Tempted By His Secret Cinderella (Allied At The Altar Book 3) Read online

  ‘Then we’ll make one.’ Her father turned about the room, dancing with his imagination. He snapped his fingers, inspiration finding him. ‘I know—you will be an Italian principessa! Where is my map of Italy?’ He opened one of the trunks crowded into their small space, doubling as storage and furniture. The scent of cedar filled the air as he rummaged. ‘Ah, here it is.’ He shut the lid and unrolled the map, reaching for a mug and a plate to anchor the sides.

  ‘Father, what are you doing?’ Elidh crossed the room cautiously, fearfully even. She hoped she hadn’t understood him aright. ‘I can’t be an Italian principessa.’ Surely he wasn’t thinking they’d impersonate royalty?

  His finger stopped at a spot of the map. ‘There—Fossano. You can be the Principessa of Fossano. Now, let me see. You need a name.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Chiara di Fossano. Principessa Chiara Balare di Fossano. I think that has a nice ring to it.’

  Elidh grabbed for the map and rolled it up in a fury. ‘Stop! This is nonsense. You want me to impersonate an Italian princess?’ There’d been schemes before, little scams on the road when the troupe had been short on coin, but nothing like this. This was madness even for him.

  ‘It’s not really impersonation, Elidh. I don’t think Chiara Balare actually exists,’ her father reasoned as if creating a fiction was somehow better than pretending to be someone else.

  ‘That’s not the point.’ Elidh lifted the trunk and put the map away. She wished she could put her father’s ideas away as easily.

  ‘What is the point, my dear? This man needs a wife to claim his fortune and we need a fortune.’ For a moment, the light left her father’s dark eyes. They were sober and sad. ‘Don’t you think I know how close we are to the edge? This time, we might very well fall off.’ He took her hands and turned them over, surveying her palms. ‘Thank goodness you haven’t stooped to doing other people’s laundry. Your hands aren’t ruined. It would give you away immediately.’

  Elidh sighed, summoning her patience. How like her father. Serious one minute and back to his schemes the next. It had been an enchanting quality in her childhood. It had made every day part-adventure, part-fairy tale. Her world had been magical. It wasn’t any more. The enchantment had worn off long ago, leaving the realities of poverty and hopelessness in its wake. It was up to her to be the voice of reason. She took her father’s hands and led him to a trunk. ‘We have to think about this logically. To start, the premise is madness. You want us to infiltrate a party for nobles and impersonate Italian royalty.’ Couldn’t he hear the preposterousness of his own suggestion? What he proposed was impossible.

  ‘We’ve done such things before, Elidh,’ her father chided as if she was somehow in the wrong. ‘Do you remember the time your mother and I pretended to be an English lord and lady on a Grand Tour whose carriage had broken down?’

  ‘Yes, of course I remember,’ Elidh cut him off swiftly with a polite smile. If he got to talking about the old times, there’d be no reasoning with him. ‘But that was different. That was just for one night and it was for a free meal.’ Her father had promised to pay once their luggage had been retrieved, which it never was, and they’d scampered out of the inn before dawn to avoid detection. ‘This is about trapping a man into marriage.’ There were so many things wrong with the idea, she couldn’t begin to put them into words. She began with the most obvious. ‘He’ll be swarmed by women who are actually eligible for the honour. The odds are firmly against us, even if we were legitimately titled. We can’t risk so much on a gamble we have no hope of winning. He wouldn’t look twice at me and, if he did, he’d look straight through me and know. I haven’t the demeanour.’

  ‘The demeanour, bah! Do you remember when we toured Italy, Daughter? We played all the places—Naples, Florence, Rome, Turin, Milan.’ She didn’t have the heart to correct him. They had played those places. But not on the big city stages. The troupe had roamed in their caravan through the countryside, playing for various conti and duchi at their summer villas.

  ‘I remember.’ She remembered the warm nights, the lights in the darkness, the food, the wine. Her mother’s laughter as she charmed the noblemen. Those were good times when she was innocent and thought they were untouchable. She wasn’t so innocent any more.

