Cressida

by Clare Darcy

  The house, too, when she reached it and alighted from her chaise, had the same rather delightfully melancholy air of having been deserted by humanity for countless centuries—an effect that was somewhat spoiled by the appearance, in response to her knock, of an incongruously young and fresh-faced butler whom she had never seen before, and who stared in obvious surprise at her travelling-chaise, from which Moodle was in the act of extracting her dressing-case, while one of the postillions dealt with the other luggage.

  “No, I’m not expected,” Cressida said cheerfully, in answer to the butler s mutely questioning face. “Is my uncle in? I am Miss Calverton. ”

  The butler, standing aside for her to enter the hall, said he regretted that Mr. Calverton was not in, but that it was certain he would return soon, being only gone out to show the gentleman about the park.

  “The gentleman? You don’t mean—you can’t mean —Captain Rossiter?” asked Cressida, slightly taken aback.

  “Yes, miss, said the butler, and looked a trifle nervously at Moodle, who had followed Cressida into the house and was gazing about in grim disapproval at the hall, which had had all its good pieces sold—and what was left, her accusing eyes told him, was sadly in need of polishing. “May I ask, miss,” he enquired, once more addressing Cressida, “if—if you are expecting to stay— “Well, it does make it a bit awkward that my uncle is not here to ask me, but I am,” Cressida said frankly. “Perhaps I might have the Blue Bedchamber—”

  The butler, looking even more nervously at Moodle, who was now radiating scorn over his lack of “manner,” said he was afraid Captain Rossiter was occupying the Blue Bedchamber at present.

  “What—is he staying here?” Cressida exclaimed, a trifle indignantly. “Oh, very well, then—the Green.” The butler’s fresh-coloured face grew even pinker and he stammered, with an apprehensive glance at Moodle, that he was very sorry indeed, but the Green Bedchamber, too, was occupied.

  “By a Lady,” he amplified his statement, so obviously capitalising the word that Cressida immediately understood that a lady of title was involved.

  “Oh?” she said, intrigued, wondering what odd sort of party her uncle had got up for Rossiter, or if “the Lady” had perhaps come with Rossiter himself. “A Lady?”

  “Yes, miss. Lady Letitia Conway,” said the butler, which startled Cressida so much that she exclaimed involuntarily, “Good God, what is she doing here?”

  For Lady Letitia was an elderly cousin of Arthur Calverton’s who resided in Cheltenham, went in largely for charitable works, being unmarried and with a great deal of time on her hands, and was considered by her cousin Arthur an infernal bore.

  The butler, apparently feeling that answering Cressida’s question was above and beyond the call of duty, said he couldn’t take it upon himself to say, but added helpfully that she had arrived the evening before. He kept to himself the interesting fact that Lady Letitia, too, had obviously not been expected, and that a quarrel of titanic proportions had taken place between her and her host in the library that morning, of which he had unfortunately been able to overhear only the less interesting portions consisting of his employer’s rejoinders, since Lady Letitia, being a “Lady” in every sense of the word, never raised her voice, and would no doubt, if called upon to do so, have pronounced even the dread ecclesiastical curse of Anathema Maranatha in the mild, confidential tones suitable for a drawing-room tête-à-tête.

  But this piece of information would have been lost upon Cressida even if he had volunteered it, for, having ascertained that Lady Letitia was at that moment in the library, she went off at once in that direction.

  The library at Calverton Place was a large square apartment hung with gilded leather, now sadly darkened by time, and with a fine plaster ceiling typical of its period, boasting a central oval wreath of tightly packed foliage and flowers. Two striking torcheres in the form of undraped nymphs balancing scallop shells on their heads flanked the Italian marble fireplace, and sitting bolt upright beside one of them, in an attitude of resigned disapproval that might have been evoked by their shameless proximity, or might, on the other hand, have arisen out of the apparently disagreeable thoughts that were occupying her at the moment, was Lady Letitia Conway. She was an excessively thin female with a long, mildly melancholy face, dressed in a shapeless and unfashionable frock of some grey material and with her grey hair untidily arranged upon the top of her head.

