The LadyShip (6 page)

At the same time, though his mother was not far wrong in saying he had fixed on Clarissa Dudley because she was the
nearest suitable bride to hand, Allingham was not so lost to the normal young man’s appreciation of feminine beauty as
to choose a wife solely for reasons of suitability. Clarissa
was an undeniably lovely child—no, she must be nineteen
now, he reminded himself, no longer a child—and he
thought she was not indifferent to him. Indeed, only last
June, under that very oak tree standing alone at the edge of
the wood, Clarissa had looked up at him with a bewitching
smile that had stirred something dormant in his heart. It was not precisely a
coup de foudre
—he recognised that
well enough—but he remembered the occasion more viv
idly than he would have supposed. He rode on to Oak
wood in much better humour.

The Dudley mansion was just that—a massive white edi
fice, not unlike a wedding cake with pillars, perpetrated in
the last century by an architect with more ambition than
talent. The colonnaded front was redeemed only by its hav
ing been stripped of its ornamental plaster-work at the or
ders of Lady Alfred Dudley (nee Helena Towne) as soon as
she had recovered from the initial shock of beholding it
upon her parents’ speculative visit to Oakwood the year be
fore her marriage—which she had very nearly not gone through with as a result.

Allingham fully expected the entire family to turn out to
greet him, since he had been rash enough to send his note
before considering this possibility; but Lady Alfred, al
though she wasted no time in the attack, had mercifully sent her husband and offspring behind the lines for the
opening skirmish.

“My
dear
Marcus!” she gushed in greeting, “do come in
and sit down with me for a little time. I am persuaded you
will desire to see Alfred as soon as possible, but a moment
to catch your breath will not come amiss, I daresay.”

Helena Dudley was a handsome, if not precisely beautiful
woman, firm of figure and erect of carriage. Her carefully
coiffed head retained a youthfully golden glow, and petitioners for her attention were favoured with a steady gaze
from her pale green eyes. She also possessed a wardrobe of
delicately gauzy gowns and a talent for striking interesting
poses in them—which were not immediately identifiable as
such but which, after they had been shifted mechanically two or three times, as in a
tableau vivant,
became unmis
takable.

When Mr Allingham was announced, Lady Alfred was
discovered in one of these attitudes, gazing contempla
tively at a portrait hanging in her blue salon, of her children
at the tender ages of six (Felix) and four (Clarissa). She greeted her visitor and slid into a gilt chair from which she
smiled languidly at Allingham, who seated himself on the
chair’s fragile-looking twin and said, “Thank you, ma’am. I
trust I find you and Lord Alfred well? Your brother-in-law,
by the way, sends his greetings.”

Helena looked justifiably as if she doubted that Lord Ver
non had done any such thing, but she nodded agreeably
and informed Allingham that he would stay to dinner. Not
knowing what other course, if any, was available to him, he
thanked her.

“Doubtless you will wish to speak with my husband long
before that,” she further informed him, smiling archly. “I
know how it is with you young men, all impatience to be
on with your love-making.”

“How do you know that?” Allingham asked, interested if
impolitic.

The question raised barely a ripple on the placid pool of
Lady Alfred’s unvarying composure, however, and she
went on to chatter inconsequentially of her daughter’s sin
gularly tedious domestic activities of late, of Felix’s ambitions as a whipster, and of Lord Alfred’s precarious state of
health due to his locking himself up in his study for hours on end.

All this appeared designed to put Allingham at his
ease and to impress him at the same time with the charm
and intelligence of the family he was about to ally himself
with. When, after twenty minutes of this treatment, Hele
na judged that he had been sufficiently primed, she an
nounced that he would like to speak to Lord Alfred now.
After sending a servant quite unnecessarily to enquire if his
lordship was available to receive Mr Allingham, Helena
then escorted Allingham to the door of her husband’s study
and left him there, with a coy smile and an encouraging pat
on the hand.

Allingham obediently knocked on the door, barely heard
a mild request from within that he enter, and did so. He
found Lord Alfred—a thinner, paler version of his robust
brother, with mild eyes that never quite focused on any
thing—seated in a chair next to the fire, a copy of the previ
ous day’s
Morning Post
in his hand. Unlike the rest of the
house, Lord Alfred’s studious retreat was cluttered, com
fortable (if somewhat dimly lighted), and functional. Lord
Alfred, less concerned with the formalities than his wife, declined to rise and idly motioned his visitor into a chair
opposite him. At least, Allingham reflected, he could sit on
this one without risking a fracture of either the chair or his
person.

“Morning...er, Allingham,” Lord Alfred greeted him,
caught only slightly unawares by this long-expected visit. “Sit down—make yourself at home. Oh, you have. Pour
yourself something, then.”

A further vague gesture indicated a small table within Al
lingham’s reach, on which rested a decanter and two
glasses. Marcus guessed that the second glass was Lord Al
fred’s notion of hospitality, and gratefully poured the first
glass for his host.

“Thank you, my boy,” Lord Alfred said, but then set his
glass down untouched to pick up his newspaper again. “I
wonder if you’ve seen this”—Lord Alfred opened his spec
tacles with one hand, adjusted them on his nose, and
peered at the fine black print—”ah, this item about old Norfolk. It seems he’s being regarded as dead already.”

