by Лорен Уиллиг
"What very enterprising pirates they must be," commented Mr. Alsworthy, "to venture so far inland, just to kidnap our daughter. You do see the honor being done to you, don't you, my Letty? If the pirates have come all that way, just for you, it would be a positive discourtesy not to let them kidnap you."
"Speaking of kidnapping," began Letty, "the oddest thing happened tonight…."
"Mr. Alsworthy!" exclaimed Letty's mother. "How can you laugh at such a matter! Although, I must say, I would have thought if a pirate were to kidnap anyone, he would kidnap Mary. She looks quite as I did in my youth, and I'm sure a pirate would have wanted to kidnap me."
"Don't taunt me with lost opportunities, my dear."
"As you can see," interjected Letty firmly, before her parents could be off again, "there were no pirates, and I'm quite safe. There was just a small—"
"But where were you, you impossible child? You cannot possibly imagine the agonies I've suffered! The hours I have paced this floor…"
Mrs. Alsworthy illustrated her statement with a representative turn around the room, which ended abruptly when the flowing end of her nightrobe caught on an uneven piece of flooring, ending her progress with an unfortunate rending noise.
"That would all be very affecting," put in Mr. Alsworthy, as his wife clucked over her ruined peignoir, "if you hadn't awakened a mere ten minutes past."
"Ten minutes? Ten minutes!" Mrs. Alsworthy looked up indignantly from her abused hem. "You cannot reckon how time moves within a mother's heart."
"A curious sort of mathematics, to be sure."
"If you would pardon the interruption…"
Geoff neatly sidestepped Letty and strode into the room. Being forced to marry the wrong woman was bad enough; being tortured with a Punch and Judy show in the intermission was more than a man could be expected to bear.
Mrs. Alsworthy shrieked and affected to swoon, and even Mr. Alsworthy momentarily abandoned his customary pose of indolence.
"There, my dear," said Mr. Alsworthy, "is your pirate."
"Don't be absurd, Mr. Alsworthy!" exclaimed Mrs. Alsworthy, taking a step forward to attain a closer look, just in case. "That's not a pirate; that's Lord Pinchingdale. Lord Pinchingdale? Whatever are you doing here?"
Lord Pinchingdale was beginning to seriously consider a career on the high seas.
"I should think that much is clear," replied Mr. Alsworthy, before either Geoff or Letty could say anything at all.
"Why must you always be so provoking?" protested his much put-upon wife. "Saying things are clear when they're not the least bit clear at all. Why, they're as muddy as…as…"
"A pirate's conscience," put in Mr. Alsworthy, enjoying himself hugely.
"Pirates, pirates…what have we to do with pirates?"
"You brought them up."
"I most certainly did not!"
"As fascinating as this is, can we return to the matter at hand?" Geoff's voice cracked through the small foyer, lashing both the Alsworthys into silence. "I have come to request your daughter's hand in marriage."
Chapter Four
The idea of their being married was absurd.
Letty would have said so had she been able to get a word in edgewise, but her mother pipped her to the post. Mrs. Alsworthy clapped her plump hands together. "Dearest Mary will be so pleased!"
"Your daughter Laetitia's hand in marriage," Lord Pinchingdale specified tersely.
"This is quite unnecessary!" protested Letty in her loudest voice.
No one else paid the slightest bit of attention to her.
"Ah." Mr. Alsworthy's heavily pouched eyes moved from his bedraggled daughter to the irate viscount. "Not at all what I expected, but an interesting twist. A very interesting twist, indeed."
"I don't understand." Mrs. Alsworthy wrung her hands in her effort at cogitation. "You wish to marry Letty?"
"No, he doesn't," put in Letty.
"'Wish' might not be exactly the right verb, but it will do for lack of a better. I believe our daughter is compromised, my dear," explained Mr. Alsworthy mildly. "You should be very proud."
Mrs. Alsworthy flung herself at her daughter with a delighted squeal that made the crystals in the chandelier quiver.
"My dearest daughter! My very dearest daughter!"
"Mmmph," said Letty, whose head was buried beneath her mother's ruffles.
"Oh, so many things to do!" Mrs. Alsworthy clutched her new favorite daughter to her beribboned bosom. "The wedding clothes…the guest list…an announcement in the Morning Times…Oh, it is too much happiness!"
