Althea (17 page)

“Did you not specifically tell me to make sure you
remembered that you are to dine out tonight?” Tracy protested. “And I am sure
Miss Ervine has some appointment for which she must prepare also.”

“I hate to admit it, for it spoils him dreadfully, but he is
right,” Lady Boskingram sighed. “You must be off, then, for I make no doubt
that you have more invitations than you know what to do with. There’s two times
of life, my dear. Yours, when you are invited everywhere for your beauty and
your wit and your fortune, if you have any, and mine, when you’re invited
because no one dares not to invite you. I’ll not keep you longer, then. Your
patience with my stories gives me some faith in your racketty generation.” She
stretched out a hand to draw Althea close, and stood almost on tiptoe to kiss
her cheek.

Althea received her pelisse and turned once more to thank
her hostess for her kindness. Lady Boskingram waved her hand irritably and insisted
there was no kindness to it at all.

“Only idle curiosity. But Tracy, I would not have thought it
possible that any of the Blakneighs, with the exception of William, could have
had such good sense. Goodbye.” Waving her hand absently, Lady Boskingram dismissed
them and went to collect her charts and wander bemusedly up the stairs with her
arms full of them.

“What have you found to discuss so weightedly this hour and
a half?” Calendar asked as they settled into the phaeton. “I would swear that
you both wished me at Jericho when I arrived. Has Aunt Peg been telling you
dire stories of my extreme youth? Don’t believe ’em, for she did not know me
then.”

“You are shockingly conceited if you think that we discussed
you all that while,” Althea retorted briskly. “Lady Boskingram was engaged to
show me why you are your cousin’s third cousin twice removed, as well as first
cousin. She is quite amazing. But how does she know these things?”

“She asks,” Tracy said dryly. “She has gone so far as to
tell me that she loves her stories because they give her a license to ask
whatever she will, and all the time with the most angelic look on her face.”

“She has a look of you, you know.” Althea smiled. “Not
angelic, of course: that would be altogether impossible. But that supercilious
eyebrow — yes, that’s it — you share that eyebrow with your aunt, as well as
that trick of observing everything about a person when it is least expected you
could do so. You have no idea how disconcerting that is.”

“You spend a great deal of time telling me what in me you
find disconcerting. Is that in the hopes that you can reform me when you and I
are wed?”

Althea moved uneasily on the phaeton seat. “I would never
presume to change any part of you, least of all the affectations that make you
such a figure in the
ton
.”

“You mean that my height and this crop of carroty hair do
not make me remarkable enough without some affectations? A fine, carnival place
this London is come to be these days.” He looked at her gravely. “I should
never have thought to hear myself accused of affectations. Next you will have
me a dandy.”

“I confess that the thought had once or twice crossed my
mind ….”

“Never say so, ma’am!” Tracy groaned. “A Corinthian,
perhaps. A whip, or a Trojan, or even a swell I could permit with no great fear
for my reputation, but a
dandy
! As soon call yourself” — he paused to
think —”no. Perhaps you had better not call yourself
that
, but . . ..”

“Oh, I stand corrected,” Althea said unrepentantly. “And in
your excess of emotion you have driven clear past my house. No, don’t bother to
go back.” She gathered her reticule and gloves in her hand. “I am not daunted
by a walk of some hundred feet or so. I am so glad that I met your aunt, Sir
Tracy.”

“I thought you agreed that I was to be Tracy from now on.
You cannot go on speaking of me as if I were only another of your flirts, my
dear.” He took her proffered hand in his large, firm clasp. Eustace leapt down
from the curricle and stood ready to help the lady descend. “I see I am to have
no more conversation with you tonight, but I will do myself the honor of
calling on you tomorrow. Good night.” He held her hand a moment longer, then
released her, and Eustace swung her down to the street.

Althea was admitted to the house by Debbens, who motioned
her to one side of the hallway and said, in a conspiratorial whisper, “Ma’am,
his lordship’s back again. Just thought you’d be wanting to know.” Since their
initial, unfortunate meeting, Althea and Debbens had become something like
friends, or at least conspirators. Althea thanked him in the same melodramatic
whisper and, seeing Maria approaching, dismissed him. Debbens winked in a
distressingly familiar fashion and went off.

