False Angel (11 page)

So they laughed together about their own foolishness, as the dancers formed their sets around them, and they made merry gossip when the musicians rested. He took her in to a late dinner as she laughed about an anecdote from his university days, and he had some trouble managing his dessert plate as she told him of the antics of a local farmer and his errant daughters.

They had asked Annabelle to join them, but she had declined. It was Severne who had spied Annabelle’s hesitation as he had led Leonora to her chair. “Your little companion looks devastated at the way that I’ve dragooned you for the night,” he whispered. “Is it that she particularly disapproves of me? Or could it be that she expects to join us?”

“But she is not my companion, she is a distant cousin, and newly arrived in Town, and I’m sure it is only that she doesn’t know where else to sit,” Leonora declared, clearly appalled, but only because she had so completely forgotten her relative’s very existence. And thus the marquess had gone to ask Annabelle to join them. Annabelle refused the offer with a pretty show of confusion. Leonora might have felt more regretful had it not been for the fact that it was so strangely gratifying to see such an otherwise smooth fellow make such poor work of concealing his relief at Annabelle’s decision. Still, Leonora had paused in their raillery to have a serious word with him about her relative.

“I? ’ he asked in such mock confusion that she had grinned despite herself. “Come, Lady Leonora, you have been in the countryside, to be sure, but not, I think, on another planet I am the last person who might know some earnest, wealthy, decent young chap who is hanging out for a poor, virtuous, portionless wife. Now,” he added consideringly, “I may be able to call a few ‘friend’ who are fortunate enough to be earnest, wealthy, and decent And I might just be acquainted with someone who’d be interested in a female who was unfortunate enough to be poor and portionless. But that ‘virtuous’ you mentioned,” he’d sighed, shaking his head in regret “there’s a formidable stumbling block.”

Even in the midst of her laughter, a glance toward Annabelle, who sat mute and unbefriended, caused Leonora to be half inclined to go and fetch the girl to them despite her refusal, because it was Annabelle for whom she was supposed to be acting. It was Annabelle who had brought her to London in the first place, and thus it was Annabelle who had, in a very real fashion, brought this entire evening about.

But for this one night, she thought, oh just for this one night, she would be selfish and she would laugh and talk and enjoy herself to the fullest. Tomorrow she would doubtless repent having behaved in such giddy fashion, but then by tomorrow Severne would be able to report to her father that he had patched matters up between them, and by the next day he would doubtless have forgotten her as well.

For her father’s sake the marquess might well mend fences, but she knew very well that for her father’s sake he would go no further. She might have tarnished her name by association with notorious gentlemen five years before, and she might well at the very heart of her heart not care if she lost even more in an association with Severne now, but he was still, whatever his history, a gentleman. And a gentleman did not bring about the ruin of a friend’s daughter. But that was a thought for tomorrow. For tonight, the marquess sat across from her with a quizzical smile and waited for her reply to some sally he had just made. She laughed to cover her involuntary sigh. Tomorrow, she decided, would be Annabelle’s. Tonight, then, was hers.

But it was the future that he spoke about with her, even as she prepared to end the most delightful evening she could remember ever having passed in her life. He stayed her for one moment as she was about to join her father, whom she had been surprised to see emerging at last from the card room. She was astonished at how quickly the night had come to a close, for now that she was aware of the hour, she could see that her mother was already making her farewells to Sybil and Lord Benjamin, and a great many of the other guests had already left At least, she thought with relief, Severne would think that she had only forgotten the hour because as a relative of the hostess, she was expected to stay until the last. But, as usual, he had missed very little of her reaction.

“It seems wrong somehow to end a conversation only because they threaten to close the room up around one, doesn’t it?” He laughed. “But for myself, I wouldn’t mind in the least if they threw a dust cover over me and blew out the candles, so long as they allowed me to continue to stay on here through the night with you.”

Because this was a subject so near to her heart and what he had said so very close to the truth, Leonora could say nothing in reply. But after a pause, when he nodded as though satisfied with what she didn’t say equally as much as he might have been with what she might have said, he went on, casually, so entirely casually that she doubted how easily he said it, “Do you go to Lord and Lady Swanson’s musicale next week, my lady?”

