The Scandal of the Season

by Sophie Gee

  Arabella greeted her, kissing both cheeks.

  “Hello, Bell,” Teresa replied. “How glad I am to see you.” She looked at her cousin appraisingly. Arabella was just as handsome as ever, she was disgruntled to note.

  Arabella saw the glint of envy in Teresa’s eye, and wished that she did not feel so gratified by it. “Where is Martha?” she asked.

  “Abroad with our aunt and mother,” said Teresa. “They are gone to visit Mrs. Chesterton, exactly the sort of tiresome thing that Martha likes to do. Your gown is handsome, Bell,” she said. “Is it the one you wore at Mapledurham when I saw you last year?”

  Arabella had noticed before that her cousin became competitive whenever she felt ill at ease.

  “I haven’t had that gown for quite some time,” she answered. “This is another in a newer style, without flounces.” She straightened out the lace fringe of her sleeve. Better pay Teresa a compliment in return. “Your hair looks well, Teresa. I suppose that your aunt’s maid helped you put it up.”

  “Not at all,” said Teresa. “Martha and I brought our maid to town.”

  “Ah!” Arabella raised her chin in assent. That explained why her cousin’s hair had been done in such an old-fashioned style. She wondered whether she ought to point it out to her, delicately of course.

  But the carriage turned from Cheapside into Cornhill, and both girls were distracted by the sight of the Exchange. Teresa forgot her envy and unease, and gave a gasp of excitement. “What a magnificent building!” she exclaimed. “I had quite forgotten.”

  Their coach was dwarfed by the immense stone front of the facade, its high arcades and columns reaching skyward beside the great formal arch. The massive windows of the first floor stretched toward a noble balustrade, and high above the whole was the tiered clock tower, piercing the sky like the dome of a cathedral and chiming out the hour of noon across the City.

  Teresa swung the carriage door open, as sound and smell assailed her forcefully. Here at last! In London, on a glorious morning, the whole visit stretching before her. She caught the jingle of the muffin man’s bell as he pushed through the crowd with a tray of hot cakes. A heavy thump as bales of cloth were thrown down from a cart. The stamp of hooves on the muddy straw when the carriages stopped, steam hissing off the horses’ backs. A constant shrill of whistles from messenger boys. She could smell chestnuts roasting and the acrid smoke of the braziers; the spice of warmed cider; the piercing stink of fresh dung. She stood on the step of the cab, her breath misting in the cold air as she took in the scene. Then she jumped down to the pavement, thrilled to be in town and determined to make the outing a success.

  Arabella lingered in the coach, retying the hood of her mantle and arranging the folds of her cloak. A gentleman in military uniform bounded across to the carriage and offered her his hand, and she it took with a smile, stepping out down to the cobbles. The man bowed and hurried on his way.

  “Who was that gentleman, Arabella?” Teresa asked as they walked under the arch and into the courtyard.

  “I’ve no idea!” she replied. “But he was rather handsome, did you not think?” Arabella now felt in much better spirits.

  She took hold of Teresa’s arm, and said, “The shops upstairs are always the best, but I think you will like the little stalls in the yard, too. Last time I was here I bought a yard of silk ribbon. I wonder if the woman will be there again.”

  The arcaded square of the Exchange opened up before them, filled with merchants and traders and hawkers of wares, mingling with people of all occupations and positions. All the ladies and gentlemen were walking arm in arm with friends or meeting new acquaintances across the yard. A pair of men in beaver fur hats bowed as Arabella pointed and exclaimed, “Yes, look! There is the silk lady again.”

  Teresa turned to watch as a tiny old woman shook out a length of fabric that rippled open in the breeze like a fast stream. The winter sunlight, catching in its folds, made it shine like tin.

  “How pretty!” she murmured, enchanted by the sight, and she would have stopped, but Arabella was moving on through the yard. She hurried to join her.

  “You have probably not heard that Maria Granville is to marry Tommy Hawkins,” Arabella said, and Teresa was reminded of how very little news reached her in the country.

  “Maria Granville?” she echoed. “I have not heard of her since we were in Paris.”

