by Clare Darcy
She could not remain a moment longer, she felt, facing him before that great, serene statue, which had endured in its granite impassivity for thousands of years while lovers had quarrelled and broken their hearts and disappeared into the darkness of time past. She moved swiftly past him out of the room, pausing in the hall, beneath the equally impassive gaze of a liveried footman stationed beside the door, to dash the angry tears from her eyes before she re-entered the drawing room.
If she had not been so taken up with her own unhappy feelings, the tableau she saw before her as she came into the room might have given her a moment’s astonished pause. Captain Harries and Kitty stood together at the far end of the room before a large, glass-fronted case containing a magnificent display of early seventeenth century Le Bourgeoys flintlocks, their stocks decorated with silver, mother-of-pearl, gilt brass, and carved ivory. These they appeared to be examining, although far more interested, it seemed, in their own conversation than in the display before them, while beside the fireplace Lady Constance and Sir Octavius sat together, deep in confidential talk. So absorbed were the latter two, in fact, that for a few moments neither of them was aware of Cressida’s presence. What they could be finding to talk of, upon this their first meeting, that was of such great mutual interest Cressida could not imagine, but she distinctly overheard the words, “marriage settlements,” uttered by Lady Constance as she trod across the carpet towards them, and she wondered bitterly if it were possible that even Sir Octavius had so far despaired of her cause, despite his own efforts in her behalf, that he was now discussing with Lady Constance the settlements that Rossiter would make upon Kitty when they were married.
Still there was, she considered in slight surprise as she sat down beside them, a distinctly startled, almost guilty, look upon Lady Constance’s face as she looked up and saw her, which would scarcely have been the case had she merely been talking of Kitty, and even Sir Octavius’s usual quizzical calm seemed to have deserted him momentarily. A certain unwonted air of satisfaction was evident in his manner, and there was a gleam in those ordinarily shrewdly veiled dark eyes which, men active upon Change might have informed her (some very ruefully), appeared there only when their owner had concluded a most advantageous bargain.
Cressida, however, was in no case to speculate upon the significance of these details, being fully occupied with her own harried emotions, which were divided at the moment between despair at her having thrown away her last chance to detach Rossiter from Kitty and a feeling of vengeful satisfaction at having at least given as good as she had got during the disagreeable scene that had just taken place in the Egyptian Room. Not even with the penalty of going through life with a permanently broken heart, she thought impenitently, would she had given up the satisfaction of rejecting him as rudely as he had rejected her. And this consideration was sufficient to carry her, with battle colours still flying, through the remainder of the evening, which fortunately was of no long duration, for Rossiter, upon returning to the drawing room, almost immediately took his departure.
This was the signal for Cressida to indicate a wish to do likewise, and, though Lady Constance showed a surprising unwillingness to leave so soon, and even Kitty, who was being consoled in the most agreeable manner for Rossiter’s almost total neglect of her that evening by Captain Harness’s modestly admiring attentions, seemed more eager to remain than to go, Cressida carried the day, and the carriage was sent for.
In the hall, as they were taking leave of their host, Sir Octavius took the opportunity to have a private word with her.
“I gather,” he said, looking at her shrewdly, “my meddling was to no good effect?
“None whatever,” she said shortly, drawing on her gloves.
“A pity!” said Sir Otavius, and added enigmatically, “I should otherwise have considered this a most successful evening.”
She glanced up at him in astonishment, but the carriage had been brought round and the others were already going out the door. There was nothing for her to do but to follow them, and so she did, but what possible sort of success Sir Octavius could have attributed to an evening that had been, so far as she had been able to see compounded merely of dullness and frustration, it was beyond her powers of imagination to conceive.
CHAPTER 14
The upshot of the evening, as far as she herself was concerned, was that it had ended as it had begun—with Rossiter as firmly betrothed to Kitty as ever, and with his still having not the least notion of the true state of her feelings towards him. The entire situation was, she considered, in a hopeless muddle, and so despondent was she over it that she almost wished that the letter that had been sent off to Kitty’s mama in Devonshire, informing her of the splendid prospect before her daughter and requesting her blessing upon the engagement, might receive an affirmative reply the very next day, so that immediate arrangements might be made for the wedding.
