The Random Gentleman (3 page)

Another peal of ironic laughter from his recalcitrant grandchild at this rather infelicitous phrase gave him pause. His fierce old eyes took in the ravaged pride in the girl’s countenance, the hurt in the big pansy-brown eyes. Changing his tactics, the Earl said more gently, “It’s not like you, Bel, to prejudge a man. You’ve never met Dane, never spoken to him. How can you rate him so harshly?”

“Don’t try to turn me up soft, Grandpapa! You raised me, and I know your tricks. But you know me, too, and you cannot wish me to sit at table with the man who has made a public mock of me, while all London laughs and whispers that the Duke of Romsdale finds himself compelled to offer for—a snake!”

There was so much real distress in the girl’s lovely face that the Earl’s domineering old heart nearly misgave him. He adored his orphaned granddaughter, knew himself to be quite besotted over the child, but—damn it all!—the girl’s father had designed the match, and it was a splendid one in every way. No ignorant slip of a girl could be permitted to cast aside a secure, honored future on the excuse of a malicious scrap of gossip! Finding himself thus reassured by his own evaluation of the situation, the Earl said in a loud, blustering tone, “Let me hear no more of these missish vaporings, Belinda! You are a female, and too young to know what’s best for you. You will be guided by me, child. You will attend our dinner party tomorrow night, wearing your prettiest dress, and you will conduct yourself in a modest, well-bred manner which will silence the malicious tittle-tattle your behavior of last night has caused. Do you understand me?” and the old martinet glared at her from under his shaggy eyebrows.

“
Grandy!
” cried the girl with inarticulate appeal.

Softened a little by her obvious distress, the old man went on in a gentler voice, “Depend on it, having missed you last night at his sister’s ball, Dane will wait upon you today. Sure to! With flowers, and some little frippery to win a smile from you—possibly with an explanation, an apology—” His invention failed, but he finished with a firmness Belinda had come to recognize over the years. “Now, child, you will allow yourself to be guided by those who know a good deal more of the world than you can yet do! Choose your loveliest dress for tomorrow night, and prepare yourself to entertain the King, our friends, and your fiancé with your most charming behavior!”

He waved his hand in dismissal, satisfied that he’d set the child straight, and calmed the little tempest in a teapot. As Belinda went quietly from the library, he congratulated himself on his firm control of what might have worked into a most distasteful situation. He would have been considerably less smug had he been able to read the hurt and anger in Belinda’s rebellious heart. Perhaps she had been spoiled by the remarkable success of her first season in the Beau Monde, and the enthusiastic court paid her by a number of dashing young peers, but she was very young and very vulnerable to the kind of sophisticated, sneering irony which had been reported to her this morning. She had made up her mind that the arrogant Duke of Romsdale could entertain himself when he came to dinner at Sayre House tomorrow night.

Chapter 4

Somewhat to the Earl’s chagrin, no flowers arrived for Belinda from the Duke, either that day or the following morning. Even more disturbing, there was neither visit nor message from His Grace. At luncheon the day of the dinner party to announce the engagement, Lady Tulliver was the only one at the table to be in high spirits, chatting on endlessly about the arrangements she had made. Belinda presented herself for the meal looking pale and subdued. To her grandfather’s efforts at conversation she replied with quiet courtesy and none of her usual sparkle. The Duke’s name was not mentioned. Belinda herself said nothing about that evening’s party.

After lunch, trying in vain to get a few minutes’ nap in his bookroom, the Earl wondered if perhaps he should have sent some sort of message to his guest of honor, but consoled himself with the fact that Lady Freya had been all too conscious of the effect upon Belinda of the Duke’s unintended slight, and would bring her brother up to the mark tonight. Anything else was unthinkable—an insult he could not accept, however strong his desire to carry out the expressed wish of his dead son.

That evening, about one hour before the guests were expected to arrive, General the Right Honorable James Henry Darell ffoulkes Sayre, seventh Earl of Sayre and Wendover, marched down the broad central stairway of Sayre House looking every inch the gallant old soldier, shoulders squared, back erect, orders and decorations shining. The first person he saw in the splendid reception area was his butler, Farwell, who made it obvious that he wished to address his master.