  “She caused a great scandal last year—it was discovered that she and Edward Fairfax were in an intrigue.”

  “An intrigue?” Teresa repeated. “You mean that they were…bedfellows?”

  Arabella nodded. “But Fairfax married Lord Chester’s daughter, and Maria was left high and dry.”

  “So she is to marry Tommy Hawkins instead,” said Teresa thoughtfully. “There can’t be much of a thrill in capturing a quarry so thoroughly worked over by every other girl in London. He had a nibbled look about him even when I met him in the country two years ago—he will have been half eaten by the time Maria gets him to the church door.”

  Arabella smiled. “I am surprised that she managed to marry at all. Twenty other women might have told her that Fairfax was a scoundrel. But the girl thought that she had fallen in love!”

  They stepped around a beggar who had lifted his crutch to block their way, and Arabella moved her skirts expertly to one side. “At one stage I heard talk that Tommy Hawkins was paying his respects to you, Teresa. You sent him on his way, of course…” Arabella had not meant to tease her cousin, but she found herself falling into the kind of talk that the fashionable set engaged in. To her surprise, Teresa caught the style quickly.

  “Charles Stafford was overheard saying that he would shoot himself if you did not marry him, Bell,” she said. “That is quite a feather in your cap. He is said to be worth five thousand a year.”

  “Then I am afraid that we must expect to hear at any moment the news of Charles Stafford’s death.” Both girls laughed. They were beginning to enjoy themselves.

  “Oh!” Arabella cried. “That sweet pippin-monger is here. Shall we buy some of his licorice?”

  They looked over the bursting stall, with its boxes and baskets of Kentish pippins, pearmains, lemons, and pomegranates. They knew that they cut a fine sight, admiring the fruit and laughing at the little pleasantries made by the pippin-monger. Arabella ordered a pennyworth of crystallized ginger that she would never eat, conscious that she looked very well searching about for a coin in her silk purse. She noted with pleasure that two smartly dressed gentlemen were watching them from the cover of the arcade.

  She was still searching for the penny when one of them walked over. He handed a coin to the stall keeper, took the paper of ginger, and gave it to Arabella. She looked up with surprise, noting that he wore expensive gloves and that his coat was adorned with a rich fur on the collar. When she thanked him, he cocked his head in response, but said nothing. More interested than she had expected to be, Arabella turned to look at his companion.

  As their eyes met she shivered with an involuntary surge of excitement. She knew him! He was a tall man, with a high forehead and an even, well-bred nose and mouth. He wore no wig, and his dark curls were tied in a black ribbon at his neck. The expression on his face was calm and controlled—he was obviously much used to being looked at—but when he smiled at her it was with the open smile of a boy.

  “Robert!” she exclaimed. “It is you, is it not?”

  The gentleman started. But as he stepped forward into the yard, his eyes brightened with recognition. “How do you do, Miss Fermor?” he said. “You have become very beautiful.”

  “I forget that we are no longer to be known as Robert and Bell,” she replied, composing herself. “How do you do, my lord?”

  “A great deal better when you call me Robert,” Lord Petre answered.

  Arabella touched a hand to her neck. “We were in the nursery when we saw each other last,” she said.

  He took another step forward, saying, “The nursery—hardly! I was a
great man of eighteen, returned from school in the certain knowledge that the world had nothing more to teach me. Do you not remember my swaggering about with my sword and snuffbox?”

  Arabella looked at him teasingly. “Those items, at least, you appear to have retained,” she said.

  “Do not make me ashamed of what I have become,” he protested, and Arabella thought how fine he looked, standing with his sword glinting in the winter sunlight. “When I knew you then, you were the brightest nymph upon the green, the object of every pining swain. And though you are now a great lady, I suspect that little else has altered from that time.”

  Arabella wrinkled her brow. “You are right—I am changed very little,” she replied.

  “I have been largely in the country since my father died,” he said thoughtfully, as if considering why they had not met before now.

