Sally (14 page)

He tried to pass the afternoon at his club, among the thick pile carpets and leather armchairs and all the subdued hush of that well-run establishment, which he had always found soothing at the worst of times. But now it irked him. The sleeping figures of two of the older members alarmed him. He might end up like them! Snoring his life away with no wife and children waiting for him at home. Then he remembered it was a masked ball and that he hadn’t got a mask, and so he set off to look for one.

He also remembered that Peter Firkin was engaged now to Miss Wyndham, and sickeningly happy, and so he spent some time on Old Bond Street, choosing an engagement present and settling at last on an enormous box of solid gold knives and forks, and then feeling that it was all too vulgar and ostentatious the minute he had paid for it.

By evening he felt depressed and exhausted and realized he had hardly had any sleep since the day Lady Cecily had left.

He summoned his valet and was helped into his evening clothes. He slipped a black velvet mask into his pocket and set out for the Earl and Countess of Hammering’s town house in Kensington.

He did not want to waste time over an argument at the door, so he simply presented his visiting card and said he had lost his invitation, and the magic of his title worked as it had done so many times in the past.

He left his heavy fur-lined cloak and his hat, cane, and gloves downstairs, donned his mask, and mounted the stairs to the ballroom on the first floor.

Here the marquess met his first setback. The earl and countess gracefully accepted his apology for gate-crashing their ward’s ball, but looked extremely puzzled when he said he had had the pleasure of dancing with Lady Cecily at his mother’s ball.

“You must be mistaken,” said Lady Harrington. “Little Cecily has not been out anywhere in England until this evening.” The marquess then inquired after their health and said he was sorry to hear they had both been indisposed. That information was met with two blank stares.

“We shall chat later,” said the countess firmly, since she had obviously decided the marquess was mad or drunk or both. “I must welcome the other guests. You will find little Cecily in the ballroom.”

Bemused, the marquess left them and made his way into a large room full of masked guests. His eyes raked around the long room. Although she would be masked, he was sure he could tell her easily from any other woman in the room. But nowhere could he see that familiar figure or that light cloud of nut-brown hair.

“Well, Paul,” said a jovial voice at his elbow. “See old Peter Firkin’s got himself engaged.” He swung around and stared at the masked face next to his own, recognizing one of his old friends, Stuffy Bingles-Farnworth, by the brush of red hair standing on top of his head.

“Hallo, Stuffy,” said the marquess, his eyes still roving around the room. “Looks as if all us old bachelors are beginning to fall like ninepins. Still looking for an heiress?”

“Still looking,” said Stuffy gloomily. “Thought I’d try my hand with Lady Cecily, but I’m not
that
desperate.”

The marquess swung and faced him, his eyes like two chips of blue ice behind his mask. “
I
think Lady Cecily is the most charming, most fascinating girl I have ever met,” he said in a repressive voice.

“Eh, what?” Stuffy stared at the marquess in surprise.

“Where is she anyway?” demanded the marquess. “I can’t see her.”

“Why, over there!” said Stuffy. “Dancing with that long drip of a fellow, Harry Crompton.”

The marquess followed his gaze. Harry Crompton was performing a lively polka. The girl in his arms had frizzy sandy hair and a virulent pink mask.

“That’s not Lady Cecily,” said the marquess.

“None other,” said Stuffy. “And she ought to wear a mask the whole time—and a gag—if you ask me.”

The marquess waited impatiently until the polka was finished. He approached the girl in the pink mask. “Lady Cecily,” he said hesitantly. “May I have this dance?”

“Oooh!
Yeth!
” said Lady Cecily. “Very few people have asked me to danth,” she confided, “and
I
think its rotten of them, cos it’s
my
ball!”

Bewildered, he took her in his arms for the waltz. She concentrated on her steps, counting to three in a loud voice, occasionally crunching down on his foot and then saying “Sowwy,” bursting into peals of shrill laughter.

He guided her carefully behind a bank of hothouse flowers. “What are we doing heah?” said Lady Cecily, giggling. “Do you want to kith me?”

