For one brave second Charles was on the threshold of telling this ghastly old frump to go to the devil. But surely a little matchmaking was not much to ask?
“Very well, then,” he sighed. He looked full at the triumphant Miss Harvey and gave a shudder. “But Roger will think I’m mad.”
Sometime later that evening Roger, 6th Earl of Hestleton, looked across the ballroom and found a strange fat lady in green simpering and winking at him.
“Who on earth is that?” he asked his friend, Guy Manton.
Mr. Manton put up his quizzing glass and then lowered it hurriedly. “Looks just like a crocodile, don’t she. That’s the famous Miss Harvey. Most vulgar, pushing woman anyone has ever met. For God’s sake, don’t look at her or she’ll be round, shoving her way into your house in the morning.”
“Relax, my friend,” laughed the Earl. “That monstrosity will never set foot in any home of mine!”
Chapter Two
PENELOPE VESEY WAS NOT, in fact, a fully fledged governess. Having been orphaned at the age of sixteen, she was left by her penniless father to the tender mercies of the Misses Fry’s Seminary for Young Ladies in Bath, who took in the orphan as an articled pupil. Her pay was some few guineas a year, her duty to teach music to the pupils, and her lot little better than a servant’s.
Her father had been Sir James Vesey’s youngest son and had disgraced himself at an early age by marrying Penelope’s mother, a woman whose connections were considered to be vulgar in the extreme. The sight of Augusta Harvey grinning and simpering at the wedding had been enough for Sir James to vow never to set a foot across his son’s threshold, damning all his in-laws as common. He had allowed him a meager yearly allowance and, on the death of his son, the allowance had ceased, Sir James seeming to care nothing for the orphaned Penelope.
Penelope’s mother had died of cancer when Penelope was still in her cradle. Her father, a weak and feckless man, had left Penelope to be brought up by a series of slatternly servants. A few days before his death, he had assumed some sort of responsibility towards his daughter by petitioning the Misses Fry to take care of his child should anything happen to him. He died of consumption, coughing up his last breath while his terrified little daughter clutched his hand.
The only relative to attend the funeral was Augusta Harvey who seemed massively indifferent to the plight of the girl. But the Misses Fry had fulfilled their promise—only after discovering that the young Penelope Vesey was an expert musician.
She was popular with the pupils and did not eat much; therefore she was allowed to stay. Her beauty—although unfashionably fair—was at first considered a disadvantage, but since Miss Vesey was not likely to meet any men, with the exception of the elderly dancing master, the Misses Fry coped with that problem by making Penelope wear a series of unbecoming caps and, goodness knows, her dresses were dowdy enough. Her only refuge from the stultifying round of walks and lessons and bad food was in playing the pianoforte in the cold and drafty music room.
It was there that Penelope was sitting one spring day, idly running her fingers over the keys and feeling very sorry for herself indeed. The day was her eighteenth birthday, and she was human enough to resent the fact that it should be a day like any other. “We do not encourage the poorer members of our staff to celebrate their birthdays,” the Misses Harriet and Frederica Fry had told her, “lest our more affluent pupils think that they may be soliciting gifts.”
I didn’t want a gift, thought Penelope, striking a jarring chord. “I only wanted someone to say, Happy Birthday.”
She quickly got to her feet, walked over to the window and opened it with a jerk. A light, sweet wind danced into the room, bringing with it all the smells of May; lilac, hyacinth, and hawthorn. The old crab apple tree at the bottom of the garden moved its great branches in the soft wind, sending down a flurry of pink and white blossom across the scrubby lawn. Overcome by a great yearning for she knew not what, she impatiently removed her cap and let the breeze play through her hair.
Penelope began to dream that this tall, narrow, Queen Anne house with its tall, narrow, dark rooms was her own. The music room behind her changed in her mind’s eye as she busily decorated it and furnished it. The bare sanded floor would be waxed to a high shine and covered with oriental rugs. The furniture would be light and spindly, and a great fire would crackle on the hearth to banish the permanent chill of the house. Delicate china bowls, so translucent that you could see your fingers through them, would be filled with spring flowers. There would be fine paintings like Canalettos on the walls, blazing with richness and color. And the door would open. And he would be standing there … that vague suitor of her dreams.
