The Double Wager

by Mary Balogh

  Philip and Penelope were rolling around in unholy glee.

  Miss Manford's hand suddenly flew to her mouth and her eyes grew round with horror. "Oscar's pink blanket!" she exclaimed. "It was in the schoolroom. You know, children, that he will never fall asleep with any other cover over his cage."

  "Oh, Manny darling, will you relax and enjoy the scenery?" Henry chided, laughing lightly. "Brutus has it under him on the floor. And really he is being remarkably quiet when one considers that he has not been exercised today. Brutus!" she yelled suddenly, throwing herself forward to wrestle determinedly with the happy canine who was cheerfully chewing away a large corner of the blanket.

  For the next few minutes pandemonium broke loose in the narrow confines of the ponderous old carriage. Penelope pounced on the hind quarters of the dog and tried, in vain, to drag him backward. Philip threw himself astride the dog's forepart and attempted, equally in vain, to lift him off the blanket. Henry tugged at the offending article and scolded the dog. Brutus, delirious with happiness over this new game, wagged his tail vigorously, wriggled ecstatically under the combined weight of the twins, and managed to bark loudly in Henry's face while keeping a firm hold on the frayed pink blanket. Miss Manford's hands flapped ineffectually while she chanted, "Bless my soul!" to a God who would have been deafened had he been foolish enough to listen. Oscar stumped up and down the floor of his cage, shrieking "Gosh-a-gorry!" to anyone who cared to take note.

  "I say," said Giles, lowering his head from his horse's back and peering cheerfully through a window, "a spot of bother, is there?" It said a lot for the normal behavior of the family that he did not seem unduly alarmed.

  It was a flushed, disheveled, and tired family and its entourage that finally disembarked from the carriage in the driveway of Sir Peter's house in Cavendish Square.

  Lady Marian Tallant was never afterward to know how she kept her dignified composure under the onslaught. She tried to administer a graceful hug on each of the twins and lay a cool cheek next to theirs, but each of them squirmed away, threw a "Hello there, Marian," in her direction, and proceeded to busy themselves with removing the pets.

  "You won't mind having Brutus here, will you, Marian?" yelled Penelope.

  Philip's hind quarters were poking out the doorway as he tried to coax his pet out of the warm interior of the coach.

  "Brutus?" she asked with a bright smile.

  "The twins' dog," Henry explained.

  "A dog," she said, clapping her hands with delicate pleasure. "Little Timothy will be so pleased." Then her face paled as what looked like a ragged pony padded out onto the driveway and proceeded to shake himself awake. All five members of the Roedean group tensed for a moment and emitted a collective sigh of relief when it became obvious that Brutus had not taken a fancy to Marian, or to Peter, who was hovering in the background asking Giles for details of their journey.

  "Bottoms up!" a piercing voice ordered from the depths of the carriage. Marian looked as if she would have swooned if she could have trusted her husband to break her fall.

  "Pen, get that infernal blanket over the cage," Philip scolded.

  "I did!" she protested loudly. "You must have pulled it off when you went in for Brutus, you clumsy ox

  "Enough, children,"Peter said with chilling command. "If that is the parrot you mentioned in your last letter, you had better teach it manners, or out it goes.".

  "But, Peter," they both chorused in protest.

  "Enough! Miss Manford, the footman will show you and the children to your rooms. Might I suggest an hour's rest and then supper in the schoolroom?"

  "Oh, so kind, Sir Peter, Lady Marian. Just what we need. So very thoughtful of you. Oh, please, we will be fine. Come along, Philip. Penelope? Oh, and Brutus. And Oscar? Are they to be allowed upstairs, too? So considerate. The children will be so grateful. Say thank you, Penelope. What's that, my dearest boy? Oh, it is still big enough to cover the cage. Thank you, Sir Peter. So kind." Miss Manford, flushed and embarrassed, fluttered her way out of sight and hearing.

  "Darling Henrietta," Marian gushed, turning her atten-tion to her sister-in-law, "how-how well you look, my dear. I have been so looking forward to having you here. Since little Timothy was born, you know, I have hardly been out in society. But I have a veritable host of activities lined up for you. I am determined to make you all the rage, you know, though I see that we shall have to get busy to make you acceptable."

