False Colours

by Джорджетт Хейер

  Apart, they were held to be very fine young men; together, with the candlelight glinting on their burnished heads, they were so striking that the Dowager, like many before her, was dazzled into thinking them the most handsome men she had ever beheld.

  “Evelyn, my dear one!” exclaimed Lady Denville, springing up from the sofa, and going towards him with her light, graceful step, and her hands held out in welcome.

  He took one in his own left hand, and kissed it, murmuring wickedly: “You are smart tonight, love! Dressed like Christmas beef!”

  She chuckled, and would have led him forward, but he put her gently aside, and advanced down the room alone, to where the Dowager sat. If he was in a quake, no trace of it was apparent in his bearing. He bowed, and with a smile quite as disarming as Kit’s, said: “I owe you an apology, Lady Stavely. But indeed I couldn’t help it!”

  In spite of herself, her lips twitched, and she put out her hand. “So you are Denville, are you?” she said. “H’m! You’d better beg my granddaughter’s pardon, young man!”

  “Why, yes!” he agreed, his mother’s mischievous look in his eyes; and turned towards Cressy, holding out his hand. “So I do, Cressy—but you are very well rid of me, you know!” She had risen to her feet, and as she laughed, giving him her hand, he kissed it, and then her cheek, saying: “I wish you every happiness, my dear!”

  “Thank you! May I return that wish?” she said demurely.

  The smile in his eyes acknowledged the sly allusion, but he replied audaciously: “Indeed, I am excessively happy to have you for a sister!” He turned his head. “Kester!”

  Kit strolled forward, but his eyes were on Cressy, warmly appreciative. Evelyn said: “If I have any right to this hand, may I bestow it on my brother, Miss Stavely? He is much more worthy of it than I am—but that I needn’t tell you!”

  “Thank you, twin, that will do!” said Kit, receiving the hand, and clasping it strongly.

  Evelyn laughed, and turned away to confront Sir Bonamy. He looked down at him, laughter dying, and his smile a little rigid. “Kit tells me, sir, that I must offer you my felicitations.”

  Sir Bonamy, regarding him with all the wariness of one faced with a cobra, said: “Yes, yes! Very much obliged to you, Denville! That is—if you have no objection!”

  “Eh?” exclaimed the Dowager. She looked sharply from Sir Bonamy to Lady Denville. “So that’s it, is it? Upon my word!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” corroborated Lady Denville sunnily. “That’s it! Sir Bonamy has done me the honour to ask me to marry him, and I have accepted his offer.”

  “You have, have you? Well,” said the Dowager trenchantly, “if that’s so, it’s the only sensible thing I’ve ever known you do, Amabel!”

  Sir Bonamy, paying no heed to this, seized the opportunity to say, in an urgent undervoice: “Not if you dislike it, Denville! Naturally, it’s the dearest wish of my heart, but no need for you to take snuff! Only have to tell me! For I wouldn’t come between you and your mother for the world!”

  Over his hapless head the twins’ eyes met for an instant of unholy joy. No more than Kit could Evelyn resist the appeal of the ludicrous; the rigidity melted from his smile; he produced his snuff-box from his pocket, unfobbed it with an expert flick, and offered it to Sir Bonamy, saying: “Take snuff? Yes, indeed! Will you try my sort, sir?”

  “Well, that isn’t precisely what I meant, but—thank you, my boy! I’ve often wondered what your mixture is—a touch of old Havre, I fancy, and a suspicion—no more—of French Prize, added, of course, to—”

  “Just so, sir—and you will not find it dry!”

  Sir Bonamy, helping himself to a pinch, was shaken by one of his rumbling laughs. “Ah, that waswhere I was a trifle too knowing for Kit! Told you about it, did he? He hasn’t your deft way of opening his box, either!”

  “Oh, he will never acquire that!” said Evelyn. “His taste is for cigars!”

  “No!” uttered Sir Bonamy, profoundly shocked.

  The Dowager broke in impatiently on this digression. “Now, listen to me,” she commanded, driving her cane into the carpet with an imperative thud. “Very pretty talking, all of this, but if you think—any of you!—that I’ll give my consent to this havey-cavey business you very much mistake the matter!”