“Well, returned at last, I see,” Maria said a little too
loudly. “What did you think of Lady Boskingram? Did she prose you or try to
scare you or both? I hope you gave her a smart set-down. You have been gone the
longest time! It was quite unfair of Sir Tracy to demand you meet his aunt on
such short notice.”

“I liked it very well. I’m glad to have met her and made her
my friend. But you, Mary. Has anything happened while I was gone? Did anyone
call?”

“Call?” Maria looked up quickly. “No, no one called. I took
my tea all alone. Oh, there was one thing.”

Althea looked up too quickly. “Yes?”

“Your new gown was sent from Helena’s, and there was a note
from the shoemaker’s about my sandals. Oh, and I got a note from Harriet
Leveson-Gower about her aunt’s
bal masque
next week. But no one called.”
The kerchief was almost irredeemably contorted by now. “We are to dine at
Cousin Anne’s tonight, so hurry and dress.”

Althea, fearing that there was no way to bring Maria to own
up to Francis’s arrival, started up the stairs for her room to begin her
delayed evening toilette. Maria’s choked whisper stopped her.

“Ally?” She motioned her sister to rejoin her, and her voice
dropped to the tiniest whisper. “Francis came back this afternoon. I haven’t
yet seen him, but I heard his voice.” Her face hovered uncertainly between joy
and misery. “Do you think he can forgive me, ever?”

“I am sure that he can, Sister, but this is no place to be
discussing it. Go dress and then come see me before we go out.” Althea patted
her sister’s hand and continued up the stairs.

“Ally? I’m so happy he’s back....” Maria stood alone in the
large hallway, rather small, and looking anything but happy.

As events transpired, the reunion between the Bevans was
neither so dramatic nor so painful as Maria, Francis, Althea, or any of the
servants had feared (or hoped). Lord Bevan had simply become tired of life at
his shooting box and lonesome for Maria. There was, after the first day or so,
no decent wine to be had there; his housekeeper had no idea of how to sustain a
gentleman above three days; there was no one within proximity of the cottage
who was in the least amusing. In short, everything there seemed only to
increase his longing for the warmth and well-ordered comfort of Grosvenor
Square — and for Maria.

They did have a short bout of mutual self-recrimination;
while Maria accused herself of being cowardly and deceitful, of willful
behavior and flirtation aforethought, Francis spoke of his wretched temper, his
violent jealousy of any man who so much as looked at Maria, and finally told
her the story of his gaming debts with Calendar. Each was generous with
absolution and loving words, and when the emotion of this charged scene had
dissipated, they found that they had slipped back into their accustomed style
of living.

Althea watched her sister’s happiness with preoccupied
pleasure. She had sworn Maria to secrecy even from Francis on the matter of her
engagement, and was trying to work out her misgivings for herself. To be
practical, although it was not generally considered the business of young
ladies to be practical in the matter of marriage (that was for fond mamas and
doting papas), Althea knew that marriage to Calendar could only improve her lot
socially. To marry an acknowledged Matrimonial Prize, a rich man and a noted
figure of Sport and Society, to be no longer a millstone around Maria’s neck or
responsible to her father — all of this was, of course, desirable. Still she
retained an abhorrence of marriage to a man who merely wanted a wife and a
mother for his heirs, and who had shown no sign of affection for her. Had not Lady
Boskingram intimated that marriage was Tracy’s duty?

Althea tossed the positives and negatives of the marriage —
or any marriage at all — back and forth, without reaching a conclusion and
without being able to banish the thoughts from her mind for longer than five
minutes at a time. She was unable to read or sit alone without falling into a
brown study, and no matter what hour she retired or what her exertions had
been, it took her hours to fall asleep, during which time she was unable to
divert her thoughts from the problem.

Francis and Maria were not normally perceptive, and just
after Francis’s return they were more besotted than usual. After a week or so,
though, Francis remarked to Maria that he had noticed that fellow Calendar was
much about the house these days, and also that Ally seemed set about in some
fashion. She was surely not going into a decline, he hoped. Maria did not
betray Althea’s confidence, but gave her husband a look of great portent,
saying that she thought Ally must be only a trifle fagged with all the
unaccustomed gaiety.

