A Kiss at Midnight

  Kate recoiled. She had never cried, not since her father’s funeral. “Of course not!” she snapped.

  There was another beat of silence in the room.

  “Why don’t you do the honors?” Kate said finally, looking at her stepmother. “I’m agog to learn the particulars.”

  “The particulars are none of your business,” Mariana stated. Then she turned to Victoria. “Listen, darling, you remember how we used to see dearest Victor even before we came to live in this house?”

  Victor! Kate had never thought for a moment that her father’s name had any connection to that of her stepsister.

  “Yes,” Victoria agreed. “We did.”

  “That would be because your mother was his mistress,” Kate said. “I gather he visited your house for at least eleven years, before my mother died. Was there a colonel at all? Is Victoria illegitimate?” she asked Mariana.

  “It hardly matters,” Mariana said coolly. “I can provide for her.”

  Kate knew that. Her beloved, foolish father had left everything to his wife . . . and Mariana had turned it into a sweet dowry for Victoria, and be damned whether the estate needed the income. It was all Victoria’s now.

  Who was not only pregnant, but illegitimate. One had to suppose that the colonel, Mariana’s putative first husband, had never existed.

  Mariana got up and stubbed out her cigarillo in a dish overflowing with half-smoked butts. “I am shocked beyond belief that the two of you haven’t sprung to your feet and hugged each other in an excess of girlish enthusiasm. But since you haven’t, I’ll make this short. You will go to Pomeroy Castle, Katherine, because your sister is carrying a child and needs the approval of the prince. You will dress as your sister, you will take the bloody mongrels with you, and you will make this work.”

  Mariana looked tough, and more tired than she usually did. “In that case, you will keep the Crabtrees in their cottage,” Kate stated.

  Her stepmother shrugged. She didn’t really give a damn either way, Kate realized. She had launched the Crabtrees into the situation just in case the plea of blood relations failed.

  “I’ve summoned the same man who cut Victoria’s hair,” Mariana said briskly. “He’ll be here tomorrow morning to cut off all of that rot on your head. Three seamstresses are coming as well. You’ll need at least twenty gowns altered.”

  “You’ll be at the castle for three or four days,” Victoria said.

  She got to her feet, and for the first time, Kate recognized that her sister was indeed going to have a child. There was something slightly clumsy about the way she moved.

  “I’m sorry,” Victoria said, walking over to stand before Kate.

  “There’s nothing for you to be sorry for!” Mariana interjected.

  “Yes, there is,” she insisted. “I’m sorry that our father was the sort of man he was. I’m not sorry that he married my mother, but I’m—I’m just sorry about all of it. About what you must think of him now.”

  Kate didn’t want to think about her father. She had tried not to think of him in the last seven years, since his death. It was too painful to think about the way he laughed, and the way he would stand by the fireplace and tell her amusing stories of London, reflected firelight glinting from his wineglass.

  And now there was a whole new reason to not think of him.

  She returned Victoria’s embrace politely, then disengaged herself and turned to Mariana. “Why must I come to dinner tonight?”

  “Lord Dimsdale has some doubt that you two look enough alike to fool someone who might have met your sister.”

  “But my hair—”

  “It’s not the hair,” her stepmother said. “We’ll put you in a decent gown and you’ll see the resemblance soon enough. Victoria is known for her beauty, her dogs, and her glass slippers. As long as you don’t indulge your churlish tongue, you’ll pass.”

  “What on earth is a glass slipper?” Kate asked.

  “Oh, they’re marvelous!” Victoria cried, clasping her hands together. “I brought them into fashion myself this season, Kate, and then everyone started wearing them.”

  “Your feet are about the same size,” Mariana said. “They’ll fit.”

  Kate looked down at her tired, gray gown and then up at her stepmother. “What would you have done if my father had lived? If I had debuted when I was supposed to and people recognized the resemblance between myself and Victoria?”

  “I didn’t worry about it,” Mariana said with one of her shrugs.

