Swept off Her Feet (23 page)

He was making me be first lady.

I turned, with
No!
written in silent plea on my face. Then, for good measure, I added, “No, please!” aloud, in case he couldn’t read faces.

“Better get it over with while it’s fresh in your mind,” he urged, and set off circling again. The music did
not
help. It was so fast and frantic that I couldn’t think, which only added to my mounting panic, trapped in the middle while Dougie and Catriona screeched “Party piece!” at me.

“Do something, dear!” urged Sheila. “Anything!”

“Value Sheila’s furniture?” suggested Catriona.

Everyone laughed, and promptly changed direction and went the other way.

“Nice corner cabinet,” I said, trying to follow Sheila as she moved around. “Is it . . . Waring and Gillows?”

“Indeed it is,” she said. “My mother’s. Now set to your partner.”

Fraser grabbed me before I could go past him, put me in front of him, lurched from side to side, then with a twist of his hands spun me round. Even though my arms went stiff and my feet started moving in a different direction to the rest of my body, he still managed to put me back in the middle, pushing me toward Robert.

“Now me,” said Robert, reaching out to turn me toward him. As his hand touched my arm, something tingled across my skin. He bowed his head mock-formally as I shuffled from one foot to the other, and then gripped my wrists, and the room was turning—or I was.

I was surprised by how easy he made it. And surprised at
how I didn’t tense up the way I had with Fraser—I just seemed to flow into the turn as his strong arms gave me nowhere else to go. And then I was back in the middle again, feeling a little stunned, and facing Catriona, who flapped her hands at me.

“Figure eight!” she squawked. “Figure eight! Quick!” Fraser and Robert started walking round me as if I were a traffic cone, giving me discreet shoves as they went.

Too late. The circle was moving again and I was feeling faintly seasick. The music was so
fast
.

“And
back
into the middle as we all go round!” called Sheila. “Your next partners are Dougie and Duncan,
five
, six,
seven
, eight.”

“Oi! Perform!” yelled Dougie.

My eye skated around the sitting room—old Indian rug, sofas pushed back against the wall, large marble fireplace . . . “Mantel clock, Victorian!” I said, pointing to it. Then, as the circle went the other way, I added, “Nice pottery spaniel figurines, I’ll give you a hundred quid for them!”

“Ai-yaaaarp!” shrieked Dougie.

Fraser went past and smiled encouragingly, soon followed by Robert, who merely raised one eyebrow like James Bond.

The music changed to a rattling sequence, and Duncan put out a hand to stop me, as if I were a ball in a roulette wheel. He set to me with some wild leaping from foot to foot, but then walked me round very carefully, and I felt a contrary pang that he wouldn’t be turning Kirstie and Catriona quite so cautiously.

“I wish I knew how to do this!” I confessed.

“I was a mere beginner a year ago—and look at me now!” he said, guiding me back to the middle, spoiling it only by going back to the wrong place in the circle and having Sheila grab him and reinsert him next to Ingrid.

The only thing I could say was that at least I hadn’t fallen over yet. Still, I told myself, just one set and turn to go, and I’d be free to sink into the background while everyone else showed off.

I stepped back to face Dougie, and caught Catriona leaning in to murmur something in his ear. She stopped when she saw me.

“Och, Duncan, Cat’s right, she’ll not learn if you turn her like that!” snorted Dougie, and reached out to grab my wrists. “Just keep your arms loose,” he went on, ignoring the warning quacks from Sheila, “and let me steer you into—”

“Let you what?” I gabbled, but Dougie was already winding me up. Just as he applied maximum force to the spin, my body went rigid, as it always did when threatened with a step sequence, but I carried on backward as if I’d been shot from a cannon.

The music drowned out any shrieked guidance from the others, and then I must have lost my footing on the carpet, because my shoe slipped off, and I was spinning, then slipping, then stumbling backward, arms flailing.

Everything really did go into slow motion, because I had time to think (a)
I am definitely going to fall over
, and (b)
I hope my head doesn’t connect with that original Doric-columned marble fireplace directly behind me.

“Evie, mind the fire!” screeched Sheila, so loud I could hear her over the dueling accordions.

