Lady Roma's Romance

by Cynthia Bailey Pratt

  Mrs. Derwent had been watching and listening with a frown of incomprehension. “Are you talking of the Marbles?” she asked. “I confess I was disappointed. So many fragments and not a whole figure to be seen. I don’t know what the fuss was about, though Derwent tried to explain. But I feel that if the Greeks want them back, they should have them. Though Lord Elgin should offer to make repairs first.”

  “I believe he intends to sell them to the British Museum if a price can be agreed upon,” Bret said, remembering the duty he owed his hostess. Keeping the conversation going was the first requirement of a good guest, and he knew that he and Lady Roma had been talking rather above Mrs. Derwent’s head. Yet the warm sense of comfort in his heart had grown. It was just as well that she seemed to have no notion of flirtation. Bret felt that he’d found a friend in her. To lose this friendship to the conventional roles of male and female would disappoint him to say the least. Who had said that the first requisite of friendship was the ability to laugh at the same things?

  They discussed the Marbles and the Royal Academy and the theater. Mrs. Derwent accepted Bret’s invitation to make one of his party to the Theater Royal. “Will Mr. Derwent be able to join us as well, or shall I have the privilege of escorting three enchantresses all alone?”

  “Oh, Derwent will most likely be home by then. I never know when to expect him. May I say, Mr. Donovan, that dressing gown becomes you far more than it ever did Derwent. He insists on wearing some tatty old thing he’s had since his days at the University. Quite beyond human aid but he will not permit me to touch it. He knows I should throw it on the fire.”

  “It must be a sentimental attachment,” Lady Roma said, apparently not a whit disturbed by the unusual, not to mention intimate, turn of the conversation. Then he saw the twitching muscle in her cheek. He studied the carpet in detail, afraid that if he looked at her again, he’d laugh. Then he glanced up at the exact instant that her gaze sought his.

  Bret choked audibly. Mrs. Derwent stared at him in some alarm. “Are you well, Mr. Donovan?”

  “A crumb,” he said hoarsely, putting his fingers to his throat.

  Then Roma sputtered, and the two of them broke into laughter, each echoing the other and their mirth mingling. Mrs. Derwent sat in confused dignity until Roma stood up and crossed to her. Stooping to kiss her cheek, she said, “Dina, you are ridiculous. Imagine discussing your husband’s dressing gown at a tea party.”

  “Husbands are too confounding not to discuss diem,” Mrs. Derwent said. “I thought Mr. Donovan, being a man, might be able to tell me why a man with such a handsome dressing gown would insist on wearing some out-at-elbow thing his mother made quite thirty years ago. Believe me, Roma, had you married Elliot, you’d be grateful for anyone who could explain him to you,”

  Suddenly the pink flowered in Mrs. Derwent’s cheeks, and she pressed the pads of two fingers to her lips. “That’s right,” she said from behind them. “You said something about the date. This is the anniversary of when Elliot died, isn’t it?”

  The smile did not fade from Lady Roma’s lips. Better if it had. The smile solidified there, rigid as though carved in stone. “Yes. It was today.”

  “That’s why you went to visit Lady Brownlow.”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, my poor dear. Have a scone.”

  Chapter Four

  Having sent one of the Derwents’ servants ahead to acquaint Lady Brownlow with the small calamity that had overtaken him, he returned to an unconcerned aunt more than two hours after he’d left. So far as Bret could tell, she’d not moved an inch in any direction. Still ensconced in her chair, she greeted him with a brilliant, loving smile and a “Well?”

  Bret ensured the door was shut tightly behind him. “You look like a robin awaiting the first worm of spring, all eager anticipation and yearning.”

  “What a dreadful image,” she said. The pert angle of her head and the brightness of her eye made the resemblance complete.

  “I should have said a very pretty robin.”

  “That’s all right, then. But come,” she said, indicating a chair near to her. “Tell me ...”

  He sank down on one of the herd of footstools clustered about her. “What would you like to know, dearest of my aunts?”

