Eloisa James - Desperate Duchesses - 6 (20 page)

"What?" Eleanor asked. "Did you say that they are learning to be French?" "Exactly," Mrs.

Minchem said.

"This was one of my ideas!" Lisette cried, clapping her hands again. Villiers realized that he would be quite happy if Lisette never clapped again. "All the best ladies' maids are French, aren't they? So I told Mrs. Minchem that she simply must turn some of the girls into
mademoiselles."

"It took some doing," Mrs. Minchem said grimly. "But they've got the trick now, and I think they'll find good places. We had to give them fancy names, of course." She opened the door.

There were six girls, also wearing white gowns and seated in a circle, but instead of sewing, they were apparently having a tea party. As the door opened they rose to their feet, lined up, and dropped into a synchronized curtsy.

"Now girls," Mrs. Minchem said heavily, "demonstrate, if you please."

The tallest girl stepped forward and curtsied before Lisette.
"Bonjour, mademoiselle.

Comment allez-vous? Votre coiffe est très élégante."

"We concentrated on three things," Mrs. Minchem said. "A proper command of French, development of an appropriate accent while speaking English, and a French manner."

"A French manner?" Eleanor asked. "How does one quantity such a thing?"

"The national character of the French is frivolous," Mrs. Minchem announced. "It is their lack of practicality that explains why they do not thrive. Nevertheless, they are very good at hair and clothing. We teach the girls to be voluble, excitable, and easily swayed by passion. Demonstrate."

At a nod from the eldest pupil, two girls stood forward.

"Je m'appelle Lisette-Aimée,"
one said.

"Je m'appelle Lisette-Fleury,"
said the other.

"How adorable!" Lisette cried. "They both have my name!"

"They all respond to Lisette," Mrs. Minchem said in answer to Eleanor's questioning glance. "That makes it easier for the staff."

"Madame! Vos souliers sont salis. Permettez-moi 6e
les nettoyer pour vous," said the first in rapid French.

"Madame! S'il vous plait, attendez. Vous ne pouvez être vue ainsi! Votre tenue est en complet
désordre!"
said the other, her voice rising.

"Pardonnez-moi,"
cried the first, collapsing into the second's arms.

"Enough," Mrs. Minchem said.

The girls sprang apart and dropped into identical curtsies.

"The girls will be a credit to this establishment," Mrs. Minchem said, opening the door "We will place them with gentlewomen in the next few months."

"There is something extremely bizarre about Mrs. Minchem," Eleanor said quietly to Villiers as they followed the other two down the corridor again.

"Did you think that the two Lisettes at the end of the line looked alike?" Villiers asked.

"They were not identical, and they were older than your children, no?"

"Apparently, my daughters are identical."

"Then they have not been turned into Frenchwomen."

"Thank God for small favors," Villiers said. He was starting to get an edgy, angry feeling.

Ahead of them Lisette apparently grew tired of listening to Mrs. Minchem prose on about the virtues of laundry. She abruptly turned to the side and put a hand on a doorknob.

"I must insist that you allow me to direct your visit!" Mrs. Minchem snapped.

Villiers eyed the two women. Mrs. Minchem had burning eyes and the voice of a circus barker. But he'd put his money on Lisette. The more he saw of her, the more she seemed like a force of nature.

Sure enough, with a charming smile that completely ignored Mrs. Minchem's purple cheeks, Lisette turned the doorknob and pranced inside.

"Ugh," Eleanor said, and hurried forward.

Villiers took the opportunity to open another door, the one closest to him, and walk through. Inside, a half circle of girls sat before the window, heads bent over their work. He stopped, feeling foolish. The girls sprang to their feet, but without Mrs. Minchem there, they obviously didn't know where to look, or whether to curtsy. "Good morning," he said, closing the door behind him.

"Good morning," they chorused, after a nod from the tallest girl. Then they dropped one of those uncannily accurate curtsies.

"What are you working on?" he asked uneasily. As far as he could tell there were no twins in the group.

There was a silence. "Buttons, sir," the tallest girl said finally.

One had to suppose that buttons were made somewhere, but Villiers had never imagined that they came from orphanages.

"Are there any twins in the orphanage?" he asked abruptly.

