Fair Fatality Page 8

  It was in the drawing room of Blackwood House that the ladies enacted this portrayal of domestic tranquility. Lady Blackwood was regally disposed upon the crocodile-shaped couch, drawn up close to the hearth. Sara, as befit her lowly status, had been assigned a simple chair at some distance from the fireside.

  She did not mind, especially; chilly as was Sara’s corner of the chamber, a close proximity to the hearthside, and consequently to the dowager, was no guarantee of comfort. She paused in her labors to draw a shawl — woven from the fleece of wild goats in Kashmir, one of the few mementos remaining from a more prosperous heyday — closer around her slender shoulders. Confucious growled.

  “Aha!” snapped the dowager. Sara started guiltily and wondered if her employer had taken offense at her possession of the shawl. Lady Blackwood was not tolerant of servants who indulged themselves with fripperies and folderols. “There you are, miss! You are to be felicitated; never in all my life have I been so put out of countenance!”

  That the action of a mere servant should put the dowager duchess to the blush was unthinkable, and Sara relaxed and cast the current source of Georgiana’s displeasure a compassionate glance.

  Lady Easterling was in fine fettle, and looked in no need of sympathy. The skirts of her gown, white poplin with a deep blonde flounce, rustled as she crossed the room. “There’s no need to be kicking up a dust over trifles!” she informed her aunt, taking up a position by the fire. “You’re just out of sorts because Carlin sat coquetting with me.”

  “Coquetting!” Lady Blackwood looked incensed. “Fiddlesticks! Carlin is one of the highest-bred men in England — and, as I warned you, infernal starched-up. He could not help but dislike your impertinent manners, miss!”

  “Oh, pooh!” Lady Easterling turned her attention to the wide-eyed Miss Valentine. “This is all fudge! Carlin came to me at the Opera, Sara, and stood talking with me for quite twenty minutes, which has put my aunt out of frame!”

  “Out of frame, am I?” The dowager altered her position so as to give Sara the full impact other glare. Hastily, Miss Valentine lowered her gaze and resumed brushing the somnolent Confucious. “To give you the word with no bark on it, Carlin can only look upon my niece as a female not fit for association with respectable people! As I told you in the past, my girl: put Carlin from your mind.”

  “By Jove!” Lady Easterling had very much the aspect of a damsel about to fly off the hooks. “That’s an outright taradiddle, Georgiana, even if I shouldn’t tell you so! Carlin was as civil as a nun’s hen.”

  Upon receipt of this graphic assertion, Lady Blackwood winced. “Tiresome creature!” she responded, with what Sara thought a startling degree of patience. But, then, Jaisy was a wealthy damsel, and must be handled differently from penniless companions who could be turned peremptorily out into the streets. “Carlin is all that is honorable,” the dowager continued. “Much as he disliked your conversation, he was obliged to swallow it with good grace until such time as he could gracefully escape. Now let me hear no more of this farrago of nonsense! You have done some truly reprehensible things in that quarter, but no real harm has been done.”

  Miss Valentine, as a result of her childhood acquaintance with Lady Easterling, might, if consulted, have informed her employer that logical conclusions would avail her nothing with Jaisy. Before she could open her mouth, Jaisy had erupted into angry speech. “Jupiter!” she cried, eyes aflash, fists on her hips. “You make it sound as if I am expected to wear the willow for Carlin, as if we should not suit! And it is nothing of the sort! Believe me, Sara, Carlin suits me to a cow’s thumb!”

  “So he may,” interrupted the dowager, in equally determined tones. “But if you think Carlin will be suited by a little baggage who talks to him — and everyone else! — of ‘wisty cantors’ and ‘cross-and-jostle work,’ you are all about in your head!”

  Not only Lady Easterling suffered that affliction; upon discovery of the extent of her charge’s folly, Miss Valentine touched her fingers to her brow. Since in so doing she failed to consider that she still held Confucious’s brush, she very narrowly avoided putting out an eye. “Sara,” inquired Jaisy curiously, “what the blazes are you doing with that nasty brush? You ain’t crying, are you? Because there’s no need! No matter what Georgiana may try and tell you, Carlin ain’t a penny the worst of it!”

