The LadyShip (8 page)

“Thank you, no. Perhaps a little later on.”

“Yes, to be sure—by way of celebration, eh? You know,
sir, I must tell you—and this is no reflection on my father, naturally—but I shall be glad to have you in the family, so
to speak. By jove, yes, very glad.”

“Why?”

“Why? Er, well...you are well-known as a man of dis
tinction, of taste, are you not? Not that my father isn’t, but
he’s a queer old duck, and he don’t much care about the
finer things in life. And my mother ...well, she’s a
Towne, as she keeps reminding everybody, so she’s bound to have been brought up proper and all that, but she’s more interested in Clarissa than in me. Only to be expected. Un
cle Vernon’s a Trojan, of course. If you ask me, it’s the shabbiest thing on earth that he can’t inherit the title and
really be head of the family. That would put my mother’s nose properly out of joint, of course, but...well, we need
a head of the family.”

Struggling to picture his free-spirited friend as the next Marquess of Redding, Allingham remarked that he didn’t
think Lord Vernon much coveted the honour.

“Oh, lord, I should think not!
I
wouldn’t want it, and
I guess I’d be next in line if Uncle Vernon was made marquess. But there’s no denying it’d open doors—they
wouldn’t dare condescend to me at the Pelican, for one
thing, the way they did the other day when I stopped
there.”

“The Pelican at Speenhamland?”

“No, the one at Froxfield. Made me take my dinner in the tap, and then cleared away the covers before I was finished.
Overcharged for it, too.”

“Had you been in London?” Allingham asked, suspecting
Felix to be one who allowed minor grievances to assume
disproportionate importance. He thought Felix must not
have enough to occupy him at home and wondered
vaguely what he did do.

Felix shrugged. “No, only to Reading, to look over a pair
of greys that turned out to be touched in the wind. I could
go up to town more often, I suppose, if I didn’t have to
drive up by myself every time. I do give the clubs a look-in
now and then. But I don’t find anybody I know there these days. They’re either in the army or married—the fellows I
knew at Oxford, that is—and I can’t say I fancy either of those careers myself.”

“What do you fancy?” Allingham asked.

It was to be some time later, however, before he would
discover the answer to this question, for at that moment
the salon door opened and Clarissa was revealed there in a
dramatic posture with one hand on the doorknob and the
other over her fluttering heart.

“Oh, there you are,” Felix said, rather spoiling the effect.
“You’ve kept Allingham waiting, you know.”

“Yes, and I
do
apologise most sincerely, my dear sir,”
Clarissa declaimed, gliding gracefully into the room. Disre
garding Felix for the moment, she fixed her lovely green
eyes on Allingham. “Please say you forgive me, sir—Marcus, I mean—for I feel sure you understand my—my agita
tion.”

Allingham didn’t, but he made the appropriate noises
while Clarissa shooed her brother out of the room with a
wave of the hand hidden behind her back.

Felix closed the door behind him with a last rolled-eye
glance at Allingham and the obvious feeling that Clarissa
had been behaving in an unladylike way and, far from
apologising to Allingham for it, was in all probability about
to compound her transgression. Felix was not quite certain
what this might have been, but from the implacable expression on his mother’s face when she had cornered him in the
billiard-room and ordered him to go and entertain Mr Al
lingham for ten minutes while she talked sense into his idi
otic sister, he presumed it to be a serious one.

Felix’s imagination likewise did not stretch to the ways in
which Clarissa might be courting further disaster, so that
when some time later both Miss Dudley and Mr Allingham
emerged from the salon, she smiling brightly and he look
ing relieved, Felix pushed his uneasiness into forgetfulness
and joined in the felicitations of the rest of the family.

These were so genuine, and the exclamations of admiration
for the magnificent betrothal ring Clarissa was now flashing
at everyone so heartfelt, that even Lady Alfred scarcely re
marked it when her son-in-law-to-be answered a question
about the wedding date by saying they would not set one
immediately.

“Clarissa wishes to perfect her—shall we say, plan of
campaign?—before we send the announcement to the
Ga
zette,”
he explained with an indulgent smile.

A slight frown marred Lady Alfred’s beaming countenance, and Clarissa hastened to add, “Indeed, Mama, there are so
many
considerations, are there not? Who, for exam
ple, are to be my attendants, and ought they not to be the
first to be informed? Where shall we hold the ceremony,
and who shall perform it? And who is to make my gown?
You recall, Mama, that when Alicia Tarleton announced her
engagement, she was positively
deluged
with solicitations
from mantua makers and seamstresses, and when she fi
nally chose one of them, she was not at all happy with the result. In fact—as her dearest friend, I should not say so,
but she looked positively frumpish in all that lace. Not that
Tarleton minded, I suppose, and he is so absent-minded he
never noticed that people laughed behind his back about
Alicia.”