“Well, Farwell, what is it?”

“It’s Miss Belinda, My Lord,” uttered Farwell in accents of doom. “Lady Tulliver is quite beside herself—it seems Miss Belinda is not in the house—”

“
Not?
Then where the devil is the girl?” roared the old martinet.

“I could not say, My Lord.” The old butler knew the signs and offered no provocation.

“Where is Lady Tulliver?”

“In the Gold Salon, My Lord.”

The Earl stormed into the elegant room. Lady Tulliver was indeed there, draped out on a satin sofa, attended by at least three female servants, one of whom was revealed to be Mrs. Munn, the housekeeper. The odor of burnt feathers tainted the air. The Earl’s bellow of rage shocked the two weeping maids into little shrieks of alarm, but Mrs. Munn, long in the Earl’s service, was made of sterner stuff.

“Miss Belinda has left the house, My Lord,” she said crisply, “and Lady Tulliver has swooned.”

The Earl gathered his forces. “How do you know the girl’s gone?” he snapped.

“There was a letter,” the housekeeper informed him.

“By God, there would be!” shouted the Earl. “Where is this—this missive?”

Lady Tulliver, opening one eye, fumbled in her corsage and extended a shaking hand in which she clutched a crumpled sheet of notepaper. The Earl took it and stalked over to the mantelpiece to read it in the light of the numerous candles burning there.

Dear Lady Tulliver (the message read, in Belinda’s unmistakable hand): I am compelled to leave Sayre House before the Dinner Party. My Grandfather knows my reasons. Give him my dearest love. I shall let him know where I am as soon as I can. My apologies for making your numbers uneven at the table tonight.

Belinda

When the Earl raised his head, Mrs. Munn, who knew, after the manner of all good servants everywhere, every detail of the imbroglio, was seized with a sense of pity. The face was ravaged, and the look in the fierce old eyes caused her to avert her own gaze from such naked suffering.

A moan from the supine lady upon the sofa drew everyone’s attention. “Where can she be?” Lady Tulliver cried, weak-voiced. “The
King—!
”

“Someone must—that is, I must inform His Majesty, of course—but are you sure the child isn’t hiding somewhere, just to—to teach us a lesson?”

Mrs. Munn was embarrassed. She had never seen the Earl in such straits in all the forty years she had served his house. She waited a moment for Lady Tulliver to speak, but when the only sounds from that woman were renewed sobs, Mrs. Munn said calmly, “No, My Lord, she is not hiding anywhere in this house. I sent maids to search as soon as Her Ladyship informed me of the—the problem.” When the Earl was about to speak, she held up one hand, and continued, “I then inquired of the footmen, and learned that Miss Belinda had summoned a hackney coach about three o’clock this afternoon, which took her to the Saracen’s Head Inn, where there is a stagecoach office. Farwell informs me that the second footman, James, who handed Miss Belinda into the coach, overheard her giving the driver her direction. James went immediately to Aldgate High Street to the inn to make inquiries.”

“Damme, that’s good staff-work!” congratulated the Earl, for the first time feeling that all might not be lost. “What was her destination, Mrs. Munn?”

“That, James did not discover, My Lord,” admitted the housekeeper, “since he ran to the inn rather than securing a hackney, and so missed your granddaughter at the posting station. He was subsequently unable to ascertain which stagecoach she had taken.”

At that disappointing moment, Farwell entered the Gold Salon, flinging back the doors with a flourish. “His Grace the Duke of Romsdale; the Lady Freya Goncourt!” then, catching sight of the still-recumbent Lady Tulliver, the old fellow gulped audibly, and said “My Lord!” in a strangled voice.