I lurched and crashed into something scratchy, and my feet flew up over my head, revealing (oh, my God) the large hole in my emergency tights that I hadn’t planned on wearing, because up until the dancing class I’d had no intention of wearing a skirt. But at least I wasn’t on fire, or out cold.

There was a moment’s silence before the pain crashed in, and I heard a clunk, which I presumed was my shoe landing on the wrong side of the sofa.

Then the sting of splinters, the ache of bruises, and the burning hum of embarrassment hit me all at once.

“Now,
that
is a party piece,” said Douglas. “Right into the log basket.”

“Evie, are you all right? Speak to us! Douglas Graham, you are the most stupid boy I have ever . . .” Sheila and Ingrid rushed over, but even from my low vantage point, I could see they were both trying hard to swallow gurgles of laughter.

Frankly, I could have done without the crowd round the log basket. It was hard enough to sort out my skirt and unbuttoned shirt, let alone gather my tatty dignity, without negotiating the hands that now stretched out to haul me back to my feet. I’d made a right mess of the basket. There was kindling
everywhere.

“I’m fine,” I said, bravely dusting myself off, ignoring the metallic tang of blood where I’d bitten my lip. “Honestly, how funny. I hope it wasn’t an heirloom. Ha-ha-ha.”

The
Ha-ha-ha
didn’t ring with authenticity, but it allowed everyone else to stop fighting their hysterical giggles. And how.

While Catriona, Kirstie, and Dougie were clutching their aching sides and rocking back and forth like windup monkeys—and even Sheila and Duncan were patting their eyes—only Fraser seemed absolutely mortified.

“Did you get any splinters?” he asked, examining my skinned palms. “You must think we’re a right bunch of thugs, letting Dougie hurl you across the room on your first go.”

“Aye, and I thought I’d lost my touch with hammer-throwing,” mused Dougie, to mass cackles.

“More like a
caber
!” hooted Catriona. “No offense!” she added.

“Och, she could have been
killed!
” giggled Kirstie. “No, I mean, it’s
terrible
.”

My hands were throbbing, but I didn’t mind because Fraser was doing some kind of EMT inspection to make sure I hadn’t broken anything. It involved squeezing and moving my extremities with the utmost gentleness, and wasn’t totally unpleasant.

He was gazing right into my eyes, too. I swallowed, rather thrilled at the sudden attention, then realized he was checking my pupils for concussion.

“I’m so sorry,” he said as he flexed my fingers experimentally. “You were doing so well, too. Please don’t let that put you off.”

“I just need to learn how to do that spinning whatsit,” I croaked.

As I said it, I knew I really
did
want to learn how to do the spinning whatsit. For that brief second when it was almost working out, and that briefer second when Robert’s hands had grabbed mine and I’d felt him dance with me, I’d wanted to glide with the same poise as Kirstie and Sheila. I wanted to rise to the occasion, and not just because the fireplaces in Kettlesheer were twice as big and twice as likely to knock me out cold.

The shock almost took away the pain in my hands and legs. I
wanted
to dance. And I was going to learn how if it killed me.

“Oh, you’ll get it,” Fraser assured me. “We all had to learn once. It’s just practice.”

“I might need some extra lessons,” I said.

He smiled, his sunny, perfect-gentleman smile, the one
that made me feel delicate and bonneted. “I think that’s the least we can do, since you’ve been brave enough to volunteer.”

I heard imaginary strings swelling behind us in
Gone with the Wind
fashion, but they stopped with an abrupt screech when Robert appeared at Fraser’s shoulder. He looked amused and modern.

“Nothing broken?” he asked. “It’s all about letting go and relaxing. I was watching your arms—you’re resisting. Stop resisting. Let the man place you where you need to be. You seemed to be okay when I was spinning you. Was it Dougie? Did he frighten you with his Scottish manliness?”

“Back on the horse!” said Sheila, bustling up behind us. “Can’t let that put you off, Evie. Let’s get going again—you’ve done your turn now, so you relax for a bit. Douglas, will you stop doing that, and put the music back on?”

I watched as Catriona, Kirstie, and then Ingrid took their turns in the middle, and a queasy combination of outright jealousy and definite fear began to swill around in my stomach.

On Saturday night, I’d have to do this in front of everyone at the ball, in some weird long fashion-forward dress of Alice’s, with Catriona’s fearsome mother watching, and with everyone else’s engagement at stake.