  If tears trembled in Sara’s eyes, they were inspired wholly by her painful encounter with the dog brush. Miss Valentine had no other cause for woe, neither the demonstrable failure of her efforts to fashion a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, failure which she been promised would lose her a place, nor a certain item glimpsed in that morning’s news sheet. If a certain Mr. R — was reputedly dangling after a pretty little opera dancer who could be glimpsed most evenings onstage at Drury Lane, it had naught to do with Sara, except perhaps in explanation of why Mr. R — had failed to fulfill their pact. Perhaps the lazy Jevon had never meant to try and warn his sister away from an ineligible parti. Perhaps he had merely held out that offer to divert Sara from her tedious megrims.

  “I do not comprehend why I should try and tell anything to Sara,” remarked Lady Blackwood. “She is paid to do what I require of her; and I am not required to provide explanations to my servants! I do have something to tell you, miss, so you may come here and sit down.”

  Though her lower lip protruded in an alarming manner, and her huge blue eyes sparkled angrily, Lady Easterling obeyed. Sulkily, she seated herself beside Georgiana on the crocodile-shaped couch. The dowager duchess reached out and caught her niece’s arm in a viselike grip. “I have been,” she announced, “remarkably patient. I thought you would soon come to realize that life in the metropolis is quite different from what you are accustomed to, and would allow yourself to be guided by Sara and myself. Instead, you have earned yourself a distasteful notoriety. Do not interrupt! I know you think it a splendid thing to have your name on every tongue, but I do not feel similarly. In short, my girl, if you do not immediately mend your ways, I will wash my hands of you!”

  Well did Miss Valentine remember the lightning speed with which her friend’s sunny disposition shifted to impending thunderstorm; and well did she recall the heavy-handed manner with which the dowager greeted such outbursts. “Jaisy —” she ventured.

  “Silence!” decreed Georgiana, with an unappreciative glance. “Not only will I dispatch you back into the country, Jaisy, I will insure that no other member of the family lends you countenance. Easterling’s people won’t oblige you; they never approved his marriage to so young and volatile a miss, and that Easterling left you everything that wasn’t entailed put their noses further out of joint. I daresay that eventually you’ll find some respectable female to lend you countenance — you dare not return to London without such a female lest you put yourself altogether beyond the pale — providing, that is, that you don’t first dwindle into an old maid!”

  There was in the dowager’s statement just enough truth to cause Jaisy’s lovely lips to thin: Though it was inconceivable that Lady Easterling would dwindle into an old maid, it was fact that without the dowager’s sponsorship she would find it difficult to marry as high as she pleased. A certain sort of gentleman would always be attracted to wealth and beauty, and never mind being tarred with the common brush; but Jaisy’s birth was unexceptionable and she would not wish to wed beneath herself. Watching the expressions that played across Lady Easterling’s face as she made the acquaintance of these unpalatable facts, Sara’s heart ached for her friend. Well did she know the frustration attendant upon Lady Blackwood’s tyranny. Even better, Sara knew there was no comfort she could offer.

  “And what am I to do about Carlin?” inquired Jaisy, still stiff-lipped.

  Pleased that her words of warning bad not fallen on deaf ears, the dowager released her niece. “Nothing, I fancy. Mark my words, Carlin will avoid you like the plague, so great a disgust must he hold you in. The cream of the jest is that I have it on good authority that he means to take a
wife, so as to secure the succession. Doubtless he will choose from among the bevy of beauties that have been dangling after him this age, all of them good obedient girls.”

  Though Lady Blackwood might consider Lord Carlin’s prospective marriage a very good jest, her niece did not feel similarly. In rather strangled tones, Jaisy begged permission to withdraw to her bedchamber. Rendered almost benign by victory, the dowager graciously granted her niece’s request. Spine rigid, Jaisy walked out of the drawing room. Once safely in the hallway, her unnatural composure deserted her, and she kicked viciously at the wainscoting, and drummed her fists against the wall, and sought relief for her rage in calling the dowager duchess a great many unflattering names, among which “old gorgon” was by far the most innocuous.

  “I beg your pardon?” came a voice behind her, and Jaisy spun around to discover that she shared the hallway with her aunt’s portly butler and a freckled young man with sandy hair. It was the latter who had spoken. “May I be of assistance?” he inquired.

