Belle of the ball (3 page)

Stunned, Arabella realized that protest was hopeless. Her mother's opinions were ever a mystery to her. Apparently in Lady Swinley's mind, the life of one opera dancer was of no account, nor did the poor girl's fate portend ill for any wife Count Verbrachan might choose. She would just have to keep her own counsel on the subject of Count Verbrachan.

Lady Swinley stared down at the paper in her hand and then said, "The most likely, I must say, is Lord Pelimore."

"Lord Pelimore?" Arabella slipped the silken cord of her fan around her wrist and allowed Annie to drape the soft, multicolored shawl around her shoulders. "He is sixty, at least!"

"And what is wrong with a mature man?" Her mother threw down the paper and stamped one foot on the carpet. "First you complain Bessemere is too young and now Pelimore is too old! There is no pleasing you, and I do not know why I take all of this trouble—"

Arabella sighed, picked up the paper and handed it back to her mother. "Tell me about him, then."

Lady Swinley's voice took on the enthusiasm reserved for one topic, money. "He is very, very wealthy—he owns a brewery, you know—and just out of mourning for his son, who died last year without issue. His current heir is his nephew and he despises the fellow; he can't even stand to be in the same room with him. So it is a certain thing that he is looking for a second wife—^Nellie died more than twenty years ago—^and he will need one of breeding age." The baroness took her daughter by the shoulders and looked her over critically one more time. "Perfect You are perfectly lovely, as usual." A rare smile lit her face. She squeezed Arabella's shoulders and released her. "His age is in his favor, my dear, because he will not want to waste any time and will likely choose a bride early in the Season."

The ugliness of the discussion hit her that moment and Arabella felt a dull dread sweep over her. By this time next Season she would be married and likely with child by a man she would not love. Not everyone was as lucky as her cousin, Truelove, who had fallen in love with Lord Drake and had had her feelings reciprocated. It was almost nauseating how happy True was, and yet she could not sneer at her cousin's joy. Arabella felt an envy she had never experienced before. What must that be like, to be so in love?

Anyway, she thought, squaring her slim shoulders and heading out the door, she was not likely to experience that, as she had joked with True, until she had married, presented her husband with a couple of sons, and then taken a lover. Or perhaps she was just not capable of the emotion so cloyingly described by the more putrid poets. She was her mother's daughter, after all.

On the way to the Parkhurst ball Lady Swinley kept up a steady stream of chatter. There were other eligibles, of course, and it would be worthwhile looking at them, but they must focus early on one, for they had little time. This Season was it; Arabella must be engaged by the end of it, or the vultures—meaning the moneylenders Lady Swinley owed—would close in around them. They could not be choosy, they must settle on one husband, and soon.

Arabella steeled herself to enter the Parkhursts' London mansion, lit up in glittering candlelight and with flambeaux at the door, with liveried footmen lining the walk. This was it, the first ball of the Season. Here she would find out if the horrible scene at the Farmingtons' country mansion had made the gossip rounds and if she was to be cut
en masse
. They had visited friends already, and had received their invitation to this ball a week ago, but that could have been delivered before news of the debacle was related to the Parkhursts. The next few minutes would tell the tale of their London Season.

She felt as though everyone in the world must know about it, and could not help reliving over and over again the awful moment of being ejected from the Farmington mansion on a frigid January evening. Lord Conroy had been peeping out from behind his formidable mother, and if Arabella hadn't been crying, her tears crystallizing into ice on her chilled cheek, she might have felt like laughing. It was like a scene from one of the more ludicrous of romances—the innocent maiden wronged and then thrown out into the night by a wicked aristocrat. And yet the thought made her indignant, too. One moment Nathan was ready to propose and the next, he was standing back and letting his mother toss the object of his supposed affections out of the house! What kind of man would do that?

She mounted the marble steps and entered the house behind another group of people, a couple she did not know. At last in, she listened, her ears burning while the butler announced their names.

"Baroness Swinley and the Honorable Miss Arabella Swinley," he intoned.

The entire company gasped and drew back in horror as one, and a wave of whispered condemnations —

"Arabella, what are you gaping at? Come," Lady Swinley hissed, grabbing her daughter's wrist and starting down the steps.

