by M C Beaton
“Success is coming,” said Henrietta to herself. “I can feel it.”
Chapter Two
“What is so vastly interesting in the existence of a new confectioner’s?” asked the Earl of Carrisdowne.
His friend, Mr. Guy Clifford, neatly guided his curricle between a Covent Garden cart and a hackney carriage before replying, “Nothing. If it were an ordinary confectioner’s, that is. What makes Bascombe’s so interesting is that Miss Bascombe is a brown-haired beauty.”
“Nothing unusual in that,” remarked the earl. “Confectioners are famous for their beautiful girls.”
“But this one is Bascombe’s, if you take my meaning. She started the business a month ago. And she’s gently bred, and so are her two female assistants.”
“It is not out of the way for shopkeepers to claim gentility,” said the earl. “You know that, Guy.”
“But, damme, you’ve only got to look at ’em, speak to ’em. They’ve even got a dragon of a lady to keep an eye on ’em.”
“Are you trying to tell me that these tonnish ladies have taken to trade?” demanded the earl.
“Well, I suppose that’s it,” said Mr. Clifford awkwardly. “Ain’t that just what I’ve been saying?”
The earl cast a cold blue eye on his friend. “I thought you were looking for a wife, not a mistress,” he remarked.
Mr. Clifford flushed. “Surely running a respectable establishment like a confectioner’s don’t put a female beyond the pale?”
“Yes, it does, my friend,” said the earl gently. “And well you know it.”
Mr. Clifford set his lips in a mutinous line. Rupert, Earl of Carrisdowne, was his friend, not his guardian. But sometimes the earl went on like a guardian or a parent.
He forgot how many times the earl had pulled him out of dangerous scrapes when he was younger. The earl, like Mr. Clifford, had recently returned from the wars in the peninsula, the earl because of the death of his father, which meant he inherited the earldom, and Mr. Clifford because of a shrapnel wound. They had not seen much of each other during the past five years, having been in different regiments. Mr. Clifford was now twenty-nine. He had a comfortable income from a small Kentish estate and planned to find a wife and settle down.
The earl had readily agreed to enjoy the delights of London in Mr. Clifford’s company. He was tired of war and wanted a period of relaxation before sinking himself into the cares of his estates.
He was a tall, broad-shouldered man burned brown by the Spanish sun. He had a thin, high-bridged nose and a firm mouth. His clothes were faultless, and Guy reflected enviously that the earl managed to achieve in half an hour what it took him, Guy, a good half day to accomplish.
The earl’s coats lay across his shoulders without a single wrinkle, cravats fell into intricate, sculptured perfection under his fingers, and his breeches hugged his thighs like a second skin. His boots never had a mark on their glossy surface, even in the muddiest of weather.
Guy was a contrast to his tall, black-haired autocratic-looking friend. He had a fair, pleasant face and steady gray eyes. He was stocky and of only medium height.
Despite his longing for sartorial elegance, his clothes seemed to have a mind of their own. After a bare hour of leaving the hands of his valet, his waistcoat would start to ride up, and his shirt would bunch out over his breeches. The strings of his breeches would untie themselves at his knees, and the starch would mysteriously disappear from his cravat.
And yet Guy, who often resented the earl’s highhanded manner and puritanical views, found that the comradeship of more easygoing friends always seemed to lead to marked cards and fast women. Despite his rather rakish past, he was a romantic at heart and was determined to fall in love when the Season started, get married, and live happily ever after.
No one could accuse the earl of being romantic. No beauty had been able to light a spark in his black, cynical eyes. At the age of thirty-three, he was still unmarried. Guy pitied the woman the earl would eventually take as a wife. He was convinced the earl would lead her a dog’s life.
The earl, meanwhile, was making a mental note to have a look at this Bascombe’s. It would be just like Guy to fall in love with a shop girl.
But when he made a few discreet enquiries that evening, it was to find that no one seemed to have actually gone into Bascombe’s—only doubtfully admiring the ladies from afar.
Gunter’s was the fashionable place, and no one could see any reason to go anywhere else.
