Page 39 of The Cornish Mermaid

Morvoren’s gown was to be covered with a diaphanous silk chiffon as an overskirt that would make a train, something that filled her with a mixture of excitement and dread. It was bad enough trying to cope with the long skirts of her day dress without the possibility of something that trailed on the ground behind her, waiting to trip her up. “Couldn’t I just have a dress without a train?” she pleaded, but Ysella overruled her.

“Nonsense, this is a ball we’re going to and we have to look our most elegant.” She giggled. “It’ll be such fun. I’m so glad we’ll be going together.”

Quite by chance rather than design, they were just finishing their shopping when Kit returned, something over an hour later. A slight aroma of alcohol hung about him as he cast his eyes over the mound of things Ysella had selected. No doubt he’d been to the local inn for his “few small errands.”

However, he gave the pile no more than a cursory glance. “Add these things to my account, if you please.”

Miss Honoria and Miss Lucinda curtsied again, and Kit swept Morvoren and Ysella out of the shop, leaving those poor little half-starved looking sewing girls to begin working on the dresses. Not without Morvoren feeling guilt creeping up on her, though. If only she had money of her own, she’d have given them some, but she didn’t, so there was nothing she could do. But Kit could.

She accosted him as soon as they were back in the barouche.

“Those girls who were working for the Misses Sedgewick,” she began, catching his attention. “How old do you think they were?”

Kit raised a supercilious eyebrow. “What girls?”

Had he not noticed them? Were they so far below him that he didn’t even know they existed? Although he had only been inside the shop for a very short length of time.

“They had three little girls working behind that counter, at the back of the shop in the gloom. All of them looked a lot younger than Ysella.”

Ysella nodded. “Yes, I’ve seen them there before when I’ve been to order something with Mama. They’re excellent seamstresses. Such tiny stitches.”

Morvoren gazed from one well-to-do aristocrat to the other and immediately understood why the French Revolution had taken place. “But they’re hardly more than children, and they’re being made to sit hunched over and stitching in dreadful light. They’re not even fully grown yet.”

Kit frowned. “They’re lucky to have work. Many do not.”

Ysella tilted her head to one side. “They must be at least fourteen, I would think. Any younger than that and their stitchwork wouldn’t be good enough for the Sedgewicks’ shop. So they’re not really children.”

Good heavens. She was still such a child herself at eighteen, and in one sentence she’d condemned fourteen-year-olds from a different walk of life to drudgery. Morvoren bristled but held herself under control. With difficulty. “Did you not see their thin little arms and pinched faces? None of them looked as though they’d had a good meal in months.”

Kit frowned some more. “They’ll be apprenticed to the Sedgewicks, learning their trade, so they won’t be being paid much as yet. But I’m sure their parents will be feeding them.” He shook his head. “You can’t get decent work out of poorly fed staff. But they’re nothing to do with Ormonde. I have no power over how the Sedgewicks treat their staff.”

How to make them see that this was wrong, even if these badly treated children weren’t from Ormonde? “Could we not send them some food?”

Ysella’s face brightened. She clapped her hands together. “Yes. What a good idea. We could send them some sweetmeats and fancies as a reward for stitching our gowns at such short notice. We can get Cook to prepare a hamper for them.”

Not being quite sure what she meant by “sweetmeats and fancies,” Morvoren hesitated. But a hamper as a reward was a good idea. She needed to be more precise about what should go in it, though. “Sweetmeats and flowers perhaps for the Sedgewicks,” she said, picking her words carefully. “But for those three girls I would suggest something more substantial that they can take home to their families. A large joint of meat, bread, fruit, perhaps some tonic wine? Foodstuffs that provide good nutrition. That would be more appropriate in their circumstances, don’t you think?”

Two sets of surprised brown eyes regarded her.

Kit spoke first. “Ye-es. You have it right there. Even if they don’t live in one of my properties, I suppose their want still concerns me because I use their employers’ shop. That would be a suitable reward that would help their families as well as them, whereas sweetmeats, nice as they are, have little value for a child.” His eyes twinkled. “Why, Morvoren, you have a fine sense of what is right.” He paused, suddenly serious. “And it’s only what I’ve done for the poor miners and fishermen in Cornwall in the past.”

She sat back against the upholstered seat of the barouche, content at having improved the lot of those three little seamstresses, but most intrigued by his remark about the poor people of Cornwall. Could that have something to do with his reasons for smuggling?

Chapter Seventeen

Morvoren

“We shall get up early tomorrow morning and you can teach me how to ride astride,” Ysella said as she and Morvoren climbed the stairs to their rooms that evening, hands protecting their guttering candle flames. “I can wait no longer.”

This didn’t sound like a particularly good idea. “What if someone catches us?”

“Nonsense. We won’t be caught if we get up at six. Mama stays in bed until nearly ten, and Kit will be busy in the estate office with Sam Beauchamp. I heard them talking this afternoon. Sam wants Kit to go over the estate books with him, and I heard Kit asking if there were any more families in want. When he’s here, he does like to enquire into the welfare of our tenants. If I know Sam, he’ll keep Kit occupied all morning, not even stopping for breakfast.” She beamed. “Which means we can go down to the stables and make sure our horses have the right saddles for riding astride. No one will ever know.”

The flaw in her plan seemed to be that the grooms would all know and probably gossip about it in the servants’ hall, but Morvoren resisted saying so. After all, she did want to ride astride on that pretty little grey mare and feel the wind in her hair again in a gallop through the grounds of the estate. And jump those obstacles properly. Temptation was a fickle thing.

“What are we going to wear?” she asked, glancing down at her dress and fancy slippers. “We can’t ride astride in riding habits. We need trousers. Where will you get breeches for us?”

Ysella tapped the side of her nose. “Come with me and I’ll show you. Kit’s and my old clothes are stored in our old school room. Since I abandoned it last year, it’s been used for storage. No doubt it will stay like that until Kit decides to grace us all with a bride and some children, but for now, there are some very useful trunks of his old clothes in there that I’ve made use of before. He wasn’t always as tall as he is now, you know.”