“Why yes,” she said at once, immediately deciding to cancel the impending headache that normally would have prevented her from ever setting foot in the Swansons’ parlor to hear the youngest Swanson debutante grind up sonatas in her pianoforte.

“Why that is excellent,” he said, smiling down at her with such warmth that she wondered how anyone could ever have called that lean face austere or threatening. For the amusement in those dark blue eyes and the power of that quirked smile quite banished any hints of coldness or cruelty from the angular planes of his face. No, she amended, tearing her gaze away from those knowing eyes, not austere in the least, but yes, oh yes, she thought with a panicky sort of delight, still threatening.

“But that is delightful,” he said as he took her hand, preparatory to taking his leave, “for I am promised there as well. Perhaps you will care to sit with me?” he asked quickly, as though he really did not care in the least. She answered as quickly, so that he would not think it an important decision, “Why yes, my lord.”

He frowned, as though he had felt a momentary pain.

“Ah no. Please, at least Severne or better still, Joscelin, or best of all Joss. ‘My lord’ is for strangers, and Severne was for schoolmasters. You don’t wish to remind me of noses, do you? But then, with your family history, perhaps you consider even Joscelin too fast “Well,” he said reasonably, “I note that your sister and Lord Benjamin seem the most devoted couple, and yet I’ll swear he’s never told her his Christian name.” Before she could chide him for the liberties he took with her sister’s idiosyncrasies, he went on obliviously, “So, Joscelin, if you must, and Joss if you will, but if you hedge it and name me Lord Joss at the Swansons’, I warn you, I won’t reply at all. You understand,” he said suddenly, “this is all so that I may call you Leonora, as your sister and mother do.”

“I wish you would not,” she said with the beginnings of a laugh, but stopped when she saw how quickly his smile vanished and how cold and still his features suddenly became. She rushed on to say, before he could note how appalled she was both at his misjudgment of her intentions and his instant reaction to it, “Not Leonora, please. Mama and Sybil are very correct, you see. And Annabelle very shy of informality. But father dubbed me Nell when I was little, and so I shall always be to those who ... know me and my preferences,” she finished, now horrified at how close she had come to saying a wrong word, making a slip she had hoped she would never make again with him.

“As in Nell Gwyn,” he observed as he relaxed. “Then I see their objection, although I don’t share it.”

“Just so,” she said, relieved that the potentially disastrous moment had passed.

Then they made their good nights and he went home grateful that he had waited to hear out the rest of her sentence so that the misunderstanding had not remained. And she went home relieved that she had caught herself before she uttered the one disastrous word that would have ruined her night Although it was an innocent enough word, it only being
love.
And they both looked forward to the musicale at the Swansons’ stately townhouse.

The Swansons’ evening, designed to provide music for friends and potential suitors for their daughter, was a disastrous failure for all but two in attendance. Miss Swanson botched her Bach and forgot half her country songs and then proceeded to thrash Haydn within an inch of his musical life. The gentlemen in attendance fled into sleep, the dowagers, who should have been used to such little musical murders, gossiped in low voices when they weren’t wincing from the discordant notes, and the young people squirmed in their chairs as they had not since their earliest days in the nursery.

But Leonora sat beside the marquess. And when they could not speak it made no difference, for when they looked at each other the evening became uproarious. Though Leonora did not once laugh aloud (although she felt that effort nearly cost her life, even though she had never actually heard of anyone strangling on repressed hilarity), she could not remember a more enjoyable night. And so she told Joss when she could, and so he agreed that it was.

They seemed so much in agreement that night, though they had so little chance for words, that Leonora was surprised that she did not see him the next evening at the theater, for he had said that he admired Kean and she felt sure that he would have understood her reference meant that she was to be there. So she saw very little of Mr. Kean’s splendid portrayal of Shylock, or any other goings-on upon the stage, she was so busy scanning the audience in hopes of catching sight of the marquess.

