Talk of the Town

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Talk of the Town Page 3

by Joan Smith


  Lady Pamela shot a sharp look through narrowed eyes at dear Mrs. Pealing.

  “Yes, five hundred pounds twenty-five years ago, when it was worth so much more,” Daphne replied, smiling as sweetly as their caller.

  “And interest, of course, at five percent, just like in the funds,” Pamela returned. “Well, I’ll make it twelve hundred pounds, love. Will that do?” She scribbled out a cheque as she spoke.

  “Oh my, I never thought to see a penny of it,” Effie said happily.

  “And it won’t be mentioned in the book you’re writing, Effie? Sammie never did know about that year I lost all the money gambling, and I managed to save back every penny of it.” A good many other things Sammie didn’t know remained unmentioned, for Lady Pamela was not sure Mrs. Pealing knew of them either. “Do you remember how Georgiana was always losing at loo?” she laughed.

  “Why, Pamela, it’s not that kind of a book,” Effie said on the brink of offence. “I wouldn’t mention dear Georgiana, and she in her grave.”

  “Oh, no, I’m sure it’s not, but you won’t mention me all the same?”

  “What is there to mention?” Effie replied in mindless delight as the cheque was handed over to her. “You don’t owe me anything now, Pamela. We’re even, so let’s forget it. Have a glass of wine.”

  The glass of wine was drunk up with a haste not usually achieved on a morning visit; and with a great sigh of relief, Lady Pamela was off to report to a few worried friends that Effie was very manageable, but you had to pay up with interest. Lady Pamela’s friends consulted their bank books and investments and sat down to compute interest for twenty-five years at five percent.

  “What did that lady mean, she saw the notice in the Observer?” Daphne asked after she had admired the cheque.

  “What notice? She didn’t mention anything about a notice,” Effie answered.

  Daphne had already perceived that her aunt was not quite as bright as she might be and went off to peruse the Observer for the notice. After much searching she found the note in the social column and fell to wondering. Lady Pamela had been worried and had made a point of not having her debt mentioned. She had come here to pay so Auntie wouldn’t mention it in her book, Daphne soon deduced. What a horrid mind!

  While she was finishing her conjecture, there was another caller announced and a Major Deitweiller came in. After the merest mention of surprise at seeing Effie’s name in the paper after so many years, his business, too, soon emerged. He owed her a thousand pounds for the purchase of his commission in the Army and now, as a respectable, well-to-do major, he wished to repay the loan. He did not mention interest, nor did Daphne nor Effie. He paid a thousand in cash and left very soon afterwards, with the casual mention that he supposed her having helped him all those years ago would not be in the book. His wife—he had married a Miss Norton from Warwick, one of the Nortons—didn’t know of his lowly beginnings, he laughed nervously.

  “Oh, no, it is more of a book of travel,” Effie smiled. “Though, as I'll have been looking through my memoirs these past days, a good many stories from London occur to me that might make interesting reading. Do you remember, Major, that young Harcourt fellow who used to chum around with you? He joined up at the same time as yourself.” He had also joined up through the same financial arrangement as Deitweiller, though it was not said. “He was dangling after Lord Severn’s girl and had a pretty little actress on the side.”

  “Yes, I see him often,” Deitweiller said. “He plans to come to call on you shortly, Ma’am.”

  “That’s good. I look forward to seeing him.”

  “I’ll tell him, Mrs. Pealing. Good day.” Harcourt was informed of the matter, and sold his team of greys and his wife’s pearls to raise the wind.

  “He was in a bit of a hurry,” Effie said to her niece. “I was just going to remind him of the night Harcourt rode his horse up the front steps and into my hallway, but I suppose I shouldn’t relate such a story as that in the book. He is a Colonel now, and stands very high on his dignity, I daresay. Funny to think of all those young bucks having risen so high in the world and not a brain to speak of among the lot of them.”

  Before they sat down to lunch they had a third caller—a Mr. Munro—coming to repay Effie a debt of two hundred pounds for some matter she had forgotten long since and was sure she had not bothered to record in her memoirs. She remembered Munro, but not why he insisted he owed her two hundred pounds.