Obediently, Arabella followed her mother down the steps into the crowd, who had, in truth, ignored their momentous arrival. She was relieved that her little daydream was not reality, but it was still to be seen how they would be greeted by the Farmingtons' intimates. And what if Lord Conroy should have come to London for the Season? It was quite likely, despite his mother's purported indisposition, and yet she had not even thought of it until now. Oh, Lord, how she hoped he didn't!

Lady Swinley led the way to their hostess, who stood with her husband and a group of their friends. "Lady Parkhurst! How wonderful you look tonight, and Letitia, too!"

The young lady just named, the Parkhursts* spinster daughter, thirty or older and still unwed, nodded coolly.

Lady Parkhurst smiled and took Lady Swinley's offered hand. "How nice of you both to attend," she murmured. She turned to Arabella. "Lady Snowdale mentioned meeting with you at the Nash Emporium." Her smile was malicious. "You had a brave defender for some imagined slight."

Managing a smile, Arabella said, "Yes, was that not absurd? It just shows how a situation can be misunderstood so very easily!"

"I suppose," Lady Parkhurst murmured.

So, the Snowdales had spoken of the scene, but had clearly not retailed the gossip that was behind their snub, nor had they revealed the snub itself. Could she breathe easier? Would she and her mother escape without condemnation? Why had the Snowdales been so circumspect?

Arabella drifted away as her mother headed for a line of chairs along the wall where a couple of her bosom bows, other women acting as chaperones, were seated. Strictly speaking she should stay by her mother until claimed for a dance, but she was no green girl in her first Season. No one would look askance at a girl of three-and-twenty without her chaperone clinging to her skirts.

The first ball of the Season. It had been many years since her first ball of her first Season, but she could readily identify the wide-eyed looks and pale complexions, and the snowy dresses of this year's new crop. There were blondes and brunettes and a few unfortunate redheads, and it seemed to Arabella that there were an excessive number of truly beautiful girls to add to the few diamonds from the previous year who had not made a match.

"Have you ever seen so many frightened children?"

Arabella jumped at the voice almost in her ear, and whirled to find her friend, Miss Eveleen O'Clannahan, at her elbow. Eveleen was red-headed with sprinkling of reddish freckles across her narrow nose, though the rest of her complexion was the color of thick Devonshire cream. She was as tall as Arabella, but rather more voluptuous. Arabella gave her friend a quick hug and then put her at arm's length.

"Eveleen, it is so good to see you! My, but you look marvelous!" She scanned her friend's gown, a rich and lustrous azure, trimmed in expensive muslin. She wore sapphires around her neck and wrist, with diamond ear-bobs. Oh, to be that rich, Arabella thought, envious of her friend's fortune. "I believed, from your last letter, that you had determined not to do this—^what did you call it? The 'annual farce of searching for a man one can bear to be near for more than a few seconds'?"

Eveleen chuckled. "That was until my father threatened to forcibly take me back to Ireland and confine me to my great-granny's farm. As long as I pretend to search for a husband he will let me stay in London with just Sheltie to protect me."

"Sheltie! Where is the dear old thing?"

Eveleen glanced around and pointed to an extraordinary-looking woman who seemed, at first glance, to be a bundle of rags, until one looked closer and realized it was only a multiplicity of shawls that made her appear so. She was a great-aunt of Eveleen's, dark Irish with a thick brogue that put off the more superficial of the London crowd. Anyone who got to know her fell in love with her multiple eccentricities and marvellously original conversation. She was broody and fey and claimed to see visions, like some Gypsy from a caravan. Arabella waved—the merest genteel fluttering of her hand—and the woman peered at her, then waved gaily back before returning to a conversation with another lady. In fact . . . no, Arabella would not believe it. But yes! It appeared that Sheltie was reading the woman's palm, right in the middle of a London ballroom!

"You are lucky," Arabella said, enviously. "Your own establishment, with just darling Sheltie to deal with."

Eveleen gazed at her friend with an expression of understanding in her brilliant blue eyes. "Ah, but I am a spinster of many more years than you, my girl, and independently wealthy."

"Eve, my dear, you are twenty-nine, not thirty-nine!"

