Suzanne Robinson (5 page)

“Ah, Mrs. Bright,” the duke bellowed. “About that stallion you said you owned …”

Mattie and Narcissa exchanged knowing looks. They had wondered how Mama had extorted an invitation from the duchess. They took advantage of Mrs. Bright’s distraction to join the procession of guests mounting the stairs.

The portrait to be unveiled that evening stood at the end of the Long Gallery on the second floor. The gallery extended the length of the house and bore portraits of Bracewells from the Renaissance to the present on every wall. In the middle of this enormous room were arranged groups of chairs and couches, ferns and flowers in antique vases and urns. Upon their arrival in the gallery, Narcissa was snatched up by her fiancé’s parents. Mattie had just enough time to glimpse Edward Allington’s portrait by Holbein before being surrounded by young men.

“Miss Bright, my evening is complete at the sight of your beauty.”

Mattie put on a polite smile. “Why, Lord Herne, you’re so kind.”

“He’s not kind,” said Harry Blinksdale, “he’s boring. Herne, you rotter, can’t you think of anything original to say about Miss Bright? I call her uncommon fair. Her beauty is the toast of the empire.”

“And her voice,” chimed in the Marquis of Eckleshire. “Her voice is that of a goddess singing in the clouds.”

Mattie let the gentlemen babble and tried not to roll her eyes. It was amazing how the plainest of girls became exquisite when her fortune reached the millions. She happened to know of at least twenty young ladies far more presentable and certainly more charming than herself who rated no such attentions simply because they had but a few hundred pounds a year. Before the evening was over she would accept asinine compliments like this from almost a dozen titled men. And all of them wanted her money.

The marquis, for example, had to support three sisters, a widowed mother, and two aunts. Lord Herne’s father had gambled away most of the family fortune, while Harry Blinksdale was in search of a lady who could support his expensive stud. When he looked at her, Mattie had no doubt he saw the face of his favorite racehorse. Blinksdale’s highest ambition was to beat the Prince of Wales’s entry in the Derby.

“I say,” Blinksdale said in his high, wheedling tone, “did you hear old Allington is coming tonight?”

“No!”

“You’re not serious.”

“It’s true. I heard it from the duchess herself. He’s decided to reform.”

“Good God.”

Mattie glanced from one supercilious face to another, noting the alarm that they shared.

“Who’s old Allington?”

The marquis sniffed. “An absolute rotter, my dear Miss Bright. An unsavory younger son of the duke’s. Almost got himself kicked out of the family for his beastly manners, you see.” He lowered his voice to a stage whisper. “Went into trade, in the city. Investments, of all things. Absolutely no conception of what it is to be a gentleman.”

“Yes,” said Herne. “You should be warned. More than one young lady has been blinded by his appearance, only to discover what an unsavory sort he is.”

Harry Blinksdale elbowed Herne. “Shhh! The duchess.”

Herne tried to whisper something to Mattie, but Her Grace’s voice drowned him out. “Miss Bright, I’d like you to meet my youngest son, Geoffrey Cheyne.”

Mattie disengaged herself from Lord Herne and turned to the newly arrived nobleman. Her jaw fell while he paused in reaching for the hand she’d extended for him to kiss. Time stopped while Mattie beheld the startled Geoffrey Cheyne Allington.

Without his dressing of tomato and melon pulp, Allington’s effect on her was unexpected. He wore jet-black evening attire as easily as he had riding clothes. No Saville Row tailor had been forced to pad the shoulders of his coat or widen the waist of his trousers. He wore no jewelry, but no woman would notice once she’d glimpsed the Prussian blue blaze of his eyes. What was more startling was the aura of barely leashed force emanating from the
man. Like some puissant mage in a fairy tale, a sorcerer, one expected powerful spells, the summoning of dragons or black enchantments.

“Lord Geoffrey,” the duchess said as if to prod her son from his silence, “Miss Bright.”

Allington blinked, as if startled awake. “Dear God, it’s the harpy.”

“Geoffrey!”

Mattie came out of her amazed trance and flushed. Her suitors bristled.

“I say, old man. What kind of tone is that?”

“Don’t complain to me, Blinksdale. This young woman nearly ran over me with her motorcar last week, and then had the gall to swear at me like a drunken miner.”

