Lady Roma's Romance

by Cynthia Bailey Pratt

  “Oh, yes,” Miss Livia sighed. “So dashing. I heard it was based on an event that actually happened in Italy.”

  “Truthfully? How dreadful. He did have quite a fierce look in his eyes, I thought. It’s a wonder the young lady can bear it night after night.”

  “It must be wonderful to be an actress,” Miss Livia said.

  Roma left them to their raptures in order to devote herself to Lady Brownlow. “Have you everything you want, dear?”

  “Oh, yes. This iced punch is quite delicious. Most refreshing. I wonder how they make it,” she said, licking her lips as if to analyze each flavor.

  “A pity they had no champagne.” Dina sat flicking her fan to and fro, even though the theater was not overly warm. She had stated that she’d seen the play before but had preferred seeing it again rather than sit at home alone.

  “Shall I bring you some, Mrs. Derwent?” Mr. Morningstreet offered.

  “You mean they do have it? By all means, let us go and seek it out. Punch is rather insipid.”

  Roma noticed that quiet Mrs. Morningstreet watched them go with a faint line traced between her brows. But when asked if anything was not to her liking, she smiled sweetly and began to talk about the play again.

  Only after the curtain had risen upon the third act did Roma realize her father had not returned. Neither had Dina or Mr. Morningstreet.

  Roma left her chair and, as discreetly as possible, made her way to the rear of the box. A hand grasped hers. “What is it?” Bret asked under cover of the last dying conversation from the audience in the pit.

  “Father,” she whispered. “He’s so absent-minded ...”

  “Stay here. Enjoy the play. I’ll go.”

  She shook her head and, drawing her hand from his, went on. Bret opened the door for her. In the deserted hall, they met two of the truants. Dina stood between Mr. Morningstreet’s arms, his hands pressed against the wall beside her head. Though they were not kissing, there was a drugged, dazed look on each face that spoke of reason enough for guilt, even if they did not feel it themselves. Traces of lip rouge dotted Mr. Morningstreet’s chin.

  Roma had believed herself to be entirely mature and even worldly. Yet this blatant display of her cousin’s infidelity shocked her to the core. She glanced swiftly up and down the narrow corridor. Fortunately, no one was about now that the play had recommenced. “Are you mad?”

  “Why, yes,” Dina answered smugly. “Quite mad with love.”

  “Lady Roma, Bret, believe me,” Mr. Morningstreet said hastily. “Mrs. Derwent and I... my intentions are honorable.”

  “Hush,” Roma said abruptly, “not here. You must go in. Pretend the buckle came off your shoe, Dina. Anything. But hurry.”

  Bret looked at Roma with surprise as the couple went past, Dina Derwent’s nose high in the air. “You’re quick with a tale when needed.”

  “Dina, of all people.”

  “Why not Dina?”

  “She’s married,” Roma explained, and Bret laughed.

  “Don’t tell me you never suspect married people of having emotions, You are sweet.”

  “I hate that kind of cynical talk. Of course married people have feelings. But a good woman suppresses them when they are for men other than her husband.”

  “Little innocent,” he said, but the laughter had gone out of his voice. “You’ll make some man a fine wife one day.”

  “I may yet do so. Now help me find Father. Dina’s difficulties will have to wait.”

  But the earl was not to be found. “Unless he’s wandered into another box,” Bret said, “I think we must conclude he has left the building. Do you think he forgot why he was here?”

  “He’s not that forgetful,” Roma said. “Though it is possible he went into another party’s box. They might not like to embarrass him by asking him what he is doing.”

  “True. Politeness has its drawbacks. What do you think your father is doing?”

  “I think ... I think he may have gone to rescue a damsel in distress. In which case, I may have the chance to be a fine wife sooner than I thought.”

  * * * *

  Lord Yarborough couldn’t recall the last time he’d walked through the streets of Bath at night. A natural-born early riser, he enjoyed getting a good advance on his daily work before the rest of the world had rubbed the sleep from their eyes. Besides, the English countryside at night was black as the inside of a dog. Walking about after nightfall was likely to result in disasters large or small, from a broken leg to wandering into an occupied pasture.

