Cressida

by Clare Darcy

  She had answered him, she remembered, disdainfully: his own temper was as rough and direct as hers was quick and impetuous, and words had been spoken that it was unlikely either of them would forgive or forget.

  And so he had gone off to Portugal alone, and she, after a few months of a horrid kind of corrosive misery, as if acid had somehow got inside her and were eating away all the happy, eager expectations that, in spite of everything, she had always managed to keep bright there, had awakened one morning to find Great-aunt Estella dead and herself the possessor of a fortune beyond her wildest dreams.

  It had often occurred to her since to wonder what Captain Deverell Rossiter had felt when he had learned that on the day he had broken off his engagement to young Miss Cressida Calverton he had thrown away a magnificent fortune as well. She would have been more than human if the thought of his chagrin had not spread balm over her misery—and more than human, too, if the change in her life brought about by Great-aunt Estella’s death had not done much to erase the memory of that brief engagement from her mind. Lady Constance, a relation by marriage on her mother’s side and a lady well acquainted in the fashionable world, had been hit upon by her uncle Arthur as the proper person to take her new household in charge and introduce her into the ton, and a hectic London Season had followed, in which offers of matrimony had been showered upon her like autumn leaves and she had, as Lady Constance had approvingly noted, “come on” amazingly in the social arts.

  She had been engaged that first Season—engaged, it seemed to her now, more in order to prove to herself that, if Rossiter did not care to marry her, there were other men who did; but there had been none of that wildly magical happiness in the matter that there had been when she had been engaged to Rossiter, although the young man was handsome, the possessor of wealth and title, amiable, intelligent, and in every way the most eligible of partis. And in the end, she had cried off from the engagement, censuring herself as severely for doing so as the most conventional of dowagers might have done, but hiding her inner confusion under a coolness that had from that time forth gained her the reputation of being an accomplished and even heartless flirt.

  Of course this reputation had not deterred a long list of gentlemen from seeking the rich and dashing Miss Calverton’s hand in the years that followed, and more than one of them had carried the matter to the point that rumours of an approaching marriage had been circulated in the ton; but there had been no more engagements.

  “Deuce take it,” Cressida thought to herself with rueful severity, as she sat over the cold coffee-cups with her chin in hands, “I suppose I really ought to marry Leonard, ” who was Lord Langmere, the latest and most importunate of her suitors, a marquis, a power in the Government, a handsome man in his late thirties whose fortune equalled her own and whose tastes ran with hers towards politics, good conversation, and racing. “It is perfectly absurd to expect to feel again like a girl of eighteen loving a stranger à corps perdu”— and than Lady Constance put her head in at the door again and demanded in a despairing voice what she was to do about the Chenevix girl.

  “Good heavens, ask her to come here for the Season, of course, if you have decided you care to go to the trouble of chaperoning her about,” Cressida said, moved to this act of charity by her remembrance of another young girl who, until Great-aunt Estella had unexpectedly endowed her with a fortune, had been just as poor as Kitty Chenevix was, and reflecting as well that Lady Constance, who had much enjoyed managing the late Mr. Jeremy Havener in his more manageable moods (which had occurred chiefly when there was no opportunity for him to wager money on anything), but had sensibly refrained from attempting to manage Cressida, who had a will of her own, would perhaps derive a good deal of satisfaction from manoeuvring Miss Chenevix into a suitable marriage.

  Lady Constance looked gratified. “So generous of you, my dear!” she exclaimed. “And I expect she will really turn out not to be a great deal of trouble, after all, for she writes a very pretty, modest letter, and does not seem to be at all a coming sort of girl. I can just recollect seeing her at that little house Emily hired one year in Bath—she is quite a martyr to dyspepsia, you know: poor Emily, that is, of course, not the child—when she was only a little thing, very fair and quiet, I recall, and with charming manners. It would be so dreary to think of her never being given an opportunity to have even a single Season in town!”

