The Daring Debutantes Bundle

by M C Beaton

  The compte spoke clearly and slowly in English. “My apologies, my lord, but I must take my immediate leave. I should have married a French girl. I cannot stand any more of my wife’s behavior.” He turned to face Didi, his eyes as wide and lost as a spaniel’s. “I shall return to my parents and set the affairs in motion for a divorce. Our marriage is not recognized by the Catholic church in any case.” He threw up his hands. “English women are—are—immoral.“

  “I’m not English,” wailed Didi. “I’m American.” But she spoke to the empty air. Her husband had gone. Didi rushed from the room after him.

  “That girl’s going insane,” said Elinor with an amused chuckle.

  Hester decided to make good use of the scene. “I think her reaction to Jeremy was a normal one. The ladies simply cast themselves at your feet. Don’t they, my pet.”

  Hester caught a strangely shrewd look in Lucy’s eyes and immediately knew she had gone too far. Andrew’s two army friends were making inarticulate sounds of embarrassment in the best English manner. Boodles and his fiancée, Miss Annie Pyeford, sat silently in a corner holding hands, and from the lugubrious looks on their faces, appeared to be reconsidering the whole idea of marriage.

  Aunt Emily bustled in, bright and inquisitive as a bird. “What is going on, Andrew? There are frantic yells and crashes from the de la Valles’ bedroom. House parties are not what they were in my day, you know. You young things eat too much, drink too much, and think of nothing but sex.”

  Andrew closed his eyes.

  “Furthermore,” went on the dowager marchioness, “in my day, if a young man was interested in a young lady, he saw her parents and received permission to pay his addresses. So much easier, my dears, than a house party full of nutty people.”

  Andrew winced.

  “She is a very pretty girl,” went on Aunt Emily, oblivious of her nephew’s distress, “but go out and slay dragons or something. So much easier than all this fuss.”

  Elinor cast Andrew an awful glance of coquetry and smoothed down her gown. “Heh! What’s this?” said the large guardee John Hannaway, his mustache bristling with excitement. “Never say you’re going to get married, Andrew?”

  “Dinner,” said the butler from the door, “is served.”

  Andrew looked at him as if he were an angel descended from on high. But he half expected the table arrangements to have gone awry, and it was with a further feeling of relief that he found that they had not and that Lucy was seated on his right, his aunt on his left with MacGregor next to her.

  MacGregor gave Andrew and Lucy one quick look, took an enormous swallow of his sherry, and launched forth into conversation with the dowager marchioness. He sparkled, he mimicked, he told scandalous story after scandalous story while the company roared with laughter and begged him for more. It was a heroic effort and was to place MacGregor as the foremost wit of society. The ex-butler was paying Lucy back for her long hours and agonies in the casinos. He held everyone’s attention and prayed under his breath that Andrew Harvey would make the most of it.

  Under cover of MacGregor’s chatter, Andrew turned to Lucy.

  “Well, Auntie let the cat out of the bag,” he said. “I’d have done much better slaying dragons. I’ve wanted to talk to you ever since Dinard. I thought this house party would be a splendid idea … walks with you in the rose garden and all that. It’s turned into a nightmare. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

  “Yes,” whispered Lucy, wishing for the hundredth time that she could say something light and flirtatious. Andrew exuded a strong air of masculinity and that intense blue gaze so fixed on her own made her legs tremble and took away her appetite.

  “Look, Lucy, why don’t we escape tomorrow? Pack up a picnic and go on the lake and leave the others to look after themselves. Will you come?”

  “Yes,” said Lucy.

  “Good-oh. Look, I’m not overwhelming you or anything. I’m not in the way of doing this sort of thing in earnest, you know. Pursuing young girls, I mean.”

  “Do you mind if I wear old clothes?” asked Lucy unexpectedly.

  “Why? Do you think I’ll shove you in the lake?”

  “No,” laughed Lucy. “It’s just … oh, how can I explain.”

  “Try.”