“No,” he said, removing his mask. “I just want you to remove your mask a minute.”

“You
do
want to kith me. Wicked man!”

With many titters and giggles, she removed her mask. Well, handsome is as handsome does, and we can’t all be pretty, but there is something rather infuriating when a really plain girl thinks she is a mixture of Venus, Cleopatra, and Lillie Langtry. Little, pale piggy eyes with white lashes ogled up at him, great rabbit teeth sprouted out from between thin lips, and, under the piled-up fuzz of her sandy hair, her ears stuck out like jug handles. “The twouble is,” said Lady Cecily, “I’m iwwesistible!”

“Quite,” said the marquess hurriedly. “Oh,
please
put your mask on again, Lady Cecily,” he added with such urgency that she began to pout horribly.

“My dear Seudenham,” said an acid voice in his ear. “What are you doing with my little Cecily?”

He turned around. Bosom heaving, the Countess of Hammering stood glaring at him awfully.

The marquess opened his mouth to explain about the fake Lady Cecily and closed it again. “I don’t know,” he said, and before either ward or countess could reply, he strode away across the polished ballroom floor.

He refused to think. His mind was a numb blank. He ordered his carriage and stood impatiently on the red-carpeted steps under the striped awning, waiting for it to be brought around. It had started to snow again, great white flakes drifting past the globes of gaslight from the streetlamps. “She should have come on the hunt,” he thought suddenly. “It didn’t snow on Saturday.” And then his mind went blank again.

It was only when he walked into his town house and into his small sitting room and looked around at the bright flowers and new curtains and crackling fire that he realized that in some mad way he had dreamed of bringing her back with him. If she had been there, which she had not.

For whoever she was, she was not Lady Cecily Trevelyn. She was a liar and an imposter, and he had told her he could abide neither. So he would never see her again.

Which was just as well.

Wasn’t it?…

Sally sat in a first-class compartment, waiting for the train to Bath to leave the station. She was dressed as Aunt Mabel once more. Mr. Barton’s instructions had been short and precise after he had read the letter from the duchess, threatening to visit Aunt Mabel’s sickbed. Sally was to return to Banjahar and rid herself of the duchess once and for all, and Mr. Barton did not care how she did it.

At first Sally had protested, but Mr. Barton had held firm. She was by now too valuable an asset to risk exposure. Sally had thought of little else but the marquess since she had returned to London, but with new maturity she felt sure that so long as she did not see him again, she would manage to get over him, or rather not suffer the longing and hurt with such intensity. Time, it is said, cures all, and Sally was prepared to grit her teeth and give it a lot of time. But now she would shortly be seeing him again.

She had the compartment to herself. The train was about to leave any minute. Sally decided to indulge in her latest terrible vice. She opened her reticule cautiously and extracted a box of Turkish cigarettes. She had just lit one and was relaxing in her corner when the guard outside on the platform blew his whistle, and at the same time the compartment door was wrenched open and the Marquess of Seudenham tumbled in.

He threw his portmanteau on the rack and turned and smiled down at the old lady in the corner, who was staring up at him through a cloud of smoke.

“Aunt Mabel!” he exclaimed in surprise.

Sally nervously stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray, burning her gloves in the process, and smiled weakly back. “My nerves, my lord,” she said, much flustered. Sally felt sure that little old ladies did not smoke cigarettes.

He stood looking down at her thoughtfully for what seemed a very long time, and Sally dropped her eyes. Then he sank into the corner seat opposite. Sally became aware that the train had left the station.

“So you are going to Banjahar,” he said lightly. “Good. We all need your advice.”

“I am going for the last time, my lord,” said Sally. “It is really most inconvenient.”

“Especially when you have been ill,” he said with warm sympathy. “You should not let Mother bully you. She doesn’t really need you for anything now. By the way, Miss Wyndham and Peter are engaged.”

“Splendid!” said Sally without much enthusiasm. What was Hecuba to her or she to Hecuba? How could she share in Miss Wyndham’s joy when her own heart was breaking? “And what about you, my lord?” she could not resist asking.