"Mother…" Letty fought her way free of the clinging ruffles.
The movement was a mistake, since it brought her into full view of Lord Pinchingdale's face, stiff with revulsion. It was enough to make her wish herself into indentured servitude in the farthest antipodes. She wasn't quite sure whether they had indentured servants in the farthest antipodes, or even quite where the farthest antipodes were, but she was sure they must need servants.
Letty fought a craven urge to hide in her mother's bosom. It might not be the antipodes, but at least it was there.
Mrs. Alsworthy released Letty long enough to grasp her by both shoulders and hold her at arm's length. "My daughter." She sighed on a wave of maternal pride. "A viscountess!"
With a strength borne of ambition, she wrenched Letty around to face the silent men. "Viscountess Pinchingdale! Doesn't it sound well?"
"My dear"—Mr. Alsworthy's voice filled the uncomfortable silence—"before you exclaim any further, be so kind as to give the rest of us a moment to adjust to our extreme rapture."
"All this rapture," managed Letty, wriggling out of her mother's grasp, "is decidedly premature."
Mrs. Alsworthy, with the word "viscountess" ringing in her ears, was incapable of hearing any others. She brushed off both her daughter's and husband's demurrals with equal inattention. Both hands extended, she advanced on Geoff. "You must think of me as a mother now, my dear boy."
Geoff backed up several steps.
"I have commitments that demand my attendance abroad within the week," said Geoff rapidly, directing his words at Mr. Alsworthy. "We will be married as soon as I can procure a special license."
"No!" Mrs. Alsworthy's alarmed cry shook the chandelier. "But the lobster patties! Think of the lobster patties! You cannot possibly have a wedding without lobster patties!"
"My dear," interjected Mr. Alsworthy, "I don't believe the world will topple off its axis for lack of lobster patties at our daughter's wedding breakfast."
"Have a wedding without lobster patties! I'd as soon have a turban without feathers!"
"And so you ought," murmured Mr. Alsworthy.
Mrs. Alsworthy plunked both hands on her hips. "Do you mean to imply, Mr. Alsworthy, that you do not approve of my headgear?"
"I merely mean to say, my love, that the birds might approve if you left them a few of their feathers to fly with."
"Ooooh! If you understood the first thing about fashion—"
Letty ended the discussion by dint of marching between her parents.
"This," she said firmly, "is ridiculous."
"I should say so!" exclaimed Mrs. Alsworthy. "My bonnets are exceedingly becoming!"
Letty could feel the last fragile threads of patience beginning to snap. "Can we all just speak reasonably!" she demanded. "For five minutes? Is that too much to ask?"
It was. As Letty plunked her hands on her hips and glowered at her parents and her accidental abductor, a new voice entered the fray. A soft voice, pitched just loud enough to carry, with a plaintive note that whispered around the small foyer like an enchantress's charm.
"Geoffrey?" ventured Mary.
Mary must, thought Letty cynically, have taken the time to change out of her traveling clothes when she heard the hullabaloo downstairs, because she was impeccably garbed for bed, her white linen night rail entirely wrinkle-free and every black lock falling in gleaming perfection along her lace-frilled shoulders.<
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"Oh, Mary!" exclaimed Mrs. Alsworthy. "Your sister is to be married. Isn't it above all things marvelous?"
"Look and learn," added Mr. Alsworthy. "A bit more practice and you, too, could be compromised, my girl."
Mary's deep blue eyes widened in a way that suggested the concept of being compromised was entirely foreign to her. In a gesture worthy of Mrs. Siddons, one elegantly boned white hand extended toward her former lover, halted, and, as if the retraction caused her extreme pain, dropped again to her side. Mary's eyelids drooped and her lightly parted lips quivered in a way meant to suggest passionate emotion nobly contained.
It was a masterful performance.
Lord Pinchingdale's throat worked in a way that wasn't feigned at all. Turning abruptly on his heel, he addressed Mr. Alsworthy in a rapid monotone. "I will call on you tomorrow to make the arrangements. Your servant, ladies."
And with a brief nod in the direction of the center of the room that never quite made it as far as the white-gowned figure on the railing, he achieved the door and was gone, leaving an unhappy hush behind him.
