by Joan Smith
Alex made a point of leading the group and took up the seat beside Anne before his brother could beat him to it. “What was Rosie saying to get your dander up at dinner?” he asked.
“She has turned matchmaker and is hinting me in Cousin Florian’s direction.”
“Florian? He’s only a child.”
“He’s nearly twenty, and apparently looks older.” A bark of laughter greeted this. “As she is lining up an heiress for you, I agree she might do better than a Bartholomew baby for me.”
“Shall we tell her to butt out, or shall we let her prate on?”
“Till you see your way clear to repaying Exmore, I think the phrase ‘butt out’ had best be suppressed.”
His brow furrowed, and he put a hand to his head in a troubled way to rub it. “I’ll pay them, somehow.”
“It’s a pity she had gas light installed, and got a new phaeton when ...”
“She didn’t know how we were situated here. It’s not Rosalie’s fault,” he said forgivingly. “Exmore was very good about it. He told me not to worry, not to do anything desperate, but of course he must be paid as soon as possible if they need the money.”
“Oh, Alex, how badly can they need it? They look so prosperous.”
“So do we,” he said, and looked around the sumptuous saloon, where fine old furnishings, carpets, and paintings lent an air of opulence. “Who’d ever think to look at this room of people that we can’t raise a penny among us?” His eyes turned to Anne, and his expression softened to a smile. “But really, I don’t mind. I’m even becoming attached to your old gold silk gown. I was wrong and ungallant to suggest it didn’t do you justice.”
“No, Alex, you are ungallant to suggest it does do me justice. I would look much better in the white crepe, and one of these years I shall have it. About the time white crepe goes out of style, I expect. They always lower the price then.”
“You look fine to me, Annie,” he said, but his warm eyes said a great deal more.
Something in their attitude, leaning toward each other and smiling, alerted Rosalie to imminent danger. She catapulted herself forward to join them. “I’ve been racking my brain and have come up with the very heiress for you, Alex,” she said brightly while darting suspicious looks from one to the other.
“Have you, Rosie?” he answered playfully. “I appreciate your concern but I think I have come up with an heiress of my own.”
“Who?”
“A local lady. I’ll let you know as soon as things are settled.”
He didn’t look at Anne, nor she at him, but a tension in the air spoke clearly of his meaning.
“But who is she?” Rosalie insisted. “What is her dowry?”
“Her dowry is not great, but she’s an excellent manager.”
“Surely not Miss Peoples! You can’t mean Squire Peoples’s girl, with only ten thousand. Why, a baronet is worth ten thousand. You must not settle for a penny less than twenty-five.”
Alex’s lips moved unsteadily. “It is not Miss Peoples’s ten thousand I have in mind.”
“I am relieved to hear it, for you will need much more than that.”
“Yes, sis, and now that you’ve discovered I am all set, you can get back to Robin and find an heiress for him.”
“That will present no problem. My, how he has blossomed. I bet you Sylvia Mapleton would give her eyeteeth for him. She was crazy about Charlie, and really they are as like as peas in a pod.”
“Why don’t you suggest it to him?” Alex asked.
“I shall, never fear. And I’ll find a man for you, too, Anne.”
“I thought you had settled on a boy for her,” Alex said blandly.
Rosalie laughed, but mirthlessly. “You’ve been telling Alex what I said about Florian. Perhaps he is a little young, but I’ll keep you in mind and see what I can do when I get back to London.”
“You know, if I didn’t owe you so much money, Rosalie, I’d tell you to butt out of our affairs,” Alex said with a perfectly charming smile.
“Would you, Alex?” She smiled back. “But you do owe us nearly four thousand pounds, so I’ll just go on butting away.” She leaned back in her chair, determined to do exactly as she said, and with a mutual smile that worried her considerably, Anne and Alex relaxed, too, and let her butt away.
