Faro's Daughter (7 page)

Lady Bellingham had been a very pretty woman in her youth, but there was little trace of a former beauty to be detected in her plump countenance today. A once pink-and white complexion had long been raddled by cosmetics; there were pouches under her pale blue eyes; her cheeks had sagged; and it could not have been said that a golden wig became her.

Some traces of hair-powder still clung to this erection, but the monstrous plumes she had worn in it on the previous evening had been removed, and a lace cap set in their place, with lilac ribbons tied under her little chin. A voluminous robe with a quantity of ruffles and ribbons, enveloped her stout form, and she wore, in addition, a trailing Paisley shawl, which was continually slipping off her shoulders, or getting its fringe entangled in the pins and combs which littered the dressing-table.

She looked up, when her niece entered the room, and said in a distracted way: ‘Oh, my dear, thank heavens you are come! I am in such a taking! I am sure we are ruined I’

Miss Grantham, who was looking very neat in a chintz gown, with her hair dressed plainly, bent over her to kiss her cheek. ‘Oh no! Don’t say so! I had some deep doings myself last night.’

‘Lucius told me you had gone down six hundred pounds,’ said Lady Bellingham. ‘Of course, it can’t be helped, but why would not Mr Ravenscar play faro? People are so tiresome! My love, nothing could be worse than the fix we are in. Just look at this bill from Priddy’s! Twelve dozen of Fine Hock at thirty shillings a dozen, and such nasty stuff as it is! Ditto of Claret, First Growth, at forty-two shillings the dozen—why, it is robbery, no less! Ditto of White Champagne, at seventy shillings—I cannot conceive how the half of it can have been drunk, and here is Mortimer telling me that we shall be needing more.’

Miss Grantham sat down, and picked up the bill from Priddy’s Foreign Warehouse and Vaults. ‘It does seem shocking,’ she agreed. ‘Do you think we should buy cheaper wine?’

‘Impossible!’ said Lady Bellingham, with resolution. ‘You know what everyone says about the inferior stuff that Hobart woman gives her guests to drink! But that is not the worst!

Where is that odious bill for coals? Forty-four shillings the ton we are paying, Deb, and that not the best coal! Then there’s the bill from the coachmakers—here it is! No, that’s not it. Seventy pounds for green peas: it doesn’t seem right does it, my love? I dare say we are being robbed, but what is one to do? What’s this? Candles, fifty pounds, and that’s only for six months! Burning wax ones in the kitchen, if we only knew. Where is that?—oh, I have it in my hand all the time! Now, do listen, Deb! Seven hundred pounds for the bays and a new barouche! Well, I can’t think where the money is to come from. It seems a monstrous price.’

‘We might let the bays go, and hire a pair of job horses,’ suggested Miss Grantham dubiously.

‘I can’t and I won’t live in squalor!’ declared her aunt tearfully.

Miss Grantham began to gather up the bills, and to sort them. ‘I know. It would be horrid, but we should be spared these dreadful bills for repairs. What is K.Q. iron, Aunt Lizzie?’

‘I can’t imagine, my love. Do we use that, too?’

‘Well, it says here, Best K.Q. iron, faggotted edgeways-oh, it was for an axle-tree!’

‘We had to have that,’ said Lady Bellingham, comforted. ‘But when it comes to eighty pounds for liveries which are the most hideous colour imaginable, and not in the least what I wanted, we have reached the outside of enough!’

Miss Grantham looked up with an awed expression in her eyes. ‘Aunt, do we really pay four hundred pounds for a box at the opera?’

‘I daresay. It is all of a piece! I am sure we have not used it above three times the whole season.’

‘We must give it up,’ said Miss Grantham firmly.

‘Now, Deb, do pray be sensible! When poor dear Sir Edward was alive, we always had our box at the opera. Everyone did so!’

‘But Sir Edward has been dead these dozen years, aunt,’ Miss Grantham pointed out.

Lady Bellingham dabbed at her eyes with a fragile handkerchief. ‘Alas, I am a defenceless widow, whom everyone delights to impose upon! But I will not give up my box at the opera!’

There did not seem to be anything more to be said about this. Miss Grantham had made another, and still more shocking discovery. ‘Oh, aunt!’ she said, raising distressed eyes from the sheaf of bills. ‘Ten ells of green Italian taffeta! That was for that dress which I threw, away, because it did not become me!’

