Misfit Maid

Maidie cut them short. ‘It makes no matter. Find me some gowns of suitable colours, and we shall say no more about it.’

The modiste made haste to comply. Clapping her hands, she scattered her assistants with a stream of instructions as Maidie turned back to Lady Hester, whose face was alight with laughter.

‘Maidie, you are abominable! Don’t you know that it is the height of bad taste to parade your rank and wealth?’

‘So it may be,’ said Maidie, unrepentant, ‘but that it is effective, you will scarcely deny.’

‘Her great-uncle, you must know,’ put in Miss Wormley with diffidence, ‘was a trifle eccentric. I am afraid he imbued her with some very improper notions.’

‘Humdudgeon!’ said Maidie. ‘Great-uncle may have been as eccentric as you please, but I must be ever grateful for his teachings. He could not abide shams, and nor can I.’

‘Well, let us not fall into a dispute over him,’ said Lady Hester pacifically. ‘Instead, we must bend our minds to the problem of gowning you appropriately.’

In the event, despite the new enthusiasm of Cerisette, it was Maidie and Lady Hester between them who selected the gowns most suited to her colouring. Maidie opted for a muslin of leaf-green, and a silk of dark blue. But her clever mentor bespoke a crêpe gown of pale russet that picked up highlights in her extraordinary hair, and muslins both of peach and apricot that enhanced the brightness above.

But when Lady Hester and the modiste seized upon a pale lemon gown all over silver spangles, Maidie balked again. ‘Nothing would induce me to wear such a thing!’

‘But you must have something suitable for a ball,’ protested Lady Hester.

‘That is as may be, but I refuse to parade around in a garment that would be better employed upon the stage. It looks fit for a fairy—and I am certainly not that.’

To everyone’s astonishment, including her own, she fell in love instead with a creamy muslin gown covered in huge sprigs of lacy black. Despite the protestations of her elders that the décolletage was positively unseemly, she insisted on trying it.

‘I am obliged to admit that it looks magnificent,’ conceded Lady Hester, watching Maidie twirl before the mirror.

‘It does take attention away from your hair,’ offered Miss Wormley in a doubtful tone.

‘It is hardly the garb of a debutante, but I dare say Maidie will not care for that.’

She was right, Maidie did not care. If something could indeed be done about her hair, she began to think that she might not fare so very ill, after all.

‘I never thought I could look so well,’ she marvelled. Drawing a breath, she turned confidingly to Lady Hester. ‘I do begin to have a real hope of finding a man willing to marry me.’

‘My dear Maidie,’ came the dry response, ‘there was never the least doubt of that. With your fortune, there will be no shortage of suitors, even had we made no change at all in the matter of your dress.’

Maidie fixed her with that wide-eyed gaze. ‘Then why are we doing all this?’

Lady Hester burst into laughter. ‘How can you ask me? For the purpose of bringing Laurie to heel. We cannot do without him, and he can have no objection to be seen with you looking like this.’

‘Which is as much as to say,’ guessed Maidie, with a glint in her eye that boded no good to the absent Viscount, ‘that he would not be seen dead with me otherwise!’

It was not until the early evening that Delagarde put in an appearance. He strode into the drawing-room where the ladies had gathered before dinner, and stopped short, staring. Maidie, unable to help herself, had jumped up on his entrance, and now stood rooted to the spot, her heart unaccountably in her mouth.

She was arrayed in the dark blue silk. It had long, tight sleeves, and its folds fell simply from the high waist, but Maidie became acutely aware that its cut across the bosom was slightly lower than it should be. Though this was as nothing to the anxiety that gripped her as she recalled her exposed locks. Until this moment, she had believed that the cleverly wielded scissors in the hands of a master had worked wonders.

The thatch of ginger had been considerably thinned, a deal of it combed forward to fall in curling tendrils about her face. The rest, behind a bandeau of blue velvet from which two dark feathers poked into the air, fell lightly upon her shoulders, with some few ordered ringlets straying down her back.

In vain did Maidie remind herself that she cared nothing for his lordship’s opinion. In vain did she recall the budding resentment she had experienced upon Lady Hester’s ill-considered revelation. The stunned expression in his face robbed her of all power over her emotions, until she realised that he was staring, not at her deplorable hair, but at her costume.

Delagarde found his tongue. ‘What the devil is that?’

‘Laurie!’

‘Have you all gone stark, staring crazy?’ He turned a fulminating eye on his great-aunt. ‘What do you call this? She is supposed to be making her debut. Only look at that neckline! And feathers!’ he uttered in a voice of loathing, his eye rising to Maidie’s head. ‘She looks like a matron with a bevyful of brats in her train, instead of…’

His voice died as he caught sight of her hair. For a moment he gazed in blankest amazement, the fury wiped ludicrously from his face.

‘Good God!’ he uttered faintly at length.

Quite unable to prevent herself from reaching up to cover what she might of her horrible locks, Maidie burst out, ‘He hates it! I knew he would.’

‘It is certainly startling,’ he conceded. He might have been looking at a stranger!

‘Well, you cannot hate it more than I do myself,’ Maidie stated, resolutely bringing her hands down and gripping her fingers together. ‘You may be thankful you were spared seeing it before it was styled.’

A short laugh escaped him. ‘Yes, I think I am.’

Maidie shifted away, and he moved around her, his eyes riveted to the extraordinary hair. Who would have believed it? Such a little dowd as she appeared this morning—and now! He tried to recall the impression he had formed of an unremarkable countenance, but the colour of that head was so very remarkable that he could not recover it. She turned to face him again, and he could not repress a grin at the sulk exhibited in her features.

Maidie flushed. ‘It’s well for you to laugh. I dare say you think it excessively funny. But I must live with it.’

‘So, it would appear, must I,’ he returned smoothly.

‘Well, it is no use supposing that I can get rid of it,’ Maidie said, goaded. ‘I have tried before now, and it does not help in the least.’

‘You tried to get rid of it?’ repeated Delagarde, amazed.

‘She did,’ averred Miss Wormley. ‘She cut it all off.’

It was a new voice to the Viscount, and he turned quickly in her direction. One glance at the faded countenance and the discreet grey gown told him exactly who she must be. Moving to her chair, he held out his hand.

‘You are Lady Mary’s duenna, I think?’

‘Miss Wormley, Delagarde,’ confirmed Lady Hester. ‘Our cousin, you know.’

‘Ah, yes. How do you do?’

Miss Wormley had risen quickly to her feet, and now grasped his hand, murmuring a series of half-finished sentences, from which Delagarde was unable to untangle the references to his supposed kindness from her hopes that he had taken no offence. He cut her short with a word of dismissal.

‘But you don’t mean,’ he went on, ‘that Lady Mary really did cut off her hair?’

Miss Wormley nodded vigorously. ‘Indeed, she did. She must have been thirteen at the time.’

‘Worm, don’t!’

‘But I wish to hear it,’ said Delagarde, a hint of amusement in his tone, and a smile for the duenna.

Miss Wormley succumbed. ‘She appeared at the dinner table one evening, quite shorn to pieces. She might almost have taken a razor to her head, except that it was cut too raggedly for that. I was very much shocked, but Lord Shurland could only laugh.’