A Highly Respectable Marriage

by Sheila Walsh

  ‘Oh, that wretched boy!’ exclaimed Pandora, her foot already on the stair. ‘How could he, after promising me most faithfully that he wouldn’t so much as touch that dreadful weapon again within the bounds of Mrs Hamilton’s house!’

  ‘No more he did, miss.’ The butler was quick to William’s defence. ‘The incident took place in the park, Miss Prossett having taken both children there some little while earlier for an airing. It was, I believe, some kind of bird perched upon a low branch which precipitated Master William’s enthusiasm ‒’

  ‘Thank you, Binns, you need say no more!’ Their eyes met in rueful recognition of William’s undoubted temptation. Then Pandora shrugged and mounted the stairs preparing herself for the inevitable.

  ‘Is that you, Pandora? I know it is you, so do not be thinking to creep past the door!’

  Octavia’s voice rang out almost before she had reached the landing, its strident tones confirming Pandora’s worst fears. She drew a deep breath and pushed open the drawing room door to find the curtains half drawn, casting deep shadows over the gold-striped chintz. She was just able to make out her beautiful half-sister prone upon a sofa placed at right angles to the fire, a vinaigrette clutched in one hand, a crumpled square of cambric and lace in the other. On the floor beside her a child of some seven summers knelt playing with a doll, dark ringlets falling across a pretty, slightly petulant profile which, though as yet undefined by the years, already showed a distinct resemblance to her mama’s.

  Pandora decided that a frontal attack was her only hope. ‘I had no intention of creeping past; in fact, I wished most particularly to see you. Binns has told me something of what happened. It was a most unfortunate accident, but William must of course be punished for his carelessness ‒’

  ‘His carelessness? Is that how you term it?’ Octavia’s mouth was working in a most unbecoming way, her shrill voice quivering on the air. ‘I am amazed that you can take the matter so calmly! But then you are not a mother and can have no conception of how it feels to have your child viciously struck down, to know that she might have been fatally wounded, the delicate bloom of her youth snapped at a stroke!’

  ‘She looks remarkably healthy to me,’ Pandora cut in, unable to endure such a farrago of nonsense one moment more. She walked across to Eliza and bent down to put a hand under the child’s chin. Eliza looked up and in so doing revealed a small piece of sticking plaster adorning one cheekbone and another even smaller piece covering part of her ear lobe.

  ‘My!’ She smiled encouragingly. ‘How bravely you are bearing your battle scars!’

  Eliza was torn between this affecting and somewhat heroic view of herself, and her running grudge against William. In the end she compromised. ‘I bled and bled,’ she lisped. ‘And Mama says that now William will have to go away!’

  Pandora’s glance flew to Octavia who sat up, swinging her legs gracefully to the floor, her pose of distraught mother discarded, its purpose served. She patted her impeccably coiffured hair and looked at Pandora, hard-eyed.

  ‘I am sure that I have been patience itself where William is concerned, but there is a limit to even my goodness … and Miss Prossett declares she can endure no more! The boy constantly disrupts lessons by asking unanswerable questions so that it becomes impossible for her to proceed.’

  Pandora’s opinion of Miss Prossett led her to declare most unwisely that the governess’s inability to answer William’s questions might well stem from her own inadequacy rather than any great degree of difficulty in the questions themselves.

  ‘There is nothing wrong with Miss Prossett! She is a perfectly adequate governess and I do not intend to lose her on William’s account! Frederick will have to make enquiries first thing tomorrow about finding some suitable alternative. I doubt any school will be found willing to take him this late into the year, but we shall have to see. Until such time as a solution may be found, however, he will have to study alone. I can no longer allow him to share Eliza’s lessons.’

  ‘William ought to go to Charterhouse,’ said Pandora quickly. ‘It is where Papa went, and although Courtney never followed in his footsteps ‒ for Mama could not bear to be parted from him, you see, and there was a very able tutor in Lisbon who prepared him for Oxford ‒ the circumstances are now quite different. I am sure that Papa would have wanted at least one of his sons to follow him.’

