Love in Disguise (9 page)

As the barouche clattered past and stopped immediately in front of his door, the Earl handed the reins to his groom and jumped lightly down. For a moment Fancy considered reversing directions and retracing her steps around the square. But she rejected such a cowardly thought. She would never let the top-lofty Earl believe that she was afraid to face him. No, indeed.

And so she continued her even pace and the Earl, having given directions to his groom, turned to watch her approach. The color bloomed in Fancy’s cheeks, but she refused to lower her gaze or slow her step. She had as much right on this street as anyone.

Hercules, now having gotten a good look at the Earl, made a sudden lunge that tore the leash from Fancy’s fingers. Then he raced down the pavement and launched himself at the Earl. Fancy, hurrying after him, uttered a cry of dismay and involuntarily closed her eyes. When she opened them, Hercules was sitting calmly on the pavement, his great tail threatening it with destruction and the Earl was calmly regarding her.

Fancy, who had expected to see the Earl measuring his length on the pavement or, at the very least, with his well-cut coat of blue superfine and his buckskin breeches liberally coated with dirt, could not suppress a cry of surprise.

“Good day. Miss Harper,” said the Earl coolly. “I trust your cry of dismay is not due to the failure of your dog to lay me low.”

“Of course not. Must you be so nasty?” snapped Fancy and then wished she had curbed her tongue. For certainly that flicker of amusement in the Earl’s eye was caused by her evidence of temper. His next words proved it.

“Tch, tch, you are very touchy today.”

“The times are trying,” said Fancy stiffly. “Covent Garden has been closed and I do not know when it will open again.”

The Earl shrugged. “Admirable as the theater may be there
are
other things in life.”

“Not for me,” replied Fancy testily.

“That is because you refuse to look around you. For instance, you might spend some night training this brute here to more gentlemanly behavior.”

“He is trained,” said Fancy, and then, realizing she had said the wrong thing, flushed again.

The Earl chuckled, an unpleasant sound. “I am well aware of his disreputable tricks.” He shook his head. “That so much beauty should be wasted.”

Fancy bristled. “Hercules’s tricks are not disreputable. Rather it is the lords who occasion their use that should bear that title. And my beauty, as you call it, is mine. Many men enjoy it from afar and it gives them pleasure. It is
not
wasted.”

“Ah,” said the Earl, his eyes fastening on hers. “Does it
give you
pleasure?”

“Of course it does!”

Morgane shook his head. “You are a strange one, Miss Fancy Harper. You pick a calling that immediately marks you for sale and then you refuse to sell.”

“You are insulting me, milord,” replied Fancy haughtily. “There have been great actresses who were also virtuous.”

Morgane laughed. “Then they obviously kept that virtue well hidden for it was of no help to them in their careers - except perhaps for the first sale.”

Fancy felt her gloved fingers curling into fists. “You are a miserable human being,” said she from between clenched teeth. “The aristocracy of this country certainly has fallen into ill repute.”

The Earl’s lips tightened into a thin line. Then he stooped and retrieved Hercules’s leash. He offered it to her with a sardonic smile. “May I suggest that you take this faithful beast home before we stoop to trading insults on our parentage like a couple of irate fishwives?”

Fancy took the proffered leash. “You are quite right, milord, I find that conversation with you quickly degenerates into insult.”

With a sharp tug at the leash she marched past the Earl. “Don’t scold him too much,” said that amazing man just as they passed him. “He really cannot help it if he prefers the company of quality.”

His mocking laughter followed her as she proceeded down the street and up the steps to her own door. But Fancy dared not look back. If she saw him now, with that terrible haughty smile and those cool gray eyes, she knew she would scream. Her very fingers inside her glove itched to make contact with that assured smirking face.

Someday, she thought as she banged the knocker sharply, someday she would give the Earl such a set down that he would never recover from it.

As the door opened she thrust the leash into Henry’s hand and said crisply, “See that this vile dog is taught some manners and see to it immediately.”

