Free Belinda Goes to Bath by M. C. Beaton Page A

the tower.
    ‘Go to the right,’ said the marquess. ‘You will obtain a good view of the castle buildings and the gardens.’
    Belinda did as she was bid. She clutched the parapet and looked down at the jumble of chimneys on the roofs of the castle buildings, at the formal gardens behind them, buried in snow. The wind rose suddenly and she drew back, stepped on a pebble and gave her sprained ankle a savage wrench.
    She let out a moan of pain. The marquess caught her round the waist and supported her. ‘Your ankle,’he exclaimed. ‘I had forgot. I should never have let you walk for so long on it. Allow me to carry you.’
    Belinda protested feebly but he lifted her up easily in his arms and made for the staircase. ‘Hold tightly around my neck,’ he commanded. ‘The stairs are narrow.’
    Her heart began to thud painfully and she found it hard to breathe. He was holding her so very tightly and the feel of the hardness of his body against hers was doing bewildering things to her senses.
    The marquess reached the bottom of the staircase. It was very dark there. Before he opened the door, he looked down at her and met a wide-eyed gaze. On impulse, he bent his head and kissed her on the lips. It was the first kiss Belinda had ever received and she thought dizzily that it was wickedly delicious, rather like one’s first ice cream.
    And then it was over. He freed her lips and said in a husky voice in which surprise and passion were mixed, ‘You enchant me.’ Then he opened the door and, still holding her tightly, strode across the courtyard.
    From a window overlooking the courtyard, Hannah Pym looked down on the pair in deep satisfaction.
    From the window of her bedchamber farther along, Penelope Jordan also saw the marquess and Belinda and bit her lips hard to stop herself from crying out. She had been schooled from birth to learn that only the vulgar showed an excess of emotion. Ladies must never laugh out loud or show anger or passion of any sort. To produce a few affecting tears to demonstratefashionable sensibility was in order, as was the occasional swoon. Of course, a type of laughter was permitted, the silvery laugh, taught by one’s music teacher, which began on a high note and rippled down the scale.
    As she watched, the marquess set Belinda down and indicated her ankle. Then he put an arm about her waist and helped her into the house.
    Penelope let out a slow breath of relief. That clever minx had affected to be suffering badly from that sprain and had cleverly manipulated Frenton into carrying her. But the marquess surely could not favour the few charms Miss Earle had above her own. Miss Earle had unfashionably high cheek-bones as well as an unfashionably large mouth.
    She rang for her lady’s maid and put that servant through a gruelling hour and a half – choosing clothes, brushing her hair and trying it in different styles, seeing if rouge would improve her beauty and then deciding it would not, trying on olive-green stockings and then rejecting them in favour of pink, until at long last she was nearly satisfied with her appearance.
    Penelope shivered slightly despite the warmth from the bedroom fire. She was wearing a very thin spotted muslin gown under a pelisse of black lace trimmed with narrow bands of sable. On her pomaded curls the maid finally placed one of the latest turbans, decorated with two scarlet plumes to match the scarlet spot in the muslin. Penelope carefully examined her elbows, her beautiful eyes narrowing as she thought she detected a sign of red roughness on them. Shecarefully applied some white lead, but the two white patches stood out, so she applied more white lead to her upper arms and drew on a thin pair of scarlet gloves that reached to just below the elbow.
    Then she made her way to her parents’ rooms. They were in their sitting-room, breakfasting in front of a roaring fire. Her father was dining on shrimp and old ale, his favourite breakfast, while her mother had wafers of