“Isn’t it fortunate that your wife has such a lovely, slim figure? She can wear the new high-waisted styles so gracefully! Take this gown, for instance. My lady would be lovely in it.”
“I quite agree with you, Miss Stark. This style would be ravishing on Lady Isabella.”
Over Miss Stark’s head, which was bent over the pattern book, Alec’s eyes met Isabella’s. The mocking glint in them made her grit her teeth. He was embarrassing her, the fiend, and he knew it. She was convinced he was doing it deliberately.
“Ordinarily I do not involve myself in ladies’ fashions, of course, but I want my wife’s wardrobe to be slap up to the nines. She tends to favor quiet shades of blue and gray, but I would like to see her in warm colors: pink, maybe, and lavender, and perhaps soft yellow.”
“You have a wonderful eye for color, sir! That is just what I would have recommended myself, had I dared to venture an opinion.”
The little seamstress beamed at Alec, and the two proceeded to pour over the pattern book in perfect charity with each other. Isabella, left with nothing to do but silently seethe, was forced to either make a scene—which she was certain would be reported from one end of the countryside to another by Miss Stark’s gossip-hating mouth—or acquiesce.
After styles were agreed upon between them—they seemed not to need Isabella’s opinion at all, but rather discussed her as if she were not even present—then there was the matter of accessories. Alec insisted on slippers to match each outfit, and reticules, redingotes and even a sunshade to complement particular gowns. To Isabella’s protests that she didn’t need this or that, and certainly not so many gowns, both turned a deaf ear.
When, after about an hour, Miss Stark packed up her things to depart, Alec had ordered a complete wardrobe, from slippers to stockings to underclothes to outerwear and bonnets. Miss Stark was atwitter with excitement. She had already promised Alec one of the gowns by the following day, and the remainder within three more.
“If I must work night and day, I will,” she said heroically as Alec escorted her from the room. “I shall carry out all we have agreed upon, sir, as quickly as it may be done.”
“I am sure you will,” Alec murmured by way of answer, rewarding her devotion to duty with a dazzling smile. Isabella, left behind, sniffed. Alec’s charm had blinded Miss Stark to the truth of his character, just as it had Isabella herself and every other female she had ever seen him exercise it on. He used it quite deliberately, she was convinced, and when he returned to her, smiling, she told him so.
“You’re turning into a regular scold, Isabella,” he admonished lazily, throwing himself down on the settee he had shared with Miss Stark and stretching his arms up to lock his hands behind his head. He watched her from half-closed eyes, crossing his booted feet at the ankles as though to emphasize how little her displeasure disturbed him.
“Am I indeed?” she responded crossly from the other side of the room. “I suppose you will try next to tell me that a governess needs such a wardrobe?”
“No,” he surprised her by saying. “But if you’re to have the fun of turning me into as near a gentleman as is possible to do, then I reserve the right to have a little amusement of my own.”
“Such as?” She eyed him warily.
He grinned at her, those golden eyes teasing. “Why, I mean to turn you into a regular little beauty, Isabella.”
XLIV
“I
wish you will stop your everlasting teasing.” She crossed her arms over her chest in a gesture of annoyance.
“Believe me, I am very serious.” That lazy smile matched his indolent posture.
Fulminating, she looked him up and down. He smiled at her.
“If I am to be your tutor, then I will give you my first lesson in decorum. A gentleman never sits while a lady stands.”
“I make you my apologies.” With a lurking smile and a handsome leg, Alec got to his feet. “Pray go on.”
“A gentleman never, ever, presumes to discuss, er, unmentionables with a dressmaker, or any other lady, for that matter.”
“Er … unmentionables?” Isabella was quite sure he knew to what she was referring.
“Underclothes,” Isabella elucidated, mentally grinding her teeth.
“Oh. Ah, I see. I shouldn’t have told Miss Stark that you require a dozen chemises, all of silk, or three dozen pair of stockings, or—”
“Hush, you devil!” Isabella crimsoned, and looked around to make sure that there was not the slightest chance that he had been overheard. Thankfully, they were quite alone.
“Am I embarrassing you?” he asked innocently.
“You know you are.”
“Ah. Another solecism. I’m sure a gentleman would never embarrass a lady.”
