by M. C. Beaton
Miss Hissop was proudly wearing the first of several gowns Henrietta had ordered for her. It was a soft dove-gray velvet, and Miss Hissop had cried tears of gratitude after she had tried it on, saying that it was so very beautiful she had a good mind to change the instructions for her funeral and request that she be buried in it.
Although the profits from the confectioner’s were to be divided equally among the four of them, all had agreed to live as frugally as possible, saving all they could for the girls’ dowries and Miss Hissop’s retirement. But when the others had insisted that Henrietta’s theater gown should be paid for from their joint savings, she in turn had been equally insistent that all their clothes in that case should be charged to the profits before they were divided up.
Henrietta had become very fond of Josephine and Charlotte. Although both girls were older than she, Charlotte being twenty-two and Josephine twenty, Henrietta at nineteen felt older than they. If only she could keep Lord Carrisdowne amused and interested, then Mr. Clifford and Lord Charles might propose to the girls very soon.
Her hopes for them took predominance over her own desires. The earl was an enigma, but he was an intelligent man and courteous company.
Having convinced herself that all her excitement at the prospect of spending an evening in his company was dictated by her delight in being shown to society in such exalted company, Henrietta was quite unprepared for her own reactions when she saw him again.
Esau came shuffling reluctantly up the stairs to scratch at the door and announce that “him” was below.
The earl was standing in the middle of the shop in black evening dress and diamonds. Henrietta came down the stairs so softly that he was not aware of her approach. She stood looking at him for a brief moment, her heart doing a somersault. He looked so very grand, so very masculine, the cascading white muslin of his cravat setting off the hard firm lines of his tanned face. His black evening breeches were molded to his legs, showing all the strength of the muscles in his thighs. He looked cool and remote and every inch the aristocrat.
Why does he bother with me? thought Henrietta in sudden panic. Why?
The earl turned and saw her. A smile softened the harsh lines of his face. Those black eyes of his that gave so very little away studied Henrietta in silence. Then he said, “You look like a fresh rose with the dew on it, sparkling, untouched, not yet full-blown.”
“A pretty compliment, my lord.” Henrietta avoided his intense gaze. “Shall we go?”
The press of carriages as they approached the Theater Royal, Drury Lane, was so great, and Henrietta was so anxious not to miss the beginning of the play that they alighted from the carriage a few streets away and walked to the theater.
A covey of bloods came barreling along the street, and the earl pulled Henrietta tightly against his side and swung her away from them so that she would not be roughly knocked. That brief contact made her feel dizzy. It was weak and humiliating to have such violent physical reactions to a man who did not seem too much moved by the same contact.
They were only two playhouses in London: the Theater Royal, in Drury Lane, and the Haymarket Theater. It was a sad change from the days of Queen Elizabeth and King James I when London, then only a tenth of its present size, contained seventeen theaters. But the two remaining playhouses were enormous. Old people said the acting was better in their young days because there were more schools for actors then, and the theaters were so small that the natural voice could be heard and the natural expression of the features seen, and therefore rant and distortion were unnecessary.
As Henrietta and the earl approached the Theater Royal, they saw the soldiers stationed at the doors in case of riots, and as they drew nearer they were pestered by women trying to sell them oranges and boys selling playbills.
Once inside, Henrietta was overawed by the size, the height, the splendor, and the beauty of the theater. The pit was capable of holding a thousand people. Above it, on three sides, rose four tiers of boxes supported by thin iron pillars and above them, two galleries, the higher at such a distance that anyone taking a place there had to be content with the spectacle, for it was impossible to hear the dialogue. The theater was decorated in colors of blue and silver and the whole illuminated with chandeliers of cut glass.
The people in the galleries were very noisy as Henrietta and the earl took their places in his box. They were whistling and calling to the musicians and passing the time waiting for the play to begin by throwing orange peel at the audience in the pit.