That was quite scary. But what spooked me was that for the first time in my life, my brain was concentrating on the moves and a new, determined voice in my head was counting the bars.

Max called me in the morning
so delirious with excitement that I could barely make him out. He sounded as if he’d been drinking—since he’d got my e-mail the previous night.

“This table. You know what it is?” he demanded. “I mean, you
know
what it
is
?”

“Yeees,” I said, thrown. “It’s a table, isn’t it? I mean, it
is
a table?”

“It’s not just
a
table, it’s
the
table!” he gurgled. “Evie, you little star, you haven’t just got us a big fish, you have found me a whale! A Chippen-whale, if you will!”

He laughed uproariously at his own joke.

I’d taken the precaution of stepping outside to take Max’s call, because Duncan had spent the entire morning distracting me with family photographs and artifacts from VIP visits in the twenties. I was easy enough to distract as it was. Right now I was shivering on the terrace, wrapped in my coat and feeling a bit guilty about disturbing the pristine snow around the flowerbeds with my nervous pacing.

“Is it the real thing, then?” I asked, my heart starting to beat faster. “How can you tell without seeing it?”

“Would you like a history lesson?” Max inquired. “You would? Lovely. Now, have you heard of a place called Dumfries?”

“Yes, it’s about sixty miles away.”

“And have you heard of Dumfries House? The treasure trove of magnificent eighteenth-century furniture, much of it made especially for the Earl of Dumfries by Thomas Chippendale himself?”

I stamped my feet. Picturesque as the snow was, even with a pair of Duncan’s jazzy shooting socks on, I was fast losing sensation in my toes. “Can you just e-mail me a link to the Wikipedia page you’re reading, please.”

“I don’t have Wikipedia, you saucy brat. Just years and years of buying old biddies sherry. All
you
need to know is that a quick check of my sources reveals that a certain Donaldina McAndrew was rather pally with the various members of the earl’s family, and that various splendid items of furniture were known to have arrived at Kettlesheer around that time. It’s not
wholly
unlikely that if Mr. Chippendale was being commissioned to make a substantial amount of furniture for Dumfries House, he might have been prevailed upon to knock up a little something for the McAndrews.”

My head swam instantly with visions of messengers galloping across from Dumfries with rolled parchments of plans and wood samples. Donaldina—what a name!—commissioning something to keep up with her rich friend, so the return invitations could be issued. …

“So it’s worth a lot of money?” I asked, thinking of Ingrid’s face when she’d talked about the oil bills.

“Darling, it’s worth more than your flat and my flat put together,” Max sighed. I could picture his fingers wriggling with excitement. “And it’s a major find. No one’s seen anything like this for generations. In fact, I might even give my contact at the BBC a call, see if there might be a spare camera crew. . . .”

I wasn’t listening. I was too busy being thrilled. “Blimey,” I breathed. I’d done it! I’d saved Kettlesheer from being developed!

And yet, I didn’t feel anything like that on the table. No history, no glamour. Just wood and polish.

I pushed that thought aside. The evidence was right there in the book. Max had already known they had something precious hidden in the house—it made total sense.

But still it slipped out. “You can definitely tell it’s the real deal from the photos I sent?”

“I’d stake your reputation on it. You said something about written provenance, in a book? And what about the chairs?” There was a horrible slurping noise down the phone. “If there is a whole set of matching chairs . . .”

“I haven’t really checked out the chairs.” I bit my lip. “Should I tell them, then? So Duncan can prepare himself for having to sell it?”

Because that was another hurdle. Maybe I’d tell Robert first, see if he could make his dad see that, to save the house, he’d have to sacrifice the table. Desperate measures and all that.

“Don’t tell them yet. Let me get some buyers lined up, with some nice, tempting cash in hand. Meanwhile, you get yourself in there and look for chairs,” said Max, in the manner of someone settling back into an easy chair and lighting a fine cigar. “Find me two dozen rococo Chippendale chairs, and I might even let you go home early on Saturday.”

“Ah,” I said. “Saturday. That might be a problem.”

“In what way?”

“We’re snowed in. It doesn’t look good for getting back—the forecast is for even more at the weekend. But probably better that I stay here and carry on looking, right?”