The Original Miss Honeyford

by M C Beaton

  Lord Channington smiled ruefully down at the large puddle of wine at his feet. Most of the glasses of wine he had raised in a toast and then lowered under the table and spilled amid the sawdust and oyster shells.

  It would be fun to go to the Park and see the drunken captain disgracing himself in Miss Honeyford’s eyes.

  Captain Jocelyn was a full quarter of an hour late arriving in Charles Street. In his blurred and fogged mind, he had been expecting the hoydenish Honey of Kelidon, and had to blink several times before he recognized the vision who was awaiting him—a vision who was studying him with some amusement.

  Honey was wearing a carriage dress, a rich cardinal cloak of white satin stamped with small blue flowers and ornamented around the edge with an Egyptian border. Under it, she wore a simple white muslin gown enriched at the neck with Vandyke lace and at the bottom with three rows of richly-worked hemstitch. On her head, she wore a Danish bonnet of satin straw.

  Captain Jocelyn bent over her hand, and continued to bend until Honey put her hand under his chin and pushed him up straight again.

  “Are you well, captain?” demanded Lady Canon sharply. “You do not appear to be in plump currant.”

  Captain Jocelyn made one of those magnificent rallies that the very drunk can often achieve, and all at once looked sober and staid.

  “Certainly, my lady,” he said carefully. “May I assist you to the carriage, Miss Honeyford?”

  He helped Honey up onto the high perch of a rather tired-looking phaeton, and then went around the other side and leaped up himself—only somehow he could not stop himself and shot on past Honey, took a nose-dive off the other side of the phaeton, and landed on the pavement.

  Lady Canon fortunately had gone indoors and closed the door.

  Honey was used to dealing with drunken men on the hunting field. She shouted to the open-mouthed groom who was standing by the horses’ heads, “Help Captain Jocelyn into the passenger seat. I will drive.”

  She moved over and picked up the reins. “Don’t know as I ought,” said the groom, looking nervously at the four restless horses.

  “Go to the captain and stand away from their heads,” snapped Honey.

  Captain Jocelyn was pushed up beside her, and she set off down the road, driving the team well up to their bits, and holding her whip at just the right angle.

  “Mush she Miss Wetherall,” muttered Captain Jocelyn sleepily.

  “You will see her soon enough,” said Honey, “but whether she will want to see you is another matter.”

  Honey bit her lip. She was torn between the desire to take the captain straight back to his lodgings and the longing to drive this four-in-hand in the Park. Perhaps Lord Alistair would be there, and would be able to see the lady he had damned as a fatiguing schoolgirl holding this mettlesome team in perfect control.

  Vanity won. Honey swept in through the gates of Hyde Park, and, giving the team their heads, set off at a smart pace down the Row. She was so engrossed in her driving, so enjoying that old feeling of freedom and mastery, that she quite forgot about the captain and therefore was completely unaware he had fallen asleep. She did, however, notice that there was no sign of Miss Wetherall.

  She had completed the round twice at a smart pace and was slowing her team to a comfortable trot when she came abreast of Lord Channington and slowed to a halt, her face flushed with triumph.

  “Miss Honeyford,” said Lord Channington, “your escort is in a disgraceful condition. My tiger will take my carriage and I will escort you home.”

  “No need for that,” came a hatefully familiar, lazy voice. “Miss Honeyford drives better than any man.”

  Lord Alistair bowed and smiled and drove past.

  Honey glared after him. She hated his calm assumption that she was equal to anything from nearly being killed at a hanging to driving this team.

  She wanted to surrender the reins to Lord Channington and feel loved and cherished. But she could not disgrace Captain Jocelyn so.

  “Captain Jocelyn is unwell,” she said stiffly. “I am about to convey him to his lodgings.”

  “That would occasion a great deal of gossip, Miss Honeyford,” said Lord Channington. “Allow me to take him. I know where he lives.”

  “Very well,” said Honey, relieved. “Do make him understand I am not in the least put out and that he may call on me as soon as he feels better.”