“No. A gentleman would not.”
“What else would a gentleman do that I do not?”
“He would not be a dreadful tease!”
“Are you accusing me …? Isabella, you wound me; I protest you do!”
Isabella fixed him with virulent eyes.
“You—are—a—” She broke off, unable to come up with a word to properly describe the maddening creature.
“Yes?” he encouraged, grinning.
She set her teeth and refused to answer.
“Bastard? Son of a—”
“Stop!” Thoroughly incensed now, she marched up to him, finger pointing at him admonishingly. “So you want me to turn you into a gentleman, do you? All right, I’ll do my level best. On top of the points I’ve already mentioned, a gentleman does not swear in the presence of a lady. He certainly does not try to provoke a lady into following his despicable example.” Her eyes swept him. “You’ve mud on your boots. A gentleman would never come into a lady’s presence in all his dirt without first apologizing, and begging her leave. You are coatless, and you seem to have mislaid your neckcloth as well. A gentleman never comes into a lady’s presence unless he is fully clothed.”
Her eyes swept him again, took in the breeches and shirt that, being too loose and too well-worn for fashion, had obviously been chosen strictly with comfort in mind. “You need a valet,” she pronounced with satisfaction.
“A valet?” His tone was both dismayed and defensive as he looked down at himself. “Me? You aren’t serious.”
“A valet,” she repeated with relish. “A gentleman’s gentleman will see that you are well turned out on all occasions. He will help you to dress, and undress, and see that your boots are shined, your linen clean, your neckcloths starched, your hair properly trimmed.”
“I don’t need a bloody bishop to put my breeches on for me!”
“Ah-ah! Two transgressions! You swore, and you mentioned breeches (they’re considered unmentionables, you know) in the presence of a lady! I can see that you’re going to have to do a great deal of hard work. You’re a sad case, indeed.”
Alec’s eyes narrowed. “Are you enjoying yourself, Countess?”
“Immensely.” She smiled in such a way that it was more a baring of her teeth. “You did hire me to teach you to be a gentleman, did you not? Or, when faced with grim reality, have you taken the coward’s route and changed your mind?”
His lips compressed. His eyes met hers, and held. “I’ll tell you what, Countess. I’ll make you a deal: I will put up with your nonsense if you put up with mine. I’ll do whatever you say, within reason (and that means no bloody valet!) to be turned into a gentleman, if you will follow my dictates on how to become a beauty. Whatever I say, mind! Do we have a bargain? Or are you going to take the coward’s route and refuse now that the agreement’s become two-sided?”
“We have a bargain!”
He had deliberately goaded her into answering in the affirmative, and as soon as the words left her mouth she wondered if she was not being too hasty. Just how did he plan to turn her into a beauty? If he thought that she would fall for being told that the greatest beautifier of all was the exercise involved in warming a man’s bed, he was very much mistaken!
“Within reason,” she modified cautiously. She didn’t trust the tricky devil one bit.
“Within reason,” he echoed, grinning, and held out his hand. “I’ll have your hand on it, Countess. I’m sure reneging on a deal can’t be gentlemanly—or ladylike.”
“No,” she agreed. “It isn’t.”
And she gave him her hand. He shook it, briskly, and the deal was done.
As he tucked her hand in his arm and escorted her from the salon, Isabella felt more like a participant in a battle that had just been thoroughly joined than a partner in an agreement. Alec’s very manner was unsettling to her nerves. He was acting the gentleman with outrageous punctiliousness, just to tease her again, she knew.
She only hoped that she would not live to regret the bargain they had made. But she was afraid she probably would.
XLV
A
lec was as good as his word. The first dress arrived, as promised, late the following morning. To Isabella’s dismay, a hairdresser, Mr. Alderson, showed up at Amberwood just after luncheon. Under strict orders from Alec not to cut the mass of her hair, he trimmed the ends and scissored a few strands so that they would curl about her face (despite Isabella’s adamant protest that her hair would never, under any conditions, curl), and twisted the rest up on the crown of her head in a soft topknot. The effect, when Isabella was at last permitted to look into the mirror, was astonishing. Piled high, her hair took on a silken gleam that was almost striking. It was still plain light brown, of course, but the way Mr. Alderson had styled it revealed glinting strands of red and gold that she had never suspected she had. To her further astonishment, the small strands that he had cut short around her face did curl, as he had promised, enough to form a flattering frame for her face and bring out the size and shape of her eyes.
