by Laura London
“Now, now, none of that,” commanded Robert, leaning toward me and speaking in a low tone. “I’m going to look after you, and there’s Gwen and Ellen to hover around too. There are only two things you need to remember. One’s when you meet the squire, tell him immediately that you admire his scholarship excessively.”
“But, Robert, I’ve never heard of his scholarsh—”
“Hush and listen, will you? The second thing is: give Peregrine Absalm the sharpest setdown you can manage as soon as he makes you his first indecent proposal.”
“His first what?”
“You heard me. Be quiet. We’ve about reached the reception line.”
I reflected with nervous irritability that it was just like Robert to say something to wrack my nerves to bits, and decided to put both very odd bits of advice from my head.
But when I was introduced to Squire Perscough, I stood trembling as he twitched his two black caterpillar eyebrows, looked down his very long nose, and said, “What do you have to say for yourself, young lady?” I grabbed at Robert’s words like a body sinking in quicksand reaches for a clump of swamp grass, and vowed meekly that I had heard of his scholarship. For a moment, I thought I had made a terrible mistake, for he waggled those awful eyebrows furiously and turned beet red.
“You have, have you?” he trumpeted. Silence fell on the room, all ears tuned to his voice, all eyes turned to us. Then he clapped me on the back, set me on the window seat, demanded two glasses of champagne from a hovering footman, and said, “Young lady, I take my recognition where I can find it.”
The squire, so I learned, had spent the better part of the last twenty years developing a one thousand page document in support of his assertion that William Shakespeare was married in the parish church a mile from Lambelle, a theory that was based in its entirety upon the squire’s discovery of an entry in the Episcopal register in 1582 which alleged the issue of a marriage license to one W. Chas. Pierre, which the squire said any idiot could see was the phonetic spelling of an underlettered church clerk for William Shakespeare. Pierre wasn’t an English name, was it? No, it was French, and what would a Frenchman be doing getting married in a British church in the year of 1582? He’d be married in France, wouldn’t he? Unless I’d be wanting to be damned unpatriotic and attribute Shakespeare’s plays to some misplaced Frenchman! I said that I did not, and the squire looked extremely pleased with me, said I was a likely lass with more in my head than most silly things my age, offered to lend me a copy of his treatise and handed me to his wife with the admonition that he bet I’d like to be spending my time with the young people.
He was wrong; there was nothing I wanted less. Still, Ellen came to my one side, and Robert took the other as he had promised, and I soon discovered they were as invincible an armor as any. Ellen might be shy in a group, but she was very well-liked by both sexes, and I could see that Robert was easily the most popular blood of the young set, as well as the chief arbiter of taste. It was very clear that anyone who was unkind to me would be so at their social peril.
Robert guided the talk into such unalarming topics as the upcoming festivities to celebrate May Day and who was going to London for the finish of the season. While Robert and Ellen directed their remarks frequently to me and encouraged others to do the same, they left no chance for the conversation to become more personal, or for anyone to ask me questions that might be awkward. I was to be given the generous opportunity to wait and catch my breath and to sit and observe without fearing that I would need to defend myself.
As I began to separate out the faces, Peregrine Absalm was one of the first to which I put a name. I would have noticed him even if Robert had not mentioned his name to me as we came in because to be noticed was a thing into which Mr. Absalm put a great deal of effort. He was a tall young man and good-looking in a heavy, hard-jowled sort of way. I guessed his age to be about two years under Robert’s and everything he did seemed to be centered around proving that he was a young man who had seen it all. He held a wineglass that he let dangle from his fingers with such artistic negligence that you’d think he’d spent a month practicing it. He threw back his head like a rearing stallion when he laughed. When he talked, he made a habit of letting fall a few carefully chosen profane words and then apologizing profusely to the ladies present, to bring home the point that he was accustomed to the company of females of a far more risqué order. His companions received each peculiarity with the tolerance of old friends, though Peregrine’s sister, a prim girl in pink, did sometimes say, “Peregrine, will you stop? Or I shall tell Mama!” which crimped some of his better efforts.
