Fair Fatality Page 14

  This explanation Miss Valentine for the large part ignored, as with much less success she attempted to ignore Mr. Rutherford’s brooding expression. He would be experiencing keen frustration, she imagined, would wish to interfere with a match obviously destined for unhappiness, yet would not dare defy his aunt. A pity Jevon was so mercenary, thought Sara, then wondered why she had not earlier recognized that grasping aspect of his nature. Even Jaisy had said her brother might be trusted to feather his own nest. With all her might, Miss Valentine strove to convince herself that Mr. Rutherford’s avarice was strong indication of a nature that was base. She failed. Were Jevon Rutherford the most mercenary creature in existence, the vilest and most base, Sara Valentine would not care.

  He must naturally be kept unaware of the depth of her sentiments regarding him. With what she hoped was a blank expression, Sara gazed down the street.

  It was a damnable predicament, decided Sara, and she could have wept with vexation at her own foolishness. She, a penniless spinster, had fallen fathoms deep in love with a gentleman entirely too well versed in the game of hearts, and one, moreover, who was on the dangle for a fortune and consequently could only offer her false coin. If he would offer that, Sara reflected gloomily. She had not failed to notice that, after her shocking conduct in Lady Blackwood’s garden, Jevon had ceased to make his regular visits to his aunt. He did not want to encourage her to harbor hopes that could never be fulfilled, Sara concluded. Mercenary Jevon might be, but his failure to take advantage of her appalling greenness was further proof of his good heart. On the other hand, she supposed her conduct could be interpreted as the utmost callousness; for what assurance had Jevon that Thomas would not spread the story of their interrupted embrace all around the neighborhood, with the result that Sara was turned out with empty pockets and a large number of frivolous bonnets into the streets? Sara did not know what to think, other than that to henceforth avoid Jevon Rutherford like the very plague would be her only prudent course.

  As Miss Valentine silently maligned his character — Jevon Rutherford knew perfectly well that Thomas would keep a still tongue in his head, having paid the butler a very generous stipend to do that very thing and threatened him within an inch of his life if he did not — Jevon heard out Arthur’s account. His sister had followed up her outrageous conduct with alternate hysterics and vaporing, and was currently locked in her bedchamber, with vials of nervous medicines and laudanum. She was at her last prayers, on the shelf, had frittered away her chances, Lady Easterling was prone to announce. It was no use to load her with reproaches; before she apologized to Carlin she would allow herself to be broken on the rack.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn Lady Blackwood had such a thing hidden away somewhere!” Arthur concluded. “I don’t mind admitting that the old — er — the dowager duchess gives me quite a nasty turn! But Lady Easterling swears Carlin is a cruelly unfeeling coxcomb who has played fast and loose with her, and claims her life is ruined, and therefore Lady Blackwood may do with her as she pleases, even to marrying her off to me!”

  “Ah.” Mr. Rutherford had paid this explanation only half the attention it warranted, the other half of his concentration being occupied with why his ladylove was looking like a tragedy queen. “Have you considered presenting your case to my aunt?”

  “No!” Arthur glanced nervously over his shoulder, as if expecting to find that the dowager duchess hovered there to enact retribution for his unwise blasphemies. “I’ll be hanged if I give her my head for washing, thank you!”

  “It sounds as if you may as well be hanged if you do not!” Jevon responded ironically. “Still, I daresay a kind word from Carlin would make my sister heart-whole in an instant, and equally quick to refuse to marry you.”

  “Certainly!” Arthur responded irritably. “And pigs will fly quicker than Carlin will speak to Jaisy! Hang it! It’s all well and good for you to be rainbow-chasing, sir, because you have nothing at stake. Oh, I beg pardon, I’m sure! But your sister is abominably provoking!”

  Once more silence descended, broken only by Confucious’s bitter comments, as Arthur wondered miserably if his impertinence would result in Jevon Rutherford’s bidding him to the field of honor, from which he would be summarily dispatched, which was not a solution to his dilemma that Arthur relished overmuch; and Jevon reflected that this young cawker would be free to pursue his Sara, did he persuade Carlin to bestow upon Jaisy the aforementioned kind word. The situation obviously called for prolonged cogitation, no easy undertaking for a gentleman suffering from a severe head cold.

