She tried to calm the butterflies cavorting about in her stomach by reminding herself that this was a far cry from the court presentation that was to have been hers, but this argument was silenced by the knowledge that he would be there, and had claimed her for the first waltz. Under such circumstances, it was impossible to remain blasé; in fact, no young lady making her first appearance at Almack’s had suffered a greater agitation of spirits.
Her turbulent thoughts were interrupted by a light tapping on the door, and a moment later her mother peered into the room. “Daphne, do you need any assistance? How I miss the days when I used to have a lady’s maid to help with—oh, my dear!” she exclaimed in quite a different voice. “Never have I seen you in such looks! Such bright eyes! Such a rosy glow! When I think of the brilliant Season you might have had, and the match you might have made, it puts me all out of patience with—but never mind that! I am sure all that is to be put right, for Sir Valerian has only to look at you to—to—” Here she was obliged to seek recourse to the lace-edged handkerchief she carried in her sleeve.
“I’m glad you are pleased, Mama,” Daphne said in a curiously flat voice. How could she tell her mother that it was not the prospect of dazzling Sir Valerian that had put the sparkle in her eyes and the color in her cheeks? Worse yet, even if her mother were to be proven right, and Sir Valerian were to make her an offer, how could she possibly accept, when her heart belonged to Mr. Tisdale? And yet, how could she not, when marriage to Sir Valerian might well be, as her mother claimed, their only chance at a better life?
THEO, IN THE MEANTIME, had wrestled all week with a dilemma of his own: the question of what to wear. He could hardly send to London for his evening kit; besides giving his valet palpitations, he would have to offer his present company some explanation for his possessing clothing of such quality. And yet, he could not tolerate the thought of presenting himself to Miss Drinkard dressed in his secondhand work clothes. In the end, however, he was forced to do exactly that, selecting the better—but not by much—of his two shirts and doing his best to compensate for its shortcomings by reclaiming the cravat he’d abandoned after his first day at the mill (although its appearance might have been greatly improved by a liberal application of starch) and the plain brown tailcoat.
His toilet complete, Theo descended the stairs to the drawing room where, on this occasion, everyone was to assemble before removing to the dining room in a formal procession. The reason for this departure from the usual arrangement soon became clear: Mrs. Drinkard had invited the more respectable of Sir Valerian’s party guests to dine before the event, just as if she had been hosting a ball in her own home. Once these had arrived—the squire and his lady, the doctor and his wife, the vicar along with his spinster sister and his sixteen-year-old daughter—the company paired off and progressed to the dining room, led by Mrs. Drinkard on the arm of Sir Valerian. Theo, as (apparently) the lowest in rank amongst the males of the party, offered his arm to the vicar’s daughter, a well-behaved girl whose plain countenance concealed a keen intelligence. Theo, finding her disconcerting gaze upon him, rapidly calculated how long it had been since he had attended divine services with his sister and her family, and how old this unnerving young lady must have been at the time.
Upon entering the dining room, however, all such thoughts were driven from his head, for here it must have become clear to the meanest intelligence that Mrs. Drinkard, having been asked to act as hostess, intended to do the thing properly. The room had undergone a stunning transformation since the previous night’s evening meal. A cloth of crisp white linen overlaid with fine Irish lace now covered the table, anchored by porcelain bowls of late chrysanthemums. Tall beeswax candles in silver candelabra (which, had Theo but known it, Daphne had spent the better part of the morning deedily employed in polishing) had been positioned at intervals down its length, whence they cast a warm golden glow over the room. The table was set with what Theo suspected must be Mrs. Drinkard’s wedding crystal and china; certainly they were different, and far finer, than that on which her boarders usually partook of their meals.
Nor had the seating arrangements escaped alteration. Miss Drinkard had been ousted from her place at the end of the table opposite her mother, and Sir Valerian installed there in her stead, with Miss Drinkard on his right. In like manner, old Mr. Nethercote’s traditional place at Mrs. Drinkard’s right was now occupied by the squire; clearly, age and infirmity hadn’t a patch on one who, besides being the holder of a baronetcy, had been so obliging as to allow Sir Valerian to hold the fête in his barn.