  Cressida agreed with proper civility that it would be very dreary, and, jumping up forthwith from the table, announced that she must go upstairs at once and dress, or she would be late for her appointment with Sir Octavius Mayr in the City.

  “You know I cannot approve of your calling upon a gentleman at his place of business, my dear, ” Lady Constance said, for perhaps the dozenth time since she had taken up residence with Cressida. “It would be far more proper for him to wait upon you here”—but Cressida only laughed.

  “Of course he would do so if I asked him to—and a great piece of impertinence it would be upon my part!” she said. “Do try to recollect, love, that Octavius is a man of vast importance in the City, and that the only reason he condescends to act as my man of business is out of a sense of gratitude to Great-aunt Estella. And if you tell me that he is not a gentleman,” she went on, forestalling another of Lady Constance’s familiar objections, “I shall remind you that Sir Walter Scott himself has spoken warmly of his wit and learning, that he has gathered what is considered to be one of the finest art collections in England, and that he has Royalty to dine at his house whenever he pleases!”

  “Good heavens!” exclaimed Lady Constance in dismay, for, though she had heard this encomium before, it seemed to her it had never been delivered with quite so much spirit and feeling. ‘‘You are never thinking of marrying him, my love! He is quite old enough to be your father, by what I have heard, and, as fabulously rich and important as he may be, one cannot really call him—” “A gentleman?” Cressida’s mischievous smile was very much in evidence again. “Oh, no, something far better—the wisest man I know! But never fear—I am not at all the sort of female he would consider allying himself with, though I believe he has the intention to ranger himself with a lady of suitable rank and years when he is ready to retire from business. He discussed the whole matter with me very seriously one day, and I discovered myself weighed in the balance and found wanting—”

  “Wanting! You! A Calverton!” exclaimed Lady Constance, in her deepest tones. “The man, my dear, is an impertinent fool!”

  “Not at all!” said Cressida, laughing again, “though I won’t say he is not riding his collector’s hobbyhorse in this instance, with an eye out for obtaining only the rarest and most distinguished article of its kind. In fact, I have sometimes suspected him of having designs upon one of the Royal Princesses: there are so many of them, and all pining for husbands, poor things! But he was really quite complimentary in dismissing my pretensions. ‘I see through you, my dear,’ he told me, “and yet I allow you to twist me around your little finger, which is a very poor situation for a husband to find himself in. What you need is a man who sees through you and can still stand up to all that will and charm—’

  “Well, that is Langmere. Langmere could do that,” Lady Constance said stoutly, putting in a word for the absent marquis; but this statement was manifestly so absurd, since the love-stricken Lord Langmere would notoriously have gone through fire and through water, though much against his better judgement, at his beloved’s bidding, that even Lady Constance felt she had not got the better of that exchange.

  CHAPTER 2

  Something less than an hour later Miss Calverton, stepping down from her carriage before a building near one of Wren’s charming little City churches, St. Mildred’s Poultry, was met by an obsequious clerk of Sir Octavius Mayr’s and escorted upstairs to the elegantly furnished office where Sir Octavius himself was awaiting her.

  “Well, Cressy?” he greeted her, with the lift of a quizzical eyebrow, as he rose from the large armchair in which he had
been sitting behind a magnificent Bellange desk decorated with green bronze paterae and resting on eight winged lions sculpted in mahogany. “Only a quarter hour late today? You are improving! Were you so late coming from the Campetts’ ball last night that you could not bring yourself to leave your bed this morning, or am I to gather that the reason for your tardiness is that that fetching costume was donned for my benefit, and required a great deal of time and thought in the selection?’

  Cressida, who was indeed looking very smart that morning in a walking-dress of water-green crape, with a daring hat a la Hussar set at a jaunty angle on her tawny curls, grimaced at him and regarded the Vulliamy timepiece that stood on the mantelshelf, its hands pointing uncompromisingly to three quarters past the hour.

  “I daresay your clock is wrong,” she said. “It can’t possibly be so late.”