Although both pit and galleries were already full, the earl explained that the lower side boxes, of which theirs was one, did not begin to fill up until toward the middle of the first act, because, he told her, that part of the audience considered themselves too fashionable to come on time, and in any case came to see the other fashionables and to be seen themselves rather than to listen to the play.
He did not tell her that the front boxes—those facing the stage—did not fill until halfway through the play, when they would be swarming with prostitutes and the men who came to meet them. There had been a move to prevent prostitutes from entering the theater, and men had been placed at the doors during the previous year to keep them out. But, alas for the fashions of the Regency! It was so hard to tell lady from prostitute! The whole plan was abandoned after two aristocratic ladies with highly painted faces and transparent muslin gowns had been marched off to the nearest roundhouse.
The play began. Henrietta watched the stage, and the earl watched Henrietta. He was fascinated by her rapt attention and the expressions that flitted across her face.
Noisy fights broke out during the play between the men in the front boxes vying for the custom of the prostitutes, but Henrietta did not even seem to notice. The play had lately been revived to display to advantage those two stars of the English stage, Mr. Kemble and Mrs. Siddons.
When the play was finally over—there were no intervals; they only had those on benefit nights—Henrietta heaved a sigh of pure delight. “Do you wish to stay for the afterpiece?” asked the earl. “It is Don Juan.”
“Oh, yes,” breathed Henrietta.
With all the candles blazing in the theater, making it as bright as a sunny day, Henrietta became aware that many glasses were being turned curiously in the direction of their box.
Then, from the leering stares, the malicious giggles of the ladies, and the occasional loud remarks, the deeply humiliated Henrietta realized she was being regarded as Lord Carrisdowne’s latest mistress. There were many jokes about the earl’s “sweet tooth.”
The earl looked thoughtfully at Henrietta’s flushed and unhappy face, such a contrast to the childlike wonder that had transformed it during the play. He seemed to come to some decision.
He rose to his feet. “Before the afterpiece begins,” he said, “I should like you to meet someone. She is only two boxes away.”
“Who is it?” asked Henrietta nervously.
“My aunt, Lady Browne. She will not eat you.”
Henrietta was escorted by him from the box and soon found herself in the presence of Lady Browne, a terrifying-looking old dowager with a gimlet eye.
“Well, Carrisdowne?” she demanded. “Never say you have brought a lady to meet me at last.”
The earl performed the introductions.
“And how did you find the play, Miss Bascombe?” demanded Lady Browne.
“It was very fine. I-I thought it was wonderful, in fact. You see, I had never been to the playhouse before.”
“Such enthusiasm does you credit. I cannot abide these young misses who consider it fashionable to find everything a bore. Tell me, Carrisdowne, how goes Emmeline?”
It transpired that Emmeline was the earl’s mother. Henrietta listened while the earl discussed his mother’s health. Then, “We must leave,” he said. “Don Juan is about to begin.”
Henrietta curtsied low. Lady Browne took her hand and drew her face down to her own and kissed her on the cheek. “I hope you never lose
that fresh look,” she said. “There are too many jaded women in London.”
The introduction and that kiss were noticed by many jealous female eyes. Miss Bascombe was not the earl’s mistress, or he would not have introduced her to his aunt.
Lady Clara Sinclair clutched her fan so tightly that she broke one of the sticks. Until a few weeks ago, she had entertained hopes of a proposal from the earl. He had escorted her to the opera and had finally invited her to that dinner party where she had taken the role of hostess—although it was a role he had not asked her to assume.
She had believed his recent absence was due to his business affairs. Now it appeared all too plain that it was because of that sly Bascombe creature.
Spoiled and willful, Lady Clara was used to getting anything she wanted. And she wanted the Earl of Carrisdowne. There must be some terribly simple way to drive that Bascombe woman out of London.
The old story of Don Juan was performed as a pantomime. It was a favorite spectacle everywhere. The London audiences were delighted when the statue came to life, and the sound of his “marble” footsteps always struck a dead silence through the theater.