But more striking than all of these was the meal itself. In lavish contrast to the single course usually offered the boardinghouse residents, tonight’s dinner ran to four removes, each one grander than the one before it. It began with a white soup, which yielded place to a salmon pie along with asparagus in cream sauce, followed by stuffed partridges and a potato pie. There were custards and aspics and puddings, along with fresh fruits, nuts, and cheeses.
How, Theo wondered, did Mrs. Drinkard expect to pay for it all? In the next instant, he knew. Like the deceased husband whose habits she so frequently deplored, Mrs. Drinkard was a gambler, staking all her counters on one cast of the dice: tonight Miss Drinkard was to secure a proposal of marriage from Sir Valerian. The realization gave Theo a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach, and he found himself unable to do justice to the cook’s pièce de résistance, as the crown roast of lamb brought Miss Drinkard’s rôle of sacrificial lamb all too forcibly to his mind. As he picked at his dinner, he pondered with relish the prospect of a private interview with Mrs. Drinkard, during which he would reveal his identity and request her permission to pay his addresses to her daughter. But any satisfaction he might have derived from this pleasant fantasy was considerably dampened by the realization that, so long as he remained in his present circumstances, his hands were tied. Damn Ethan! What was taking him so long? At this rate, Sir Valerian would be posting the banns before Theo was at liberty to speak to Daphne at all.
Such was Theo’s state of mind when Mrs. Drinkard at last rose from the table, signaling the end of the meal. The ladies of the party followed her lead, as did the gentlemen, who in deference to the occasion forewent the custom of postprandial port. Sir Valerian had already arranged to transport the Drinkard ladies to the fête in his own carriage, and the vicar gave the curate a seat in his gig, but although the squire and his wife offered to take up Mrs. Jennings in their antiquated landau, that lady was resolute in her refusal—so much so that more than one member of the party wondered if the poor old dear was growing senile. Once the carriages had set out, however, she turned to regard Theo, her eyes bright with intelligence and purpose.
“At last!” she declared. “I thought they would never go. Come upstairs at once, for we haven’t much time.”
“I—I beg your pardon?” Theo asked, all at sea.
“So much like your dear mama, God rest her soul,” recalled Mrs. Jennings with a reminiscent sigh. “But we haven’t much time, not if we’re to save Daphne from that odious young man. Did you see the way he looked at her? I thought he was going to eat her along with the sweets course.”
Theo had indeed seen, and had found the sight every bit as repugnant as Mrs. Jennings had. “But—what are we going to do?”
Mrs. Jennings had by this time reached the top of the stairs, but at this home question, she paused to look back at him. “Haven’t I just said? We—you, that is—are going to steal a march on Sir Valerian.”
Theo could find nothing to object to in this plan, although its details were unclear. He followed Mrs. Jennings up the stairs and down the corridor to her room, on the opposite end of the house as his own. He caught up with her only to find her standing before the wardrobe. Having flung open its double doors, she stared with apparent bewilderment at the collection of outmoded finery within.
“Now, where did I put it? Oh, yes! I remember.”
She spun away from the wardrobe with the agility
of a woman half her age, then dropped to her knees before the bed. Theo watched in some confusion as her entire upper half disappeared beneath the bedframe. Little by little she re-appeared—torso, shoulders, and, finally, her head—dragging in her arms a large pasteboard box.
“Here, let me get that,” Theo said quickly, realizing her intention. “Do you want it on the bed?”
She surrendered her burden gratefully. “So very kind—so very like your poor mother—yes, that will be fine.”
Theo set the box on the bed, and Mrs. Jennings lifted the lid almost lovingly. The sharp scent of camphor filled the room as she pushed aside layers of yellowed muslin until, finally, she found what she sought. There inside the box lay a complete set of formal clothing suitable for a gentleman: a double-breasted tailcoat of dark blue Bath superfine, black stockinette pantaloons, and a dark red waistcoat of silk brocade, along with a fine cambric shirt, white silk stockings, kid leather pumps with tarnished silver buckles, and a—
“The cravat,” Theo said irrelevantly, staring in rapt wonder at the stiff length of linen, rolled rather than folded in order to preserve its shape. “It’s starched.”