  “The clock, ” said Sir Octavius tranquilly, “keeps excellent time. I could wish, my dear Cressy, that one could say the same of you. However, in view of the charming picture you present, I am not disposed to cavil over a mere quarter hour.”

  He smiled at her—an amiably cynical smile that had made more people than Miss Cressida Calverton realise that there was very little use in trying the ordinary small social deceptions on him. He was a rather small, neatly built man, with a noble head crowned by iron-grey hair, and not a trace of his Danish origin lingered in his speech, despite the fact that he had been eighteen years of age when he had first come to England to begin his career there as a clerk in the offices of a well-known Baltic merchant.

  Once there, his ascent in the world of business had been phenomenally rapid. Within the space of four years he had amassed a small fortune and set up in business for himself, at which time he had come to the notice of Miss Estella Calverton, who was then living in London. Miss Calverton, with her usual strong-minded eccentricity of behaviour, had taken him under her wing, introduced him into the literary and artistic salons she frequented, and entrusted her considerable fortune to his care—a course of action that had been amply justified over the years as that fortune had grown, under his management, into a truly splendid one.

  Upon Miss Estella Calverton’s death, Octavius Mayr (he was Sir Octavius by that time, having been knighted for services to the Crown not well known to the public, but of exceeding value to a monarchy perennially in financial distress over the French wars) had accepted the charge laid upon him in her will to act as one of her great-niece’s trustees, the other being Arthur Calverton, who neither knew nor cared anything about finance except how mortgages and loans were arranged, and was quite content to leave the whole complicated matter of his niece’s fortune in Sir Octavius’s hands.

  If Cressida had been an ordinary girl, there is little doubt that Sir Octavius would have managed, as soon as she had attained her majority, to shift his responsibility for her fortune on to other shoulders and go on about his own more important affairs. But Cressida was not an ordinary girl, and Sir Octavius, who had found the nine-teen-year-old heiress shy, odd, and delightful, found her even more delightful, though no longer shy or odd, as her star had risen and attained its present shining eminence in the ton. He was not a man to whom it had ever been granted to fall in love, for finance was his golden and demanding mistress; but he sometimes congratulated himself upon the fact that he had not come upon Cressida twenty years earlier, when he might still have been young enough to have committed the folly of losing his head and his heart to a young woman who, however great her charm and however generous her spirit, he was well aware could be impetuous, self-willed, and, to the male mind, quite maddeningly unreasonable when she chose.

  Having seen her comfortably ensconced now in a gondola armchair of gilded wood upholstered in green, he did not at once proceed to the matter of business he wished to discuss, but allowed himself instead the indulgence of a few minutes’ social conversation with her. It had been several weeks since he had seen her, during which time the Regent’s daughter, the Princess Charlotte, had been married with great ceremony to Prince Leopold of Coburg and the Byron scandal had come to a head with that disastrous ball at Almack’s which had been given for him by his few remaining friends in the ton with the intention of rehabilitating him in the eyes of Society, but which had ended instead in abysmal failure.

  “It was horrid,” Cressida, who had been present, said in describing the affair to him. “The room simply emptied as soon as he walked into it. I do think he is a bit of a bore, with his posturings and the Cheltenham tragedies he is always enacting for one, but on the other hand I have not the least patience with Lady Byron. Any sensible woman would have known how to manage matters better than to land them both in the middle of all this scandal-broth. But from what I hear, she is enjoying her own martyrdom, and enjoying even more having made Byron a pariah to all England.

  Sir Octavius said, with his usual cynical wisdom, that he dared say if the truth were known Byron was rather enjoying it, too, and would play Ishmael for all he was worth all over Europe, now that he had been driven out of England.