  Octavia stared. ‘My dear girl, you must have windmills in your head! Even if there were sufficient funds, which there are not, do you suppose that Charterhouse would take him?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. William is very bright, you know.’

  ‘William, or had you forgotten, is the son of a man who ordered his batteries to open fire on their own comrades!’ Octavia said harshly. ‘That he was also an ex-pupil of Charterhouse is, I would hazard, the very last thing they would wish to be reminded of!’

  Pandora felt anger rising to choke her. ‘It wasn’t like that!’ The words were forced out. ‘Lord Wellington himself completely exonerated Papa … you know he did! There was a tragic blunder in communications … it happens sometimes when the weather is appalling and everything is in disorder. Papa wasn’t even present when the order was given, and the captain in charge of the battery was little more than a schoolboy with no experience ‒’

  ‘But Father accepted responsibility.’ The hard voice was unrelenting.

  ‘Of course he did! They were his men ‒ under his command! What would you have had him do?’ Pandora dashed a hand across her eyes. ‘Oh, what is the use … you will never understand. You never really knew Papa. He would have given his life for any one of those men ‒ indeed he did exactly that very soon after!’

  ‘So you have told me, ad nauseam. All I can say is that it was very convenient for him to be dead and well out of it, but thanks to that Ibbot woman who seems determined to make his name a byword, it is we who continue to bear the stigma.’ Octavia lifted an impatient hand as Pandora, horrified by such selfish insensitivity, would have said more. Her beautiful face was unrelenting. ‘No, I don’t want to hear another word. I am quite tired of the whole business. We must face the facts as they are. Frederick must place William where he can, until such time as a school can be found to take him. It will, of course, be an added expense and you cannot expect us to defray it …’

  Pandora’s heart turned over with a sickening fear. They meant to find some horrid little hell-hole that would take William for next to nothing! ‘But the annuity?’

  ‘Oh, that! My dear, that will scarcely suffice! No there is a solution we have all overlooked. I believe the time has come for Courtney to leave Oxford and take up his responsibilities.’

  ‘You cannot ask that of him! He will have exams ‒’

  ‘My dear Pandora, you know as well as anyone that Courtney cares not one jot for examinations!’ Octavia rose gracefully, as though bored with the conversation. ‘Much better that he leaves now. Frederick can probably find him some employment of a clerical nature in the City, and the monies thus saved can be put to other uses. You, naturally, may remain here until Courtney is able to make some kind of home for you. Come, darling.’ She held out a hand for her daughter who had been gazing from one to the other with a wide-eyed, almost morbid interest.

  It was on the tip of Pandora’s tongue to blurt out that nothing would induce her to stay ‒ that she meant to leave at once, taking William with her, but she was so filled with impotent rage that she could not bring herself to speak. Not caring if Octavia took her silence for acquiescence, she turned on her heel and left the room, climbed the bare unprepossessing flight of stairs leading to the nursery floor with hands clenched rigidly at her sides and a painful lump blocking her throat.

  It was more than anyone could be expected to endure! To be any longer beholden to Octavia, to have the deplorable Frederick ordering their lives … this was bad enough; but infinitely more distressing to bear was the way Octavia talked about Papa as though he were not her father at all, but some frightful stranger.
The woman who had begun the rumours had lost a son in the unfortunate accident and might be forgiven for hating Papa, but how could Octavia believe such a thing of him?

  Yet dearly as she had loved her father, Pandora could not but deplore his carelessness in leaving them without home or direction. He was ever a man of erratic humours, spare of figure, red-haired, with a quick flaring temper that could dissolve as quickly into laughter. He had loved their mother with a passionate mercurial love which had reached out to embrace his children ‒ his fellow officers avowed that he was as black-humoured as ten devils when they were not with him ‒ but Mama was used to say in fun that they were never in the least doubt as to their importance in relation to the Regiment. His beloved guns came before all else; his men, who loved and feared him in equal measure, he regarded as his stern charge and responsibility and consequently watched over them with scrupulous care, whilst his family came a poor third. Though he refuted the accusation as a gross calumny with a great show of indignation, there was a grain of truth in it none the less. Yet his enthusiasm was such that they were all carried along in its wake.

