The Lord I Left Page 8

  Alice had not been dressed by someone else since she was a child, and she did not know what to do. But Baxter’s fingers were so brisk that before she knew it she was out of her drab gown and dressed in a fabric as soft as clouds that smelled of rich people.

  “Now, your hair,” Baxter said. “This flat look doesn’t suit your wee head.”

  Alice was not sure whether to laugh or cry at this observation. Her hair was not her crowning glory, especially after a day in the rain and snow. “Not much to be done about that. My hair is lank by nature.”

  “Not when I’m dressing it, it’s not,” Baxter said, with a wink. The woman sat Alice down at a pretty gold table and began doing violent, painful things to her scalp, something between massage and torture. Baxter used her comb to tease the strands into whorls that she held in place with hairpins, moving them rapidly from the pocket of her apron to her mouth to Alice’s increasingly tender head.

  “There we are,” she said, stepping back, so Alice could see herself in the mirror.

  “Oh my,” Alice breathed at her reflection. The dress was not immodest but cut much lower than the high-necked gowns that made up her Charlotte Street wardrobe. The dark blue set off her eyes, making them more violet than brown. But her hair was the real miracle. Baxter had removed Alice’s middle part in favor of an intricate high chignon that swooped elegantly above her hairline, making her look, if not tall, positively regal.

  Baxter winked, smoothed Alice’s gown to fall more gracefully about her shoulders, and left as briskly as she had arrived.

  Alice could not help casting a sly smile at her reflection. She looked like quite the Lady Miss. Perhaps this was her sign from Henry Evesham’s God, for her mother would cackle with pure glee at the looks of her right now.

  Josephine came to get her and led her downstairs to a formal parlor where the family was gathered. “Prepare yourself for the festivities,” she said in a dry whisper.

  Despite the sumptuous surroundings and flickering candles, the mood in the room was palpably grim. A thin, impeccably dressed gentleman wearing a powdered wig seemed to be presiding, and beside him was a man who could have been his twin, were he not several decades younger and his own wig quite a bit taller. They were locked in a low conversation with Henry, who had to bend at the waist to match their shorter stature, and did not appear to be enjoying himself.

  When he saw her, he broke away, looking at her with an expression almost like bemusement. She stiffened, worried that she had already done something amiss that might expose their lie.

  “Why Mrs. Hull,” he said, his face breaking from perplexity into a cockeyed, boyish smile that made him look extremely handsome, and nothing like a minister. “Blue suits you.”

  He’d never looked at her like that before. Like he was just a man, and she was just a woman.

  “You look well yourself.” But then, he always did.

  He smiled—a quick, private smile—more to himself than her.

  Josephine looked from him to her and Alice paused—she’d forgotten the girl was right beside her. Evidently so had Henry, for he quickly stepped back, assuming a more formal posture.

  “Let me introduce you to my family,” he said, leading her to the pair of men. “Mrs. Hull, this is my elder brother, Mr. Jonathan Evesham, and my father, Mr. Charles Evesham.”

  She curtsied and said “good evening” and was relieved when both men gave her polite, dismissive bows and returned to their conversation.

  She turned her attention to a collection of pale china vases placed on the nearest table, painted with purple flowers that resembled the ones embroidered on her dress. “So pretty,” she said offhand to Josephine, so that Henry would feel free to rejoin his father’s conversation rather than worry about putting her at ease.

  “Why thank you,” Josephine said with an enormous smile. “I painted them myself.”

  “I’ve seen similar in a little shop in Mayfair, but yours are so much finer. What talent.”

  Josephine looked immensely gratified. “Papa fabricates them for me in his factory. I have a mind to sell them, but he believes I will never find a husband if I appear to have an interest in trade.”

  “Men have such odd notions,” Alice sighed. She froze, for perhaps that was not the right thing for a proper widow to say.

  Josephine just rolled her eyes. “Truly.”

  “Why, the Lord Lieutenant has arrived!” a woman’s voice called from across the room.