  Henry glowered but said nothing. She hated to lose a bet, and if winning the one against Douglas Raeburn meant having to be made over into a different person-a simpering miss, no less-then a simpering miss she would become. She smiled grimly as she removed her bonnet and shook out her short curls.

  Marian reached for a bell rope in the salon to which she had led Henry. "I shall have Mrs. Lane show you to your room, Henrietta," she said. "You must rest for a while. I shall instruct the cook to set back dinner an hour."

  "I would much sooner eat as soon as it is ready," Henry declared candidly, forgetting in the instant her resolve to become a simpering miss. "I'm starved. I could eat a horse. "

  Marian's smile was strained. "Of course, dear. How thoughtless of me. Traveling does tend to invite an appetite, does it not?"

  Mrs. Lane entered the room at that moment, to Marian's almost visible relief, and took Henry to a large, comfortable room and, blessedly, a bathtub full of warm suds.

  Marian meanwhile had collapsed gracefully onto a sofa after sending a footman for a tray of tea; she glanced despairingly at her husband, who stood with his back to the empty fireplace, hands clasped behind his back, a grim expression on his face.

  "My dear Peter, what are we to do?" she wailed. "They are all so… rustic."

  "They are Tallants," Peter answered stiffly, "and as I am head of the family, they are my responsibility."

  "Oh, yes, of course, my love," Marian added hastily. "It is just such a shame that no one has taken them in hand until now. The twins are quite wild. I really do not feel they should be encouraged to speak until they are spoken to. It appears that their governess has no control whatever over them. And that dog and that bird, Peter! Really, they cannot be allowed to roam the house. Especially when we have the upbringing of little Timothy to consider."

  "Under your genteel influence and with my firm hand, they will all come about in no time at all, my dear," Peter reassured her. "Miss Manford has been with them since Giles was quite young. I believe she stands somewhat in the place of a mother to them. She filled a gap after Mama died when the twins were born. If she must be dismissed, of course, then sentiment cannot be allowed to stand in't lie way. But I shall have a talk with her first."

  "And Henrietta!" Lady Marian seemed lost for words for a moment. "Such a fright, my love. I shall have to call a dressmaker and a hairdresser to the house. I cannot take her out looking the way she does now."

  "Yes," he agreed dryly, "I knew Henrietta would be the main problem. I reprimanded Papa many times when she was growing up about allowing her to indulge her tomboy ways. But he was a stubborn man. He could never be convinced that she should be properly prepared for the life she must be expected to lead as an adult."

  "Her speech, Peter. Does she always speak with such a want of manners?"

  Between them they had a comfortable cote over the teapot, pulling apart Henry's character and scheming to put right the terrible wrongs that her upbringing had developed in her.

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  Henry gradually became aware the next day of the terrible ordeal in store for her. While the twins and their pets were confined to the schoolroom with Miss Manford, and Giles spent the day out of the house somewhere with his brother prior to returning to university the next day, I leery was consigned to the tender mercies of Lady Tallant.

  During the morning a hairdresser arrived. Henry was made to sit on a stool in her sister-in-law's bedroom, while Monsieur Pierre (a phony Frenchman, Henry
decided as soon as he opened his mouth) walked slowly around her several times, his head tilted at various angles, his eyes narrowed in concentration.

  "I know there is not much to be done, Henry told him practically. "The curl is natural, you know, but no one has ever been able to control it. You can brush it and hot-iron it as much as you please, but it will look like a spiky thornbush five minutes later. And you really cannot cut it any shorter. I. should be quite bald if you tried it, and Marian would never recover from the vapors."

  Monsieur Pierre appeared to ignore this candid advice and proceeded to alarm Henry to no small degree by picking up his scissors, flexing his fingers artistically, as if he were about to play a sonata on the pianoforte, and began to snip.

  Henry sat meekly enough through the ordeal, which did not last for very long. When she was finally allowed to examine the results in the mirror, she was astonished. Her hair appeared to be no shorter than it had when she had ruthlessly brushed it for all of ten seconds earlier in the morning, but now it had shape. Soft curls molded her scalp and the nape of her neck. It actually looked tame.