Caught off guard, Mattie tried to cover her embarrassment. “I beg your pardon, my lord—”

Allington gasped and gave a sharp laugh. “Damn. She has caught civility and a proper accent. When I last saw you, Miss Bright, you spoke as if you belonged in a Wild West show.” He grinned at the suitors. “I assure you she made me blush with her rough speech.”

“Geoffrey,” the duchess ground out. “That will be enough. You’ve embarrassed Miss Bright and her friends.”

“She deserves to be embarrassed,” Allington retorted. “She nearly killed me and my horse, and then she blamed me for her actions in language that would get me chucked out of a music hall.”

Crimson with fury and shame, Mattie glanced around to find that more and more heads were turning their way. With a stiff expression, the duchess turned her back on her son and announced that it was time to unveil her portrait. Everyone moved toward the end of the gallery where the painting stood. Allington gave Mattie a derisive glance and followed his mother.

“I say,” Blinksdale said in a shocked tone. He eyed Mattie.

The Marquis of Eckleshire harrumphed and offered his arm to Mattie. “Not a gentleman, whatever his birth. I’m sure your accent is charming, Miss Bright.”

“I—I have no idea what he could mean,” Mattie said as she walked toward the portrait on the arm of the marquis. “I’ve never encountered such ghastly behavior.”

“The bloke needs thrashing,” Lord Herne said.

The marquis shook his head. “He’d grind you into pepper, old man.”

“Please, gentlemen,” Mattie said. “I’ve no wish to discuss this subject further.”

Blinksdale bent over her hand. “Of course not, Miss Bright. Anyone who knows you understands that you’re a young lady of delicacy and refinement.”

Beside the portrait the duke was giving a speech. It was short, not surprising given his almost complete lack of interest in the topic, and he soon swept the velvet cover from the painting. There was a burst of applause, not just out of politeness but for the way
Sargent had captured the duchess’s nobility of carriage and her air of snowy detachment. the artist himself was in France, but the duchess was more than happy to receive everyone’s compliments in his place.

It was all Mattie could do to keep her composure. She had to preserve her dignity. Papa would be ashamed if he had witnessed that scene with Allington. Mama would hear of it and have a conniption fit. Mattie put a gloved hand to her cheek. It was still hot.

That horrible man had exposed her most grievous faults to the very people she had to impress with her refinement if she was to succeed. She disliked herself intensely for her shortcomings. Having them repeated in public was almost more than she could stand. Thank God no one believed him.

Narcissa appeared at her side. “Mattie, what happened?”

“That fella I told you about,” Mattie whispered as she joined in the applause that came after the duchess finished speaking. “That Cheyne Tennant. Turns out he’s really the younger son of the Bracewells, damn his hide. He doesn’t go by his full name or his title. Just now he called me a harpy in front of everyone, including the duchess.”

The crowd was breaking up now. Narcissa pulled her away and headed for the lady’s retiring room. As they went, Mattie felt the stares of the guests. She tried not to look at them for fear of seeing Allington again. When they reached the retiring room, she flounced down on an ottoman and groaned.

“Papa would be so ashamed.”

“Who cares for Allington anyway?” Narcissa said. “He’s only a younger son.”

“With a nasty way of making me look like a flea on an angel’s wing.”

Narcissa sank to her knees in front of Mattie. “Then you make him look like a bigger flea. Remember what you did to Pokey Depew back in New York?”

“That was a long time ago,” Mattie said. “We were girls.”

She stopped as she remembered how Allington had humiliated her. Yet there seemed to be no way of retaliating without appearing either spiteful or wounded. She was supposed to be above spite, and she had no intention of revealing her distress. Besides, maybe a child’s prank was just the thing to assuage her and teach Allington proper conduct. Slowly Mattie began to smile. It was a smile at home under rocks in the desert, that basked in the sun and waited for small rodents to pass by.

“I’ll need the fixin’s.”

“Leave that to me,” Narcissa said. “It’s almost time, so you go look at the place cards while I slip down the back stairs. I’ll meet you in the dining room.”

Her spirits restored, Mattie gave her friend a peck on the cheek and hurried downstairs. Dinner was to be held in the saloon, the oldest room in the ducal mansion. Mattie had learned from a book on great houses Mama had made her read that it was one of the finest remaining examples of a great chamber.
The old medieval solar had become, in Elizabethan times, the great chamber, the room in which lords entertained. In the Baroque and Palladian periods this became the saloon, and finally most of these enormous rooms ended up as picture galleries. Of high architectural style, the great chamber was still a nobleman’s setting for great gatherings. The Duke of Bracewell’s saloon was indeed a chamber fit for any such occasion. Its ceiling rose over thirty feet high, and no fireplace broke its symmetry. The doors were set in alcoves surrounded by marble arches, topped by carved shells that reached fifteen feet above Mattie’s head.