Nor did she see him at the dashing Lady Armintage’s soiree at week’s end, though he had, in passing, mentioned that he had also received an invitation to that crush. There were upward of two hundred at the affair, and Leonora looked at no person more than once, and scarcely attended to a word that was addressed to her, and behaved in such distracted fashion as she sought to catch a glimpse of the marquess’s distinctive form that her mother said quite crossly that her sojourn in the country had turned her into a veritable bumpkin. And she did not find him at his London neighbors’, the Pruits’, dinner party the next night, although she could have sworn he’d said he would be there.

Only when at last she sank to her lowest ebb, and lost the battle with herself, and forced herself to go to Hatchard’s, creeping veiled through the aisles of that great bookshop as though she were seeking pornographic literature instead of only a glimpse of him again, did she admit that she already knew. He was gone. And the years had changed nothing for her. For she couldn’t cope with loss any better now than she had then, even if this time it were only the loss of something she had really never had. Even if it were only the loss of a particularly fond, recurrent dream.

SEVEN

There was very good reason for the fact that saints were so often martyred, Leonora thought on an afternoon a week to the day after she had met the Marquess of Severne at her sister’s house. The way they inspired others with an irresistible urge to kill them precisely when they were at their saintliest, she reasoned, even as Annabelle sat and stared sadly at her, was likely only another integral part of their heavenly make-up, a divine device to ensure that they would not fail to get speedily to their just rewards.

For though only Annabelle seemed to know or care about what was bothering Leonora as the days went on, it seemed that only Annabelle continually irritated the sufferer. Oh Katie knew, for there was little that Katie did not know, but Katie’s idea of helpfulness was only to sniff and say once if she said it a hundred times, that it stood to reason that a gentleman who threw over a wife would have even less thought of constancy to an acquaintance. But Annabelle, in her quiet fashion, seemed to genuinely grieve for her relative’s disappointment, and was so tirelessly solicitous that she made Leonora feel even worse. Her constant presence was a constant embarrassing reminder that Leonora had forgotten her existence entirely when the marquess had but smiled upon her. Thus, her oversize, omnipresent concern soon wore on her cousin’s already frayed nerves.

Leonora gave a guilty start when she realized that Annabelle had addressed a question to her even as she had been brooding about the murderous proclivities such unrelenting kindness provoked.

“I’m sorry, Belle,” she said at once, “but what was that you said?”

“I only wondered, cousin,” Annabelle said softly, “if you would like to read some more today? We were up to Act Three, Scene One, when we left
off
this morning, before luncheon.”

“A very good idea,” Leonora said with false enthusiasm. “Why don’t you start, and I’ll listen a while. My eyes are rather bleary and tired today. I believe they always appear to be so when the apple blossoms come into bloom.”

Since the park was several blocks away, and nothing that remotely resembled a humble apple tree would be given leave to grow anywhere near the Talwins’ town-house, Annabelle could be forgiven if she had raised a skeptical eyebrow at her cousin’s excuse. But not one of her pale brows was lifted as she replied, sincerely.

“Ah no, cousin. I’m sorry you feel unwell, but I’m content to wait. I cannot read half so well as you do. My voice is too soft, I can’t put such passion into my reading of those lines. I should much rather wait until you are feeling more the thing.”

Annabelle, seated on a small gilt chair, sat erect, her hands folded neatly in her lap, and continued to stare at Leonora, who lay back, with one hand shading her eyes, against a gold velvet settee.

After a brief silence, Annabelle spoke again. “Then what should you like to do, cousin?” she asked hesitantly.

Leonora bit back the words, “Hang myself ... or you,” and finding herself amused at her unspoken reaction, realized that she was feeling rather better. One thing that Annabelle’s constant mournful presence had done, she thought, was to help make her thoroughly sick of herself. If every patient got themselves an irritating doctor, Leonora decided, sitting up and looking around her with renewed interest, they might all make themselves well a great deal faster. She found herself wishing she had someone to share this idea of a medical advance with, and then, looking toward her relative’s concerned face, she realized that her lack of humor was perhaps Annabelle’s most singular lack of all. And then, now feeling very guilty as well as bored with herself and her languishing, she said briskly.

“But I’m not blind in the least. So I’ll just go fetch down the book and we shall read a bit, and then, why if I continue to rally, we’ll go for a stroll.”

“To Hatchard’s?” Annabelle asked at once.