Again, they all blinked at him, until the tallest girl said," Jane-Lucinda and Jane-Phyllinda were born on the same day, sir."

"Did they have the same mother?"

They all nodded at that.

"Where are they?"

"Phyllinda was rude again and they're—" the youngest girl piped up, and abruptly went silent after a ferocious look from the tallest girl.

"I'm sure we wouldn't know, sir," she said calmly. "We're snails, and Jane-Lucinda and Jane-Phyllinda are gold twist."

"Snails!"

She didn't smile. "We are making snail buttons, trimmed with French knots. Sometimes known as death's-head buttons," she added.

Villiers looked down the row of perfectly solemn faces. "You refer to yourself as snails?"

"We make snail buttons."

He nodded. "And your names?"

"Mary-Alice, Mary-Bertha, Mary..." And so it went. There were six Marys. Villiers bowed. "Where will I find the Janes?"

There was a moment of silence. "Two doors down on the left, sir," the girl said finally. "But you won't—" said the little girl, and stopped again.

In the hallway everything was quiet. Two doors down on the left he found a circle of girls. The only difference was that these girls were wearing brown pinafores over their white dresses. "Are you the Janes?" he asked.

They sprang to their feet, lined up and dropped a curtsy. He looked them up and down but there wasn't a face there that resembled his own.

"Where are Jane-Lucinda and Jane-Phyllinda?" he asked.

The youngest girl in the row put her fingers in her mouth, but otherwise no one moved "We really couldn't say, sir," the tallest girl finally said.

He looked down the row. Cowed, dull eyes stared back at him until he reached the youngest, the one sucking on her fingers. Her eyes were bright blue: cautious, but awake.

He walked over to her. "What is your name?"

"Jane-Melinda," she said around her fingers. "Hands out of your mouth," the eldest girl snapped.

Jane-Melinda took her fingers out of her mouth, and Villiers grabbed her wrist before he was even aware of what he was doing. Her fingers were bleeding, four of them, and the fifth was deeply scored.

"What in the hell is this about?" he asked, putting her hand down gently and turning to the head of the line.

"Gold twist can be hard to manage in the beginning," the girl said.

He picked up the hands of the girl next in line. Her fingers were swollen, grotesque, and bleeding sluggishly in a few spots. The brown pinafores suddenly made sense.

In the middle of the circle was a basket full of buttons, glittering in the sunlight. Before each chair was a half-covered bobbin, a nub of a button in the process of being wound with the treacherously fine, cutting gold twist.

"It's wire," the tall girl said, ducking her head as though ashamed. "It does hurt now and then but you have to make it tight or the button falls apart."

"Christ," he said under his breath. And then: "Tell me where to find Lucinda and Phyllinda,
now."

The eldest girl froze, trembling. "I daren't," she gasped. "Mrs. Minchem..."

Down to his left, the smallest spoke. She had her fingers back in her mouth so it was difficult to understand her.

"Jane-Lucinda was smart to Mrs. Minchem," she said, big blue eyes fixed on Villiers's face. "So she was sent to that place. And Jane-Phyllinda went with her, of course."

"Where is that place?" he asked. And then realized that his voice must be quite awful, as a few girls flinched.

"The sty," the eldest girl finally whispered.

"The pigsty?" He could see the confirmation in their eyes, so he stepped back and made an elegant bow. He didn't know what to do. He didn't have any boiled sweets. He had nothing to give children with bleeding fingers.

The basket of gold twist buttons twinkled up at him innocently from the floor. He couldn't leave them to twist more wire. "Come along, all of you," he said, turning to the door.

"Wh-What?" It was the tallest girl, Jane-something.

"Follow me," he said impatiently. "I can't leave you here." He looked back and held out his hand."Melinda."

She trotted over to him and put a warm, wet hand in his. He tried not to think about blood and saliva, but simply pulled open the door and exited.

The corridor wasn't the quiet refuge he had rushed through on the way from the snails to the gold twists. He came out like a mother duck, trailing a limp line of girls in brown pinafores to find a group of screaming females milling around.

Mrs. Minchem was in the middle, looking like Lot's wife after the salt hit: stiff and bitter. Eleanor was in front of her, yelling something. Her whole body was so vibrant with fury that he was surprised that Mrs. Minchem didn't just dissolve. Lisette was off to the side, surrounded by a circle of girls in white dresses.