  “Was there ever such a thing, Daphne?” she chirped merrily. “Twenty-four hundred pounds in one morning coming at us out of the blue. All my old friends remembering me and coming to pay what they owe. None of them knew where I was living, and that is why they haven’t been to call sooner. It was that notice in the paper that has brought them back to me. How happy I am I decided to write it after all. Didn’t I tell you I had a feeling things would happen? My feelings are never wrong. It’s a fact. I am not clever, but I feel things before they happen."

  “Do you think it is just friendship that brings them back?” Daphne asked. Her own opinion was growing stronger with each visit that it was fear of revelation in the book that brought them.

  “What else could it be, my dear?”

  Daphne mentioned her own opinion and was talked down as being suspicious and mean-natured, “which you get from James, dear, and nothing can be done about it; but I do wish you would not take that notion into your head or you will spoil all our fun.”

  “I could be wrong. They’re your friends, and you must know them better than I.”

  “I should say I do, and they are not at all like that, Daphne, so pray banish the thought.”

  “It is banished,” Daphne told her, not quite truthfully. “And what do those intriguing feelings of yours inform you we have in store for this afternoon?”

  Effie shivered. “How strange,” she said. “A chill just ran over me. I got the feeling someone..."

  “An evil person?” Daphne asked quizzingly.

  “No, not evil precisely. More troublesome,” Effie said.

  “It will be interesting to see who else has read the Observer,” Daphne answered, and ate her omelette without paying the least heed to Effie’s warning, which was rather a pity. But then the six feet-and-two-inches of trouble that was on its way would not have been turned aside in any case, for when the Duke of St. Felix undertook to do a thing, he did it thoroughly.

  Chapter 4

  The day after receiving his sister’s summons to Charles Street, St. Felix stopped by to see what old Bess was in a pucker about now. The late Duke of St. Felix had fathered four children, each spaced five years apart. He had not hurried his breeding. The eldest, Elizabeth, was forty-five; the other two daughters forty and thirty-five; with Richard, the precious son and heir, a mere stripling of thirty in this family of aging women.

  Despite his youth, he ruled the family as firmly as ever his father had done. From his sire he had come to appreciate the value of the perquisites that were his to bestow, and none were bestowed on those who failed to live up to his high standards. He was generous to the brink of fault with relatives whose sons did well at Oxford and distinguished themselves in those jobs he found for them; but let a daughter make a poor match or behave in any unseemly manner and she was called severely to account. He did not despise liveliness or spirit in the extended family over which he held sway, but the semblance of propriety was always to be maintained. He spoke a good deal of the family’s name and reputation, as though they were living things, subject to physical deterioration.

  Elizabeth was awaiting her brother in her Gold Saloon, hoping to soften him with a glass of Larry’s very best burgundy.

  “Good afternoon, Bess,” he said with a smile. It cheered him to see his sisters living in good, respectable homes surrounded by luxury and tokens of success. He was particularly close to Lady Thyrwite, as she was the only one of his sisters to reside in London, like himself. The others were well married into influential county families and received semi-ann
ual visits from their brother to see that they were not slipping into obscurity or any other bad habits.

  “Dickie!” Bess began, and at the one word his genial smile faded.

  “I have been asking you for twenty years to call me Richard,” he said. It seemed a reasonable request from a very tall gentleman in his thirty-first year.

  “Sorry, Richard, but it slipped out. I still think of you as my dear little brother.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  She indicated a chair and poured him a glass of wine. She was tempted to invite him to have a cheroot, for she wished him to be in a good mood, but then the stench lingered so, like burning garbage. “I want to ask you to do a little favour for me, Richard.”

  “So I assumed. What is it?”

  She cleared her throat. “I wonder if you would be kind enough to drop by Mrs. Pealing’s place for me, and...”

  “Who the devil is Mrs. Pealing?”

  “You can’t mean you don’t know of Mrs. Pealing, the ex-Countess Standington!”

