A Lady of Consequence

by Mary Nichols

  The mention of the orphanage reminded Duncan of Madeleine and the story she had told him, a story that had tugged at his tender heart. He really must stop thinking about her; it clouded his judgement. ‘Of course, Stepmama, I am at your service. What time do we leave?’

  ‘Ten o’clock—that is, if you can rouse yourself from your bed in time.’

  ‘I will be ready and, just to show you my good intent, I will not go out again tonight, but retire early.’ He was only teasing; he was quite used to staying up until the early hours, dawn sometimes, and he could still rise bright and early.

  He was as good as his word and presented himself in the breakfast parlour in good time to eat a hearty breakfast and oversee the loading of two large laundry baskets full of donated clothes into the boot of the carriage before handing his stepmother in, settling himself beside her and instructing the coachman to take them to Maiden Lane.

  ‘You are thoughtful,’ remarked the Duchess when they had been going for a few minutes and he had not spoken. ‘You do not mind coming with me? I have not kept you from more pleasurable pursuits?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ he said abstractedly.

  ‘Then you are troubled about something else.’

  ‘No, Mama, not a thing,’ he said, falsely bright. They were crossing the square in front of St Paul’s and he had just spotted Madeleine Charron walking arm in arm with Marianne Doubleday towards the market.

  Having spent a wakeful night trying to decide what to do about that disgraceful wager, he was unprepared for seeing her again so soon. The sight of her, laughing with her companion as if she did not have a care in the world, set his heart racing. If she knew what was going on in his mind, she would not be laughing. She would be angry.

  His head was full of her and his loins were stirring with desire, even now, in this busy square. He had made a wager of which he was thoroughly ashamed and yet the fulfilling of it would give him a great deal of pleasure. One-half of him goaded him, telling him the pleasure would not all be his, he knew how to give pleasure too and he could be very generous to those who pleased him and what else could an actress expect? The other half of him knew that such thoughts were reprehensible and dishonourable and he ought to have more respect for her than that. Why, he would not treat the lowliest servant in that cavalier fashion.

  The ladies had stopped and were looking towards the carriage and it was then that the Duchess saw them. ‘Oh, there is Miss Doubleday. I need to speak to her.’ And before Duncan could make any sort of comment, she instructed the coachman to pull up.

  The carriage drew to a stop beside the actresses and Duncan had perforce to jump down and open the door for his stepmother to alight.

  Marianne took a step towards them and curtsied. ‘Your Grace, good morning.’

  ‘Good morning, Miss Doubleday,’ the Duchess said. ‘I hope I find you well.’

  ‘Oh, exceedingly well, my lady.’ She smiled, almost mischievously. ‘My lady, may I present my friend and colleague, Miss Madeleine Charron.’

  Frances turned towards Madeleine, while Duncan stood silently behind her wondering what was coming next. ‘I am pleased to meet you, Miss Charron, though I would have known you anywhere. You are become quite famous and rightly so. I saw your performance in Romeo and Juliet and it moved me almost to tears.’

  ‘Thank you, my lady.’ Madeleine made a curtsy, though she always maintained she would never bow the knee to anyone just because they were aristocrats, but she did not want to embarrass Marianne, nor alienate the Marquis. And her ladyship was not behaving like a top-lofty aristocrat at all, getting down from her carriage to speak to them.

  Her ladyship indicated Duncan with a movement of her gloved hand. ‘This is my stepson, the Marquis of Risley, a keen theatre-lover.’

  Duncan held his breath, half-expecting Madeleine to say they were already acquainted, but she simply smiled coolly at him and inclined her lovely head. It was not a bow, simply an acknowledgement. ‘My lord.’ When she looked up again, he saw the merriment in her violet eyes and found himself smiling back at her.

  ‘Miss Charron,’ he said, doffing his hat. ‘I am honoured.’

  If the Duchess noticed the conspiratorial look that passed between them, she ignored it and instead turned back to Marianne. ‘Miss Doubleday, I am glad we are met, I wanted to have a word with you about a little musical evening I am planning. If you are free of engagements, I should be very grateful if you would perform for us.’

