A Lady of Resources Page 0,1

mixed with exasperation—a familiar feeling, and one she had struggled with since the very inauspicious moment of their first meeting.

She adored the Lady, and had for most of the six years they had known each other, but tangled in with the love was the uncomfortable knowledge that she could never be like her guardian—so calm, so competent, so sure of what to say and do in any circumstance, from breaking a mad scientist out of Bedlam to curtseying to the Empress.

Oh, dear. The wretched bloody curtsey.

“Lady, do I really have to go?” came out of her mouth before she could stop it—something that seemed to happen with distressing regularity these days.

But instead of a crisp “Of course,” which was all such a babyish whinge deserved, the Lady took Lizzie’s gown from the wardrobe. It was her first real, grownup gown, the palest shade of moss-green silk, with glorious puffed sleeves and a neckline trimmed with lace as fine as a spiderweb that dipped just low enough to show her collarbones and no lower. Considering there wasn’t much below that to show off, it was just as well.

The cool silk slid over her head, and when she emerged and the Lady began to fasten the hooks behind, Lizzie thought perhaps she had decided not to dignify her whining with a reply.

But no. “Of course you do not need to go, if you don’t wish it,” Claire said quietly. “You are sixteen, and able to make up your own mind about such things. But I should like you and Maggie to be there. I should like to know that you are proud of me, and that when you write to Tigg and Jake and Willie, you will be able to give a good account.”

What a selfish wretch she was! Lizzie turned into the Lady’s arms as her cheeks heated with shame. “Of course I’ll come, Lady,” she said into her neck. “I wouldn’t miss it for anything. I’m just afraid I’ll do something stupid, is all, and embarrass you.”

“Nothing you could do is any worse than I could do—or have done—myself,” Claire said on a sigh. “Just ask Julia Wellesley—I beg her pardon, Lady Mount-Batting. Come. Let’s practice the curtsey one more time so it’s fresh in your mind, and then Lady Dunsmuir has lent us her maid to do our hair. We must give her time to produce perfection.”

Lord and Lady Dunsmuir had arrived the night before and were the honored guests of the Landgraf von Zeppelin, as the engineer of the Zeppelin airship and the director of the worldwide “empire of the air” was known throughout the Kingdom of Prussia. But to Maggie and Lizzie, he had become Uncle Ferdinand, the man who smelled of pipe tobacco and bay rum, who kept peppermints in the pockets of even his business suits, and who had changed all of their lives so astonishingly five years before.

MacMillan came in as quickly as if she’d been listening at the door, and proceeded to brush, braid, coil, and generally subdue Lizzie’s dark-honey mane so thoroughly that she hardly recognized herself in the cheval glass afterward. The French braid in a coronet about her head was awfully pretty, though. And beneath her wispy fringe, her green eyes sparkled with nerves and anticipation.

“The same for you, miss?” MacMillan asked Maggie.

They’d never dressed or done their hair alike—because before they’d met the Lady, they’d never had anything better than what they could filch from the ragpicker’s pile, where finding a matched set of anything was impossible. But MacMillan’s fingers were skilled, and Maggie’s gaze so admiring, that Lizzie said, “Do, Mags. You’ll look lovely, to be sure. We shall be as pretty as the princesses themselves.”

And she was. When MacMillan was done, Maggie turned back and forth before the glass, her nut-brown hair far more used to order than Lizzie’s was, her hazel eyes set off by the pale amber—“the color of a fine muscatel,” Uncle Ferdinand had said—of her gown. It was fortunate that the Prussians didn’t believe that young girls should wear white until they were engaged, like they did in England. Lizzie appreciated a bit of color, and while the Lady tended to go about in navy skirts and blouses with sleeves she could roll up, her eye for color and what lines suited a figure best was keen.

“And for you, milady?” MacMillan asked as Claire took her place at the dressing-table. “I’ve seen a new look many of the ladies are wearing since that