Carola Dunn (3 page)

 “T-two dozen, Your Grace?” she faltered, bewildered. “By tomorrow?”

 Twenty-four gowns in twenty-four hours! He might as well ask her to spin straw into gold. What could anyone possibly want with twenty-four gowns? Dazzled by his magnificence, she must have misunderstood.

 “That’s right. We shall soon find out whether Tom Miller’s lied to me. If so, I’ll turn him and his brats out of the mill to beg in the streets.”

 Horrified, Martha steeled herself to protest, but already the duke was turning away, pulling the heavy oak door shut behind him.

 “Don’t worry,” he said over his shoulder, “I shan’t let anyone interrupt your work. I even thought to have your supper brought up in advance. Yes, there it is.” He gestured at the small table on which stood an earthen jug and a tray covered with a white napkin.

 The door thudded to. Martha heard the great iron key turning in the lock.

 Martha’s feet carried her unwillingly to the southern window. There, across gardens and park and fields, beyond the church tower and the thatched roofs of the village, the mill’s sails turned and turned in a brisk breeze from the North Sea. There Pa, loud-voiced and jolly, presided over the great round, rough stones that ground to flour the corn from the rich arable soil of the Norfolk plain. The biggest millstones in the county, he was wont to boast, and the finest flour.

 What would he do, what would Mam do, and the little ones, without the mill that was their home and their livelihood? Tears rose to Martha’s eyes and trickled down her cheeks.

 It was up to her. Perhaps if she worked all night she might manage three or four dresses, even half a dozen, if she didn’t take her usual pains to make every stitch straight and small. Tapes instead of buttons, single seams for double, even basting in place of proper stitches where it would not show—considering the possibilities, Martha moved towards the table.

 His Grace claimed to be a reasonable man. Surely he would be satisfied with three or four completed gowns!

 She stopped with a shock. White muslin. How could she have forgotten all she had to work with was plain white muslin? And cheap stuff at that, she realized, fingering it.

 Her heart sinking again, she skimmed through the fashion magazines. As she expected, Lady Elizabeth wanted crêpe and sarcenet and lutestring, with lace dripping from the sleeves, silk roses set on, rouleaux of satin, and even seed-pearl embroidery. Even the simplest morning gowns were of fine jaconet, mull, or sprig muslin.

 Beside each illustration, her ladyship had written firmly the colour she desired, primrose, lemon or canary yellow, lime, spring or pomona green.

 Martha sank down on a stool and wept.

Chapter III

 “Miss Miller, don’t cry,” came an urgent voice from the direction of the door. “Pray don’t!”

 The sight that met Martha’s startled stare made her jump to her feet, knocking over the stool. She retreated backwards, her hand to her mouth.

 From the keyhole—but the keyhole was far too small!— protruded a red-haired head. Even as she watched, eyes round with astonishment, a neck and then blue-coated shoulders followed Lord Tarnholm’s head into the room.

 So he really was a changeling!

 He wriggled his shoulders and his arms popped free. Changeling or no, he looked most uncomfortable and Martha instinctively started forward to help. How, she had not the least notion.

 “I’m afraid I seem to be stuck,” he said apologetically. “I’m only half faerie, you see.”

 Dismay at his plight conquered her alarm. “Can you go back, my lord?”

 “I might as well. I’m no earthly use to you like this.” With an expression of intense concentration on his homely face, he began to move backwards, then came to a halt. “Dash it, I really am stuck.”

 “How...how did your lordship do it?”

 “How did I get this far? I just wished myself through. To tell the truth, I didn’t expect it to work even this well,” Lord Tarnholm confessed wryly. “My mother tried to teach me faerie magic when I was a child, but something always went wrong so I gave up.”

 “It’s no good giving up now, my lord. You cannot stay there for ever. Could you try a different spell for your...your lower half?” Blushing, she persisted. “A different sort of magic, or wish, or whatever it is?”

 “I could turn half of myself temporarily into smoke, I daresay. The trouble is, I cannot be sure which half would stay solid.”

 “Oh dear!”

 “I suppose I must try it. If I end up back outside the room, I shall just have to make another attempt to persuade Reggie to leave off this addlepated nonsense.”

 Martha watched with bated breath. She was not at all sure that she wanted Lord Tarnholm, solid or not, locked in the tower room with her, for all he was well thought of in Willow Cross and environs.