Francis was not well pleased with Calendar’s calls at his
house, for every sight of that visitor reminded him of the shocking sum he
still owed Sir Tracy for that one ill-advised night of gaming after the
Fforydings’ ball. To be sure, Sir Tracy had, in a note, written to Francis
saying there need be no hurry with the debt, but the fact that there was
walking about in London a man to whom he owed considerably more than his year’s
income made Francis very uncomfortable. He would have been surprised and a
little indignant to find that Calendar, in the times he had seen Bevan since
his return, had only looked at him in the light of a future brother-in-law,
never as a man who owed him over ten thousand pounds. On all occasions his
behavior was cordial, almost friendly, and entirely perplexing to Francis, who
knew nothing of Althea’s affairs. Tracy had assumed that Bevan had been told,
and was himself a little surprised at Bevan’s standoffish manner. AlI in all,
everyone was a little less than certain of exactly where matters stood with
anyone else, and Francis, like Althea, had thoughts concerning Calendar that
took up entirely too much time and effort.

All this preoccupation did not keep Althea from enjoying, or
at least from participating in, the usual gaiety around her. When, as she
thought was more and more the case, she saw Sir Tracy out in company, he was
very likely to monopolize her entirely, so that for the first few days after
their engagement was contracted, she felt constricted and confined by him. So
enclosed and caged did she feel by this flattering attention that she found
herself becoming unappreciative of what she elsewise might have thought of as
Sir Tracy’s kind consideration. By sticking so close to Althea, he was ensuring
that Edward Pendarly, still happily unaware of Althea’s discoveries, could not
approach her until she was ready for such a confrontation. Observing the lady’s
distraught manner, Tracy was not likely to permit this to happen too soon. Another
thing that escaped Althea’s preoccupied notice was the gossip that was
occasioned by Sir Tracy’s attentions. Tracy was himself well aware of it. He
had been used, for the past ten years, to hear his name tied to some female’s,
be she on the right or wrong side of the social pale. Now, although he knew
that overreaction would only worsen the talk, he had a dislike of hearing
Althea’s name spoken in the same way. It was an effort to ignore his own
inclinations and keep from placing a notice of their betrothal in the
Gazette
,
but that, he knew, Althea would not forgive.

Despite an air of distractedness that was so interesting
that certain young ladies had begun to copy it, Althea was conscious soon
enough of some of the talk regarding her. At Almack’s one evening she heard two
of the patronesses discussing scandals, and was appalled to hear her own name
mentioned by Lady Jersey, who said solicitously to Lady Caroline Lamb that she
hoped the young Ervine was not going to have her feelings hurt by Calendar, when
all the world knew that he had a heart of stone. Caroline Lamb, somewhat piqued
by this (Calendar had long, if speciously, pronounced himself her devoted
slave) lisped charmingly that Miss Ervine seemed entirely able to fend for
herself. “And besides, until Tracy started to beau her around, wath she not
busily engaged in winning Fulvia Laverham’th thon-in-law from Mith Georgiana?
Exactly the thort of country behavior one might expect from such an amathon!”
Sally Jersey twittered nervously and wondered at Calendar being so particular
in his attentions.

Althea had been waiting for Maria when she caught this
snatch of speech, but she moved immediately away from the area, determined
rather to seek her sister out than to stay and hear more. If Lady Jersey or Lady
Caroline noticed her, she gave no sign, and Althea, wishing herself away on the
instant, instead found her arm taken by Sir Tracy. His expression was
inscrutable, but she wondered if he had heard.

“You needn’t pay any attention to them,” he said. “Caro is
spiteful these days — restless — and I expect she’ll wind up ruining herself
with one of her mad starts some fine day. I used to fancy myself quite
dreadfully in love with her when I was a boy.”

“What happened?” Althea asked coolly.

“She threw a Sévres jug at me when we had an argument, and
from that time on —” He looked down apologetically at Althea’s amused eyes. “I
didn’t so much mind that she had thrown it at me, but what a deplorable waste
of a beautiful jug. Unconscionable.” He settled Althea on a very uncomfortable
chair and allowed himself to lean on the wall next to her. “And Sally is called
Silence for good reason: she has an unreasoning fear of allowing her tongue to
grow still. You see, you are quite silly to heed them. And besides that, they
are all wrong as well. My intentions are quite honorable. Are yours?”