“It was my son’s.” The gentle caress with which her arthritic hands stroked the collar of the coat gave Theo to understand that it was the entire ensemble, not merely the cravat, that had belonged to her son. “He was to have been married in it.”
“What happened?”
“He fell ill. The wedding was postponed, and then postponed again. When his health continued to decline, he released Miss—well, never mind her name, for she has changed it since then. Suffice it to say that he released her from the engagement, and after protesting that she had no desire to be released, she finally returned his ring.” Mrs. Jennings tugged a lace-trimmed handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes. “On the day we buried him, the announcement of her marriage was published in the Morning Post. I was thankful he did not live to learn of it.”
“I’m very sorry,” Theo said, and meant it. “But what—why—?”
She gave a determined sniff and tucked the handkerchief back into her sleeve. “It deserves a happier fate than to remain hidden beneath my bed, a memorial to heartbreak and loss. It is perhaps a bit out of date, but gentlemen’s fashions haven’t changed so very much, have they? And we can’t have you courting Daphne looking like a common laborer.”
“I—I don’t know how to thank you,” stammered Theo.
“You can thank me by preventing Daphne from marrying that coxcomb, Sir Valerian. She deserves to be a duchess, and he—” She gave a disdainful sniff. “He would turn his own mother out into the street if he thought he could gain from it. I knew his father, and he was just such a one, too.”
“Mrs. Jennings, have you told anyone? About who I am?”
“Good heavens, what sort of gabby do you take me for? Whatever you’re about, you must have your reasons, and you won’t want an old woman meddling in your affairs. When you came down to dinner in that garb, though, I thought you might not object to a bit of assistance.”
“Not at all,” he assured her with feeling.
“The shoes need a bit of work,” she observed, regarding them with disfavor. “We’d best step lively. If you’ll run and change your clothes, I’ll see if I can’t polish them up a bit.”
Theo was quick to do as he was bidden, and by the time he padded back to her room on stockinged feet, she had contrived to buff the silver into something resembling a shine. At the sight of him in his borrowed finery, she was obliged to seek recourse once more to the handkerchief in her sleeve.
“They might have been made for you,” she said between sniffs. “It’s almost like seeing my Edward come back to life.”
“Actually, they’re a bit loose,” Theo confessed, shrugging his shoulders to demonstrate. “He must have been a broad-shouldered fellow, your son.”
“Aye, that he was, before the illness took him. A well-built lad he was, and ripe for every kind of lark. He would be delighted to know he was playing some part in your adventures. The shirt has yellowed a bit,” she observed, startling Theo once more with her sudden change from sentiment to practicality. “Still, I daresay it won’t be noticed in candlelight, and in any case, it’s better than what you were wearing before.”
“Much better,” he agreed, stepping into the shoes. These proved to be a little too large, but this problem was easily resolved by stuffing the toes with scraps of silk cut from an old pair of stockings. Having overcome this last obstacle, Theo held out his arm to his benefactress. “I would be honored if you would accept my escort.”
This, however, Mrs. Jennings refused to do. “You won’t want to dance attendance on me when there’s Daphne waiting. Then, too, I would rather be alone tonight with my memories. Seeing you wearing his clothes brings him back to me, you know, in a way nothing has in a very long time.”
For a long moment, Theo shifted his weight awkwardly from one foot to the other, then bent and kissed her on the cheek. “In that case, please accept my sincerest thanks—and thank Edward, too, for the use of his clothes. I assure you, I shall never forget it.”
