Miss Lindel's Love Read online

  It was said in the village that Lord Danesby kept a splendid greenhouse up at the manor and that he had fresh fruit and flowers even in the deepest parts of winter. How magical and wonderful it must be, she thought, to be able to give your mother a lapful of roses in January, though she herself preferred the wild disarray of flowers growing by hedge or bank.

  With this thought in mind, she went into the drawing room. The mulberry-colored curtains were thrown wide and Mrs. Lindel sat in a pool of sunshine. Around her on every side were trunks, carried down from the attics and up from the lumber room. Spilling out of the trunks, like a rainbow on the floor, were great swaths of fabric.

  “There you are, dearest,” Mrs. Lindel said, putting up her cheek to be saluted. “Did you ask Mrs. Granger about the tonic?”

  ‘Yes, Mother. She’ll send a bottle over once it has cooled.”

  “Oh? Did she make some up fresh?”

  “She didn’t quite like the color of the last batch. She thought it would lack strength.”

  “Excellent. Poor Mrs. Cosby’s in a very bad way. Her sneezing is fit to carry off the roof and her poor eyes are so red there’s not a soul alive who wouldn’t believe she’d been stealing the port.”

  “Poor Mrs. Cosby. Every year her rose cold seems to grow worse.”

  “Mrs. Granger’s tonic will set her to rights. What’s that? The post?”

  ‘Yes. There’s a letter from Uncle Shelley. I hope nothing is wrong in Sheffield.”

  Mrs. Lindel reached in her pocket for her magnifying lenses. As she slipped the point of her scissors under the flap, she commented on how ruinous this was to them. “I do wish John had been more attentive at school. His hand grows ever more difficult to distinguish.”

  Maris smiled, trying to picture her mother’s brother as a small boy laboring to form perfect loops with an uncooperative pen. Now he was broad-shouldered, though not tall, gray-haired, and proprietor of the most luxurious white mustache in the North of England. He had no children of his own, having only recently married for the first time to a young widow. He’d spent his early life building up a prosperous business, creating and importing the copperware which was then silver-plated in the great workshops of Sheffield.

  “What does he write?” Maris asked when she saw the smile awakening on her mother’s face.

  “He can send the coach for us, but only as far as London. So Sophie will be able to make the journey north in greater comfort as well as saving us the price of a fare for her and a maid.”

  “Best of all,” Maris added, “Sophie will be able to spend a few days in London. She’ll be in alt when she finds out. Where is she?”

  “Reading, of course. But come,” Mrs. Lindel said, rising to her feet. “We’ll tell her the good news later.” Leaving the letter on her chair, she pulled out from an opened chest an unraveling length of thin white silk.

  “What is all this, Mother?”

  “Dress lengths, goose.”

  “So I can see,” Maris said with a smile on the edge of laughter. “What are they for?”

  In one voice, they answered, “Dresses.”

  Maris’s younger sister entered the room as they laughed. She raised her head from the book held open a few inches in front of her nose, showing a face very similar to Maris’s own. Her hair was darker, shading into brown rather than her sister’s honey tones. As though to compensate, her eyes were a deeper blue, when one could see them. Most of the time, they were down, unceasingly tracing over lines of print. Furthermore, her cheeks were slightly plumper and lit by a pretty shade of rose.

  “There you are, Sophie. Good news.”

  “Oh?” Her reaction to the treat in store was typical. “Ah, excellent. I shall be able to visit the bookshops.”

  “You are such a bluestocking,” Maris said, giving her sister a squeeze round the shoulders. “What about plays? Milliners? The fascinations of bazaars and pantheons and emporia?”

  “Those too,” Sophie agreed. “But first, the bookshops. I can’t think what Father was about to purchase only the first two volumes of so many three-volume books. And not only novels, though they are perhaps the most frustrating.”

  “It wasn’t your father’s fault,” their mother said. “When your grandfather died, the books were divided among his heirs.”

  “What a foolish arrangement,” Sophie said bitterly. “They should have all been left to me. I’m the only member of this family who reads.”

  “You weren’t born yet, dearest. Besides, you know perfectly well you never looked at a book until two years ago.”