  ‘I will deem it an honour, my lady. But it would depend on the day. A Thursday would be best. We have no evening performances on Thursdays.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I will bear that in mind and send you a note.’

  ‘Then I shall look forward to hearing from you, Your Grace.’

  ‘I leave the choice of offering to you,’ the Duchess added. ‘I am sure you will think of something suitable.’

  ‘I will give it some thought, my lady.’ She jumped as she felt Madeleine’s fingers digging into her back. ‘Perhaps a dialogue, my lady, that is, if you would allow Miss Charron to accompany me.’

  ‘An excellent idea.’ She looked at Madeleine and smiled. ‘Do please come, Miss Charron. It is all very informal and having both of you at once will be a great draw. Don’t you think so, Duncan?’

  ‘Oh, without doubt,’ he said promptly, aware that Miss Charron was looking at him with a strange light of mischief in her eyes, as if she were bamming him. She was up to something and he hoped she was not going to put him to the blush in front of his family and the top-lofty friends his stepmother invited to her soirées. But she could not possibly know whether he would be present or not. He seldom attended his stepmother’s routs; they were more often than not exceedingly boring and he usually had to be coerced into putting in an appearance.

  ‘Then it will be my pleasure, my lady,’ Madeleine said.

  Having made their adieus, the Duchess and Duncan returned to the carriage and were carried away, leaving the two actresses staring after them.

  ‘Well,’ Madeleine said, letting out her breath, which she suddenly realised she had been holding. ‘I never thought it would be so easy.’

  ‘And I am not so sure I shouldn’t make your excuses and go alone,’ her friend said. ‘I am afraid you will stir up a hornet’s nest.’

  ‘No, I will not. I will be the embodiment of decorum, you will be proud of me.’

  ‘How can I be proud of you, when I know what a deceiver you are?’

  ‘One tiny fib, that’s all I told, and it harms no one. Besides, I told you I would confess, if I ever find myself talking to the Marquis privately again.’

  ‘Oh, there is no doubt you will, I saw the way he looked at you. And you smiling back at him, like the temptress you are.’

  ‘I am not!’

  ‘Oh, my dear, I sometimes think you do not know when you are on stage and when you are off it.’

  “‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players”,’ Maddy quoted, remembering Lancelot Greatorex’s words the day she had first met him. You don’t need to tread the boards to play a part. We all do it from time to time. Do you tell me you have never had a fantasy, never pretended to be other than you are? Oh, she had certainly done that.

  ‘That may be true,’ Marianne said. ‘But we can only play the role for which we have been cast…’

  ‘You played the lady,’ Madeleine interrupted her. ‘You went to Stanmore House and deceived the whole company, so why can’t I?’

  ‘The reasons for doing it were very different. I was enrolled to help catch a blackguard who meant to harm Lady Lavinia.’

  ‘You never told me that.’ Madeleine was glad to divert the conversation away from her own motives; if Marianne continued to question her about them, she would be hard put to answer truthfully because she did not know what they were herself. Was she still nursing a grievance against the whole nobility? And how could making a fool of the Marquis of Risley assuage that?

  Was it simply th
at she wanted to see what it was like to be a lady of consequence? Or was she so ashamed of her past that she had to invent one nearer to her liking? But that must mean she was ashamed of her darling mother who, poor as she was and without a title, had been a gentlewoman in the truest sense of the word. Such a thing was inconceivable; she was proud of her mother. But oh, how she wished Mama had told her something of her father. But he was a shadowy figure, a wraith, with no substance.

  Perhaps it was envy that the Marquis of Risley could trace his forebears back generation after generation while she did not know who she was. Her name wasn’t even Charron, it was Cartwright. But could she even be sure of that? Her mother might have fabricated that too, just as she had invented the French émigré. And having brought him into existence, she was stuck with him.

  Marianne smiled. ‘Maddy dear, you have gone into another of your daydreams. If you do not keep your wits about you, one of these days you will be run down by a coach.’

