Page 50 of The Mad Baron's Bride
How could a woman, knowing the heat of his embrace, the safety of his arms, ever bear to part from him? What could possibly have driven his wife away?
Leda cleared her throat. “Why do they call him the Mad Baron?”
Her conspirators considered this question, looking to one another for assistance.
“He’s the one as drove her to it,” said a new voice at Leda’s ear.
Leda turned and saw a girl, barely to her shoulder, clad in a prim printed calico. Dark hair lay pinned beneath a straw bonnet, and a white tucker like a child would wear filled the neckline of her gown, but a black ribbon tied around her throat lent her a more mature aspect. Leda guessed she was thirteen, perhaps fourteen—a girl on the cusp of womanhood, and seemingly, from the unease in her stance, unsure how she felt about it.
“The mad-making baron, then,” Leda said.
The girl nodded, her eyes narrowing. Their color was startling, the green of seaweed that speckled the shore. Leda had seen that color. Recently.
“You think he drove her to despair?” Leda questioned. The girl’s serious demeanor roused her curiosity.
“Such a barney he had to get her,” Jane said thoughtfully, shaking her head. “Then to find she’s not keen to the shackle.”
“Thas all mardle, hintut,” Ellen said. “Nowt but gossip and talk. How you goin, Miss Nora?”
The girl raised her chin. She had a fine-boned beauty to her, like expensive porcelain. “None too sadly. It’s a tidy place I have, when the missus isn’t titchy.”
“Nora works for the Waddelows,” Mary said, hushed as if it were a secret. “In the house we shewed yew.” She nodded toward Hope House.
“Where Anne-Marie grew up?” Leda asked, surprised. “Did you know her?”
The girl stiffened. “I was a babe when she married,” she said. “A foundling. And the Missus said I wasn’t goin with her when she married, so I’m a maid of all work now, aren’t I.”
“Good of Missus Waddelow, warnt it,” Mary remarked, with the air of someone rehearsing a fact she didn’t quite believe.
Jack lifted his head and looked over the market, searching for something. His eyes paused on Leda, and his lips half-lifted, as if he smiled despite himself. He did have a delicious mouth, that man.
Then he noticed Nora, and the smile froze.
Leda’s skin prickled, and she looked around. Muriel had given up on the chicken and she, too, stared, not at Leda, but at Nora, as if the girl were a wild creature chained to a stake. Nora stared back at Muriel for a long moment, her lips tightening into a line.
A cool wind swirled through the marketplace, winter on the back of it, as if spring were yet far away. Leda was glad she had worn her flannel petticoat.
“You have some lovely ribbons on your bonnet,” Leda said, struck by one of those intuitions she didn’t question. “I’ve been searching out ribbons for Muriel. Can you help me look?”
Nora softened and started toward a table across the way, where a woman sat behind a small folding table drifted over with trimmings, feathers and buttons and bows. “That girl needs a treat, she does.”
“You know her?”
“We’ve never spoken.”
The two girls converged before the ribbon as if they’d made an assignation. They stared at one another, both with the same mother-of-pearl skin, the same light green eyes, Nora’s dark hair beside Muriel’s red, the color of fired clay.
“Hello, Muriel,” Nora said. “Your lady friend said you wish for a ribbon.”
Muriel clamped her lips together. “She’s not a lady, an she’s not my friend.”
“That is true,” Leda said, though her stomach pinched like she’d been poked with a pin. Muriel would resist even the smallest overtures, it would seem. “Our acquaintance at this point is very slight.”
“And she willnotmarry my da and carry him off with her, howsomever,” Muriel said.
“That’s a caution did she do,” Nora answered. “You’ll want a green for your eyes, then? Or a red to go with that sash on your frock.”
While the girls discussed colors and textures, Leda turned to the peddler who had come alongside. Pans hung from the sack slung across his back, and he had the weary, wizened look of a man worn down by the elements. A sparkle entered his eyes when he heard Leda’s request, and in short order he had located her item within one of his many packs.