16
I do perceive here a divided duty.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Othello
DAPHNE HAD SEEN THE squire’s barn many times before; in fact, she had been inside it only a few weeks earlier, having been dispatched by her mother on an errand involving the purchase of a pig whose slaughter would provide the residents of the boardinghouse with carefully rationed bacon and ham throughout the long winter months ahead. Tonight, however, the building had been transformed. Many of its four-legged residents had met with the same fate as the Drinkards’ pig, and their salted carcasses now hung in the smoke house. Their more fortunate fellows had been turned out into the pasture for the occasion, and the newly vacated barn had been shoveled out and its floorboards scrubbed until no threat to the ladies’ dancing slippers remained. Lanterns had been hung from the rafters to provide lighting, and a long table set up against one wall groaned under the weight of food and drink provided by Sir Valerian for his guests. Nor had he spared any expense on musicians; rather than old Mr. Barnhill sawing away on his fiddle, as was the usual musical offering at the infrequent local assemblies held at the Red Lion, Sir Valerian had insisted upon sending to Manchester, and fully half a dozen musicians now occupied a makeshift dais at the far end of the barn.
In fact, the matter of dance was one which had caused her mother considerable mental exercise, Daphne recalled, stealing yet another futile glance at the door through which, surely, Mr. Tisdale must enter at any moment. Only a few of Sir Valerian’s guests would have enjoyed the tutelage of a dancing master, and yet it would be a very poor hostess who would allow the untutored majority to languish against the wall watching their betters enjoying themselves. The Sir Roger de Coverley had been an easy choice; as it was more than a hundred years old, most of the persons present would have at least a passing familiarity with it, while as for those benighted souls who had not, well, its movements were so simple and so repetitive that one might learn it merely by watching those couples who went down the dance ahead of them. Likewise any contredanse, most of which were based on earlier folk dances, might be enjoyed by the lower classes, although their efforts would not have passed muster in even the most egalitarian of London ballrooms.
The waltz was another matter entirely. To be sure, no London ball would be complete without the fashionable German dance—at least, so said Kitty Morecombe, whose recollections of her own London Seasons never failed to spark a most unworthy sense of envy in Daphne’s breast even as she tried (not entirely successfully) to convince herself that Kitty did not mean to gloat. But this was no London ball—not by a long chalk—and most of those present at Sir Valerian’s fête would have had no opportunity to learn the steps. Even Daphne, whose own dancing-master had praised the grace with which she executed the figures, had never had an opportunity to demonstrate her skills in public. Still, the prospect of s
eeing her daughter twirling about the room in Sir Valerian’s embrace had worked strongly upon Mrs. Drinkard’s mind, and she had finally determined that one—but only one—waltz would be played. It was this dance that Daphne had promised to Mr. Tisdale.
Now, however, as she performed the steps of the Scottish reel with Sir Valerian, she wondered if the eagerly anticipated dance would come and go before Mr. Tisdale had even put in an appearance. She could not imagine what might be keeping him so long; she had thought he would be following them immediately after dinner, and although they had been driven to the fête while he would be obliged to travel the distance on foot, surely it could not take so very—
This worrisome train of thought was interrupted when a slight stirring near the door attracted her attention. She missed a step and barreled into Sir Valerian’s chest.
“Miss Drinkard?” He caught her arms to steady her. “Are you all right?”
She raised glowing eyes to his. “Oh, yes! I’m quite all right. I—I beg your pardon. I’m not usually so clumsy. I can’t—I can’t think what came over me.”
He glanced in the direction where her attention had been fixed at the time of her stumble, and saw a golden-haired stranger clad in evening attire. No, not a stranger; his newly appointed personal secretary, dressed in garments that, besides being fully two decades out of date, had obviously been made for someone else.
“Oh?” Sir Valerian regarded Daphne with one eyebrow lifted. “Can you not?”
It was perhaps fortunate that the movements of the dance required them to separate and return to their places in the line, for Daphne could think of nothing to say in response to this home question. She turned with positive relief to the squire, diagonally opposite her, with whom she must now take a turn, and by the time the dance brought her back to Sir Valerian, she had had time to compose herself. Still, an eternity seemed to pass before the violins ground to a halt and Sir Valerian escorted her back to her mother.
The Desperate Duke Page 16