“They don’t give him more than a few weeks,” Allingham said. “When I ran into Brougham, he said there’s a
movement afoot to get young Arundel-to-be to renounce
his religion in order that he may take the old duke’s seat in
Parliament.”

This opening led to a lengthy discussion of the potential
gossip from London, Lord Alfred probing his visitor for
anything he may have heard at his clubs. Lord Alfred knew
Allingham to be the sort of man who listened more than he spoke, and he had long been making use of him to provide
the interest in life that Lord Alfred was too diffident to seek out for himself—although once possessing it, he had no dif
ficulty in seeing himself as an enlightened observer, appre
ciative of affairs of state and other such weighty matters.

Allingham’s sources were not limitless, however, and the
discussion began to falter as he ran out of answers to Lord
Alfred’s seemingly endless supply of questions. During one
of these pauses, Lord Alfred removed his spectacles and peered curiously at Allingham’s cravat, as if he wondered
what it was doing there.

“About Clarissa, sir,” Allingham began, seizing the open
ing, “I imagine you know why I am here today.”

“Oh, yes—that is. Helena told me.” Lord Alfred sat back
and attempted to address this unseemly subject. “You want
to marry her, do you? Well, it’s nothing to me. I mean to say, I’ve no objection. Have you talked to the girl?”

“Not yet, sir. I thought I should mention it to you first.”

“Well, very proper—but you’ve done that now, haven’t
you? Best get it over with...er, with Clarissa, I mean. It’s not the sort of thing you want to drag out, is it? I wouldn’t.”

An unexpected, sympathetic smile appeared on Lord Al
fred’s thin lips, and for an instant his eyes met Allingham’s.

“She’s a good girl, Clarissa.”

“Yes, sir. I know she is. I’ll take good care of her.”

Since Lord Alfred had either forgotten or not been in
formed of the next stage of the manoeuvres, Allingham
took his leave before he could turn the conversation back
to matters more to his taste, and slipped out onto the landing, certain that Helena would be hovering somewhere in
the vicinity. After an hour in Lord Alfred’s ambiguous com
pany, in fact, he was not entirely reluctant to be trundled
about by the single-minded, if occasionally ruthless, Lady
Alfred.

And so it was. Helena, accustomed to her husband’s in
ability to think of or act upon the next logical move, was
waiting to escort their visitor back to the blue salon the in
stant he emerged from the study. Very shortly, therefore,
Allingham found himself on the brink of the most decisive
moment of his life, as his future bride entered the room,
gaily swinging a frivolously pretty feathered bonnet by its
ribbons.

Clarissa Dudley was a very lovely girl. She had inherited
the best features of both her parents, and although not vain,
she was well aware of her charms and knew how to use
them to best advantage. Her golden curls were dressed to just the right degree of careless precision, and her green
eyes and clear complexion benefited from a conscious regi
men of fresh air and uninterrupted sleep. Her enticingly
rounded figure was emphasised by a fetching riding dress
of green velvet, militarily trimmed with a double row of
frog fastenings down the front and a squared collar fixed by
a brooch masquerading as a campaign medal. Clarissa had
undoubtedly spent long hours that morning, as she did
every day, over her toilette; but once it had been com
pleted to her satisfaction, she had given it no further
thought. She had all the unself-conscious poise of a girl
who had been a beauty since she was let loose of her lead
ing strings to pursue whatever her fancy lighted upon.

“Why, good afternoon, Marcus!” she exclaimed, laying
the bonnet on a table. “How nice of you to come to visit.
Mama told me you had, so naturally I had to see you. I’ve
been out exercising my mare Jonquil—as you will have
guessed from my habit. Isn’t it a lovely day for a ride? Did
you come here on horseback? Oh, but where
is
Mama?”

Mama had tactfully retreated to allow Clarissa and her ar
dent suitor to hold a private conversation—but Allingham
instantly realized that Clarissa was not aware of the need for such a talk. What was more, she was evidently unaware that
he had been expected for a week. It followed, therefore— even Lord Alfred would have understood the logic—that
Clarissa had no notion of the purpose of his so-obliging
visit.

Fortunately, Clarissa dismissed her mother’s unaccount
able absence as soon as it occurred to her. Marcus Alling
ham was, after all, a neighbour and a friend of many years, and there was no need to stand on ceremony with him. Ac
cordingly, Clarissa sat down and asked him after his
mother, and whether he had sold all his spaniel bitch’s pup
pies, and if anything exciting had happened in London
when he was there. Allingham allowed himself to be wafted
along on this mild conversational breeze for a time, mean
while admiring Clarissa’s full mouth and rosy cheeks—and
wondering how he was going to raise the subject that had
brought him to be sitting there beside her.

Perhaps if Clarissa had been aware of his errand, he
would never have completed it. Forewarned, she would
also have been forearmed and would not have chattered
away so cosily with him—nor would she have let it occur
to him that marriage to this lovely, vivacious creature might
be a pleasant thing. She would be as much at home at
Brookfield as at Oakwood, he told himself; she would
make no unreasonable demands on him as long as he per
mitted her a generous allowance and frequent jaunts to her
London modiste—and she would be an undeniably decora
tive addition to his household.

Taking heart at the very
sight of her, in fact, Allingham ventured to interrupt Claris
sa’s artless discourse on the dearth of local assemblies at
this season of the year to raise the subject that preoccupied him.