“Doom and disaster,” sighed Miss Henrietta Bascombe to herself as she looked out at the bleak February day. Only two months until the Season started and, unless a miracle happened, they would need to lock up the shop and go home.
Over the doorway of Bascombe’s in Half Moon Street swung a golden pineapple, the sign that hung outside all good confectioners.
Inside were the most delicious cakes and confections imaginable. But the little tables stood empty, and the fashionable throng drifted past with only brief curious looks.
Henrietta, Charlotte, and Josephine were all dressed alike in striped cotton gowns and muslin aprons. Little lace caps with jaunty streamers ornamented their heads. Charlotte had put on some much-needed weight, for often they ate some of their stock at the end of the day before delivering the rest to the foundling hospital.
Henrietta did not want to leave London, particularly when things were looking so hopeful for Josephine. One of their very, very few customers, a Mr. Guy Clifford, had seemed enchanted with Josephine, and Henrietta had liked his easy, open manner.
As she stood by the window of the shop, a pale-faced young man hesitated outside. While Henrietta sent up a silent prayer, he took a few steps away, then turned back, and opened the door.
Henrietta went forward to serve him. “Just some hot chocolate,” he murmured, sitting down at a little table and burying his face in his hands.
Henrietta rushed to prepare a cup of chocolate and then set the steaming liquid down in front of him.
He winced as if she had presented him with a cup of poison, turned a greenish color, muttered, “I can’t. The brandy, you know. Oh, my cursed head,” and stumbled to his feet and lurched out of the shop.
“What on earth was the matter with him?” asked Josephine, round-eyed.
“He, like most of the gentlemen in Mayfair, is suffering from having drunk too long and too deeply the night before,” said Henrietta crossly. “Perhaps I should have opened an apothecary’s… .” Her voice trailed away as an idea struck her. “That’s it,” she breathed. “That’s it!”
“I am glad you have realized that that is it,” said Miss Hissop, who had emerged from the back shop in time to hear Henrietta’s words. “Now that you have come to your senses, we can all pack up and go home.”
“No, no. I mean I have hit on a plan to get the fashionables to patronize us,” said Henrietta, her eyes glowing. “I still have Papa’s book, where he has his recipes for various cordials, highly efficacious for the treatment of a disordered stomach and spleen. If I put them in the window with an advertisement, that will fetch them!”
“Nothing will fetch them,” said Miss Hissop. “We are unfashionables, as I knew we should be. Dear Henrietta, let us return to our little home. I do not wish to die in London. London undertakers are so expensive. And in London, it costs one shilling an hour to hire a mute.”
Miss Hissop’s morbid preoccupation with her own funeral often irritated Henrietta who, like all young people, thought of herself as immortal. But this new idea was burning in her brain, and she was too anxious to begin to make up the medicines and cordials to become annoyed with her spinster friend.
She worked far into the night while the other ladies went to bed in a sort of dormitory above the shop.
At last she was finished. She felt exhausted because she had had to walk to visit the herbal shops and apothecaries over in the city the previous afternoon. There was still one thing to be done, the all-important one—how to word the advertisement
that was to stand in front of the bottles in the window.
It was no use hinting at the problem these prescriptions were supposed to cure. Gentlemen were too fussy in their heads in the morning to deal with subtleties. Taking a deep breath, she printed carefully,
BASCOMBE’S ELIXIRS.
FOR DISORDERS OF THE SPLEEN CAUSED
BY OVERINDULGENCE.
Was that too rude? Too blunt? Henrietta nervously chewed the end of her quill and then had to pick bits of feather out of her mouth.
“I shall leave it,” she decided. “Should it prove too blunt and no one takes the bait, I shall rephrase it.”
After some two hours’ sleep, she awoke and roused the others. The day’s baking had to commence, just as if they were expecting a flood of customers. There was always hope.
The elderly Duke of Gillingham picked his way homeward along Half Moon Street the following morning at eleven o’clock. He had been drinking and gambling at Watier’s club at the corner of Bolton Street and Piccadilly. A large breakfast, which usually put him to rights, had failed to work its magic.