  The drunken captain was heaved like a sack of coals from the rented phaeton into Lord Channington’s carriage. Honey bowed, gathered up the reins, and drove off in style.

  “Now my sottish friend,” said Lord Channington, “let us make sure you do not trouble Miss Honeyford again.”

  At the captain’s modest lodgings in Jermyn Street, Lord Channington asked his man for a pitcher of water and poured it full in the captain’s face.

  Captain Jocelyn woke with a shock from his drunken stupor with many Where-am-I’s? and demands to know what had become of Honey.

  With great and malicious exaggeration, Lord Channington told him of his behavior in the Park, ending up with, “So you see, my dear fellow, it won’t do to go calling on her, for I fear she will never forgive you.”

  “But she must,” said the still-drunk captain. “She promised to help me further my suit with Miss Wetherall.”

  “Do you mean to tell me,” said Lord Channington, “that your sole interest in Miss Honeyford is to use her to get closer to Miss Wetherall?”

  The captain tried to think of a more delicate way of putting it, but his fogged brain refused to work.

  “Yes,” he said baldly.

  “The deuce,” snarled Lord Channington. “What an infernal waste of good wine!”

  He stalked from the room, leaving Captain Jocelyn staring after him in a bemused way.

  Lady Canon was waiting for Honey, shocked to see her drive up to the door alone. A groom was sent to take the carriage and horses back to the livery stables. Lady Canon gave Honey a lecture on the folly of encouraging a young man who did not know how to hold his wine, and then went on again to lecture her about the visit to the hanging. For the gossip of the crowd deaths had reached Lady Canon at last.

  “But there were several finely dressed ladies there,” said Honey.

  “They were probably cyprians or merchants’ wives or low people like that. You must not disgrace yourself again by appearing in public on such friendly terms with your servants. If you must watch hangings, then a window can be hired—”

  “Stop!” said Honey, appalled. “Do you know, Aunt Elizabeth, that I still have nightmares and horrors when I think of that barbaric spectacle? Never, ever again will I go to such an affair.”

  “Well, well, your feelings do you credit. Still, it is a mercy that such a high stickler as Lord Alistair Stewart did not see you there with your servants. Although he heard of it and went in search of you, it is as well he did not find you. There is nothing gives a gentleman more of a disgust of anyone as to see a member of the ton being overfamiliar with servants.”

  Honey was weary of her aunt’s lectures and so did not tell her of her rescue by Lord Alistair. Drat the man! She did not even want to think of him. Almack’s was tomorrow and she must be prepared to shine.

  Lady Canon must have great social influence, thought Honey, to have acquired vouchers for Almack’s for her. The patronesses ruled those famous assembly rooms with a rod of iron.

  Many diplomatic arts, much finesse, and a host of intrigues were set in motion to get an invitation to Almack’s. Very often people whose rank and fortune entitled them to an entree anywhere were excluded by the cliquishness of the lady patronesses.

  Honey gave herself an impatient shake. So little time in London and already she was fretting over a mere ball. She sat down at the writing desk and wrote her father a long and affectionate letter. Lady Canon had left to make a few calls and so the house was quiet.

  Just as she finished the letter, a huge bouquet of flowers arrived from Captain Jocelyn accompanied by an abject
letter of apology.

  Honey sighed. She should never have given in to vanity and taken the captain to the Park. He might have come across Amy and then she, Honey, would have had that on her conscience.

  She opened a book from her aunt’s library entitled Sacred Meditations and settled down to read herself into a more serene frame of mind.

  But the first paragraph that met her eye did little to soothe her. On the subject of women, the writer had this to say: “The happy timidity, the native gentleness, the maternal feelings, the muscular inferiority, and the parental infirmities of the female sex make them averse to the bold and fierce employments of uncultivated man. Their milder character is ever operating insensibly to soften his asperities and to infuse a softer spirit into his mind.”