  After luncheon, Henry was confronted with her sister-in-law's dressmaker, Madame Celeste (another phony, Henry decided), in the yellow salon. Marian was present, too, having canceled all earlier plans for the afternoon and having instructed the butler to deny her presence to any visitors who chanced to call. Henry had been told quite bluntly that her own clothes just would not do in London, and she was ready to concede that it would be agreeable to have some new clothes. She was prepared for a boring half-hour with the dressmaker in order to accomplish the necessary task of choosing a few clothes-a day dress, a ball gown, and perhaps a riding habit, she thought, though the prospect of riding in London did not possess much charm for her if it meant having to ride sidesaddle.

  Henry was horrified to find that the session lasted for almost three and a half hours and that she was to have so many new clothes that it would surely take her all Season to wear each of them just once.

  "Why do I need ten ball gowns, for heaven's sake?" she asked, appalled. "Won't one last me for the few months until summer?"

  Madame Celeste allowed a superior smile to settle on here sallow features while Marian raised her eyes to the ceiling and struggled to hold on to her ladylike patience.

  "My dear Henrietta," she said, "we shall be attending niany balls, given by some of the most influential members of the ton. Your brother and I move in the highest circles, you know. It would be quite unthinkable to wear the same gown more than twice at the most in one year. Everyone would think you must be a pauper, my dear. And we would never find a gentleman to make an offer for You.

  "And is that the purpose of all this fuss and fluster?" Henry asked, one arm indicating the jumbled mass of patterns, bolts of fabric, and cards of ribbons and lace strewn everywhere. "Am I to be put on the market for the highest bidder?"

  "Really, Henrietta," Marian replied sternly, "I am trying my best to make you look like a lady. I would ask you to make an effort to speak like one, too. Of course it must be the aim of any young lady of breeding to find herself a suitable husband. What else is there?"

  Henry was about to argue the point, but remembering a certain wager that she was determined to win, she shut her mouth with an audible clacking of the teeth.

  She endured the seemingly endless spell of standing on it low stool while Madame Celeste measured and pinned, poked and prodded. Then she sat in gloomy silence for the remaining time period while her sister-in-law and the dressmaker discussed styles and fabrics and trimmings ad nauseam. Only once did she express an opinion.

  "Not pink," she declared.

  Marian looked doubtful. "You are probably right, Henrietta, " she agreed. "Pink might clash with your hair."

  "I don't care about that," Henry declared, "but pink is fur girls!"

  Marian wisely refrained from comment.

  The tedium of the fitting session over, Henry breathed it sigh of relief and announced her intention of going outside for a walk. A loud argument ensued when Marian forbade her to set so much as a nose out of doors until the first of her clothes should have arrived two days later. Henry lost the argument.

  She would, she felt, have gone quite mad at the tedium of the day had one incident not brightened it up. Little

  Timothy's nurse could be heard shrieking in near hysteria abovestairs. Henry was sitting in the drawing room at the time busily employed with shaking her foot back and forth and counting how many shakes it took before the slipper flew off. Marian was also there, working some embroidery.

  The latter leapt to her feet first and rushed for the nursery whence the sounds were proceeding. Henry followed at a more leisurely pace. Daily crises in the Tallant home had conditioned her not to panic too easily.

  The scene that met her eyes when she reached the nursery door delighted her greatly. The twins were busily examining the baby's toys while the toddler himself was on the floor tangled up in the reclining body of Brutus and having his face thoroughly licked. The child was chuckling with merriment. Oscar was perched on the headboard of the gently rocking cradle, viewing the scene before him and repeating benignly, "Bless his boots!"

  By the time Henry lost interest in the scene and wandered back to the drawing room, the twins had been sent back to the schoolroom with their pets; Miss Manford, who had nodded asleep over some darning before the twins had made their escape, had been scolded; nurse, who had discovered the scene of horror on her return from a visit to the kitchen, had been left to soothe a howling baby, who had been deprived of his new toy; and Lady Tallant had been helped to her room by her lady's maid and was resting quietly in the hope that she would be recovered in time for dinner.