Then there was John Lennox, a tall, rakish blond with a long neck and tumbling blond curls, who had a quick, secretive grin, made some of the funniest puns I had ever heard, and was a third cousin to Robert and Lord Brockhaven. Julie Aldgate had a habit of tossing her head to and fro while she talked to make her curls bounce, and I wondered why her mother didn’t tell her to stop, until I met her mother and discovered that she had the same habit. Ellen’s closest friend was a girl named Claire, who was pretty and lively and made much over by the men; Claire’s younger sister was Roberta, though everyone called her Bobby, which she seemed to like. There were the Nettel twins, good-natured young men who both affected the use of a quizzing glass, which made it quite startling to be beheld by the two of them at once.
Before dinner was announced, I had been introduced to more than forty people and acquired a miserable headache.
There is a custom of the gorgio aristocracy that is called “leading the ladies in to dinner,” which reminded me of “leading the cows to the pasture” as if we couldn’t be trusted to find our way there on our own. During this process I was left unattended for long enough to give Peregrine Absalm the opportunity to rub his omnipresent dangling wineglass against my arm suggestively and leer at me with the lecherous precision of a randy goat.
“You glorious creature! They say that gypsy women can take whatever men they choose as lovers. Is that so, sweet dream?”
His words and manner afflicted me with a variety of emotions, the most prominent being amazement that anyone had garnered such a fallacious notion about the privileges accorded gypsy women.
“It’s hardly likely,” I said, headache and embarrassment adding an unintended edge to my voice. “Our tribal justice decrees that promiscuous women should have their nostrils slit.”
I saw right away that I had horrified Mr. Absalm, for he blanched and swallowed loudly and said that he begged my pardon. It occurred to me that I had just received the predicted indecent proposal and, to my shame, I realized that John Lennox was standing only a few paces away and that he must have heard everything. I looked at him, blushing, only to find that he was regarding me with voluptuous approval and, as our gazes met, he lifted his hands and made a gesture to me of mute applause. As for Peregrine Absalm, for the rest of the evening he treated me with a respect that bordered upon awe.
Dinner went off very well, “considering,” as Ellen would say. Lady Gwen had impressed upon me the importance of dividing one’s attention equally between the partner on the right and the partner on the left. This was easy enough to do, because on my right was an elderly baronet who needed little encouragement to talk about the disastrous drop in the prices for farm produce since the end of the war, and on my left was the rotund and red-faced parson who announced straightaway that while he was sure I would know much that interested him about the ways of the gypsy, we would have to discuss it at some later date, for it was death on his digestion to talk during dinner.
Mrs. Perscough deplored the modern trend toward allowing one’s guests to speak across the table on formal occasions, as it allowed uncongenial people access to their various foes, rendering null and void a hostess’s careful efforts to separate the incompatible, and inevitably making the meal a less than peaceful occasion. To discourage this practice, she had placed huge silver bowls at frequent intervals down the table and had the gardener fill them w
ith arrangements of tall white hothouse lilies surrounded by an impenetrable array of green foliage. Ellen, seated toward the end of the table, I could only see if both of us happened to crane our necks at the same instant; Lady Gwen caught us at it and frowned me down.
My cousin, Isabella, and her husband had arrived late, delayed by a strained spavin on one of their coach horses, and they were seated when they came in halfway through dinner, though not before Isabella had made a great show of being happy to see me, followed by a more restrained greeting from Vincent. I smiled back at them with as much animation as my throbbing head would allow, feeling relieved that whether at Vincent’s advice, or at Lady Gwen’s, Isabella had not carried her ill feeling toward me into the public eye.
Isabella and Brockhaven were seated side by side. Through the foliage I could see them talking to each other in a steady, intent way I found painful to watch, no matter how much I chided myself for it. They had been lovers once, and she still cared for him. And she was so pretty, like a vision. For all Brockhaven’s apparent hostility, was any man ever proof against a beauty like Isabella’s?
I kept my smile in place and continued to mind my manners, but my headache continued to grow, and with it my loneliness and my sense of being an outsider.
