Excerpt
Touch Me with Fire
Chapter 1
Hertfordshire, England
September 1813
In the ordinary course of events, Blaise St. James would never have contemplated anything so drastic as running off with a tribe of Gypsies. But these were not ordinary circumstances. She was desperate. Her stepfather had banished her to England with orders to acquire a husband.
Not that she objected strongly to marriage. She gladly would have returned home to Philadelphia to conduct the search if given the choice. But America was currently at war with Britain, making ocean travel exceedingly dangerous. And her English relatives had banded against her, determined to bring her to heel.
Blaise was just as resolved to foil their plans. She absolutely did not want a stuffy, stiff-necked husband from the British upper class like her stepfather or her English cousins, or the todgy gentleman farmer her aunt had chosen for her. Squire Digby Featherstonehaugh was not the pinnacle of a young girl’s dreams—especially Blaise’s dreams. Merely the idea of being wed to him for life made her shudder.
“Englishmen are cold fish,” Blaise muttered as she struggled into the borrowed gown of drab brown broadcloth. “And no one will ever convince me otherwise.”
“Beg pardon, miss?” The chambermaid at the Bell & Thistle, at a loss to explain the strange doings of the Quality, watched with wide eyes as the raven-haired lady disappeared beneath the folds of her best dress.
“Nothing, never mind.” Blaise’s dark head emerged from the plain, ill-tailored garment. “But take my word for it. I’ve lived in a dozen countries and there is nothing so cold and unfeeling as an Englishman. A trout has more passion.” She finished buttoning the high-waisted bodice of the dress and straightened the long sleeves. “There now, how do I look?”
The chambermaid blinked. “Ah…well, miss…the fit is well enough, but ’tisn’t likely that you’ll pass for me.”
“Whyever not?”
“Well…you still seem too fancy. Your ’air and face…”
“I don’t suppose you have a mirror?” Blaise glanced around the tiny garret room and realized the foolishness of the question. Except for a lumpy pallet and a small clothes chest, the room was starkly bare of the simplest amenities, attesting to the vast differences between the servant class and the gentry in England. “I shall just have to make do, then. I can darken my face a bit with soot and cover my hair…Do you have a kerchief? I’ll pay you an extra guinea.”
“Oh, miss…you’ve already offered me too much. I’ll be taken for a thief if I turn rich of a sudden. But I do ’ave a kerchief.”
When the girl turned to rummage through the meager belongings in the chest, Blaise knelt at the small window under the eaves. Her aunt’s traveling chaise still stood below in the bustling yard of the posting inn.
Blaise frowned. Lady Agnes would never leave as long as her errant niece could not be found.
The shrill blare of the Royal Mail Coach announcing its departure, however, gave her an idea.
“Quickly she pulled the pins out of her elaborate coiffure and shook her head, letting the ebony tresses fall to her waist in a thick cloud. Accepting the kerchief she was handed, Blaise covered the silken mass of her hair and tied the cloth ends at the nape of her neck. Then standing, she withdrew a double handful of silver shillings from her reticule and dropped what was no doubt a half year’s wages into the palm of the wide-eyed servant. Finally Blaise pinned her purse beneath her skirt and drew the girl’s plain brown cloak around her own shoulders.
“Now,” she announced, smoothing the woolen folds of the well-worn garment. “The lady who accompanied me will be searching for me any moment now. You must tell her that I left on the Mail. She is sure to give chase in her carriage, and then I shall slip away with no one the wiser.”
Looking doubtful, the maid nodded.
Blaise flashed a brilliant smile. “I can never thank you enough for lending me your clothes and coming to my rescue. Now go, please—and don’t forget, you saw me leave on the Mail Coach.”
The girl, after bobbing a curtsy, scurried from the room. Blaise counted to one hundred, then went to the door and pressed her ear to the panel. Her Aunt Agnes had the voice of a shrew and a temperament to match, and Blaise was certain she would hear the commotion when her ladyship discovered her niece missing.