His head felt hot and fevered and his stomach queasy. He felt he wanted to go home, summon his lawyers, and dictate his last will and testament. His tongue felt like a Turkish carpet that had had cigar ash spilled on it.
He was about to pass what he privately termed “that jolly little confectioner’s with the pretty gels.” He was often tempted to go in. But no one went there. It was as simple as that.
He stopped a few paces on and looked thoughtfully at the ground. Then he walked back again and raised his quizzing glass. He leaned forward, was overtaken by a sudden fit of dizziness, and banged his head against the glass. Cursing horribly, he straightened up and slowly and painfully scrutinized the advertisement.
Like a sleepwalker, he mounted the shallow steps, opened the door, and went in. He almost fled before the nauseating smells of sugar and cinnamon and chocolate.
“May I help you, sir?”
There was a dainty brunette in a striped gown and apron and a delicious frivolity of a cap curtsying before him.
“Bascombe’s Elixir… fast,” grated the duke in a rusty voice.
“Yes, sir,” said Henrietta.
“Yes, your grace,” whispered Miss Hissop, who had made it her business to discover who was who in the West End of London.
Henrietta placed the duke at a seat by the window. She poured a small bottle of the cordial into a glass and handed it to him.
He looked at her doubtfully with his red-rimmed eyes. Then he jerked the contents down his throat and placed both hands on the table and hung on.
A warm glow spread throughout his stomach. A feeling of well-being began to permeate his whole system. He shook his head as if to clear it and looked around slowly, a little color beginning to tinge his yellowish face.
What a charming place it was, he thought with a sort of wonder. How good everything smelled! Charlotte and Josephine came in from the back shop bearing trays of cakes. What beauties, breathed the duke.
Now Henrietta had another powerful advertisement to add to the one already in the window. The Duke of Gillingham was seated at the window of the confectioner’s in full view of anyone passing. He asked for chocolate and flirted amiably with Charlotte and Josephine.
One by one more gentlemen came in to take the cure and stayed to chat with Henrietta, Charlotte, and Josephine.
By the time the ladies of Mayfair set out on their calls, every fashionable man in London seemed to be crammed into Bascombe’s.
The ladies could not find places, and so they were determined to get to Bascombe’s the next day before the gentlemen arrived. A confectioner’s was the only place where two ladies could meet for tea and cakes unescorted. And with all these gentlemen, it now looked a better prospect for attracting a suitable beau than Almack’s.
Guy Clifford, arriving at his usual time of three in the afternoon, found he had to stand outside on the pavement and wait for a free seat.
Gloomily he watched through the window as various gentlemen ogled and stared at Josephine, and ground his teeth. She should not be subjected to such vulgar company. How he longed to take her away from it all.
He flushed guiltily when he heard himself being hailed and turned and saw the willowy figure of the Earl of Carrisdowne’s younger brother, Lord Charles Worsley.
“What are you hanging around here for?” asked Lord Charles curiously.
“Waiting for a place,” mumbled Mr. Clifford, wondering what the earl would say if Charles told him where he had found him. “Oh, look,” said Mr. Clifford suddenly, “those two Bond Street fribbles are just leaving. Come along.” He seized Lord Charles’s arm and all but dragged him inside.
“What’s all the fuss? Why all the stampede?” asked Lord Charles. He was as black-haired and high-nosed as his brother, but where the earl’s expression was autocratic and harsh, Lord Charles’s was innocent and guileless.
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Clifford, who had been too busy watching for glimpses of Josephine to read the advertisement. “It’s worse than a rout.”
Charlotte curtsied before them. “What is your pleasure, gentlemen?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said Lord Charles. “I was dragged in here, so to speak. I know, I’ll have one of your wet confects.”
Confectioners sold wet or dry confects. The wet ones were various fruits immersed in liquid syrup; the dry, apart from cakes and biscuits, were little figures or houses or ships made out of marzipan or fruit, beaten into a paste with sugar.