  Teresa stood awkwardly aside as Lord Petre and Arabella spoke, pushed backward until she felt the pippin-monger’s stall against the hoop of her gown. She felt foolish, wanting to be gone, and she tried to step around Arabella so that she might at least wait in company with Lord Petre’s friend. But he had slipped away, and in his place there was a little Gypsy acrobat with a monkey on his shoulder, who watched over their party with a leering grin. Teresa jumped backward violently, knocking into the pippen stall.

  “Look out there!” the owner cried, and a dozen ladies and gentlemen turned toward Teresa. She went scarlet, and pointed speechlessly to the monkey. Lord Petre swatted the man away with a wave of his hand, the other resting on the hilt of his sword.

  His face changed from playfulness to anger when he saw that his friend had gone. “Where is Douglass?” he demanded. Arabella saw that in the place of idle amusement was a look of awakened concentration. “We had not been together five minutes before I saw you,” he added. He looked around, but his companion had disappeared.

  “Did you see where my friend Douglass went, Miss Fermor?” he demanded again. Arabella shook her head coldly, put out by this change in Lord Petre’s manner. He stood looking at the ground in silence, and then continued to look around, seeming for a moment as though he might walk away altogether.

  But suddenly he collected himself. “There’s nothing to be done; I suppose he must be meeting an acquaintance,” he said, and made an effort to smile. But Arabella believed that he had not put Douglass out of his mind.

  “Will you do me the honor of introducing your companion?” Lord Petre asked after a moment.

  Arabella was disappointed. Perhaps he had not singled her out after all. What if he were to smile at her cousin as he had smiled at her? In a constrained voice she said, “I present to you my cousin, Miss Teresa Blount of Mapledurham.”

  Lord Petre looked up with real interest, and exclaimed, “Mapledurham! A lovely spot, on the prettiest elbow of the river. I envy your growing up in such a place, madam.”

  Arabella frowned; she had forgotten Mapledurham. Of course Lord Petre would know of it. She found herself wanting to tell him that Mapledurham was Teresa’s brother’s—that her cousin had no money of her own—and was surprised by such immediate jealousy.

  Teresa, for her own part, sensed that her moment had arrived at last.

  She laughed brightly, but, because she had been silent beforehand, it sounded much louder than she had meant it to. “But you grew up at Ingatestone, my lord,” she said, “a place of which the whole world has heard a great deal. What a beautiful park you have there.”

  Lord Petre nodded at her and said, “Your brother has visited my family there, has he not? Do I recall that he is a fine sportsman?”

  “Oh, yes, he is!” she said. “A wonderful rider.”

  “You are a fond sister, I see,” he answered kindly. “And you, do you like to ride?”

  “I rode with Michael very often at Mapledurham.”

  “Teresa is being modest,” said Arabella, interrupting their conversation. “She is an excellent horsewoman. I hope that we shall see you ride in town, Teresa.”

  The intervention had been well judged, since Arabella was well aware that Teresa did not have a horse in London.

  “Do you ride, Miss Fermor?” Lord Petre asked her at last.

  “I ride when I am in the country, but in town I sit only pillion,” she said. “If a woman in London is mounted alone upon a horse, she declares to the world that she wants for either a carriage or a cavalier. But pillion is another thing altogether. How pleasant to ride in the green shade of the park at noon, sitting comfortably behind one’s companion, just as though one were about to drink bohea on a sofa at home.”

  Petre nodded. “You paint an alluring scene, and one that tempts me to offer myself as your cavalier. But since you would hardly admire a man who could fall upon a trap that he had seen you set, I shall walk away, to leave it ready for another gentleman.”

  Arabella’s spirits rose gloriously once again. “If the world should ever see you trapped, my lord, I, at least, will know that the device must have been very well concealed,” she answered, biting her lip to suppress a smile.

  “But I suspect that Teresa is in a hurry to be gone,” she said, turning toward her cousin. “We only came to buy gloves. Shall we go upstairs to Fowler’s now, Teresa?”

  “We need not linger at the Exchange at all,” Teresa answered mischievously, resentful that Arabella had made her the foil in her flirtation with Lord Petre. “Why do not we go to that shop in Cheapside where my mother gets her gloves?”

  But Arabella was more than a match for her cousin. “Oh, I much prefer Fowler’s,” she said. “The gloves are smarter, and they have newer stock. The other shop feels rather decrepit, don’t you think?”