  Alice turned, and saw that the voice belonged to a drawing of a wealthy woman in a newspaper. Or rather, a woman who looked exactly like a drawing of a fashionable lady, with glossy dark hair piled in such an elaborate fashion above her head that it made the handiwork Baxter had performed on Alice’s tresses seem rudimentary. She wore a beautiful silk dress in a chestnut shade that matched her hair, and amber jewels set in yellow gold, so that when she moved it was like the colors of autumn swirled about the room.

  “Olivia, have you ever met Mr. Henry Evesham?” this vision said to someone behind her shoulder. “He wasn’t at our wedding.”

  A second woman walked in quickly to catch up with the first, and she was equally striking, though her hair was blond, and her gown was a deep, saturated pink adorned with fine, whispering feathers.

  Alice knew that women like this existed, theoretically, but she rarely came across such creatures in the wild. The wealthy women who held keys at Charlotte Street did not come to the establishment in such regalia. She tried not to stare, despite desperately wanting to.

  Henry looked perplexed to be the center of these two ladies’ attention, though the rest of the family looked on as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Alice watched as he was introduced to the blond woman, Miss Olivia Bradley-Hough of Bath, who Alice gathered was the cousin of the other woman, who was married to Henry’s brother and who the family called Isabel.

  Josephine introduced Alice to the ladies, who gave her gracious smiles. The elder Mr. Evesham gave a signal to the servants, who opened a door to a long, grand dining room. Inside, the table was dressed with more dishes than Alice had ever seen at once. The spread was thoroughly delightful, arranged on gleaming silver platters in towering heaps that seeming to quiver in excited anticipation of being eaten.

  Alice felt the long day of cold and worry melt away in the face of such a feast.

  This was going to be fun.

  She was shown to a place between Henry and the senior Mr. Evesham, who headed up the table. Josephine sat across from her, and Miss Bradley-Hough sat at Henry’s other side, beside Jonathan Evesham, who would be handsome were it not for a pinched expression that made him seem permanently cross.

  As soon as everyone was seated, a retinue of servants emerged, graceful as ballet dancers, holding more trays of food, which they proffered to the guests. A footman went around to fill their cups with wine. When he reached Henry, Henry politely waved him away with a soft “no thank you.”

  “Why, no wine Mr. Evesham!” Miss Bradley-Hough said, laughing. “How sensible you are. The gentlemen of Bath are forever in their cups at supper. It drives my mother to fits, trying to keep her cellar filled.”

  “She should host more Methodists,” Henry quipped. “We’re mostly a temperate lot, easy on the purse strings. If she’d like to set an example, I’m sure we can arrange for a revival.”

  Miss Bradley-Hough laughed, but Alice noticed Henry’s father scowling at the exchange.

  Another servant came by with a mousse of fish and Henry waved that onward too, taking none. He piled his plate with potatoes in cream sauce and a dish of greens. When a platter of pork filets in butter came by him, he waved that away too. He did the same with a big, beautiful leg of lamb that smelled like heaven itself.

  With each dish he declined, his father became more visibly annoyed.

  “Take some lamb, Henry,” he ordered his son in a voice pitched low enough, Alice suspected, to avoid being overheard by Miss Bradley-Hough.

  “No thank you,” Henry sa
id pleasantly, instead accepting a dish of jellied fruit.

  “A man cannot subsist on potatoes and jelly,” his father hissed.

  Henry looked taken aback. “I prefer not to eat meat, as you know,” he said calmly.

  “You’ll make yourself ill,” his father barked. His voice lacked the educated smoothness of his children’s and his wife’s. His accent reminded her of the blacksmith’s in Fleetwend, Mr. Flaiff, who’d gown up poor in Bristol.

  Henry laughed—a forced kind of laugh that held no amusement. “I have not eaten the flesh of God’s creatures in years, and I have yet to waste away.”

  “Indeed,” his brother said slyly, leaning over Josephine so as to better hear the conversation. “He’s built like an oxcart as it is. If he ate properly, I imagine he wouldn’t fit through the door.”

  Henry’s mouth curled up in an utterly acidic smile. “Quite,” he said evenly.