  The outcome of the incident was that Brutus and Oscar were banished to the stable. Sir Peter was quite adamant. There was to be no reprieve. He declared that he was being too softhearted to allow the creatures to be kept at all.

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  When the first of Henry's clothes were delivered two days later, she discovered that she was still not at liberty to relax and order her own life. Clothed in one of the day dresses, she was whisked off to Bond Street by Marian to shop for bonnets, feathers, gloves, boots, slippers, fans, parasols, and a whole lot of other "useless frippery," as she confided to Miss Manford on her return.

  "Really, Manny," she said crossly, "is this the way females snare husbands? It is all a ridiculous game. Does no man choose a woman that he feels he might be comfortable with for the rest of his life rather than a primped-up doll?"

  "But some people feel it is delightful to dress up and look pretty, dearest girl," Miss Manford soothed. "And the gentlemen spend no less time in looking their best. Why, I have heard that Mr. Brummell used to spend three and a half hours sometimes merely in tying his neckcloth."

  Henry burst into loud laughter. "He must have been a peacock!" was her opinion.

  "Perhaps so, dearest girl, but never say so to anyone else. He set the fashion for a long time, I have heard."

  "What a lot of fustian!" Henry declared before going out to the stable to join the twins in a mournful visit to Brutus and Oscar.

  Lady Tallant finally revealed her social plans to Henry. For the next couple of weeks, there were to be minor social activities, including a few small dinner parties, a musical evening, and a picnic party to Kew Gardens. But Henry's official come-out was to be made with the daughter of Marian's friend, the Countess of Lambert. The Tallants had a ballroom only large enough for a moderately sized affair, but Marian wanted to make a larger splash for her sister-in-law's first official appearance. The countess had been quite insistent that they share the occasion-and the cost. Althea was a shy girl, she declared. It would help her to have another debutante with whom to share the nerves that every girl must endure on such an occasion.

  Henry dutifully attended all the pre-come-out activities, listening avidly to the names of all gues
ts that were announced. It seemed that the Duke of Eversleigh attended nothing. How was she supposed to get him to propose to her when she had never even set eyes on the man? She began to appreciate the genius of her brother and his cohorts in naming him as the object of her conquest. They must have known that it was unlikely that she would ever even meet him. But really, she thought, they were playing the game very unfairly. She conveniently forgot that she had insisted on aiming for the duke.

  She was beginning to doubt the very existence of the man, when suddenly she heard him mentioned for the first time since she had come to London. Her sister-in-law had introduced her to Althea Summers during a particularly insipid party. There was nothing to do. There was no dancing. Loo tables had been set up, but the older set had occupied the tables and the younger people had drifted into unenthusiastic groups. Althea and Henry sat together, a little removed from the others, not by Henry's choice. She labeled Althea as a twit after one glance at her pasty, anxious face.

  "Henrietta, are you not horribly frightened about the ball?" Althea asked, leaning confidentially toward her new friend. "I declare, I do not know how I shall live through it. "

  "Why?" Henry asked. "What is there to be frightened of?"

  "Why, everyone will be looking at us," Althea said, wide-eyed. "And there will be so many gentlemen. What if we do not make a good impression, Henrietta? We will be wallflowers for the rest of the Season. And how dreadful it would be to have to begin another Season next year without any beaux."

  "As for me," Henry said unconcernedly, swinging her legs freely, "if the gentlemen do not care to take notice of me, I shan't take any notice of them. There is to be a supper table, is there not?"

  Althea darted a frightened, rather doubtful look at her companion. "You are funning, Henrietta," she said. "You really are droll." And she tittered in uncertain amusement. "I am sure I shall forget every dance step I ever learned," she continued.

  "Pooh!" said Henry. "Who cares for dancing?"

  "Mama says I have to dance with Cousin Marius if she can lure him," Althea continued. "I shall just die, Henrietta. He has such a, way of looking down his nose and through his quizzing glass at one. I shall forget even which foot is which. But Mama says it would be a great coup to get Eversleigh to dance with me. It will ensure my success."