  “I feel sometimes as if I’m imprisoned in a clothespress,” said Lucy slowly. “I’m hemmed in from morning to night in tight clothes and boots and gloves, and my hair is so elaborately arranged that it makes my head ache.”

  “I feel the same, believe me,” said Andrew. “You don’t think I can relax at the moment in this boiled shirt, do you? We shall cast convention to the winds.”

  Lucy looked at him nervously from under her lashes.

  “Not all the conventions,” he assured her. “My intentions are desperately honorable.”

  There! He had almost said it. MacGregor caught Lucy’s eye with a pleading look. She gave a slight nod of her head and with great relief, MacGregor at long last fell silent.

  Andrew had caught the exchange and a frown creased his forehead. Sometimes he thought that Lucy and her father were like two actors, each one waiting for a cue from the other. They were so elegant and well-bred and charming, but the whole thing had the flavor of the Green Room. And why did he always have the nagging feeling that he had met both of them before?

  Before they retired for the night he caught another exchange of glances. Tables had been set up for the evening baccarat and Lucy had remarked very firmly that she never played cards. Andrew noticed that Lady Hester had looked at Jeremy and raised her thin penciled eyebrows and that Jeremy had definitely winked.

  But he was not going to let any of these misgivings sway him from his objective. In a hurried whisper he told Lucy that he would meet her in the entrance hall at eight o’clock.

  Lucy went happily to bed despite a feeling of irritation that Sally, her maid, had not waited up for her. She would really have to do something about Sally. But the more she tried, the more sullen the girl and the more frequent her mother’s illnesses became.

  Lucy lay on the bed with the firm conviction that she would never, ever sleep. She awoke to find the sun blazing into the room and the birds merrily twittering in the wisteria outside her window. She sprang from bed in a panic and then found to her relief that it was only seven-thirty. She brushed out her long black hair and rolled it into a careless knot at the back of her neck and hurriedly dressed in an old skirt and a soft cool silk blouse. Her stays were left abandoned in the chest of drawers. Free of their constriction, Lucy felt like a schoolgirl again and ran out of the bedroom and lightly down the stairs. Andrew was already there and waiting with a picnic basket slung over his arm. He was dressed in an old pair of riding breeches and a black polo sweater which had seen better days.

  Andrew surveyed her with pleased approval. “If that’s the way you dress when you are being informal, then I hope you’ll be informal all the time. You do look jolly pretty. I suppose you society girls have to go through hell with all your frippery bits. I always think that the women at Ascot, don’t you know, look a bit like ships under full sail. All white and stately and full-rigged. I’m talking nonsense, you know. You’re going to wish you’d stayed in your stays and not cast them off for this babbling idiot. Oh, dear! I shouldn’t have said that. Gosh! What a heavenly morning.”

  They walked slowly across the lawns, their feet leaving prints in the dew-wet grass. A thrush perched on the very edge of a rose bush obligingly sang his heart out for them with such energy that the heavy red roses shook, sending glittering sprays of moisture onto the ground.

  “Do you go boating much in your part of the world?” said Andrew.

  Lucy thought frantically about her fictitious home and decided against boating and water. If she said there was a loch nearby, he might ask which loch. “No,” she lied. “The Channel crossing was my first experience of boats.”

  “Well, we’re taking a punt out and what could be more English than that. I’m quite go
od at punting in an inept kind of way. Much better at rowing, you know, but the ladies don’t like that because you can’t help splashing their frocks no matter how much you feather the oars. Here we are.”

  An ornamental lake stretched out before them like glass. The willow trees surrounding it hung their long leafy branches straight down into their reflections and the sun blazed down from a sky of pure cerulean.

  He held out a strong white hand to help Lucy into the punt. She put her hand into his and again the electric current ran between them. They stood motionless, Andrew looking down at Lucy’s bent head and Lucy staring as if hypnotized at their joined hands.

  “Can I push you out, sir?” Both turned. A young man in a Norfolk jacket and breeches was standing behind them.

  “Yes, thank you,” said Andrew, settling Lucy against the cushions in the punt and taking up the pole. “Who are you, by the way?”

