The musicians signaled that they were taking a rest by ending the dance with a special flourish. Without being asked, Bella’s partner escorted her to her stepsisters. There wasn’t room for her on their bench, but she didn’t mind; she stood behind them and accepted a cup of punch from yet another young man.
“I don’t have to ask if you’re having fun,” she said, pulling a fan off her belt and vigorously cooling herself with it.
“I don’t know when I have ever had such a good time!” Pearl whispered, as Amber giggled and sipped punch demurely. “No one has this much fun at the parties we get invited to.”
The twins had caught their breath by this point, and allowed new partners to carry them off into the dance. For a moment Bella found herself without anyone to chaperone and without a partner—
“Alone and defenseless. Just the way I like them,” purred a voice in her ear.
Reflexively she stomped her neat little heel onto a set of booted toes, thrust an elbow behind her and nimbly leapt over the bench the twins had been sitting on. Since the current dance was a very lively Dargason, this went entirely unnoticed.
There was a muffled yelp and an equally muffled curse as reactions to her assault, but when she turned, whoever had accosted her was gone already.
She knew who it was, however. There was no mistaking that voice. Duke Sebastian’s Gamekeeper—who was rather too superior to allow anyone to call him a Gamekeeper to his face, insisting on the loftier title of Woodsman. He was, without a doubt, taking advantage of the fact that this was a masked ball to try his luck and his charms on girls who were here without Guardian Mamas. Well, too bad for him, the dog; he’d found a bitch who would bite back. Serves him right, she thought, seething a little. She didn’t seethe long, though; a moment later the musicians struck up “Jenny Pluck Pears” and a partner materialized out of the crowd, and she was back to doing what she loved best.
Much earlier than she would have liked, but about the time it was prudent to take leave, she and the twins met at the bench again in a similar state of happy, panting, overheated exhaustion. “I really do not think,” Amber puffed out, “that another round of punch is going to restore me one little bit.”
“Me, either,” Pearl panted, though she looked wistful.
Bella nodded. “All right, then, they’ve just brought a fresh bowl out. Let’s slip away while there’s a mob for punch.”
About this time of night people started slipping something a bit stronger than wine into the punch, too. Not that, given the enormous bowl that was kept filled, one bottle of brandy was going to have much effect—but it was better to leave while the only unpleasant spot on the festivities was that wretched Gamekeeper, Eric.
Once out in the night air, they were glad of their cloaks. Things were very frosty. “I think it will snow again soon,” Bella remarked, as the three of them hurried through the silent streets to Henri Beauchamps’s handsome house. “If you don’t mind people knowing it’s us, we can go skating on the pond by moonlight as soon as the ice is hard enough. There’s usually a bonfire and chestnut sellers and mulled cider and music.”
At nearly four years older than her stepsisters, Bella had been sneaking off to these dances long enough to know exactly which ones were going to be great fun, as this one had been, and which were ones that it was prudent to stay away from.
Bella unlocked the private door into the garden and gave each of the girls a little basket she had waiting on a shelf above where most people would look. “We’re home!” she called up the staircase. “The girls found some nice things.”
As she expected, it was Genevieve’s maid that appeared, not Genevieve herself. “Mistress would like to see you when you have all changed into something more comfortable,” she said, with the little sniff that told she meant cleaner.
“Of course, we brought her a few things, as well. We’ll be there in merest moments,” Bella said breezily, ignoring the snub. She didn’t at all mind; it meant that Genevieve was not going to be asking why the girls were in their shepherdess frocks when the gowns were no longer the mode and were rather unsuitable for scrambling about in their father’s warehouse.
Henri Beauchamps was a merchant trader, as his father had been before him, and his father before that, coming up from a mere peddler with a single donkey; at the moment, he had a thriving business in furs, although at one time or another he had dealt in practically anything that wasn’t living and couldn’t be eaten. Bella had always had the run of the warehouse and the freedom to take anything she pleased, but when she had asked the twins if they wanted to go to the dance, she had hit upon the notion of saying they were going to the warehouse with her.
Now, the reason Bella went combing through the old stores was because she had an uncanny knack for finding forgotten treasures there. Many had been the time when Genevieve, Amber or Pearl would look at some bit of lace, panel of delicate embroidery or other little addition to her gowns and ask where she had got it. If she answered “the warehouse,” there would be much sighing, for this meant it was not likely there was any more of it, nor would be ever again.
Genevieve was consequently quite happy to allow her girls to go rummaging through the building—which was not at all dusty and dirty, though you could never persuade her of that. Thus, a perfectly reasonable explanation for why the girls would be out after supper. Bella had, in fact, made the selections in the three baskets yesterday.
They all hurried up to their rooms. The twins’ maid was one of Henri’s household, and was completely loyal to Bella; no fear there that the twins would be tattled on. And Bella herself did without a maid; she had elected to do so as soon as she was old enough to dress herself, and saw no reason to change unless the gown she had to get into was more complicated than the simple things she usually wore. When she was comfortable in nightgown, dressing gown and heavy plush robe with matching blue slippers, she picked up her basket and went to her stepmother’s room.
Genevieve was sitting up in bed, like an expensive porcelain bed-doll on display, surrounded by the boxes and jars and cabinets full of the pills she took for her many—mostly imagined—ailments. Genevieve fancied herself an invalid. She kept three doctors busy— Well, she would have kept them busy if they had actually been treating her. Instead they were pretending to treat her, honest gentlemen that they were, giving her harmless concoctions made of flowers, simple herbs that could do no harm and even bits of baked cookie dough. They charged her father almost nothing, and yet, because they knew Genevieve so very well, they were alert to anything that might be an illness, serious or otherwise. He in his turn kept these old friends well supplied with the finest wines and brandies that he came across in his trading ventures, so it was a good arrangement all around.
“It’s Genevieve’s hobby,” he had once told Bella, when she made some scornful remark about it. “It’s harmless enough since I am not actually paying my friends anything, and she is not being dosed with things that really would make her ill.”