  “Pah!” said Honey, picking up another book. This one promised to be more to her taste—An Enquiry into the Best System of Female Education, by the Reverend J. L. Chirol. Mr. Chirol based his argument on “an aggregation of incontrovertible facts collected in more than 500 schools,” and then went on to say that even the best of them was good for nothing owing to the characters of the governesses at the English seminaries for young ladies.

  “Some have been kept mistresses, cast off when the bloom of youth and beauty began to fade. Placed in a situation of reputed respectability, they soon make their fortune through the patronage of their former protectors, who obtain a right of admittance to the young ladies committed to their care and thus not infrequently indemnify themselves with these for the loss of the charms of their quondam mistresses.”

  And I cannot think of a more delicate way of putting it, as Lord Alistair would no doubt say, thought Honey, and threw the book away.

  She finally settled down with The Gentleman’s Magazine, which was more to her liking, and read an article where the writer considered women would make very good army officers indeed.

  “Most women can dance and play with a fan, and they might be taught to swear,” she read. “In fact, with a very little expense and trouble they might be rendered as formidable to our sex as many of the brave defenders of our garrisons, while they would be less dangerous to their own.”

  Honey’s eyes began to close.

  The heat from the fire was warm and the ticking of the many clocks, soporific. She stretched lazily out on the sofa and went to sleep.

  She was walking across a sunny meadow with Lord Alistair. His eyes were as blue as the sky above as he smiled down at her. He turned and took her in his arms. She watched his mouth descending toward her own and closed her eyes. The kiss was not what she expected. It was warm and rather wet. Furthermore, he had not shaved and his chin prickled. Honey opened her eyes in her dream and looked up into the dead brown eyes of Lord Channington.

  She awoke with a start. Some horsehair was pressing through the upholstery of the sofa and prickling her cheek. She felt tired and cross and out of sorts. There must be some way she could banish Lord Alistair from her dreams.

  Lady Canon was, at that moment, taking tea at the home of a certain Lady Maxwell and graciously accepting praise on the beauty of her niece from the other ladies present.

  “I am very pleased to say,” said Lady Canon, “that I have high hopes of Honoria’s announcing her engagement very soon.”

  Immediately, she was pressed to reveal the name of the lucky man, all the other hopeful mamas wondering which eligible man they could knock off their list.

  “Now, I cannot really tell you at this moment,” laughed Lady Canon. “But a certain young earl is vastly épris in that direction.”

  All the mamas carefully ticked off Lord Channington in their minds. Then Honoria Honeyford’s hopes and aspirations were forgotten as Lady Maxwell began to talk about an article she had read on the proper care of cooks. The article, she said, pointed out the necessity of frequent administration of physic to one’s cook. The cook lived most of his life among unwholesome vapors exhaled by the coals, and the intense heat of the fire was pernicious to the lung and sight. The continual fumes arising from the stores, the vapors arising from the walls, and the amount of drink he had to pour down his parched throat, all combined to encrust the palate. “I did notice my Armand’s ragouts were becoming too highly seasoned,” said Lady Maxwell, “and so I called the physician on the spot. The wretched man prescribed two days’ complete rest for my cook, which was quite impossible as I was giving a supper. I do not think one should cosset servants—even cooks!”

  There were nods of agreement all around with the exception of a mousy, little girl called Miss Teesdale, who volunteered timidly that it might be more inexpensive in the long run to remodel the kitchen and make sure there was enough light and air. Everyone promptly pretended not to have heard Miss Teesdale, deafness being the weapon the aristocracy always uses to depress radical ideas.

  Lady Canon at last rose to take her leave. To her surprise, Mrs. Hudson, an old friend of Lady Maxwell, accosted her in the hall and begged for a moment of her time. Lady Canon reluctantly agreed to drive around with her for a little. Mrs. Hudson was very rich, but did not go about much in society, and Lady Canon preferred to limit her friendships to those who were good ton. She was also worried that Honey might possibly have decided to get up to some mad escapade in her absence. But what Mrs. Hudson had to tell her in the leather-scented darkness of the carriage as it ambled around and around Berkeley Square alarmed Lady Canon into giving the unfashionable Mrs. Hudson her full attention.