  “Oh—also ex-Mrs. something else, isn’t she? I heard some mention of her yesterday. Writing a book of reminiscences, I believe. Is that the one?” Bess nodded. “She seems to have the whole town in a twitter with this book of hers.”

  “Yes,” she said grimly.

  “Now why in the world should I call on her? She is exactly the sort of person I abhor. To live a life of debauchery and then, in her old age, to make public her conquests. What do you have to do with the woman?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know her at all.”

  “I shouldn’t think you’d want to.”

  “I don’t, but the thing is... It’s this book she’s writing."

  Richard stared in fascination, a slow smile spreading across his handsome face. “You don’t mean to say you ever performed an act worthy of publication in the book, Bess?” he asked.

  “Certainly not! It is no such a thing.”

  “Ah—you blast my hopes. I had thought there for a moment that in your salad days you had cut up a lark. It’s Larry, then, is it?”

  “Yes, and she must be bought off, Dickie— Richard!”

  “What did he do?”

  St. Felix was treated to an expurgated, whitewashed, and harmless version of the straying of Lawrence, and lifted a brow in question. “It’ll hardly set the town on its ear that he once paid a few calls to Mrs. Pealing,” he pointed out.

  “It was more than that.” The story came out in bits and pieces, until after fifteen minutes St. Felix was more or less possessed of the facts and reminded that a folio in the Cabinet hung in the balance—a fine ornament for the family’s reputation.

  “Very well, I’ll go with Larry,” he decided. “I confess I am curious to see the latest scandal. And I’d better make sure he don’t overpay. Not a penny more than five hundred pounds in my opinion. If I have the whole story, that is,” he finished up.

  This jibe went unanswered. “No, Richard, Larry must not go with you. I want you to go for him. You deal with her, you are better able to handle her sort.”

  “On what do you base that opinion?” he asked.

  "Oh mercy, Dickie, don’t get satirical on me. I am desperate! You know Larry’s a fool—that is... I don’t mean—only he is not shrewd like you and not able to give a set-down half so well.”

  “Thank you,” Richard said in a thin voice. “Tell me, is Larry to foot the bill at least, or am I to have that honour, as well?”

  “I took a thousand pounds from the bank. I hope she’ll settle for five hundred.”

  “She will,” Richard said, arising.

  “Lady Pamela Thurston stopped by for lunch. She went to pay up yesterday, and she says they are demanding interest.”

  “I don’t know why you associate with that creature. Hair the colour of a flamingo.” He stopped in mid-tirade. “Did you say they? Is Pealing in on it, as well? I thought I heard she was a widow.”

  “She is, but she has a girl staying with her. A niece, I believe; and Lady Pamela says she’s the image of Mrs. Pealing at the same age. She was very pretty, you know.”

  “I didn’t suppose an antidote had half of London at her feet,” he said, continuing towards the door.

  “Come right back and let me know!” Bess called after him and then took up her vigil.

  St. Felix drove his curricle to Upper Grosvenor Square and eyed a somewhat ramshackle apartment building with scorn. What a fool old Mrs. Pealing must be to have run through the fortune Eglinton left her and be living in such squalor as this. He gave his card to the butler and said he had come on a matter of business.

  The card was handed to Mrs. Pealing, who sat in the study with Miss Ingleside, continuing on the work of editing. Her pink face paled, and she said, “Impossible! He’s dead.”

  “Who is dead?” Daphne asked.

  “St. Felix.”

  “Oh yes, for a certainty. They never canonize a living person. But who on earth—or in heaven—is St. Felix?”

  Effie handed her the card. “Oh, the Duke of St. Felix,” Daphne smiled, impressed. A baronet’s wife and a colonel were their lordliest callers thus far. “I wonder how much gold is jingling in his pockets. We’d better go in and see him.”

  “Not I!” Effie stated firmly. “I am too busy.”

  “Auntie, you can’t leave a duke cooling his heels. Now do use your head. It isn’t the dead St. Felix flitted down from heaven to see you. It is his heir, probably his son. Come along. I’ll go with you.’’

  “No, no. I do not wish at all to see St. Felix. Perhaps you could handle it, dear.”

