Grace had to agree. Helen spent her days remaking The Willows to her liking, flinging up wallpaper, painting the rooms and rearranging furniture. Meanwhile, the Elliot boys had mastered the art of hiding bric-a-brac and returning furniture to its rightful place in the middle of the night—with Will’s help, Grace suspected. When questioned, the culprits regarded their father and stepmother with the innocence of newborn lambs.
Maybe we have a ghost.
Yes. They certainly did.
Perhaps it was just as well the new Lady Elliot had locked the east parlor up tighter than the Royal Treasury since she had decided to hold her luncheon in that sunny room.
“I must say, the mustache is rather dashing.” Pevensey’s comment shook her from her musings.
Despite his efforts at levity, Grace couldn’t muster a smile. “I’ll be so glad when this luncheon is over, Pevensey. It’s hard, watching her get out my mother’s finest things. Even using the silver tea set the Benevolent Society engraved specially for her.”
“No one could ever take your mother’s place, Lady Grace. Or your own. All the servants say so.”
Her eyes burned at the tenderness in his words, and she wished he could gather her in his arms as he had when she was little and sprained her ankle. But she was a woman of five and twenty, and had been mistress of the house during her mother’s illness. Everyone was looking to her to make things right. She heard the unmistakable sound of Helen’s voice and the click of heels descending the stairs.
The boys looked up in horror, saw Grace, then dashed past her into the study with a pleading glance.
She looked from the freshly inked mustache to Pevensey. “The table,” she hissed, gesturing to the demilune that sat a few feet from the freshly decorated peacock. Pevensey leapt into action, dragging the table beneath it, while Grace snatched a tall flower arrangement from a pillar in a niche and set the flowers where the spray of gladiolas and lilies obscured the mustachioed bird.
Funeral flowers, she thought.
With one last conspiratorial glance, Pevensey walked one way, while Grace raced, breathless into the study, flinging herself into a chair and scooping up a newspaper. She hid behind it, focusing on the caricature on the front page of the daily as if, by will alone, she could make her stepmother walk past the study.
The Elusive Viscount E—who will snap him up first?
She’d been following the series of caricatures depicting her childhood neighbor since Cruikshank began it, and the thought of the arrogant, aloof Lucien Harcourt being chased by crocodile brides was the most diverting yet.
However, at the moment, her own vexation was at hand. Helen blew into the room like a sprigged muslin hurricane. “Oh, Grace!”
With an inward groan, Grace peeked over the top of her newspaper.
Corkscrew curls of faded blonde framed her stepmother’s once pretty face. Age had softened the jawline and pressed fine wrinkles here and there that rice powder and rouge could not conceal. Her eyes were the gray of an overcast sky. Plump hands clutched at the blue velvet ribbon on which a brass key hung against a bosom like the prow of a ship.
“I’ve been searching all over for you!”
“Well, you’ve found me.” The newspaper rustled as Grace set it aside.
Helen paused, regarding the publication as if it were a rat. “How can you bear reading that dreadful thing? I can’t see why you’d wish to pollute your mind with matters that are so unwomanly.”
“It’s something Mama and I liked to do together,” Grace said. “Mama always said it was absurd for women not to know what was happening in the world around them when their husbands, brothers and sons would be the ones sent off to war.”
Tears glistened in Helen’s eyes as they so often did when someone extoled the first Lady Elliot’s virtues. Which, Grace had to confess, was often.
“Tell me, what is troubling you so?” Grace asked more gently.
“Oh, Grace! Such a calamity I don’t know what to do!” Lady Helen twisted the ribbon until she was in danger of strangling herself. “Nanny has run off to the barber to have her tooth pulled.”
No wonder her brothers had been up to no good, Grace thought. Helen was fortunate it wasn’t worse.
“I hope Nanny is able to get some relief,” Grace said. She pictured the round face of Nanny Bea as it had been of late, the sunny smile that graced the Elliot nursery tight with pain.
“Yes, yes, butsuchan ill-fated time! I spent all yesterday getting everything arranged quite perfectly for my luncheon in the east parlor and now Nanny has left the boys to run wild and my guests are due to arrive in an hour!” Her lower lip trembled. “Wilberforce refuses to aid me in my time of need. He insists he has another engagement.”
No doubt he does sinceyouinsist on calling him by his full name, Grace thought wryly. He’d told Helen a dozen times to call him Will. There had been increasing strain since Will had come to visit from Oxford, and Grace was beginning to think it wouldbe a relief when her brother headed to London to spend the rest of his holiday with friends.
“I would ask the maids to mind your brothers,” Helen rushed on, “but I had such charming new uniforms made for them. You must think I’m a silly goose, fluttering around here like a new bride but I never wish to give dear Vernon cause to regret wedding me.”
The fact that this bride was well past her fifth decade, and had been a wife of thirty years before the whirlwind courtship had brought her to The Willows, made this fuss feel a trifle ridiculous. Still, there was a desperate eagerness in Helen’s actions that sparked Grace’s sympathy as much as they irritated her.