  No more than anyone did Jaisy relish being caught out looking foolish. “Oh, the devil fly away with you!” she cried, and ran away down the hallway, leaving the young man to stare after her with no little perplexity.

  In point of fact, Arthur Kingscote had during recent days found many things at which to gape, in a manner he suspected irrevocably branded him a rustic; and of those wonders, distraught females ranked lowest on the scale. Arthur had never before, in all his eight-and-twenty years, been so far from his country home as London, and certainly he had never traveled on a mail coach, twice as dear as the common stage. Splendid beyond comparison were the coaches of the Royal Mail, painted mauve and scarlet and black, with the royal arms emblazoned on the doors, and the royal cipher in gold upon the fire-boot, and the panels at each side window embellished with various devices, such as the badge of the Garter, the shamrock, the thistle and the rose. And fortunate indeed was the individual privileged to ride upon the box seat by the coachman, which was usually charged extra, except during inclement weather when outside passengers were prone to freeze to death.

  Arthur had not minded the cold weather, nor the snow; he had dreaded his journey’s end. From the moment his shabby portmanteau had been stowed with that of the other passengers — fifteen of these there were, four inside and eleven out — he had felt as if embarked upon a grand adventure. Nor had he found cause to alter that opinion en route. He thrilled to potential disasters — were a wheel to catch on a bridge corner or a stone post at some sharp turning, the unlucky outside passengers could be sent hurling through the air, to land up against whatever hard surface first interfered with their flight; he delighted in the half-thoroughbred horses which, during their eight-mile stages, were wrung of every ounce of endurance they were worth. The steadier wheelers were theoretically supposed to act as checks on their leaders, which Arthur supposed was a wise and prudent precaution — but there was never excitement like when the driver gave the wheelers their heads and the whole team dashed along at a full gallop! Then came the changing of the horses at the next stage, when hostlers and stable-boys rushed to take out the winded horses and harness up the fresh in the scant minute they were allowed. Even that undertaking was not without excitement, for instance the occasion when a recalcitrant wheeler had insisted on lying down, and had been roused only by straw set afire beneath his nose.

  But the adventure was now ended, and Arthur was brought back to the present by the butler’s discreet cough. Time now to meet the Dowager Duchess of Blackwood, long conceived by Arthur as some semi-Olympian deity, alternately malicious and sublime, to be regarded with awe. This impression he had gleaned from comments made by his family, who eked out small incomes with the dowager’s charity, and consequently dared not cause offense. When the summons had come, there had been no question but that he would comply with it.

  What did Lady Blackwood want of him? Arthur wondered. Perhaps the dowager duchess had singled him out from among her numerous kinfolk as the object of some special benevolence. Perhaps he was to be presented some means by which his future might be made secure. Arthur’s future was a matter which had concerned him for some time. As the eldest of a large number of siblings, it was his responsibility to devise some means by which he might make his own way in the world.

  A harsh voice, bidding him enter the drawing room, broke into Arthur’s thoughts. With no little trepidation, he stepped across the threshold.

  So awesome was the drawing room — never before had Arthur been present in a chamber strewn about with lotus columns and lilies and papyrus stems, hieroglyphics and odalisks and pyramids, to say nothing of lions and vultures and crocodiles — that he was briefly aware only of these marvels. As the initial impact waned, he next realized that within that hitherto unglimpsed splendor dwelt two females. The first of these, who looked to be near Arthur’s own age, was clutching a vicious-looking dog to her breast. The second, seated on a crocodile-shaped sofa near the fireplace, was observing him narrowly.

  Surely this could not be the dowager duchess? thought Arthur, stunned. He had envisioned some great Amazon of a woman, who breathed brimstone and flame. What was it the tearful beauty encountered in the hallway had called her? An old gorgon? Perhaps his parents had been overly pessimistic in warning Arthur against potential missteps.

  “I do hope,” observed the dowager duchess, reinstating Arthur’s faith in his parents’ perspicacity, “that you’re not a mooncalf! Come here, young man!”

