Elizabeth Beacon - The Marquis's Awakening

Until she had come here and discovered the liberty of breeches and boots she must have spent her waking life enduring the wretched things, she supposed with a sigh. As she lifted her skirts to descend the stairs without tumbling down them, she wondered how she’d borne it for so long. She minced impatiently into the housekeeper’s kitchen they used instead of the vast castle kitchens and tried hard not to knock anything over now she felt several feet wider than usual.

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, girl, you’d look a fright even without the sad state of your hair,’ Lady Wakebourne exclaimed as she turned from stirring a saucepan for Prue with a look of despair at Polly’s unfashionable array.

‘What’s wrong with me now?’ Polly replied defensively.

‘It looks as if you last ran a comb through it about six months ago.’

Polly raised a hand to feel if she was right and realised the hasty plait she’d twisted it into first thing this morning had gone sadly awry and she might as well be wearing a bird’s nest on her head. She felt herself blush at the spectacle she must have made when Lord Mantaigne first laid eyes on her. She wasn’t surprised he’d let his gaze linger on her long legs and what curves she had to her name so impudently now. No, she was, she had to be. His preoccupation with her long limbs proved to her that any reasonably formed female body would do for him to bed a woman, she reminded herself militantly.

‘I’m not primping and preening for any man, let alone him,’ she said, even as the idea of sharing a meal with that finicky, arrogant aristocrat looking as if she had been left out in a tempest for a day made something deep inside her cringe.

‘Don’t worry, I think we would know that, even if you did the rest of us the courtesy of taking a brush and comb to that wild mess now and again.’

‘I’m not going all the way back to my room to try and turn myself into a sweet and docile lady for the marquis’s benefit.’

‘Not much risk of you ever being one of those, Miss Polly.’ The girl stooping over the fire to turn the spit for her sister Prue straightened up as far as she could to eye Polly critically. ‘If you wouldn’t mind watching this for me, your ladyship, I could take Miss Polly along to my room and tame that tangle into something closer to how it ought to look.’

‘Of course, Jane dear. Far be it from me to stand in the way of such a noble undertaking,’ Lady Wakebourne said cheerfully and took over the task with an ease her former friends might find a little distasteful if they could see her. Since they had turned their backs when she found out her husband had gambled away his fortune, Lady Wakebourne’s dowry and a whole lot more before he shot himself, Polly was very glad to have missed out on knowing them.

* * *

‘You have such beautiful hair, Miss Polly,’ Jane said when she finally persuaded Polly to sit still on a three-legged stool in her bedchamber on the other side of their makeshift kitchen from the men’s sleeping quarters, where the heat of the fires at least warded off the chill from the southwest winds and ancient walls left too long without enough fires powerful enough to warm them.

‘It gets in a mess as soon as I’ve finish tying it back every morning.’

‘That’s because it needs thinning here and there and if you’ll let me take a few inches off the ends, I’m sure you won’t find it so hard to manage,’ Jane said shyly as she undid the heavy mass, then brushed and combed it into a crackling and vital cloak about Polly shoulders.

Even her hair seemed imbued with some of her impatience with being primped until suitable for the lord of Dayspring to set his noble eyes on so he wouldn’t be put off his dinner. Polly wondered how long Jane had wanted to be a lady’s maid and it was a hope unlikely to ever come true, given society’s prejudices, so if playing one for a night made her feel better, Polly found she could keep still after all.

‘Do what you like with it then,’ she said with a restless shrug.

‘Only if you promise to sit quiet,’ Jane chided, then produced a pair of sharp scissors and began snipping at Polly’s hair as if shaping it was a work of art. ‘Sit there while I fetch a branch of candles. I can’t see well enough to do this properly,’ Jane said just as Polly was beginning to hope she’d finished.

So Polly had time to sit and wonder why she was doing this. Surely she didn’t want that popinjay to admire her as he might have if their eyes met across a crowded ballroom? She squirmed at the idea of being sized up as the other party in a wild and fleeting affair by a society rake and told herself it was because her seat was too low and rather hard, not because the very thought of Lord Mantaigne made her feel as if a crucial part of her insides might be melting. She despised unprincipled dandies and who could doubt he was one of those when he wore that ridiculously elegant get up as if he was about to take a stroll across Mayfair instead of camp out in a dusty and crumbling castle?

If she’d first seen him sauntering down Bond Street in that exquisitely cut coat, tightly fitting pantaloons and gleaming Hessians she would have shot him a scornful look, then forgotten him as a man of straw. If he’d raised his perfect top hat from his gleaming golden curls and bowed as if he knew her, she would have given him the cold stare of a lady dealing with an overfamiliar gentleman and moved on with a dismissive nod. How she wished she had seen him like that, in his natural orbit and revealed for what he was under the cool light of a London Season.

Except she had only ever heard about such beings in Lady Wakebourne’s tales of former glory. Miss Paulina Trethayne had no youthful rites of passage to look back on; she had never stood on the verge of womanhood, waiting nervously to meet a hopeful youth who might marry her and make her and her children secure for the rest of her life, or might gamble and whore his way through every penny of his fortune and her dowry. She never would now and, since she was already a woman who knew the best way to feel secure in life was to rely on herself; that was just as well. If she came across the Marquis of Mantaigne outside the castle walls it would be as his unequal in every way and she refused to regret it.

So why did a part of her she didn’t like to admit existed long to dance with him at grand society balls and drift about the dance floor of Almack’s Club during a dazzlingly intimate evening of gossip and dancing? The flighty Paulina Trethayne she might have been, if things had been very different, stopped twiddling her thumbs in boredom with the mundane life she had been forced to live beyond the playgrounds of the haut ton

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