It came almost immediately: a shriek and a thump, as if an outraged female had stomped her foot in fury. Blaise could indeed hear the tirade that followed, albeit not too clearly, since it issued from the floor below.
“The Mail Coach? That wicked girl! I vow she’ll be the death of me. I warned Sir Edmund I could never handle her, but would he listen? No, he had to saddle me with that shameless wretch for the entire season!”
The soft murmurs that succeeded this outburst, Blaise knew, came from her own abigail, Sarah Garvey. Garvey had accompanied her all the way from Vienna in order to attend her during the London Little Season—the winter months when the fashionable upper crust of British society gathered in the Metropolis to see and be seen, when young ladies of quality were sold to the highest bidder on the marriage mart.
Blaise wrinkled her nose at the mere notion. It would be so humiliating to be paraded like a filly at a horse fair and then purchased for the dubious privilege of breeding some stuffy Englishman’s heirs…principally Squire Digby Featherstonehaugh’s heirs. Well, she wouldn’t surrender meekly! She would marry for love, if she had any say in the matter just as her parents had done. And if she were extremely lucky, her love would be an American, as her father had been.
Passing the cavalcade of traveling Gypsies upon the road a short while ago had been the greatest stroke of good fortune. She knew that particular tribe; Miklos’s little band was as familiar to her as her own English cousins—and far more dear. Indeed, some of the happiest hours of her happy childhood had been spent in Miklos’s camp, in the company of her adored father. And after her father’s death…well, she might have died of grief herself if not for Miklos.
She would be entirely safe with his tribe. Contrary to ignorant popular belief, Gypsies were not the licentious degenerates purported in old wives’ tales. Where females were concerned, their morals were as prudish and proper as the highest stickler’s. Miklos would be as protective of her as he would his own daughters, Blaise knew. Almost certainly he would offer her refuge if she asked. And if she was ever to escape the vigilant chaperonage of her aunt, her best chance was now, before she was incarcerated in the country, at Lady Agnes’s mercy, for the months prior to the beginning of the social season.
For that interim Lady Agnes had arranged to hold a house party, specifically so Blaise could become better acquainted with her prospective suitor. Squire Featherstonehaugh was a wealthy farmer and a neighbor of her aunt’s, and Blaise had met him on several occasions in past years. He wasn’t quite as cold or formal or distant as her English stepfather, yet he was more than twice her age—stodgy, stiff-necked, and just plain dull. Perhaps she was unrealistic in her dreams, but she wanted more passion, more spirit, from the man with whom she would spend the rest of her life. She was not even nineteen yet, and she wasn’t ready to give up those dreams, or to be coerced into a marriage of convenience—which was precisely what her aunt intended.
Lady Agnes hadn’t wanted the responsibility thrust upon her, but she was determined to do her duty by her sister’s child, which included arranging a suitable marriage. More impossibly, she’d sworn to turn Blaise into a proper English lady if it killed them both—which it very well might, if the past two days were any indication. Blaise had spent the excruciating journey from Dover to London to Ware confined in the traveling chaise with her shrewish aunt, who alternatingly scolded her for her latest disgraceful conduct and sang the squire’s praises. Blaise’s ears were still ringing from the tirades. She didn’t think she could bear another hour of that constant haranguing, much less an entire season.
When the chaise had stopped to change teams at the posting inn at Ware, Blaise had partaken of luncheon—an escape would be better executed on a full stomach, she prudently decided—and then left the private parlor with the stated intent of visiting the ladies’ necessary. It had been the work of a moment to find a chambermaid and bribe her to provide a change of clothing.
With a feeling of triumph, Blaise listened now as her aunt’s angry voice faded away. She waited until she heard it again in the yard below, calling impatiently for the coachman to hurry if they expected to catch the Mail. Then she slipped quietly from the attic room.