Charlotte described the various varieties of wet confects, and Lord Charles settled for apricot. Mr. Clifford asked for turtle soup. Charlotte blushed prettily. All good confectioners sold turtle soup, but since they had had no customers for it, it was an expensive business to keep making pots of turtle soup and then being forced to give it away, and so they no longer had any in stock.
“Not today, sir,” she said.
“He’ll have the same as me,” said Lord Charles cheerfully. And as Charlotte walked away, he said to Mr. Clifford, “I’ll eat yours if you don’t want it. Couldn’t stand to see her blush. Pretty girl. Very pretty girl. Do you see that beautiful shine on her black hair?”
“I say,” said Mr. Clifford, hitching his chair closer to the table, “you know how authoritative Rupert can be at times.”
“My brother can be a demmed bully, if that’s what you mean,” said Lord Charles with feeling.
“Yes, well, I told him about Bascombe’s and how odd it was they were all ladies. He disapproved. Said they couldn’t be ladies if they were working in a shop. Told him that little Miss Bascombe over there who can’t be more than twenty opened up the business herself. He gave me a cold look—I was driving at the time, and I swear I felt the chill from it going right down one side—and more or less told me I was making a cake of myself. You know.”
“So you don’t want me to tell him you’ve been seen here,” grinned Lord Charles. “Tell you what, we both shan’t tell him we’ve been here, and we can enjoy the company of these pretty ladies undisturbed. Now, which one is it? Miss Bascombe, the one with the chestnut hair, or the beautiful princess in the tower who is serving us?”
“No one in particular,” said Mr. Clifford airily. “Ain’t much interested in ladies these days, to tell the truth.”
He turned and found Josephine at his elbow and flushed brick-red.
“Oho!” grinned Lord Charles maliciously. The truth, is it?”
Instead of waiting wearily until ten in the evening in the hope of a customer, Henrietta was able to put up the heavy shutters at six. She went back into the shop and looked with dazed delight at the empty shelves. Then she groaned. It was going to be another long night of baking, and brewing elixir.
Charlotte and Josephine were sitting in chairs in the shop, looking weary but triumphant. Miss Hissop was counting out the day’s takings and dreaming of a magnificent funeral with plumed horses and paid mourners.
“I am very strong,” said Henrietta, “though I do feel a little weak at the moment. I must sit down and get out the order book. We are going to need large quantities of everything. Yes, you are right. We do need a boy to fetch and carry for us. Perhaps on Sunday I shall go to the nearest workhouse and see if I can find someone.”
“The workhouse!” shuddered Miss Hissop, her hands full of sovereigns and silver. “Much safer to get a young man from one of the agencies.”
“No,” said Henrietta. “It is a chance to allow some poor boy from the workhouse a comfortable living. We are a success, ladies! Bascombe’s has become fashionable.
“Nothing can stop our success now!”
A week later, the Earl of Carrisdowne stood outside Bascombe’s and looked in. His younger brother and his best friend were cozily ensconced in a corner, gazing at two of the young shopgirls in a decidedly spoony manner.
He walked on, thoroughly irritated. His brother and Mr. Clifford were notoriously gullible when it came to the fair sex. Had not Guy nearly proposed marriage once to a member of the fashionable impure whom Guy had persuaded himself was really an innocent virgin?
And had not young Charles run off with an opera dancer? And would have married the trollop had he, the earl, not been home on leave to put a stop to the romance?
Nonetheless, he had almost decided to leave the matter of Bascombe’s until things became more obviously serious but changed his mind because of the involvement with that wretched place of another member of the family.
His young sister, Lady Sarah Worsley, had been steadily growing as fat as a pig. She was just seventeen and had an enormous appetite for cakes. When the earl had pointed out that she was ruining her face and figure with sweetmeats, she had gone on a strict diet for a while and had emerged as a pretty girl. Now she was fat and spotty again, and he soon learned the problem was Bascombe’s. Lady Sarah stated she had never tasted such delicious cakes before. The earl forbade her to visit Bascombe’s, an order that Lady Sarah accepted with uncharacteristic meekness. Then it transpired that she had simply been sending round a footman each day with a long list of all the cakes she craved.