  “Why not? Wouldn’t there have been the risk that someone would have seen the two of us together and guessed?”

  “She’s five years younger than you. I would have kept her in the schoolroom until you married.”

  “I might not have taken. I might not have found a husband. My father would have . . .”

  A smile twisted the corner of Mariana’s lips. “Oh, you would have taken. Don’t you ever look in the mirror?”

  Kate stared at her. Of course she looked in the mirror. She saw her perfectly regular features staring back at her. She didn’t see Victoria’s dewy eyes, or her light curls, or her charming smile, because she didn’t have any of those.

  “You’re a bloody fool,” Mariana said, reaching out for her cigarillo case and then dropping it again. “I’m smoking too many of these, which is entirely your fault. For God’s sake, get yourself into a decent dress by eight this evening. You’d better go see Victoria’s maid straight off; you’re not fit to scrub the fireplace in that rag you’re wearing.”

  “But I don’t want Algie to see my lip like this,” Victoria said, sniffing.

  “I’ll instruct Cherryderry to put a single candelabrum on the table,” her mother said. “Dimsdale won’t be able to see a rat if it jumps on the plate in front of him.”

  So it all came back to the rats, which was fitting, because that’s where the story began.

  Four

  Kate knew quite well that the household was on her side. They couldn’t help it; it was bred into the bones of the best servants. They were trained to serve ladies and gentlemen, not those of their own class. Obviously they had sensed that Mariana’s origins were not genteel. For her part, Kate had imagined that her stepmother was a shopkeeper’s daughter, who had married a colonel. She hadn’t thought she was—

  What she was.

  A fallen woman. Her father’s mistress. A trollop, by any other name.

  No wonder poor Victoria found herself with child. Her mother was hardly qualified to steer her through the season. For that matter, Kate wasn’t entirely sure how to behave in polite society either. She had been only twelve when her mother retired to bed, and sixteen when her mother finally died and her father remarried. Though she’d learned how to use cutlery, the finer nuances of behavior in polite society escaped her.

  She’d had a year of dancing instruction, but it felt as if it had happened in another lifetime. Weren’t there rules about talking to princes, for example? Did you have to back out of the room after speaking to one? Or was that a rule that applied only to kings and queens?

  She found Victoria’s maid, Rosalie, in Victoria’s dressing room. Years ago the chamber had been designated for guests, but at some point Victoria had amassed so many dresses—and they had no visitors—that it had been transformed into a wardrobe.

  Kate looked around with some curiosity. The room was lined with cherry cabinets clearly stuffed with gowns. Flounces of lace and corners of embroidered fabric poked from half-open drawers. The room smelled like roses and fresh linen.

  “Cherryderry told me of the dinner tonight, and the seamstresses coming tomorrow,” Rosalie said, “and I’ve been through all of Miss Victoria’s gowns.” That would have been no small task, given that Victoria had half again as many as her mother, though they were more neatly arranged. “I think you should wear this tonight, as it won’t need more than a stitch or two around the bodice.”

  She held up a gown of the palest pink silk. It wasn’t particularly low-
cut, but it looked to be tight until just below the bosom, when the overskirt was pulled up into curls and furbelows, revealing a dark rose lining.

  Kate reached out a finger. Her father had died before they would have begun the visits to modistes to assemble a wardrobe for her debut. She had gone straight from funereal blacks to sturdy cambrics, reflective of her changed position in the household.

  “Couleur de rosette,” Rosalie said briskly. “I fancy it will set off your hair a treat. You won’t need stays, being so slim.”

  She started to unbutton her, but Kate pushed her hands away.

  “Please allow me—” Rosalie began.

  Kate shook her head. “I’ve been dressing myself for years, Rosalie. You can help me put that gown on, if necessary, but I will pull off my clothing myself.” Which she did, leaving her in nothing more than an old chemise. She did own a pair of stays, but they were too uncomfortable to wear, as she was on horseback every day.