Even Lady Alfred had some difficulty finding any point
to this speech, but the tone of it was appropriate to the
occasion, so that she allowed the matter of an announce
ment to pass for the moment. Dinner that evening was a
considerably more comfortable event than anyone had
anticipated. The ladies were particularly merry and could
swallow only the merest nibble of fricaséed chicken be
tween professions of delight at the idea of the first family
wedding since Lord and Lady Alfred’s twenty-two years before. The gentlemen were necessarily more subdued—
Allingham lapsing into the role of bashful bridegroom,
Lord Alfred given to long pauses, fork raised over his
plate, of staring bemusedly at his extraordinary family,
and Felix attending more appreciatively to his dinner
than anyone and not at all to the nonsense being spoken
by his mother and his sister.

A bottle of champagne was brought out with great cere
mony at the end of the meal to toast the happy couple.
Allingham found himself becoming more garrulous—posi
tively blithering, it seemed to him—and wondered whether
it was the weight off his mind or the wine on his brain that
was responsible for it. No one seemed to find this at all out of the way, but he was nevertheless thankful when Clarissa
declared that champagne’s invariable effect on her was to
make her sleepy. Bidding her betrothed a languorous good
night, then, she retired to her room.

Once closeted safely in this chamber, however, Clarissa
showed no inclination to go to bed and—with some diffi
culty—dismissed her maid.

“Shall I come back later, then, miss?” Peggy asked, hov
ering in the doorway.

“Yes, yes!” Clarissa said impatiently. “I’ll ring when I
want you. Now go!”

Peggy had a long wait, however, for as soon as she was
gone, Clarissa sat down at her writing-desk. Hurriedly dip
ping pen in ink, she began a letter.

“My dearest love,” she wrote, going on in a rush, “the
most
dreadful
thing has happened...”

Clarissa did not stop to think that the thing might not be
considered so dreadful by anyone else. She was not ac
quainted with Miss Elinor Bennett, and had anyone sug
gested to her that another woman might carry an unre
quited love for Marcus Allingham in her heart for years, Clarissa would have been dumbfounded by the very idea.
She
was
acquainted with Marcus’s mother, but she had
never felt on comfortable terms with her, for when
Dorothea Allingham looked at Clarissa Dudley over her
pince-nez, even Clarissa’s monumental self-esteem faltered.
Mother love was understandable, Clarissa supposed, but
even Lady Dorothea could not expect her to actually be
happy
with Marcus Allingham.

It could not in fairness be said that Clarissa had taken a
friend of many years’ standing into sudden dislike. She
had always been known for her loyalty to old friends and
for her honest, if sometimes perfunctory, kindness to all persons who did not actually stand in the way of her de
termined if undeclared plans for her own future. But Mar
cus Allingham, however inadvertently, had got in the
way.

She did not consider that one of the reasons everyone
assumed she would jump at a match with Marcus was that
she had never given any indication otherwise. To the
contrary, they had doubtless judged, along with Mr Al
lingham himself, that the week she had spent the previous spring idly contemplating an
affaire de coeur
with her neighbour—solely for lack of any other amusement
at the time—meant much more to her than it had. At the advanced age of nineteen, her past was catching up with
Clarissa Dudley.

It had been such fun to flirt with all those handsome
gentlemen the season she made her bow in London! She
had vowed to her mother in all earnestness that she had
not accepted one of the offers made to her, simply be
cause she could not make up her mind among so many.
But then last summer (after the affair under the oak tree),
Lady Alfred had advanced with her on Paris—where
Wellington’s soldiers were even more handsome and de
lightful to flirt with—with the express intention of con
tracting a brilliant alliance for Clarissa. Life had been a gay whirl of parties, outings of all kinds, and a veritable
deluge of nosegays,
billets-doux,
and languishing looks
from lovelorn gentleman admirers. It was not long, how
ever, before Clarissa discovered that one gentleman in particular—a young Guards officer—was caught up in
the same whirl. Everywhere she turned, it seemed, he was close behind her.

Had any of her other suitors been so relentless, and so
immune to snubs, she would have tired of him immedi
ately, declaring such an easy conquest to be no feat at all;
but this time—she did not know why—she felt differently.
Very shortly, she was exchanging polite conversation with
the lieutenant; then she was riding with him in the Bois de
Boulogne. Then—because she had by that time discovered
that his name was undistinguished, his family insignificant,
and his fortune nonexistent—she was meeting him secretly
in out-of-the way places at scandalous hours.

There was no denying that Clarissa found this affair
vastly entertaining—in the beginning. She fancied herself
as Juliet, as Guinevere, as any romantic heroine that sug
gested herself—for a time. At last, the game palled; she
knew herself to be genuinely in love for the first time in her
dazzling
career, and the experience was not at all what she
had anticipated. The excitement turned to anguish, the ro
mance to unhappiness. She no longer wanted a Grand
Passion, but only to be married to her quiet cavalier and to
raise his children.

In the end, the lieutenant told her to go home and wait
for him. She was to keep their secret until he could sell out
as advantageously as possible, collect what prize money he
had coming to him, and find out how matters stood with
his own family. Then he would speak to her father, as con
vincingly as he could, of his love for her. She would simply
have to be patient and trust him a little longer.

Clarissa had agreed to everything her love suggested. She
had pleaded utter exhaustion from the exigencies of her hectic life in Paris—a claim that Lady Alfred conceded,
from her daughter’s pale complexion and drooping pos
ture, to have some merit—and was taken home to recover
her health and looks in rustic seclusion at Oakwood.