‘Do what you like with it then,’ she said with a restless shrug.
‘Only if you promise to sit quiet,’ Jane chided, then produced a pair of sharp scissors and began snipping at Polly’s hair as if shaping it was a work of art. ‘Sit there while I fetch a branch of candles. I can’t see well enough to do this properly,’ Jane said just as Polly was beginning to hope she’d finished.
So Polly had time to sit and wonder why she was doing this. Surely she didn’t want that popinjay to admire her as he might have if their eyes met across a crowded ballroom? She squirmed at the idea of being sized up as the other party in a wild and fleeting affair by a society rake and told herself it was because her seat was too low and rather hard, not because the very thought of Lord Mantaigne made her feel as if a crucial part of her insides might be melting. She despised unprincipled dandies and who could doubt he was one of those when he wore that ridiculously elegant get up as if he was about to take a stroll across Mayfair instead of camp out in a dusty and crumbling castle?
If she’d first seen him sauntering down Bond Street in that exquisitely cut coat, tightly fitting pantaloons and gleaming Hessians she would have shot him a scornful look, then forgotten him as a man of straw. If he’d raised his perfect top hat from his gleaming golden curls and bowed as if he knew her, she would have given him the cold stare of a lady dealing with an overfamiliar gentleman and moved on with a dismissive nod. How she wished she had seen him like that, in his natural orbit and revealed for what he was under the cool light of a London Season.
Except she had only ever heard about such beings in Lady Wakebourne’s tales of former glory. Miss Paulina Trethayne had no youthful rites of passage to look back on; she had never stood on the verge of womanhood, waiting nervously to meet a hopeful youth who might marry her and make her and her children secure for the rest of her life, or might gamble and whore his way through every penny of his fortune and her dowry. She never would now and, since she was already a woman who knew the best way to feel secure in life was to rely on herself; that was just as well. If she came across the Marquis of Mantaigne outside the castle walls it would be as his unequal in every way and she refused to regret it.
So why did a part of her she didn’t like to admit existed long to dance with him at grand society balls and drift about the dance floor of Almack’s Club during a dazzlingly intimate evening of gossip and dancing? The flighty Paulina Trethayne she might have been, if things had been very different, stopped twiddling her thumbs in boredom with the mundane life she had been forced to live beyond the playgrounds of the haut ton and livened up at the idea of dancing with such a man, intimately or not.
Polly wondered how much of the wilful and contrary young girl she had once been was left in her soul, breathlessly green and curious as ever. It felt as if she was on the edge of something life changing and potentially wonderful and nothing could be further from the truth. She looked sideways into the square of mirror Jane and her sister had rescued from somewhere and saw a beanpole dressed in a jumble of hand-me-down clothes with a rough cloth draped over her shoulders to collect stray hairs. What was worse, the lanky creature was staring back from that pane of silvered glass all soft-eyed and dreamy with a silly smile on her face.
Idiot, she condemned her inner fool. You know exactly what happens to such romantic dreamers. With impatient revulsion she turned her head sharply away and was about to get up and ruin Jane’s day when the girl came bustling back into the room as rapidly as her twisted limbs allowed.
‘Sit down and have a bit of patience for once in your life, Miss Polly,’ she ordered, and Polly folded her long legs back on to her perch and meekly did as she was bid. Just because dreams stopped being rosy when reality broke in, it didn’t mean Jane’s secret ambition deserved to be pushed aside as if it didn’t matter.
‘There’s so much to do,’ she protested half-heartedly, but Jane frowned with the air of an expert interrupted in a vital task. ‘And that mincing fop wouldn’t care if I sat down to dinner wearing a sack.’
‘But you should,’ Jane reproved her gently, and Polly felt ashamed for not caring she had straight limbs and an acceptable, if lanky, female form when Jane must long for such luxury every time her legs refused to obey her.
‘It’s been years since I needed to,’ Polly admitted softly and they were both silent for a while, Jane busy with her self-appointed task and Polly wondering how her life might have been, if Papa hadn’t been so feckless and the boys so very young and dependent on her when he died.
* * *
‘There, I’ve finished,’ her companion said at last. Polly sighed with relief and got ready to get up and go about her interrupted evening without another thought for her reflection in that unforgiving mirror. ‘No, you don’t. You have to at least take a look at yourself now I’ve done all I can at short notice,’ Jane protested.
‘I’m still me,’ she argued, snatching a glance in the mirror to pacify Jane. ‘It looks a little wild for my tastes,’ she said, eyeing her newly barbered and carefully arranged hair dubiously.
‘Not wild; cut and dressed to frame your face properly. You have beautiful hair, Miss Polly. It’s a crime to bundle it up as best you can and hack bits off it when you get impatient with the weight of it like you do. Come to me whenever it gets in your way and I’ll soon have it looking lovely again.’
‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, Jane, but since you enjoy cutting hair you might as well practise on me as anyone else.’
‘You’re a fine-looking lady, Miss Polly, and it’s high time you realised it,’ Jane said with a militant nod. ‘His lordship won’t be able to take his eyes off you tonight.’
‘Flatterer. You know perfectly well I’m a quiz at my last prayers and I don’t care a jot what that lordly fribble thinks of me,’ Polly said as she left the room and walked straight into a wall.
Blinking at the odd fact it was a warm and very well-dressed wall that smelt of Lady Wakebourne’s best herbal soap and clean linen, she groaned very quietly as she replayed her own words in her head.
‘Forgive me,’ Lord Mantaigne said with meticulous politeness as he set her at arm’s length and stood back. ‘I seem to have got sadly lost in my own castle.’
‘I’m sorry too, Lord Mantaigne,’ she said stiffly as she pulled back from the impact he had on her senses as if he’d stung her. ‘I didn’t see you out here.’
‘Little wonder, you’d have a job to see a shooting star in all this gloom,’ he grumbled rather dourly.
‘What did you expect after so many years of doing your best to let this poor old place fall down, a diorama put on in your honour?’
‘Even I am not that unreasonable or deluded. No, I expected a great deal worse than this and should thank you all rather than complaining about shortcomings I caused in the first place,’ he admitted. She refused to find the sight of him running a distracted hand through his now wildly curling golden locks endearing. ‘I expected we would have to camp out in an outhouse or sleep in one of the barns. Hence all those wagons and so many provisions for the horses until we could buy more.’
‘I’m relieved to know the space was not entirely taken up by your clothes,’ she said before good manners could catch up with her tongue.
‘What a very high opinion of me you do have, Miss Trethayne,’ he said so smoothly she wondered if anything touched the real man under the gloss and glamour. She must have imagined her scathing opinion of him had hurt, for there was nothing in his eyes but mockery of them both for standing here trading insults whilst their dinner was waiting and they were sharp set.
‘This is a fine and noble heritage, my lord, and I