Mary Or The Perils 0f Imprudence

by Catherine Bowness

  Mary tucked her hand into it and walked with tottering steps to his lordship’s curricle. She heard Mr Armitage’s horse’s hooves resume their journey as she reached it and could not help a heavy sigh escaping her.

  “Allow me, Miss Best,” the Viscount said, picking her up without more ado and depositing her on the seat. “Thank you, Manning,” he added to his groom, taking the reins from him and preparing to turn the vehicle.

  “I left my reticule on the road. We came from the other direction,” Mary said, pointing back the way she had come.

  “Did you? I suppose Mr Armitage was so concerned about your health that he did not notice. We will go at once to pick it up.”

  “Thank you,” Mary said in a small voice, untying the ribbons of her bonnet and placing it once more upon her head before retying them with shaking fingers.

  “What happened to you?” his lordship asked. “Were you on your way to do some shopping?”

  “Yes. Her ladyship had asked me to go to Tunbridge Wells to buy some playing cards and counters for her card party.”

  “It is a long way to walk to Tunbridge Wells,” his lordship observed. “You would hardly be there before nightfall and I imagine the shops would have been closed by the time you arrived.”

  “Oh, I was not intending to walk all the way. I set off in the gig but it cast a wheel. I sent Potter back on the horse to fetch the carriage and decided to walk while I was waiting. That was when Mr Armitage rode past and recognised me.”

  “I see. Did he knock you over? He seems inclined to proceed at a perilous rate.”

  “Yes. No, he did not. I was still upon my feet when he stopped.”

  “And offered to convey you home? Very kind, I’m sure, but an odd way to carry you.”

  “Yes; he is somewhat precipitate in character,” she explained.

  “Indeed. When I accosted you, you asked for my help. In fact, I seem to recall that you accused him of abducting you.”

  “I was funning,” she muttered, turning her face away.

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “I am sure I shall have an enormous bruise upon my back where he pinned me to the horse,” she said. “Otherwise, no.”

  “I noticed scratches upon his face,” his lordship continued in a quiet voice. “Was he obliged to extract you from a bramble bush?”

  Mary hunched a shoulder and admitted, “We had a difference of opinion. Pray do not question me further, my lord.”

  “I believe I should call him out,” Marklye observed heavily. “What did he do to you, Miss Best?”

  “Nothing much; he kissed me; that is all, but he was most insistent upon taking me home and I – I did not wish him to do so. Pray do not call him out; that would be absurd. He has done me no harm and he is Lady Leland’s friend’s son.”

  His lordship was silent for a few moments so that Mary began to hope that he had consented to leave the subject.

  “I have not met him before,” Marklye said after a few moments. “He does not usually reside with his parents, does he? I have met the younger boy, who seems perfectly agreeable.”

  “No, this one is more often in London. I daresay he is heavily dipped and has come on a repairing lease – or a fund-seeking one. Her ladyship has invited him to the card party. I own I hope he decides against it for I am sure he would find our little games – and most particularly our stakes – trivial.”

  “No doubt. I daresay his decision on whether to attend or not will depend to some extent on the strength of his desire to meet you again versus the degree of shame he may – should - feel at his treatment of you. Has he kissed you before? Is he, perhaps, by way of being a suitor?”

  “Certainly not! Do you suppose that I would allow myself to be pursued by a man whose manner of ‘helping’ a female involves carrying her across his saddle like a parcel? In any event, I am not the sort of woman he would court; he has need of a fortune.”

  “But you will have one, will you not?”

  “What in the world makes you think that likely?” she exclaimed in shocked tones.

  “The invitation to her ladyship’s card party, which stated quite plainly that she was getting up a little entertainment during which she planned to announce her decision to make you her heiress. Did you not know that?”

  “I most certainly did not! I wrote the invitations and there was no such statement.”

  “There was by the time they arrived at their destinations – at least there was when mine did. The announcement was made on an additional piece of paper which was inserted alongside the card. If Mr Armitage has seen it he already knows that you are an heiress.”

  “I am certain that he does not for he is only now on his way to his parents’ house. But I am afraid you are probably right: if he supposes me to have the promise of a fortune he might well decide to pursue me in a more proper manner.”

  “I was correct then in surmising that his manner of carrying you was not one he would have employed if he had judged you his equal – or even his superior?”

  “No, it was not, but pray do not call him out. I am perfectly well able to look after myself; there is absolutely no necessity for you to be brandishing swords or pistols at him in the early morning.”

  “But I have always wanted to fight a duel and have never found a suitable reason to issue a challenge – or behaved badly enough for anyone else to call me out. Would you deny me that excitement?”

  Marklye’s voice shook slightly as he spoke but Mary was not inclined to see the humour in the situation. She replied firmly, “Yes, I would. He is a bad man and he might kill you.”

  “Would you mind?”

  “It would be grossly unfair if you were to lose your life because you came across me having a slight altercation with such a man. I am perfectly well and wish you would stop talking about it.”

  “Very well.”

  They continued in silence for a short distance until Mary said, “She must have written the note after she sent me out. Oh, why in the world did she do that?”