  “And speaking of Ishmaels,” he remarked, “I may tell you that you are about to be rewarded for your lack of punctuality by meeting the man who—though his reputation may not quite rival Byron’s—will no doubt be taking his place this Season in providing the town with its more interesting on-dits. In other words, I am expecting the famous—or should I say, the notorious?— Captain Rossiter, and when he arrives I shall make a point of presenting him to you, so that you may boast to all your friends that you were the one who met him first. ”

  He broke off, cocking an interrogative eyebrow at her, for in the not very agreeable surprise of hearing what he had just told her she had been unable to prevent herself from colouring up slightly and looking vexed. She herself was aware of this, and, with some annoyance at herself for such an unexpected piece of self-consciousness, managed to say in a cool and quite unconcerned voice, “Unnecessary! I am already acquainted with Captain Rossiter.”

  “Indeed? Sir Octavius continued to look at her, the eyebrow still raised. “Do I detect, perhaps,” he enquired after a moment, “a slight coolness in your tone?”

  Cressida shrugged and said nothing.

  “Yes,” Sir Octavius answered his own question thoughtfully, “a very definite coolness, I believe! Now where, I wonder, can you have made the acquaintance of the dashing Captain? He has been so little in England, I understand—”

  “It was in Gloucestershire, and years ago,” Cressida said, preserving her indifferent air. “Do let us leave the subject, Octavius! If my being late to my appointment really has put you out, I wonder that you should wish to be wasting your time on gossip!”

  Sir Octavius looked far from satisfied over this cavalier dismissal of the subject of Captain Rossiter; but he made no attempt to continue it, turning instead to the business he had to discuss with her. He had been agreeably surprised to find, upon first making her acquaintance, that she was quite capable of taking an intelligent interest in the management of her fortune, and he never made any important decision now concerning it without informing her fully. They accordingly had a brief and very businesslike conversation upon the matter of the latest investments he wished to make upon her account, and then there was a tap at the door and an elderly clerk, entering noiselessly, came in and murmured a few words in Sir Octavius’s ear.

  “Ah, yes! Show them in at once, Smollett,” said Sir Octavius, with a glance at Cressida.

  The clerk departed, and Cressida rose and began drawing on her gloves.

  “I shall leave you to Captain Rossiter then, Octavius,” she said. “I expect you will have a charming conversation—”

  “What—running away?” Sir Octavius enquired, in mock-surprise. “It is not like you to be so poor-spirited, Cressy! What has Rossiter done to make himself so feared by you?”

  “I am not afraid of Dev Rossiter!” said Cressida, with rather more emphasis than was strictly necessary. She stood looking indignantly at Sir Octavius for a
moment and then sat down again. “Very well, I shall stay!” she said. “But only long enough to put the notion out of your head that I do not care to meet him. It is a matter of complete indifference to me!”

  “Is it, indeed?” said Sir Octavius politely; and then, at the sound of footsteps approaching the door, turned his gaze in that direction.

  The next moment a tall man in his middle thirties, with the black hair and disquietingly arrogant eyes of the dark Celt, and wearing riding dress instead of the more fashionable town costume of pantaloons and Hessians, appeared upon the threshold. He was followed by an equally tall, but somewhat younger, fair-haired man, with a modest manner and an agreeable smile.

  Cressida, who had naturally been remembering a much younger Rossiter, had the peculiar sensation, as her eyes took in the dark face of the first arrival, with its harsh lines and direct, penetrating, rather cynical eyes, that she was looking at a stranger—one closely related, perhaps, to a person she had once known, but still a stranger. The shock of surprise was so great, in fact, that she scarcely heard his greeting to Sir Octavius and his introduction of his companion as Captain Miles Harries. Following these brief civilities, his eyes turned indifferently in her direction, and then paused there in a sudden hard, incredulous gaze.

  As if that abrupt meeting of eyes had returned her presence of mind to her, she smiled at him composedly.

  “Yes, it is really I,” she said, in a voice that had suddenly become far more mannered than it had been when she had been talking to Sir Octavius, as if she were an actress who had just come on stage and had begun to speak her lines in the character of a dashing young lady of fashion. “How are you, Dev? Or perhaps I should say Captain Rossiter? It has been a very long time, after all, and our acquaintance was of a rather brief duration.”