  Her face lightened immediately, however, at sight of Cressida, whose quite unexpected appearance at Calverton Place did not seem to occasion the least surprise to her.

  “Cressida, darling,” she said in her almost inaudible voice, as she rose to embrace her. “So good of you to come. And so soon. I had scarcely dared to hope—it is such a long way from London. But now you are here, we must put our heads together at once. Such a terrible thing to be thinking of doing—” She put her head on one side, regarding Cressida s surprised face interrogatively. “I am sure you must agree with me?”

  “If you mean Uncle Arthur’s thinking of selling Calverton Place, I agree entirely,” Cressida said, tossing her elegant bonnet upon a table and seating herself.

  But how could you have known I was coming, Cousin Letty? You simply couldn’t have done: I didn’t know it myself until a few hours before I left London. ”

  “Oh, said Lady Letitia, looking astonished, “then you didn’t get my letter? But there—of course you didn’t!” She peered into her reticule, which was made of papier-mache in the form of an Etruscan vase, in a style that had been fashionable in France during the Directoire, and produced with an air of triumph a sealed missive, which she held up for Cressida to see. “I only wrote it this morning and I haven’t posted it yet,” she said. “But I did ask you most earnestly in it to come, and of course I imagined— She lowered her voice to a still more inaudible whisper. “Naturally I came at once myself, as soon as I heard what he was planning to do,” she said. “I considered it my duty to Speak to Him; nothing, as I told him most emphatically this morning, will induce me to countenance his selling Calverton Place out of the family. Not,” she added, looking at Cressida with imploring eyes and a slight flush in her thin cheeks, “that there is anything that I can do to prevent it. Arthur is really most unaccountably obstinate. But I am sure that you, dearest Cressida—”

  “Well, I shall certainly do my best,” said Cressida, but feeling somehow that Lady Letitia’s having got in before her with Arthur Calverton put her at a disadvantage. People—especially people like her uncle Arthur, who liked things to arrange themselves without any undue fuss or trouble—had the disagreeable habit of digging in their heels and laying back their ears when opposition threatened to disturb a comfortable status quo, and the fact that Lady Letitia’s well-meant meddling had apparently already caused this process to set in would, Cressida considered, most assuredly not make her task any the easier.

  But she had no opportunity to reflect on what alteration in her tactics this unexpected change in the situation ought to bring about when her uncle himself, followed by Rossiter, walked into the room.

  Arthur Calverton was a small, dapper man with greying hair and a nice taste in waistcoats, who had a genius for backing slow horses and a penchant for quiet little games of whist for large stakes, from which he hardly ever seemed to rise a winner. Cressida had held him in somewhat exasperated affection all her life, but felt the exasperation rather getting the upper hand of the affection now as she saw the alarmed roll of the eyes with which he took in her unexpected presence in his library.

  “Cressy, my dear! Didn’t expect to see you in these parts just now—middle of the Season and all that!” he said, assuming a quite transparently false air of welcoming jollity as he advanced to fold her in a brief embrace and give her an unenthusiastic peck upon the cheek. “Nothing wrong in town—eh?”

  “Nothing at all,” said Cressida coolly; and, deciding to take the bull by the horns, she went on at once, “I’ve come because I heard you are thinking of se
lling Calverton Place.

  “Selling Calverton Place?” For a moment it seemed that Arthur Calverton might have intended taking craven refuge in a denial, but, with Rossiter standing politely silent behind him, instant realisation of the futility of such a course obviously overcame him, and he said hastily, in what was apparently intended as an offhand manner, “Best thing to do under the circumstances, my dear. Dashed millstone around the neck and all that for these past few years—place falling to rack— feller’d need the brass of a nabob to keep it up. And Walter’s agreeable—says he’ll be glad to be rid of the place—” He broke off, looking around rather guiltily at Rossiter. “You two do know each other, don’t you?” he asked. “Seem to remember—”

  “We were engaged once, Uncle Arthur,” Cressida said, looking at Rossiter with an expression that plainly told him she had said it only to deny him the pleasure of saying it himself.