Before leaving, Mrs. Wickfield invited the whole party to tea the next day. There was some discussion as to who was included in the group. Everyone from Babe to Aunt Tannie was invited, but between Alex’s insistence that such a party was too large and Tannie’s suggestion that they take the girls but not the twins and Anne’s complaint that the twins would be in the boughs for weeks if they were left out, nothing was definite.
The hostess fell into that morass of uncertainty that usually results when trying to assemble a party of indeterminate size. “Bring them all” was her parting command, but the echo of Alex’s—”No, no, the children will remain home”—left some doubt. It was of cold ham and desserts the ladies spoke as they drove home in Penholme’s closed carriage, with their own gig following.
More important matters had to wait till later for consideration, when Anne was in bed. Her love for Charles had dwindled over the months since his death. Really, she had loved only a memory for some time now, and learning the truth about him had soured even the memories, but it was of Charles that she thought that night. A charming wastrel who had wasted her youth, along with his family’s fortune. And now it began to look as though his evil lived after him, ruining her chances and Alex’s.
Chapter Ten
The Wickfields were no sooner seated at breakfast the next morning than the cook began sending messages up to them via Mollie Prawne. First they were told that a brace of fowl had been sent down from Penholme, and should she prepare them for tea, as a different menu had been settled on earlier?
“We had better, for likely as not the children will come, and they will like the fowl. Yes, tell Cook to go ahead and prepare the fowl as well as the ham.”
Next it was a basket of fruit from Penholme’s pinery, and what were the plans for it? It, too, was to be prepared and arranged to form an edible centerpiece for the table. When breakfast was finished and the ladies had begun the chore of readying the house for a visit from Londoners, for all this fuss and bother was only to impress the Exmores, a head of cheese and two quarts of cream were delivered. There was a note addressed to Miss Wickfield stuck into the basket, which she opened with some impatience at their benefactor.
It read: “Dear Duck: To save your backhouse boy his forays up the hill, pray tell me if there is anything you require for this afternoon. Your obedient servant. P.”
She smiled and scrawled off a reply on the back of the same paper. “Dear Obedient: We require guests, as many as possible, with large appetites to consume the meal you have sent. A.”
Alex always liked to include the children in any treat, and after reading her note, he issued the order that the children were to be dressed up to attend. Exmore’s carriage and his were required to haul such a number of people. When Rosalie entered the saloon, she immediately began berating Alex for his thoughtlessness.
“Whoever heard of bringing children along to a grown-up party? Aunt Alice, I apologize on behalf of this brutish brother of mine.”
“We’re glad to have them.”
Certainly the children were happy to be there. Nor were they much bother, for it was only afternoon, and they soon ran outdoors to amuse themselves in the sunshine. When they had left, Rosalie looked around to see how the place was holding up. She hadn’t been to visit the Wickfields since Alex’s departure three years before. Nothing had changed. The same carpets, same draperies, not a chair recovered or a new bibelot added to the room. She liked to be always changing and improving her own surroundings.
“Have you seen the lovely new Carlton House tables they are using in London?” she asked. “Really desks, with dozens of little drawers. So sweet. Bertie got me one for my study. One of them would look g
ood in this room, Auntie—just there between the windows.”
“We’re not up to all the new rigs,” Mrs. Wickfield told her. “We have the old Kent table desk in the study that we use for our writing.”
“I remember it, but these new desks are much more elegant. Not great, heavy things like those of Kent.”
“It would be out of place here. The furnishings are all old and heavy.”
“The Sheraton chairs are not bad. Covered with some nice new bright material, they would smarten you up.”
“The way of it is, if you go putting one new thing into a room, it makes everything else show its age,” Mrs. Wickfield said resignedly.
“That’s perfectly true,” Rosalie agreed. “When I got my new Carlton House table, I had to redo the walls, for it didn’t stand out against the old brown paper. I had them redone in yellow silk. It looks lovely.”
She then turned to Anne. “Does Miss Barnfield still make your gowns, Anne?”
“Her eyesight is failing. Mama and I usually make our own now.”