  “Don’t be so provoking, Bret. What did you think of Roma? Isn’t she the most delightful girl? Though I suppose I shouldn’t call her that. She’s hardly a girl. A young woman, gracious and mature. Not a giddy, thoughtless chit. Do you know she has never once failed to visit me when she is in Bath? Not only on the anniversary of poor Elliot’s death, but often for no reason at all. Merely to sit with me for an hour or to bring me a pot of my favorite preserves. She makes her own jam, you know, from the fruit she forces at Yarborough. Really, you know, I think she’s a homebody at heart. All this jaunting around with her father is certainly undertaken out of a sense of her duty toward him, not for her own pleasure.”

  Bret chuckled. “Does she raise her own hens and sew her own clothes as well?”

  “I don’t know about the hens, but I’m sure she could sew her own clothes if she wished. Her mother was a very thorough woman and surely must have taught her ...” She came as near to frowning as her look of perpetual good humor would permit. “Are you teasing me?”

  “Are you matchmaking?”

  “Certainly not,” Indignant, Lady Brownlow wriggled in her seat. “As if I’d do anything so vulgar. However, I can’t help thinking that it would be a vastly convenient thing if the two of you did ... like one another.”

  “One would have to be extremely hard to please not to find Lady Roma charming and her company delightful.”

  Lady Brownlow sighed with pleasure. “She is a sweet child, isn’t she?”

  “I wouldn’t describe her that way.”

  ‘You didn’t find her sweet?”

  “She’s no child.”

  Bret found himself thinking of Lady Roma’s eyes, not their color, but their depth. They showed warm friendliness toward a stranger who might have been a relation but were shadowed by the memory of grief. He had felt her gaze upon him, as if eager to find some trace of his cousin in his face or manner. He feared he’d disappointed her. He and Elliot had been nothing alike. They had not shared one taste in common, nor one interest.

  From his boyhood, Bret had been mad for the army. His games were all about horses and valiant battles. At school, he’d naturally gravitated toward other boys with the same obsession. Those who were still alive were still serving, all but those, like himself, who were too damaged to continue.

  “How did she and Elliot meet?”

  * * * *

  Roma leaned back in her cousin’s cozy bedroom chair and watched as Dina struggled out of her dress. “Dreadful rag,” she said, giving it a vicious little kick to send it flying, landing in a huddled mess on the floor. “I shall give it to my maid. That will show Madame Le Gros I am no counter jumper’s wife to be fobbed off with a copied gown.”

  “Very wise.”

  “I should like to see Madame’s face when Lucy Preston tells her that my maid is wearing her dress. Perhaps I shall have Pruett promenade up and down in front of Madame’s shop wearing it. Or would that be too obvious?”

  “I’m sure Pruett will enjoy the dress whatever the circumstances.”

  “I think she does deserve a little token,” Dina said complacently, wrapping herself around with the very latest style of dressing gown. “She’s quite the best maid I’ve had yet. And you needn’t worry about talk; she’s a perfect clam. Never utters a word about me or my friends. Or my relations.”

  Though Roma flattered herself that her posture was no less easy, suddenly the comfortable chair had developed an astonishing collection of lumps. “Why should she want to talk about your relations?”

  “Oh, well...” Dina hitched her shoulder in a gesture particularly her own that might mean something or nothing at all depending on her mood and the subject at hand. After Dina had reached her maturity, her
governess, one Miss Langley, had left Dina’s parents’ house to spend the next several years teaching Roma at Yarborough. Miss Langley had been very strict about shrugging, calling it a “nasty French habit.” Now Roma wondered how much of Miss Langley’s dislike had been caused by Dina’s affection for the gesture.

  “Why should Pruett have anything to say about me?” Roma demanded again.

  Under this firmer questioning, Dina gave a little laugh. “They love to talk about their betters amongst themselves, these girls, and if there’s nothing of interest to say, they use their invention. Anything to make themselves consequential.”

  “Invention would find little enough to work on in my case,” Roma said confidently, yet perhaps there was a touch of wistfulness in her tone. Had her life become so dull that she could not offer even one sop to a gossiping maid’s imagination?

  “They don’t need very much,” Dina said somewhat absently. She peered at herself in her dressing table mirror. Frowning, she rubbed at a small spot on the side of her nose, then began to rummage among the porcelain bottles and pots arrayed before her. Finding what she wanted, she daubed some lotion on her nose and rubbed it well in. Then she returned to her subject.