  But instead of acknowledging that he had been checkmated, he only grinned at her.

  “A chapter in your life that you would prefer to forget, Cressy?” he drawled. “No—don’t answer that: I am full of kindly feelings towards all Calvertons today, and I shouldn’t be able to put my heart into a quarrel with one of them.” He strolled across the room and sat down opposite her, and again she felt, as she had done more than once since they had renewed their acquaintance at the start of the Season, the mocking, reckless intensity of his gaze upon her, as if he were endeavouring to strip the veneer of London sophistication from her and penetrate to the real person beneath.

  This, of course, always made her quite determined that he should do nothing of the sort, and as a result she assumed her most Londonish air and said that she, too, hoped they were not to quarrel.

  “You have only to tell me that you quite see the unsuitability of anyone outside the family buying Calverton Place, and I assure you I shall be the soul of amiability, ” she said airily; and was not at all surprised to see his black brows snap together in a sudden frown.

  “Have I, by God?” he said, thus causing Lady Letitia to open her faded, anxious blue eyes very wide and say something in a reproachful voice, but fortunately so inaudibly that no one understood it. “So that is why you are here,” continued the Captain rather grimly—“to thrust a spoke in my wheel. Well, it won’t do, Cressy— not even if you are prepared to buy Calverton Place yourself—”

  “It is exactly what I am prepared to do,” said Cressida, in such a calm, well-bred, and altogether condescending tone that anyone would have forgiven Captain Rossiter the desire to beat her that was for a moment expressed quite clearly upon his dark face. “And what is more,” she continued, “it is what I intend to do.”

  Arthur Calverton, scenting battle in the air, hastily rang for his butler and said they would all have some sherry.

  “Not for me, Arthur dear,” said Lady Letitia, looking shocked. “And I should think not for you, either, just at this time. We are talking business, and I remember dear Papa’s always saying, Sherry after business, because one needed a clear head—”

  Arthur Calverton said rather crossly that they weren’t talking business as far as he could see, and if she meant the house, that was all settled now.

  “We’ll have the Oloroso,” he said to the butler, who had by this time appeared in the doorway. He turned to Rossiter. “Not the best year,” he said. “The bloodsuckers got all that. Sold up to pay a tailor’s bill, if you’ll believe it. Enough to make a grown man cry.”

  Rossiter, who appeared to have lost interest quickly in the sudden crossing of swords between himself and Cressida that had alarmed their host, said that he had observed the depleted state of the cellars, and that when he came to restocking them he would be glad of Mr. Calverton’s expert advice. This statement quite soothed Mr. Calverton, and set him off on a learned monologue on the comparative merits of Oloroso and Manzanilla, and the difficulty nowadays in obtaining the good Mountain-Malaga one had been able to procure in his youth—all of which left Cressida stranded high and dry on the rocks of her own indignation and certainly got her no further in her intention of thwarting the projected sale of Calverton Place to Rossiter.

  She was not in the least daunted in her determination to carry out this intention, however, and, taking advantage of the momentary preoccupation of the gentlemen with their talk of wine, moved to seat herself beside Lady Letitia and say to her in a low voice, “It will do no good to say any more of the matter now, with Rossiter in the room. I shall contrive to see Uncle Arthur alone a little later.”

  “Yes, do, my dear!” Lady Letitia whispered fervently. “He does not listen to me, you know; he never has. I remember very clearly that when we were both quite small children—”

  But the arrival of the butler with the sherry interrupted the no doubt interesting reminiscences in which Lady Letitia was about to indulge, and Cressida, seizing the opportunity to escape, pleaded the fatigue of her journey and went upstairs to the bedchamber that had been prepared for her.

  CHAPTER 9

  Cressida lost no time in contriving a private conversation with her uncle. There was, indeed, little difficulty in managing it, for the door of her bedchamber was exactly opposite the door of his, and she had only to leave it ajar a trifle while they were both dressing for dinner, and when she heard him come out follow him down the stairs and herd him, though much against his will, into the little sitting room off the half-landing.