  “Well, I like them very much now.”

  Maris gave her sister another hug. Scarcely more than a year apart in age, they had grown up with a special kind of closeness, second only to twins. When, two years ago, a particularly violent fever had laid hold of Sophie, everyone had despaired of her life. This illness, coming so soon after Mr. Lindel’s death, had rocked the foundations of their lives.

  When she’d emerged from her illness, she’d been much changed. Wan, weak, easily tired, she could scarcely bear the effort of even a desultory conversation. So Maris had begun to read to her. Her former impatience and quickness of thought translated itself into a fierce eagerness to learn the end of the story before Maris could possibly read the whole thing. As soon as the doctor approved, she’d begun reading everything in the house, despite her mother’s fears for her eyesight. Yet in other ways, she remained the same.

  Therefore, when her mother began to display the various fabrics stored in the trunks, she put down her book and took full part in the selection. Mrs. Lindel draped and pinned, deciding a dark blue silk was too heavy for Maris, but right for Sophie, or that the cherry blossom pink washed out Sophie but brought out Maris’s golden highlights.

  “Must all mine be put away until next year, Mother?” Sophie asked plaintively as they folded up the pieces, almost dancing as they came together and parted, shaking out and flattening down the material.

  “I think Sophie should have a few new dresses, Mother,” Maris added. “She’s grown quite another inch and there’s next to nothing more on her hems to be let down.”

  Sophie flashed her sister a look of gratitude. Mrs. Lindel wavered. “Well, I suppose ...”

  “She may very well be invited to attend a dinner at Uncle Shelley’s house. I imagine our new aunt entertains guests on a regular basis. I don’t want my little sister looking like a poor country cousin amid all those silver-plated nabobs.”

  “Oh, no, certainly not. We’ll make up the blue shot sarcenet for a dinner dress and then the bronze green poplin for a new afternoon dress. With the Indian shawl I have laid by, it will be vastly pretty.”

  Maris squinted at Sophie, picturing the gown in her mind’s eye. “What happened to that length of gold braid, Mother? I’ll give her old cloak a new touch with that.” Maris had become a notable seamstress through sheer necessity. Not only did their present finances preclude hiring a dressmaker, but the nearest one to Finchley, unless you counted old Mrs. Williams who did plain sewing, was thirty-five miles away.

  Later that evening, the women put on their pattens and stumped along on the two-inch high metal rings into the village. Mrs. Lindel had dithered over taking the carriage or walking, but her daughters’ desire for exercise overcame her objections. Maris thought her mother looked quite five years younger with her cheeks flushed and the rigid waves of her hair slightly loosened at the edges of her cap. Several of the other guests commented on her fine looks and as usual, Mrs. Lindel deflected the compliments onto her daughters.

  “You are too kind but a woman cannot be thinking of herself when she has two daughters such as mine. Sophie’s hair has quite regained its former curl—such a relief to my mind.”

  Sophie soon left Maris’s side to go argue companionably with Ryan Pike. Though he was a scholar, she had read more widely than he, if not as deeply. Though Mrs. Lindel might sigh and shake her head over Sophie’s “blue” qualities, Ryan referred to her as th
e only “girl of sense” he knew. Looking at the serious, too-thin young man as he towered over Sophie, her arms crossed as she shook her head at him, Maris wondered if Ryan had ever noticed that her sister was never more beautiful than when she made a valid point. Probably not. Ryan thought nothing of living beauty, for his heart was given to old bones.

  Mrs. Pike bustled up, a nervous and distracted hostess in blue damask. “Ah, there you are, Ellen. I made sure I should hear the carriage.”

  “We walked, Margaret.”

  “Walked? Gracious, how intrepid. I vow I have hardly stepped foot outside today, what with the preparations and those children of mine driving me to distraction. Here’s Ryan having all but outgrown his evening wear—again! And I don’t know what Lucy thinks she’s doing. I have asked her half a dozen times to come down—” She turned abruptly to Maris. “She’s in her room. Will you ask her to join us please? She must play the pianoforte for Mrs. Robinson’s flute.”

