The Dreadful Debutante (3 page)

And then Mira heard Charles’s voice at her ear, saying with bitter contempt, “You are a disgusting hoyden, Mira. I am ashamed of you!”

Then Mr. Markham was there to say the carriage had been summoned. Drusilla must be taken home immediately before she caught a chill. Voices rose and fell about Mira’s now scarlet little ears, voices exclaiming in condemnation at her behavior.

Mr. Markham said nothing until they were home and Drusilla, wrapped in blankets, had been carried up to bed to be fussed over by her mother and the servants.

“In here,” he said curtly to Mira, holding open the door of the library. Head bowed, Mira slowly walked in.

“Will you send me home?” she asked.

“That is what you deserve,” he said coldly. “Mrs. Markham is most insistent on it. She suggests you be returned to Mrs. Dunstable and confined to the house. I do not like failures, Mira, and you are not only a social disgrace but a social failure. Because Lord Charles Devere spoiled you by paying attention to you when you were a child does not mean he is going to trouble his head now with a hurly-burly miss. You will have, however, a chance to redeem yourself. You are to be kept indoors here for two weeks, two weeks in which you will study dancing, deportment, and manners. You have been overindulged as a child and allowed to run wild.”

Mira wanted to cry out, “But I did it for you. You wanted a son. I tried to be that son.” But one did not express one’s feelings to one’s parents, and so she stood there, feeling her world about her lying in ruins. She felt too weak to protest, too weak to say that after what she had done, she could not face one member of London society.

“You may go,” said Mr. Markham, and Mira turned and ran from the room, ran to the sanctuary of her bedroom, feeling a tight pain in her chest made by the tears that would not come, for the disgrace and the hurt were too much for tears.

To Mira the following week was a species of hell. She stood at the window and watched Drusilla driving off with Charles, saw the glow of admiration in his eyes as he looked at her sister, saw bleakly the way Drusilla flirted with him. Then in the evenings there was all the fuss as preparations were made to take Drusilla to some ball or party. When she drove off with her parents, Mira was left alone with the servants to reflect on her social disgrace.

Because of her one burst of temper, Charles was out there, at all the balls and parties attended by Drusilla and every other pretty girl in society, and she could only torture herself with thoughts of what he would say, how he would look, and how little he probably thought of her.

Mira was even banned from the drawing room when Drusilla’s admirers came to call, and then at the end of that first week, she heard Mrs. Markham say complacently, “Lord Charles is only the younger son of a duke, but he will do very well for Drusilla. Has he asked you yet for permission to pay his addresses?” And Mr. Markham replied in an amused voice, “Not yet. But he will. He will.”

So Mira began to move about in a dream of what it had been like in the past, remembering Charles’s every word and expression.

At the beginning of the second week, the weather was still unexpectedly fine, and Drusilla and her parents set off to a picnic in the Surrey fields. Mira was told to practice her scales on the pianoforte. She itched for freedom, and though she had sworn never to don masculine clothes again, she put them on, hung over the banisters, and waited until the hall was empty of servants, and then slipped out into the London streets.

Somehow she found her steps taking her in the direction of South Audley Street. Although she knew Charles would probably be at the picnic, she had a sick desire to stand outside his house and to walk on the same pavement he walked on every day. But there was something cheering about the weather, about the sunshine and the scudding little breeze, which drove white clouds across a blue sky far above the grimy chimney pots of London.

She turned into Grosvenor Square and was halfway round it when she stopped to listen to a noisy altercation. A tall gentleman with arresting good looks and a powerful figure was berating a protesting groom. The groom was saying that he did not know where my lord’s tiger had got to, and my lord was complaining crossly that he was due at a curricle race and needed his tiger.

Afterward Mira blamed the sunshine and the light breeze, which appeared to have made her reckless. There was also the desire not to be shamed Mira, the social disgrace, but someone else entirely.

She marched boldly up to the curricle, pulling her hat firmly down over her eyes as she did so, and said in what she hoped was a Cockney accent, “I’ll be yer tiger, my lord.”

A pair of cold gray eyes stared down at her. “Experience, lad?”

“Tiger to Mr. Markham, sir, of St. James’s Square.”

“Very well. Hop up. I have wasted enough time as it is. But if you prove not to know what you are doing, you will get a whipping.”

Mira sprang nimbly onto the backstrap and hung on for dear life as the carriage surged forward. They went as far as a point on the Great West Road just beyond the village of Knightsbridge, where her driver slowed his team and joined several other drivers and carriages. She dutifully nipped down and ran to the horses’ heads. She discovered from overhearing the conversation that her driver was the Marquess of Grantley. The diminutive tiger holding the heads of a team of horses next to her jeered, “Can’t your master buy you a livery?”

“’Is tiger’s sick,” drawled Mira laconically. “Standing in.”

Then she found her temporary master looking down at her. “Name?” he demanded.

“Jem,” said Mira.

“Well, Jem, we are about ready to start.”

Mira was never to forget that race. Never had she been driven so fast. Houses and nursery gardens and then countryside seemed to pass in a blur. They were ahead of the others almost from the start, and Mira shouted and yelled with exhilaration, all her worries forgotten.

When they drove into an inn yard after the marquess had easily won the race, Mira felt she was Jem and that sad girl Mira was someone she had once known. She jumped down and ran to the horses’ heads, and then when the marquess had climbed down, she expertly unhitched the team of four and said, “I will see they are rubbed down, my lord, and watered.”

“Good lad,” he said. “The job is yours if you want it,” and without waiting for a reply, he strode into the inn.