  It had been Mama, gay, biddable Mama, who had provided some degree of stability, had insisted upon the house in Lisbon as a home to which they could return from time to time, and had compelled her volatile husband to at least look the future in the face so far as to make a will. But when Mama had taken a fever and died with such alarming suddenness, he had been blind and deaf to all advice, had disposed of the Lisbon house, packed Courtney off home to Oxford and assumed that she and William would continue to live their lives very much as before. Pandora had no quarrel with this decision. The Army was almost the only life she knew. But her father was quieter, more withdrawn and they were no longer carried along on the former plane of excitement. It seemed that she grew up, almost overnight, trying as best she could to fill the unbearable gap left by her mother’s death.

  ‘’dora!’ The hissed whisper came to her from above. She blinked quickly several times to clear her eyes and looked up to see William hanging over the banister rail, his face pale with ill-suppressed agitation, so that his freckles, more marked than his sister’s, were starkly etched. ‘Come on up quickly before that old nanny-goat Prossett catches me! I am charged not to leave my room and I’m to have no supper.’

  Pandora took the last few stairs at a run and bundled him inside, closing the door softly behind her.

  ‘It’s no more than you deserve, abominable boy! And kindly do not call Miss Prossett names.’ Her pent-up anger found release at last. ‘Why I don’t box your ears, I cannot think! Quite apart from breaking your promise to me, you have put Octavia all on end ‒ and this time there will be no smoothing her down. Whatever can have possessed you to use that wretched catapult again, let alone aim so glaringly abroad that you must needs hit your cousin?’

  ‘There was nothing wrong with my aim,’ William maintained stoutly, his mouth tight with indignation. ‘I don’t see that I can be blamed because that bird-witted widgeon, Eliza, chose to run across my path just as I let fly!’ He met Pandora’s eye and had the grace to flush guiltily. ‘Yes, I know I promised not to, but you see,’ he wheedled, ‘I forgot to remove it from my coat pocket, and when I saw that crow sitting on the branch just waiting to be potted, it was in my hand before I thought.’ His enthusiasm could not long be stemmed. ‘If I’d had Pa’s gun I wouldn’t have missed, I can tell you!’

  The sight of his sturdy body planted pugnaciously on thin bare legs exposed by his too short nightshirt filled her with a great suffocating wave of love.

  ‘Well, we have that much to be thankful for at least,’ she said on a choked laugh and sat down abruptly on the edge of William’s hard truckle bed. The sparsely furnished room set in the rafters was very much like the one allotted to her. Hardly a place to call home, she thought. Not that lack of comfort troubled them greatly; Army life had long since accustomed them to laying down their heads in far worse conditions, but remembering Octavia’s luxurious boudoir, it seemed just one more pointer to her meanness.

  Her pensive manner brought a shuffling of feet and a slightly shame-faced: ‘I didn’t mean to make more trouble for you, ’dora.’ And when she didn’t reply at once, William added, ‘Is Octavia still in a blue fit? She screamed at me so much, I thought she’d die!’ and regretfully: ‘But she didn’t. I expect she’ll go on about sending me away again, now.’ He sat on the bed and slipped a hand into Pandora’s. ‘I shouldn’t mind going away to school, you know ‒ oh, I should miss you, of course, but I would much liefer be with a crowd of other boys than be obliged to stay here and share Eliza’s lessons, and be bored by Miss Prossett.’

  But not some awful school of Frederick’s choosing, vowed Pandora, hearing the wistful note in his voice. She hugged him fiercely, and stood up. ‘We shall have to see. I had better go now before Miss Prossett catches me, but I will try to smuggle you some food up later.’

  There was little opportunity to broach the subject of William again that night. The Hamiltons were seldom at home in the evening and had never formed the habit of taking Pandora out with them.

