“Miss Thornhill, there you are! I was beginning to think you’d gotten lost, between here and the dining room.”
This was met by polite titters.
“I’m quite well, thank you,” Felicity responded. Should she go and talk to her? The answer came soon, when Miranda got gracefully to her feet, shrugging a blanket around her shoulders like a cape, and kept tripping over to where Felicity stood. There were muffled gasps of worry, and a few dirty glances were shot Felicity’s way, the other ladies clearly thinking that she should have gone to Miss Sinclair.
“I wonder, Miss Thornhill, if I could entreat you to a few words alone?” Miranda asked, her voice low and sweet. “I have been trying to talk to you all evening, but it has not happened. It will not do, my dear Miss Thornhill. May I call you Felicity? And youmustcall me Miranda. I feel as though we’re friends already.”
Felicity had no idea what she could have done to make the woman feel like they werefriends already, but she smiled politely anyway.
“Of course. Shall we sit down, then?”
Miranda glanced delicately around. “Not here, I fancy. Somewhere, private, perhaps? Do you know somewhere?”
“The library, perhaps? It’s not far from here.”
“Will Miss Sinclair not be cold?” asked a woman, a dowager, who’d been hovering in the background, eyeing Miranda and shamelessly eavesdropping on their conversation.
Miranda flashed the woman a dazzling smile. “I shall be quite alright, Mrs. Dunbarton, thanks to your care. A thousand thanks, my darling friend. We shall not be long.”
Looping a graceful wrist through Felicity’s elbow, Miranda all but dragged her out of the room. The door closed behind them, and Felicity could almost imagine the chatter exploding behind them, wondering what the two ladies – who everyone knew were not friends – had to talk about.
“It’s so cool out here,” Miranda sighed. “They are so kind, but they are making me feel rather suffocated.”
“They’re worried about you,” Felicity responded. “You could have drowned today.”
Miranda flashed a quick, secret smile. “Yes. I suppose I could have.”
They reached the library, and Miranda closed the door behind them. She slipped the cloak-blanket off her shoulders, tossing it carelessly away. She placed her hands on her hips and shot Felicity a frankly unsettling grin.
“Now,” she breathed. “A word in your ear, my dearest,dearestFelicity. As you may have guessed, this is about our mutual friend, Lord Lanwood.”
Chapter Sixteen
Things were going swimmingly.
Pun intended, of course.
All things considered, Miranda felt that the day had gone extremely well indeed. Beatrice Langley had been the predictable darling she was and offered Miranda a bed at her home for as long as she needed it, and Miranda intended to drag it out for as long as she could.
The half-drowning part had been a little worrying, not to mention that the boat was ludicrously hard to tip. It wasn’t as though Miranda could betooobvious in making it go over. Still, she’d done it, Arthur had rescued her as Miranda knew he would, and theybothmanaged to look good. The hero and the damsel – it was the stuff of legends.
Not to say that everything wasperfect, of course. For one thing, Arthur had mostly avoided her. Miranda hadn’t expected that he would instantly fall back in love with her after saving her, but it would have been nice. No, there would be work to do, and now she was perfectly placed to manage it. She had Mrs. Langley exactly where she wanted her, too.
That dull little spinster, Lucy, seemed to be able to see straight through Miranda’s games. She’d caught the woman looking at her as she lay on the beach, expression blank and entirely unsympathetic. It hadn’t helped that Lucy found her jumping up on and down on her new bed, when she was meant to be resting.
Annoying, but it was hardly a game-changer. Besides, Lucy didn’t seem to have told anyone about it. They wouldn’t believe her, anyway.
The day I tiptoe around a plain, unwanted old spinster is the day they can drape me in a black stuff dress and a veil and cart me off to a nunnery,Miranda thought sourly.
But back to the problem at hand.
Miranda glided into the room, glancing regretfully at the empty fireplace, and chose a sofa large enough for two people to sit side by side.
Felicity Thornhill had been suitably baffled by Miranda’s friendliness, and even more baffled at being dragged off to the library for a private conversation. Miranda had hung back enough at the drawing-room door to hear the girl’s mother haranguing her, which explained the pale cast to Felicity’s face.
If Miranda was a different sort of person, she might have felt sorry for her.
But she was not a different sort of person. She was Miranda Sinclair, and she was a here for a reason. To steel herself, she remembered how Felicity’s face had lit up when Arthur asked her to go boating, and how the two of them outpaced everybody else, lost in conversation.
