Read Online Her Ladyship's Companion by Joanna Bourne - Free Book Online Page B

always go away,” Melissa offered defensively.
    Mrs. Armitage accepted her drink cordially.
    Lady Dorothy said, “So you can. Excellent idea, Miss Rivenwood. Please go and fetch me my ... Let me think. What should it be? The worst of these summer parties is that one hasn’t an unlimited number of shawls to manipulate back and forth.”
    Melissa suggested helpfully, “A bottle of smelling salts? A glass of warm milk from the kitchen? A little cushion for your back?”
    “That’s enough of your tongue, miss. You may go into the green parlor across the hall. There’s a candy dish on the table with wrapped mints in it. You may bring me one of those.”
    Melissa inclined her head obediently.
    “It will take you about ten minutes, I think, to do a proper job of it.” The dowager waved her away and continued her low-voiced tête-à-tête with Lavinia Armitage.
    The green parlor across the hall from the Mirror Salon had been allowed to become slightly shabby. Deliberately, Melissa thought. Men retired here in twos and threes to talk or smoke, and men are never really comfortable in a room until the decor begins to deteriorate somewhat. The parlor was also used for storage of the odd inebriated guest during parties. The wrapped mints were available in the hope—probably vain—that any gentleman whose breath spoke too strongly of alcohol or tobacco would try one before inflicting himself upon some hapless young lady. With ten minutes to select one, Melissa saw no reason to start at once.
    In the Mirror Salon the musicians struck up another dance, this time a waltz. Lady Dorothy considered this evening a very minor entertainment, but there was nothing second-rate about it. The band was small, but it was excellent and imported from London for the occasion. The fashionable new German dance, the waltz, was played in the Mirror Salon just as it would be in Harforth House, and if half of Wheatcross stigmatized the dance as “fast,” the other half was anxious to try it.
    There were no mirrors in the green parlor, for which Melissa was grateful. Yes, she, too, had been watching her appearance in the other room. She was glad to be free of five images reminding her to smile. She let her shoulders sag a bit.
    Here the drapes were still open, and the room faced the sunset. It was a silver and gold, not a red, sunset. Melissa crossed to the window. There was singing in the stableyard, laughing, a very muted level of roistering. Lady Dorothy had not forgotten the coachmen! There was a barrel broached between the parked coaches, and not all the cakes had gone upstairs. Hobson, the head groom, could be trusted to see that no one became precisely drunk.
    The grounds of the house, the neat kitchen garden, the hay storage, the white-painted coachman’s cottage spread out beneath Melissa’s view. Behind the stable was the dark green vastness of the rhododendron wilderness, with the true woods behind it.
    In the middle of the woods was a startling patch, silver as a tossed shilling amid the green, where the river had been dammed to make a little lake. At its center was a tiny island and the ruins of a little white folly that was falling patiently to pieces there. The ladies had once gone to that summerhouse out in the lake, on warm, sweet evenings like this, to drink their tea. That was when tea was still a new and exotic drink. Or perhaps they had walked the few hundred paces from one end of the island to the other, leaning on a strong arm, of course.
    Betty, the nurserymaid who straightened Melissa’s room, generally when Melissa was trying to read, had assured her seriously that the summerhouse had been allowed to fall to decay because it was only a “nasty damp swamp of a place anyway, and good riddance to it. Besides being full of vipers, most likely no one would want to get her good silk stockings muddy in such a mucky place.” The complaints had a practiced sound. Melissa wondered who had been trying to convince Betty to walk in