"Who are these girls?" he said, looking down at Melinda. She had edged closer to him at the first sight of Mrs. Minchem, and was sucking her right hand again.

"The Sarahs," she said, rather obscurely.

"What do they make?"

"Wigs," one of the other Janes said. "They make perukes for gentlemen."

That didn't sound as difficult as gold buttons. Villiers strode forward as if he always had a small girl in one hand and a train of others following.

Eleanor swung around. Her eyes were smoldering, but not in a sensual manner. Rather, she looked like a firework about to explode. "Villiers, you will not believe the manner in which these children are treated!"

She had exploded, obviously.

Unfortunately, Mrs. Minchem was also an exploding rocket. She gobbled in a voice so high and screechy that he could hardly understand it.

He dropped Melinda's hand, since he needed that hand to draw his sword stick. It slid free from its sheath with a swoosh.

Instant silence.

It was quite gratifying.

"Now that I have your attention," he said, "I have one question. Where is the punishment room, Mrs.

Minchem? Or should I say, the pigsty?"

Eleanor drew in her breath, but what really interested him was the way Mrs. Minchem drew up her bosom. It was a formidable bosom. It jutted before her like the prow of a ship approaching a new land.

"You are interfering with my methods," she spat. "Why have the Janes left their work?" She rounded on the eldest Jane. "How dare you, Jane-Jolinda? You will not finish your quota!"

Melinda pressed against Villiers's leg.

"The Janes will never make a gold button again," he told her. He brought the tip of his sword gently down to the ground. Everyone's eyes followed its bright surface.

Mrs. Minchem didn't quail. Instead she took a step forward. "Do you dare to threaten me? Me, who cares for the neglected orphans of England? Me, who spends every waking moment of my day shaping these negligent bits of humanity into something that society might find useful? Me?" She wasn't shrieking anymore. Her voice had taken on the brawny tones of a dockworker.

"Yes, you," Villiers stated.

She laughed at him. "I do the work that no one else wants to do. My girls won't be prey to the likes of you. They'll know a trade when they leave me. You think you can come in here and lord about, but what do you really have in the way of morals?" She spat it.

He managed not to flinch.

"I see that you think you're coming in here like a knight in shining armor, coming to save the poor orphans. You fool, you fool! Do you have any idea how much work it takes me to give each of them a trade and a sense of purpose? And you—you're one of them!"

"Them?" he asked. Melinda was clinging to his pantaloons now, so he switched his sword to his left hand and put his right on the child's shoulder.

Mrs. Minchem's eyes were maddened now. "You're one of the men who incontinently fill the landscape with the offspring of your illicit, your disgusting, unions!"

Villiers resisted the impulse to cover Melinda's ears. It was regrettable that Mrs. Minchem actually had a point.

Eleanor marched around to confront Mrs. Minchem. "The pedigree of these children does not excuse your treatment." Her voice was at once soft and terrible, and cut through the woman's strident tones like a knife. "You are wrong to treat them so,
wrong."

"What do you know of these girls?" Mrs. Minchem said shrilly. "If I do not subdue them, keep them working, they will betray their origins. They will become nightwalkers, like their mothers."

"I will not bandy words with you," Eleanor said, and there was a crushing finality to her tone.

"Leopold, summon your footmen. Mrs. Minchem will be leaving the premises and she may need an escort."

Taking just a split second to savor the fact that she'd used his given name instead of his title, Villiers turned to the eldest Jane. "My coachman is waiting in the courtyard, fetch a footman." She scurried off after one look at Mrs. Minchem, who was shuddering, like the surface of a seething volcano.

"You—you—"

"Hush," Eleanor said, cutting through her words. "You can explain yourself to a judge. The children have heard enough, and so have I."

Villiers thought of agreeing, and decided that would be undignified. "Lisette," Eleanor said, not raising her voice. Lisette skipped up, children clinging to both hands.

"We need a good woman to make sure these children are warm and clothed, and that their injuries are attended to. Do you know of someone in the village, or in your household?"

"I've never treated these girls with aught less than loving kindness," Mrs. Minchem squealed.