Talk of the Town (18 page)

“An attack of innocence, I expect. Miss Ingleside wouldn’t know the seriousness of the Almack’s affair, and Mrs. Pealing is not so bright as one could wish in her chaperone.”

“But you can’t expect me to have a repeat of the Deitweiller rout!”

“No, I expect much better behaviour from you than fainting in shock. You will make them welcome and see they are introduced.”

“Are they threatening to print that story about Larry again? Is that it?”

“No, they are not,” he said curtly.

“Then why are you trying to make me ask them here? You know it will be fatal to Larry’s chances; and for myself, I should prefer the company of the rest of London to theirs.”

“You will have both.”

“I can’t do it. If it weren’t for Larry I would, but at this
crucial
time in his career

“It will look very bad indeed for Larry if his own brother-in-law cannot recommend him for the Ministry,” he said in an offhand way.

Bess was instantly on her feet. “Dickie, you wouldn’t! That
is
blackmail.”

“So it is. I have learned a trick from Mrs. Pealing."

“Why are you so anxious for them to be accepted? They are nothing to us.”

“They are something to
me.
I have become very interested in them.”

“I see what it is! They’re blackmailing you about that woman being Papa’s flirt. I have been thinking about that, and I don’t think they can prove it.”

“That is not why I’m doing it.”

“Why, then?”

“For Larry,” he said in a kindly voice.

“You said they weren’t going to print that.”

“They are not, but only think how ill it would look for my wife to be cut by the whole city. It would be bound to reflect on Larry’s position—and promotion—don’t you think?”

“Dickie, you have never
married
that creature!”

“No, I haven’t even written to her father yet, and in future I would prefer if you refer to Miss Ingleside as a lady, rather than a creature. I only knew his direction a half hour ago and am about to write to him now. I don’t foresee any difficulty. So, for the sake of Larry, I really think we ought all to stick together and make Society accept Miss Ingleside and her aunt.”

“Oh, my dear, yes. What will Mama say when she hears? This will kill her, Richard, and I don’t know how you can be so unfeeling.”

“She has heard, and what she says is that if you wish to inherit anything from her, you will ask Mrs. Pealing and Miss Ingleside to your ball. She comes to mine herself, by the by.”

“How did you have the nerve to tell her you mean to marry that woman’s niece?”

“It took every atom of mettle I possess, but she didn’t take it half badly. Papa might have fared worse at Perdita’s hands, you see. That was the saving crumb.”

“Perdita who?” Bess asked, her mind reeling from so much bad news.

“Perdita, Mrs. Robinson. Papa’s other flirt. You are old enough to remember Perdita.”

Bess sank back on the sofa, wilted. “Go away, Dickie. I have had more than enough bad news for one day,” she said in a failing voice. “I’ll just sit here and succumb quietly to a fit of the vapours.”

“Have a feather burned under your nose. Might I suggest that particularly ugly pink one you had stuck in your hair like an Indian at the opera last week?”

She glared at him. “Maybe they won’t come. That is my only hope.”

“They’ll come if I have to truss them up in ropes and drag them here. I’ll need some help organizing my ball, as well. I’ll drop by tomorrow and talk to you about it.”

“You’ll put in a good word for Larry with Liverpool?” she regained enough strength to ask.

“But, of course. Families must stick together. I’ll threaten to turn Whig if they don’t give him a folio.”

“Oh, would you, Dickie?”

“No, but Richard might, if you ask him very nicely. I begin to perceive this blackmail is a handy weapon.”

“And I always thought you were so good.”

"Where did you get such a cork-brained notion as that?” he asked, and left the room laughing.

Effie and Daphne received the invitation, delivered in person the next morning by St. Felix, who urged an acceptance on them. They demurred, disliking to go again into Society after their recent ignominy. St. Felix had other proposals to put forward, as well. Invitations to drive in the Park and to let him escort them to the opera were fended off with sundry weak excuses. He had no luck in any of these lesser plans, but he felt them to be weakening in their resolve not to attend the ball. Effie was not much good at resisting any scheme urged on her more than once; and Miss Ingleside, though recalcitrant, secretly wanted very much to go to the ball. She felt also that if St. Felix insisted, it was the right thing to do. So he bided his time, since he was not sure in his own mind that a too hasty re-entry on the scene was wise, while always putting forward a mention of their attending Bess’s ball.

