Follow the Heart (19 page)

After a tedious morning of needlework and gossip, followed by an uncomfortable luncheon at which Edith managed to separate Kate from Lord Thynne and then monopolized everyone’s attention, Kate gratefully escaped to her room for a bit of a rest before changing into her afternoon gown.

No sooner had Athena helped her out of the overskirt of her walking gown than Dorcas entered the bedroom.

“Edith wanted me to remind you that the seamstress is coming today to fit your ball gown for Friday night.” Dorcas perched on the edge of the chest at the foot of Kate’s bed, her voluminous skirt ballooning behind her.

Kate blinked and glanced away from the garish green-and-yellow plaid of the dress, so happy she’d stood her ground on choosing her own colors and patterns for the new gowns in the making. They might not be as fashionable or eye-catching as those worn by Edith and Dorcas and the other young women now in residence, but Kate would not feel ridiculous wearing any of them, either.

“So she says not to bother coming down to the sitting room, as it would just be for a short time and not worth your while.”

Though far from wanting to sit with the sisters and their guests while they made more small talk and embroidered or knitted, Kate couldn’t help but feel ostracized.

“I wish I could stay up here with you. The Brocklehursts are coming to visit this afternoon.” Dorcas’s fine features twisted into a comical scowl. “Dear Mrs. B can carry gossip like no one I have ever met—including servants who live to gossip about their employers. And her aunt, poor dear, who would prefer to be polite and speak of the weather or of events going on in town, is so soft-spoken she cannot get out three words before Mrs. B overspeaks her.”

“Cannot Edith direct the conversation to more general topics?” Kate pulled her arms out of the sleeves of the bodice with Athena’s help.

Dorcas rolled her eyes. “She could; however, she enjoys gossip just as much as Mrs. B—and the more salacious, the better. I will admit, I do not always try to see the good in people, but I feel strange participating in conversations relaying the worst about them, when it might not even be true.”

Kate slid her arms into the dressing gown Athena held for her. She then lifted a knitted shawl—made for her by her sister Clara—and wrapped it around her shoulders. She crossed to the armchair beside the fireplace and sat, taking the warm slippers from Athena to put them on herself. But the long, extremely tight corset would not allow her to bend so far. With a knowing smirk, Athena knelt and held the fleece-lined shoes for her to step into.

“Have you ever tried inviting the aunt aside and carrying on a separate conversation with her?” Kate buttoned the dressing gown from neck to waist before tying the sash.

Athena dipped a curtsy and excused herself from the bedroom, taking the pieces of Kate’s walking dress with her to be laundered.

“I . . . no.” Dorcas’s eyes lit up. “I believe both of us would much prefer that. Thank you, Cousin Kate!” She bounded up from the chest, gave Kate’s hand a squeeze, then swished from the room.

Kate knelt as best she could and stoked the fire, hoping to make the room a little warmer before the seamstress arrived. It leapt a little, then settled back to the same sluggish blaze as before. She took her lap desk from the table and positioned the armchair so it faced the hearth before sitting and taking out the letter she’d begun to Maud and the girls yesterday.

She wrote of Lord Thynne, describing him with as much detail as she could, though without sentimentality, lest her stepmother draw erroneous conclusions.

Her pen hesitated over the ink bottle as she debated herself over the wisdom of telling them of his request to walk with her again—but a knock at the door made her quickly sand the paper dry and put it back in the cubby inside the angle-topped box.

Kate set the box on the table as Athena assisted Miss Bainbridge and her apprentices with the protective white cloth wrapped around the gown.

The silk satin glimmered in the room’s soft light—with highlights as light as a robin’s egg and shadows as deep as twilight. More chills ran across her skin, but this time in anticipation of wearing so beautiful a garment.

After laying the gown flat across the bed, Miss Bainbridge joined Athena in the small dressing room where all of Kate’s clothes were kept, and the two discussed petticoats. Kate ran her fingertips along the skirt of the gown, her hand tingling at its cool smoothness.

Though Kate usually detested fittings, Miss Bainbridge kept up such pleasant conversation that she found herself enjoying the process. She wished she could see how the dress looked on her, but the seamstress had placed the dressing screen between Kate and the freestanding, oval cheval mirror. She wondered if the woman had done it intentionally, to enhance her anticipation. Unfortunately, it merely served to increase her apprehension.

