Page 7 of A Delicate Deception
“Youtoldher?”
“As I said, I was sixteen and a consummate idiot. And I had a very bad case of spots.” She tilted her chin, presumably to show him the resulting scars, but he could not detect any in the dappled shade. “My sisters really do have steadier characters.”
He scrubbed his hand across his face. “I don’t find that at all hard to believe.” And then he realized what he had said, and he went still. “I beg your pardon—I didn’t mean—”
“Yes you did, and I’m taking it as a compliment. I will write it in my diary. Today a very large stranger laughed at my jokes and praised my talents as a comedienne—”
“That is not—”
“—but he does not like cake, and I’m therefore inclined to disregard his opinions on all important matters.”
He buried his face in his hands, both to muffle his laugh and to cover the blush he knew had spread across his face.
Chapter Three
As if the imminent prospect of a duke in the neighborhood weren’t alarming enough, the next day brought Amelia’s quarterly parcel from her mother.
“Oooh,” Georgiana said, coming in from the garden with an armful of chrysanthemums. “Is that what I think it is?”
Amelia already knew what was in the parcel, but she tore it open anyway. Out tumbled three gowns: russet merino, emerald-green watered silk, and pearl-gray muslin. The muslin, at least, she might wear. She recognized her youngest sister’s hand in that last gown—something practical, something Amelia might actually use. Amelia had long since given up trying to explain to her mother that she had no use for fine clothes, seeing as how she had retired to the country with the express purpose of avoiding the kind of society where such attire would be required. But Amelia’s mother had always expressed her love in yards of silk and cashmere, and Amelia tried to receive the gesture as it was meant. Still, whenever she opened the clothes press she’d see those gowns silently judging her and finding her wanting.
Rationally, she knew she could have Janet, the housemaid, sell them and donate the proceeds to some worthy charity, or she could figure out a way to slip the funds into Georgiana’s bank account. Breathing the scent of the sachets her mother’s maid had laid between the layers of fabric made her heart race, but it also made her homesick.
She remembered years of similar gowns, and how by the end they had felt like stage costumes; every time she slipped one over her head, she assumed a role. At first that role hadn’t been a bad thing—she was used to the idea that being in polite society required a certain degree of performance, and was well aware that anything like her authentic self was grossly insufficient for most social situations. But by the end, the role had crowded out whatever was left of Amelia’s actual identity. That was the problem with being schooled from one’s earliest age to mask one’s emotions in favor of playing a role: it left one with no doubt as to the inadequacy of one’s true self. Mother would no doubt be horrified to hear Amelia say such a thing. She had always been generous with praise whenever Amelia behaved as she ought, and had never understood that this praise only confirmed that Amelia, as she truly was, warts and all, was unfit for human society.
With a shudder, she remembered the night of the incident, standing in the middle of a ballroom, crammed into that ghastly gown, and simply deciding that she was done, that she couldn’t endure one more minute of it. As she moved through the steps with her partner, she overheard the conversation of another couple on the dance floor. It had been a variation on a theme she had heard since she could remember being talked about, since she could remember even existing. The man had said to his partner that Amelia seemed ladylike, all things considered; the woman had responded that Amelia was harmless, and could be relied upon to make up one’s numbers at a dinner table at the last moment. And it had struck Amelia that this was the most she could hope for: all her mother’s work, all her half brother’s connections, day after day, year after year of checking every movement and weighing every word, and she had achieved harmlessness. At that moment, halfway through a gavotte that seemed like it would never end, she realized it wasn’t worth it.
Once she knew it, there was no unknowing it. As soon as she saw that she had nothing to lose—or nothing that she didn’t heartily wish to lose—she took a glance at her dance partner, who happened to be the Russian ambassador. She was on her best behavior, because the man had titles and medals and she was supposed to be very gratified that he wished to dance with her. If she made a mess of this, there would be disastrous consequences. And so, she made a mess of it. She turned, walked off the dance floor, out of the house, and directly home.
There had been a time when she had enjoyed things. Little things, like sneaking the kitten into church, and big things, like seeing her friends happy. But that last year in London, joy had been permanently out of reach, and the next-best thing—the absence of panic—she could only achieve with her bedroom door bolted and her eyes shut. She had tried to figure out where things went wrong, when the town she had loved began to close its walls in on her. Above all, she wanted to know when the simple act of being around people made her feel like an especially grotesque insect pinned to a board.
As her mother and sisters and friends had pointed out many times, she was, objectively, an unremarkable woman of four-and-twenty, not an eldritch creature from one of those novels she and Georgiana read. Sometimes she thought her perception had been skewed by those first few years of her life, when it had been Amelia and her mother, trying their hardest to appear what they decidedly were not, and having scorn heaped upon them whenever they fell short. A fallen woman, her illegitimate daughter, and everyone’s judgment landing squarely on them. Perhaps that was why she now needed to be spared the gaze of anyone who might see her and find her lacking. That was the only explanation she could think of for her present condition, unless she were to admit the possibility of madness.
Her heart pounded against her ribs, and she realized she was still clutching the gowns. She glared at the silks and satins in her arms. She was starting to think it was possible for inanimate objects to judge her. This could not be a good sign.
“So lovely,” Georgiana said, stroking a length of braid on the russet gown.
“You can have it,” Amelia said hastily. “Janet could take it in.”
“A perfect ninny I’d look in russet,” Georgiana said. And she was right, of course: the faded muslins and colorless round gowns Georgiana wore suited her pale coloring and white-blond hair.
“As if you could be anything other than stunning,” Amelia said, rising to her feet. “I was just heading out for a walk.”
“Now?” Georgiana asked. It was not the time for Amelia’s walk, and Georgiana was no more accustomed to Amelia doing things out of order than she was for the hands of the clock to start spinning backward.
“I’m feeling bold and daring,” Amelia announced. She was feeling penned in and increasingly hysterical, but she could do that out of doors as well as she could in the sitting room.
She swept up her shawl and bonnet and exchanged her slippers for a pair of sturdy boots and all but fled the house. It was a sunny day, a rare cloudless August afternoon. She drifted towards the stables, trying to look casual about the direction she was taking.
“No,” Keating said without looking up from the horse he was currying. Dash it. There was no getting anything past Keating.
“You don’t even know what I was going to ask,” Amelia said, trying and failing to keep the petulance from her voice.
“If you don’t think I know by now what a young person with a bad idea looks like, you can guess again. What was it going to be? Swimming in the pond? Learning to box? Setting something on fire? Doesn’t matter, leave me out of it.”
Amelia suppressed a smile. Thank goodness Keating had come with her to Derbyshire. Amelia and Keating had sort of inherited one another when his employer embarked on a tour of the continent with Amelia’s half brother, Alistair, Marquess of Pembroke. Keating would lie, steal, and perjure himself for Robin, but drew the line at going to France. He had remained in England, nominally to be Amelia’s general factotum, but, Amelia increasingly suspected, to keep an eye on her. He didn’t seem to think it was at all unusual for a pair of youngish ladies to live as recluses, or if he did, he didn’t talk about it. Amelia supposed that his years working for Robin had gotten him used to people who strayed from the beaten path.
Contrast that with the vicar, who seemed to think that Amelia belonged either in Bedlam or a home for wayward girls, and that Georgiana had come to Derbyshire to tempt men into wickedness by performing such risqué acts as existing while being pretty.