  But in Bath, light gleamed from windows and flickered from street lamps, pools of orange light forming at his feet. The very rattle of wheels over the paving stones seemed hushed by the slight fog that had settled over the city. It had been coming on when they left for the theater, but now it swirled and broke apart upon his passing. No London fog, choking with yellow sulfurs, it did not impede him in any way, only softening the lights and the sounds until he seemed the only living soul in a world populated by preoccupied ghosts.

  Though wisdom dictated going slowly, his lordship strode along, his habitual stoop straightening out, his well-fitting black clothes no impediment to his speed. He knew the address of the house he sought, and thank heaven, Bath was laid out on a sensible plan. He thought about the Roman love of straight roads, realizing anew the sense of creating “the shortest distance between two points.” One point was his heart; the other resided behind one of these doors.

  When Mrs. Keane had arrived with only her youngest daughter in tow, he’d been disappointed out of all proportion to the time he’d spent with Sabina. It had taken considerable effort to be civil to Mrs. Keane, the cause of his disappointment. All through dinner, he was afraid, he’d been very distracted. He’d been thinking of clever ways to circumvent Mrs. Keane’s evident wish to keep her eldest daughter out of male society. He thought of spying on the house to seize a chance when Sabina’s mother would not be home. He thought of insisting that Roma continue to invite all the Keane ménage until Sabina appeared. He considered suborning their servants with large bribes to inform him of those times when Sabina would be alone. He realized that it was not art he wished to discuss nor even Roman remains. He wanted to look into her beautiful, speaking eyes and feel like the young fool he’d never been.

  He’d paid no attention whatever to the play, caught up in this revolution of all his long-held ideas. Perhaps he was suffering from a St. Martin’s summer in the September of his life. Perhaps he was in love.

  Halfway through the second act, a beautiful thought occurred to him. Mrs. Keane was not at home now. She was here. Only Mrs. Martin was home with Sabina (he discounted the story of Sabina’s illness as an invention) . Mrs. Martin already knew they had met and had not, possibly, revealed that fact. He’d left as soon as the interval began.

  Lord Yarborough jumped up her staircase two steps at a time. Not even out of breath, he rapped impatiently at the door. There was a pause which, in his present mood, he could hardly bear. He knocked again, then heard the slight rattle as a hand came to rest on the doorknob. “Yes?” Not the voice of a servant but of a lady, hesitant and uneasy.

  “Miss Keane, if you please. Miss Sabina Keane.” Not a name to be shouted, it had a liquid feel in his mouth, as if he sipped at a brandy too fine to be swilled or gulped. It took a connoisseur to appreciate the delicacy, the fineness, of a name like Sabina. He didn’t care for Keane, though. “Sabina” was worthy of a greater dignity than could be afforded by a single syllable. One did not serve the choicest liqueur in a tin mug.

  The door opened a crack and then widened to display Mrs. Martin. She peered at him until the light fell upon him. “Why, it’s Lord Yarborough. La, what a fright you gave us.”

  “Is Miss Keane at home? Is she well?”

  If Mrs. Martin had wished to hold the door against him, she failed before she began. He was pushing open the door and was in the house before she could say anything.

  “I am here. I am qui
te well.”

  She stood upright as a lily on the threshold between the entry and the room beyond. A plain girl in a mobcap stood half beside her, half behind her, like a handmaiden to Venus. Her smile eliminated any hint of the ridiculous from his forcing his way into her home at such an unconventional hour. Nor did it falter when he said, foolishly, “Would you care to take a walk with me?”

  “I should like it more than anything in the world,” she said, taking no notice of her sister’s gabbling protest that it was after ten, there was a fog getting up, and she didn’t know what on earth Mother would say.

  The maid flitted away to bring hat and coat and gloves, but Sabina and Lord Yarborough gazed into each other’s eyes and the wait seemed of only an instant’s duration. Then they were leaving, and Mrs. Martin flapped her hands at the maid, demanding her own outside garments. “Hurry, hurry. I must follow them. He’s mad, I think, or he’s bewitched her. Hurry.”