“Most definitely not!” Leonora declared as she rose from the settee, “for I’ve enough books to read to last me through a confinement, much less a simple headache.” Annabelle blushed at Leonora’s remark, but got up from her chair with alacrity and was at the door to her cousin’s chamber before Leonora had taken her first step forward.

“Oh no!” she cried softly, with something very much like horror in her expression. “You’ve been unwell, cousin. I cannot let you carry the book. I’ll be back in a moment” Leonora sank back on the settee and smiled to herself. There it was. For no one else would consider the fetching of a book, sizable though it was, as some kind of Promethean task. But Annabelle had stationed herself at her beck and call since she had declared herself feeling poorly, going so far as to offer her fresh handkerchiefs each time that she so much as frowned, and a fresh cup of tea each time she sighed. And even when she had clearly not been needed, she had seated herself a space apart and fixed her cousin with such a basilisk stare that Leonora could swear she could see her great blue eyes continuing to gaze at her in the night, long after Annabelle herself had crept off to her own room.

It was that, as well as her own resilient spirit, which caused Leonora to declare her period of mourning over. For it
had
been precisely that, she realized, as she awaited her cousin’s return. She had been in at the death of an illusion, and it was only proper that she had grieved for it for a decent interval. It had not only been the demise of all her fantastic dreams of a knight errant (and as she laughed to herself now, there scarcely could have been a more errant knight than Severne), but it had also been the end of the last silly lingering hopes of her girlhood. But all things must die in their proper time, Leonora thought fiercely, and as she was three and twenty it was time and past it for her to be done with such idle foolishness.

So it was that when Annabelle came back to the room, slightly flushed and more than a little winded, burdened as she was by the huge volume she bore in both arms, Leonora greeted her immediately by saying,

“Now that I’m feeling more myself, Belle, we shall finally complete our arrangements for that little ball we were to give. You know, the one where we were going to show you off as a bit more than Lady Leonora’s dutiful companion. Don’t look so shaken, Belle, we talked about it at length when we were back in Lincolnshire.”

Annabelle put the volume down on a tabletop and brushed down her dress, all the while never taking her great-eyed gaze from Leonora’s face.

“But cousin,” she breathed, “your mama ... your sister ... your papa ...”

“... will all think it is for me, and since they fear I’m past all prayers, they’ll be thrilled to provide such a showcase for me. It won’t be deception, Belle,” she explained kindly, seeing the apparent fright in her cousin’s face, “for I shall let them hose and shoe me, and ring me round with mayflowers as well, if they like. The only difference is that I shall insist we do the same for you, and that instead of seeking a life’s mate for myself at the ball, I shall instead be alive to all possibilities for you. And who knows, my dear, if you capture the interest of someone that Papa fancies, perhaps he’ll even arrange some sort of dower for you.”

Leonora paused to muse on this new theme, but after her cousin’s continuing silence she realized that in this, she might be building impossible expectations, so she hastened to add, “Never mind that In any event, I have funds of my own, and trust me that I shall not let you go penniless to a husband.”

“Oh cousin, how ever shall I repay you?” Annabelle whispered, so overcome by emotion that her little nose became pink-tipped, and her eyes began to grow red and fill up with what seemed to be shining pinkish tears.

“Good lord” Leonora cried, growing embarrassed, and feeling curiously rather like a great hulking huntsman in contrast to Annabelle’s dainty white rabbit. “Don’t weep, Belle. I thought you wished to read with me,” she said at last, in an attempt to forestall any sobbing.

But that remark turned the trick, for Annabelle did no more than give a little shaky sigh and then she turned her complete attention to the book she’d brought in from her room. It was one of a set that rested in the library at home in Whitewood Hall, but they were such particular favorites of Annabelle’s that when the family removed to London, Leonora insisted they be brought with them. In fact, Annabelle took such pleasure in each book that Leonora insisted the girl keep whatever volume they were currently reading on hand in her room so that she would not have to constantly dash downstairs to the library. It was not only because the books were heavy, it was also because Leonora knew that her father was often to be found in that room here in his townhouse, and believed the less reason there was to cross his path, tine better for them both.