“Oh, my dear—such a bore for you! There is nothing so tedious as stitching. I have an ingenious French modiste. An artist—really, she is an artist. She is making me up an exquisite white gown for a do Bertie and I are going to at Carlton House next week. White crepe, with seed pearls all down the front. I look a regular dasher in it, I promise you.”
“Annie likes white crepe,” Robin said with a mischievous smile at his cousin.
“It would suit you better than the yellow you wore last night,” Rosalie said. “That blue you’re wearing is pretty, Anne. Is it new?”
“I’ve had it a few years,” Anne admitted.
“Very nice color. The cut, of course, is not quite à la mode, but the color suits you.”
Alex, sitting with Exmore and waiting for some masculine talk to get started between them, was listening to this conversation.
Soon Rosalie tired of examining the furnishings and gowns. “I don’t know how you all endure the tediousness of living in the country from head to toe of the year. Nothing ever seems to happen here.”
“Nothing happen?” Mrs. Wickfield exclaimed, astonished. “Why, we’ve had a half dozen births in as many months here in the neighborhood, to say nothing of old Albert Secours dying and leaving no will. A fine brouhaha that was! Why, exciting things are happening every day. You only have to know where to look.”
“And what to consider exciting,” Alex added, tossing a mischievous smile to Anne.
She smiled back, but wanly. All her happy joking about her impoverished condition had deserted her during Rosalie’s tirade. She looked wistfully at her visitor’s elegant lutestring gown, at her white hands, which never did anything more strenuous than lift a teacup, at her dainty slippers, which would be cast aside long before they ever required mending.
As he watched, Alex’s heart ached for her. Would he ever be able to give her all the fine things she deserved? Being deeply in love, he thought better beaux would fall into her lap, given half a chance. Perhaps he was being unfair to dangle after her.
Exmore soon began asking him questions about the Peninsular Campaign, which prevented Alex from overhearing the ladies’ discussion, but he noticed that as Rosalie rattled merrily on, Anne’s spirits sank lower, till in the end she was replying in monosyllables. After half an hour, she rose, saying, “I’ll round up the children for tea. They’ll need washing after their activities.”
Alex followed her to the front door. “Has Rosalie been trying to smarten you up?”
She gave him a startled, conscious look. “What do you mean?”
“I’m speaking sartorially—is she telling you all the new fashions in London?”
“Yes, and making me realize what a dowd I am in the bargain.”
“You don’t look dowdy to me, Duck.” He smiled. It wrenched her heart to see him being so brave, trying to cheer her, from the depths of his own problems.
“To her I do, but that’s not why I’m peevish. How will you repay Exmore, Alex?”
“I don’t know. I’ll think about that tomorrow.”
“It seems to me they don’t need the money so badly. The things Rosalie has told us about buying in the past half hour must come to more than what you owe them. She’s a part of the Penholme family, too. She should take the loss of her loan to Charlie and not pester you with it now.”
“It was Exmore’s money, not hers. He must be paid.”
They called the children, and soon the whole throng was seated around the table. It was not the happy sort of meal recently enjoyed at Penholme. Rosalie chided her sisters for their lack of manners, and when Bung began talking about the frog he had caught at the pond, she scolded him for discussing such things at table.
“People eat them,” he pointed out.
“The French eat them,” she corrected.
“The French are people. What’s wrong with talking about them at the table? It’s no different from chickens or cows. We eat dead animals.”
Rosalie pushed away her plate with a pained expression. “Till these ruffians have been taught some manners, Alex, you ought not to allow them into company. I don’t approve of having children at table with adults. They invariably say something disgusting and usually make such a revolting mess of their food besides, that no one with any sensitivity can bear to eat a bite.”
The less sensitive members finished their tea—even Rosalie had soon attacked her food again—but the party was not a great success. Everyone was relieved when the duchess entered her black carriage with the strawberry leaves on the door panels and was driven to Penholme, where she was soon complaining of the holes in the wall of the armaments room and the dust under her bed, in spite of dozens of servants. Alex quietly locked the door of the blue suite, to prevent her from seeing the charred curtains there.