  “I imagine she wanted people to know the true state of affairs and suspected that, if she asked you to write it, you would demur.”

  “Yes, I would have done. Oh, how am I to hold up my head now?”

  Chapter 19

  “Oh!” Susan cried, jumping up from the log and going towards the music teacher, her heart almost breaking with pity. “Pray do not … it is not that you do not play beautifully, it is only that I … that it makes me feel … I hardly know. But I do know that I should not be here, that Mama would be exceedingly angry if she knew what I was doing.”

  Signor Pontielli did not seem comforted by her concern. He moved away from her outstretched hand, a look of horror upon his face. “Are you sorry for me?” he cried as though she had pierced him with a blade.

  “Yes … no, of course I am not! Why should I be sorry for you? You are grown-up and free. Only I have never … this is entirely new to me and I hardly know how to go on.”

  “Ah!” he said, enlightenment evidently striking him. He advanced the step he had withdrawn, took her hand – which he had dropped when he stepped back – and swept her into his arms again, pressing his beautiful lips upon hers once more.

  This time, although startled and barely more experienced than she had been a few minutes before, she had some inkling – some faint understanding – of the feelings such contact between a man and a woman might evoke.

  For a moment she submitted, almost swooning within his embrace, but then her sense of propriety, together with an unwelcome image of her mother’s expression suddenly appearing before her mind’s eye, caused her to struggle as much against her own feelings and her mother’s imagined ones as against his actions.

  “I cannot!” she cried when he loosed his hold slightly in response. “What would Mama think?”

  “I should imagine she would be envious.”

  “Envious? She would be horrified; she would think me utterly lost. Oh, what have I done?” she cried, pushing
him away and stumbling backwards.

  “I hope you have fallen in love,” he said, “for I have done. Dearest Susan: I asked you earlier if you would become my wife; you received my request with some degree of shock and I did not like then to press my suit. You were no doubt taken aback by my presumption but I must ask again: will you – could you - can you, in short, give me any hope?”

  This time, as with his second kiss, she was less startled but, beyond being able to control her features a little more exactly, found herself not a great deal more confident in her ability to give a sensible – and true – answer.

  “I do not know,” she stammered, knowing that she must make a reply sooner rather than later; too long a pause would be unforgivable and would, besides, lead him to draw a perhaps erroneous conclusion. “Papa – and Mama - would never countenance it – I am certain of that; I know they have ambitions for me and would not …” She broke off, not wishing to hurt his feelings by admitting that her parents had engaged a music tutor in order to improve her chances of marrying a man with a title, not in order that she should ally herself to the tutor himself.

  “They would be outraged if you were to throw yourself away on a mere musician,” he supplied in a bitter tone, letting his arms, which had remained loosely around her, drop and turning away with an air of dejection.

  “Yes, I am afraid they would. I am sorry if such an admission causes you pain, Signor, but it would be wrong of me to allow you to think that there is any hope.” Once embarked on this, in her imagination, practised, statement she grew a little more confident, her voice gaining strength.

  “But you – if you were not obliged to marry a nobleman, which is, I assume, what your parents are seeking - would you consider me? I am some years older than you but I hope that would not weigh with you.”

  “No,” she agreed doubtfully. “Of course it would not. But, Signor Pontielli, I hardly know you – and you hardly know me.” Now she had embarked, quite without meaning to, on the nub of the matter. “Do you truly wish to ally yourself to a – a girl who can neither sing nor play with any degree of talent?”

  “An ability to sing and play the pianoforte is not essential in a wife,” he said flatly.

  “No, but would you not seek such a – such an ability in your wife, Signor?”

  “The character of my wife is of far greater importance to me than her musical ability – or lack thereof. Above all, I seek the affection of the woman I want to accompany me through life’s hazards and I am convinced that, although shocked and surprised, you did not find my caresses disagreeable. As a consequence, I allowed myself to hope that you would not dismiss my suit out of hand. Was I mistaken?”

  “No,” she replied bluntly, “but I should not have done. I mean I should have found them disagreeable; I cannot think what came over me. Pray, Signor, pray do not press me. You have indeed taken me by surprise; I was not expecting anything like this and fear that it may have been my careless conduct which encouraged you to – to take such a liberty.”

  “It was the strength of my feelings,” he said in a low voice, turning back to her with a beseeching look. “I apologise wholeheartedly and promise that it will never happen again – unless you wish it. Although I perfectly understand that you will feel you must tell your mama what transpired between us, I beg that you will not for she would almost certainly send me away immediately. It would break my heart if we were never to see each other again.”

  “No, I shall not tell her,” Susan agreed readily, her own heart quailing at the prospect of his threatened banishment, “for she would indeed be excessively displeased – with me quite as much as with you,” she added, incurably honest. “But I cannot meet you here again.”

  “No, I perfectly understand,” he agreed in a humble tone. “We will conduct our lessons in future with absolute propriety in the music room with either your mama or the maid present at all times.”

  “Yes,” she said in a tone so despairing that his eyes lit with what she could not mistake for anything but renewed hope; they scanned her face as though by such means he could read her mind, which was not difficult on account of her youth and inexperience as well as her instinctive reluctance to deceive.