After the meal the gorgios segregate by sex, with the ladies retiring to another chamber to “leave the gentlemen to their port,” which is a practice that occurs only by accident at Edgehill. Lord Brockhaven leaves the table immediately after dinner to shut himself in his study with piles of estate business, and Robert rides off to gambling or cockfighting with his cronies.
Gypsies do the same, my grandmother had told me. The men sit together, looking very pleased with themselves, as though they have cleverly and by stealth shed their petticoat government so they can swear and smoke and argue about business, politics, and horses. The women form a group of their own, looking equally pleased with themselves so they can discuss the men; who has put on weight and who has lost it, how best to cure your husband of snoring, and the clever thing their youngest child said when he had seen his father cut himself during shaving.
As I walked to the white drawing room with the other ladies, the throbbing in my temples was so intense that when Ellen asked me how I had liked dinner, she had to repeat her remark three times before I could make sense of it. I apologized and told her about my headache, and soon I was surrounded by ladies speaking in solicitous whispers of headache powders and warm compresses and having our carriage brought round to convey Gwen and Ellen and me back to Edgehill. I demurred quickly, and raised my eyes to Mrs. Perscough, and in a voice that I distantly recognized as pleading, asked if I might lie down alone for a few minutes in the dark. No, thank you so much, I didn’t need Lady Gwen or Ellen to come with me.
I hardly recall being led to a guest chamber, being tucked under a soft blanket, or Mrs. Perscough’s whispered message that she would return to see how I did in one hour, and that I should ring the call bell and send a servant for her at once, if I should need something before then.
My eyes closed in blessed relief, my mind faded restlessly into sleep, and I dreamed that I was a Saxon princess held captive by Danish pirates. Lord Brockhaven fluctuated with bewildering speed between the identity of a Saxon hero who was come to rescue me, and the leader of the pirates.
It was more than an hour later when I woke up, so said the small bracket clock that sat beside a single lit candle on the mantelpiece. A note propped beside it from Lady Gwen said that she had come with Mrs. Perscough on the hour and when they had found me sleeping, decided it would be better not to disturb me. The note ended by saying that I should ring for her to come to me as soon as I woke up, and that she knew how sensitive I was, and I mustn’t allow myself to feel awkward about lying down—everyone understands a headache—and she loved me.
I smiled mistily at the note, tucked it into my reticule, made what reparations I could to my hair, and determined to find my own way back to the white drawing room.
The corridor was dark and quiet, with small, glass-globed tapers that burned many yards apart, shedding pale, flickering light in silver haloes along the blue walls. I passed door after anonymous door, stopping at intervals to listen in vain for the sounds of conversation. The corridor reached an abrupt end, so I had to retrace my steps, which built in me a feeling of failure that began to nibble away at the well-being that Lady Gwendolyn’s note had given me. At length I found a well-lit staircase hung with a chandelier, and remembered I had climbed it on Mrs. Perscough’s arm. Almost running down it in my relief, and not looking anywhere except the steps ahead of me, I reached the bottom and barreled full speed into the tall figure of a man.
“What’s this?” he said, above my head. “Why, Liza! Hello, little Liza.”
“Vincent!” I gasped, then corrected myself hastily, “I mean Mr.—Mr.…” Elves had fuddled my tongue, for I couldn’t remember his last name.
“Randolph,” he supplied, with some amusement. “But I liked hearing Vincent better from your lips. Please continue with that. I hope you’re feeling better now. Mrs. Perscough told us that you had a headache. We were very concerned about you.”
I wondered who he meant by we, and why he was so kind to me when his wife hated me so, and why he always looked at me in that particular, discreetly analyzing way. My words were as disjointed as my thoughts, as I said, “Oh, no! There was no cause! I had the merest trace of a… that is, I’m ashamed to have been such a baby about—” I broke off, realizing that I was doing exactly what Lady Gwen had cautioned me not to do in her note.
He put up his hand, as if in one gesture to reassure and show me that he understood.