  “Why, just permitting a man to see me home late one evening nearly caused a scandal. Merely because he stayed an hour or two, a ‘kind friend’ wrote screeds and screeds to Mr. Derwent about it. If he had believed that spiteful cat instead of his lawful wife, I might have found myself being divorced in front of Parliament and the king and everyone. That’s not something a married woman lives down, whatever liberty might be granted to someone like you.”

  “Someone like me?” She’d never thought of herself as possessing too much liberty, certainly never enough to misbehave with impunity.

  Dina used the tone of a teacher explaining the ABC’s to a backward child—very patient and slow, each word very clear. “Well-connected, wealthy, tragic.”

  “Tragic? I?”

  “Of course you are. All that sad business with Elliot Brownlow dying only a few days before your wedding. Everyone knows you’ve buried your heart in his grave.”

  “Do they?” Had she? Certainly she had not felt either gladness or sorrow with anything like the force she’d known by Elliot’s side, either well or ill. Even as she felt again the dull, echoing emptiness of losing him, she could smile at Dina’s blurting out the facts of the case when everyone else tiptoed around the subject with clumsy delicacy. Either they never mentioned Elliot at all, treating him almost as an indelicate subject, or apologized for bringing up his name as if she were liable to shatter at the mere forming of the syllables. Not Dina. She reserved her small store of tact for her husband and her grander emotions for herself.

  “I’m beginning to look a perfect hag,” Dina muttered, displeased with her reflection in the glass. “Naturally, everyone understands that men simply don’t interest you anymore. No matter what Pruett might say, no one would believe any scandal about you, even if you did come here, soaking wet, with a strange man. Your explanation would never be questioned.”

  Roma nodded as Dina confirmed her guess about where all this was leading. “Let me assure you that I met Mr. Donovan only this afternoon at Lady Brownlow’s town house.”

  Dina smiled reminiscently, and her limpid eyes grew a little sly. “I met my gentleman friend that very evening at a rout. When a man is thoroughly charming, what is time?”

  Unable to sit any longer, Roma arose and walked swiftly up and down the room. It was Dina’s turn to sit and watch placidly, now rubbing quite a different unguent into her cheeks. “You don’t think Mr. Donovan thought I was flirting with him, do you?” Roma asked plaintively.

  “He’d have to be very stupid if he thought anything of the kind. You can’t flirt, Roma. I’ve watched you for years; you haven’t the least notion how to go about it.”

  “I knew once,” Roma said, remembering.

  “When? When you met Elliot Brownlow? Nonsense. You forget that I was there. If he hadn’t made a dead set at you, you’d still be sitting with your back growing to Almack’s wall.”

  “We didn’t meet at Almack’s.”

  “What on earth are you talking about? Of course you did. You were wearing that white silk gown, the skirt caught up with little golden suns. I remember it perfectly because I wanted to see how the suns were attached and I was very vexed because you never came near me after Elliot asked you to dance.”

  “Your memory is excellent, Dina. I couldn’t tell you what you were wearing.”

  “A dotted Swiss which my mother-in-law had chosen as part of my bride clothes and quite the worst gown I ever put on my back. Too country cousin for words.”

  “Nevertheless . . . that wasn’t the first time Elliot and I had met.”

  * * * *

  “Of course, his father was appalled. Delby was a great believer in keeping to one’s class. If Roma had been the daughter of a City merchant or a banker, your uncle would have welcomed her as if she were his own child.”

  Bret heard an undercurrent of disapproval which his beloved aunt would no more express aloud than she could fly herself twice around the moon. Never by any word or action would she have brought herself to express the commonly held opinion that Sir Delby Brownlow had been one of England’s leading snobs, but there was also no doubt that she knew it. Sir Delby had been a noted adherent of the strenuous occupation known as “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps.” Bret had been far away when Sir Delby’s son and heir proposed to the earl’s daughter, but even in Spain some of the effects of the attendant ructions had reached him.

