Page 224 of The Ladies Least Likely
Ren announced that he would wait for them downstairs and exited the room. Harriette checked that her hat was securely fastened to her powdered coils of hair and then took Amalie’s arm as they leisurely descended the curving staircase, giving Ren plenty of time to proceed unobserved at his own pace.
“Did you know that in the Dark Ages, marked children were the sign of a magical bloodline?” Harriette said. “My friend at school told me the legend of a great lady named Mélusine who had ten sons, all of them with some oddity. One had two different colored eyes, like you. One had three eyes.” She winced. “One had a tuft of hair on his nose, and one had a lion’s claw protruding from his cheek, and one had an enormous tooth. They called him Geoffrey Great Tooth, and he was considered quite fierce and marvelous.”
“But why did they have these strange marks?” Amalie questioned, dubious.
“Well, at some point in their marriage, Mélusine’s husband discovered she was of the fairy, and she suffered a curse thatturned her into a serpent from the waist down one day a week. So he accused her of infecting his sons with demon blood, and that is when she turned into a dragon and leaped out the window and flew away, never to be seen in human form again.”
“So the children looked as they did because they were part demon,” Amalie said flatly.
“No, my point is that they were all considered quite strong and marvelous, and their outward defects were marks that they were magical. Set apart.”
“I do not wish to be set apart,” Amalie said as they turned the last curve from the first floor toward the ground level. “I wish to be like everyone else.”
“While every normal girl wishes she were remarkable,” Harriette replied. “Which reminds me that my friend Amaranthe, who told me this story, is now pledged to marry the new Duke of Hunsdon. I really ought to call on her.” Not least because her friend might have some advice for Harriette about how to behave as a duchess when one had been an unacknowledged nobody all one’s life.
“Oh, dear, what is the matter now?” Amalie murmured as they moved down the last flight of stairs towards Ren, who stood watching with fascination the mill unfolding in his entrance hall.
Two footmen in Renwick livery, the hall boy, and a groom stood clustered around two men in the doorway, while Dunstan the butler hovered at the back of the group, curious and dismayed. Beater stood in the open double doors, brandishing an enormous fur muff as large as his torso, apparently using it to act out some prize fight of his past. Jock leaned on his crutches beside him, laughing at the amazement on the faces of the footmen as Beater swung and feinted, astonishingly light on his feet for a man his size.
“S’enough to suffocate a grown man, it is,” Jock hooted.
Amalie faltered on the stairs as she saw the group. Her eyes went to Jock with his twisted legs, leaning on his crutches. His tight coat outlined the wiry muscles in his arms and chest. Beater stopped his play and turned brick red. Amalie clapped her hand over her sleeve and turned nearly the same color, the blush spreading down her pretty throat.
“Thank you, and I hope you have not dirtied the princess’s muff by defeating it in a match,” Harriette said, stepping forward. The crowd of men melted away as she plucked the muff out of Beater’s hand. “Lady Amalie, this is John Beater, former champion of the ring and now footman and groom to the Countess of Calenberg, and Henry Jock, former champion of the racecourse, her ladyship’s equerry. Men, this is Lady Amalie, Renwick’s younger sister. You’ll forgive Jock if he doesn’t bend a knee to the floor,” she added.
“Oh, I can bend a knee, Lady H,” Jock said smartly. “It’s getting me up off the floor again you won’t like.”
He gave Amalie a bold wink. Her blush deepened.
“I don’t—that is—how very nice to meet you,” Amalie stammered. Harriette handed her the muff and she looked at it as if not knowing what to make of it. Harriette slid the enormous confection onto the girl’s left arm, then lifted her right hand and tucked it into the silken lining. In an instant Amalie’s defects were invisible.
“Oh, my word—this is the most luxurious thing I’ve ever felt in my life,” Amalie murmured in rapture.
“Is it not? We all steal it and take turns wearing it when Princess isn’t about,” Harriette said. “She ordered it from Paris for the winter and we can’t put it away even if it is high summer. If I sketched you now for Mary Darly, she would no doubt put you in her satire of ‘Wigs,’ wearing that.”
“How many w-rabbits gave their li-life to make that extravagance?” Ren asked, making his way down the last of the stairs.
“It’s perfect. Thank you for bringing it to me, Lady Harriette.” Amalie turned a beaming smile on Harriette’s men.
Beater tipped his hat with a bashful smile, then jostled Jock with an elbow and muttered under his breath. “Shut yer trap, man, yer catchin’ flies.”
Jock snapped his mouth shut.
“You l-look quite the fashion plate, sister,” Ren said. “Are you willing to come with us now?”
Amalie hugged her muff, beaming. “I suppose I am.”
She watched Jock with cautious interest, and the groom threw out his chest as he swung out the door to the very smart town coach waiting before the house. With a nod to the driver, Jock went to the near horse and pulled himself onto its back, arranging his legs against the animal’s sides. Beater collected the discarded crutches and swung with them onto the platform at the back of the coach, nodding to the footmen who had turned out to see them off with reverential stares and murmurs.
Ren watched Amalie enter the carriage with a look of wonder and soft affection, and Harriette’s heart melted. “Come, milord, pleasure awaits us.”
It was the wrong thing to say. His eyes heated with that inner flame, and a like flame leapt to life within her, creating different melting sensations in that place in her middle that turned so aware and sensitive when he was near.
“If only.” He bent his head to drop the words near her ear, then took her arm.
Harriette shivered with the mingled pain and pleasure of the fiercest longing she had ever known in her life. If only this man could be hers. If his sister could be her sister. It was wrong to covet something she couldn’t have.
But it didn’t make her want it any less.
