Courting Magic (Kat, Incorrigible #4)(8)
My attempt at dignity lasted less than a minute.
“Kat! Kat Stephenson! Is that you?” A figure farther up the line started bobbing and waving frantically. “Kat?”
As heads turned, I peered through the shadows, lit only by scattered torches. The figure ahead of me was blonde, round, excitable…but, no, it couldn’t possibly be… “Lucy?”
“It is you!” My cousin-by-marriage, Lucy Wingate, came tearing down the steps, pushing important-looking personages out of her way, to throw her arms around me in a warm embrace. It was the first time I’d seen her in nearly six years, since her horrible mother had expelled her from the family for magical usage. “I can hardly believe it!”
“I can’t believe it!” I said honestly as my family rustled in surprise around me. “I thought you’d been banished to Scotland and your great-aunts’ care forever!”
“Oh, I was!” Lucy drew back, beaming. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me. My great-aunts are delightful. Do you see up there?” She pointed to where an eccentric-looking elderly lady in a bright purple-and-yellow gown and enormous spectacles was smiling indulgently down at us. “My great-aunt Sophronia decided to bring me down for a season in Town this year. Mama is outraged, of course, but as she cast me off years ago, she could hardly expect me to follow her orders and refuse the opportunity.”
“Well…that’s wonderful, I suppose.” I shook my head in disbelief as I stepped back and took in the full view of Lucy, who looked astonishingly pretty in a demure white muslin ballgown, with flowers woven into her hair. “But…well, all the rumors, after what happened in Bath…is everything really all right?”
Six years earlier, when she was fourteen years of age, Lucy Wingate had been witnessed in full view of the fashionable Bath Pump Room, engaging in public and extraordinary feats of magic. It was the most unforgivable sin any young lady could commit, by Society’s reckoning, and as much as I wracked my brains, I couldn’t begin to imagine how she had ever managed to secure an invitation to this ball.
“Oh, I’m not Lucy Wingate anymore,” Lucy said in a cheerful whisper. “Great-Aunt Sophronia saw to that years ago by adopting me up in the Highlands, where no one had ever heard of me. I’m Lucy MacTavish now, and of course there aren’t any rumors about her. Better yet, as Mama and my sister Maria want everyone to forget I was ever a part of their family, they can hardly reveal my true identity to Society. Isn’t that fortunate?”
“My goodness.” Stepmama waved her fan rather wildly, looking as if she were about to swoon as she finally made the connection. “Lucy, is that…can that be you?”
Stepmama, of course, had been in the Pump Room that day all those years before, standing at her cousin Mrs. Wingate’s side.
I coughed pointedly. “Actually, Stepmama…” I turned to include the rest of my family in the introduction. “…And Papa and Elissa and Mr. Collingwood…may I present Miss Lucy MacTavish? A very old friend.”
“Of…of course.” Stepmama’s fan sped up, but she pinned a determined smile upon her face as the others made their greetings. She interrupted a moment later, though, to say, “My dear, I believe your companion is waiting for you.” She pointed with her fan to Lucy’s great-aunt, who was nearing the front door of the townhouse and gesturing to Lucy in a hurry-up motion.
“Oh, bother. Well, I’ll find you later, Kat!” Lucy squeezed both of my hands. “I’m so delighted to see you here! We shall have such fun together, just like last time!”
Stepmama let out a moan of horror.
“Well, not quite like last time,” Lucy reassured her.
Then she lowered one eyelid in a wink at me…just as the silk reticule that hung over my arm gave a sudden, mischievous bounce, hidden from view between our bodies.
Aha. That answered my final question.
Lucy hadn’t lost a single spark of the wild magic that had possessed her in Bath five years ago…nor a single ounce of her delight in it.
I had never expected to be smiling as I walked into my Society début.
My smile was decidedly worn about the edges, though, by the time we finally made it through the queue of stately presentations in the front hall and emerged into the massive ballroom. There must have been hundreds of tall candles scattered throughout the room as well as hanging in the giant chandeliers, and their light reflected brilliantly off the dozens of mirrors set about the walls. An orchestra was scraping away in the far corner, while at least thirty couples circulated around the dance floor and hundreds more jostled around the edges of the ballroom, packing every inch of empty space. The combined smells of sweat and beeswax and different gentlemen’s colognes and ladies’ perfumes were enough to make me grateful my new corset wasn’t any tighter.
For the first time, I wished I had actually agreed to bring a fan.
“There you are!” My other brother-in-law, Frederick Carlyle, swept in behind us to seize my arm. “Kat, you look stunned. Are you about to swoon? Or fire off a pistol just to thin the room a bit? Tell me you’re ready to liven up this gathering.”
“Don’t encourage him, Kat.” Stepping up behind her husband, Angeline rolled her eyes at me as she brushed a minuscule speck of dust off the shoulder of his dark blue coat. “He is in an absurd mood tonight.” Still, her lips kept twitching upward into an irrepressible grin of her own…especially when he did something I couldn’t see, and she gave a little jump, letting out the kind of helpless giggle I’d almost never heard from her before. “Really, Frederick!”