“Yes, Miss Fancy. Right away.” And Henry, who had witnessed the whole of his young mistress’s encounter with the Earl, wisely refrained from asking any questions. When Fancy’s eyes glittered with anger like that, the best thing, he had learned, was to leave her to work it out herself. His lips curved in an enigmatic smile as she mounted the stairs. Whatever was between Miss Fancy Harper and the Earl of Morgane was going to take a great deal of working out. That much, at least, seemed certain.

Chapter Seven

The days passed slowly for Fancy, very slowly. She studied her lines and, when she could stand that no longer, she wandered around through the rooms of the great house that had become, by such a quirk of fate, her home, and studied it. This pursuit served to alleviate some of her boredom, for the house was undoubtedly a piece of beautiful workmanship. Every trip through it uncovered further beauties to Fancy’s now discerning eye.

And, in the latter part of the day, when the weather was good, she took Hercules for several rounds of the square. Though every day she left her door internally braced for a confrontation with the Earl, the occasion never arose, that gentleman either avoiding her or, what seemed more likely to Fancy, having dismissed her from his consciousness as not worthy of his bother.

During this time a close watch was kept on Hercules and despite his earnest endeavors in that direction he did not manage to escape through the front door.

And finally the waited-for news came from Covent Garden. The theater would open again on October 4 with
The Beggar’s Opera.
Fancy, greatly relieved, immediately made plans to attend every performance in spite of Ethel’s sour observation that she was behaving like a ninny.

Several weeks passed and Fancy was beginning to feel less intimidated, especially since the proprietors, after discovering that the report of the committee in their favor did nothing to convince the rioters of the rightness of their cause, hired some well-known pugilists led by the great Mendoza to keep order in the crowd. They did not succeed very well at this task, but Fancy did feel that if she should again be pulled from the stage the pugilists would rescue her. She would not be left to the mercy of the mob or that of Morgane.

In spite of all her endeavors to the contrary. Fancy could not drive the image of the Earl’s saturnine face from her mind. At the oddest moments it would reappear there and she would feel those cool gray eyes raking her body or see those thin lips curling sardonically.

Wherever the Earl had been during those days that Covent Garden was closed, he was now very much in town. Every night from her vantage point in the wings, she saw him enter his box, the big blond Castleford beside him. It was easy enough, too, to see that the eyes of many women followed that handsome pair. That they were really prime articles, Fancy was forced to admit. The Earl’s dark sinister looks were admirably set off by the open heartiness of Castleford.

Ladies, clad in satin and silk, wearing diamonds of the first water, seemed inordinately pleased at the merest nod from the Earl. And those charmers who were so favored by the scrutiny of his raised quizzing glass seemed to think themselves the recipients of a great honor.

Fancy, observing all this, raised a disdainful eyebrow. How could those women be such fools? Admittedly the Earl was a very attractive man. But did they care nothing for character, those gay butterflies who colored under his gaze or those even more amazing ones who calmly scrutinized him first?

Fancy  could  not understand such creatures. The Earl must have been right about one thing, though, she thought. Those beauties must lead exceedingly dull lives.

And so more nights passed and it was Saturday, time for Egerton’s London debut as Lord Avondale in
The School of Reform.
Fancy hoped that the crowd would be in one of its less violent moods. Sometimes, though rarely, the rioters did not appear. But most of the time they were still there, screaming, shouting, whistling, waving banners, doing all they could to disrupt the proceedings on the stage.

The finding of the reputable committee - that the proposed prices would yield only a profit of 3 ½ percent rather than the 6 ½  percent from the old Covent Garden before the fire - seemed to have had no effect on them. The mob had no regard for logic or facts. Their minds seemed intent on the old price figure and nothing else would satisfy them.

They staged races up and down the pit benches while the play was in progress. Here and there she could see men with huge false noses and others dressed like women who swaggered and straddled about the house.

That evening there had been some disturbance at the entrance of the Duke of York during the second act. Though Parliament had exonerated him, many people were not yet sure that he was innocent in the affair of Mary Anne Clarke.

