Chapter 1
London, 1817
Lemonade. The mission was to fetch the baroness a glass of fresh lemonade.
Miss Eleanora Winfield squared her shoulders and prepared to enter the fashionable milieu before her. She could not help but feel like a plain brown minnow diving into a pool of brightly colored fish.
Despite the bright red of her hair, and despite the beautiful gown the baroness had commissioned of pale pink gauze over a rosier silk underdress, Nora did not stand out. Not here in London. At a Society ball. In the home of an earl. In the midst of the Season.
She clutched Lady Roundtree’s empty glass and inched her way through the crowd toward the refreshment table.
It was hard to focus on something so mundane as lemonade whilst surrounded by a world she had never dreamed of one day entering.
The music from the orchestra danced in her ears and vibrated through the soles of her brand new slippers. The constant swirl of aristocratic faces and rich fabrics dazzled her eyes. The onslaught of expensive perfumes, the barrage of strange faces, the dizziness of not knowing the right words to say or the right way to act…
It was all too new, too foreign,toomuch.
The lords and ladies had been born into this elegant madness. They’d had a lifetime to learn its rules and taboos and nuances.
Nora had had six days.
It was a temporary post, she reminded herself as she glimpsed the end of the refreshment line. Eight weeks at most. She could do this. She had to. Her family was counting on her.
Besides, it wasn’t as if she was expected to know how to waltz. Or even supposed to speak to anyone besides Lady Roundtree.
Nora moved to join the queue. All she had to do was keep the baroness happy and entertained until the splints came off her injured leg. The resulting salary could be enough to support her family for the rest of the year. With luck, she might save their farm.
She took a few steps forward with the rest of the queue. This was nothing like back home; she already boasted far more advantages than when she’d started. The pale pink silk swishing elegantly about her body had cost more than Nora had believed possible to spend on a single gown.
Yet Lady Roundtree had referred to the expense as amere trifle. A half-dozen “serviceable units” of just-sufficient-enough quality for the baroness not to be embarrassed to be seen in public with her distant country cousin.
Fortunately for them both, the camouflage was working. For all the attention she garnered, Nora might as well blend into the wallpaper. Even in a crowd of this size, no one had so much as made eye contact with her.
Why would they? Thebeau mondepreferred to associate with one another. Not only did their names fill the pages ofDebrett’s Peerage, the aristocracy had a secret language all its own.
Since entering the ballroom, she had spent most of the past hour watching the debutantes flirt coyly with painted fans at dapper gentleman who responded thrillingly to silent messages Nora could not comprehend.
Everything was different here. Rousing instruments the likes of which she’d never heard, spiced biscuits and French tortes she’d never known existed, the strangely cloying sweetness of ratafia coating her tongue for the first time. And the candles! Aristocrats like the baroness and the earl lit more candles in a single chandelier than Nora’s family used in an entire month.
“Miss?”
Nora’s cheeks heated. It was her turn. She’d been too busy gawking at all the brilliant jewels and fancy fixtures to notice she had reached the front of the line.
“I’m sorry.” With a shaking hand, she reached for the ladle in the crystal lemonade bowl.
With an almost comical expression of horror, a footman relinquished her grasp on the baroness’s soiled glass and gestured to a waiting pyramid of clean goblets. “Allow me.”
Nora’s cheeks flamed even hotter. Of course one would not be expected to serve one’s own beverage in a place as elegant as this. There were servants to do absolutely everything, including ladle scoops of lemonade into fresh goblets.
With trembling hands, she accepted the brimming glass. “Thank you.”
She was not at all certain if one was meant to thank the servants, but as Nora was now essentially a fellow servant herself, she would err on the side of politeness.
Her head pounded as she stepped away from the refreshment table to a much safer location near the wainscoting. She needed to calm her pounding heart.
“Freeze,” she whispered.
In her mind’s eye, the ballroom froze in place. Lemonade paused mid-stream, embroidered flounces arrested mid-swish, a droplet of wax from the chandelier above floated high above the dance floor, suspended in time.
