False Angel (8 page)

FIVE

The rain had come. It was a fine mist really, pearl gray and opaque, hardly qualifying as a true rainstorm, but it made the morning dim and bleak. Yet no one complained except for the smallest children who knew no better. In a curious way it was comforting to have such thoroughly damp and dismal weathers on the heels of those few glorious episodes of picture-perfect spring. However much that interlude had been enjoyed, a true Englishman knew when he had been given false coin. This day felt more natural, and a fellow could relax now and know the truth, that at last the brief flirtation was over, and it was well and truly springtime.

Leonora sat at her dressing table while Katie did valiant battle with her hair, which she claimed liked to coil and tie itself into knots at night just to spite her while her lady slept.

“Good heavens, Katie,” Leonora said, wincing and biting her lip as Katie found and attacked a particularly convoluted snarl, “you make me sound like Medusa. It’s only hair. And it’s only that it’s damp out today.”

Katie gave out a grim laugh and bore down harder on her chosen foe, her mistress’s heavy, tangled tresses, as if they were indeed hissing snakes she battled with. Leonora declined to mention that part of the problem just might have been that she had tossed and turned the entire night, falling to sleep now and again only to wake immediately, struggling up from the grasp of ghastly dreams. She ought to feel lucky, she thought, as she bit back a little cry as Katie sought and discovered a particularly complex knot, that at least she hadn’t strangled herself with her own hair during her restless, sleepless night.

She was in such discomfort now, from the combined effects of the past night and Katie’s present crusade against disorder, that she was about to ask the girl to leave off and simply go and get a razor and clear the whole lot off the top of her aching head, when her pain-heightened senses detected the sound of the merest scratching at her door.

“That can be no other but Annabelle,” she groaned, annoyed at the sound, but glad of a reason for Katie to lay down her punishing brush. “Go and let her in, please, for I haven’t the patience to shout her in. She’ll only hesitate and wait until I call her again, and I don’t have the head for all that roundabout this morning. Go, go, Katie, do please, or she’ll scratch a groove in the door. I wonder what’s to do? It isn’t like her to come to visit this early. She’s always afraid I’m still sleeping if it’s before noon, although I’ve told her a thousand times that I’m always up and dressed by nine in Town.”

“Maybe her bed’s on fire,” Katie muttered sourly as she went to the door. Leonora detected a bit of hope in that sullen pronouncement, and did not think it was only because her maid had been interrupted when she was just getting into her full stride as a champion hair brusher. Katie made very little effort to hide the fact that she liked Annabelle about as much as she did a toothache. But then, Leonora thought, her plain-faced, plump little Katie was very secure in her position, and probably had been secure in the cradle, and so had little patience with a hesitant, shy girl like Annabelle.

Katie opened the door to admit Annabelle and then turned around without a word and marched back to her hairbrush, as though she was eager to seize it up again before the handle could grow cold. In fact, she thought as Annabelle came softly into the room, she would be damned if she would give her breath in greeting to that sly little layabout. Katie was as class conscious as a queen. And, she thought as she attacked her mistress’s hair with renewed gusto, causing that lady to gasp as she gave good morning to her relative, there wasn’t any reason on earth why Miss Greyling couldn’t go out and work for her bread as any healthy young woman ought, for she wasn’t a true lady like young miss, and that Katie would lay odds against her own life upon.

“Well, and what brings you to visit me so early this morning?” Leonora asked with false cheeriness, since Annabelle had already done with greeting her and refusing her offer of a cup of chocolate and only stood and stared at her with a dolorous expression.

“I only came to see how you were feeling, cousin,” Annabelle said softly, “since you were so very upset last evening. You went to bed early, you know. Are you quite recovered?”

Leonora felt a twinge of guilt, for she remembered that one of Annabelle’s chiefest pleasures since she had come to visit had been when the two of them would sit and read aloud through the long winter evenings.