* * *

His Grace had been feeling unaccountably ill at ease as he accompanied his sister into the somber elegance of Sayre House. The evening to come presented itself to his mind as one fraught with as many challenges and hidden traps as the most ticklish of diplomatic crises. He was buoyed up by the consciousness that his own behavior in this vexatious business—pitchforked as he had been into a connection with a gauche schoolroom miss!—had been, in fact, exemplary. The truth of the matter was that His Grace had been even more courted and spoiled by adulation than had Belinda Sayre. A gallant, dashing, and courageous officer at eighteen; the youngest and most brilliant of Castlereagh’s negotiators at the Congress of Vienna and after, he had gone on to win a firm place in the diplomatic corps of his country. Since he was over six feet tall, golden-haired, and extraordinarily handsome, his diplomatic success was more than matched by his social triumphs in the sophisticated, glittering capitals of Europe. Possessed of a fine old name, an enormous fortune, and natural ability which gave him preeminence in sports, he was widely regarded as a Nonpareil, and had come to have a very high opinion of his own worth.

And now to discover himself pledged to marry a green girl with a pert tongue and no sense of dignity—! It did not bear thinking of! He had refused to consider his sister’s gentle suggestions that a gift of flowers would remove Belinda’s pique at his nonappearance at the ball, and that a visit of courtesy to the girl would change his own opinion. In fact, he had informed Freya arrogantly, if that wily old campaigner hadn’t already wheedled royalty into attending his wretched dinner party, Dane might have managed to get himself out of the whole disastrous business with the exertion of just a little diplomacy.

The King, of course, like all notorious philanderers, was sickeningly sentimental about everyone else’s matrimonial prospects, and had spent quite a third of the time at the ill-timed conference on the night of Freya’s ball in congratulating the Duke on his approaching marriage to a deemed handsome little filly.

“Got all the young bucks panting after her, my boy! She may be a bit hot-at-hand, Osric, and she will need a firm hand on the reins,” with a leer, “which you, from all I can hear, will surely be able to provide!”

Now, entering the impressive portals of Sayre House with Freya, the Duke was in such a recalcitrant mood that he said, quite loudly, as he allowed the butler to take his evening cape and gloves,
“Abandon Hope, all ye who enter here!”

Lady Freya, who had been unusually quiet during the drive, did not respond with the laugh he had come to expect when he was pleased to utter a witticism. Instead she frowned and her lips tightened. So it was a rather grim-faced pair who entered on Farwell’s announcement.

It was immediately obvious to them both that all was not well in the Sayre household. Lady Freya moved at once to Lady Tulliver’s side and bent to assist her into the sitting posture she seemed to be attempting to gain. The Duke’s eyes went from the emotionally exhausted older woman to the resplendent figure of his host. One quick glance at his ravaged face was enough to sound the warning to a man of Dane’s
nous
. The housekeeper took herself and the fluttering maids off at once, and Farwell, thankfully, closed the doors behind them and himself.

“What has happened?” asked the Duke quietly.

“My granddaughter has run away,” said the Earl, tight-voiced.

“
The King!
” wailed Lady Tulliver.

“There is that,” admitted the Duke, fighting to repress any sign of the intense satisfaction he felt at this eleventh-hour reprieve. “Now we must quickly contrive how we can all get out of this coil the silly chit has involved us in with some measure of credit.”

Lady Freya cast him a quick warning glance, but the damage was done.

“My granddaughter is not a silly chit, My Lord Duke,” the control the old man placed on his voice only served to emphasize his anger and contempt. “She is a sensitive young woman who has run away from a situation which you, sirrah, have rendered insupportable, with your ill-bred mockery and brazen disregard of the obligations of a gentleman.”

It is safe to say that Osric Dane had never been spoken to thus in his whole life. His head flung up, and dark red color showed in his cheeks. How he might have replied to the Earl will never be known, however, since the butler, with a distinctly harassed expression, once more threw open the doors and announced six members of London’s highest circle. The two gentlemen were compelled to present not only an air of complaisance, but a mutual regard which was, at the moment, the farthest thing from their desire. Indeed, observing their punctilious deference to one another, Freya’s lips twitched in the first smile she had wished to give in two days.