“Ah! That is a painful story. I am in love with an adventuress.”

“Oh!”

“Is that all you have to say, wise Aunt Mabel? Oh? Yes, I met a young lady at the ball who pretended to be Lady Cecily Trevelyn. I was quite enchanted. I proposed marriage. She refused. I pursued her to London and found the real Lady Cecily was someone entirely different. I shall probably never see her again, and I’m better off without her. I don’t like liars.”

“Oh,” said Sally again in a dismal voice. After a silence punctuated by the rattling of the train wheels across the points, Sally said, “Perhaps this adventuress was not really so bad. I mean, did she steal anything?”

“No.”

“Well, then…”

“Really, Aunt Mabel, one can carry understanding too far. Perhaps she meant to steal the family jewels. What other reason could she have for impersonating Lady Cecily?”

“Perhaps she simply wanted to gate-crash the ball,” said Sally reasonably, although she did not feel at all reasonable.

Fireworks seemed to be bursting all over her brain, and for the first time in her life she wondered if she were going to faint from excess of emotion, from warring feelings of hopelessness and elation.

“She’s probably not worth bothering about,” said the marquess in a flat voice. “I must have been mad.”

He took out a copy of the
Times
, shook out its crisp pages, and began to read.

Sally stared sightlessly out at the white winter landscape. Damn and blast Aunt Mabel! She hated her. She hated the marquess for having taken all that precious love and for having thrown it so callously out of his mind.

The newspaper rattled, and one blue eye peered at her around the edge of it.

“I say, Aunt Mabel, I’m being awfully rude. Do you mind if I read the paper?”

“Not at all,” said Sally in a dull voice. “It will take your mind off kissing and canoodling.”

“Exactly.” He laughed, retreating behind the newspaper again.

He was soon engrossed in a letter from a Colonel Henry Mapleson, who was complaining about the practice in the courts of kissing the Bible and cited the case of an eminent prima donna.

The Marquess read on, but somewhere in a corner of his brain a little voice nagged, “
Kissing and canoodling.” That’s what Father said when he saw me kissing that impostor
.

He gave his head a slight shake and read the colonel’s summing up.

But it
was
strange that Aunt Mabel had used the same words. Perhaps… just perhaps… his mysterious lady had written to Aunt Mabel for advice.

He lowered the paper slowly and stared curiously at Aunt Mabel. With a great roar and whoop the train plunged into a tunnel. It was a short one, and they were soon clattering out into the blinding white of the snowy countryside, which lit up Aunt Mabel’s face in sharp relief. How young her eyes were! And how remarkably like that girl’s! He was going mad. He was being haunted. He had a feeling that the love of his life was staring at him from behind a wrinkled mask. Then the embankment reared up outside the window, casting the compartment into shadow, and Aunt Mabel was once again very much Aunt Mabel.

She lowered her eyes before his scrutiny and, opening her capacious reticule, took out a magenta-colored piece of knitting and proceeded to mangle away at it in a surprisingly inexpert manner.

“What are you knitting?” asked the marquess.

“A scarf,” said Sally, looking down hopefully at the wool in her hands and hoping that that was what it was supposed to be. Miss Frimp had insisted she take knitting with her. Just the right touch, Miss Frimp had said.

“You’re not very good at it,” observed the marquess, watching her fumbling fingers dropping stitches. “Here, let me.”

He held out his hands, and Sally stared at him, aghast. “You can’t mean it!” she said. “You surely don’t know how to knit!”

“Of course I do,” he said cheerfully. “My governess taught me when I was four, and I’ve never forgotten.” He took the mess of wool and needles from her nerveless fingers and studied it with interest.

“I sometimes wonder if you are the sweet old lady you pretend to be,” he said, unaware of Sally’s start of alarm. “All ladies are supposed to be able to knit.”

“I wish you would stop calling me old,” said Sally with some asperity. “I am not yet in my grave, and you are not exactly a spring lamb yourself.”