She gave a guilty start as she heard the door behind her open, and she turned slowly round.
The eldest of the Fry sisters, Miss Harriet, stood framed in the doorway. A small, dumpy woman who affected a hideous style in turbans, she always addressed her remarks to some piece of furniture rather than the person she was supposed to be talking to.
“Miss Vesey,” she told the piano severely, “put on your cap and come to my study immediately. My sister and I have some tremendous news for you.”
Miss Fry waited nervously until Penelope had extinguished her bright gold curls under her cap. Really the girl’s looks were too flamboyant for a teacher.
Penelope meekly followed her to the dark, airless study at the back of the house where Miss Harriet and Miss Frederica Fry held court. Miss Frederica was younger than her sister by two years but was often taken for her twin. She was equally dumpy and furtive and had the same irritating mannerisms as her sister.
“Come in, Penelope,” she told the fire irons. “You shall take a dish of Bohea with us to strengthen your nerves for the Great Shock.”
Penelope looked at her in a bewildered way and then reflected that having lost a mother and father at least had its grim compensations. There was no one left in the world that she cared for now, so the “Great Shock” could not be the death of a dear one.
Penelope sat primly on the edge of a high-backed chair and accepted a cup of tea. The sisters sat on either side of her. At last Miss Frederica began.
“My dear Penelope. We have incredible news for you. Yes. Incredible,” she assured the teapot. “Is it not so, Harriet?”
“Yes, indeed,” said Harriet earnestly to a bust of Plato. “I declare, I was set all of a tremble.”
“Do, do have a cake,” Miss Frederica urged the chimneypiece.
Penelope stared at the sisters in amazement but hurriedly took a cake. She could not remember when she had last had such a treat since she was not allowed to eat with the pupils or the teachers, and had to take as much, or as little, as the servants allowed her.
With the air of a magician producing a rabbit out of a hat, Miss Frederica suddenly held up a letter. Penelope glanced at it and then ate her cake with simpleminded concentration, wondering if she could possibly just reach forward her hand and take another.
“This,” Miss Frederica was assuring the sugar bowl, “is a letter from your aunt, Miss Harvey.”
Penelope suddenly felt she would need all the small comfort she could get and courageously took another cake. She had seen Augusta but once, at her father’s funeral, and still remembered that lady with a mixture of awe and dislike.
“Miss Harvey,” went on the younger Miss Fry, “has invited you to her mansion in London where you are to make your come out.”
Penelope stared wide-eyed in amazement. “Why?” she asked faintly.
“You silly goose,” said Miss Frederica good-naturedly, rustling the letter. “Because she is exceeding fond of you. She is a delightful lady. Seventy-five thousand, I’ve heard. Delightful!”
“But aunt has no money!” exclaimed Penelope.
“She says here,” said Miss Frederica, waving the letter, “that she has inherited her late employer’s fortune.”
Penelope’s heart began to beat against her ribs. She did not want to go and live wit
h Augusta. On the other hand a Season could mean a husband, someone young and kind and merry. And then … oh bliss! A home of her own. A home with the translucent bowls of flowers and crackling fires and food, masses and masses of food. Hot food.
The Misses Fry seemed to have taken her assent for granted and talked of school matters while they drank their tea. Penelope did not despise them for their sudden kindness to her now that she was to move up in society. It was only to be expected that they should fawn on her today despite the fact that they were bullying and humiliating her yesterday. It was the way of the world after all. She cheerfully ate two more cakes in quick succession and slipped two more in her pocket for little Mary, the scullery maid who shared Penelope’s meager diet. She then cheerfully thanked the sisters for the unexpected treat and retired to her room.
With the eternal optimism of youth, she began to tremble with excitement at the thought of her good fortune. Augusta Harvey was a poisonous, vulgar woman, but she, Penelope, was to have a Season, and she would not be dancing with Miss Harvey after all. The older woman would merely be the chaperone in the background.