  “Certainly,” Maris said with a bobbed curtsy. What could be wrong with Lucy? She’d been perfectly all right when they’d parted this afternoon. She had not forgotten to bring her copy of the Ladies’ Magazine to show Lucy.

  She called out, “Lucy? It’s Maris,” as she rapped gently at the white-painted door. The sound of more arrivals floated up the stairs behind her. This was the first evening party of the spring and all the Pikes’ friends and the more superior of the parishioners had accepted the invitation. The winter had been long and dreary with endemic colds sweeping through the local population with extraordinary vehemence.

  Mrs. Lindel had kept Sophie at home more often than not, fearful of a return of fever. The weather had turned so brutal by the New Year that they’d been unable to go to even the local entertainments. Party after party had been canceled and even church had been a struggle. Maris couldn’t imagine why Lucy wouldn’t be downstairs, greeting all the people she hadn’t seen for at least two months.

  Lucy opened the door slowly, peering around the edge. When she saw Maris alone, she stood aside to let her in.

  She was dressed in her best gown, a sky blue dimity that Maris had only seen once before. It became her well, except for a small lace trimming that made her seem a trifle younger than her years. “Your mother sent me,” Maris said. “Everyone is here.”

  “I know.” She cast an anxious glance into the hall as she shut her door. “Maris,” she said intently, “do you think anyone saw what happened today?”

  “Only me.”

  Lucy put her forefinger to her lips and worried the nail. “What about the other members of the parish committee? They must have seen something.”

  “I doubt they took any notice, if they could see well enough to see anything at all. I’ve heard the punch flows with great freedom at their meetings.”

  “He didn’t seem the worse for drink.” There was still only one “he.”

  Lucy had been too shaken this afternoon to answer any of the questions that had leapt into Maris’s mind. Now she ventured one. “What did he look like, close to?”

  “I hardly know. Everything happened so quickly.”

  “You must have taken a good look at him when he held you.”

  “He didn’t!”

  “Well, ‘caught’ you then,” Marisa said, choosing her words with greater care. “You must have seen him then.”

  “I don’t know. I think ... his eyes were blue. The light was very bad.”

  Maris could only think that if she’d had Lucy’s opportunity she should have memorized every feature. Of course, she knew in a general way what Lord Danesby looked like. She’d been stealing every chance to obtain a glimpse of him for the past two years, ever since she’d decided he possessed all the qualities of her ideal. However, she had never come within ten feet of him. It seemed more than a little unfair that Lucy, who never would have thought of Lord Danesby if not for her, should have been the one to feel his touch and look into his face. If only Lucy had been a trifle bolder! She’d had so many opportunities while engaged about the parish to observe him closely, yet had always shyly kept her eyes down.

  In a few moments, after Lucy finished patting her hair into place, the two girls went downstairs. As usual the main entertainment was talking about absent friends and distant relations. Maris had never taken very much interest in the conversations of what she still called “adults.” But now, as Lucy drifted off to join the younger set, she found herself listening. As suddenly as a finger snap, what had always been background noise to her own small doings became intelligible. It was as though she’d woken up one morning gifted with an understanding of a language that had always been foreign.

  “Of course it’s his duty to the land to marry and found his nursery,” Dr. Pike said. “A fine thing if the title should end with him after existing so long.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Harley said, nodding her plume at Lucy’s father. “A proper mistress for the manor would take a lead in village affairs, just as Lord Danesby’s mother did. Not that Mrs. Pike doesn’t serve us perfectly well...”

  The vicar made a placating gesture. “Ah, but people are more willing to follow the lead of a titled lady. I have seen even the most acrimonious discussion turn into the lowing of ewe lambs by the sound of an aristocratic voice.”

  “A family at the manor would be a better thing for the village, sure enough.” Mr. Harley, the village grocer and draper, puffed up his waistcoat as he agreed with his wife. “A bachelor doesn’t order more than a bottle of embrocation once a blue moon, so to speak. With a lady at the manor and maybe children in time, there’d be some point to carrying a choicer selection of dress material, say, or patent medicines. Yes, and ladies’ maids and nurses need somewhere to buy their ribbons and furbelows.”