Fancy recalled Henry and Ethel discussing the scandal while they were still in Bath. “He did right to get rid of her,” Henry said. “A man in his position has got to be careful. Why, he had to resign as Commander in Chief of the army and all on account of her.”

“I ain’t holding none for ladies of that kind,” Ethel averred with a glance at Fancy. “Me being a decent married woman and all. But I says the Duke should of known better. A woman of that stripe.”

“She has courage besides her beauty,” said Henry. “And they say she really stood up to the House.”

Ethel nodded. “Course she did. Them women ain’t got no sense of wrong. But if what they say is true - that the Duke promised her £1,000 a month and then didn’t pay - I expect she figured she had the right to sell them commissions.”

Henry shook his head. “They say she kept ten horses and twenty servants, including three French chefs. She ate off plate that had belonged to the Duc de Berri - gold and silver - and she paid two guineas for each of her wineglasses.”

This kind of affluence had staggered Fancy’s mind in those days before the death of the Marquis had put her on St. James’s Square.

“Exactly what did she do?” asked Fancy, who was usually too busy with the stage to attend much to gossip.

Ethel’s mouth tightened grimly. “Some says she took money from them as wanted commissions in the army and then she whispered in the Duke’s ear till he give them.”

“Is she very beautiful?” asked Fancy.

“Aye,” said Henry. “They say she’s a great beauty. And full of wit. Though they’ve shut her mouth now with a pension and shipped her off to the continent to live.

“I don’t know as I believe the tale of her just adding names to the lists that she copied for the Duke and him signing them without reading them,” Henry added. “But it could be true.”

“It’s my belief they was both in the wrong.” Ethel’s expression reflected her disgust with such goings on. “The Duke’s got a Duchess, a kind, good-natured one, too, so I hears. Let him stay home with her.”

Henry smiled and patted his wife on the shoulder. “Now, Ethel, we both know that’s not the way of royalty.”

Fancy, remembering all this, took her next free period to peek at the Duke from the wings. His round face seemed affable and somehow she was inclined to believe in his innocence. Certainly with an older brother like the Prince of Wales, whose amorous adventures had reached even her uncaring ears, he could not be expected to be a paragon of virtue. He did look like a person who would not be difficult to get along with. No touch in his features of the hauteur that marked so many lords - and one dark one in particular.

Several times during the course of the play Fancy saw York raise his quizzing glass and survey a particular female member of the cast. But she did not think anything much of it until after the performance when she was busy removing makeup in the dressing room. It was then that the girl burst in to say excitedly, “Did you see the Duke of York?”

Fancy nodded, absently wiping the greasepaint from her cheeks.

“They say he’s looking for a new dasher. Someone to replace Mary Anne Clarke.”

Fancy merely shrugged. The vagaries of royalty were of little concern to her.

“How can you act that way? If he was looking like that at
me-”

Fancy stiffened suddenly.
“Do you mean that the Duke of York was ogling
me?”

“Of course. Didn’t you notice? Are you ever the lucky one!”

Fancy had no reply to this. Obviously this girl would never believe her if she insisted that this was
not
lucky. Would things in her life never return to their even tenor? The last thing she wanted was the amorous attentions of the Duke of York.

She scrubbed furiously at her face. It was one thing to scoff at Morgane, to laugh at Castleford, but how was she to refuse a member of the royal family?

When the after-piece was over and performers adjourned to the greenroom to receive the plaudits of their admirers, if any such existed in the audience, Fancy still had no answer to this question, but on one thing she was still determined. The stage was her love and no man, royal or not, was going to change that. He would simply have to accept the fact that she was not for sale. No man would ever own her.

Stepping through the door into the greenroom, she eyed the throng nervously, and then, not seeing the somewhat portly figure of the Duke, she breathed a sigh of relief and moved to join Egerton, who was animatedly talking to a young woman, a minor member of the company.

“I have never seen such a crowd,” said he. “And I have faced some bad ones. Imagine, tonight they had a flaming banner in the street.”

The girl, Annie, shivered in horror.
“We
shall all be killed one of these nights,” she whimpered.