Lady Fortescue Steps Out (The Poor Relation Series, Vol. 1)

by M C Beaton

  “If you mean Miss James, say so,” he snapped. “Miss James is a friend of mine.”

  “Really?” Lady Stanton, her eyes on those green bows, was now sure who her masked rival at the ball had been. “I thought she was your cousin.”

  “Lady Stanton, I beg you to excuse us,” said the duke, rising to his feet, “but Miss James is fatigued and must return home.”

  “Miss James is not fatigued,” said Harriet quickly. “Pray be seated, your grace.”

  “I was only trying to protect you from further insult,” protested the duke.

  “From Lady Stanton?” said Harriet, slowly uncurling her claws. “No one, least of all me, pays any attention to the remarks of the vulgar.”

  “Oh, bravo, Harriet,” said Susan, clapping her hands. “Do run along, Lady Stanton. I don’t want you, Rowcester don’t want you, my husband don’t want you … oh, run along, do. You quite try my patience.”

  Lady Stanton rose and made her way to the steps. Then she turned and faced the group. “You will be sorry you ever crossed me,” she hissed.

  Making deprecatory movements with his hands behind her back, Mr. Blackley followed her.

  “Such a relief to hear you sounding quite human, Harriet,” said Susan cheerfully. “You are become so prim and proper.”

  “It is necessary in my position to stay prim and proper,” said Harriet.

  Lord Darkwood threw her a nervous look. If she was going to turn hoity-toity with the duke, it might reflect on his political chances.

  “My love,” he said to his wife, “I crave exercise.”

  Susan looked surprised. Lord Darkwood gave her a portentous wink and she coloured and giggled and rose to her feet. “Come, then,” she said gaily. “I am sure Miss James and Rowcester wish to be alone.”

  “Susan!” exclaimed Harriet desperately, but, giggling and hanging on to her husband’s arm, Susan was already leaving the box.

  It was then that the duke, glancing out idly over the crowd, saw his widowed mother, the Dowager Duchess of Rowcester, arriving with a small party of friends. His mother, as usual, was painted and rouged and quite drunk. Her escort of slim, effeminate young men were laughing and tittering and posturing about her.

  What on earth would Harriet think of such a mother and such companions?

  “I think we should follow our friends’ example,” he said quickly, “and take another walk ourselves.”

  Harriet went with him with a certain reluctance. She was frightened she might find herself alone with him in one of the dark walks. She did not trust her own feelings. She was conscious of his strength, his virility, and of a throbbing excitement emanating from him.

  They had just turned a corner of the main alley—the walks were called alleys at Vauxhall—when they saw Lady Stanton with Mr. Blackley.

  “Quickly,” said the duke, guiding Harriet into one of the darker alleys. “I have had enough of that pair for one evening.”

  Harriet looked around nervously. The alley they were in was so narrow that the trees met overhead, hiding the moon. It was hard to see where one was going. She stumbled and the duke put an arm around her waist to support her.

  The feel of her body made his senses reel and he stopped and drew her to him, murmuring, “Harriet. Oh, my Harriet.”

  She should have pushed him away, but her body was fusing and melting hotly into his. Her body was ignoring the directions of her mind. Her lips were raised to his, slightly parted, and when his own came down on hers, the whole of Vauxhall whirled about them and disappeared up into the sky, far above the trees and the lights and music, leaving them locked together in a private world of dark soft passion.

  A drunken couple stumbled into the walk, and Harriet and the duke broke apart and stood staring at each other in a dazed way.

  They slowly turned together and started to walk back towards the main alley. But before they reached it, a woman’s voice, high and shrill, exclaimed, “My dear Lady Stanton. Rowcester is enamoured of a serving wench, you say?”

  “Oh, yes,” came Lady Stanton’s voice. “And worse than that, Rowcester’s own mother is here. I was observing them discreetly, and when he saw his mother he looked quite stricken, for the shame of being seen with such a creature must have hit him, for he rushed her off into the darkness.”