“Once he is actually married, I daresay I shall be able to put him out of my mind quite easily,” she told herself the next morning, with more bravado than conviction; and to prove to herself how little she really cared for the odious Captain, she accepted an invitation from a very dashing Polish count to drive out to the Botanical Gardens, where she flirted outrageously with him and promised him that he might escort her to the Venetian breakfast that was to be given at a great house in Chiswick the following day.
All of which in no way lifted the oppression of spirit that had lain so heavily upon her ever since the evening of the Maybridges’ ball, and as she entered the front door of her house in Mount Street, after bidding farewell in her gayest voice to the Polish count, she was hoping devoutly that no one had, or would, come to call upon them, as what she would really like to do was to go upstairs to her own bedchamber and cry her eyes out.
Her wish was fulfilled to the extent that no sound of polite conversation reached her ears as she passed the drawing-room door, but she had not gone five paces past it before Lady Constance suddenly emerged from it and pounced upon her.
“Oh, Cressy, I am so glad you are come home!” she exclaimed, and Cressida saw with some surprise that her face wore an expression of highly affronted agitation upon it. “I have not the least notion what to do,” she went on, “and there is that wretched girl upstairs pretending to be doing nothing more wicked than mending a rent in my puce satin gown, when all the while I know what is in her mind, and that she is merely waiting for this note to be brought to her!” And to Cressida’s astonishment she thrust a crumpled sheet of notepaper into her hand, adding tragically, “I knew, of course, the moment I came upon Harbage with it a few minutes ago and he said Mr. Addison’s groom had brought it by hand for Miss Chenevix, what it was! I think I must have had a premonition! So I said I would take it to her myself, and instead I opened it and read it—such a really immoral thing to do, I daresay, but then it would have been even more wicked to let her read it, when I knew it could mean nothing but mischief! It has all seemed quite too good to be true, you see—such a very advantageous offer, and in her first Season—and now she is going to throw it all away, and be ruined, besides, for Addison will never marry her, you know, no matter what he says!”
While this bewildering flood of word was being poured out, Cressida, according it only half her attention, was reading the few lines written in an elegant masculine hand on the sheet of notepaper that Lady Constance had given her.
My dearest love, the words ran, I have completed the arrangements. You will meet me at the White Hart in Welwyn. As we planned, you must contrive an errand in Bond Street this afternoon with no one but Lady Con’s maid accompanying you. Give her the slip, and the chaise will be waiting around the corner in Bruton Street. The off-leader will wear a white cockade. Don’t give the game away by taking anything with you, and, if you love me, don’t leave a note behind. Too, too bourgeois, my dear, and it will do Cressy and Lady Con a world of credit to have a genuine disappearance on their hands. One does so like to create a sensation in the middle of the Season, when everyone is
ennuye with balls and breakfasts. A bientot. Your most devoted Addison.
Cressida looked up in utter astonishment. “No, I can’t believe it!” she said. “Kitty to be planning an elopement with Addison—and in broad daylight! She must be mad! They must both be mad! He cannot possibly wish to marry her—”
“Oh, no! I am quite persuaded that he does not!” Lady Constance distractedly agreed. “But no doubt he has cozened her into believing that he does. This talk of meeting her in Welwyn—of course it will appear to her that he intends taking her north to the Border—but can you imagine Addison, of all men, planning to be married in Gretna over the anvil? It is perfectly plain that he means merely to ruin the girl, in order to revenge himself upon Rossiter.”
Cressida, who had grown a trifle paler but was now quite in command of herself, continued to stare fixedly down at the note in her hand.