He came daily to Upper Grosvenor Square to amuse the ladies, and with such agreeable entertainment on the premises, excursions beyond the apartment were hardly missed. Effie read to them from the memoirs, and for one whole rainy afternoon the three of them browsed through the diaries, discussing old scandals, while Effie clucked a warning they were not to repeat a word of it.

“Prinney and Mrs. Abercrombie!” St. Felix asked wide-eyed, and demanded confirmation that it was the same Mrs. Abercrombie who would not allow her daughters to go to plays or ridottos.

“To be sure it is. I have often remarked it is the mothers who most ran wild themselves who keep a tight rein on their own daughters. I daresay if
I
had ever had one, she’d have ended up in a convent.”

“And seduced every monk for miles around!” St. Felix gibed.

“Just like his father,” Effie said to Daphne with a rueful shake of her head.

Effie was neither wise nor clever, but if she knew anything she knew the machinations of romance, and she sat with a gloating look as she thought to herself what an excellent
parti
she had found for Daphne. She noticed with satisfaction that till Daphne entered the room St. Felix’s eyes were never far from the door, and when she was in it, they were not often anywhere but on her. If she arose to get a book or paper, he followed her every movement, and even if she sat reading quietly, he would watch her for minutes at a time without saying a word, as if he were bewitched. Maybe he was—his father had said
she’d
bewitched him. If it hadn’t been for Standington—such a fine figure of a man—things might have turned out very differently.

He did a deal of complaining, too, like his papa. Daphne was growing pale from not being out—and her cheeks blooming like a rose. She was too thin—wasn’t she losing weight?—and her gowns fitting her to a “T,” just the way they fit when she arrived.

“Time will take care of the latter,” Daphne informed him casually. “My family runs to plumpness.”

He cast a surreptitious eye in Effie’s direction and asked, “Really?” in an uneasy tone.

“Don’t believe a word of it!” Effie assured him, wondering what maggot had got into Daphne’s head. “Her mama is thin as a rail.”

“You haven’t seen her in years, Auntie. She is pleasingly plump these days.”

“She must have shrunk to a midget, then, for she told me in her last letter she weighs just over eight stone.”

“And a rouge pot will look after my pallor,” Daphne added.

“Ladies shouldn’t paint!” St. Felix objected at once. “Except—except ladies who are no longer in the first blush of youth,” he added to Effie, whose natural high colour did not look quite natural. And, of course, he knew no one’s eyelids were blue.

“Pooh—if I weren’t as pink as a peony already,
I’d
paint,” Effie told him. “You men are all alike. Arthur never liked me to wear a drop of paint on my eyes or a thing, but he liked it well enough on the actresses.
They
may use all the tricks to make themselves attractive and steal our husbands from us, but
we
are not to paint or curl our hair or squeeze into a corset in case another man takes a look at us. They want their mistresses to look pretty, but not their wives. I don’t know what they can be thinking about. And if you’re foolish enough to listen to them, they’ll turn right around and tell you to smarten yourself up and quit looking like a dowd. It makes no sense to me, and I never minded what Arthur said in the matter but put paint on my eyelids like Mrs. Jordan. She taught me how to do it so it didn’t look unnatural.”

“Did Mrs. Jordan use blue paint?” St. Felix asked, making himself very much at home.

“No, she used green, but one of Arthur’s lightskirts used blue. I got the trick of surrounding myself with blue from her. Her name was Gloxinia. She had a wardrobe of blue, and even a carriage.”

“Shame on you, Auntie. It is a trick worthy of a mistress,” Daphne said without looking anywhere in the direction of St. Felix, even when she heard him clear his throat quite audibly.

He was invited to remain for lunch on this occasion, making the cubbyhole of a dining parlour seem even smaller. The finest tableware was again on display, and the meal a happy one. In spite of this, or because of it, Daphne found her appetite flagging. She refused the pigeon pie first, then the ham.

“You must eat something,” St. Felix told her in the stern accents of a father.

“I’ll eat dessert,” she said, a remark that always goaded her papa into an exhortation on the high cost of food and the crime of wasting it.