  All the lights went out in Harriet’s soul. “Is your mother here?” she asked quietly.

  “Yes, but—”

  She ran lightly away from him, darting off through the trees. He stood for a moment, surprised, before running after her. But search as he might, there was no sign of Harriet. He returned to the box and waited. Susan and her husband came back, exclaiming at Harriet’s absence. They had supper, they drank a great deal of punch, but still Harriet did not return.

  When they all returned to The Poor Relation, the duke asked the sleepy porter if Miss James had returned. “Came ‘ome in an ‘ack two hours ago, your grace,” said the porter.

  The duke was at first relieved, and then furious. But whether he was angry with Harriet for having run away, or whether he was furious with himself for mismanaging the whole evening, he did not know.

  Chapter Seven

  The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,

  Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways

  When all the wild summer was in her gaze.

  —WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

  Perhaps, thought the duke, it was all for the best. He was sitting up in bed, sipping his morning chocolate, and reading a letter which had just been handed to him by his servant. In it, Lord Bunbary thanked the duke for his hospitality but regretted that due to his elder daughter’s having caught the chicken-pox, they were all forced to retire to the country. In fact, they were leaving that very day.

  So, he mused, he would be able to return to his town house, to live surrounded by the dignity that suited his great station in life, to be away from this odd hotel, and most of all, to be away from Harriet James.

  He had done enough. He could not spend the rest of his days crawling around after her apologizing for some imagined slight, he told himself. He would regain the calm tenor of his days, free from burning and aching and longing.

  He told his valet to ask Sir Philip to present his bill. When the bill arrived, the duke scrutinized it carefully, striking off various additions, such as two bottles of champagne which he had not drunk, and a chamber-pot which he had not broken.

  Harriet heard the news of his departure with feelings that she told herself firmly were all ones of relief. A man who fled from his own mother because he was ashamed of the lady he was accompanying was not worth a second thought.

  The guests at the hotel had all gone out that afternoon to watch the soldiers drilling in Hyde Park, for the Prince of Wales was to be present, and so the hotel seemed strangely quiet. The day was unusually warm and the malodorous smells of the London streets filtered through even the tightest closed windows.

  Harriet drifted downstairs. There was no longer any fear of meeting the duke. Sir Philip said he had paid his bill correctly, omitting to tell Harriet that the duke had paid exactly what he owed and no more. Harriet entered the money in the accounts book. A healthy sum of money was pouring into the coffers of The Poor Relation. Although many of the guests would not pay their bills until the end of the Season, the money from the dining-room and coffee room was an enormous amount. This sign of financial security should have lifted Harriet’s spirits, but she felt depressed. How dare Rowcester demean her in such a way and then move out of her range where he could no longer see how she despised him?

  And then, despite her bitter thoughts about him, she noticed that there was still no record of the fire insurance having been paid. There were sixteen fire-insurance companies operating in London. Premiums were all surprisingly reasonable considering the fact that many of the buildings in London were still made of timber and the fire engines were poor manual affairs.

  There was no official fire brigade. Each fire-insurance compa
ny had its badge stamped out on sheet lead, painted and gilt, and then nailed on the front of the house or business insured.

  There was no such badge on the hotel. The last time she had approached Sir Philip on the subject, he had said the insurance company was preparing an extra special badge for them. There were three categories of insurance: common insurance, hazard insurance, and the most expensive, doubly hazardous insurance. Sir Philip said he had paid for the doubly hazardous insurance.

  She resolved to question Sir Philip on the matter as soon as she could find him.

  At that moment, Sir Philip was the subject under discussion by Lady Fortescue and Colonel Sandhurst. They had gone for a walk, but not to Hyde Park, which was full of crowds and noise, but down to St. James’s Park, which lay under the shadow of Buckingham House, or the Queen’s House, as it was more popularly known.

  “You run to him the whole time for help and advice,” the colonel was complaining. “You never think to turn to me.”