  Lord Petre said that he would accompany them, and offered an arm to each of the girls, but he looked around distractedly as they climbed the stairs to the shops on the upper galleries.

  “You are being maddeningly discreet, Teresa,” Arabella began, looking across Lord Petre as she did so. “I am wild to know which young men in the town are presently your suitors. I think it only fair that you should warn me of those admirers whom you wish particularly to avoid.”

  Teresa answered her cousin crisply. “I wish to avoid them all, Arabella,” she said.

  “I celebrate your discretion,” Arabella replied. “But remember that if a lady is too discreet, people begin to suspect that she has nothing to hide.”

  “There is one acquaintance of mine, lately arrived in town, for whom I shall likely make an exception,” said Teresa, and Arabella saw that she glanced at Lord Petre to make sure that he was listening. “An old friend, and in a way to becoming famous. He is a poet.” She colored as she spoke.

  Arabella answered, “Ha! I was certain that you had a secret. A poet! Perhaps he will make you immortal.”

  “I believe that he does have every chance of success in his profession,” Teresa continued. “Tonson has published him already, and a much longer poem of his is soon to be printed. The Tatler has called him the new Denham.”

  “What is this gentleman’s name?” Arabella asked.

  “Alexander Pope,” said Teresa, gaining confidence.

  “Pope?” said Arabella, amusement immediately entering her voice. “You mean that strange little man whom you know from the country?” Teresa gave a scowl. Of course Arabella would remember his crippled back.

  “Yes…I suppose that must be he,” Teresa replied.

  “I thought you said he was sickly,” said Arabella.

  “Mr. Pope is not my suitor, Arabella. I mention him as an old friend of my family’s.”

  “Mr. Alexander Pope is a young poet of some note,” said Lord Petre.

  But Arabella was not listening. “It would be great fun to be the heroine of a poem by someone very dashing,” she said. “Suckling, or Lovelace—or Rochester, even though he was so wicked. ‘Pope’ has such a morbid ring to it.”

  “Do not listen to Miss Fermor,” Lord Petre intervened. “She would do well to spare her censure of a man whose only faul
t lies in a misfortune he suffered as a child. Remember that excellent adage, Miss Fermor: charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.”

  “That is one of those preposterous falsehoods that is put about from time to time, but which no one ever actually believes,” Arabella replied. “What a prude it makes you sound! A man in your position, my lord, could hardly wish to discover that merit is the true source of human felicity.”

  Lord Petre looked as though he had a retort ready for this observation, but he was prevented from delivering it by their arrival at Fowler’s glove shop. The two girls walked up to the counter, and the shop-wench, whose name was Molly, eyed them with a resentful air. But Arabella noticed with interest that she gave a saucy sort of curtsy and a smile of half-familiarity to Lord Petre, who responded to neither overture, giving no sign that he had seen her. Instantly Arabella was curious. It was obvious that they knew each other, despite Lord Petre’s affectations to the contrary.

  Molly, for her part, had sighed when she saw Arabella enter. She was a keen observer of her customers, and she knew what girls such as these were like. She guessed that Arabella would walk around talking to her friend, taking down the leather gloves and dropping them carelessly upon the tables. She would have one box brought out and then another, would turn the goods over once, and ask coldly for another color that they did not stock. She would pick up the most expensive fan and flounce it open and closed, knowing that Molly’s wages would be docked if it were torn. And then she would leave, buying at most a sixpenny ribbon for a hood that she would never wear again.

  But Arabella had no desire to linger in the shop today. Briskly she chose three pairs of kidskin gloves, ordered ostrich feathers for her spring muff, and then waited while Teresa bought two pairs of the same gloves for herself. As the girls walked away, Lord Petre turned back quietly to give Molly a shilling. But she took it with none of her usual fluttering and flattery, seeing that he was no more disposed for distraction than Arabella. Instead she bobbed her head neatly, and Lord Petre joined the others.

  They stood in the gallery in an uncertain little group, looking away from one another and toward a stout lady who was holding up a sleeve of a delicate striped fabric.