At last it was all over. The earl’s coachman had battled and fought to find a place for the carriage at the front of the theater.
They chatted about the play on the road home, Henrietta cheerful and animated and, for that short time, very much at ease in the earl’s company.
Before he left her at the shop door, he wanted to kiss her very much indeed. But he knew in his mind that he had come to a point, to a crossroads, where he must decide what his own intentions were before making any more advances to her. He wanted her desperately. But always between him and his desire rose up the great wall of his pride.
After he had gone, Henrietta let herself into the sugar-smelling darkness of the shop. She twirled around, humming snatches of a popular ballad. Then she stretched her arms up to the ceiling. “What a wonderful evening,” she cried.
Esau, crouching in the darkness of the shop, felt his heart sink. He could smell the stench of the workhouse in his nostrils and feel again the cut of the lash across his back. Something must be done to prevent Henrietta from marrying the earl.
“Something must be done to stop Carrisdowne from marrying that Bascombe shopgirl,” said Lady Clara.
Her brother, Lord Alisdair Sinclair, lounged in a chair opposite her in the sitting room of their family’s town house. His feet in their muddy boots rested on a marble console table.
“Take some of my chums and break up her shop,” said Lord Alisdair. He was a dissipated young man who roamed the lower and dangerous parts of the town with his drunken friends.
“No,” said Lady Clara crossly. “Carrisdowne would get to hear of it and you would be blamed, and then I should be suspected of having put you up to it. Everyone knows of my hopes of marriage to Carrisdowne.”
“That’s ’cos you talk too much,” said her brother.
“Instead of sitting there criticizing me, you might put what’s left of your brain to the problem and come up with something sensible.”
Lord Alisdair stretched and yawned. “Begad,” he said, “the simplest way is always the best. Smoke her out.”
“Smoke her out? She is not a cobbler.” It was considered prime sport among the bucks and bloods to blow cigar smoke into a cobbler’s little closed stall where he slept during the night so that they might enjoy the jolly spectacle of seeing the cobbler come staggering out, gasping for breath.
“I mean, set fire to her shop.”
“And if someone sees you?”
“No one will see me. Don’t do my drinking in Tothill Fields for nothing. Plenty of villains down there’d jump at the chance to do it for a golden boy.”
“Only a sovereign to get rid of that Bascombe?” Lady Clara smiled, a slow, catlike smile. “The only bargain to be found, little brother, in these expensive days. Very well. Burn her out! Carrisdowne hasn’t yet proposed, evidently, or we’d have heard of it, and without a place to stay she will need to return, even if temporarily, to where she came from. That will leave the field open for me.”
“And what if Miss Bascombe and her ladies perish in the fire?” Lord Alisdair fixed his sister with a beady eye.
“Dear Alisdair, what with pestilence, fires, riots, and hangings, London is full of dead bodies. A few more won’t make any difference. Besides, the Bascombe creature is in trade. She is not one of us. She is no more one of us than any of those wretches we saw being hanged at Newgate t’other week. Do not tell me you are become overnice in your feelings?”
“Not I, sis. Oh, no, not I.”
Chapter 10
The next day Henrietta served the Duke of Gillingham with bergamot chips instead of apple salad and left the turtle soup to boil over on the kitchen fire.
The more she thought about the evening at the theater, the more dazed she became with happiness. The great Earl of Carrisdowne was turning out to be her friend. She could hardly believe her good fortune. Perhaps, one day, he might even begin to entertain warmer feelings toward her. She was sure he had only kissed her because he had considered her far enough beneath him to accept such easy familiarities. But he had introduced her to his aunt. Miss Hissop, on hearing of this, had said he must have serious intentions, but Henrietta felt that was too optimistic a hope for the moment. It was enough that he liked and respected her. Her mind shied away from examining her own feelings too closely. The marriages of Josephine and Charlotte still held predominance in her thoughts and each mark of the earl’s respect seemed to bring the realization of that ambition closer.
