Written By: Eliza Mcharty
“I do hope you’ll consider the arrangement.”
I tilted my head to look up at Lord Dunningham, knowing full well that it elongated my neck in both a proud and sensual way. My mother would have slapped my hand for stunt like it. I allowed my eyes to glitter up at the bastard in their cold way. “Perhaps.”
I took my gloved hand off of his arm, lifting the hem of my gown to a modest height to allow me a graceful exit up the stairs, my back painfully erect. When I reached my bedroom, I slammed the door, not caring that everyone who happened to have a room in this wing would take note of it.
“Oh I simply HATE him Minnie!” My lady’s maid looked up from the nightgown she was dutifully folding. I forgot whatever it was I was talking about for a moment. She tried to be decorous, she truly did. The neckline on her dress was not at all revealing and it wasn’t as if she was wearing red, it was only a gray wool dress with buttons from her throat to the hem, and her hair wasn’t elaborately made. It wasn’t her fault that her eyes were the strangest mix of sky blue, emerald green, and a pinch of yellow right there at the middle near her pupil, and that her black eyebrows were immaculate slashes above them that gave her the most exotic appeal. It wasn’t her fault that her bosom was frankly huge, and her hips flared outward in such a way as to make one think of Aphrodite, or that her rear made it pointless to wear a bustle. No, and she made no effort whatsoever to disguise the fact that her skin tone was… olive. Not at all fashionable, and she never took milk baths to lighten it.
My dear, sweet Minnie, so loyal and straight forward. She never tried to upstage me. It wasn’t her place to, being my servant. Hours and hours she spent with me, coiling my hair, tightening my corset and darkening my lashes with soot. She couldn’t help the fact that she made me feel incredible unbecoming next to her, even in my very finest sapphire blue satin gown, with the most daring neckline of the season. Not even my mother’s diamond and sapphire jewelry, worth, it seemed to me, half the island of Wales, could make up for the fact that she was positively lovely.
I loved her. I hated her.
She looked back down, focusing all her attention on the nightgown she was folding, smoothing out the wrinkles here and there with quick, decisive movements. I didn’t know why she worked so hard on it, I’d only be wearing it in about ten minutes, and then it would be wrinkled. No one would even see me in it except her.
“What did he do now?” she queried.
I blinked, trying to bring my mind back to whatever had brought me crashing into the room in such a fine fit of fury. Ah, yes.
“Do you KNOW what he did? Do you have any idea?”
“You know I don’t.”
I ignored her, angry once again. “He bought me a gown.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad to me.” She walked to the seventeenth century armoire and deposited the nightgown in a drawer.
“It was for a woman half my size.”
She stopped, lifted one of those immaculate brows in a question. I swallowed back a lump of tears. “He said when it fit, we would marry.”Minnie