The Chaperon Bride. Nicola Cornick
‘Sibella is lucky in that she can indulge herself as a lady of fashion.’ Annis looked around for her trunks. ‘I am obliged to work for my living. Nevertheless I am grateful to you for swallowing the family pride and coming to meet me, Charles. I know I do you no credit!’
Charles laughed again. ‘It was shock, that is all. I barely recognised you in all that frumpish black. You used to be such a good-looking girl…’
Annis gave him a sharp nudge. ‘You used to be quite handsome yourself! Where did it all go wrong, Charles?’
Charles Lafoy was in fact a very good-looking man, as most of the female population of Harrogate would testify. Like his sister Sibella, he had the fair, open features of the Lafoys, the honest blue eyes and engaging smile. As lawyer to Harrogate’s most prosperous merchant, Samuel Ingram, he had a prestigious position in village society. There was no shortage of inn servants queuing up to help his groom put Annis’s luggage in the carriage. Everyone knew that Mr Lafoy always tipped most generously.
Annis Wycherley was almost as tall as her cousin, having a height unfashionable in a woman but useful in a chaperon, since it helped to assert her authority. Her eyes were hazel rather than the Lafoy blue, but she had the same rich, golden blonde hair. In Annis’s case this rarely saw the light of day, being hidden under a succession of lace caps, ugly bonnets and ragingly unfashionable turbans. She had learned early on that no one took a blonde chaperon at all seriously; it could, in fact, be positively dangerous to display her hair, for it made gentlemen behave in a most inappropriately amorous manner.
The shapeless gowns in dowager black, purple and turkey red were all designed and worn with one intention in mind—to make her look older and unattractive. This was a necessity of her profession. Just as no one would take a blonde chaperon seriously, so would nobody entrust their daughter, niece or ward to a girl who looked as though she had only just left the schoolroom herself. Annis was in fact seven and twenty and had been widowed for eight years, but she had a fair, youthful complexion, wide-spaced eyes, a snub nose and a generous mouth that all conspired to undermine the sense of gravity required by a professional chaperon. Prettiness combined with poverty had always struck her as a recipe for disaster, so she did her best to disguise those natural assets she possessed.
‘I thought that we would go straight to the house in Church Row,’ Charles said, as they made their way across to his carriage. ‘You will have the chance to settle in comfortably before Sibella calls on you this evening. When do your charges arrive?’
‘Not until Friday,’ Annis said. ‘Sir Robert Crossley is escorting the girls up from London himself and Mrs Hardcastle accompanies them as duenna in my absence. I am persuaded that she will have licked them into shape before ever they darken my door!’ She shivered a little in the breeze. ‘Gracious, Charles, I can scarce believe that it is June. The wind off the hills is as cold as ever.’
‘You have gone soft from living too long in the south,’ Charles said affectionately. ‘These charges of yours, the Misses Crossley—do they have a large fortune?’
‘Big enough to buy half of Harrogate!’ Annis said. She grimaced, remembering the interview that she had had in London with the Crossley girls before she had agreed to take them on. ‘I fear that even that will not be sufficient to sweeten the pill of Miss Fanny Crossley’s bad manners, however. The girl is as sharp as a thorn and only passably good-looking. She may well be my first failure!’
‘I doubt it.’ Charles grinned at her. ‘Even here in Harrogate we have heard of the striking success of that matchmaker par excellence, Lady Wycherley! They say that you could catch a husband for any girl, be she ugly as sin and poor as a church mouse.’
‘One or other, perhaps, but not both together!’ Annis laughed. ‘You are not hanging out for a wealthy bride, are you, Charles?’
‘Not I!’ Her cousin watched as the last bags were strapped onto the platform of the chaise. ‘I do have a client who is looking, however. Sir Everard Doble, a very worthy but rather dull man with an estate mortgaged to the hilt. We shall arrange a meeting for him with your charges.’
‘Dear Charles,’ Annis said gratefully. ‘I feel my task is already half done. And Miss Lucy Crossley, unlike her elder sister, is a sweet girl who should make a match easily enough amongst all the half-pay officers who seem to crowd the place. I do not imagine that either sister will make a dazzling match, but it should be possible to settle them creditably. So…’ Annis sighed ‘…I may get them off my hands and then spend some time at Starbeck. It was the real reason that I accepted Sir Robert’s commission to chaperon his nieces, you know. I wanted to spend some time at home.’
Charles frowned slightly. ‘Ah, Starbeck. You know that I have not been able to keep a tenant there for the last few months and that the house is in a poor state? I need to talk to you about it at some point, coz.’
Annis looked at him sharply. There was something odd in his tone, a reluctance that made her heart miss a beat, for it boded ill. The small estate of Starbeck was a drain on her limited income and she knew that Charles thought she was a sentimental fool to hold on to it. He had administered the estate for her since her father died and he had been urging her to sell for several years. The house was tumbledown and swallowed money in constant repairs, Charles had been unable to find a tenant who would stay there for any length of time, and the home farm was so poor its owners could barely scratch a living. Since Annis had no money other than what she earned plus a small annuity, it was financial nonsense to continue to support Starbeck, and yet she did not want to let it go. She had had a peripatetic childhood following her father about the country from posting to posting and travelling abroad with her parents on several occasions. Starbeck was home, the only certainty she knew, and for that reason she did not want to lose it.
‘Of course we may talk—’ she began, but broke off as a green and gold high-perch phaeton swept into the inn yard, scattering the ostlers like nervous chickens.
‘For pity’s sake!’ Charles flushed red in annoyance and skipped out of the way as the offside wheel almost ran over his foot. Annis tried not to laugh. Her cousin had always been slightly stuffy, the responsible one amongst the three of them. Perhaps it stemmed from the fact that Charles was the eldest, or more likely it was because he was the only boy and as such was now head of the Lafoy family. Whatever the case, he deplored frivolity.
The phaeton was gleaming and new and contained two occupants, a lady and a gentleman. The lady, a buxom brunette, was swathed in furs. She was laughing and clutching a saucy hat on her dark curls. Her vivacious brown eyes scanned the assembled company, rested thoughtfully on Charles’s red face and dismissed Annis’s plain one, before she took her companion’s hand and jumped lightly down to join him on the cobbles of the inn yard. The landlord had emerged and was bowing enthusiastically, waving them towards the inn door.
‘Ashwick!’ Annis heard Charles say, under his breath.
She cast him a quick glance. Once again there was an odd note in Charles’s voice, one that she could not place. It was neither envy nor even disapproval, both of which might have been understandable from the country lawyer to the dashing peer of the realm. Annis knew of Lord Ashwick, of course; no one who had sponsored girls in ton society for the last three years as she had could fail to be aware of a man whose recent career consisted mainly of playing high and keeping low company. Adam Ashwick was a friend of such luminaries as the Duke of Fleet and the Earl of Tallant, who had scandalised the town with their exploits for years. Tallant was married now and had become disappointingly uxorious, but the gossips were still entertained by the activities of Sebastian Fleet and Adam Ashwick. It seemed extraordinary to find him in so out of the way a place as Harrogate.
The couple had to pass them to reach the inn door. Annis drew back against the side of the coach, having no wish to push herself forward for notice. To her surprise, however, Adam Ashwick paused in front of them and gave Charles the briefest of bows.
‘Lafoy.’ His tone was cold.
Charles’s own bow was correspondingly slight. ‘Ashwick.’
There was a