  Her words pitched Madeleine back fifteen years. She was standing outside a haberdashery shop and her mother, who had just come from the shop, was pulling on her gloves and saying something about getting home. She heard again the clatter of horses’ hooves, the sound of carriage wheels, the yells as the driver tried to pull the horses up. She saw his contorted face as the carriage careered out of control and then her mother wasn’t beside her any more. She was lying in the road, white and still, and a small trickle of blood was coming from under her head and growing wider. Maddy could still hear her own screams.

  ‘Maddy! Maddy! Whatever is the matter?’ Marianne’s voice came to her, loud and insistent. ‘You are white as a sheet.’

  Madeleine gave a huge shudder and looked about her. She was back in 1827, in front of the colonnaded arcade of Covent Garden. The traffic flowed past her; there was no one lying in the street and her friend was tugging on her arm.

  ‘I was thinking of my mother.’

  ‘Oh, Madeleine. The Lord smite me for the fool I am. I forgot. I am sorry. Will you forgive me?’

  ‘There is nothing to forgive.’ She smiled at her friend and took her arm. ‘Come, we had better be going.’

  But the memory remained at the back of her mind, as if she needed a reminder of why she was what she was and why she had to break free from the constrictions of the past. And it had been her mother who had invented the name of Charron, so it was her mother who was guiding her now. It made her feel better.

  ‘You did not tell me you were arranging a musical soirée,’ Duncan said, as he and the Duchess continued to their destination.

  ‘Is there any reason why I should have? I have them regularly and you have never shown the slightest interest in them before.’

  ‘Yes, I have. I attended the last one.’

  ‘Only under extreme duress and you only stayed fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Perhaps I had another engagement.’

  ‘Oh, undoubtedly. At White’s or Boodles, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘Mama, you make me sound like a regular gamester, and you know I rarely gamble.’

  Frances smiled, remembering how he had played truant from school and gone to a gaming hell when he was only fifteen. The Duke had rung a peal over him and extracted a promise not to visit such places again. Oh, she knew he went to the gentlemen’s clubs, but he had matured enough not to gamble more than a few guineas, which he could easily afford to lose. ‘So, I collect, you wish to come to my next gathering. Could it, perhaps, have something to do with the delightful Miss Charron?’

  He looked startled. ‘Now, why do you say that?’

  ‘Because I know you very well and I know you cannot resist a pretty face.’ She paused. ‘Was she the one you and Benedict were wrangling over?’

  ‘We were not wrangling. He challenged me to take her out to supper without telling her who I was, that was all. I wish now I had not.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It seemed an ungentlemanly thing to do.’

  ‘And so it was.’

  ‘She told me her history and I felt so ashamed. She comes from a good family, Mama, her grandfather was a French comte who fled the Terror. Her father was killed in the late war and her mother was run down by a carriage when she was nine years old. She has been forced into acting by a need to earn her own living.’

  ‘If it is true, then it is very sad.’ She paused. ‘But do be careful, Duncan, you do not raise hopes in her that can never be fulfilled.’

  He laughed a little harshly. ‘Oh, Mama, you are as bad as Lavinia. I took her out to supper and escorted her home afterwards. Nothing untoward happened, I promise you. I am not a rake.’

  ‘Oh, my dear boy, I know that.’

  The coach drew up outside the orphanage in Maiden Lane and he was saved any more embarrassing revelations. His stepmother was very astute and he could no more have tried to deceive her than fly to the moon.

  Duncan helped the coachman carry the baskets of clothes into the orphanage, where they were gratefully received by the ladies who looked after the orphans. Duncan, who had accompanied his stepmother on other occasions, had never before paid much attention to the inmates, nor the conditions in which they lived. The house was clean, the children clothed and fed and that was as far as his observation had taken him, but now, thinking of Madeleine Charron’s story, he looked with new eyes.