Lady Swinley bustled over at that moment. "Why, hello, Eveleen." She looked her daughter's friend over critically. "Put on a few pounds, have you not?"

"Mother!" Arabella gasped.

"Never mind; listen to me. Lord Pelimore has just entered. Look lively, my girl. He has created quite a stir." She hustled away again, with just a motion of her head toward the stairs.

"My heavens," Eveleen exclaimed. "Have you ever seen so much flashing teeth and eyes and batting eyelashes? You would think the man was the catch of the year instead of an ugly, snuff-addicted old man! I had heard he was on the lookout for a wife, but I never envisioned this . . . this hubbub! I pity the poor girls who must go after him. What did your mother want, bringing him to your attend—" Eveleen's words trailed off as she gazed at her friend.

Arabella stayed silent; she could not meet her friend's gaze.

"Never say—do not tell me you are entering the matrimonial stakes for old Lord Pelimore?"

"I am afraid so, Eve. I very much fear it is true."

Three

"What on earth could induce you to do such a mad thing, my dear girl?" Eveleen's voice, faintly inflected with an Irish lilt, was filled with incredulous wonder. "You are not thinking that at three-and-twenty you are past anything better? If so, I assure you that you are not quite at such desperate ends yet."

"Some of us are not independently wealthy and must marry," Arabella said, stung into a precipitate reply by her friend's mocking tone. She glanced around hastily at the crowd, hoping no one had heard their indelicate conversation. One did not speak of money, even if one was desperately in need of it. It just was not done.

"Oho! It is money, is it?" Eveleen regarded her silently for a moment. She had always been blunt, and no subject was off limits. "Are you and your mother under the hatches, then?"

It went against the grain to confess all, but if not to Eve, her dearest and closest friend, then to whom? "We are." Arabella lifted her chin, desperately trying not to feel the shame attendant on poverty. "And it is up to me to repair our fortunes, and we only have this Season to do it" It did not even need to be said, she knew, that all must be kept in confidence. Eveleen might like to listen to gossip, but she was not without sensitivity, and she was fiercely loyal to her friends.

"How comes it that even with no other heirs to snatch Swinley Manor from under the widow and child's bottom, that you and your mother should be so undone?"

Eveleen referred to the fact that the barony had lapsed after Lord Swinley's death. There was no male heir known, and so the manor house and land, including farm, timber, orchards, and other enterprises, had stayed with Lady Swinley. It was a gray area in law, and there was some dissenting view that the Swinley tide and lands should revert to the throne, but there had not been much interest from any quarter, and there was really nothing to take that was not encumbered with mortgages. Arabella did not honestly know what had happened and said so to her friend, her words smothered among the hubbub of lords and ladies arriving and chattering to friends they had not seen through the long winter.

"Mama claims that Papa left the estate in a bad way," Arabella continued, moving out of the way for Lord Stibblethorpe, a clumsy and usually drunken marquess, well known for his corpulence and smell. Luckily he was already married, or her mother would have included him on the list. She drifted back toward Eveleen and they both turned to watch the marquess make his way through the crowd like a fishing scow among elegant sailboats. "But it just seems so unlikely," she continued. "I mean, I did not spend overmuch time at Swinley Manor as a child, you know. Mama didn't have much use for a little girl under her feet, and so I spent most of my holidays at my cousins' home in Cornwall. Their father is a vicar, and I stayed at the vicarage for some months every year. But I just wonder how it can be that Papa left things so involved when it is the only thing he did—managing the estates, I mean. I do not remember any sign of gambling; he spent little time in London, and then only at Mother's behest. So what can have happened to all the money?"

Eveleen shrugged. "I cannot imagine, my dear, but I am sorry to hear about your troubles."

Lady Swinley was at that very moment giving her significant looks that urged her to go greet Lord Pelimore, still enveloped by a crowd of frothy pale gowns and bare white arms, all belonging to girls being introduced by their hopeful chaperones. But Arabella did not think that was the way to gain the old man's attention. All of those girls would blend into one another after a few seconds; he would not be making any choice this very evening anyway. There were better ways to gain a gentleman's attention, as a veteran of the London Season knew.