 Still, she decided, nothing could possibly be worse than it already was.

 Slowly the baron drifted away from the door. From the waist down he had become a cloud of purplish mist. Or rather, from the waist up, for being lighter the mist rose towards the ceiling. Stuck in midair now, his lordship dangled head down, arms flailing.

 “Don’t turn back into...into you yet,” Martha warned him. “You will land on your head and hurt yourself.” Without thinking, she put one hand between his shoulderblades, the other on his chest, and tiptilted him right side up.

 He promptly solidified. His feet thumped to the floor and he caught her arm to steady himself as he stumbled. Hot with embarrassment, Martha found herself nose to nose with Lord Tarnholm.

 His eyes were silver, and slightly slanted, she noticed as she backed away. And he appeared to be as embarrassed as she felt, his thin cheeks stained with scarlet.

 He looked away. “I’m sorry,” he said despairingly, limping towards the table, his crooked shoulders obvious now that he was on his feet. “I thought I might be able to help you.”

 “To help me? With spells?” She clasped her hands tight together. “Will you really?”

 “You have already seen what a mull I make of it when I try to do magic.”

 “I cannot see how you can possibly make things worse.” Her woes returned to the forefront of her mind and her lips trembled. “Please help me. Please! I’ll give you...” But what had she that a rich lord might want? “I’ll give you my lucky four-leafed clover.”

 Fumbling in her pocket, she took out the tiny leather case Will Cobbler had made for her precious talisman, and laid it in his outstretched palm. His hand was long-fingered, strong yet smooth and slender, quite unlike the square, red, calloused hands of the village lads.

 As she withdrew her own hand, she felt a strange sensation, as if invisible threads as fine as spider’s silk connected her fingertips to his. She brushed her fingers on her gown and the feeling went away.

 “The ideal gift.” Lord Tarnholm’s smile made her wonder for a moment why she had thought him plain. He opened the little case and regarded the brownish green, carefully pressed leaf with due gravity before putting it away in his inside coat pocket. “I shall certainly need luck as well as magic for this business. Let us get to work.”

 “What do we do, my lord?”

 “For a start, I am not here as your lord, and to call me so will inhibit the magic. I have a faerie name,”—his face twisted in sudden misery—”but I do not care for it. You had best call me Edward.”

 “Yes, my...Edward.” Martha’s curiosity was aroused. What was his faerie name and why did he dislike it so? She didn’t know what to make of him, but he was her only hope to save her family.

 “What do we do?” she asked again. “How shall we set about it?”

 “I haven’t much more notion than you do,” he admitted. “The one thing I’m quite certain of is that I cannot make something out of nothing. Shall we unroll some of that muslin? Maybe it will give me an idea as to what to do next.”

 Lord Tarnholm was stronger than he looked, for he lifted the heavy bale with ease. Martha spread several yards of the white material across the table. He contemplated it for half a minute, then shook his head.

 “I don’t know enough about dressmaking. In fact, I know nothing about dressmaking,” he admitted. “I’m afraid you will have to make up a gown to start with, and I shall watch you and try to learn.”

 So she showed him how to create a paper pattern by combining the design shown in a print in Ackermann’s with the measurements she had taken of Lady Elizabeth.

 “Remembering to add an allowance for seams and hems,” she pointed out.

 While she pinned the paper shapes to the cloth and cut them out, he glanced through the magazines.

 “All the morning gowns are basically the same shape,” he observed. “Long, full sleeves, a high waist just under the...er....” He blushed and continued hastily, “A middling high neckline, and fairly full skirts. With luck, we should be able to manage with the one pattern.”

 “It will not last for twenty-four gowns,” she said with regret. “There are too many pin-holes, and sooner or later it will tear.”

 Fixing his gaze on the paper she had just unpinned from one of the cut-out pieces of muslin, he gestured at it. The pin-holes disappeared.

 Martha clapped her hands.

 Lord Tarnholm grinned, then sobered. “That was easy. What next?”

 She took two panels of the skirt, pinned them together, and threaded a needle. Putting on her cheap tin thimble, made to fit her finger by a travelling tinker, she began to tack the seam. He watched closely over her shoulder, his breath warm on her cheek.