“And may I suggest just the suspicion of color on your lips, my lady? If you will permit.…” He pulled out a leather-bound box that, to Isabella’s horror, contained cosmetics. Never before in her life had she worn such, and never had she expected to do so. Ladies didn’t—although females like Pearl certainly did.
Pearl was certainly far more gifted with beauty than she was herself, but the paint helped enhance what nature had wrought. Perhaps it could do the same for her. Isabella was shaken by the sudden strength of her desire to be beautiful. Never before in her life had she minded being plain, but now there was Alec.
“AH right, just a touch,” she consented, and closed her eyes while Mr. Alderson rubbed a cream into her lips and cheeks, and brushed her eyelashes with what, by the smell of it, was a burned stick. The final touch was the whisking of a hare’s foot over her face to, Mr. Alderson promised, eliminate shine.
“You may look now,” he instructed.
Isabella opened her eyes.
The face that the mirror reflected back at her was hers. The features were the same, from the too wide mouth to the abominable freckles sprinkling her nose to the too-high forehead and pointy chin. But Mr. Alderson had wrought a miracle of alchemy in those unremarkable attributes. With her hair piled high on her head, her cheekbones suddenly seemed more prominent. The faint touch of pink, which even Isabella wouldn’t have known was paint had she not felt Mr. Alderson’s deft fingers at work, brought a sparkle to her eyes. Secretly Isabella had always considered her eyes to be her best feature—after all, what was there to find offensive in large eyes of soft blue-gray?—but like the rest of her, they had never been anything out of the ordinary. Now, framed in artfully darkened lashes, their color intensified by the wash of pink on her cheeks, they were positively luminous.
Isabella blinked, then blinked again, entranced at the unexpected effect. Her eyelashes, no longer colorless, were suddenly as thick and sweeping as chimney brooms. Alec had vowed to make her a beauty. He had not succeeded, of course. A beauty, she would never be. But she was certainly … pretty. Very pretty. Amazingly pretty, considering that she had sat down on the dressing table stool as a little brown wren. Now, looking at herself in the mirror, she felt as if she’d been turned into a peacock.
“Mr. Alderson,” she breathed, “you are a worker of miracles!”
“I have done no more than bring out what was always there, hidden,” he said modestly, surveying her reflection in the mirror with a satisfied air. “My lady has by nature a certain something not quite in the common style. It only needed to be shown off.”
“Thank you,” she said, turning on the stool to smile up at him. He nodded in reply.
“It was my pleasure, truly. I will leave with you the cosmetics you need, and you have only to use them thus”—he demonstrated the application technique of rouge and burned stick on himself—“then follow with a hare’s foot just dipped in rice power. Do this each morning, and—
bellisima!”
With a bow he left her, Isabella touched the little pots of rouge and powder with a hesitant finger. Paint was for hussies and light-skirts.… She looked in the mirror again. But the effect was so lovely. Perhaps she would use them, just a little, every day. At least while she was with Alec.
She knew, of course, that their time together was finite. Sooner or later, she would have to end this delightful interlude and return to being herself. Although quite how that was to be managed, she couldn’t fathom. Perhaps if she talked with Bernard, and told him that she knew that he was behind her kidnapping and had schemed to get her killed, and that others knew too (no need to mention who the “others” were, because Bernard would certainly scorn the intimidation factor of people of Alec’s class), perhaps then Bernard would be frightened into leaving her in peace. Perhaps Bernard now regretted what had happened. She could even, if necessary, petition for a bill of divorcement. Isabella shuddered at the thought of that. She would be the object of scorn and scandal, shunned by everyone, including (probably especially) her own family.
Without money of her own, how would she live?
Perhaps she need never go home. Perhaps she could stay with Alec forever.…
“Shall I help you with your dress now, ma’am?” Annie said. Isabella smiled at her. This unschooled country girl she’d taken to maid on Alec’s orders was very far from her own dear Jessup, but she was biddable and eager and willing to learn. Isabella felt herself much the elder and wiser of the two, which was nice.