“I’m much recovered, Belle,” Leonora began, and then she broke off and said more vehemently, “Oh rot, no I’m not. But at least my wretched night brought me counsel. I was sick with shame at myself last night, Belle, and there’s the truth of it. Imagine, to serve Severne such a turn! He doesn’t deserve it, nor do I deserve the opinion he must have of me that I’ve given him with my own rash tongue. I know better, Belle, there’s the worst of it. I have all the words in my head, ready and in perfect order and formation, and then I see him, and open my mouth, and they all tumble out like clowns.”

“Do you care for him so very much then?” Annabelle asked, her blue eyes wide.

“Why no!” Leonora exclaimed at once, as though her relative had asked her if she plotted against the King. “But, you see, he did me a favor once, and I’d like to show I’m still grateful. Then too, you know, Belle, he is not acceptable everywhere and I should like him to know that I don’t agree with that sort of attitude at all. And yet each time I see him I give him cause to believe the opposite is true.”

Although her mistress’s hair now resembled a dark and flowing silken scarf, Katie gave a handful a little sharp tug as she began to arrange it, if only to pay her back for such a blatant lie. For gratitude didn’t bring such a look to a female’s eyes, nor did a grateful lady jump as though she’d sat on a tack when she was asked about her feelings for a gentleman she only wished to give her thanks to.

“But he is acceptable here and he must know that,” Annabelle said reasonably, “because he was here just the other night as your father’s guest.”

Katie gave the blond young woman a rare nod of approval, for someone ought to make her mistress see sense. If she could overcome her nervousness about the fellow, she could speak to him and judge him whole and cold, as a female ought to do, before she made some other disastrous leap. Not, Katie mused, as she paused in her work, that a leap toward the marquess would necessarily have been so ruinous for her mistress, if it were not for the matter of that shocking divorce.

There was the pity, Katie sighed to herself. If it weren’t for that, she considered that he might have been one of the few gentlemen in all the civilized world who might have made a fair match for her adored mistress. But then too, if it weren’t for that, he likely would have been married three times and over by now, he would have been that eligible. Still, that was an opinion she would never breathe aloud, since she believed her mistress to be such an impulsive female. Better, Katie thought, that she should never think any other decent female could see a glimmer of goodness in him.

“That’s true, but you see, Belle,” Leonora sighed sadly, “Father has sophisticated tastes, and Mama doesn’t necessarily share them. I don’t believe Severne would ever have been one of her guests.”

As her relative cocked her head to one side in her incomprehension, and Katie nodded above her head like a wise woman reading gypsy cards, Leonora told Annabelle the pertinent details that she knew about the marquess’s brief marriage and subsequent disgrace.

“It was a writ, I believe, called an
A Vinculo Matrimoni
,
or
some such,” Leonora went on, wrinkling her brow as though in deep recollection, as if she hadn’t committed the words to heart the moment she learned of them, “being an entire dissolution of the bonds of matrimony, which is more difficult to obtain than a plain separation. But then again, a mere separation would mean that neither party could ever marry again in any case.”

Annabelle did not lose her quizzical expression, but then, Leonora thought whimsically, perhaps she never could, her light brows were so perennially arched above those wide light eyes. But she must have been surprised, for she only said with wonderment,

“Indeed, I have never heard of such a thing, cousin. There were some terrible husbands that I knew of at home, but their poor wives could never be quit of them. Why,” she said, blushing faintly, “I am sure that Mama might oftentimes have wished to be free to wed another, but even though Father left us and never returned, she couldn’t ever seek her happiness with any other gentleman while he yet lived. And yet she herself often said that so it must be. And so it must. I cannot believe that this marquess can be so admirable if he was party to such a proceeding.”

Katie gave a vigorous nod of agreement as the fair young woman went on to add, before her cousin could cut in,

“And I doubt it matters if it was his wife that sought such, or even if she was at fault in it For if she sought to obtain a divorce from him, it may be that she was driven to it by unspeakable actions on his part, and if he sought it, what sort of a man must he be, not to be able to bear it as most men might?”

