Page 10 of A Sorceress Comes to Call
None of the schoolbooks had a sample for when your mother had done something terrible to your friend’s father. Cordelia bowed her head and stared at her hands in her threadbare gloves. Her mother flicked the reins and Falada set out, pulling the stolen carriage as if it weighed nothing at all.
CHAPTER 5
It was late and the fire had burned down in the grate when the butler announced that their guests had arrived. Hester would normally have gone to bed by now, but her presentiment of Doom was so powerful that she doubted she’d sleep anyway. She had a cup of hot cocoa instead, and sat by the fire, pretending to read a book.
“By Jove, you made it! I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.” The Squire rose, beaming, and no one could have guessed that he had been snoring gently but a few moments earlier.
“And miss your company? Never!” said Evangeline. “But oh, what a terrible trip we have had. I cannot tell you how glad I am to be here at last.” She smiled warmly at the Squire and held out both her hands. He took them, bowing over them, his smile even wider than hers.
“Misfortune on the road?” asked Hester. Her eyes picked out Doom’s shadow behind her, a young woman who seemed to be trying to fade into the wallpaper.
“Everything that could go wrong went wrong,” said Evangeline. “Our carriage threw a wheel in the rain and went over and half our luggage went flying into a field of mud and cabbages. Dresses everywhere, completely drenched, and the carriage horses panicking and trampling everything. Fortunately a friend happened by and loaned us his cabriolet to continue on, but our coachman had to stay with the carriage to try to soothe the horses.” She spread her hands. “And though I am not a poor driver, I am not like you, Samuel, who can drive to an inch, so we went very slowly all the way here.”
During this dramatic recitation, Hester kept her gaze on Doom’s daughter. The girl was watching her mother, her eyes wide.
“So I fear that we must throw ourselves on your mercy, dear Samuel, Lady Hester. We have little more than a hatbox or two and what clothes we managed to salvage. Thank heavens we already have an appointment with the dressmaker, or we should look like proper vagabonds indeed.”
The Squire began some nonsense about how Evangeline would look stunning even in rags. Hester broke in to say, “I shall have hot baths arranged in your rooms. But who is your young friend here?”
“This is my daughter, Cordelia,” said Evangeline, beaming with precisely correct maternal devotion. “Cordelia, make your curtsy to the Squire and his sister. He’s been so exceptionally kind, letting us stay with him.”
The girl stepped forward and curtsied clumsily to her brother, her eyes on the ground at his feet. Hester was surprised to see that the girl was not a beauty. Her hair was more mouse than chestnut and her eyes more gray than blue. She looked like a badly washed-out copy of her mother, like a handbill that had been left to fade in the sun.
The Squire bowed to Cordelia. “Lady Evangeline, this cannot be your daughter. Your younger sister, surely?”
Good lord, he actually said it. Hester pinched the bridge of her nose. She loved Samuel and had resigned herself to his gallantry, but she did wish that he had more imagination.
All else aside, Evangeline was in her thirties and Cordelia, standing with her hands clasped tightly together, looked twelve. How old did Doom say she was? Seventeen?
Cordelia would certainly not be the first girl to look younger than her years, but Hester had her doubts.
Doom was flirting with the Squire again. Hester had missed the exact exchange, but that hardly mattered. It was unlikely that it would be either enlightening or original. “You must be exhausted after your journey,” she broke in. She smiled warmly at Doom’s daughter, just to see what would happen. The girl looked at her with wide, startled eyes. A pulse beat in her throat as she swallowed. She looked quickly to her mother, as if she needed guidance in how one responded to even so simple a statement.
“Oh yes,” said Evangeline breezily. “After the misadventure we’ve had, I fear poor Cordelia is quite done in.” Cordelia nodded agreement.
Hester wasted no time in ringing for the housekeeper. “Please see our guests to their rooms,” she instructed. “And draw a hot bath for each.” She smiled at Doom, digging her nails into her palm as she did so. “We won’t dream of keeping you up after such an adventure. You must tell us all about it in the morning.”
If Evangeline was put out by being deprived of the Squire’s presence, she gave no sign. “Dear Lady Hester,” she said warmly. Her blue eyes were almost painfully bright. “You are kindness itself.”
“The very least I can do,” said Hester, and felt intense relief when that blue gaze swept away and its owner went up the stairs after the housekeeper, trailing her daughter like a shadow in her wake.
There were so many closed doors! Cordelia could hardly imagine it. The hallways were lined with doors and every single one of them was closed. They can’t all be closets. No one has that many closets!
It was an enormous house, bigger than anything in the village, bigger than the Parkers’ manor house that Cordelia had glimpsed once or twice when out riding. Presumably such a house would have a great many closets, but some of those rooms had to be bedrooms and parlors and studies, and if so, the doors were closed.
For all the good that does me, given that I’ve managed to humiliate myself as soon as the front door was open.
It wasn’t her fault. The door had opened and the man standing there had been so tall and lordly and aloof that he was obviously the Squire, and Cordelia knew her manners and curtsied immediately.
Except that the man had stood looking down at them, and one icy eyebrow had risen slightly in his icily correct face, and her mother had said, “Please inform the Squire we’ve arrived,” and Cordelia realized that she had just curtsied to the butler.
Her mother hadn’t seen her. That was the only saving grace in the matter. She would not have been pleased. But the footman behind Cordelia had and the butler definitely had, and her face went scarlet with embarrassment and then dead white, because what if he said something to Evangeline?
But he did not. Butlers, apparently, did not report such things to their guests. He had ushered them inside and led them, in icily correct fashion, to the sitting room where the Squire and his sister had been waiting.
And really, he looks so much more regal than the Squire does, how was I supposed to know the difference?
She’d been so flustered at that point that her mother had had to tell her to curtsy, a failing for which Cordelia would undoubtedly pay later. And the butler had witnessed all of it, which only added insult to injury.