All her past rancor was forgotten when Leonora saw her cousin standing, looking down at the book in anticipation. If it was often difficult for Leonora to remember that only a year of age separated herself from her new-found relative, times like these made that fact almost impossible to accept For how like a happy child Annabelle appeared at such moments. And almost like a child, she was always attracted to books with large and interesting pictures. She’d been embarrassed when Leonora had noted that about her when she had first come, and had blushed and ducked her head when her cousin had spied her interest in time-worn favorites that had been retired from her own nursery days.

But Leonora had only been amused that first week when she’d seen Annabelle take refuge from a dreary day by thumbing through her old copies of Mrs. Dorset’s delightful illustrated booklets. She had watched in silence as Annabelle perused
The History of Mother Twaddle and the Marvelous Achievements of Her
Son
Jack,
with all its lavish copperplates, remembering what a particular favorite it had been of hers. When she had seen Annabelle engrossed in her old copy of
Beauty and the Beast,
she had been touched, remembering how her father had used to read her a bit of the story each night from that handsome book before nurse took her off to bed.

So it was not at all surprising that Leonora had hit upon a happy idea even as Annabelle, becoming aware of her presence, had blushed and stammered and tried to make light of her literary tastes. Leonora had said not a word but only stepped up on the ladder and taken down Volume One of Mr. Boydell’s beautiful edition of Shakespeare. Annabelle’s eyes had widened as Leonora had struggled to lift the book down gently. For it was a formidable looking thing, all covered in fine floral-embossed black leathers with gilded endpapers, and it was fully a foot wide and more than that in height.

“There!” Leonora had announced triumphantly, opening the book at random, “Now this is one of my favorites and it has equally as many pretty pictures as any you’ve chosen. But here, you see, is a picture book for those who like to pretend to be adults. For these words are the match of any picture for beauty, but there is a great quantity of both.”

Soon Annabelle had been gently leafing through the book, exclaiming over all the lovely page-high illustrations. And as she had been enchanted by one particularly amusing one from
Measure for Measure,
showing Falstaff with a great pair of antlers upon his head, it was only natural that Leonora should begin to read the pertinent passage aloud. Annabelle was enchanted, and Leonora soon secretly appalled when she discovered that the poor girl’s education had been so haphazard that she knew very little Shakespeare at all.

Nothing would do but that Leonora must sit down and read more of the play, from the beginning. Annabelle sat by her side with her wide eyes shining, and listened, and looked at the amazing pictures by Mr. Fuseli and Mr. Smith and the other artists whose engravings filled the volume. When Leonora paused and asked her cousin to read, Annabelle took fright, and she only humbly asked that Leonora please go on, for she could never do half so well. And so the pattern was established for them.

On some rare occasions, when Leonora had done reading and insisted that Annabelle have a go, the girl would approach the book as though it had teeth and she’d begin to read the last bit that Leonora had just done with. But she’d speak it flat, the way a tone-deaf person might sing, without expression or conviction, as though she only just heard the sound of the words and not their meaning at all. Then a combination of the flattery implicit in the request, and Leonora’s own love for the bard would cause her to pick up the book and read again, just as Annabelle had wished her to.

Now Leonora winced to see the page Annabelle’s marker fell open to, for they had left off in the midst of
Romeo and Juliet.
It had been a choice made over a week ago. As Leonora eyed the page unhappily, she devoutly wished she had opened the book to something different on that past, carefree morning, something that she could have coped with more easily now. Something less poignant, like
Hamlet
or
Othello.
Because she knew she would have been more at ease this morning with any emotion as simple as revenge or jealousy, than she could possibly presently be with love.

But she soldiered on to find herself becoming engrossed in the words, just as she always did, taking refuge from her own harsh reality in the equally cruel but safely fictional world, just as she always had.

“Ah dear,” she sighed at length, closing the book, running a knuckle beneath her nose and sniffling rather loudly, “I daresay I’m the only person I know who actually weeps when Mercutio is slain. But he is one of my favorites. Everyone else saves their tears for Romeo or Juliet, of course, but not I. I
always
weep for Mercutio. He’s such a lively, brave fellow, so full of jest and wit ‘Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man,’ he says, even as he’s dying. How I always miss him when he’s gone.”