Ravensby Od by Charlotte E. English

Author:Charlotte E. English [English, Charlotte E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-07-09T07:14:13+00:00

Chapter Nine

Stricken with sudden alarm, Meg whirled about, seeking either Edmund, or a way back to where she had left him. Nothing emerged to comfort or serve her: Edmund was missing, and so was the archway through which she had stepped. She saw two white-painted doors set into the pale plastered walls, but both were at some distance, and firmly closed; neither looked as though they might take her back to the Weald.

She tried them anyway. The first was locked, or stuck, and would not open no matter how she rattled the polished brass handle. The second opened at once, and so promptly that Meg (who had expected resistance) almost fell through it.

‘Oh!’ she said, having instantly beheld another person on the other side of it. ‘I am sorry. I came through from—’ She stopped, helpless to explain the nature of her arrival, or of her errand, for she understood neither.

The person upon whose solitude she had so rudely — if involuntarily — intruded looked up. Meg had entered the modiste’s store-room, and what a warehouse it was: quite as large as the chamber through which Meg had just passed, and every inch of its walls fitted with shelves positively groaning with fabrics. The riot of colour near hurt her eyes, such richness had they, such intensity; Meg blinked, and blinked again.

Her interlocutor stood at one of the many shelves, engaged in fetching down a bolt of dark purple something. The lady seemed oddly indeterminate: her age unguessable (save that she was not a youth), her garments nondescript (odd, for a woman so surrounded with every possible finery). She had brownish skin and browner hair, and a shrewd stare; under the force of this latter, Meg squirmed. A measuring-rope wound itself around one of her wrists, apparently by its own volition, for it was not tied, and she had a quantity of brass-headed pins stuck into the folds of her apron.

‘Meg Lavender,’ said this person, after only a moment’s reflection.

Oddly, Meg felt a surge of irritation. ‘I begin to grow tired of feeling several steps behind everybody else,’ she snapped. ‘I am sent here by Mrs. Duhamel, for reasons I do not know, but doubtless you do?’

She regretted this ungracious speech immediately: where were her manners! Her mother, always exquisitely courteous, would have been ashamed of her.

Fortunately, the modiste (if it was she) found this outburst amusing rather than offensive, for she grinned, and the expression lit up a face that had seemed virtually without memorable feature. ‘Ah, but you do know me,’ she said, in a gently chiding tone. ‘For did I not dress those limbs from head to toe myself, and in the finest ruby-coloured satin? And with silver ribbons! You remember.’ This last was uttered with the force of a command: you remember.

Meg, at first, did not, and began a protest. But some of the words sank in: ruby-coloured satin, and silver ribbons.

Meg, thirty years ago: still Miss Megwen Wolverley then, a tiny child delighted with the way her shimmering red gown rustled around her tiny legs when she walked.

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