From her position on the stairs, Mary raked Letty with a long, appraising gaze. "I never knew you had it in you."
Letty stared at her sister. "But I never meant…This wasn't any of my doing! Mary…"
Letty held out a hand in mute appeal.
Mary narrowed the midnight blue eyes her admirers had compared to sapphires, velvet, and the water off the coast of Cornwall. Currently, they were as hard as agate, and as dark as a scoundrel's heart.
"Who asked you to interfere?"
Flinging her glossy tresses over her shoulder, Mary retreated up the stairs with all the dignity of an exiled queen. In the painful silence, Letty could hear the swish of her hem sweeping across the steps like a train, until a door thudded shut on the story above and even that small sound was blotted out.
Letty's mouth opened and closed but Mary wasn't there to argue with anymore. All the reasons that had seemed excellent two hours ago turned to dust at the back of Letty's throat.
"Wait!"
Lifting the hem of her cloak, Letty scrambled up the stairs after her sister, slipping and skidding on the treads. It was as if twelve years had rolled back, and she was a roly-poly little six-year-old again, scrabbling after her older, more interesting sister, desperately wanting to be allowed to do whatever Mary did, play whatever Mary played.
But no matter how she tried, she was always the one stumbling after, the one with tears in her dress and scrapes across her knees. Always the one running behind.
On the landing, Mary's door was closed. Letty barreled into it, scarcely taking time to turn the knob before tumbling into the room. Inside, all the candles were lit, branches and branches of candles, burning like little stars against the dingy wallpaper. The wallpaper had once been white with blue stripes, but time and indifferent care had faded the whole to a dull pewter. The room bore the signs of hasty action: Mary's traveling dress lay strewn across the unmade bed, and a portmanteau slopping over with scarves slumped next to the window. Letty could see the corner of Mary's silver-backed brush sticking out of one corner, smothered beneath a length of spangled gauze.
Mary stood by her dressing table, which, like the wallpaper, had once been white. Her perfect profile was averted, staring fixedly at nothing in particular, or, rather, nothing that Letty could see. Her stillness terrified Letty more than a dozen screaming rages.
"Mary?" she whispered.
At the sound of Letty's voice, Mary's head slowly lifted, her spine straightening. By the time she turned, moving as deliberately as an actor in a court masque, she was once again entirely in command of herself, her face as composed as a porcelain fig-urine, and about as warm.
"What would you like me to say?" she asked. "Congratulations?"
"Of course not! Mary, you know I didn't…I wouldn't…" Letty's protests faltered against her sister's unruffled regard.
"But you did," said Mary.
It was a simple statement of fact.
And there was nothing Letty could say to refute it. In the face of Mary's implacable poise, all her perfectly sensible arguments crumbled on her lips, like so much chipped paint.
It had always been like this.
"You didn't love him," objected Letty. "You can't claim you did."
Mary reached to rearrange a strand of her hair, and turned to examine the effect in the spotted glass of the mirror. "No. I didn't. Did I? You know best, of course. You generally do."
Doubt lacerated Letty's heart with ice.
"If you do really care about him…" she began uncertainly.
"I suppose it could be worse." Mary's voice was as finely edged as frost. "At least one of us gets him. We keep it all in the family."
She smiled at Letty, the tight, social smile of the hostess speeding the parting guest.
"If you don't mind, it is quite late. I need my sleep if I'm to set my cap at a new prospect tomorrow. Good night."
Letty found the door neatly closed in her face.
There was very little she could say to a door, especially when she didn't know what she wanted to say in the first place. Please don't hate me? I'll make it right? She had been so sure that Mary's feelings for Lord Pinchingdale went no deeper than his title and fortune. Admittedly, there was a good deal there to love, but it wasn't the sort of love that drove susceptible maidens into a decline. If she barged back in, demanding answers, Mary would merely smile her enigmatic smile and reply in stinging commonplaces, turning Letty's questions back against her like a mythical hero's enchanted shield. It was impossible to tell whether Mary was speaking the bald truth and mocking herself for it, or hurt and hiding it. Either way, the acid tone was the same. Either way, she kept Letty on the other side of a door harder to breach than wood.