  She stared at him for a moment, her lips slightly parted, her clear, almost childish, eyes grave, before turning and walking swiftly away from him.

  As she walked, her mind was in turmoil, ranging wildly from the sheer excitement of a man having declared love for her to the awful guilt which she knew was her portion for having – she must have done in some way or another – encouraged such improper behaviour. She should never have agreed to meet him outside the house; why in the world had she if not because somewhere, in the depths of her heart, she had wanted him to make love to her? And now everything was changed: her natural attraction to him, caused partly by his extravagantly handsome looks and partly by his ability to draw a species of magic from musical instruments, had ceased to be merely the fantastical yearnings of a barely grown girl and become instead an episode of actual lovemaking with which she was exceedingly uncomfortable, not only on account of her mother’s likely disapproval but also because in truth she was unsure of her own feelings. She had been flung, with no warning, from the first youthful stirrings of a set of emotions that were entirely new to her into a frightening maelstrom of sensations of which she was afraid.

  She was flattered that such a man – as handsome, nay more handsome, than any hero in a romantic novel from the lending library – should apparently have fallen violently in love with her and should find her so irresistible that he could not refrain from taking her in his arms and pressing his lips to hers. She felt dreadfully sorry for him that he should have conceived such a passionate love for a girl whom she knew quite well to be far from his reach; her parents would never countenance such a match and her friends, although they would no doubt be envious of her having received such a declaration, would be anxious on her behalf for, once a man had kissed a girl, was he not bound to offer her marriage? He had indeed done so but was not she, in honour, bound to accept? If she did not, what did that make her? Little better than a light o’love. How could she have kissed him back? If she had fought him off, she could at least make a claim to having been assaulted – even if she had, at least partially, enjoyed it but to have kissed him back … that was clearly the sign of a female lost to all propriety, one who was doubtless destined to lose her reputation and become an object, certainly of derision and possibly of pity.

  This time when she entered the hall she did not meet Lord Marklye but her mother.

  “Why, wherever have you been, Susan? You look as though you have been dragged through a bush!”

  “I … I went for a walk and then I lost my way,” Susan said, prevaricating wildly. “I have been running this way and that.” She raised a hand and discovered that beneath her bonnet, which she feared must be crooked, her hair was hanging down in thick, tangled strands.

  “Well, I am glad you have found your way back,” Mrs Porter said disapprovingly. “But, really, my dear, you must try a little harder to behave with propriety. I hate to think what anyone who saw you looking like would suppose you to have been doing.”

  “Running through a bush, I suppose,” Susan said, so relieved that her mother did not appear to consider it likely that her errant daughter might have been hiding in a wood and kissing an unsuitable man that she was for once indifferent to the implied criticism.

  “You had better go upstairs immediately and attend to your appearance,” Mrs Porter told her. “Ring for the maid to rearrange your hair. And, in future, it might be advisable to take someone with you when you decide to take a long walk.”

  “Yes, Mama.” Susan untied the ribbons of her bonnet and removed it, at which point her hair fell down so completely that she wondered if, when she was not paying attention, Signor Pontielli had removed some of the pins.

  “You look a fright,” Mrs Porter added as Susan turned to the stairs and began to mount them.
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br />   “Yes, Mama,” she agreed humbly.

  When she reached her room, one glance in the mirror revealed a different girl from the one who had tied on the bonnet before her rendezvous with the music teacher. From the tangle of her hair, which she could not help thinking closely resembled an ungroomed horse’s mane, her face looked out, flushed and, she noticed, much changed. Her lips, so lately comprehensively kissed, were red and – it seemed to her – swollen, her eyes sparkled as brightly as jewels. She leaned forward, pushing the thick strands of hair away from her face, and stared at this altered countenance. For the first time she thought that, although nothing could change her excessive and unfeminine size, her face was not actually half so plain as she had hitherto supposed it to be. She had, usually, a pink complexion; one, unfortunately, much given to flushing with exertion as well as those, far too frequent, occasions when she found herself in an embarrassing situation. She supposed that she did look a fright and, afraid that the too-knowing maid would draw the correct conclusion as to how she had come by her heightened colour and tangled hair, she did not ring the bell immediately but endeavoured to put right at least some of the aspects of her appearance which were so particularly shocking.

  She threw a quantity of cold water from the jug on the washstand into her face to cool it and proceeded thereafter to drag a brush through her hair. This was for some time a painful and not very successful operation but she persisted, attending to one portion at a time until she had untangled it. She had thick, straight hair of a light brown colour which, when it was not horridly knotted, fell to below her waist like a velvet curtain.

  Only when she had bundled it up and inserted a quantity of pins to hold it in place did she ring for the maid. Conscious of having conducted herself in a way that she wished to remain hidden, she felt she had, from the moment when she lied to her mother, embarked upon a course of deception; obliterating as many of the signs of her moral lapse in the wood before allowing the maid to observe her was, she was afraid, probably only the first of many small subterfuges which she must now employ.