  ‘You spent the summer in Italy with nobles, you were sixteen then. You managed beautifully. It will come back to you and, if you make a mistake, you shrug and you say “it is different in Italy.” Being foreign will cover a multitude of sins.’

  ‘But not a lack of clothing.’ Even if she could pull off the mannerisms, her wardrobe would give her away.

  ‘Nonsense. We have your mother’s costumes.’ Her father rose and moved about the room, flipping open trunks as he went, pulling out gown after gown in a whirlwind of silks and satins emerging from their tissue wrappings until the little room was a harem of colours, rich and lush, at odds with the grey pallor of the walls. ‘This one should do for an evening gown, there used to be a tiara that went with it.’ He rummaged deep into the trunks. Out came the velvet sacks of paste jewels and headpieces. They winked and twinkled in the gloom, looking exquisite at a distance. Looking real. ‘Rosie can help you alter them. She is still in Upper Clapton living with a sister. She can help us with costumes and maid duties. She played one often enough on stage, she should be an expert.’ Rosie had been her mother’s dresser and had played a maid both off and on stage.

  Elidh was truly worried now. If her father was willing to alter her mother’s sacred costumes, he must be desperate indeed, all that more committed to his latest scheme. When he had an idea, he clung to it with tenacity. It would make her job of persuading him that much harder. ‘Father,’ she warned, ‘we’ll never get away with it.’ Perhaps the best way to reason with him was to play along, to pose obstacles carefully veiled as questions. ‘I don’t speak Italian, not much of it anyway.’

  ‘No one else does either. They will compliment you on your English. Your accent was flawless when you played Juliet on stage in Tuscany that one summer,’ her father said encouragingly, his eyes lighting again as he thought of the past. He held out his arms in an expansive gesture and turned about the room. ‘Everything we need is here. We have all of your mother’s costumes and our own ingenuity.’

  Elidh tried one last time. ‘Even if you are right, it’s too much to risk on the hopes he’ll look my way.’

  Her father gave a nod and tapped a knowing finger to his temple. ‘There’s more than one way to win at this. We’re not going solely for the young, rich eligible parti. That would be far too foolish. We will also be pursuing a patron. This party will gather the right sort of men I need access to in order to sell my play. If an Italian prince can convince them he’s found an Englishman to rival Shakespeare, they’ll listen.’

  ‘But you don’t have a play,’ Elidh put in bluntly. This was getting crazier by the moment.

  ‘Yes, I do. Nothing new, mind you, but I’ve given an old play a new title. It’s been years since it was out and it was only performed on the Continent. I’ve been thinking I simply haven’t had the chance to meet the right patron. After all, what sort of men buy plays in Bermondsey Street? My plan’s not so risky now, is it? There’s money to be made in the short term if nothing else, perhaps at cards if no one buys a play. I can wager some of our “jewels” for a stake.’

  Dear heavens. Elidh wanted to reel and she was sitting down. Impersonating royalty, crashing an elite party, trying to court a wealthy man, trying to snare a patron, all the while fleecing people with the lure of false jewels on the side. Worst, her father was entirely convinced of his plan’s merits. She could see it in his eyes. Elidh tried a new strategy. If she couldn’t persuade him it was impossible to crash the party, perhaps she could persuade him about the dubious merits of actually succeeding. Success was not without consequences.

  ‘It’s mad genius to be sure, Father,’ she said sweetly. ‘Have you thought what h
appens, though, if we succeed? I would be trapping a man into marriage.’ Her father was a romantic at heart. He’d loved her mother deeply—surely such sentiment would work against him here?

  ‘Trapping him? It would hardly be that,’ he scoffed. ‘Being alone with a man in a garden with the sole intention of being caught kissing him is a trap. But when a man invites women to his home for the express and overt purpose of taking a wife, that is not a trap any more than the entire Season in London is a trap. Society doesn’t call it the Marriage Trap, they call it the Marriage Mart. This is no different.’ He wagged a finger at her. ‘And we are no different, miss, than anyone else attending the party.’ He talked as if going was a foregone conclusion.