It had always been that way, too.
Well, nothing was final yet. If Mary wanted him, she could have him. One hand on the banister, Letty hurried back down the stairs in search of her father. There had to be some way around this ridiculous situation. It was ridiculous, as ridiculous as one of the Greek tragedies of which her father was so fond, where the hero inevitably managed to charge straight into whatever doom he was trying to evade. Letty had never had much patience for those heroes. Yet here she was, having tried to thwart an elopement, winding up having accidentally eloped herself.
Accidentally eloped. The very words made Letty wince. One didn't accidentally elope. One accidentally picked up the wrong book at Hatchards, or paired a dress with the wrong-colored shawl. One didn't accidentally find oneself in a carriage at the dead of night with a member of the opposite sex, bound for matrimony.
She supposed Oedipus hadn't exactly intended to kill his father and marry his mother either.
Letty nearly barreled into her father, who was just starting up the stairs, nightcap on his head and candle in hand. "I must speak with you."
"Must you?" Mr. Alsworthy stifled a yawn. "As much as I hate to agree with your mother, the hour is, indeed, unnaturally advanced."
"Papa…" Letty said warningly.
Mr. Alsworthy bowed to the inevitable. "If you must."
Letty's breath released in a long rush. "Thank you."
Mr. Alsworthy led the way into his book room, a tiny square of a room filled with the boxes of books he had insisted on bringing down from Hertfordshire, augmented by his purchases since their arrival in London. The volumes filled the shelves and tottered in uneven stacks along the corners of the room. With the ease of long practice, Letty edged between two tottering piles and removed another from the room's only extra chair.
"How did you get yourself into such a pickle, my Letty?" inquired Mr. Alsworthy kindly, as Letty lowered the tower of books to the floor with a decided thump.
"With the best of intentions," began Letty irritably.
Mr. Alsworthy wagged a reproving finger at his favorite child. "That should cure you of those."
"I thought we were being robbed."
&nbs
p; Mr. Alsworthy grimaced at the dust furring the edge of his desk. "A most undiscriminating burglar, to be sure."
Letty had long ago learned that the only way to conduct a conversation with her father was to ignore his little asides. "Instead," she continued determinedly, "I found Mary packing for a midnight elopement."
"Unsurprising," murmured Mr. Alsworthy. "Unfortunate, but not unexpected."
"I went downstairs to talk some sense into Lord Pinchingdale," Letty hurried on before her father could interrupt again, "and was accidentally carried off. It was all a ridiculous mistake. And now…" Letty frowned at a battered copy of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Mr. Alsworthy steepled his fingers in front of himself. "Shall I begin for you? You," he said, "wish to remove yourself from this hasty arrangement. Oh, yes, it is hasty. There can be no two ways about that."
"And ill advised," replied Letty decidedly.
"I said hasty, not ill advised." Mr. Alsworthy contemplated the tassel on his nightcap. "The two are entirely different things."
"Not in this instance," Letty put in firmly, before her father could go off on a philosophical tangent about the merits of hasty action, as exemplified by the ancients. "This is entirely unnecessary. Don't you see? We'll just put it about that it was Mary in the carriage instead of me. Everyone knows how Lord Pinchingdale feels about her—goodness knows he hasn't exactly been subtle. It's far more believable than his being discovered with me."
"Truth is stranger than invention?" mused Mr. Alsworthy, who had developed the cheerful ability to turn any situation into an aphorism. "Be that as it may, it won't do. I take it you were seen?"
"By Percy Ponsonby," retorted Letty. "But Percy Ponsonby is a positive pea-brain. Everyone knows Percy Ponsonby is a positive pea-brain."
"Nonetheless, he was there on the spot, and that counts for more than intellect in such situations as these."
"This is the man who leaped out of a second-story window because he thought it seemed like a good idea!"
"It does make one wonder about the continued survival of the human race, does it not?" When Letty declined to follow him down that particular byway, Mr. Alsworthy recalled himself reluctantly to the situation at hand. "People are willing to believe anything that bears the promise of scandal. And you, my dear, have created rather a nice little scandal for yourself—I know, I know," Mr. Alsworthy said as he raised an admonitory hand, "with the best of intentions."