  “Name’s Hefford, my lord. I’m the second footman.”

  “Of course. Didn’t recognize you in your civvies. It’s a funny thing,” he went on as the footman pushed them off and the boat glided silently across the mirror of the lake, “how one never recognizes even very old servants when one sees them out of their livery.” He looked down at Lucy and frowned. Now what had he said to upset her?

  Lucy realized miserably that she was going to have to begin to lie to this man she adored, and, should they marry, keep on lying for the rest of her life.

  She could not talk about gambling. She could not talk about Marysburgh. She had to talk about something.

  She took the plunge. What on earth was the name of that fictitious village she was supposed to hail from? Auchterherder. That was it.

  “At home,” she said carefully, “it’s also very beautiful at this time of year. Except not so tame and groomed.”

  “The savage highlands, eh. Is your mother still alive?”

  “No,” said Lucy miserably. “She died a long time ago.” She bit her lip, wondering how her mother was getting on and whether she was receiving her letters, postmarked Glasgow.

  “Obviously it distresses you,” said Andrew kindly. “I’m sorry. I’ve bought some splendid food along. Cold grouse and champagne. Have you ever had champagne for breakfast?”

  “No,” said Lucy, “and what a lot of questions you do ask.” She felt suddenly carefree. The punt was now in the middle of the lake and she and Andrew Harvey were enclosed in a summer world far from the biting remarks and the formal social dance of society.

  “We’ll moor over at that little island,” said Andrew. “Drink our champers, eat our breakfast, and think comfortably of the rest of the house party snoring in their beds and missing all this beautiful morning.”

  He helped her to alight and took a rug from the punt and spread it on the grass and then helped her ashore.

  “Do you like my home?” asked Andrew with his fair hair bent over the picnic basket as he fished out the champagne and two glasses.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Lucy, looking across the park to the mellow brick of the old mansion.

  “I’m very fond of it myself,” he said, handing her a glass of champagne. “I’m going in for agriculture, you know. Do you like the country? Or do you prefer it in town?”

  “I much prefer the country,” said Lucy with a happy sigh as she sipped her champagne. “London is so noisy and dirty and being a debutante is so exhausting. I wish my father had left me ‘in.’ I don’t really want to be brought ‘out.’ I agreed to it because I thought it would be … oh, very elegant and leisurely. But it’s already a rat race of balls and teas and masquerades and what Boofy said to old Chuffy and don’t you think poverty is simply all the fault of the poor and have you ever heard of anything more ridiculous than women trying to get the vote. And I’m expected to sit manicured and glittering and confined in boots two sizes too small and smile and smile … but never too enthusiastically or I might get wrinkles. Most of the time I feel like a high-class Chinese harlot.” She blushed and looked embarrassed but he only laughed.

  He refilled her glass. “Don’t stop,” he said. “You don’t have to be ladylike with me.”

  “Oh, but I do,” said Lucy quietly.

  He put down his glass and leaned over her. “Then … it’s not just me. You feel the same.”

  She gazed into his blue eyes, trying to think of some flirtatious rejoinder but found that she could only nod. His face was drawing nearer, the blue eyes serious and intense, no longer mocking. He put one arm gently around her shoulders and with his free hand turned her face up to his. Their kiss seemed to last an eternity until at last they broke apart, trembling and breathless.

  “Walk with me a little, Lucy,” said Andrew quietly, helping her to her feet. There was a little colonnaded marble rotunda at the other side of the island. He wanted his proposal to be perfect, not a scrambled affair over the half-empty champagne bottle and the untouched breakfast.

  He took her arm and they walked along the narrow path that led to the rotunda on the other side of the island.

  He led her inside and Lucy sat down on a marble bench. She instinctively knew he wanted this moment to be perfect.

  She turned her head in order to allow him to prepare his proposal and leaned her arm on the sun-warmed ledge and gazed down into the deep, deep, clear depths of the lake.