  ‘We’d be impersonating royalty,’ Elidh reminded him once again. It was so easy to overlook that one detail amid all the madness surrounding it.

  ‘If you think anyone going to the party is really being themselves, you’re more naive than I thought.’ Her father frowned. ‘Those guests might bring their own names, but they’ll be impersonating their better selves and leaving their real selves at home. Those sorts always do.’

  ‘Then I pity this poor Sutton Keynes,’ Elidh said defiantly. ‘He has to choose from a room full of frauds and that’s no choice at all. If he chose me, I’d be no different than them, a false front for someone he doesn’t really know.’

  ‘You see!’ her father crowed. ‘No different. That’s what I’ve been saying. We’re just levelling the playing pitch. We’d be no different than anyone else there.’

  ‘If you’re right, he’ll fall in love with a princess.’

  ‘If I’m right, he’ll fall in love with you.’

  Elidh studied the newspaper. ‘If you’re right, I’ll cost him his fortune. He would hate me for it. Saving his fortune is the whole motive behind his party.’ All the more reason her father’s idea was the height of madness. This Sutton Keynes couldn’t afford her.

  Her father’s features softened and he looked at her gently. ‘A man who chooses money over my daughter isn’t the right man for her. It’s the classic quandary, isn’t it? Love or money? It’s the stuff playwrights dream of.’ Her father sighed happily, already imagining a hundred plots he would never write.

  Long shadows filled the room. Elidh moved to light their candle stubs. She stopped to open the window and put out a dusting of breadcrumbs for the birds who gathered on the little sill. If she didn’t go with him, she feared he’d go alone and goodness knew the trouble he’d get into without her.

  ‘What’s the worst that can happen if we try?’ he cajoled as she worked about the room.

  Elidh paused and looked up from the candles. ‘We end up in Newgate? Fraud is a crime.’ They’d be committing it on so many levels.

  Her father looked thoughtful, hands folded across his stomach. She thought she might have reached him at last. ‘We might end up there or somewhere like it anyway if we do nothing. If we stay the course, we are certainly doomed, Daughter, for the workhouse, for the streets.’ He shook his head. ‘We have nothing to lose as it is. We have to try. It’s all we have left. Your mother would expect it of us. She wouldn’t want us to give up.’

  Her mother wouldn’t want them defrauding an innocent man either. Elidh was sure of that. Well, fairly sure of that.

  He met her gaze sombrely. ‘I haven’t anything left to give you but this one chance. I couldn’t save your mother, I couldn’t save the troupe, but maybe I can save you. Win this man’s heart and you will have your freedom from penury. You will have a life of luxury I could never give you.’ He paused, his eyes watering suspiciously. ‘I’m not getting any younger. Last winter showed us both that. I want to know you’re taken care of.’ It was a lovely little monologue. Was he the actor in these moments or her father? It was so hard to tell. When she was little, she’d loved watching her parents on stage, playing out a scene from her father’s latest work: her mother so beautiful and blonde, her father darkly handsome and intense. Even now, he could still deliver a speech with enough pathos to bring an audience to tears, even if it was only an audience of one.

  ‘Don’t talk like that, Father.’ She couldn’t bear the reality of his words. Elidh busied herself putting away her mother’s costumes. Her father had nearly died last winter with a terrible cough that had lingered for months in his chest. What would happen if he took sick again this winter? What would happen if she lost him? He was all she had left. The thought was untenable.

  It was a classic quandary indeed. What would she do for love? Would she risk it all on her father’s mad plan? Not out of love for an unseen man with a fortune, but out of love for her father. She would risk for him what she would not risk for herself. But how best to do it? If her mother were here, she’d say to find the middle ground, that there were always more than two options to any dilemma.