  “But, Grandmama!” interposed Cressy, releasing Kit’s hand, and sitting down beside the Dowager. “You told me more than once that you liked Kit! Why, this very day you said that he was a very proper man, and were ready to eat me for seeming to be unwilling to accept his offer! You said I was no better than a moonling!”

  “Hold your tongue, girl! I’ll have you know that there has never been any scandal attached to the Stavelys, and I’ll have no hand in helping you to create one! A fine piece of work this is!”

  “Well, of course, it is a little awkward,” agreed Lady Denville, “but I dare say it will soon be forgotten!”

  “That,” said the Dowager witheringly, “is an observation only worthy of such a jingle-brain as you are, Amabel!”

  A flush rose to Evelyn’s lean cheeks; but before he could speak Sir Bonamy forestalled him. “Perfectly true!” he pronounced, fixing the Dowager with his round-eyed stare. “I never knew a scandal that wasn’t precious soon ousted by another! What’s more,” he added, pointing a stubby finger at her, and wagging it, “if it hadn’t been for that dashed silly notice in the Morning Post there ain’t a soul worth a rush who would have known anything about this affair!”

  “Yes!” Evelyn struck in. “Who was responsible for that notice? Not you, Mama!”

  “No, indeed!” Lady Denville replied indignantly. “I may be jingle-brained but never have I been guilty of vulgarity!”

  “No one said you had!” said the Dowager testily, and for once in her life disconcerted. “We all know it was Albinia who was responsible for that! Not that it’s proved against her, mind, but I’mnot one to blink what’s as plain as the nose on your face! It was her doing, no question about it! I wrote instantly to tell her that I knew it, and not one word has she dared set down on paper in reply! And if she thinks that because she has given Stavely an heir she’ll hear no more of the business she will very soon learn her mistake! But,” pursued the old lady, making a gallant recovery, “I’ll thank you all to remember that pretty well every member of the family believes that it was you, Denville, whom they was invited to meet in my son’s house, and you who had made her an offer!”

  “What of that?” demanded Sir Bonamy, continuing to fret the Dowager with his unnervingly blank stare. “It ain’t to be supposed they’ll spread it about that they was hoaxed! They’ll do what you bid ’em, my lady!”

  “Not all of them!” replied the Dowager unexpectedly. “Stavely saw fit to gather his relations together stock and block, and there were several sprigs there I never saw before in my life, and don’t wish to see again!”

  “That’s very true!” said Lady Denville. “Only think of that tiresome young man who pestered Kit to buy a horse which I know poor Evelyn doesn’t want to own!”

  “Lucton!” ejaculated Evelyn. “Kester, you didn’t?”

  Kit, who had seated himself a little apart from the rest of the group, replied briefly: “Nothing else I could do.”

  “Gudgeon!” said Evelyn. “An abominable screw! Why didn’t you consult Challow?”

  He won no answer at all to this inquiry, Kit having relapsed into frowning abstraction. He took no part in the lively discussion that followed, although once or twice he showed that he was not wholly deaf to it by raising his eyes from contemplation of his own clasped hands to glance thoughtfully at one or other of the disputants. If the Dowager was brought to own that, despite his perfidy, she would be very well pleased to see her granddaughter married to Kit, only that hitherto pattern of superior sense and propriety herself maintained, in what the Dowager did not scruple to inform her was an unbecomingly highty-tighty manner, her unshakeable indifference to public opinion. Lady Denville was fully alive to the necessi
ty of concealing (by unexplained means) the true facts of the case from the world; Evelyn, knowing that these could only be extremely prejudicial, if not fatal, to his twin’s career, came down heavily on the Dowager’s side; and threw Sir Bonamy into disorder by demanding whether he, an experienced exponent of the established mode, was sincere in declaring that no one would think anything more of the hoax than that it was a very good joke.

  “But it’s something you have frequently done before!” urged Cressy. “Would people be so very much shocked?”

  “I should hope they would be!” replied Evelyn tartly. “Good God, Cressy, I’d a better opinion of your understanding! Of course we have done it before, but only for the sport of it! That was one thing: this is quite another!”