  “Well I’ve never met a gentleman who lives on vegetables!” Miss Bradley-Hough remarked, no doubt trying to smooth away this disagreement—an act of graciousness that Alice thought admirable. “Are you also a vegetarian, Mrs. Hull?”

  Alice glanced down at the generous portion of red-blooded, silky lamb she’d heaped on her plate, and hoped a meatless diet was not some characteristic of Henry’s sect that would expose their lie about her being a member of his worship circle.

  “Evidently not,” Alice said to Miss Bradley-Hough, jauntily spearing a piece with her fork and putting it in her mouth with delectation.

  Beside her, Henry laughed appreciatively.

  In truth, she could not imagine turning down such luxurious food. She was shocked when the plates were cleared, a whole new array of dishes was brought to the table, and the process repeated.

  As the dishes came around the two lady cousins chattered of this and that—evidently they had both grown up in Bath, and Alice gathered they were quite popular there. Isabel Evesham seemed to be doing her best to forward a friendship between Henry and Miss Bradley-Hough. Oddly, Isabel’s husband seemed to be doing his own best to block his wife’s efforts—to the obvious agitation of his father. Meanwhile, Josephine and Mrs. Evesham told Alice of their preparations for the Christening, as though none of this was happening.

  Observing the Evesham family at supper was like watching a game unfold, without quite knowing what the object of it was.

  “Tell us of your work in London, Henry,” Isabel said. “It sounds so very important.”

  Henry’s fork paused in the air. The entire family stopped talking.

  “Yes, how is your little flock these days?” Jonathan asked. He’d been drinking heavily throughout the meal, and his words had grown thicker and less clever with each sip. “Still giving farmers’ wives conniptions in the streets?”

  “Not as often as I like,” Henry said smoothly. “My work for the House of Lords leaves little time for preaching.”

  Jonathan turned to Miss Bradley-Hough. “Olivia, my brother has always had quite a way with women. He makes them faint, y’see. Claims they’re moved by the spirit of the Lord, but—” he paused to take a swig of claret—“I’ve always said it was boredom at the sheer duration of his sermons.”

  He chuckled at his own joke, smiling at his wife’s cousin as if he was certain she would also find this very droll. Miss Bradley-Hough looked nervously down at her plate. Henry’s face continued to be fixed in an expression of sardonic boredom.

  Alice had lost her appetite.

  Imagine, not seeing one’s family in years, only to be subjected to drunken mockery within an hour of arriving. And mockery that came at no provocation. Alice’s mother could be critical, but at least she did not behave that way for sport.

  “The Lord Lieutenant’s sermons are in great demand in London nevertheless,” Alice interjected, looking Jonathan Evesham directly in the eyes and employing the arctic tone she’d perfected under Elena Brearley’s tutelage. “People gather from across the town to hear him on Friday afternoons. ’Tis why he was made a deputy of the House of Lords.”

  “He was made a deputy,” Jonathan rejoined, “because he traffics in obscene tales under the guise of Christian virtue.”

  At the word ‘obscene’ Miss Bradley-Hough jumped a bit in her seat, causing her elbow to catch a passing platter of duck in brown gravy. Alice watched in fixed horror as the tray overturned in a colossal arc through the air and rained a cascade of sticky, orange-scented sauce down the front of her beautiful pink gown.

  The scream she let out was, Alice thought, a rather fitting conclusion to the meal.

  Isabel leapt up and rushed around the table to come to her cousin’s aid as a cavalry of servants scurried about, attempting to staunch the worst of the damage. The whole chaotic party rushed out of the room, leaving two empty seats, and the rest of the Evesham family looking stunned.

  “Jonathan, what has come over you?” his mother hissed from the end of the table. “Speaking of such things in front of a lady of Miss Bradley-Hough’s breeding.” She glanced at Alice. “And our guest, Mrs. Hull.”

  Jonathan waved his hand expansively and rolled his eyes. “’Tis only the truth. Imagine, he could have been a bishop. Instead he traffics in hysteria and hellfire, yet condemns his own family for peddling porcelain.”