The next diversion in the lives of the Penholmes and the Wickfields would be less unappealing to her grace. The children who had so marred the last outing would not be attending the spring assembly in Eastleigh, nor the dinner at Penholme before it, to which the Wickfields were invited.
Anne, weary of her rose and old yellow gowns, reached farther back into her closet to see what she could do with a blue moire gown of yore. She would look a quiz beside the elegant duchess and the merchants’ daughters, but at least she would be in the company of the most elevated persons at the assembly, and she took what consolation she could from that. Rosalie did not spurn country do’s. Having been raised at Penholme, she enjoyed to go again among her old friends and amaze them with her duke and her London style.
As the Duchess of Exmore, with Bertie a notch above Penholme in precedence, she would get to open the dancing. She planned to flirt discreetly with her old beaux and break a dozen hearts before the night was over. She was in good spirits and, of more importance to her, in good looks.
Decked out in diamonds and silk, Rosalie did the family credit; Alex smiled to see her open the assembly. “She puts them all in the shade, doesn’t she?” he asked Anne while they stood waiting to join in the dance.
“Yes,” Anne said briefly, but added not a word of praise on the loveliest creature ever to have come out of the county.
The duchess was the undisputed queen of the party, but the king was not so easily ascertained. There was Bertie, the only duke present, to be considered, and there was Penholme, a returned officer and the local lord, but both of these gentlemen were run very hard by Lord Robin. He looked licked to a splinter in Charlie’s black evening outfit by Weston. Rosalie was undecided whether to honor him or Penholme for the second dance, but in the end precedence won out, and she stood up with Alex.
Her mind was more than half full of the impression she was making, but she saved a corner of it to look around for eligible ladies for her brothers. Before long, she had singled out a pair who were second only to her in fashion. Alex was unable to enlighten her as to their identity, but during the third dance, Robin told her they were the Anglin girls, Maggie and Marilla.
“Anglin? What kind of a name is that? I never heard of any Anglins hereabouts.”
“They’re new. Their papa is lately retired from London.”
“I don’t recognize the name from London society either. Who are they? They look unexceptionable.”
“They’re cits, Rosie,” Robin said bluntly. “You wouldn’t have heard of them, but I daresay you’ve heard of the Albion string of stores. They have a couple of them in London and one in Bath and Brighton—all over the place. Anglin is the owner.”
It was a hard circumstance to a Penholme-Exmore, very much aware of her family bloodlines, that such rich girls should be so low-born. In appearance, however, they might pass for fine ladies, and as ladies Penholme and Robin they might also get by without their ancestors passing under too close a scrutiny. She was not so impetuous as to hand her brothers over without hearing what sort of accent came out of the girls’ mouths and seeing whether they handled their cutlery at dinner with propriety.
It was necessary that she see them at close range to determine whether they could conceal their origins, and for this, she must have them presented to her. Robin was not loath to perform the introduction; indeed, he performed with suspicious alacrity in the matter.
The girls were examined with the thoroughness of a horse breeder about to purchase a brood mare. It was not chest and eye and ankle that were studied but the presence (or absence) of pronounced aitches, the tilt of the head, whether lofty or hung low in high company. They gained a point immediately by holding their heads at the proper angle and blushing prettily as they expressed their delight in the presentation.
Their features were seen to be pleasing, not outstanding enough to rival Rosalie’s own, but with no raw-boned, common look about them. Rather fine-featured, actually. Both were a little inclined to tallness, but they carried themselves well and were a few inches short of being termed “ladders.”
The elder was the prettier, with brown eyes and hair and a good set of teeth. Miss Maggie was not unlike her, but the face was shorter, with a smattering of freckles that bespoke an unladylike familiarity with the sun. They were well-spoken, a matter of paramount importance; and of nearly equal merit, they were not in the least forthcoming. They realized very well the degree of condescension bestowed on them, and were suitably reverent.