Since this was the longest speech that Annabelle had given in days, Leonora was so taken aback that she could not speak up in defense of the marquess at once. But, she noted from glancing in the looking glass, Katie was actually smiling at her cousin in the fondest way imaginable. That, if nothing else, stung her from her silence. For she knew Katie’s opinion in the matter, and that opinion was that Severne was a handsome dog with a heart as black as coal and morals that must make his heart seem lily-white by comparison.

“Well there you are!” cried Leonora heatedly. “Belle, you have said just what so many supposedly proper people say. But you can’t have looked at it clearly. For I say that it is far worse to continue on in a marriage that is a mockery of man’s and God’s laws, simply for propriety’s sake, than it is to dissolve such a union for sanity’s sake. There are too many persons, right here in London, who lead lives that are blatantly hypocritical lies, who would be better off declaring the truth and—” But here Leonora stopped, for both her cousin and her maid were observing her in horrified fashion. She had raised her voice, as well as herself, she realized, becoming so impassioned that she sprang to her feet without knowing it and no doubt startled them. Worse, she thought as she sank back to her chair, she had almost said, “too many persons right here in this house” instead of “right here in London.”

“Well,” she said weakly now, “I’m sorry if I became exercised. But you see, it’s foolish to think Severne a monster, for nothing in his aspect or his reputation gives credence to that, at least. And I maintain that his was an act of courage, not cowardice.”

“And his wife?” Annabelle asked, as much to Katie as to Leonora.

“No one knows,” Leonora said sadly, “for she was from the remote North country and not from the West where Severne’s principal family seat lies, and she never came to Town at all. She did marry again, but she died of a fever not two years past.”

“Unhappy lady,” Katie murmured, earning a sharp glance from her mistress, for Leonora well remembered her maid’s initial reaction to the news when she had it back at home. Katie had positively slavered over the gossip then, with not a hint of the pious sympathy she was treating them to now.

“Still,” Annabelle persisted, more animated in this discussion than her relative could ever remember her having been before, “if it were a meritorious thing, cousin, why are there not more such divorces?”

“Ah well,” Leonora said with a shrug, “it is no easy thing. Even our Prince, you know, would give much to be rid of his Caroline. But it drags on in its legalities, and costs the earth. And then one must testify to all sorts of shameful things. Severne, you see, said it was his fault. He said,” and here she dropped her voice and looked down at her toes, “that it was his inability to consummate the marriage.” Katie snickered at that and Leonora’s head came up, even as her shoulders did. “Well,” she declared fiercely, her fine brown eyes blazing, “since everyone and their uncle here in Town seems to know that that’s not true, we must assume it was a gentlemanly lie in order to save his wife the agony of testifying in front of a legion of strangers.

“Then too,” Leonora continued into the thoughtful silence which followed her words, “a divorce does forever exclude one from certain parts of society. I am not saying that it has made Severne a pariah, for it has obviously not done so. But he did have to join a different club, and some of his acquaintances dropped off. Your reaction, I assure you, is only a fraction of a larger tide of censure. I cannot say who his late wife remarried, but Severne himself may have a great deal of difficulty marrying another high-born lady.” Here, Leonora’s expression clearly showed what she thought of such lofty ladies.

Leonora fell silent, abruptly realizing that her discussion was showing a knowledge of divorce and all its laws and their repercussions that went far beyond the common. Her listeners might never guess the actual hours of reading and subtle questioning that she had done to obtain her information, but they must if they had any wit, be aware by now of how very interested she was in the subject.

Katie was aware of it, and had been far before her mistress’s outburst The only revelation she had been treated to this morning was the one involving Miss Greyling. For, Katie thought, it only went to show that even she could be wrong once in a lifetime. Because it now was clear the chit was wide awake to Lady Leonora’s obsession, and was caring enough to have it out with her. There wasn’t a doubt that she’d not budged the lady an inch from her opinions, despite her objections to Severne, but it showed some heart and spirit to at least have tried. Katie thought for a moment of offering the girl some help with that flyaway blond hair of hers, but then stopped herself. There wasn’t any point, she sniffed, in going overboard.