Chapter Sixteen
Tell her the joyous time
will not be stayed
Unless she do him by
the forelock take.
—Edmund Spenser
SHE’D BLOWN IT but good.
Mac felt a trickle of sweat run down the front of her bodice as she watched the masked and costumed society couples perform a quadrille on the Gresham’s elegant parquet ballroom floor. She plucked at her elbow-length gloves, longing to peel them off. In spite of open windows and the late hour, so fashionable for nineteenth-century balls, the room was stifling. Ten pounds more or less of ball gown didn’t help—even though it left the upper part of her arms bare and plunged in front a little too low for comfort.
At least she’d put her foot down at the idea of a full costume. The half-mask she wore had the advantage of making her feel a little more anonymous. Caroline’s instruction during the past two weeks hadn’t appreciably improved Mac’s talent for dancing, so Mac was relegated to the status of wallflower for every dance but the waltz.
Thank God. Six weeks in the past and she still felt as if she were on a movie set.
The movie set of a historical farce, at that. A farce in which she, the heroine, had messed up history and couldn’t seem to put it right again.
Everything had gone downhill after Caroline’s rebellion at Cliff House and Mac’s confrontation with Liam on the beach. She’d hardly had two words from Liam since, even though she’d been at the Gresham home so often she might as well have moved in.
And she hadn’t seen Perry at all. It was as if her great-great-grandfather had literally disappeared—a circumstance that made Mac extremely uneasy. Her careful questions to Liam had been ignored, and Caroline had clammed up and looked on the verge of tears when Perry’s name was mentioned.
It had been a thoroughly lovely fortnight. Liam hadn’t let Caroline out of the Gresham mansion. The big surprise was that Liam not only allowed Mac to see Caroline, but had actually encouraged long visits. And those visits were almost always in his presence, since he’d made himself a part of the furniture from dawn to midnight every day. Mac suspected he’d decided she was the lesser of two evils—though given their last conversation, she was amazed that he’d let her within spitting distance of his precious ward.
Or maybe he thought he’d rather have Mac underfoot than out conspiring somewhere with Perry. He permitted Caroline Mac’s company because he wouldn’t let her have anyone else’s until the ball, except a few girlfriends for occasional tea or a brief gossip. And, of course, the indispensable dressmaker.
Mac had learned more than she ever wanted to know about Victorian female gossip, fashion, and etiquette. Caroline had seesawed between “perfect ladyship” and moody silences, treating Mac either as a long-lost friend or a hopeless rustic who didn’t know Spanish lace from Irish.
She might not win an Oscar for “Best Modern Woman Impersonating a Victorian Lady in a Historical Drama,” but at least Mac wasn’t giving herself away badly enough to be thought anything but eccentric by Caroline’s friends.
That’s me. Eccentric Mac, who knows damned well she doesn’t belong here. And she also knew damned well that time was ticking away. Literally. She was treading water pretending to be what she wasn’t in a society that wasn’t hers. And until she found a way out of this mess, she was stuck here.
It wasn’t just her heart she’d be leaving in nineteenth-century San Francisco. If she could leave…
She pushed that thought away and snapped open her fan. No point in thinking about how she was supposed to get home until she had a reason to.
There was one good thing to think about. Liam may have been ignoring her, at best being frigidly polite—but he wasn’t conceding much more to his bride-to-be. Mac hadn’t seen any sign that he’d asked Caroline to marry him. He certainly hadn’t tried to reprise his kiss at Cliff House. To the contrary: he seemed bent on making himself as much a living example of menacing and omnipresent implacability as was humanly possible. If there was love on Liam’s part, Mac hadn’t observed it.