Royal Regard

Chapter Five, Part 1

"You were quite the success—" Charlotte lied as she opened the bruise-colored velvet curtains, then the casement window, in Bella's sitting room. Bella took a shawl from the arm of the sofa as she sat down, draping it over the shoulders of her long-sleeved, high-necked Directoire frock.

"Hardly," Bella interrupted.

"—in spite of yourself." Charlotte shuddered, "I hope you didn't tell anyone you live in Russell Square. It's as though you want to be ruined."

"You know perfectly well I was ruined as soon as I said 'damn.' I could live in the king's bedroom and not survive that."

"Your language!" Charlotte admonished. "And best not discuss the king's bedroom, or Lady Conyngham will scratch out your eyes."

Bella spoke up to be heard above the sounds of construction reverberating intermittently through the house.

"Please close the window. We are overlooking the point of entrance and egress, and it's chilly this morning."

Charlotte ignored the question of the ominous clouds and sharp breeze, and Bella's request for a quieter environment in which to visit, turning away from the window without closing it an inch. Charlotte's claret-colored merino-wool day dress was far warmer than Bella's gown of Indian cotton, chosen for a quiet—or not-so-quiet—day at home before a fire. She pulled the shawl closer.

Bella had hoped for contemplation, not conversation, but of course, she had forgotten Charlotte's incessant need to analyze every word and every deed of every lady and every gentleman at every party. Or rather, she had hoped in vain Charlotte might have outgrown it.

"What is all that awful banging?" Charlotte asked.

The servants' entrance from the mews behind the house, where merchants' deliveries were now nearly nonstop, sounded like Cheapside at Yuletide, and there was no room in the house left undisturbed. The workmen clattering and shouting were giving Bella headaches.

"A great many things that require hammers and nails and bashing holes in the walls. Heated water, gravity showers, Argand lamps, voice pipes. Carpentry and plasterwork. It should only be this intolerable another few days, I'm told. Meanwhile, I am choosing furniture and cushions." She indicated the boxes of samples on her writing desk.

For the moment, her private sitting room walls were yet covered in dank, water-stained, lavender-flowered wallpaper above the chair rail, tattered lemon-yellow silk below, all grimy with twenty years of uneven sun-bleaching and dust. Although all of the colors complemented her skin tone, to Bella's taste, it looked like a dyed Easter egg left to decay on a shelf for a decade; an elderly spinster dressed in desiccated debutante finery.

Bella picked up an embroidery hoop and laid it on her lap while she sorted silks. "If you don't mind, I would much rather discuss the appointments for my home than the notoriety attached to my name."

Charlotte maintained, "We have weeks to decorate your house, but only one morning-after-your-first-party-in-London."

Bella pursed her lips. She should have known better.

Charlotte flounced over to sit next to her cousin on the de Cuvilliés sofa, upholstered in a once-cream-colored tapestry, woven with fist-sized purple flowers of a genus and species Bella had never seen. Bella winced and Charlotte started at the sound of another long tear in the fabric.

The upholstery of all the furniture had dry-rotted under the dustsheets that had covered it for fifteen years—themselves replaced twice—but no servant was so impertinent as to sit in the baroness' chairs, so the shredding only became apparent once she had. Now everything was dripping horsehair and wadding. The wood, of course, had all been cleaned and polished with beeswax before Bella and Myron returned.

With less reaction to the problematic furniture than Bella had expected, Charlotte pulled at the rumpled lace on Bella's coral morning dress. "This is a lovely color, but your abigail is hopeless with an iron. You must let me find you someone new."

"I have no lady's maid. I am the one hopeless with an iron," Bella frowned.

Charlotte sniffed, "Pressing your own clothes. It's like you were raised by a pack of wild dogs."

"I was raised by your mother."

Charlotte patted her knee. "Touché."

"Self-reliance is a virtue in places no competent servant will go, and wrinkles are not such a tragedy in other parts of the world. I can even arrange my own hair." Bella hoped it was early enough in the day that it wasn't yet falling from its pins. With her tiny sewing scissors, she clipped a ragged end of grey-brown silk at an angle, threading it carefully through the needle, and began to fill in the outline of a robin redbreast.

Charlotte frowned at Bella's coiffure. "Whoever told you that was playing you false. I can easily find someone proficient. An advertisement will be placed this afternoon."

"You are no longer responsible for my deportment. And you might look to your own house. You are running to fat these days."

Charlotte's nostrils flared and her nose wrinkled as she made an unidentifiable sound in the back of her throat. It had been years since Bella had needed to determine her cousin's moods by ear, but this was suspiciously like the noise Charlotte made when she might begin to cry, so Bella conceded, showing Charlotte it was a tease with a small smile.

Emotions once more in check, Charlotte responded with a slight chill. "As long as you won't have a care for your appearance, I will, and my figure is my husband's concern, not yours. I've given him two children, and he likes me the way I am." She punctuated her comment with a hard nod. "You, on the other hand, will need a new husband in no time at all. Your suitors may as well be handsome and rich, considering your new title and all you'll inherit. Just as easy to wed a handsome man as a hideous one, all fortunes being equal."

"Charlotte! Mind your tongue!"

"Why? Myron looks like his legs will go out from under him any second."

"Please do not make me a dowager before my time, nor wish my husband dead. And there is no way to know whether the king will confer a title. He is changeable, and Myron and I know it better than anyone. If we had a guinea for every time he sent us someplace we didn't intend—"

"Don't you, though?" Charlotte asked, shrewdly. She leaned in closer, lowering her voice, looking around to ensure no servants were in the room. "Before the Brewster's ball, you will be the Countess of Huntleigh. Myron will receive the Writ of Summons tomorrow, and the king intends to hand it to him personally."

Bella touched the back of her hand to her lips. "As soon as that?" When she realized she was staring wide-eyed, she schooled her expression to something more appropriate than the look of a little girl given a new doll.

"Alexander has it from Lord Pinnester, who was there when His Majesty gave the order."

"I must admit," Bella relaxed her mouth and her shaky hands, picking out a short row of bad stitches. "I am so proud of Myron. He has given his life to the Crown, almost literally on more occasions than I care to consider. He deserves to be recognized for it."