Page 8 of Undercover with the Heiress
‘And I will wear my blue dress. The one with the hand-painted flowers and the lace.’
‘Yes, miss. You told me that’s what you’d like this morning. And after lunch. I’ve had it all pressed and ready for you for hours.’
‘Sorry, Becca. I’m just nervous.’
‘You, nervous? I haven’t known you to be nervous since I first came through the front door. I’ll never forget. Starting a new job, thinking it would be a lazy dream. Just a regular family done good who wanted some help looking the part. Wasn’t I in for it, finding a firebrand spit of a girl telling me how she liked things to be, and only six years old.’ Becca shook her head, smiled, and picked up her comb. ‘It’s all in hand, don’t you worry. You focuson looking your elegant best for that poor young man who seems to be so smitten with you.’
‘Becca!’
Becca chuckled as she set to work, pinning Rosanna’s long brown hair into place.
‘I want everything to be perfect.’
She had to be perfect.Everythinghad to be perfect. Because today, if he asked—and he seemed so close to asking… If he asked today, she had decided that she would say yes. She would not change the conversation. She would not encourage interruption. If he said,Be my wife, she would say,I will.
She’d be a lady. Independent. A fashionable figure in society. The woman who had everything.
A thump and a squeal came from the hallway, followed by a shout from Beatrice. ‘Keep your stupid things on your side of the room!’
Rosanna took a slow breath. She would not be flustered. She would not get angry and let her face flush. She would not break a sweat. Not today.
‘Mama says I cannot play on the stairs,’ Nova argued, her light young voice serious, pleading for understanding from her older sister. ‘And there isn’t enough space to line up all the carriages on my side of the room.’
‘Johannes!’ Elliot called from somewhere further down the hall. ‘Come to the courtyard. I made a new batch of pin-wheel firecrackers, and I want to test them.’
‘Becca!’ Beatrice swung the door to Rosanna’s room open. Becca jolted. Rosanna winced as the comb scratched hard into her scalp. ‘Was my lilac dress pressed? I’m going to be late for my dramatics club.’
Rosanna grasped the edge of her stool and twisted around to face her sister. ‘Do you have knuckles?’ she snapped.
Beatrice looked down at her fingers. ‘Of course.’
‘Use them! Knock first!’ Rosanna hated the return to childhood frustrations with her slightly younger sister, but she also found immense comfort in her anger. Thirty minutes, just thirty quiet minutes was all she asked for. So that she might dress and prepare herself to meet with Lord Richard on what might be the most momentous day of her life. Could she not have a small sliver of time? Of quiet?
‘But if I’m late, I’ll lose my place in the tableau,’ Beatrice pleaded.
Rosanna met Becca’s gaze in the mirror. ‘Finish my hair. Then help Beatrice find her dress. Come back afterwards and help me finish dressing.’
Becca worked fast, remembering the feathers but forgetting the beads. When done, she scampered from the room and across the hallway.
Rosanna picked up the string of seed beads and tucked them into her braid. For as long as she could remember, Rosanna had been responsible for dressing herself. It was only in the last half a dozen years that the long hours of building, opening, and running the three Asters had brought in substantial returns and drastically altered the family’s fortunes. The changes in their lives had been fully realised about a year before she debuted, at the slightly older age of twenty. Rosanna had entered society as if she had always been a woman with confident wealth behind her. No one bothered to examine how things had been before. No one knew that Becca had first been hired as a general house mistress, and that her mother didn’t keep her own help, and that Rosanna and Beatrice had dressed themselves and braided one another’s hair for their first encounters with society. No one seemed to care.
The house echoed with the steadybongof the clock in the hall.
‘Heavens.’ Rosanna leapt from her chair and pulled open the door to lean into the hallway. ‘Becca! Are you coming back to help me with my dress?’
Johannes’s and Elliot’s light laughter floated up through the stairwell, and Nova clattered past, her hair streaming behind her. But no sound announcing Beatrice or Becca followed. The lastbongrang out loud. Seven o’clock.
Lord Richard hated to be kept waiting.
‘Blast and drat it.’ Rosanna huffed to herself. ‘Just one night. One night without noise and hassle and drama. Is that too much to ask? Obviously, yes.’ She pulled the bustle from where it had been laid out on the bed, stepped into the cage, then pulled it up over her bottom. She fastened the belt at her waist before checking herself in the mirror. Satisfied it hung straight, she snatched her cotton petticoat and tugged it over her head. A button caught on her hair.
‘Miss!’ Becca called from the door. ‘Look what you’ve done. Why didn’t you wait for me?’
Becca tutted and tugged at the petticoat until it lay smooth. Rosanna raised her arms as Becca gently angled the dress over her head. While Becca fixed the buttons, Rosanna fanned beneath her arms. Should she add a splash more rose water? Or would it be too much and she’d smell like she had marinated in it? The clock struck half past. No time, there was simply not enough time. Becca cinched the ribbon at Rosanna’s waist.
‘Thank you!’ Rosanna called as she yanked the door open and raced down the hall.
A quick glance to make sure she didn’t collide with anyone descending from the upper floor, and Rosanna clutched the banister to set off down the stairs. Above was the nursery for the younger children and where Becca and Nanny Abigail slept, while this floor was firmly the domain of the older Hempel children. Six of them, aged between eight and twenty-three, distributed between four rooms. The hallway on their level always had a slightly dishevelled look, with wallpaper faded from little hands trailing its edges, crumbs from biscuits smuggled from the kitchen ground into the carpet, and the endless shouts of fights or games bouncing off its walls and doors.