  Sir Delby had written that he knew “nothing against the gel, but what does Elliot intend to do in ten years’ time with a wife that’s too good for him?” while a businesslike cousin wrote that “dear Elliot has done exceptionally well for himself as her family is said to have any amount of money. The title, unfortunately, is entailed, but no doubt the earl will settle a fine sum on his only child.”

  Bret found it difficult to reconcile these two points of view with the young woman he’d met today. Lady Roma was as far from haughty or too good for her company as she could be. And if anyone looked at her and saw only wealth, that person must be blind to everything but the lure of riches. Neither picture included a pair of gray-green eyes that were too modest to sustain his gaze for long, no matter how bright and kindly her words. Only when she looked at him limping had her eyes met his, and the blaze of anger in them had oddly warmed him.

  “What did Lady Roma make of Uncle Delby, I wonder?”

  “She was always the soul of politeness. Very well bred girl, though she could not have agreed with him. Elliot, of course, tried his best to talk his father around, but words were of no use. Yet I think, given time, she would have convinced even Delby of the suitability of the match. They were so happy together, so very happy.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought they’d have a great many subjects in common,” Bret said, thinking of Elliot.

  Lady Brownlow sighed, caught up in romantic visions. “How much does any young couple have in common? In time, she would have adopted his interests and let the ones he disapproved of drop away. Women adapt themselves to marriage much more readily than men do. We like a quiet life.”

  “Elliot disapproved of something Lady Roma liked?”

  “Oh, that’s too strong,” she said, twisting a thread from her shawl about her finger. “He didn’t disapprove so much as thought it beneath her.”

  “What was that?”

  “Oh, frivolity. I told him that she would settle down once they were married. Every girl comes to find that peace and quiet, a happy home, gives her more joy than racketing about London. Of course, it was her first Season, and such things undoubtedly go to a girl’s head.”

  Bret had great difficulty picturing Lady Roma as a giddy, pleasure-seeking hedonist. “Did you find her to be so hot-at-hand, Aunt?”

  “Well, no, but then I didn’t meet dear Roma until they were already eng
aged, though before it was given out. He brought her to visit us at Packings. I could tell it wasn’t at all what she’d been used to. But nothing could have been more gracious than her manner to me.” Lady Brownlow smiled, a warm, motherly expression. Bret could imagine that even a thoughtless young girl would be touched by such a look. Lady Roma must have liked Lady Brownlow at sight.

  “I remember her begging me to tell her any little thing that would please Elliot. I gave her my receipt for new potatoes pickled in wine. Elliot was always so fond of. . .” She turned her head aside, closing her eyes tightly as she fumbled in her lap for her handkerchief. After a moment, she sniffed, blinked, and seemed grateful to find Bret still there.

  “A few weeks later, we went to Yarborough. Elliot and his lordship were already on the best of terms. It had been quite agreed that Elliot would take over the position of agent, in order to spare his lordship all those little details of the estate that kept him from concentrating on his important investigations. Lord Yarborough was so grateful when Elliot said he’d have no objection to Roma’s continuing to live at Yarborough after they were married.”

  “How was Elliot occupying his time before all this?” He didn’t particularly long to hear the details of Elliot’s last days, but he felt it did his aunt considerable good to talk about him as much as she liked.

  “He’d been studying for the bar, but I never felt the law was the right field for him. You remember how he so loved the countryside. He was never happier than when at our little country home.”

  Bret held his tongue. There were rules regarding discussing the beloved dead, and one of them said that to contradict the deceased mother on the glories of the late child’s character was in poor taste at best. If Elliot had liked the country, Bret felt, it was only because the country was less expensive than the town, even when one’s parents paid for all. He’d never been generous, not with jam tarts as a boy, not by standing the nonsense as a man.

  But Elliot, it seemed, had shown his usual talent for landing feet first in a pot of jam. A beautiful wife eager to please him, a compliant father-in-law willing to provide him with both position and rent-free lodging, as well as, no doubt, suitable financial arrangements, all would have been Elliot’s. He wondered what Elliot had thought about it. Had it hurt his pride to have such a life handed to him? Or had he been so in love with Lady Roma that he would have taken her without so much as a half crown in hand?