The news of her good fortune soon spread quickly through the school. The governesses and richer girls who had always treated her with alarming condescension but liked her because she “knew her place” now became very affectionate indeed. Only Mary, the little scullery maid, crying dismally over her present of two cakes in the basement, seemed genuinely sorry that Penelope was leaving.
“I shall send for you, Mary,” said Penelope, giving her a fierce hug. “You shall be my lady’s maid as soon as ever I am married.”
And little Mary’s tears had dried because Miss Penelope was so pretty—why, she would be married after her first ball!
Penelope was lucky in her journey. The road was fair and conditions were good. She was too unused to comfort to mind the jolting of the cumbersome coach and too unaccustomed to compliments to object to the heavy badinage from the men on the roof of the coach, unaware that her air of shy good breeding had spared her from coarser gallantries.
The light was fading as the hack which she had hired outside the Bell Savage rolled into Brook Street. She tipped the jarvey with the last of her meager store of money and shyly walked up the marble steps and knocked timidly on the door.
A powdered footman answered the summons and ushered her into a large drawing room at the front of the house. He then departed to inform Miss Harvey of her arrival.
Penelope timidly looked about her. A thick carpet covered with pink cabbage roses quarrelled noisily with the screaming red and yellow stripes of the furniture. An overornate clock ticked away the seconds like a series of sharp reprimands. A row of Miss Harvey’s “ancestors,” bought at a countryhouse sale, stared down into the room as if amazed to find themselves in such vulgar surroundings. Some bad pottery figurines simpered and danced on various little cane tables and bowed to their counterparts on the mantelpiece.
Penelope crossed to the looking glass over the fireplace and frowned at her reflection, carefully removed her shabby bonnet and, finding a comb in her reticule, ran it through her curls.
Miss Harvey was announced, and Penelope swung round. Both women surveyed each other in silence.
Augusta reflected that the girl was much thinner than she had remembered and her face was too pale. But her hair was still as gold and her wide questioning eyes still as deep and startling a blue as they had been when last she saw her niece.
For her part, Penelope was thinking gloomily that Aunt Augusta was much the same despite a new, shiny nut-brown wig, rouged cheeks, and a fine collar of pearls.
“Welcome, my dear,” said Augusta, waddling forward. “I can see we’ll need to buy you some fine new dresses, heh! Of course it will cost me a prodigious amount of money, but there then, I always was a generous soul. Lady Courtland was only saying to me the other day, ‘La! Augusta, if you ain’t the soul of generosity,’ that she did!
“And of course you ain’t the type of gel to forget a bit of Christian gratitude when you is wed to a fine Lord. You’ll always remember your old auntie what took you out of the gutter? Course you will,” she rattled on before Penelope could protest that the seminary in Bath was hardly the gutter. “ ‘Cause I’m going to dress you proper. I would’ve taken care of you before, but I hadn’t the money and that’s a fact. You’ll hear some say I poisoned the old man so’s to get his money, but I assure you that was not the case since the old quiz a-took of an apoplexy and died proper in his bed but this is London and them society tongues is wicked.”
She actually paused for breath, and Penelope said tremulously, “I am sure I shall always be grateful to you, Aunt.”
“That’s my girl,” wheezed Miss Harvey, plunking her great bulk down on the sofa and smiling from ear to ear. “Now for the best bit of news. Me and you has been asked to none other than the Earl of Hestleton’s for dinner tomorrow night. I got a fine dress made up for you but, now that I see you, it’ll maybe need taking in a peg or two. Now this here Earl is the catch of the Season and a pretty little thing like you will catch his eye, that’s for sure. You’re not to pay any attention to his young brother, the Viscount, who is by way of being a friend of mine. ‘You’re like a mother to me, Augusta,’ says the dear boy. So he has told the Earl he wants to entertain us to dinner, but the Earl, he’s not too keen on the idea, but as soon as he sets eyes on your loveliness, it’ll be right and tight and you leave your auntie to fix the marriage settlements good and proper.”