  But time did not perform tricks for her, and her fingers refused to slip into the right casings while the strings of her hat were no sooner tied than they came undone again. The more she hurried, the more tangled she became. Hastening down the steps while still fastening her pelisse, she was met by thin white fog and a slight echo of conversation. “You will call me Roger, won’t you?”

  “Oh, yes. I shall.”

  Though Mrs. Martin often heard tantalizing pieces of conversation filtered through the fog, she never caught up with her sister. Twice she thought she had, only to apologize profusely to the utter strangers she had accosted.

  When Mrs. Keane and her youngest daughter’s chairs appeared at their house after a pleasant evening, they found only the maid fluttering about from window to door like a moth trapped indoors. Her account of the happenings was disjointed and backward. “Someone made off with Julia?”

  “Perhaps my brother-in-law arrived unexpectedly,” Livia proposed, hardly troubling to cover her yawn.

  But her mother was listening to the servant’s explanations and enlargements. “He came and took Sabina away? Who was this person?”

  “Should we summon a constable, do you think?”

  “Do be quiet, Livvie.” She continued questioning the servant as gently as she could under the circumstances. It was only at the very end of this that the girl could be brought to produce the name Mrs. Martin had pronounced when the “big man with ooh such a wild look in his eye” had first entered.

  “Lord Yarborough? Are you sure?” Upon assurance, Mrs. Keane pressed her still-gloved hand to her heart. “Lord Yarborough and Sabina of all people. Sabina! I could understand him choosing a bright and lively young creature such as yourself, but...”

  “Mama! He’s quite old.”

  “Never despise a title, my child, even if it comes attached to a Methuselah. Besides, he’s not so much older than I. But Sabina, of all people.”

  “She’s quite pretty in a kind light, you know.”

  “Yes, but she has no charm, no conversation.”

  “Maybe he’s not interested in talking to her. Most men don’t care if a girl can talk or not.”

  “Livvie!” Mrs. Keane exclaimed, shocked but not displeased by this grasp of the realities of life which she’d not known her daughter to possess.

  “Sometimes they just want you to listen.”

  “Well, yes, that, too.” Mrs. Keane turned to the maid. “What time was all this madness?”

  But the maid could make no guess at that. She started to cry, and Mrs. Keane had some work to do to keep the girl from giving notice. She wished heartily that she’d not allowed the upper servants a free evening. Perhaps one of them could have kept Lord Yarborough there long enough for a woman to ascertain his intentions. She could only just grasp the implications of having a daughter who might well become a countess.

  She hardly knew whether she should hope for it or not. However, a moment’s reflection on the chagrin of friends and relations brought a smile to her lips. They had thought Mr. Martin had been a very good catch for the daughter of a small-town solicitor. They hadn’t believed her when she’d told them sending Julia to an expensive school would reap well-placed friends. They hadn’t understood her ambition. True, she had not thought that Sabina would be the one—she’d been grooming Livvie for a grand marriage—but she would not let that stand in the way of her triumph.

  It seemed so wonderful a state of affairs that she hardly dared to hope that it might be true. She sent Livvie and the girl to bed, taking over the latter’s pacing duties. After a time, the door opened and closed, but it proved to be Julia. Mrs. Keane listened with only half her attention to the tale she told.

  Leaving her post, she put a hot brick into Julia’s bed and rubbed her chilled flesh with a rough towel before tucking her up.

  “I don’t know what got into Sabina,” Julia kept saying. “I never would have behaved like that with Martin.”

  “I know, dear heart. I know. You’ve never been one to throw your cap over the windmill. You’re such a comfort to me. To think that Sabina, of all people ...” She still couldn’t see the attraction.

  When she came downstairs again, the front door was ajar. Two figures stood on the step outside, speaking in whispers, his black cloak enfolding them both. “You may as well come in and be comfortable,” Mrs. Keane said.

  Sabina’s face was glowing and not from the cold. Lord Yarborough kept one arm about her shoulders, the white silk lining of his cape pouring over her. The sparkle of happiness in his eyes belied the sunburned lines beneath them, while she turned her face up to his like a blind woman seeking the sun’s blaze. He didn’t even glance at Mrs. Keane when he asked for Sabina’s hand.

