Page 37 of Reforming Lord Ragsdale
“Other foot.”
She leaned the other way as he held that ankle.Such a shapely foot, he thought as he carefully traced it. Not small, he considered, half-enjoying the weight of her against his shoulder. He looked at the papers. “Well, what color do you want?”
“Black or brown; something sensible. And if you please, stockings to match, my lord,” she said. She sounded embarrassed at the intimacy of their association, so he did not look at her while she stepped into her shoes again.
“I’m surprised your Virginia indenture holders didn’t see that you were better shod,” he said as he took the papers and stood up. He looked at her then, and her cheeks were still pink.
“My lord, I think you will understand the matter more completely when you consider that Robert Claridge’s bills generally outran the family’s entire quarterly allowance,” was her quiet reply as she took her seat at the desk again.
He strolled over to sit on the desk, ignoring his mother’s voice calling to him from the front entrance. “So you were the afterthought.”
“I and the other servants, sir,” she said, dipping the quill tip into the ink bottle again. She looked at him in that calculated way of hers, as though gauging his response. “And I have to tell you that I like going barefoot in the summer, so please don’t feel sorry for me, Lord Ragsdale.”
She turned again to the letter in front of her, effectively dismissing him from his own book room. He grinned at her impertinence and left the room.
Lasker hovered outside the door, obviously sent by Lady Ragsdale to tell him to hurry up but also obviously reluctant to tell him anything. “It’s all right, Lasker, I’ll go peacefully,” he said, pleased with himself to earn one of the butler’s rare smiles. “And you take these to wherever it is Lady Ragsdale gets her shoes made. I want one pair of sturdy brown shoes.” He started down the hall, then turned back, grinning broadly. “And another pair of red Morocco dancing slippers. Good night, Lasker. You needn’t wait up,” he added, knowing that the butler would be sitting ramrod straight in one of the entryway chairs until the last titled member of the household was indoors and abed. It was their little fiction.
~
Truly enough, there was Lasker waiting for them when they returned in that late hour just before the dark yielded to the blandishments of another day, careering in from the east. He handed his mother and cousin their candles, wished them both good night, and went to the book room, hoping that Emma might still be up. He wanted to tell her about the diamond of the first water—a daughter of Sir Edmund Partridge—who had flirted with him mildly, and who appeared, when he worked up the nerve to converse with her, to have at least some wit. He wanted to tell Emma that he and Clarissa Partridge were destined to witness a balloon ascension—he whipped out his pocket watch—in eight hours.
But the book room was dark. He held his own candle over the desk, where Emma had arranged the letter she hadcomposed for him to Sir Augustus Barney, and the other to his bailiff. He picked up the letter to his bailiff and read it, noting that she had changed some of his dictated wording and added other passages. He read it again and had to admit that her changes were salutary. “Really, Emma,” he said out loud as he left the room, “you were supposed to be here so I could tell you about Clarissa Partridge. Do I have to doeverythingin this courting venture?”
Well, it would keep for the morning, he decided as he mounted the stairs. He stopped halfway up. Emma was taking her day off tomorrow, and he would not see her until the evening.Perhaps I was a little hasty with this day off, he thought. He continued up the stairs, putting Emma from his mind and wondering what one wore to a balloon ascension.
~
While the day could not have been deemed an unqualified success, at least Emma Costello ought to have the decency to hurry back from her day off so he could tell her about it, Lord Ragsdale decided the following evening as he paced back and forth in front of the sitting room window.
He had decided that he would begin by painting a word picture of Miss Partridge for Emma, describing her delicate features, her big brown eyes that reminded him of a favorite spaniel, long dead but still remembered, and her little trill of a laugh. Of course, by the time the balloonists had taken themselves up into the atmosphere, he did have the smallest headache, but he couldn’t attribute that to Clarissa’s endless stream of questions. He just wasn’t accustomed to having someone so small and lovely who smelled of rosewater hanging on his every word and looking at him with those spaniel eyes.
“Emma, you are certainly taking your time with this day off,” he muttered under his breath. He was beginning to feel that when Emma finally opened the door, a scold was in order. He would remind her that London was far from safeafter dark and that nasty customers liked to prey on unescorted women, especially if they were pretty.
There wasn’t anything else he could scold her about. When he had wakened in the morning, his correspondence was ready for his attention on the smaller table in his bedroom. He had signed the letters, initialed the morning’s bills, and noted with approval a newspaper article about Norfolk that she had circled to catch his attention. A man never had a better secretary than Emma Costello.
But where the deuce was she now? He clapped his hands together in frustration, imagining her conked on the head and being delivered unconscious to a white slaving ship anchored at Deptford Hard, even as he wore a path from window to window. One would think she would have more consideration for his feelings. That was the trouble with the Irish.
And then he saw her coming up the street, moving slowly, as though she dreaded the house and its occupants. As he watched, she stopped several times, as though steeling herself for the ordeal of entering into one of London’s finest establishments.
“The nerve of you,” he grumbled from his view by the partially screening curtain. “When I think of the legions of servants who would love to have half so fine a household as this one. . .”
Perhaps I am being unfair, he thought as he kept his eyes on her slow progress. She trudged as though filled with a great exhaustion, discouragement evident in the way she held herself. He thought she dabbed at her eyes several times, but he could not be sure. He waited for her knock, which did not come.You idiot, he realized finally,she has gone around to the alley and come in from the belowstairs entrance.He rang for Lasker.
“Tell Emma Costello that I would like a word with her,” he told the butler.
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“I was not aware that a day off meant a night off too,” he found himself telling Emma several minutes later when she knocked on the sitting-room door, and he opened it.
She mumbled something about being sorry, and it was a longer walk from the city than she realized.
She looked so discouraged from her day off that he felt like a heel for chiding her. Her eyes were filled with pain that shocked him. He wondered briefly if her feet in those dreadful shoes were hurting her, and then he understood that the look in her eyes was another matter. He stood in front of her, hand behind his back, rocking back and forth on his heels, feeling like a gouty old boyar chastising his serfs.
“I trust this won’t happen on your next day off,” he ventured, wishing suddenly with all his heart that she would tell him what was the matter.
If he was expecting a soft agreement from her, he was doomed to disappointment. At his sniping words, Emma seemed to visibly gather herself together, digging deep into some well of resource and strength that he knew he did not possess.
“It will probably happen again and again, my lord,” she replied, each word distinct, her brogue more pronounced than usual. “Unlike some of us in this room, I do not succumb easily to misfortune.”