  “I want to talk to you, Uncle,” she said, at which ominous words Mr. Calverton nearly bolted, but was restrained by the fact that she was standing in the doorway.

  To an unbiassed observer, Cressida, in the gown she had chosen to wear that evening—an underdress of sea-green silk veiled by a tunic of paler green gossamer-thin muslin—would have seemed a charming figure as she stood there; but to Mr. Calverton, filled with guilty consciousness of his own shortcomings, she had more the appearance of an avenging Nemesis.

  “Yes, my dear,” he said hastily. “Certainly! But not at this moment. My guests, you know—Letty, Captain Rossiter—afraid they don’t quite get on with each other. Wouldn’t do to leave them alone together—”

  “Cousin Letty hasn’t come down yet, and you will be able to hear her when she does,” Nemesis said ruthlessly, and then made matters worse by coming over and slipping an arm coaxingly through his. “Do let us sit down here together for just a moment, Uncle, ” she said.

  Mr. Calverton, finding that his reluctant feet were being guided irresistibly to a horridly uncomfortable cane-backed settee, which only lived there now because the Hepplewhite sofa that had used to stand in its place had been sold, sat down and fidgeted.

  “And don’t fidget, darling,” said Cressida soothingly. “There really is not the slightest need, you know. You have only to sell Calverton Place to me instead of to Rossiter, and everything will be quite comfortable. How much has he offered you for it? I am prepared to go a full thousand higher.’’

  Mr. Calverton looked at her unhappily. He had really not the slightest objection to selling his ancestral estate to his niece, and the lure of an extra thousand pounds to a gentleman who perennially found himself, as he expressed it, without a feather to fly with, was not inconsiderable. Unfortunately, his situation at the present time was such that, no matter how his own inclinations stood, he was unable to take advantage of Cressida’s offer, and so he regretfully informed her.

  Papers already drawn up and signed with Rossiter, m’dear,” he said. “‘Couldn’t get out of the bargain if I wanted to. Pity, because if I’d known you were interested in buying the place, of course I’d have been happy to let you have it.

  “You would have known,” Cressida said in pardonable reproach, “if you had given me the least inkling you were thinking of doing such a thing. Really, Uncle, you have managed the affair very badly, you know!”

  “Well, how was I to guess you’d take it into your head to want to buy a ramshackle old place like this?” Mr. Calverton retorted, stung into defending himself by this
frontal attack. “From all I’ve heard of your doings lately, you’re on the verge of getting yourself riveted to Langmere, and the Lord knows he has no need for another house!”

  Cressida said with dignity that people who listened to gossip were unfortunately very often deceived.

  “You mean you’re not going to marry him?” Mr. Calverton said incredulously. “The biggest catch of the Season, and you’re going to whistle him down the wind? You must be all about in your head, my girl!”

  “No, I am not!” said Cressida, nettled. “I haven’t said I shan’t marry him; I simply haven’t made up my mind as yet. ”

  “Well, you d best make it up soon, then,” Mr. Calverton advised her, with a masculine lack of tact. “A man like Langmere ain’t going to stay dangling at your shoestrings forever, you know. Too many other females on the catch for him.” And he went on, with sudden inspiration, “If you don’t care to have him, why don’t you marry Rossiter? Engaged to him once, you say—must have thought it was a good idea then. That would settle the matter nicely; then you could both have Calverton Place.”

  Cressida, giving him a speaking look, said she had never heard a more addlepated suggestion, as she would not marry Rossiter for a hundred Calverton Places and she was sure he himself had other plans.

  “No, has he? said Mr. Calverton, looking interested. “I rather wondered about that, you know—I mean, buying this place and all that. Who is she? Anyone I know?”

  “No,” said Cressida, and then was angry with herself for that momentary and unaccountable little act of cowardice, for why in heaven’s name, she asked herself, could she not have said in plain words that it was generally believed in London that Rossiter was on the point of offering for Kitty Chenevix? “But all this has nothing to say to the matter,” she hurried on. “What is important is that you really must tell Rossiter that you have decided you don’t wish to sell, after all—”