  The story of the seduction of Pamela and her subsequent enforced marriage to the younger son came out.

  “But why did you simply not force Channington to marry her,” said Lady Canon, appalled.

  “Pamela had written him several very… unwise… letters,” said Mrs. Hudson. “She promised him anything so long as she could spend some time with him. He threatened to have the letters published. He said he would make Pamela a laughingstock. He would claim that he had been seduced. We were terrified of the scandal. When he promised not to speak, not to talk about it, we were so relieved. Now, I feel I have let him go free to ruin some other young lady’s life—some young lady like your niece.”

  “But Honoria has great independence of spirit. I cannot see her running slavishly after any man,” said Lady Canon.

  “Pamela was just such a girl until he broke her spirit. I beg you, Lady Canon, do everything in your power to keep your niece away from Channington. The man is a devil. At first he seems so very warm and kind and protective. There was another lady who fell victim to his charms. I tried to warn the girl’s parents. They did listen to me, but when they ordered their daughter not to see Channington, she ran off with him.”

  “I will think of something,” said Lady Canon firmly. “Thank you, Mrs. Hudson. I only wish I did not believe you.”

  Lady Canon summoned Honey to the saloon as soon as she arrived home.

  “I have nothing arranged for this evening,” she said. “I wish you to have as much rest as possible before the ball at Almack’s tomorrow night. Channington seems very persistent. Do not encourage him.”

  “I find Lord Channington an extremely agreeable man,” said Honey. “You are surely not going to order me to fall in love with someone else.”

  Honey’s chin had a stubborn line and her eyes flashed.

  Go carefully, thought Lady Canon. If I forbid her to see Channington, she might rebel.

  “I have heard Channington is a womanizer,” she said aloud.

  “So have I,” said Honey. “Lord Alistair was at great pains to point that fact out to me. Allow me to be my own judge of character, Aunt Elizabeth. Lord Channington’s manner to me has been all that is correct.”

  Lady Canon decided she needed time to think and plan. She dismissed Honey, telling her to have an early night.

  After Honey had left, she considered sending for Channington and warning him off, but such an experienced seducer might tell Honey, and then persuade her to go off with him.

  What does one do to fight a seducer? thought Lady Canon
, scowling horribly at the fire.

  And then she had an idea.

  Find another seducer, and the one would cancel out the other!

  Seven

  “You want me to what?”

  Lord Alistair Stewart was shaken out of his usual urbanity.

  “I want you to lure Honoria away from Channington and as quickly as possible so that she may fix her attention on someone suitable.”

  “I am relieved to hear you do not consider me suitable.”

  “You are a confirmed bachelor, Lord Alistair, for all your charming ways.”

  “Just why should I waste my time making a chit like Miss Honeyford fall in love with me—even supposing I could do so?”

  “For the sake of the very dear friendship between your mama and myself,” said Lady Canon firmly. “Also, you are a gentleman and I am asking you to do a chivalrous action.”

  “The simplest way is often best,” pointed out Lord Alistair. “Why not warn Miss Honeyford that Channington is a womanizer?”

  “I have tried, as you yourself have tried. I almost set her off in a contrary direction. She is very strong-willed. Come, Lord Alistair, a man of your charm and address should not need to waste much time on the matter. A week at the most. It should be a refreshing novelty for you. You have spent so long fending young ladies off, you should enjoy putting yourself out to attract one.”

  “I do not think Miss Honeyford likes me. In fact, I am persuaded she detests me.”

  “And what has that got to do with love?” said Lady Canon cynically. “You have not tried to court her. In fact, if her account of your behavior on the road be true, you went on more like a cross old uncle.”

  “I had reason, believe me.”

  “Then you now have reason to behave otherwise,” said Lady Canon tartly.

  Lord Alistair sighed and studied the polished toes of his boots. If he refused, Lady Canon would call on his mama, and his mama would call on him and would start to weep. Then, he found himself thinking of Miss Honeyford. A little time in her company would soon prove her to be as tedious as any other female.