  Sensing a heavy windfall from a long overdue debt to be waiting in the next room, Daphne was not inclined to lose it only because her aunt was suddenly shy of this man she had never met. “Very well, I’ll see him. But before I go, what was the nature of the other St. Felix’s dealings with you?”

  “We were—just friends,” she answered vaguely.

  “Did you lend him money?”

  “Lend St. Felix money? Lord, no, he had more of it than I.”

  “I see,” Daphne replied, surprised. Was it possible one person was actually calling out of mere friendship?

  When she was face to face with St. Felix, she relinquished the thought. There was no token of friendship on the formidable gentleman’s arrogant face, nor indication of it in his stiff bearing.

  “Miss Pealing?” he asked, looking her over from head to toe with cold grey eyes.

  She returned the inspection, taking in a well-cut coat of blue Bath cloth, an elegant but unexaggerated cravat, a generally subdued outfit. He was too tall for the foppish mode. “Miss Ingleside. I am Mrs. Pealing’s niece. She is indisposed and asked me to see you in her stead. Pray be seated, Your Grace.”

  He sat, still regarding her coldly. “I daresay you are privy to her dealings, and we can handle the matter between us.”

  “Very likely. What is your business with my aunt?”

  “I have no business with her, I am happy to say. I am here on behalf of Sir Lawrence Thyrwite.”

  The name conveyed nothing to Miss Ingleside. She had not read all the memoirs, by any means. “And what is Sir Lawrence’s business with my aunt? I am sorry, I know nothing of him.”

  “His business at the moment is of only a financial nature. There is no need to go into details. Just tell me the sum.”

  “Oh, he owes her money, you mean?” she asked, smiling with satisfaction. At this rate, the book would bring in more before its publication than it was likely to do after.

  “That is a matter of opinion. He is willing to pay in any case."

  “I’m sure we don’t want him to pay if he didn’t borrow anything,” she said, disliking the tone of her caller. The others had at least put a decent face on it—pretended friendship. “We are not extortionists, you know.”

  “How much are you charging for your silence?” he asked in a sneering voice.

  “I told you we are not extortionists! If Sir Lawrence owes nothin
g, certainly we want nothing from him.”

  “I would prefer not to have to return to this place,” he stated with an emphasis that implied the “place” was a snakepit. “What is the price?”

  “Well, ‘Silence is Golden’, you know,” she answered, piqued into ill humour herself.

  “Will five hundred do it?”

  “I had best speak to my aunt. Perhaps she recalls Sir Lawrence.” She left and walked at a sedate pace till she was beyond his view; then she broke into a run.

  “Auntie, who on earth is Sir Lawrence Thyrwite?” she asked, breathless.

  “Larry Thyrwite? Gracious, I haven’t thought of that ninny in a quarter of a century. Is he here?”

  “No, St. Felix is here on his behalf. Does this Sir Lawrence owe you money?”

  “No, I never gave him anything. He used to try to make love to me after Jerry died, but I didn’t care for his lips. They hung open in that loose way some dull-witted people have. He is married now to—oh, dear!—St. Felix’s daughter. That is why that man is here.”

  “Daughter! He can’t be more than... Oh, married to the sister of this St. Felix, I suppose. And you are sure you didn’t lend him any money? Think hard, Auntie. He mentioned five hundred pounds, and I would dearly love to gouge this gentleman.”

  “It doesn’t need thinking about. Larry was always well to grass. He only came around for romance and didn’t get much of it, either.”

  “Too bad. I’ll send St. Felix off then.” She was extremely sorry to have to let him off so easily.

  “There seems to be some misunderstanding,” Daphne said to St. Felix when she returned to the Blue Saloon. “My aunt finds Sir Lawrence owes her no money."

  Richard regarded her closely, and considered this statement carefully. “Owes her no money—what did that imply?

  “They were just friends, you see,” Daphne went on, feeling uncomfortable in a totally silent room with those probing eyes staring through her. “In common with the rest of my aunt’s ex-friends, he has not been to see her for many years.” He continued to listen and think and stare, and she became increasingly angry at his silence.

 

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