  Lady Fortescue sighed. She had been feeling tired of late. She hoped that after all her years of good health she was not going to succumb to any of the wasting illnesses of old age.

  “We are running a hotel,” she said brusquely. “It is a charlatan’s job. I am not a charlatan, and neither are you. Sir Philip is. In fact, he is amoral. Would you stoop to any of the low tricks he gets up to? Would you have dressed as a woman and pretended to be Miss Tonks?”

  “I feel you often encourage him in a lot of folly,” said the colonel. “Besides, despite the fact we are still living on our small incomes and taking little out of the hotel funds, Sir Philip contrives to buy something new each week to wear.”

  Lady Fortescue looked surprised. “To tell the truth,” she remarked, “he’s such an ugly little man, I never notice anything he is wearing.”

  “Indeed!” The colonel began to feel quite charitable towards Sir Philip. “Nonetheless,” he went on in a mollified tone of voice, “there is the question of what he stole from Rowcester. He will never tell anyone. The threat of discovery is hanging over us all. I think we all must have been mad. We could all end up in the dock at Newgate.”

  “Whatever it was,” said Lady Fortescue slowly, “Sir Philip seems to have no fear of being found out.”

  “The other thing I wished to discuss with you,” went on the colonel, “is our future.”

  “Our future?” echoed Lady Fortescue and threw him a roguish look.

  “Yes, all of us,” said the colonel, staring straight ahead and unaware that a bleak frost was now shining in Lady Fortescue’s eyes. “Miss James says everything’s looking very healthy. Perhaps we could return the hotel to a home at the end of the year, invest what we have made, and live quietly.”

  “I have lived quietly for too long,” said Lady Fortescue. “We are such a success. It is rumoured the Prince of Wales himself will visit us. We are known. Our success will continue. Our hitherto drab lives are full of light and colour. We have servants to wait on us. We live, thanks to the hotel, in the style of members of society.

  “Members of society,” commented the colonel drily, “do not wait table, neither do they have a drawing-room in the schoolroom, nor do they have to share cramped bedrooms. It is good of our three ladies to volunteer to share a room and a bed, for it leaves Sir Philip, you, and me with our private cubbyholes, but nonetheless …”

  “Nonetheless you do not seem to be offering any reasonable alternative.” Lady Fortescue stabbed at the unoffending grass viciously with the end of her parasol, a parasol which all too recently in her mind she had been debating whether to sell for food.

  The colonel sighed. “Perhaps I am expecting too much,” he said. His dream had always been that he would once more have enough money to belong to the Cavalry Club and White’s, to drive a smart carriage, to wear fine clothes, to talk to what was left of his old army chums on equal social terms. But who was going to greet him on equal social terms after the stigma of trade had firmly attached itself to his name?

  Besides, it was all a dream. His old life had been a peculiarly lonely one. When the Season was over and his friends left for the country, there had been no one to go home to in the evenings. He had never married. There had been a woman once, an American, when he had been captured and put on parole outside Boston. She had been a vivacious widow with free and easy manners. After the war with America was over and he was back in England, he had written to her, hoping to return, hoping to marry her, but she had written to say she had married an American officer, and that was that. And most of his friends were dead.

  But he did often wish that Sir Philip had not coerced them all into this mad idea of running a hotel. God put one in one’s appointed station, and to move out of it was flying in the face of Providence. It might seem ridiculous to the enlightened that an elderly gentleman feared the wrath of God because he had decided to work for a living, but most would have agreed with the colonel, for it was a comforting philosophy which made one able to turn a blind eye to the misery of the paupers on the streets of London. Life was but a journey. The better life lay ahead for everyone when they went home to heaven. People were even hanged on a Friday, the authorities having somehow worked out that it would take them until Sunday morning to get to heaven, and arriving on that holy day would no doubt save their immortal souls.

  This day was a Friday, and in the distance sounded the great bell of St. Sepulchre’s at Newgate, announcing another series of hangings. To a lot of people, a hanging was an excusably jolly affair, where one could wear one’s best clothes and eat gingerbread. For were not the wretches on the scaffold going to meet their Maker?