‘Well, what else is one to do with dresses which don’t become one?’ asked her aunt reasonably.

‘I might at least have worn it! Instead of that, we bought all that satin—the Rash Tears one, I mean—and had it made up.’

‘You never had a dress that became you better, Deb,’ said her ladyship reminiscently. ‘You were wearing that when Mablethorpe first saw you.’

There was a short silence. Miss Grantham looked at her aunt in a troubled way, and shuffled the bills in her hand.

‘I suppose,’ said Lady Bellingham tentatively, ‘you could not bring yourself-?’

‘No,’ said Deborah.

‘No,’ agreed Lady Bellingham, with a heavy sigh. ‘Only it would be such a splendid match, and no one would dun me if it were known that you were betrothed to Mablethorpe!’

‘He is not yet twenty-one, ma’am.’

‘Very true, my dear, but so devoted!’

‘I’m his calf-love. He won’t marry a woman out of a gaming-house.’

Lady Bellingham’s mouth drooped pathetically. ‘I meant it all for the best! Of course, I do see that it puts us in an awkward position, but how in the world was I to manage? And my card-parties were always so well-liked—indeed, I was positively renowned for them!—that it seemed such a sensible thing to do! Only, ever since we bought this house our expenses seem to have mounted so rapidly that I’m sure I don’t know what is to become of us. And here is dearest Kit, too! I forgot to tell you, my love. I have a letter from him somewhere—well, never mind, I must have mislaid it. But the thing is that the dear boy thinks he would be happier in a cavalry regiment, and would like to exchange.’

‘Exchange!’ exclaimed Kit’s sister, aghast. ‘Why, I daresay it would cost seven or eight hundred pounds at the least!’

‘Very likely,’ said Lady Bellingham in a despondent tone. ‘But there’s no denying he would look very well in Hussar uniform, and I never did like his being in that horrid line regiment. Only where the money is to come from I don’t know!’

‘Kit can’t exchange. It would be absurd! You must explain to him that it is impossible.’

‘But I promised poor dear Wilfred I would always look after his children!’ said Lady Bellingham tragically.

‘So you have, dearest Aunt Lizzie,’ said Deborah warmly. ‘We have never been anything but a shocking charge on you!’

‘I am sure no one ever had a better nephew and niece. And if you won’t have Mablethorpe, I dare say someone richer will offer for you.’

Miss Grantham looked down at her shapely hands. ‘Lord Ormskirk is making very precise offers, aunt.’

Lady Bellingham picked up the haresfoot, and began to powder her face in an agitated way. ‘There you are, then. If only you would have Mablethorpe, there would be an end to Ormskirk’s pretensions! I can’t deny, Deb, that we are very awkwardly situated there. Don’t, for heaven’s sake, quarrel with the man! I daresay he would clap us up in a debtors’ prison in the blink of an eye!’

‘How much money do we owe Ormskirk?’ asked Deborah, raising her clear gaze to her aunt’s face.

‘My love, don’t ask me! I had never the least head for figures! There’s that odious mortgage on the house, for one thing. I have been quite misled! I made sure we should make a great deal of money, if only we could set up in a modish establishment. But what with green peas, and two free suppers every night, not to mention all that champagne and claret, and the faro-bank’s being broke twice in one week, I’m sure it is a wonder we can still open our doors! And now what must you do, my love, but play piquet with Ravenscar; not that I blame you, for I am sure you did the right thing, and if only he may be induced to try his hand at faro it will have been worth the outlay. Did he seem pleased, my dear?’

‘I don’t know,’ answered Deborah candidly. ‘He is a strange creature. I had the oddest feeling that he did not like me, but he chose to play with me all the evening.’

Lady Bellingham laid down the haresfoot, and turned a brightening countenance upon her niece. ‘Do you suppose perhaps he may offer for you, Deb? Oh, if that were to happen-! I declare I should die of very joy! He is the richest man in London. Now, don’t, don’t, I implore you, take one of your dislikes to him! Only think how our troubles would vanish!’

Deborah could not help laughing, but she shook her head as well, and said: ‘My dear aunt, I am persuaded no such thought has entered Mr Ravenscar’s head! I wish you will not think so much about my marriage. I doubt I was born to wear the willow.’