  “Oh, dear, that is exactly what Kit said!” exclaimed Lady Denville guiltily. “I ought never to have asked him to do it! It is all my wretched fault—only I was fully persuaded that you would have done the same thing for him!”

  The swift change in his expression betrayed the difference that lay between his own mercurial temperament and Kit’s more evenly balanced one. The frown of fretting anxiety vanished; a zestful gleam, compound of recklessness and amusement, heightened the brilliance of his eyes; he burst out laughing. “You were right, love!” he told his mother. “I would! In a crack!” He threw a challenging look at the Dowager. “You might as well blame my brother for drawing breath as for coming to my rescue, ma’am: he couldn’t help himself! Nor could I! But he, if I know him, took my place that evening only for that reason, and with extreme reluctance; whereas I, standing in his shoes, should have had no reluctance whatsoever! I don’t know that I should have carried it off as well as he must have done, but I should certainly have enjoyed the fling, which he, even more certainly, did not!”

  “No doubt!” she retorted. “It didn’t need your uncle Brumby to tell me that your brother’s worth a dozen of you, young man!”

  “Oh, anyone could have told you that, ma’am!” he said cheerfully. “Indeed, I know of only two persons who would deny so obvious a truth: Kester himself, and my mother—who considers us both to be above criticism! Well, we are not, but you may believe, Lady Stavely, that neither he nor I would have entered into this particular hoax had we known that it would ever become known, or that we should be obliged to maintain the imposture! My brother presented himself to you that evening in the belief that either I had forgotten the date of the engagement, or had been delayed by some hitch, or accident, and must surely reappear at any moment. In fact, I had suffered an accident which knocked me senseless for days. When I did recover consciousness, and realized that the date of my engagement was past, I thought I must have ruined myself, and—to own the truth!—I was too pulled and battered to care! Had I known that my brother was in England, and desperately trying to save my face—but I didn’t know it, until I saw the notice in the newspaper! By that time he had not only been forced to keep up the pretence—which, once having entered into, he couldn’t abandon without, as he believed, serving me the worst possible turn—but he had fallen in love with Cressy, and she with him. But what I wish you will understand, ma’am, is that at the outset he had no other thought than to save my face!”

  “And mine!” Cressy interpolated. “That thought also was in his mind, and in Godmama’s mind too, and whatever the outcome I should have been grateful to them for sparing me the humiliation I must have suffered had he not presented himself in your stead that evening!”

  “Very noble!” said the Dowager. She added, in the querulous tone of a very old lady rapidly approaching exhaustion: “I don’t want to hear any more of your glib-tongued pittle-pattle! Find a way out of this abominable scrape that won’t set every tongue wagging, and Cressy may marry your brother with my goodwill! And that’s my last word!”

  “Well, if that’s so, a way must be found!” said Evelyn. “But the only way I can see is for Kester to continue to be me, and for me to be him!”

  The Dowager threw him a contemptuous glance; Cressy laughed; and Sir Bonamy paid no heed. But Lady Denville said earnestly: “No, no, dearest, that would never do! Only think how awkward it would be for you in Vienna, trying to make everyone believe you were Kit, when I dare say you don’t know anything about foreign affairs, or even who anyone is!”

  “For heaven’s sake, don’t be such a widgeon!” snapped the Dowager, quite exasperated. “And if you can think of nothing better to do in this pass, Denville, than to cut silly jokes—”

  “Not at all!” said Evelyn incorrigibly. “Kester could perform his part without the least difficulty, but Mama is far from being a widgeon! She has detected, in a flash, the flaw in my scheme! I had never the least turn for politics—”

  “Or I,” interposed Kit, getting up, “for the management of estates!” He came forward, and said, addressing himself to the Dowager: “May I make a suggestion, ma’am? I know how tired you must be, but—but I think it just possible that there is a way out of the tangle.”

  “Ah!” breathed Cressy, raising her eyes to his in a glowing look of confidence. “I knew you would find it—oh, I knew it, my dearest dear!”

  22

  “Well, it’s to be hoped he has!” said the Dowager irascibly.