Rather than relegating the task solely to her two young apprentices, Miss Bainbridge joined them on the floor to pin the hem of her skirt—held to extreme fullness by what seemed to be every petticoat and crinoline Kate owned.

“While I am certain this amount of fullness is fashionable, I am uncertain I will be able to move with this many layers underneath.” Kate looked down at the three women hunched like groveling penitents on the floor in front of her.

Miss Bainbridge had to remove a few pins from her mouth before answering. “Do not worry, Miss Dearing. I have a few petticoats at my shop that, with the correct starch, can hold up a skirt like this without quite so much assistance.” She rose and looked Kate up and down. “Now, Athena, if you will move the screen . . .”

After making one final adjustment to where the sleeve started at the top of Kate’s arm, Miss Bainbridge took Kate by her bare shoulders and turned her until she faced the mirror.

Kate gasped. Never before had her shoulders looked so creamy and sloped. And never before had she shown quite so much décolletage. Athena reached around from behind and fastened Kate’s mother’s sapphire-drop pendant necklace around Kate’s neck. It wasn’t the collar-style necklace favored by so many of her acquaintances in Philadelphia, dripping with diamonds and gemstones, but she loved it for its simplicity. The gold chain sparkled in the lamplight, and the large stone reflected the dancing flames from the fireplace as it rested just below the hollow of her throat. The petite row of white lace standing up from the neckline of the gown framed it perfectly. In fact, the gown acted as a frame for Kate herself. She turned to see her profile—a bit surprised by the extra volume of the skirt in the back, making it rise almost like a bustle from the previous century.

“Now see if Lord Thynne or any of the rest of them can keep their eyes off you at the ball,” Athena said, adjusting one of the curls at the back of Kate’s coiffure.

Kate’s blush started in her chest and climbed to her face. “Not with Miss Buchanan or Miss Dorcas in the room.”

Athena and the seamstress exchanged a glance in the mirror. “I think you’ll be surprised, miss,” Athena said.

Kate ignored her, turning so the seamstress could do some more pinning on the lace draping in rich folds from the short puffed sleeves. If there was a man she wanted to be unable to keep his eyes from her, it wasn’t Lord Thynne. It was someone whose mud-encrusted work boots, and hands with soil under the fingernails, would never be welcome at an event like the Buchanans’ ball.

Kate sighed and looked away from her reflection. If Lord Thynne was the one God had chosen to secure the Dearing family’s future, she must put all thoughts of Andrew Lawton in the past.

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

K
ate’s skin tingled as Athena arranged the final curl in the cluster that hung behind Kate’s left ear and cascaded over her bare shoulder to rest in the hollow of her collarbone. In the dim candlelight, with the windows inky black from the early nightfall outside, the blue satin appeared almost indigo, with flashes of lighter blue as Kate turned first one way, then the other, to examine herself in the cheval mirror.

Now that the night of the ball had finally arrived, Kate found herself as nervous as a fly trapped in a spider’s web. Not only would all of the visitors from the house party be in attendance, but additional guests would swell the numbers into the dozens, perhaps close to a hundred. All of them here to view her as if she were a wild animal in a zoological park.

When the seamstress returned with the gown earlier today, Kate feared it had been taken in too far in the waist, lowered too much on top. Yet by the time Athena, using all of her strength, had finished tightening Kate’s corset, the bodice of the gown fastened easily in the back. The lace lining the wide neckline rested slightly lower than Kate was comfortable with, yet high enough to provide some modesty. The short puffed sleeves covered the points of her shoulders, making her neck look even longer than it was. And her mother’s sapphire necklace sparkled against the base of her throat.

She looked like someone else.

And that, more than anything, gave her the confidence she needed to leave the bedroom. If she looked like someone else, she could pretend she was someone else—and pretend the problems that led her here did not exist.

Reaching the top of the marble stairs leading down into the grand entryway, Kate paused and took a deep breath, adjusting her gloves. Tonight, she would not be Kate Dearing, the penniless Philadelphia spinster no one wanted. Tonight, she would be Katharine the socialite, the exotic foreigner arousing every guest’s curiosity, the woman who could take all the lessons on flirtation she’d learned through observation over the past ten years and use them on every eligible gentleman present.