“But, Aunt,” protested Penelope. “I do not know this Earl. He may take me in dislike!”
“Then it’s up to a clever puss like you to see he does not,” said Augusta with her smile at its widest. “I don’t want you to be fast, mind, but a gel can always do discreet things, you know, bend forward and let your dress slip a little. Discreet little pressure of the hand, heh! Tie your garter and then pretend you didn’t know he was in the room, heh!”
Penelope blushed painfully. “I must know, Aunt,” she said firmly, “whether you have brought me to London for the soul purpose of seducing this Earl?”
“Lord love you, no! As God is my witness,” cried Augusta, raising her dirty, plump arms to the painted ceiling, “it’s just such a chance for you!”
Penelope sighed. She found her aunt more pushing and vulgar than she had remembered, but perhaps the Bath seminary had made her too missish in her ideas.
“I will do my best for you, Aunt,” Penelope said dutifully.
“That’s all I ask,” said Augusta. “Just do what Auntie tells you and never forget where your bread and butter comes from or the good Lord above will strike you dead for your ingratitude. He often does that, you know,” she added in a conversational voice. “He seeks out the sinner even here in St. James’s and He strikes ‘em dead as doornails. And you don’t want to be a-burning in hellfire with demons a-sticking pitchforks in your naked body, do you? No, I thought not. People don’t. So you run off to bed like a good girl—the housekeeper will show you to your room—and get a good night’s sleep for we’ve a great deal of shopping to do on the morrow. Good night, my child, and may the angels attend your rest.”
Penelope dutifully kissed the rouged cheek presented to her and meekly followed the housekeeper out and up the wide carpeted stairs to the uncarpeted and sparsley furnished bedroom above. Augusta did not believe in spending money on furnishing the rooms that nobody but the inmates of the house were likely to see.
A few streets away in an elegant mansion in Berkeley Square, Roger, Earl of Hestleton was wrestling with both his cravat and his temper while his young brother lounged in a chair beside the dressing table and watched his efforts.
“Not like you to make such a mull of it,” said Charles laconically.
The Earl swore and ripped the muslin from his neck and held out his hand to his valet for another cravat. “If I were not so upset and puzzled by your strange behavior,” snapped Roger, “I should have this pesky cravat completed in a trice. As
it is, I am taken up with wonder over my dear brother’s dinner invitation. I keep asking and asking and each time you become more evasive. Why, pray, is one of London’s most pushing mushrooms to grace my dinner table?”
“Oh, she’s not so bad and I hear her niece is a beauty,” said Charles, shifting in his chair and avoiding his brother’s eye in the mirror. “You’re not usually so high in the instep.”
“Not when it comes to rank,” said the Earl, completing the arrangement of his cravat in the Mathematical, “but I certainly am when it comes to manners and elegance of mind and from what I have heard, Augusta Harvey has neither.”
“Well … well,” said Charles, rising to his feet, “the invitation is issued and that’s that. It’s only one evening, that’s all.”
“One evening too much,” said the Earl, placing a diamond pin carefully in the snowy folds of his cravat and turning abruptly to face his brother. “Are you in dun territory again, Charles? Is this why you are encouraging this woman?”
“No!” said Charles sulkily. “Didn’t I give you my word? You could at least trust your own brother’s word.”
The Earl surveyed him in silence and then a singularly charming smile lit up his harsh features. “Come, now, Charles,” he said. “I am not such an ogre that you cannot confide in me. If it is not money, then are you interested in Augusta’s niece?”
“No!” shrieked Charles. He then added in a quieter voice, “No. It is just that Augusta Harvey has been exceedingly kind to me. She’s not that bad you know, and people are too hard on her. Well, you will see for yourself tomorrow.”
He looked hopefully into his brother’s rather austere features, and sighed. Charles knew that the Earl would be horrified by Augusta. Charles had not yet met Penelope, but he was sure she would prove to be as impossible as her aunt.
Chapter Three
PENELOPE WAS EXHAUSTED, bewildered, and hungry by the time the hack deposited her along with her aunt on the Earl of Hestleton’s doorstep.
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