  Rosalie didn’t say a word, just looked at the tired chemise, and the way Kate had darned it (not terribly well), and the length of it (too short). “Mr. Daltry . . .” the maid said, and paused.

  “Turning in his grave, et cetera,” Kate said. “Let’s get on with it, Rosalie.”

  So the maid began pulling out hairpins and clicking her tongue like someone counting pennies. “I never would have thought you had all this hair!” she said finally, having unpinned and unwound all of Kate’s locks.

  “I don’t care to have it messing about,” Kate explained. “It gets in my way while I’m working.”

  “You shouldn’t be working!” Rosalie cried. “It’s just wrong, all of this, and seeing you there in that chemise like a dishcloth. I didn’t know.” She threw down her brush and pulled open a deep drawer. Inside were stacks of pristine white chemises.

  Rosalie snatched one. “Miss Victoria won’t even notice, not that she would care because she isn’t like her mother. She likes silk for her chemise,” the maid said, jerking Kate’s chemise over her head and throwing it to the side. “I prefer a nice cotton, as sweat stains these terribly. But there, if you aren’t dressed properly to the skin, you aren’t really a lady, when all’s said and done.”

  The chemise settled around Kate like a translucent cloud. It was trimmed with exquisite lace.

  Had her father lived and had she debuted, she would have worn garments like this all the time, not fraying, tired garments in sober grays and blues that made her look like the poor relation she was.

  Her mother had left her some sort of small dowry, but without the chance to meet any eligible men, it hardly mattered. For years she’d been telling herself to leave the house, to go to London, to find work as a governess . . . anything to escape. But that meant deserting the tenants and the servants to Mariana’s haphazard and unfeeling oversight.

  So she hadn’t left.

  An hour later her hair was curled and tousled and swept up into an approximation of Victoria’s. Her face was dusted with rice powder, the better to approximate the pampered look of her sister’s skin; she was swathed in pale pink, and her lips were painted to match.

  She stood in front of the glass waiting for a moment of startled recognition. To realize that she really looked like Victoria, that she too would be accounted a great beauty.

  Not only did she not resemble her sister, but she would be accounted a beauty only by a blind man. She looked too angular and the dress hung oddly from her shoulders.

  Rosalie plucked at one sleeve. “You’re broader in the arms than Miss Victoria,” she muttered.

  Kate glanced down at her offending limb and knew exactly what the problem was. She spent at least two or three hours a day in the saddle, trying to manage the estate the way her father’s bailiff had done, before her stepmother threw him out of the house. Her arms were muscled, and lightly colored from the sun. She couldn’t imagine that other young ladies faced that particular problem.

  What’s more, her cheekbones were too pronounced, her eyebrows too sharp. “I don’t look like Victoria,” she said, a bit dismally. She had vaguely hoped that fashionable clothing would transform her, making her as beautiful as her sister. A woman whom all the ton considered a diamond.

  She looked more like a flinty stone than a diamond. Like herself.

  “The style doesn’t suit you,” Rosalie admitted. “Pink wasn’t the right idea. You need bold colors, more like.”

  “You do know why I have to look like Victoria, don’t you?” Kate knew perfectly well that Cherryderry had followed her up the stairs and positioned himself outside her stepmother’s bedchamber, intent on hearing the entire conversation.

  Rosalie set her mouth primly. “Nothing that I shouldn’t know, I would hope.”

  “I am to accompany Lord Dimsdale on a visit to Pomeroy Castle, and I need to make everyone there think I’m Victoria.”

  The maid’s eyes met her own in the mirror.

  “It won’t work,” Kate said, accepting it. “She’s just too beautiful.”

  “You’re beautiful too,” Rosalie said stoutly. “But in a different way.”

  “My mouth’s too big, and when did I get so thin?”

  “Since your father died and you started doing the work of ten people. Miss Victoria, bless her soul, is as soft as a pillow, but she would be, wouldn’t she?”