‘Never say so, Deb! Why, you are so handsome you have even turned Ormskirk’s head—not that I should like you to become his mistress, because I am sure it is not the sort of thing your poor father would have wished for you at all, besides putting you in an awkward situation, and quite ruining all your chances of making a good match. Only if it is not to be Ormskirk, it must be marriage.’

‘Nonsense! Put all these bills away, ma’am, and forget them. We have had a run of bad luck, it’s true, and have been monstrously extravagant besides, but we shall come about, trust me!’

‘Not with Indian muslin at ten shillings the yard, and wheatstraw for bedding a crown the truss, or the bushel, or whatever it is,’ said Lady Bellingham gloomily.

‘Wheatstraw?’ asked Miss Grantham, wrinkling her brow.

‘Horses,’ explained her aunt, with a heavy sigh.

Miss Grantham seemed to feel the force of this, and once more bent her head over the bills in her hand. After a prolonged study of these, she said in a daunted voice: ‘Dear ma’am, do we never eat anything but salmon and spring chickens in this house?’

‘‘We had a boiled knuckle of veal and pig’s face last week,’ replied Lady Bellingham reflectively. ‘That was for our dinner, but we could not serve it at the suppers, my love.’

‘No,’ agreed Miss Grantham reluctantly. ‘Perhaps we ought not to give two suppers every night.’

‘Anything of a shabby nature is repugnant to me!’ said her aunt firmly. ‘Sir Edward would not have approved of it.’

‘But, ma’am, I daresay he would not have approved of your keeping a gaming-house at all!’ Deborah pointed out.

‘Very likely not, my love. I’m sure it is not at all the sort of thing I should choose to do, but if Ned didn’t wish me to do so he should not have died in that inconsiderate way,’ said Lady Bellingham.

Miss Grantham abandoned this line of argument, and returned to her study of the bills. Such items as Naples Soap, Patent Silk Stockings, Indian Tooth-brushes, and Chintz Patches, mounted up to a quite alarming total; while a bill from Warren’s, Perfumiers, and another from a mantua maker, enumerating such interesting items as One Morning
Sacque
of Paris Mud, Two Heads
Soupir d’etouffer
, and One Satin Cloak trimmed Opera Brulée Gauze, made her feel quite low. But these were small bills compared with the staggering list of household expenses, which it was evident Lady Bellingham had been trying to calculate. Her ladyship’s sprawling handwriting covered several sheets of hot-pressed paper, whereon Servants’ Wages, Liveries, Candles, Butcher, Wine, and Taxes jostled one another in hopeless confusion. The house in St James’s Square seemed to cost a great deal of money to maintain, and if there were nothing to cavil at in the Wages of Four Women Servants, £60, it did seem that two waiters at twenty pounds apiece, an Upper Man at fifty-five, and the coachman at forty were grossly extortionate.

Miss Grantham folded these depressing papers, and put them at the bottom of the sheaf.

‘I am sure I am ready enough to live a great deal more frugally,’ said Lady Bellingham, ‘but you may see for yourself, Deb, how impossible it is! It is not as though one was spending money on things which are not necessary.’

‘I suppose,’ said Deborah, looking unhappily at a bill from the upholsterers, ‘I suppose we need not have covered all the chairs in the front saloon with straw-coloured satin.’

‘No,’ conceded Lady Bellingham. ‘I believe that was a mistake. It does not wear at all well, and I have been thinking whether we should not have them done again, in mulberry damask. What do you think, my love?’

‘I think we had better not spend any more money on them until the luck changes,’ said Deborah.

‘Well, my dear, that will be an economy at all events,’ said her ladyship hopefully. ‘But have you thought that if the luck don’t change-?’

‘It must, and shall!’ said Deborah resolutely.

‘I am sure I hope it may, but I do not see how we can recover, with peas at such a price, and you playing piquet with Ravenscar for ten shillings a point.’

Miss Grantham hung her head. ‘Indeed, I am very sorry,’ she apologized. ‘He did say he would come again, to let me have my revenge, but perhaps I had better make an excuse?’

‘No, no, that would never do! We must hope that he will presently turn to faro, and make the best of it. Mablethorpe has sent you a basketful of roses this morning, my love.’

‘I know,’ replied Deborah. ‘Ormskirk sent a bouquet of carnations in a jewelled holder. I have quite a drawerful of his gifts to me. I would like to throw them in his painted face!’