  Chapter Eleven

  Roma heard the creak of the second stair from the top as he came up very late that night. She’d been waiting for him, wrapped in a warm shawl, seated in a chair she’d pulled up close to the door. She was perfectly aware that she resembled nothing so much as an overanxious mother waiting for a wayward son to come home from a night on the spree.

  “Father?” she softly called, opening her bedroom door a crack.

  “You shouldn’t have waited for me,” he whispered. “But I’m so happy you did.”

  Even by the light of her single candle, she could see the changes in him. In a few hours, ten years at least had flown away from his eyes. The lightness in his step belonged to a young man, and his smile was unshadowed.

  “What happened?” she asked, though she’d already guessed. She would not spoil his surprise by stealing his thunder. “You vanished from the theater.”

  “I’m sorry. I should have spoken to you before I left. I simply didn’t think of it.”

  “That’s all right. You hardly need account for your movements to me. Where did you go?”

  “Miss Keane’s house.” He took his hands out of his pockets, the better to gesture with. “I can’t wait until you meet her, Roma. I’m sure you’ll find her everything that is sympathetic and kind.”

  “I’m sure I shall,” Roma said, though she had her doubts. “Father, are you going to marry her?”

  He nodded. “Do you mind terribly?”

  Roma knew that if she hesitated or gave him less enthusiasm than he deserved, she might cause a shadow to fall over his happiness. Therefore, instantly, she gave him a dazzling smile and stepped forward to fling her arms about him. “I couldn’t be happier! I’ve longed for you to find someone to be by your side forever.”

  He kissed her cheek, patting her back. “You’re a dear girl, Roma. I know this is a shock. I’m rather shocked myself. I never thought...”

  Roma sat down again. “Tell me all about her, Father. Where did you meet?”

  “At the museum. Well, she says we met several times last year and I remember that, but we never actually spoke until here in Bath.”

  That was so like him. “Is she very pretty?”

  He pursed his lips. “I should say she is very pretty. Such a speaking countenance, if you understand me. She doesn’t say very
much, or perhaps I chatter so that she can’t squeeze a word in. She’s a delight.”

  Though she could not imagine her taciturn father “chattering,” his excitement tonight prompting more words than she usually heard from him in a fortnight, she could well imagine that a very quiet girl might prompt him to fill in the silences himself. Certainly, if he found her as sympathetic as he said, he might want to say things to her that long silences with his daughter would not call forth. Roma suppressed a pang of envy. “What do you talk about?”

  “Art.”

  “Art? Roman art?”

  “Yes, that as well. She’s a fine artist. Her watercolors are charming. Her sketches capture so much of the person, if you know what I mean. I think I will turn the smaller of the morning rooms at Yarborough into a studio for her. It gets only northern light as you know, and no one wants to sit there except in high summer.”

  “That’s true,” Roma said. “Remember how Great-grandfather’s tame artist used it when he had that portrait done of Great-grandmother.”

  “Yes. I shall write to Mr. Brayle and set the conversion in train. Perhaps add that door to the knot garden that we have discussed so often. Paints and such are rather smelly, I believe. Ventilation will be important. Sabina said something about wanting to work in clay as well. She’s remarkably talented.”

  “I believe you. Let me write to Mr. Brayle, Father. I know where the plans are that that architect drew for Great-grandfather when he toyed with the idea of having an artist permanently installed.”

  “Yes, excellent. I shall leave it in your hands, Roma.”

  “Thank you. I should be very happy to do something for my new stepmother.”

  Lord Yarborough frowned. “Do you think you should call her that? She’s so young...”

  “I know. I believe she’s only a year or two older than . . . than Mrs. Martin. But she will be my stepmother, Father, whether I call her so or not.”

  For the first time, his happiness seemed to dim a trifle. Roma instantly set out to restore it to its former gleam. “And just think how all your friends will envy you, Father. None of them will have so charming and lovely a bride.”