  “I don’t condemn anyone,” Henry said heatedly. “I only suggested you not sell to traders headed to Barbados, as—”

  “Oh please,” Jonathan Evesham spat. “You can spare us your moralizing. Save it for your sermons.”

  Alice could see Henry forcibly restraining himself. His shoulder blades stood out beneath his artfully tailored coat, like they might burst through the fabric.

  The senior Mr. Evesham held up his hand. “Enough, Jonathan.”

  “No wine, no beef, no wife, no life,” Jonathan went on merrily, smacking his lips in satisfaction at his little poem. “But then, I suppose he has his choice of wayward women with whom to spend his lonely nights.”

  “What an utterly preposterous statement,” Alice burst out.

  Henry met her eye and subtly shook his head at her, as if to say don’t get involved—but his fingers clenched his glass of milk so tightly that she wondered how it didn’t shatter. She was so angry on his behalf that she wanted to leap up and push his brother into the remaining puddle of duck sauce. Instead she channeled this impulse into lowering her voice into the flat, belittling tone she’d perfected answering Elena Brearley’s door.

  “It is true, sir, that Mr. Evesham is highly influential in London for his ability to provide solace to the suffering,” she said. “But he also strikes a great deal of fear into the hearts of drunken louts as result of the rather significant power at his disposal. Some might argue such a combination is terrifying enough to command respect. But then, one has to be clever enough to see it.”

  Chapter 11

  It turned out that a fearless, sharp-tongued woman trained by an expert in dressing down males who considered themselves superior was an effective accessory to bring to a family supper. Oh, the surge of pure, radiant affection he felt for Alice as she glared at his brother, like Jonathan was no better than a flea.

  His entire family stared at Alice, as if not sure whether to be angry or afraid of her.

  His mother, clearly noting that there was little hope of returning to civility, stood up before the verbal altercation could become more heated, or another dinner guest could wind up covered in roast fowl.

  “Ladies, shall we leave the gentlemen to brandy and retire to the drawing room?”

  “I will join the ladies,” Henry said, rising. He shifted his eyes to his brother. “After all, as Jonathan points out, I don’t drink.”

  “Stay,” his father ordered. “We have things to discuss.”

  His mother signaled to Josephine and Alice to follow her out of the room. Alice shot him a questioning glance. He smiled at her reassuringly, touched, if a bit ashamed, that she was worried about leaving him in a room with his own family. Imagine, he had worried she
might lower him in his family’s esteem. He should have been worried his family’s crass behavior would lower himself in hers.

  It no doubt already had.

  As soon as the others were gone, his father turned to his brother, rage written on his face. “Jonathan, if you have any sense at all you would not malign your brother in front of Olivia after everything I’ve done to fix the hash you’ve made of things.”

  Henry dearly wondered what Jonathan had done.

  (He hoped, God forgive him, it was something unutterably terrible.)

  “Olivia should know Henry consorts with whores if she’s going to marry him,” Jonathan shot back, before Henry could ask.

  Marry him.

  Oh.

  Now he understood why he was here.

  Not for a christening.

  To pay the eternal debt.

  To be given one last chance to prove himself of value to the family empire.

  He should have assumed there was a cynical purpose to the invitation. His father had been eager to forge an alliance with the Bradley-Houghs for a decade, for they owned his largest competitor in the southwest of England. This revelation should not slice through him. But he could feel the stoic expression he’d managed to maintain withering on his face. He felt flattened.

  “So that’s why you summoned me,” he said to his father, trying not to sound as disheartened as he felt.

  His father rolled his eyes heavenward, as though to even imagine otherwise was foolish. “Of course that’s why I summoned you.”

  “It won’t work,” Jonathan told their father, reaching for his wine. “Olivia won’t have a gelding.”

  His brother smirked, enjoying his own wit.

  It took every ounce of every promise Henry had ever sworn to himself or God or Reverend Keeper not to stand up and suffocate his brother with his ridiculous three-tiered wig.

  Instead, he calmly folded his serviette and rose from the table. “Sir,” he said in a low voice to his father, “I’ll come to discuss the matter with you in the morning.” He looked meaningfully at Jonathan. “Privately.”