  Kate eyed the material draped over her bosom. Or rather, where her bosom ought to be. “Can’t we do something about my chest, Rosalie? In this dress, I don’t seem to have one at all.”

  Rosalie plucked at the extra material. “You’ve a nice little bosom, Miss Kate. Don’t worry. I can’t do much for it in this dress, but I’ll find others that will work better. Thanks be to God, Miss Victoria has more gowns in her chambers than a modiste would after a year’s labor.” A moment later she had tucked two rolled-up stockings into the front of Kate’s chemise, and that was that.

  It was odd how her similar features resulted in such a different appearance from Victoria’s. Of course, she was five years older. All ruffled and curled and made up, she looked like a desperate aging virgin.

  Panic was a new sensation. Never having been offered the chance to dress like a lady, at least not for years, Kate had rather forgotten that her nubile years were passing.

  She’d be twenty-four in a few weeks, and she felt as long in the tooth as a dowager.

  Why hadn’t she noticed that she wasn’t rounded and charming and delectable anymore? When had bitterness entered her bloodstream and—and changed her from a young girl into something else?

  “This isn’t going to work,” she said abruptly. “I don’t have the faintest resemblance to a young debutante who took the ton by storm.”

  “It’s a matter of wearing the right clothing,” Rosalie said. “You don’t look your best in this gown, miss. But I’ll find a better one for you.”

  There wasn’t much Kate could do but nod. She had thought . . .

  Well, she hadn’t thought much about it. But she knew that she wanted to be married, and to have children of her own.

  A sharp pang of panic rose into her throat. What if she was already too old? What if she never—

  She cut off the thought.

  She would do this visit for Victoria, for her newfound sister’s sake. After that, she would leave, go to London and parlay her modest inheritance, the money her mother had left, into a marriage license.

  Women had done that for years, and she could do it as well.

  She straightened her shoulders. Since her father died, she had learned what it felt like to be humiliated: to tuck your hands out of sight when you saw acquaintances for fear they would see the reddened fingers. To hold your boots close to the horse’s side so that no one saw the worn spots. To pretend you left your bonnet at home, time after time.

  This was just a new kind of humiliation—to be dressed as lamb while feeling like mutton. She would get through it.

  Five

  By the time Kate escaped to her room hours later, she was exhausted.
She had been up at five that morning to do three hours of accounts, then was on a horse at eight . . . not to mention the emotional toll taken by the day’s charming revelations. At dinner, Mariana had been snappy even with the viscount, and Victoria had wept softly through three courses.

  And now the dogs—the “rats”—were waiting for her, sitting in a little semicircle.

  There was no more fashionable accessory than a small dog, and Victoria and Mariana, with their characteristic belief that twenty-three ball gowns were better than one, had acquired not one small dog, but three.

  Three small, yapping, silky Malteses.

  They were absurdly small, smaller than most cats. And they had a sort of elegant sleekness about them that she found an affront. If she ever had a dog, she’d want it to be one of the lop-eared, grinning dogs that ran out to greet her when she stopped by the cottages on Mariana’s lands. A dog that barked rather than yapped.

  Though at the moment they weren’t yapping. As she entered her small room, they rose in a little wave and surrounded her ankles in a burst of furry waving tails and hot bodies. They were probably lonely. Before the bite, they were always at Victoria’s side. Perhaps they were hungry. Or worse, they might need to visit the garden. If only she had a bell in her room . . . but persons of her status had no need to call servants.

  “I suppose,” she said slowly, thinking of the stairs and her aching legs, “I have to take you outside.” In point of fact, she should be grateful that they had not urinated in her room; it was so small and the one window so high that the smell would last a month or more.

  It took a few minutes to figure out how to attach ropes to their jeweled collars, not helped by the fact that they had begun yapping, jumping up and trying to lick her face. It was hard not to flinch away.

  She trudged down the back stairs that led to her room, her steps echoed by the scrabbling little claws of the rats. She was so tired that she couldn’t even remember their names, though she thought they were all alliterative, perhaps Fairy and Flower.