  And yet, before he had met Lady Fortescue in the Park, the colonel realized with surprise that he had become reconciled to the idea of death, almost ready to welcome Death himself as a friend.

  Now? Well, now he meant to eat and drink sparingly and take gentle exercise, for the days were full of life and colour and companionship.

  And so he surprised Lady Fortescue by suddenly seizing her black-mittened hand and kissing it. “I owe you a lot,” he said.

  “You old flirt!” exclaimed Lady Fortescue, highly pleased.

  The colonel eyed her slim erect figure dressed in heavy black and said, “I often wonder what you would look like in something … er, brighter.”

  “I have worn mourning for my dead husband these twenty years,” said Lady Fortescue, and then added on a lighter note, “That all sounds very proper, but the fact is that I had no reason to wear anything else, and new clothes would have cost money. It is still an impossibility but … Miss James is so very clever with a needle. I wonder if she could trim one of my gowns for me, just to see how it would look.”

  And in high good humour with each other, the couple walked on under the trees.

  Sir Philip strolled back from the City where he had stood unobserved at the corner of Amen Lane and watched the arrest of Mr. Evans, the crook who hired those French wretches out as servants. Sir Philip had sent an anonymous letter to the authorities and then had let justice take its course.

  As he walked down Ludgate Hill to the Fleet River, he saw that a building in Farringdon Street was blazing merrily. He felt a pang from his never very active conscience. The money which should have gone to the insurance company he had spent on little knick-knacks for himself: a snuff-box, a new chestnut-brown wig which he had not yet had the courage to wear, and a pair of Hessian boots. Somehow, he would need to raise the money to pay the insurance. But perhaps tomorrow … The thieving of that grand necklace from the duke often worried him. He had only stolen trifles before. And it was not only the necklace, but all the stuff from the attics. If the duke had so quickly noticed those missing candlesticks which Lady Fortescue had tried to take, it surely would not be long before his housekeeper did an inventory of the attics and reported the thefts. But would she? He had never before heard of anyone bothering about what was in the attics of a stately home until the bailiffs called, and they were not likely to call on the
rich Duke of Rowcester.

  How free and easy he had felt about taking things to ward off starvation. How easy it was to feel guilty now with a good meal in his belly and shillings in his pocket. He moved towards the network of alley-ways which formed that Holborn slum called The Rookery and stopped at a dingy shop just on the outside of the quarter. The shop claimed to sell old clothes, but it was in the back-shop that Virgil Flamand, fence, forger, and jeweller, performed his real trade.

  “Got anything for me?” asked Virgil. “I’m busy with this piece of work. All legitimate, too. Diamond necklace for Lady Lesington. She sells the real thing on the quiet to meet her gambling debts, I give her a paste copy, husband never knows, everyone happy.”

  “That necklace I sold you,” said Sir Philip, dusting a chair and sitting down. “I suppose you broke it up.”

  Virgil raised his dirty hands to heaven. “A piece like that? No, I’m waiting till the dust settles before I move it. Think I could sell it on the quiet in one piece.”

  “I may pay you a little from time to time to keep it safe until I am in a position to buy it back from you,” Sir Philip found himself saying.

  “Turning honest in your old age?”

  “Something like that,” said Sir Philip.

  “It would suit me,” said Virgil. “I’ll give you time, and if you don’t buy it back, it should be cold enough for me to sell at a good price. Honesty don’t suit you, Sir Philip, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  “It’s an uncomfortable thing, a conscience,” said Sir Philip. “Ever trouble you, Virgil?”

  The jeweller looked amazed. “I’m a craftsman. Why should my conscience trouble me?”

  Feeling comforted now that there was hope the necklace could be reclaimed, Sir Philip went into a chop-house and ordered a plate of mutton washed down with small beer. He would need to tell the others what he had done, and Harriet would need to begin to put by such sums as she could. They wouldn’t like it, but they would like the threat of Newgate less.