With fingertips trailing down the carved banister, Kate descended the stairs, adjusting to the new petticoats so stiff they could almost stand on their own, careful not to let too much ankle show, even though no one stood below to see. After all, as her stepmother always said, one practiced in private to be perfect in public.

She headed toward the rear of the house. After the guests divested themselves of their wrappings and refreshed themselves from the journey to Wakesdown in the ladies’ and gentlemen’s receiving rooms, they would be announced as they came through the small parlor to be greeted by the family before entering the gallery, which had been cleared of furniture to serve as a ballroom.

She stopped before entering the parlor. Standing outside the door and dressed plainly with her hair in a severe chignon at the nape of her neck, Nora turned and smiled in greeting. “Good evening.”

Kate paused, then smiled back at her as pleasure overcame her shock. “Miss Woodriff, I am surprised to see you.”

Nora stepped back and looked Kate up and down. “You look lovely, Miss Dearing.”

“Thank you.” Kate thought she caught a shadow of wistfulness in the other woman’s golden-brown eyes, but it was quickly masked. “It must be hard—”

“Kate.” Christopher’s voice broke across Kate’s and she turned to greet her brother—but not before she saw a spark of warmth in Nora’s eyes as she turned her gaze toward Christopher.

Dread niggled at Kate’s stomach, but she bit back the almost overwhelming urge to warn Christopher again against forming an attachment. Who was she to set rules about whom he could find attractive? So long as he didn’t act on it. And she trusted her brother to retain his senses and remember his responsibility toward their family.

With a nod toward Miss Woodriff, Christopher offered his arm to Kate, who bade the governess farewell before taking her brother’s arm and allowing him to escort her into the parlor.

“Isn’t that dress a little too . . . revealing?” Christopher whispered.

She sighed. “It’s what’s fashionable, I’ve been told. And compared to Edith and Dorcas, I’d say I’m quite modest.”

“But neither of them is my sister.”

Kate squeezed his arm. “I thank you for your concern. But do recall why we are here. None of the men who will be thrown my way tonight would deign to glance at me if I dressed like a prude.”

Christopher glanced back over his shoulder toward where Nora Woodriff stood just outside the door. Kate’s stomach dropped.

“Oh, Cousin Kate, you look beautiful.” Florie Buchanan gave her a wide, toothy smile—until a glance at her oldest sister made her mask her pleasure.

“Thank you, Cousin Florie. Will you be joining us for the ball, then?”

Florie’s cheeks turned pink and she ducked her chin, looking down at her plain day dress. “I wish I could, but I am not yet sixteen, and I cannot attend balls until I am.”

“Florie wished to see us all in our finery.” Dorcas, in pale pink satin with a much more modest neckline than Kate’s, looped her arm around her sister’s waist. “And now that you have, dearest, you must take your leave.”

“But I haven’t seen Lord Thynne yet.”

“Ask and ye shall receive.”

Along with everyone else, Kate turned at the sound of Lord Thynne’s voice. Unbidden, her breath caught in her throat. Though a handsome man under ordinary circumstances, in his black suit, white waistcoat, and white cravat, he was extraordinary—even for a man who must be at least forty.

After paying compliments and greetings, Sir Anthony dismissed Florie and Miss Woodriff, just as they heard the first guests arriving.

Half an hour later, Kate’s face ached from smiling constantly. And she’d grown quite weary of hearing Edith say, “And these are our cousins, Katharine and Christopher Dearing, visiting from America,” to the dozens upon dozens of guests as they passed through the receiving line.

Beside her, Christopher kept up a stream of flirtatious conversation with Dorcas, who stood to his right, while Kate stood silent, ignored by Edith until it was time for the introduction again.

Finally, Sir Anthony indicated that the time for receiving guests had ended, and the time for dancing was now upon them.

Stephen Brightwell, who’d stood beside Sir Anthony in the place of honor and precedence in the receiving line, came to stand in front of Kate. He bowed. “I believe the honor of the first dance is mine.”