Mattie avoided the gallery, walked across a drawing room and opened one of the saloon doors. They were so heavy she had to use both hands and lean against them. Life-size murals of spectators leaning on balconies decorated the walls, making Mattie feel as if a crowd of seventeenth century dandies and ladies were spying on her. She hid in the alcove while two servants brought in covered dishes and left. Then she raced to the dining table set for thirty and found Allington’s name near the middle, all the while whispering imprecations against titled Englishmen. Not that American men were much better. After five years she still cringed at the memory of Samuel Pinchot.

She’d been eighteen, fresh from a ladies’ finishing school in New York, the pride of Marcus and Elsa Jane Bright. Mama and Papa had organized an enormous coming-out party for her. Oblivious to social
protocol, they invited every last one of the four hundred, plus as many other notables as they could squeeze into their new stone mansion on Fifth Avenue. Mattie got all dressed up in her gown by Paquin, but nobody came. No, that wasn’t true. None of the four hundred came because Mrs. Astor hadn’t called on Mrs. Bright. Since she hadn’t, the Brights weren’t known to the Astors in the social sense, and thus weren’t among those eligible to receive the honor of Mrs. Astor’s company. Labeled parvenu by this social demigoddess, the Bright family might as well have lived in a tugboat for all the recognition they got from the American aristocracy.

So Mattie had stood in the middle of the marble-and-gold ballroom in her gem-studded gown with the extra-long train, waiting to receive people who never came. She’d shivered with humiliation while the dozen or so people who showed up talked loudly to one another in an attempt to make the cavernous room seem filled. Just when she thought she’d burst into tears and complete her disgrace, Samuel Pinchot, the son of one of the oldest Knickerbocker families of New York, was announced. To the Pinchots, the Astors and Vanderbilts were vulgar newcomers. Burly, bumptious, and shortsighted, Samuel bounced over to Mattie and rescued her from mortification.

“My dear Miss Bright,” he chortled, grinning at her through his wire-rimmed spectacles. “They didn’t want me to come, but I told them all to go to the devil. I said that there was nothing that would
keep me from meeting the lovely Matilda Bright, not even Mrs. Astor.”

The weeks that followed had been a girl’s fairy tale come true. Samuel had courted her in his energetic manner, and Mattie had loved every moment. She hadn’t cared that Pinchot’s appearance failed to measure up to her romantic ideal. He made up for it with his love of life and his adventurous spirit. It had been Samuel Pinchot who had introduced her to motorcars.

Samuel asked her to marry him exactly three months from the day they met, and Mattie accepted. Two weeks later she learned the truth when she overheard her fiancé’s remarks to one of his friends.

“Just in time,” he had said. “My creditors were hounding me, and the only thing that kept them out of court was the loan I got from Father. But the second she accepted me I let them know I was marrying the rich Miss Bright. Not a word from them since. Once we’re married, I’ll pay the whole lot of them. Say, Joe, what do you think about this new landau? Pretty elegant thing, isn’t it? I’ve ordered one, and it’ll be delivered when we get back from the honeymoon. Damn. I can’t wait to build another house in the Hudson Valley. One in Paris, too, by God.”

Mattie had broken the engagement the next day, after a night spent in tears. It had taken her a long time to get over Samuel Pinchot. Mattie wasn’t one to lie to herself. She knew she wasn’t beautiful, but
she had still hoped to find a young man who might care for her—and make her parents proud. After Samuel, Mattie made sure she never fell prey to hope again. Now she had a realistic view of the world and men. Practical. None of the English gentlemen she’d met had behaved in a way that would prove anything to the contrary existed.

Every so often Mattie would stand in front of the mirror and give herself a good talking-to. “Mattie,” she’d say, “don’t go dreaming again. You’re pleasant-looking, but that’s about the limit. You keep your eyes open and your heart protected. Never believe a gentleman’s fancy compliments. The money is always going to be what they see when they look at you. Don’t be fooled, or you’ll get hurt again.”