"McNaught, Judith - Westmoreland 01 - Whitney, My Love" - читать интересную книгу автора (McNaught Judith)

She pushed her unruly hair off her face, stuffing it into the crown of her childish bonnet, and resolutely turned her back on England.

The Channel seemed to smooth out as she marched across the deck to stare in the direction of France. And her future.

FRANCE

1816-1820

Chapter Three

SITUATED BEHIND WROUGHT-IRON GATES, LORD AND LADY Gilbert's Parisian home was imposing without being austere. Huge bow windows admitted light to the spacious rooms; pastels lent an air of sunny elegance to everything from parlors to second-floor bedrooms. "And these are your rooms, darling," Anne said as she opened the door to a suite carpeted in pale blue.

Whitney stood mesmerized on the threshold, her gaze roving longingly over the magnificent white satin coverlet on the bed splashed with flowers of orchid, pink, and blue. A dainty settee was covered in matching fabric. Delicate porcelain vases were filled with flowers in the same hues of orchid and pink. Ruefully, Whitney turned to her aunt. "I'd feel ever so much better, Aunt Anne, if you could find another room for me, something not quite so, well, fragile. Anyone at home," Whitney explained to Anne's amazed expression, "could tell you that I've only to walk by something delicate to send it crashing to the floor."

Anne turned to the servant beside her who was shouldering Whitney's heavy trunk, "In here," Anne said with a firm nod of her head toward the wonderful blue room.

"Don't say you weren't forewarned," sighed Whitney, removing her bonnet and settling herself gingerly on the flowered settee. Paris, she decided, was going to be heavenly.

The parade of visitors began promptly at half past eleven, three days later, with the arrival of Anne's personal dressmaker, accompanied by three smiling seamstresses who talked endlessly about styles and fabrics and measured and remeasured Whitney.

Thirty minutes after they departed, Whitney found herself marching back and forth with a book on her head before the critical stare of the plump woman whom Aunt Anne was entrusting with the formidable task of teaching Whitney something called "social graces."

"I am atrociously clumsy, Madame Froussard," Whitney explained with an embarrassed flush as the book plummeted to the floor for the third time.

"But no!" Madame Froussard contradicted, shaking her elaborately coiffed silver hair. "Mademoiselle Stone has a natural grace and excellent posture. But Mademoiselle most learn not to walk as if she were in a race."

By the dancing instructor who arrived on the heels of Madame Froussard's departure, Whitney was whirled around the room in time to an imaginary waltz and judged, "Not at aO hopeless-with practice."

By the French tutor who appeared at tea time, she was pronounced, "Fit to instruct me, Lady Gilbert"

For some months, Madame Froussard visited for two hours, five times each week, instructing Whitney in the social graces. Under her relentless, exacting tutelage, Whitney worked diligently to learn anything which might eventually help her win favor in Paul's eyes.

"Exactly what are you teaming from Madame Froussard?" inquired Uncle Edward as they dined one evening.

A sheepish look crept across Whitney's face. "She is teaching me to stroll not gallop." She waited, half expecting her uncle to say that was a nonsensical waste of time, but instead he smiled approvingly. Whitney smiled back, feeling unaccountably happy. "Do you know," she teased, "I once believed that all one needed to walk properly were two sound limbs!"

From that night on, Whitney's laughing anecdotes about her day's endeavors became a delightful ritual at each evening meal. "Did you ever observe, Uncle," she asked him gaily one night, "that there is an art to turning around in a court dress with a train?"

"Mine never gave me any trouble," he joked.

"Done incorrectly," Whitney informed him with mock solemnity, "one is likely to find oneself wrapped in a train that has just become a tourniquet."

A month later she slid into her chair and fluttered a silken fan, eyeing her uncle with a speculative sparkle over the slats. "Are you over-warm, my dear?" Edward asked her, already into the spirit of the inevitable fun.

"A fan is not really for cooling oneself," Whitney advised him, batting her long eyelashes with an exaggerated coquetry that made Anne burst out laughing. "A fan is for flirting. It is also for keeping one's hands gracefully occupied. And for slapping the arm of a gentleman who is too forward."

The laughter vanished from Edward's face. "What gentleman has become too forward?" he demanded tersely.

"Why, no one has. I don't know any gentlemen yet," Whitney replied.