  Because he had reached no decision as to his wisest course of action, Jevon voiced no comment. Nor did Arthur, due to belated consideration for the intact condition of his own skin. At length Miss Valentine roused from her own abstraction sufficiently to realize that the silence had taken on a strained quality. “I have been showing Arthur around London,” she offered brightly. “We have been having a splendid time, Arthur, have we not? Yesterday we explored the Strand.”

  “Yes, and went into Ackerman’s Fine Art Repository, which I believe is one of the first shops in London to have been lit with gas!” Arthur was inspired by Mr. Rutherford’s unappreciative expression to add quickly: “We have driven ‘round the City! Seen the Tower, the Treasury! The Mansion House! The Bank of England and the Royal Exchange!”

  Upon this indication of how very much time his Sara was spending with this dandified country bumpkin, Jevon almost fulfilled Arthur’s apprehension and called him out. Satisfying as it would be to engage with Arthur in pistols at dawn, and to summarily dispatch him to make the reacquaintance of his maker, to do so, however, would in no way advance his own romance.

  Never had it occurred to Mr. Rutherford that the object of his affections might not fancy him; after all, Jevon perfectly understood the workings of her mind. What be did not know was whether she realized the nature of her sentiments. With a notion of finding out, he raised careless fingers to her cheek. “Sara —” he began.

  What next Mr. Rutherford might have said is destined to remain unrecorded; so startled was Miss Valentine by his unexpected caress that she dropped Confucious’s leash. Immediately the dog sprang. The exertions of eluding those wicked if sparse teeth caused Mr. Rutherford to succumb to a sneezing fit. With very much the air of a man brandishing a flag of truce, Arthur proffered his own handkerchief. Miss Valentine recaptured Confucious, sternly advised Mr. Rutherford to retire henceforth out of the cold, and upon that piece of impersonal wisdom proceeded with her entourage down the street. A handkerchief clutched in each hand, Mr. Rutherford watched their progress. His was the woebegone aspect of a man mortally wounded, not by Confucious’s sharp sparse teeth, but by the green-eyed monster, jealousy.

  Sixteen

  * * *

  Dismaying as was the offhand manner in which it had been delivered, Mr. Rutherford did take Miss Valentine’s advice, and spent the next twenty-four hours barricaded within his lodgings at the Albany, that exclusive hotel sacred to bachelors and widowers, where prior to his disastrous marriage the poet Byron had dwelt. First Melborne and then York House before its incarnation as a hotel, the Albany was now converted into sets of double and single freehold apartments. Gateways, walls and porter’s lodge had been demolished and four houses erected in their place, and very fine those structures were, reflecting the French influence in the stone eagles which perched atop the lower-story windows and appeared to support the balconies above on their wings and heads. The buildings around the courtyard had been converted into chambers, and the house divided into apartments. Between the two long blocks of cream-colored stucco buildings — three stories high with large paned windows and first-floor balconies with wrought-iron balustrades — which ran the full length of the garden was a paved and covered walk. At the far end of the garden stood two large brick buildings, which contained larger apartments than those off the covered way.

  Jevon Rutherford resided off the east side of the garden, in an elegant suite
that included an anteroom with fireplace, a drawing room which opened via fine double doors into a bedroom and dressing room behind with water closet and hip-bath, as well as cellar and garret and kitchens in the attic. Both bedroom and drawing room looked out onto the covered way. The furnishings were primarily of mahogany and rosewood, and set about were some excellent knick-knacks and bric-a-brac, such as a wonderfully embossed and chased silver teakettle, and an ormolu greyhound, and two green oval vases of Sèvres china, decorated with flowers and fruit and moldings of burnished gold.

