“Yes. But if you make the right moves, you’ll be a queen someday, won’t you? Isn’t that what you care about, Miss Stuart?”
“Yes,” she answered firmly. “That’s all I care about. Will you excuse me, please? I’m going back to my room.”
“Allow me to escort you.”
“How thoughtful you are,” she said, ironically, and when he held open the door for her she swept past him with her head held extremely high, although the overall effect was ruined when she barreled into someone coming out of the common-parlor, reeled back and bumped into him, hastily apologized to both of them, and with her dignity less than intact went on to the staircase and so up to her bedchamber.
At her door she paused. “Go ahead, say it!” she said in what he could only think of as a loud whisper. Even in the dimness of the corridor he could see her eyes snapping with hostility.
“Say what?”
“That I’m a clumsy country yokel!”
He smiled, just a little. “I,” he said, rather lazily, “would never contradict a lady. Good ton forbids it. I trust you’ll pass a peaceful night, Miss Stuart.”
She scowled and whisked herself into her room, closing the door very gently. He could tell—oh, he could tell for sure—that she wished she could have slammed it in his face instead.
The coach drew up to an imposing townhouse in a very elegant street—Upper Camden Place, the old lady had called it. They were in Bath. Livia stared, but had no time to think more about it in the bustle of arrival, as steps were let down, she and Mrs. Penhallow and Miss Cott were solicitously handed out by a footman, servants had emerged from the townhouse, the carriage with that incredible quantity of luggage pulled up, horses were neighing, and the old lady was already giving orders to, evidently, everyone, including the horses. A sharp wind seemed to be resisting their every movement and Livia kept a hand on the ribbons of her bonnet, although if it did fly off her head and float off—toward France, say—she would have been glad to see it go. The dreadful ugly thing.
Gabriel Penhallow had dismounted and stood as if immune to the chaos. How did his tall low-brimmed hat stay so securely on his head? No doubt through sheer force of will, she thought resentfully.
She watched as he handed the reins of his horse to the footman, then went unhurriedly to his grandmother and said a few words. She waved a hand, impatiently, and composedly he bowed slightly, then came to Livia and said:
“Goodbye.”
“Goodbye?” she echoed, startled and, strangely, ridiculously, dismayed. “Aren’t you staying here?”
“That would hardly be proper.”
“Oh. Of course. Where are you going, then?”
“To the York House.”
“Where is that?”
“Here in Bath.”
“Oh. When will you—”
“Miss Stuart!” It was the old lady, already at the top of the steps and on the stoop, looking down at Livia as if she were an unruly pigeon, desecrating the pavement. “Do stop loitering about in that aimless way. Come up at once!”
“Well,” Livia said to Mr. Penhallow, “goodbye then,” and dutifully went up the steps, despite herself feeling that he had callously abandoned her to the less than tender mercies of his grandmother, who, as Livia crossed the threshold, looked up toward the ceiling as if silently requesting celestial assistance for the monumental, possibly hopeless task awaiting her.
Livia started awake as into her consciousness came the noise of a door whispering open.
Where am I?
She stared up in bewilderment at the unfamiliar canopy overhead. She was in a big four-poster bed draped with sumptuous burgundy silk. How on earth did this happen? Then, as she saw in the dimness the quiet white-aproned figure of a housemaid, lighting a fire in the hearth, she remembered.
She was in Bath.
She had been here eleven—no, twelve days now.
She kept track, in order to remind herself that it was all real.
That she was real.
In the twinkling of an eye, her life had been turned upside down. No more Ealdor Abbey, no more vacuous Aunt Bella, no more caustic Uncle Charles. No more excruciating visits from the Orrs, and wasn’t it all a nice change. Sometimes she had to remind herself that it wasn’t a dream.
A bizarre, overwhelming dream that overtook her waking hours.
At first, she could barely sleep. To someone who had spent most of her life in the countryside, often outside and solitary in the quiet of the woods, Bath initially seemed raucously, intolerably noisy.
During the day came the ceaseless rattle, jingle, clink, clop of horses and carriages; through an open window one might see an endless promenade of strangers. (And how curious to see the elderly and infirm carried along in sedan chairs, some of them so extravagantly fitted out they looked like tiny portable palaces.) Even the night hours were regularly punctuated by the sonorous calls of the watchmen, or by bursts of talk and laughter among the link-boys.