  She did try to talk to Octavia, visiting her room as she was preparing to leave for a ball, apparently fully recovered from the earlier severe shock to her nerves. Her mind already on the evening ahead, she brushed aside Pandora’s opening question.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said, accepting the wrap placed about her shoulders by the waiting lady’s maid and drifting to the door. ‘We will settle William’s future tomorrow.’

  The words, invading her attempts to sleep, assumed an ominous significance as the night wore on. She ought to write to Courtney, but experience told her that he would fail to see what all the fuss was about. Better, perhaps, to seek an interview with Mr Lewis at the earliest opportunity. And if she could only find a suitable position …

  The next morning matters came to a head. William bore the punishment meted out to him by Frederick with a stoicism that filled Pandora with pride even as she protested at its severity.

  ‘My dear sister,’ came the pompous reply. ‘It is clear that you understand little of the corrective processes so necessary to the adequate formation of a young boy’s character. It is to be hoped that we have not already dallied too long in William’s case!’

  Pandora looked into Frederick’s smooth, self-important face and recognized the futility of attempting to remonstrate.

  She went straight to her room and took her best bonnet from the shelf in the tiny closet.

  Chapter Two

  ‘It’s a powerful grand house, miss!’ breathed the diminutive Cassie, her trepidation very evident as she added: ‘You don’t truly mean for to go inside?’

  Pandora stared up at the windows glinting back at her like so many haughty eyes in the strong sunlight. She felt the first twinges of misgivings. Viewed from the opposite pavement, the house in St James’s Square was indeed quite intimidatingly grand. Perhaps it would have been better to see Mr Lewis first. But now that she had gone to the trouble of discovering from Binns where the Duke of Heron lived, it would be craven to cry off at the first qualm.

  ‘Of course I am going in,’ she declared with a good deal of resolution, stepping out across the smooth kidney stones of the square with all the swaggering bravado of a Johnny Raw marching to his first encounter with the enemy. ‘And you must come with me, Cassie ‒’ She heard the abigail’s involuntary gasp, and said bracingly, ‘Don’t be afraid. You need come no further than the vestibule!’

  At first it seemed that they would be denied admittance even that far. The liveried porter eyed her disparagingly from a great height, his disapproval making itself felt. But the mention of Lady Margerson’s name appeared to exercise a beneficial effect and soon Pandora was following a soft-footed servant across the marble lozenged hallway, past a pair of towering Corinthian columns which flanked the central stairway, drawing the eye upwards to behold the delicately curving wrought-iron balconies which made such an impressive feature of
the half-landing.

  But Pandora, grown suddenly aware of the enormity of the step she was taking, was too preoccupied with a frantic last-minute rehearsal of what she would say to appreciate the architectural splendours wrought by Robert Adam upon the Duke of Heron’s town house. One scared glance had been sufficient to induce panic, to persuade her that she ought never to have come.

  Too late now to wish that she had paid more attention to what Lady Margerson, in her maddeningly indeterminate fashion, had said. Too late for regrets of any kind, in fact, for the lackey was throwing open a pair of doors. She collected her thoughts, smoothed down her best grey crape dress, took a deep steadying breath and stepped into the room as he announced in an expressionless monotone: ‘Miss Pandora Carlyon!’

  ‘Good God!’ came a soft derisive murmur from within.

  She had been expecting a modest back parlour as befitted the nature of her mission, but found herself instead in an exquisite little saloon, entirely circular ‒ a library, she deduced, since it was lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves, except for a beautiful bow window which occupied about one-quarter of its circumference. The ceiling, a masterpiece of intricate plasterwork, mirrored exactly the design of the carpet beneath her feet.

  A gentleman, tall and willow-slim, his excellent shoulders displaying to advantage the unwrinkled perfection of blue superfine in a way that would have driven Courtney wild with envy, stood apparently absorbed before one of the bookshelves.

  ‘Oh!’ Convinced that she had been shown in error to the wrong room, Pandora swung round to find the doors already closing behind her, and was thrown into confusion. ‘Forgive me … I … Oh, Gemini!’