“But can he really have considered the consequences?” she said after a moment, more to herself, it seemed, than to Lady Constance. “If he does ruin Kitty, Rossiter will be certain to call him out—”
“Oh, my dear, I daresay he does not care for that!” Lady Constance said. “He is held to be an excellent shot, I have always heard it said, and you know he has been out more than once—that affair of poor young Worthington, for example. ” She shrugged her shoulders with an air of meaningful cynicism. “My dear papa was always used to say,” she observed trenchantly, “that when a man’s lower nature was aroused, he feared nothing, and I believe that is exactly the state Addison is in, or he would never have concocted such a monstrous scheme! But what are we to do to stop him?”
Cressida, becoming conscious at this moment of the impropriety of their continuing the conversation where any passing servant might overhear them, led her into the drawing room and closed the door.
“Do?” she said then, slowly. “Why, we might lock her in her room, I daresay—that would scotch the plan for today, at least. But we most certainly cannot keep her there indefinitely, and if she remains in London he may very easily contrive to see her again and make other plans for eloping with her. He has enough gall to do so even if we confront him with this note! And we can’t tell Rossiter of it: that would throw the fat in the fire! He would be quite certain to call Addison out—
“And then there would be a scandal, and no doubt he wouldn’t marry Kitty, after all!” Lady Constance said, sinking down upon an ivory satinwood sofa with a tragical expression upon her face. “Oh, dear! Oh, dear! That wretched, idiotish girl! She has always seemed so very sensible—and then to do such a wicked, foolish thing as this, just when she is on the verge of being settled so prosperously!”
“She doesn’t care for him, you know,” Cressida said, standing very erect and still in the centre of the room, her face quite expressionless. “I daresay, if the truth were told, she doesn’t care for either of them— only she is frightened of Dev, and dazzled by Addison. To be the chosen bride of the premier dandy in London—” She made a sudden gesture of violent impatience. “Good God, is she really so enamoured of herself as to believe that a poor little dab of a girl like her can have penetrated the armour of that man’s indifference and pride?” she exclaimed. “It would take a Royal princess to accomplish that! But we must not stand here doing nothing! We must have some sort of plan, or heaven knows what will come of all this!”
She sank down into the chair that stood before an elegant little French writing-desk and, spreading Addison’s note out before her, mechanically read it through again, as if hoping against hope that there might be something in it to cause her to believe that the meaning she and Lady Constance had seen in it might be in error. But the significance was only too clear: Addison certainly meant to ruin Kitty, and Cressida believed him to be quite capable of accomplishing this purpose even if she and Lady Constance were immediately to bundle the girl out of London, back to her home in Devonshire. One could run away from Devonshire quite as well as one could from London; and then there was the fact that the taking of any drastic precautions to protect Kitty from her would-be seducer must necessarily defeat what was, to Cressida at least, their primary purpose—that of keeping Rossiter in the dark as to Addison’s intentions.
For if he were to guess at Addison’s purpose, he would—he must—call him out, and, confident as she was of Rossiter’s ability to drop his opponent, she could in no wise be certain that Addison—also a splendid marksman, as Lady Constance had reminded her— would not likewise be able to hit his mark. She had pooh-poohed the idea of a duel when Lady Dalingridge had broached the matter to her a few days before, not believing for a moment that Addision was willing to advertise to the world, by calling Rossiter out, his pique over the latter’s having carried Kitty off in spite of his own marked attentions to her.
But she was well aware that Addision was no coward, and the prospect of having Rossiter, in the role of the gulled betrothed, call him out would certainly add the final fillip to his triumph.
“I must find some way to prevent all this!” she thought in despair. “If only I could contrive somehow to make him appear a figure of ridicule! It is the only thing that will put an end to this horrid plan, for he is vulnerable nowhere but in his vanity!”
Lady Constance’s voice came across the room to her in a kind of low wail.
“Oh, what are we to do? I feel myself so responsible! After all, the child did put herself so trustingly into our care! And now we have led her into this!”