She had not slept very much the night before and so she was exhausted by the time the chores of the day were completed along with the lengthy preparations for the next.
By ten o’clock, she was fast asleep.
By eleven o’clock, the other girls and Miss Hissop were asleep as well, while downstairs, in a makeshift bed in the back shop, Esau tossed and turned, plagued by uneasy dreams.
At two in the morning, Lord Alisdair’s ruffians held a piece of brown paper smeared with syrup against the glass panes of the door. One of them tapped against the paper with a hammer until the glass broke. They gently lifted out the broken glass stuck to the paper and stuffed a pile of oily rags through the hole they had made so that the rags fell onto the floor of the shop. Then they lighted a torch and threw it in on top of the rags.
There were so many fires in London that had it not been for an amazing coincidence, Bascombe’s might have been burned to the ground. Fires were usually caused by exploding coals or candles. Only the week before a gentleman had set the tail of his shift afire by climbing into bed with his back to his bed candle. The flames from his blazing shift had caught the bedcurtains, and, although the gentleman had escaped, his house had burned to the ground.
All the insurance companies had fire engines and firemen, but if you were not insured—and Henrietta was not—or if you had not paid up your premiums, then they would drive past without even stopping to watch the blaze.
There had been inventions for preventing fires, but they had come to nothing.
A Mr. David Hartley had suggested lining every room with metal, and Lord Stanhope had invented a kind of mortar for the same purpose, but they were not adopted because no law was passed to compel the adoption. Houses in London were built for sale, and the builder did not want to incur the expense of making them fireproof, because, if the house went on fire, then he would not be the one to be burned.
As far back as 1724, inventor Ambrose Godfrey had produced balls filled with chemicals that would extinguish a fire. The Royal Society of Arts even built a house in Marylebone fields to try out his invention. His devices were thrown into the burning rooms where they exploded, and the fire was successfully quenched. But it was a trade in England to put out fires, and “All trades must live,” as the current motto went. So the firemen and the funeral directors got together, and when Godfrey or any of his friends tried to mount a ladd
er to throw one of his balls into a burning building, they simply pulled the ladder from under him, until the life of every person using them became endangered. And so that was the end of fire-extinguishing devices.
As Lord Alisdair’s ruffians ran off down the street, coincidence in the form of the Earl of Carrisdowne turned the comer of Piccadilly onto Half Moon Street.
He had been playing cards at Watier’s on Bolton Street and had persuaded himself that it was just as quick to walk home along Piccadilly and down Half Moon Street as it was to go via Berkeley Square.
He tried to ignore the little voice inside that kept telling him he was behaving like any love-smitten youth and was really hoping for some sign of Henrietta. Perhaps she might still be awake and working in the kitchen.
He saw the two dark figures running away, and then a tongue of flame leaped through the door of Bascombe’s. Shouting for help, he ran toward the shop.
Esau awoke with a start. He always slept lightly. In the workhouse it had been a mistake to indulge in heavy sleep when even the skimpy rags might be stolen off your back. He smelled smoke. He faintly heard the earl’s shout. He staggered to the door of the back shop and flung it open.
The pile of oil rags had blossomed into a sheet of flame. Esau screamed, a terrified animal scream.
Henrietta, almost as light a sleeper as Esau, leaped from bed and rushed down the stairs to the shop. Esau was standing helplessly, whimpering and wringing his hands.
“Water!” shouted Henrietta. “Fetch water, Esau.”
And then a tall figure hurtled through the flames and fell onto the shop floor, rolling over and over to extinguish the greedy flames licking at his coat.
“Carrisdowne!” cried Henrietta. Galvanized into action, Esau ran to fetch water.
“Blankets,” rapped out the earl, jumping to his feet. “Blankets, Miss Bascombe.”
“Esau’s,” said Henrietta. “The back shop.”
She ran into the back shop and snatched up Esau’s blankets and then thrust the bundle at the earl. He threw them over the flames and then stamped on them, cursing as a tongue of flame singed the black silk of his breeches.