She turned to the hired woman and made her voice as pleasant as she could manage.
“Would you be so good as to leave us a moment? I should like a private word with our maid before it is time. You have worked so hard—do take a little rest.”
The woman’s mouth pursed, but there was no refusing a bride so near the altar. She gathered her pins and swept out with a rustle of disapproval. The latch locked behind her.
Diana was on her feet at once. She came to the little writing table, drew open the drawer, and took out a small purse, worn at the seams, heavier than it looked.
“Betsy.” She pressed it into the older woman’s hands and folded the work-roughened fingers closed over it. “This is for you. Do not open it now, and do not refuse it. It is everything I have put by. Every quarter of pin money I never spent, these five years and more.”
“Miss Diana—”
“Listen to me. Please.” Her voice would not hold quite steady, and she gave over trying to make it.
“Keep my sister safe. Keep her fed, and warm, and out of that woman’s way as much as ever you are able.
And if it should grow worse, if she is ever truly in want, or in danger, or if a hand is raised to her, you are to bring her to me.
To Rosewood. However you must contrive it. Do you understand?”
For that was the whole of Diana’s plan, such as it was.
She would go to the Duke’s house a bride, and once she was its mistress in name she would find some way to send for Arabella and keep her there, out of Octavia’s reach forever.
She had tried, this past week, to arrange it beforehand.
She begged for leave to write to the Duke himself and put the question to him plainly, whether her sister might not come to live with them.
But her father had refused her both the pen and the paper.
The girl means to bolt, he had said; the moment she was out that door on some pretext she would run and shame them all.
And Octavia had stood at his shoulder and fanned that little flame most tenderly, until Diana had not been suffered to set a foot beyond the front step unaccompanied.
So the thing must wait until she was married and gone.
It was a poor, thin plan, built all of hope and hurry. It was the only one she had.
Betsy’s eyes had filled. She gripped the purse hard against her apron.
“I will guard her with my life, Miss Diana. You have my solemn word upon it, before God. As I would have guarded you, had they let me. As I guarded your dear mother, rest her soul, every day of the sixteen years I dressed her hair.”
Diana’s throat closed. That was the reason she trusted this woman and no other in all her father’s house; she learned it only a fortnight past, quite by chance, from a word let slip in the kitchen.
Betsy had been her mother’s own maid. Sixteen years at the late Viscountess’s side, and kept on after her death out of some last remnant of the master’s grief, then put down to scrub and carry once that grief wore thin, and the new mistress came.
Of everyone beneath this roof, only Betsy had loved the woman Diana had lost. Only Betsy could be trusted to love what that woman had left behind.
“Then I am easy,” Diana said, though she was not, and would not be until Arabella was safe beside her.
“One thing more. Keep her with you today, in the kitchen, the garden, anywhere but the church. I will not have her at the wedding. She has wept enough this week. I will not have her stand there and watch me taken away and think it a thing to grieve over.” She managed the ghost of a smile.
“I’ll tell her, miss.”
Betsy pressed her hand and slipped out. The door had scarcely closed before it opened again, without a knock this time, and Lady Westleigh came in, resplendent in dove-gray, and stopped, and looked back over her shoulder down the passage after the departing servant.
“Who was that?”
“A maid,” Diana said. “She came to ask whether I had eaten anything this morning.”
Octavia gave a short laugh through her nose. “Eaten. Who in her senses eats before a wedding? You will lace out of that gown before the vicar has done.”
“You would know, I suppose.” Diana turned back to the glass and smoothed her gloves with great care. “This is not your first marriage, after all.”
The laugh vanished. In the mirror, Diana watched the lovely face go hard, and found she did not much care.
“You are very free with that tongue this morning, girl.” Octavia’s voice had dropped its music. Diana rolled her eyes and Octavia’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Mind yourself with me, Diana Fernside. You forget your sister remains beneath my roof.”
And there it was. Diana set down the glove. She turned from the mirror and looked the woman full in the face, and when she spoke it was quite quietly, and quite without heat, which made it the worse.
“Should any harm come to my sister while she is in your keeping, any harm at all, I will cease this charade of polite play.” For a moment the Viscountess said nothing. Something flickered behind her eyes, surprise, perhaps, that the sullen chit had teeth after all.
Then Diana laughed, light and bright, and the spell broke. “But how foolish of me. We need none of us fret over that, for you are kindness itself. Papa says so a dozen times a day. You would never do a child the smallest wrong. Would you?”
“So long as she keeps to her tasks and makes herself of some use, she and I shall do very well.” Octavia lifted her chin. “I am not a woman to coax and pet other people’s children, whatever your papa may fancy. She would do well to learn it early.”
I must find a way to reach the Duke myself, Diana thought, with a new clarity. Betsy is not enough. I must reach him, and soon, or that woman will grind my sister down to nothing while I am away.
The door opened a third time, and her father stepped in, and in the space of a single breath the Viscountess was transformed. Her shoulders softened. Her eyes brimmed. She pressed a hand to her breast as though wounded to the quick.
“I know she does not trust me, my lord,” she said, before Diana could speak a word, “but I would sooner die than do that dear child any hurt—”
“What is this?” The Viscount crossed to his wife and took her by the arms, all tender concern, his frown bent not upon her but upon his daughter. “What has been said? Octavia, my love, what has upset you so?”
Diana looked at her father, at the soft, foolish, grieving man this woman had made of him, and was surprised to find she had no tears left for him at all.
“I told her the truth,” she said. “That I do not trust her to care for Arabella. That is all.”
“Diana!” her father snapped.
She smiled, her face stretched as she struggled to hide her growing rage. “May I have some time alone?”
For a long moment her father stared, his color rising, his jaw working. Whatever he saw in her face seemed at last to persuade him, for he mastered himself, and turned, and bent his head close to his wife’s.
“Come, my dear,” he said softly. “Leave her. Let her stew.”
And they went out together, the two of them, and the door fell shut. Diana let out a long breath she felt she had been holding since the day the woman first crossed their doorstep.
She sank upon the little stool before the glass and pressed her cold hands to her colder cheeks.
She might have run. She knew that she might.
Henrietta had offered it more than once, and even now, did she choose it, there were doors in London that would open to a viscount’s daughter with a friend and a little courage.
But it had never been for herself that Diana stayed.
She could weather this city and all its cruelties; she had the wit and the years for it, and a runaway who was grown might contrive, somehow, to live.
A child of eight could not. Arabella needed what only a settled house could give her, a roof, a fire, a name, a father, poor thing though he had become.
To take the child and flee was to trade one danger for far worse.