  It was upon those Sèvres vases that Mr. Rutherford currently gazed, and he did so with a glassy-eyed expression that was due partially to the rigors of his head cold, which he had chosen to combat with a combination of Battley’s Sedative and Morris’s Drops, and partially to the exigencies of romance. Those vases had once belonged to Beau Brummell, who had taken refuge across the Channel — to be precise, in the celebrated Dessein’s, the only hotel in all Calais suitable for a gentleman of fashion — as had many English debtors before him, a time-hallowed custom grievously interrupted by the antagonistic Napoleon. Jevon had attended the auction conducted by order of the sheriff of Middlesex on the premises of 13 Chapel Street, and there had procured the Sèvres vases, as well as a letter-scale on a black plinth with Cupid weighing an ormolu heart. These relics would remind him of the fate of gentlemen who tarried too long upon the heights.

  Yet how to, with dignity, descend? Jevon sighed and availed himself of a cup of egg hot, which stood on the table near his bedside. This potion — a warm drink composed of beer, eggs, sugar and nutmeg — had been prepared for Jevon by his valet, who subscribed to the theory that hot toddies must cure colds, and therefore with great gusto whipped up concoctions for his master’s delectation. Thus far this day Mr. Rutherford had sampled, in addition to the egg hot, a combination of warm porter and moist sugar, gin and nutmeg, fondly known to its creator as a dog’s nose, and a cup of hot brown brandy with a lump of sugar in it. If these nostrums, combined with Morris’s Drops (emetic tartar and spirits of wine mixed with brightly colored vegetable dye) and Battley’s Sedative (composed largely of opium), had done little to cure Mr. Rutherford’s illness, they at least had wiped the frown from his careworn brow. As his plain-spoken sister might very well have put it, Mr. Rutherford had shot the cat and was drunk as an owl.

  In this deplorable condition, Mr. Rutherford was discovered by Lord Carlin, who had grown so frustrated by Jevon’s avoidance of his customary haunts that he invaded Jevon’s apartments in the Albany, refusing even to allow Jevon’s manservant to announce him, and strode unheralded into the sickroom. No sooner did he cross the threshold than he stopped dead in his tracks. At first he thought, with utter horror, that his friend had expired, in so very boneless a fashion was Jevon sprawled upon his bed, and so lackluster was his eye. One could not decently ring a peal over a corpse, no matter how great one’s frustration. On tiptoe, Kit ventured closer to the bed.

  Those fine blue eyes — so reminiscent of the provoking Lady Easterling and therefore reminiscent of Lord Carlin’s serious indignation at their owner’s interference in his business — were not only unfocused but also shot through with red. All the same, Jevon appeared to be breathing still. “Zounds!” exclaimed Lord Carlin, thunderstruck at seeing his friend brought so low.

  Upon this exclamation, uttered very near his ear, for Lord Carlin had bent over to better inspect his face, Jevon winced and blinked feebly. “There is no need to shout!” he retorted irritably. “I can hear you very well. Furthermore, I have the very devil of a head.”

  Reassured that his companion was not in danger of momentarily passing through death’s door, Lord Carlin drew up a rosewood chair near the bed and seated himself in it. Even the most perfect of gentlemen may have a nodding acquaintance with that condition so aptly known as being “cast away,” or alternately “foxed,” and with the subsequent desire that one had been a great deal more sparing of one’s libations to Bacchus. “I have,” he announced, “something to say to you!”

  “Then say it in softer tones, I beg!” protested Jevon, placing a hand to his aching brow. “Which reminds me, what have you done to my sister? If I wasn’t laid up with this wretched cold, I swear I’d call you out.”

  This observation, presented as it was in the garbled tones of one who is suffering a severe congestion of the nasal passages, gave Lord Carlin pause to think. By the time he had deduced Mr. Rutherford’s meaning, and had decided that he was perfectly justified in feeling even more indignant, Mr. Rutherford had taken the notion that the only remedy for his discomfort was a bowl of steaming punch. Having requested this concoction from his obliging manservant, Jevon returned his attention to Kit. “Have you nothing to say?”

  A great many responses presented themselves to Kit, in particular a pungent comment regarding the tendency of the Rutherfords to succumb to a fever of the brain, further proof of which was the delicate lady’s handkerchief that Mr. Rutherford clutched. “I have done nothing to your sister,” he responded icily. “Rather, you should ask what she has done to me!” Conversation then faltered, as Jevon’s manservant reappeared, a mammoth bowl of steaming bishop held triumphantly aloft. The gentlemen sampled this concoction and announced it just the ticket. The manservant retired, gratified.

