“Of course.”
Guilt was a hot curl in her chest, but she made herself meet his eyes, and smile, and thank him.
She thought, as they took his carriage the following afternoon to the Western Exchange, that her plan seemed simple. She had the necklaces in her reticule, folded into handkerchiefs and ready to pass off to their original owners. She had prepared several conversational gambits to induce Spencer to put names to the shoppers he recognized, particularly the various members of the peerage.
If Fortune smiled upon her, she might find one or more of the three aristocrats on this very first engagement. She might find all of them!
Fortune, as it turned out, frowned.
The first flaw in her plan emerged when they arrived at the Western Exchange. She had gone shopping with her mother from time to time in these aristocratic environs, where wealthy patrons vanished behind elegant window displays.
She’d known—she’d thought she’d known—what to expect. But in the ten years since she had been in London, the mercantile landscape had undergone a transformation. Shops had been taken over by bazaars and arcades. The Western Exchange—a building which hadn’t even existed in 1811—was a whirling hive of exquisite, expensive personages.
Beneath the forbidding gaze of the porter, Spencer swept Winnie inside the gleaming structure. Its gilt columns rose heavenward; everything was glass and sparkle and things for sale. People carted parcels and nibbled elegant cakes; tiny well-appointed children shrieked after puppies on strings. There were milliners with glorious fruit-covered confections of hats, drapers and furriers and artists hawking their wares in galleries. Everything was decorated—already—for Christmas.
Perhaps, in her decade in Llanreithan, she had forgotten the sheerscaleof London. How would she find Roxbury or Noake or Brownbrooke amidst all this clamor?
She set her jaw against the sudden temptation of despair. For whatever it was worth, she was her mother’s daughter, and she did not mean to give up.
She asked Spencer to take her somewhere out of the way, where she might watch the passersby at her leisure. He took her elbow and led her to a little teashop in a corner that seemed calculated to attract the smallest members of theton: the standings held sweets, toys, and a display of extremely noisy and colorful green macaws.
Over tea and coffee and buttery shortbread studded with dried cherries, she asked Spencer to point out anyone he knew.
“Do you know,” he said between enthusiastic bites of pastry, “I’ve never thought so much about thread in my life?”
His dimple made an appearance.
Winnie refused to be charmed by the inexplicable witchcraft of that small imperfection. She forced her gaze back to the crowds of fashionable shoppers. “I find it becomes an obsession more easily than one would think.”
“Do you make the thread yourself?”
“Yes,” she said distractedly. A particularly well-dressed clump of people had broken off from the general horde. “Do you know them?”
“Mm, yes. The Duke and Duchess of Stanhope and their family.”
Blast.
“Wherever do you find the time?” Spencer asked. “Shearing, feeding, gathering plants for dyes—you do the work of ten, I think.”
Her fingers drummed on the table until she caught herself and picked up her teacup instead. “I like to keep busy.”
He laughed. “Are you bored? Here, I mean—in London?”
She looked down at her fingers, which were tracing circles round and round the side of the teacup, directly over what appeared to be a decidedly phallic spring onion.
Oh God, whatever she was here in this exquisite teashop—surrounded by Christmas greens and tropical birds, inappropriately fondling vegetable matter—she certainly wasn’tbored.
Before she could reply, she heard someone say, quite plummily and distinctly, “At your service, my lord Noake.”
She dropped her teacup. The spring onion stared accusingly up at her. Her head craned around, searching for the speaker.
“Win?” Spencer asked. “Everything all right?”
“Perfectly well,” she managed. “I thought that, er, one of the parrots had gotten loose.”
She heard the plummy voice again. “I can pack this one up with the rest if you’d like, Lord Noake? Have them sent on to your residence?”
A different voice, a lighter tenor. “That would be fine.”