  “But of course he has!” said Evelyn, shocked by her evident want of faith in his twin’s ingenuity. “Go on, Kester! Tell us!”

  Kit could not help laughing, but he coloured a little, and said: “I will, but I’m afraid the scheme I have in mind is pretty make-shift. I think it covers all the difficulties, but I may have left something out of account: the devil of it is there are so many of them!” He glanced round the circle. “Well—it seems to me that the most urgent need is to restore Evelyn to his rightful position. That can’t be accomplished here, but I see no reason for him to bury himself in Leicestershire: he need go no further than to Hill Street. Brigg won’t suspect anything, for he’s a great deal too shortsighted; and I fancy Dinting won’t either, because I took good care to keep out of her way when I was in Hill Street myself.”

  “What about my shoulder?” interrupted Evelyn.

  “How are the London servants to know when, or how, you broke it? They do know here, so you’ll overturn that phaeton of yours tomorrow, on your way to London—which will account for your arrival in a hired chaise.”

  “Now, hold a minute, Kester!” said Evelyn. “What the devil should I be doing, jauntering up to London, when I’m known to be entertaining guests here? Dash it, even my uncle wouldn’t believe I was as freakish as that!”

  “You are going up to London to meet me, twin. I shall send Challow to fetch the letters from the receiving-office tomorrow, and he will bring me a packet-letter from myself. Whereupon Mama will be cast into transports, and I—faithfully imitating your well-known impetuosity, Eve!—shall set out for London in your curricle, taking Challow with me, and picking you up at Pinny’s cottage. There you’ll take his place—and we’ll hope to God we can get to East Grinstead without anyone’s recognizing you!”

  “I’ll keep my hat over my eyes, and wind a muffler round my chin,” promised Evelyn. “What’s the significance of East Grinstead?”

  “Well, you don’t ever stop for a change there, do you?”

  “What, a bare six or seven miles from here? No, of course I don’t!”

  “So however well they may know you at the toll-gate, they don’t know you at the posting-houses. I propose to leave the curricle at one of them, and to accomplish the rest of the journey in a job-chaise. Challow will have to walk to East Grinstead as soon as it begins to get dark, and drive the curricle up to London tomorrow. Fimber will follow us, with your baggage: no difficulty about that! I must remember to ask him where he deposited my own baggage, by the bye. You’ll set me down, when we get to London, and arrive in solitary state in Hill Street, where, in due course, I also shall arrive—in a hack, having, for some inscrutable reason, journeyed up from the coast on the stage-coach.”

  “Not the stage: the Mail!” in
terrupted Cressy.

  “Yes, that’s much better!” Kit agreed. “Thank you, love!”

  “And then?” she asked.

  “I must see your father, and disclose thetruth to him. If I can persuade him to pardon the deception, and to give his consent to our marriage, I think I can contrive to turn the affair into an unexceptionable romance. If not—” He stopped, and said, after a moment: “I don’t know, Cressy, and can’t bring myself to face that possibility!”

  “Well, that don’t signify!” said the Dowager, who had been listening to him intently. “He’ll consent fast enough when he learns that I do!”

  “May I tell him that, ma’am?”

  “I said you might marry Cressy with my goodwill, if you could find a way out of this scrape without setting tongues wagging, and I’m a woman of my word! How do you mean to do it?”

  He smiled. “I don’t ma’am: it would be a task quite beyond my capability!”

  “Beyond anyone’s, my boy,” said Sir Bonamy. “There’s bound to be a deal of talk: no getting away from that!”

  “None at all, sir. The only thing to be done is to sell the world a bargain!—I beg your pardon, ma’am!—to publish a Banbury story, which the tattle-boxes may discuss to their hearts’ content without doing any of us an ounce of harm.”

  “Another of your hoaxes, eh? I thought as much!” said the Dowager, eyeing him with a certain grim respect.

  “The last one, I promise you!” he said. “And only with your approval, ma’am!”

  “You’ve as much effrontery as your brother!” she told him. “Out with it!”

  “Yes, ma’am! Little though any of you may know it, my love for Cressy is of long standing. I met her when I was last in England, and formed an enduring passion for her, which, however, I—er—kept locked in my breast!”