  Elidh put the last dress away, carefully tucking it into its tissues, her mind searching for that middle ground. She didn’t have to win the bachelor’s hand. She simply had to help her father secure a patron; if they could do that, perhaps it would prevent him from passing off fake jewellery as stakes at the tables. It seemed the best option. A patron’s support would be enough to get them through the winter. She would worry about spring when it came. What harm could there be in the masquerade? It only had to last two weeks. Then the Principessa Chiara Balare di Fossano could disappear for good and no one would be the wiser. She turned to face her father. ‘When do we leave?’

  ‘In four days.’

  Elidh nodded. ‘You’d better call on Rosie, then. We have a lot of sewing to do.’ It was a plan with flaws and consequences even if they succeeded, but she’d worry about that later, when and if they appeared. Now, she knew what she’d do for love and how far she’d go. All the way to Newmarket, apparently.

  Chapter Four

  Four days later, Principessa Chiara Balare di Fossano, accompanied by her maid and her father, Prince Lorenzo, stepped down from the hack that had driven them from the station in Newmarket, on to the hallowed grounds of Hartswood. Elidh had never been more nervous in her life. Perhaps it was fitting. This scheme was more outrageous than any other her father had cooked up. It was only right she should be more nervous. There was more to lose.

  The concept of ‘more’ followed her everywhere like an unwanted stray. Her father was more audacious than he’d ever been, not only using their precious rent money for the carriage ride that took them from the station on All Saints to the estate, but he’d also purchased first-class accommodations for the journey from London and proudly introduced himself as Prince Lorenzo whenever asked. He reasoned no one would believe in a prince who travelled third class. If anyone made note of their arrival, he wanted to be prepared on all fronts. Elidh hoped they didn’t regret the expenditure later.

  Looking up at the sandstone façade of Hartswood, it appeared the audacity and luxury didn’t end with her father. The estate was more opulent than anything Elidh had ever seen in England. That luxury was evident from the first turn into the long drive, featuring perfectly manicured lawns and leafy green trees overhead through which the sun filtered so artfully one had to wonder if the trees had been planted deliberately to get the effect. The circle at the end of the drive continued the theme, welcoming guests with an Italian fountain that burbled coolly in its centre while two sandstone staircases flanked the rising entrance to the double front doors of the estate, an elegant mix of English baroque and Italianate architecture.

  The luxury didn’t end there. Grooms had leapt to take the horses’ heads as soon as the driver halted. A footman’s hand had waited to help her down, his head respectfully inclined. There was no moment for hesitation or uncertainty on her part. Nerves or not, she was immediately ‘on stage’, immediately immersed into her role as the Princess, and no one assumed otherwise. Perhaps her father was right. People saw what they expected to see. Certainly, none of the servants suspected otherwise.


  A maid was present to guide them up the staircases to the wide, cool, white-marbled entrance hall, through the house and out to the afternoon comfort of the back terrace. The walk itself was subtly orchestrated to show a guest the level of opulence they’d stepped into. Perhaps it was meant to remind everyone that despite the lack of a title, the Keynes family was not without funds. It seemed she was not the only one with something to prove. Elidh filed the insight away for later.

  She was grateful for her father’s presence at her elbow. Whatever the message this home meant to send, it was intimidating to a girl who lived in a tiny two-room boarding-house suite on Bermondsey Street. Her father was, at least, known and familiar to her in this strange wonderland. ‘Don’t look around too much,’ he whispered. ‘A princess would expect such a setting. Our hosts are trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, Daughter.’ He was playing his role of princely Italian royalty to the hilt, chin up, shoulders back, not a fearful iota in his gaze as they passed crystal-cut glass vases filled with armfuls of fresh flowers and open doors that allowed for surreptitious peeks into elegantly appointed rooms done in cool, pale colours.

  Elidh could not argue with her father’s reasoning. Out on the back terrace, young girls gaped shamelessly at the graduated water ladder running down the centre of the gardens, the strategically placed statuary, the topiary trees cut in animal shapes, the plants arranged in colourful designs to draw the eye. She thought their gaping could be excused. The garden was spectacular.