Mira saw to the horses, glad now that so much of her misspent youth had been passed in the stables.

Then one of the other tigers approached her. He was a wizened little fellow with a twisted white face. He looked as if he had been born old.

“Your master cheated,” he said.

Color rose in Mira’s face. “We won fair and square!”

“Cheated! Cheated!” jeered the tiger. The other tigers and grooms gathered around.

“You lying churl,” said Mira haughtily, forgetting her role and her Cockney accent.

“Put up yer fists,” growled the tiger.

“A mill! A mill!” shouted the onlookers gleefully, and began to lay bets.

The marquess, emerging from the inn, saw with some amusement that his new tiger was squaring up in the inn yard for a fight. The tigers were crying to Mira to take off her coat, and she was refusing, clutching it tightly about her. One boy tried to tear the coat off her back, but she jerked herself away and shrugged it back on—but not before the startled marquess had caught a fleeting glimpse of a very female bosom.

He marched forward, seized Mira by the scruff of her neck, and frog-marched her off to his carriage, shouting over his shoulder to the onlookers, “I have no time for brawls.” He tossed a guinea to a watching groom. “Fetch my team and hitch them up.”

The groom stared in awe at the gold and then ran off to get his horses. The marquess kept his hold on Mira. “You stay exactly where you are,” he said softly. When his team was hitched, he ordered curtly, “Jump up,” and the terrified Mira, who felt she really ought to run away, obeyed him.

He drove off for a little way and then cut off the gravel surface of the Great West Road and down a leafy country lane. He finally commanded his team to stop. Mira jumped down and ran to their heads, hoping against hope that if she continued in her role, her true identity would remain undiscovered.

That hope died when he snatched off her cap. Her frizzy hair sprang out about her face like an aureole. Wide green eyes stared helplessly up into gray ones.

“So, Miss What’s-your-name, explain yourself.”

Mira hung her head. “I was amusing myself,” she said.

“Who are you?”

“I am Mira Markham, and I am in London for my first Season.”

“And is this the way you go about trying to find suitors?”

“No, my lord.”

“So you do know who I am?”

“I overheard your name. But I did not know who you were in Grosvenor Square.” Mira put her head back and looked up at him bravely. “I was not tricking you in order to attract you, my lord. My heart belongs to another.”

“Indeed?” The voice was warmer now, amused. “I trust you will be very happy.”

To Mira’s horror a large, fat tear rolled from one of her eyes and slid down her cheek.

“Get back in the carriage,” said the marquess. “I would like to hear your story.”

He drove sedately back to the main road and then stopped at an inn outside Knightsbridge. He told Mira to put on her cap and then ushered her inside. He ordered wine for himself and lemonade for Mira.

“Now, Miss Mira,” he began, “what is all this about?”

He was very handsome, with golden hair curling under a curly brimmed beaver. He was tall and powerful, with a trim waist and long legs encased in leather breeches and top boots. But Mira could think only of Charles, and for the first time in his privileged life, the Marquess of Grantley was facing a young female who was not interested in him in the slightest.

Mira glanced up at him fleetingly. She had beautiful eyes, he thought, like jewels. In a halting voice she began to tell him about Charles, her voice warming as she talked about the old days, when she had still been a child and they had gone hunting and fishing together. Never had anyone, not even Charles, listened so intently to Mira before. She told him of her desire to please her father by trying to be a son to him. And then she told him about Drusilla and the disastrous ball and then about her social disgrace. His eyes sparkled with laughter. “You are a terror, Miss Mira. So when do you come out of seclusion?”

“There is another ball to be held at Lord Monday’s. I am to go there.”

“But not Almack’s Assembly Rooms?”

Mira shook her head. “Mama had applied for vouchers, but the patronesses are so very strict, and because of my disgrace the vouchers were refused. Drusilla is furious with me. Oh, all this marriage-market business is so silly.”

“And yet you would not find it silly if it secured Lord Charles for you.”

Her face looked wistful. “I am not beautiful. I have no hope now.”

The marquess found himself bitterly damning Lord Charles and the Markham family. This girl had character, a piquant face, and a beautiful mouth. “You yourself,” he realized Mira was saying, “have escaped marriage.”

“Not at all,” he replied. “I was married young, but my wife died after we had been married only two years. She died in childbirth.”

“How sad! I am so very sorry.”

“That was some time ago.”

“Are you going to tell my parents what I have done?” asked Mira.

“No, it is up to you to return unobserved.”

“I do not know how to thank you. You are most… tolerant.”

“You amuse me, Miss Mira. I shall be at the Mondays’ ball. I will dance with you if you promise not to push me into any fountains.”

“I will never do such a thing again!”

“Good. And I shall be interested to see the dramatis personae in this comedy.”

“Comedy to you, my lord. Tragedy to me.”

“Everything is a tragedy at your age, my chuck.”

“But everyone will be looking at me and whispering.”

“Society loves characters, although, I admit, it has to be the men who are the characters. But if you remain pleasant and do not extinguish that liveliness of spirit you obviously possess, you will attain a certain notoriety, and that is no bad thing.”

“Charles will not even look at me.”

“If you consider yourself deeply sunk in disgrace, then Lord Charles and society will take you at your own valuation. It seems to me you have a great deal of physical courage. Now is the time for you to find reserves of moral courage. You are far from plain. You have a neat figure, splendid eyes, and good skin. Remember that.”

Mira looked at him in humble gratitude. “I had become used to thinking myself plain.”

“If you think yourself plain, then that is how you will look. Now I must get you home, for I fear if this adventure is discovered, then you will be in the suds and confined to your room for the rest of the Season.”