  The white face of Didi stared up at her, her long red hair, now as brown as the brownest seaweed, floating out around her small head. Her little hands made a pathetic pleading gesture as the water quivered under a sudden breeze, rippling the mirror of the lake and distorting the dead face below its surface.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The house party huddled together like survivors on a desert island the following day. The comte had left to arrange for his wife’s body to be removed to France for burial. A long and hysterical note from Didi explained the reason for her death all too clearly. Suicide.

  “Of course, it was drugs, you know,” said the dowager marchioness carelessly. Everyone looked at her in surprise. They had all been moping around the drawing room in a disconsolate sort of way.

  “You didn’t know?” exclaimed Aunt Emily. “Why, the child’s eyes were like pinpricks. And, my dears, her behavior!”

  “Drugs!” whispered Lucy.

  “Oh, lots of society people take them,” said Hester with a brittle laugh. “What do you think she was taking, Jeremy, dear?”

  “Heroin,” he said briefly, and stared out of the window.

  “I must say it was downright inconsiderate of her,” said Emily. “Now we can’t enjoy ourselves because it wouldn’t be the thing, and the train doesn’t leave until this evening so I can’t get rid of any of you.”

  “That is one of those thoughts that one ought to keep to oneself,” said Andrew acidly.

  Poor Didi, thought Lucy. And poor Didi’s parents, who had spent a fortune to give their American daughter a taste of aristocratic living, and where had it all led? To a loveless marriage and a cold death beneath the waters of the lake.

  “There is a willow that grows askant the brook,/ That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream …” Andrew murmured half to himself. Lucy looked up, recognizing the quotation. Didi had indeed been an Ophelia made mad by love … but love of drugs, not of any man.

  “Did you say ‘whore,’ Andrew?” snapped his aunt. “If you are going to murmur obscenities under your breath, then I suggest you take yourself off to the smoking room.”

  “I was quoting Hamlet.“

  “That’s no excuse. Shakespeare is full of filth.”

  MacGregor suddenly let out a high-pitched scream and everyone jumped.

  He smiled apologetically at the marchioness. “Since saying and doing exactly what one thinks and feels seem to be the order of the day, I was merely following the fashion. I felt like screaming so I did. Shall I tell you what I think about you at the moment, my lady?”

  “Good God! Don’t you dare,” screamed Aunt Emily.

  Andrew watched Lucy’s wh
ite face from across the room. He wished savagely he had proposed then and there instead of searching around the island for a romantic setting. He had managed to ask MacGregor for his permission to pay his respects to Lucy and MacGregor had granted it, after a little hesitation, when Andrew had thought for one horrible minute that he had meant to refuse. But MacGregor had asked him to wait until their return to London. Lucy had had too much of a shock, he had explained. And only Lucy knew how much she longed for Andrew to indicate by one glance or one touch that he felt something for her. But the viscount was hell-bent on demonstrating to MacGregor what a correct English gentleman he was and what a super son-in-law he would make, and so he left Lucy to endure the unwelcome attentions of Jeremy Brent and to watch Hester undulating around the viscount like a species of lace-covered cobra.

  The afternoon dragged on and the light began to fade. “There are the carriages being brought around, thank God!” said Emily. “I shall leave tomorrow, Andrew, although I know my role of hostess is over, unless, of course, you become enraptured of anyone else. Of course, it was Frenchwomen with your dear grandfather. What an old rip he was, to be sure. Scotch! Makes a change. Time we had some new blood in the family. She looks a strong girl.”

  “Yes. She’s got good strong hocks and splendid shoulders, my lady. Would you like to see her teeth?” said MacGregor.

  “Go along with you,” laughed Aunt Emily. “You can come and see me any time, Hamish, which is more than I can say for the rest of the party.”

  What possessed me to ask her to be hostess ? thought Andrew miserably. She’s going dotty.

  Lucy and MacGregor sat alone in their railway carriage on the way home. Andrew had gone to join his army friends.

  “You’re all set for the altar,” remarked MacGregor finally. “Andrew Harvey has got my permission to pay his addresses.”