  He seemed lost in a dream of an endless succession of women trooping into his shop to buy trinkets. Maris thought it very unfair of him to withhold these luxuries until Lord Danesby married. What about the young women who lived here now?

  “It’s nothing but laziness,” gray-haired Miss Menthrip said with a thump of her black walnut walking stick. “These young men have no consideration for the future. What right does a man of nearly thirty have to be unmarried?”

  Maris reflected that if a village, the economy, and the needs of the land were all resting on her marriage, she’d be tempted to run away from home. She could hardly blame Lord Danesby for putting off the evil day as long as possible. Besides, he hadn’t met her yet, not in any meaningful way.

  “Perhaps he simply hasn’t fallen in love yet,” she ventured softly, sure that these mature people would close ranks against her intrusion.

  Mrs. Harley smiled fondly. “Ah, you young girls with your romantic dreams.”

  “It’s all very well for people like us to marry for affection’s sake,” Dr. Pike said. “Indeed, I should hope my children marry for no other reason. Yet life on my lord Danesby’s tier of society is very different. There, mutual affection is to be expected after marriage, not before.”

  “I blame the late lord,” Miss Menthrip said, the lace square on her head fluttering as she shook her head vigorously. “This matter should have been arranged years ago before the boy grew up. Our ancestors ordered this business with more sense than we do today. Earlier barons were betrothed in their cradles. There was none of this wishy-washy prattle about romantic love.”

  Miss Menthrip’s brother had been a noted amateur historian who had settled in Finchley upon his retirement from the law. He had died only a few years later, hardly remembered by the younger people, but his sister had created a niche for herself among the villagers. They respected her sharp tongue and appreciated her kindly heart.

  “You forget the field of courtly love,” Dr. Pike said. “When a knight would dare any danger for a smile from his ladylove.”

  “A fine thing for a man of the cloth to discuss in front of his young parishioners,” Miss Menthrip said, grabbing Maris’s hand in her dry one. “You know perfectly well those ladies were married and not to t
heir knights-errant.” She tugged on Maris’s hand. When she leaned down, Miss Menthrip whispered loudly, “Fetch an old woman a glass of lemonade. All this nattering has parched my throat.”

  “Certainly, ma’am.”

  When she returned, the Pikes had gone on to their other guests and Mr. Harley was deeply engaged with some other gentlemen in a discussion of pig-breeding, his hobbyhorse and passion. Mrs. Harley only stayed by Miss Menthrip’s side until Maris returned. “I see Ramona Ransom over there. I’ve not seen her since the Christmas service. My, isn’t she pale? I hope she’s not been ill.”

  “Go on, don’t mind me.” Miss Menthrip shifted over somewhat stiffly on the settee. “Sit down, Maris, and keep me company.”

  Though Maris would rather rejoin her friends, whom she’d seen eating while she fetched the lemonade, she sat down with a pleased smile. “How are you, dear Miss Menthrip?”

  “You don’t want to hear about an old woman’s aches and pains. When do you and your mother go to London?”

  “Not for some weeks yet. There’s so much to be done. We were choosing dress lengths this afternoon. Mother has put by some beautiful things.”

  “I’ve always said she’s a sensible creature at bottom. There’s no sense in waiting until the last moment then finding what you want can’t be had. Or if it can, the price is such that none but a fool would buy. How many dresses are you to have, child?”

  “I don’t quite know. Most will be made up by a London modiste but Sophie and I are to have at least three apiece.”

  “Sophie?”

  “She is to go to my uncle in the north but we thought it high time she had a few new gowns.”

  “You mean you thought so.” Miss Menthrip laid one finger alongside her beaky nose, her lace mitten hiding the wrinkled backs of her hands. “You’re a good girl, Maris. Don’t let London go to your head.”

  “I won’t,” Maris promised but Miss Menthrip did not look convinced.

  “I’ve seen it far too often. A sweet-natured girl goes up to town and she comes back much the worse for it. They get giddy on too many parties and too much pleasure. They can’t settle down again to the quiet country life. They lead their families a pretty dance and woe betide the poor fool who marries them.”