  “What could she do that was so terrible?” inquired Jevon, who was already on his second cup of punch, as result of which he was acting very much revived. “I grant you she is a trifle mulish, and a wee bit hot-at-hand —”

  “Hah!” interrupted Lord Carlin. “Your sister bade me to the devil and then for good measure boxed my ears.”

  “So I have been told.” Mr. Rutherford emptied his second cup and embarked upon a third. “I can only think you provoked her into it, Kit, because she doesn’t usually get to dagger-drawing with her beaux.”

  “I am not one other beaux!” So perturbed was Lord Carlin by this unhappy suggestion that he emptied his third cup of punch at a single gulp. The author assumes that it is unnecessary to further illuminate the hasty inroads made by the gentlemen on the steaming bishop, save to explain that both of them were already more than a little bosky, and would rapidly grow more so, as result of which Mr. Rutherford would conceive a veritable brainstorm.

  At this point in the action, he was already on the verge of revelation, and abruptly sat up in bed. Though Lord Carlin was not of a nature to appreciate such things, the reader may be interested to learn that Mr. Rutherford remained breathtakingly handsome even when swathed about with flannel and hot bricks, and clad in a voluminous nightshirt. “I don’t know why you wish to keep me in perfect ignorance of what is going on!” said he. “It is very difficult to pull the wool over a wolf’s eyes.”

  Not surprisingly, Lord Carlin found these remarks a trifle difficult to follow. “Oh?” he parried.

  “I promise you!” By now, Jevon’s nacky notion was fully conceived. It was a notion that would have greatly astonished his beloved, so convinced was she of his avarice, and therefore convinced also that he would make no attempt to thwart his aunt, because thwarting Georgiana was precisely what Jevon had decided he must do. “There’s precious little I don’t know about the frail and the fair, I can tell you!”

  Lord Carlin’s thought processes were by this time no clearer than his host’s, and he frowned in an effort to understand. The frail and the fair? Did Jevon seek to introduce his little opera dancer into the conversation? Better the conversation than the ton! “I say, you really cannot marry her, old man!”

  “I marry her?” Now Jevon frowned. “You must think me a veritable roué! Not I, but you! Do try and concentrate your mind.”

  “The deuce!” Had his friend grown wholly deranged — or had Kit caught his fever of the brain? “I don’t want to marry your —” What had Lady Easterling called her? “Your Sara!”

  “Sara?” echoed Mr. Rutherford. “I should think not! She wouldn’t do for you at all! Though you might very well wish to marry her if you knew h
er as well as I do. Not that I would stand for it. So put the notion straight out of your mind.”

  It was not difficult for a gentleman, even a gentleman in Lord Carlin’s by now very inebriated condition, to banish a notion he had never possessed. Lunatic as Jevon might have grown, he at least retained sufficient intelligence to realize that a man of Kit’s position could never even consider allying himself with a woman of low condition. A pity Jevon did not realize that he too was ineligible for alliance with so unfortunate a creature as this Sara must be.

  Engrossed with his delusion that Jevon’s fair one was in fact a fair unfortunate, Lord Carlin failed to note that Jevon was regarding him very much like a hungry cat might regard a plump bird. “Let us be frank with one another!” Jevon suggested, so abruptly that Kit almost spilled his punch. “I know all!”

  “You do?” inquired Lord Carlin, a great deal taken aback.

  “I do!” insisted Mr. Rutherford dramatically. “There is no longer need to try and pull the wool over my eyes — though why you ever thought there was, I fail to understand. It’s not as if you could have thought I wouldn’t give you my blessing!”

  “Your blessings?” These ominous words inspired in Lord Carlin a queasiness for which the only recourse was immediate further application to the punch bowl.

  “It is only polite to ask leave of a brother before soliciting his sister’s hand in honorable wedlock,” Mr. Rutherford reproved. “I trust your intentions are honorable, Kit. Else I would feel it my duty to amend the slight done to her reputation by your heartlessness.”