“It seems a shame to waste all this good meat and vegetables,” St. Felix said, scowling at her. From having imagined her to be losing weight, he had quit worrying about her filling out to Effie’ s size.

“Yes, and with food costing so much, too!” she replied with a twinkle in her eyes.

“No one can live on sweets,” he declared, and passed along a bowl of peas, which were declined with polite thanks. “You haven’t eaten a bit! Effie—Mrs. Pealing—is this the way she always eats?”

“No, indeed, she has a hearty appetite usually.” Bread, butter, and a plate of sweetmeats were sent down the table, and all refused, for by this time Daphne saw he meant to have his way and would not eat a bite till the dessert came, if she starved to death in the meantime. St. Felix grew more impatient by the minute, and when at last dessert came, he said, “If you have no appetite for nourishing food, you shouldn’t stuff yourself with cake.”

“If I don’t eat my meat and potatoes I can’t have a treat?” she asked, laughing. “How very like home it is. Papa used to say so when I was a child.”

“If a young lady behaves like a child, she must be treated like one."

“Oh, no! That is the best part of being grown up. We may do as we please, and overbearing adults can do no more than frown and fuss, for they would not be so rag-mannered as to
tell
us we are behaving childishly.” She looked boldly at her would-be father, who first stared back at her, then laughed reluctantly.

“Don’t try to turn me into a father, young lady.”

“I am trying to prevent you from becoming one, or from becoming mine, in any case.”

“I have no intention of being a father to you."

“That’s good. One is quite enough when he is so much a father as mine is.”

“James is a father and a mother,” Effie explained to their guest, and gave a dozen examples of each role, with a few animadversions on Arthur’s similar manner of treating herself.

A few days passed in this pleasant manner, and when Effie’s party rolled around, not a single visitor came to attend it. They did not invite St. Felix, not for fear he would stay away, but for fear he would come and be the only guest. The two of them ate as much lobster and chantilly and drank as much champagne as they could hold in an attempt to be merry, but the pervading atmosphere was one of darkest gloom.

“How can we possibly show our faces at a ball, when no one comes to us?” Daphne asked. “Even Lady Elizabeth didn’t come.”

She would have done had her brother known anything of the matter, but in his ignorance he didn’t push her to it, and she had enough sense not to mention it to him. She hoped her absence would give the ladies the hint they were not overly welcome at her ball, but as the important evening drew near, she received their acceptances. St. Felix had wheedled and cajoled them out of an immediate remove to Bath, and, as they were in London with so little to do, they were eventually talked into accepting the invitation. Neither lady was completely happy about it, and it would have taken no more than a sniffle for them both to call off; but no sniffle or sneeze befriended them, and when the day of the ball dawned bright and clear and healthy, they sat together over breakfast, inquiring minutely into each other’s condition.

“We could say our gowns aren’t ready,” Daphne suggested.

“Mine wants hemming,” Effie offered, ready to grasp at any weak little straw.

“He’ll be here before noon to see we mean to go through with it,” Daphne cautioned, hoping for a stronger excuse.

During his recent visits to the apartment, he had become such a dictator in the matter of the ball that a better pretext than an unhemmed gown in mid-morning was called for.

“I’ll tell him I feel a fever coming on,” Effie decided.

Daphne looked at her askance. “You’ll have to stay in your room then and let me tell him, or put flour on your cheeks. You are blooming, Auntie.”

“I don’t feel at all well,” the aunt replied. “It’s the fever that’s making me pink.”

They both sat on in silence, their minds working hard at an excuse that might pass muster with the dictator. “I feel positively
unwell,”
Effie repeated a moment later.

“You,” Daphne began, then stopped, for Aunt Effie no longer looked fine. She had turned stark, bone white. “Oh—not a
feeling!
Wild horses wouldn’t drag me to this ball if you have a premonition about it. There is some horrid surprise in store for us, I know it. I think I feel it myself,”

“There’s something in the air all right,” Effie said, as the first jolt of her feeling passed off.

“Has it to do with the ball?” Daphne demanded, a firm believer in her aunt’s supernatural powers.

A little smile hovered around Effie’s lips and her colour returned. “No, I don’t think so,” she answered. "It was—it was Arthur, dear,” she said.