  While the Duchess talked to Mrs Thomas, the woman who ran the place, he wandered round the house, looking in all the rooms: the dining room with its long table and benches; the dormitories with their rows of beds, which reminded him of his boarding school; the room converted into a tiny chapel; the kitchen where some of the little inmates toiled at preparing the meals for the others. Was this how Madeleine had lived?

  She had said the orphanage she lived in had been for the children of officers, so perhaps it was a little more comfortable. But what was comfort when you were all alone in the world? How could comfort make up for the loss of a dear mother? His mother had died when he had been twelve years old and he had found that hard to take, but he still had a father and a sister and, for the last ten years, a stepmother he had come to love dearly. What must it be like to be all alone in the world and the prey of any jackass of a dandy who fancied he could buy your favours? He suddenly felt very protective towards Miss Madeleine Charron.

  London audiences were usually appreciative, if somewhat noisy, but on the first night of All’s Well That Ends Well some of them seemed to be in a mood to find fault. They did not wait for the other actors to speak their lines to Madeleine, but called out witticisms and then laughed loudly at their cleverness, earning sharp rebukes from those who wanted to see the play in peace. Marianne found it extremely hard to ignore them and to carry on with the performance and she was glad when the curtain came down on the last act.

  ‘They did not like the play either,’ she said to Marianne when they returned to their dressing room. ‘It makes me wonder why Mr Greatorex chose it.’

  ‘Fustian! Most of the audience loved it,’ Marianne said. ‘It was only that rake Willoughby, who fancies himself a pink of the ton, causing trouble. Didn’t you see him? He was with a crowd of young rakehells, all foxed out of their minds and intent on making themselves unpleasant. The rest of the audience was trying to silence them.’

  ‘And made them worse. They think that wealth and position give them the right to do as they please, that they can be brash and inconsiderate and spoil other people’s enjoyment and no one will say a word against them. They think they can get away with murder.’ She could not help thinking about her mother’s death at such times. It had been such a one who had run her down.

  ‘I was surprised to see Stanmore with them.’

  ‘Was he?’ She tried to sound indifferent, but mention of the Marquis set her pulses racing.

  ‘Yes, I caught sight of him sitting next to Willoughby as I was waiting for my entrance, so you see he is no different from the rest.’

  ‘I did not say he was.’

  It was har
d to admit it, but she was bitterly disappointed. He had seemed a pleasant and attentive supper companion, who had talked to her as an equal, which had made her think that perhaps he was different from others of his breed. But he was not. She had been a fool to confide in him, telling him things about her past she had never told anyone except Marianne. Now, she supposed, he had regaled his drunken friends with the story and they had decided to have a little fun with her. She felt mortified and furiously angry and was certainly in no mood to accept the huge bunch of red roses the Marquis sent to the dressing room with a note to say he would be waiting for her when she came out.

  ‘You may take them back,’ she told the messenger who brought them. ‘Tell his lordship I have no need of his bribes and I shall be dining with friends.’

  ‘Well, I am surprised at you,’ Marianne said, when the man had gone, then laughed. ‘Now, I suppose, you are going to play hard to get.’

  ‘I always was hard to get,’ Maddy snapped, thinking suddenly of Henry Bulford, now Lord Bulford, of course. Marianne was right; they were all alike. So be it. Far from confessing her deception to the Marquis, she would play the nobleman’s granddaughter for all she was worth. Someone would pay for her humiliation, not only tonight’s but all she had ever suffered.

  ‘Oh, my dear child, they were loud and uncouth and very annoying, but you must not take it to heart. After all, you have endured worse than a little calling out and hissing in the past and risen above it like the great actress you are, so don’t let tonight’s nonsense make you bitter.’

  Madeleine smiled suddenly. ‘Always my inner voice, dear Marianne, the one that keeps me from my excesses, be they of rage, resentment or the dismals. What would I do without you?’

  ‘I am sure you would manage, my dear. Now, I am off to dine with Sir Percy. What will you do?’

  ‘I think I will go straight home. I am excessively fatigued and it may be why my performance was not at its best tonight.’

  ‘Fustian! It was as good as it always is. Take no notice of a handful of drunken rabble-rousers.’