“Nonsense! said Cressida, her exasperation boiling over at this quite unwarranted aspersion upon herself and Lady Constance. “We have led her into nothing; it is all her own folly and ambition. If she had not foisted the most barefaced untruth upon us by giving us to understand that her aunt was too ill to bring her out, she would never have come near Mount Street, and would have spent the Season with a set of comfortable, worthy nobodies—which would not have suited her in the least, you know! All the same, we can’t let the wretched girl ruin herself! We shall be obliged to do something, if only to see to it that Rossiter is not killed on the head of it!” Lady Constance, her attention momentarily diverted from the problem before her, stared at her.
“But what can you mean, my love?” she demanded.
“A barefaced untruth—?”
“Yes!” said Cressida. “There has been, and is, nothing in the world wrong with Mrs. Mills’s health. I met her at Mrs. Torrance’s in Keppel Street not a week after Kitty came to us, and she told me herself that she had not been ill. Of course she had not the least notion that Kitty had alleged that as her reason for wishing to come to us; she merely thought it had been all our kindness in inviting her. No,” she went on, as Lady Constance opened her mouth to speak, “I didn’t disillusion her. I only wish now that I had done, and then sent Kitty packing back to Devonshire. That has been my only fault in this affair!”
She arose and began pacing impatiently up and down the long room. They would have to come to some decision soon, she felt, for Kitty must already be growing uneasy upstairs as the note she had been expecting failed to arrive, and they had no way of knowing what imprudences she might be led into, in her anxiety not to fail in arriving at the chosen rendezvous. Addision had used the words, “as we planned,” so that it was obvious the matter had been discussed by them previously, and Kitty might well be aware of the chaise even now awaiting her arrival in Bruton Street. She would have only to slip out of the house and walk to the fatal corner, and she would be whisked away to her meeting with Addison in Welwyn.
And if someone else were to go in her place? the thought suddenly came into Cressida’s mind. If Addison were to find, as he stepped forward to hand a blushing and inexperienced girl from the chaise in the inn-yard of the White Hart, that what he had got instead was the dashing Miss Calverton, armed with cool sarcasms and fully prepared to spread the tale of his discomfiture all over London—?
“I have it!” she announced triumphantly. “The very thing! I shall go in Kitty’s place!”
Lady Cons
tance, who was still mulling Kitty’s duplicity in the matter of Mrs. Mills indignantly over in her mind, looked at her mistrustfully.
“What did you say, dear?” she enquired.
“I said, I shall go in her place!” Cressida repeated impatiently, making for the door.
Lady Constance gave a faint shriek.
“Now, don’t, pray don’t fly up into the boughs!” Cressida admonished her, pausing to give her a bracing hug. “I promise you, I shall be quite all right, but I intend to give Mr. Drew Addison the shock of his life! I daresay he will not try a second time to elope with Kitty when he realises I have the power to let everyone in London into the jest of his having laid the most elaborate plans to carry off one young lady, only to find that he had actually got quite another, who had not the least intention of becoming his innocent victim! And everyone in London shall know of it, if I do not receive his most solemn assurance that he will never attempt anything of the sort again! Dear ma’am, pray don’t try to stop me,” she added, as Lady Constance, almost overcome with incredulous astonishment and disapproval, again began uttering objections, “for I have quite made up my mind to go! Only let me put on a close bonnet that will hide my face—though I am sure the postillions who are waiting with the chaise in Bruton Street are hired, and have no notion what Kitty looks like—and I shall be off!”
She sped out of the room, giving Lady Constance a last reassuring hug, and in the hall directed Harbage to have the barouche brought round at once. Ten minutes later, having made a rapid change into a demure blue gown of French cambric, and with a large Pamela bonnet concealing her tawny curls and the greater part of her face, she was seating in her carriage on her way to Bond Street, having left Lady Constance almost distracted in the drawing room, with her vinaigrette close at hand, and quite certain that this fateful day would not come to an end before she had seen the utter ruin of one or both of the young ladies now under her charge.