“I don’t think you’re a baby,” he said, his gray eyes searching my face from under heavy, long-lashed lids. “What would have put such a thing into your mind?”
My thoughts flashed back to Lord Brockhaven and what he had said to me in the front hall at Edgehill this evening. I found myself beginning to blush.
“Nothing. I babble sometimes.”
“Nonsense!” he retorted, with a cool, direct grin that reminded me in a small way of Brockhaven’s. “You handle yourself magnificently. I can’t imagine a more self-possessed young woman, or one with greater courage. Surely, you must realize that the sweetness of your charm holds center stage, whatever company you find yourself in and whatever situation—and I have seen you in the most difficult.”
I stared at him blankly, and he laughed.
“And modest in the bargain,” he said. “Never mind. How has it been, settling in at Edgehill? Gwen is quite a lady, isn’t she? She must be a great support for you.”
“Yes, she is, and Ellen also. I don’t know how I could have gone on without them.”
“Nor do I,” he said, a little too dryly. “I’ve wanted to come to see you but…” There was an odd, almost wistful quality to his voice that I found disturbing, and as though he sensed my unease, he lifted his long graceful arms and rested his hands over the bare curve of my shoulder, his thumbs brushing gently the flesh that covered my collarbone. “You’ve noticed, haven’t you, that Alex and I don’t get along.”
“Yes,” I said through a tightening throat.
“That makes it a trifle difficult for us to become friends. And that’s all I’ve wanted, Liza, from the first moment I spoke to you. I don’t mean you any harm. How could I? Do you believe that?”
There was a silence that I somehow found frightening, and I nodded, because he seemed to expect it and because it had never occurred to me to think that he might want to harm me. I heard a door open behind him, but his shoulder blocked my view and by the time he turned to look, the door had closed again.
As he turned back, he gave me the smile of a sympathetic advocate. “So. A pledge to our mutual trust. Your hand on it?”
I lifted my hand right away, hoping it would make him take his from my shoulders, but he only raised one hand and curled it around my fingers, bringing it to his lips.
&nbs
p; “Here’s to friendship,” he said in a low tone. When he spoke again, his voice had changed. “I’ll tell you what! Why don’t we talk to Gwen, and ask if we can’t get you over to visit us at Chad next week? I was looking through the old schoolroom in the west wing yesterday, and do you know that I found a copybook that belonged to your father? He must have been around seven or eight years old when he made it, and it’s full of diagrams for mechanical banks and spinning jennies, and poems like an ‘Ode to the Land Under a Tree Stump.’ We have a miniature toy coach and four that belonged to him too, and a pull-duck from when he was an infant. I know he would have wanted you to have them. If we can arrange a visit, then I can show you his old rooms, and where he played, and give you his toys. Would you like that?”
“Oh, yes! So much! How kind of you to think of it. Several times I’ve thought of how I’d like to see Chad, because it was my father’s home, but I haven’t wanted to impose.”
There was a sharp crack as the door behind Vincent was pushed open with some force, and Brockhaven strode into the corridor. Vincent removed his hands from me, though not before Brockhaven had seen.
“Touch her again,” said Brockhaven in a soft invitation, “and I’ll flay open your hide with a horse whip.”
Clamping a bruising iron grip on my upper arm, he pulled me with him into the drawing room. I barely noticed the cheerful groups of chatting guests that surrounded us as I stared in mute amazement at Brockhaven.
“Enjoy your latest conquest, my dearest love?” he said in a quiet tone that felt as though I was being flayed with the same horse whip with which he’d threatened Vincent.
“What do you mean?” I said, fighting for control over my voice. “What have I done to make you so angry? I met Vincent in the hallway. What would you want me to do? Walk by him, ignoring him when he spoke to me?”
“Of course not,” he said in a suddenly indifferent tone that reminded me that Lord Brockhaven was much better at playing this game than I. “Would I expect you to say no to a man? And stand still to let him run his hands over your body, so we can be certain you won’t hurt his feelings? The next time Vincent makes love to you, don’t do a damn thing to discourage him, so I can have the pleasure of killing him afterward.”