  On leaden feet, Arthur obeyed. The dowager rose to her full height, grasped his chin and turned his head this way and that as she continued her inspection. At length released, Arthur stumbled over his own feet in an effort to put a safe distance between himself and his benefactress. Lady Blackwood might be no Amazon, but he could not doubt her ability to breathe brimstone and fire. In thus attempting to remove himself from within the dowager’s reach, he noticed that the plainly dressed female was regarding him in a sympathetic manner. Tentatively, he smiled.

  “Ho!” said the dowager duchess. “Sara, say hello to Arthur Kingscote, and then be off! I do not know where you learned the addle-pated notion that I pay you to take your ease at my fireside. There is lace to be mended, and Jaisy to be attended, and Confucious to be exercised!”

  Georgiana meant to ensure that Arthur Kingscote was aware of Sara’s lowly status, it appeared, perhaps fearing that so unfortunately situated a female would grasp at any straw to escape; but Sara took no offense. Pleasant as was the young man’s guileless, freckled countenance, quite a different set of features intruded themselves all too often in Sara’s mind. What a contrary-natured female she was, mused Sara, as she passed out of the drawing room. Before Jevon had made it clear that he didn’t wish to tryst with her, trysting with Jevon had never — or at least not very often — crossed her thoughts.

  “Sara,” persisted the dowager, in case young Arthur truly was a mooncalf, and slow to take the point, “is penniless, though of respectable enough birth. If she ever marries, it must be to someone plump enough in the pocket that her own lack of fortune will not signify. Not that I expect her to climb down off the shelf! I trust you take my meaning, young man?”

  Lest he displease the dowager duchess — and he was beginning to think “old gorgon” might be much too mild a term — Arthur dared not voice his confusion. He agreed, then hastily sought to introduce a new topic of conversation.

  But Lady Blackwood was not interested in Arthur’s journey, which had terminated at the Saracen’s Head, atop Snow Hill, even though it was a journey for which she had paid. “A wise young man,” she interrupted, as with regal measured pace she closed the distance Arthur had placed between them, “would not hesitate an instant when given the opportunity to take a wealthy female to wife!”

  The dowager duchess halted in front of him. “Wife?” Arthur echoed faintly, noting how the flickering firelight case demonic shadows on the dowager’s raddled face.

  “You are a very fortunate young man, Arthur Kin
gscote!” Even more diabolically, Lady Blackwood smiled. “A very fortunate young man indeed.”

  Ten

  * * *

  Though Lady Easterling had not been privileged to view the celebrated Catalini at the King’s Theater in the Haymarket, she was among the guests at a private musical party when the temperamental prima donna performed selections from various of Mozart’s operas, thus displaying a voice of extreme richness and powerful flexibility. Accompanying Jaisy to this concert were the Dowager Duchess of Blackwood and Arthur Kingscote. And though Jaisy might profess herself well satisfied with the entertainment, and the dowager bestow upon Catalini a flatteringly benign inclination of the head, Arthur’s frame of mind was a great deal less appreciative.

  It was not the evening’s fare that dissatisfied him. Arthur was no ardent admirer of musical concerns, but he could not help being fascinated by this first glimpse of life among the Upper Ten Thousand. The elegant rooms were so crowded that several young man lay on the carpet with their heads resting in a positively Oriental fashion — or did he mean Roman? — against the cushions of the sofas on which their ladies sat. Their conversation, when the prima donna paused between arias to refresh herself, was no less engrossing.

  Princess Charlotte, only offspring of the Prince Regent, had just married Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Arthur learned. The bride had worn a wreath of diamond roses and a shimmering silver gown; hundreds of people had spent the afternoon in the park outside Clarence House, cheering and clapping and calling for the bridegroom to show himself on the balcony. The ceremony, during which the bride and groom had knelt on crimson velvet cushions beneath candlesticks six feet high, had taken place at Carlton House. Crowds of notables thronged into the Queen’s House facing St. James’s Park to congratulate Her Majesty on the marriage; they came in such vast numbers that it had taken over two hours to progress from the entrance lodge through the colonnade at the grand staircase. Ladies had their dresses torn, gentlemen lost their hats. Meanwhile, the bride’s exiled mother had shocked all of Athens by dressing almost naked and dancing at a ball with her servants.