 Suddenly the needle took on a life of its own. It slipped from her fingers. Dipping in and out of the muslin, it raced around the edges of the pieces.

 “There!” said his lordship proudly.

 Martha giggled. “Very clever, my lord...Edward, except that you have sewn up the waist and the hem! Never mind, I can easily unpick them.”

 “It is more complicated than I realized.” Crestfallen, he handed her the scissors.

 She pulled the thread from the waistline, turned to the hem, and burst out laughing. “See, the needle ran out of thread! Way back here. Never mind, I’ll finish it off.”

 “If I was all faerie, the thread would have gone on for ever,” he grumbled. “In fact, I daresay the needle would have known where to stop and start again.”

 Despite a few more false starts, Martha quickly tacked the rest of the pieces together with his carefully directed help. With one of the flatirons she had set to the fire earlier, she pressed the gown, singing a cheerful song as she worked. The ballad of Lovely Joan was one of her favourites, the story of a girl who had cheated her would-be seducer.

“Then he pulled off his ring of gold,

“‘My pretty little miss, do this behold.

“‘I’d freely give it for your maidenhead.’

“And her cheeks they blushed like the roses red,”

Martha sang, heedless of her audience.

“She’s robbed him of his horse and ring,

“And left him to rage in the meadows green.”

 Lord Tarnholm laughed. Martha’s cheeks burned, more like glowing embers than red roses. All that talk of maidenheads! So amiable and gentle as he was, she had plumb forgot she was singing to a man, and a lord at that. Covered with confusion, she hid her face in her hands.

 “Quick, the iron!”

 With a gasp she seized it. She stared in dismay at the brown scorch mark, right where Lady Elizabeth would sit upon it if the gown was ever fit to wear.

 He touched it and it began to fade.

 Was it her imagination or did the shape change to a heart, just before it vanished away? And if it did, was it a-purpose, or was it just his magic going awry again? She had never heard that the baron was one for chasing the petticoats, like his cousin the duke. Poor fellow, with his looks it could not be often he got a chance to make up to a maid, for all his title and his fortune.

 But she had best be wary, she decided. Like a shield before her, she held up the gown by the shoulders.

 “Lady Elizabeth ought to try it on now,” she said, “but his Grace said there wasn’t to be a fitting, so I’ll sew it up properly right away. Just as well, really, that my lady don’t see it, for white muslin’s not what she asked for, nor nowhere near.” Her worries returned.

 “Now I have some notion what I’m doing, we shall work faster.”

 Though he was right, a clock struck three somewhere in the house as they finished. Three hours gone, and only one plain white muslin gown to show for it.

 “Now what?” she asked hopelessly.

 “Let me see if I can double it.”

 Sweat stood out on his forehead as he concentrated on the dress. The fabric stirred. He paled and his gesturing hands shook with the effort.

 “Edward, wait.” In her concern for him, she disregarded the awkwardness of using his Christian name. “You said you cannot make something from nothing. Perhaps we should...well, sort of feed it?”

 Gingerly she picked up the gown and laid it out on top of the scraps left from cutting it out.

 At once, as though animated by the magical energy he had poured into it, the gown began to grow. Martha clutched Lord Tarnholm’s arm. Under their fascinated gaze, the gown’s edges crept across the table, absorbing the scraps of fabric. It lengthened and widened till before them lay a gown fit for a giantess.

 Martha suppressed a half-hysterical giggle as Lord Tarnholm’s shoulders sagged.

 “I warned you everything would go wrong,” he groaned, his silver eyes chagrined.

 His disappointment made Martha ignore her own. “Don’t give up,” she urged him. “See if you can divide it into two. Taking things apart is always easier than making them.”

 A moment later she triumphantly held up two gowns.

 As the short winter day faded, Lord Tarnholm struggled to develop and refine the trick of doubling in number rather than size. At last he mastered the knack, but it tired him and he had to rest often. Still, even with a break for bread and cheese, jumbles, and cider, by midnight most of the bale was gone and they had four-and-twenty identical white muslin gowns.

 “I had better hire out to Mrs. Ballantine’s Academy,” said Lord Tarnholm with a weary smile, “to make her pupils’ uniforms. To think that just a few years ago unadorned white muslin was de rigueur for young ladies on every occasion! I hope I can work out how to produce all the colours and materials Lizzie has chosen.”