The Original Miss Honeyford (2 page)

Honey winced at that “good chap,” forgetting that before this evening she would have considered it a very fine compliment. “I hope Miss Wetherall has an informed mind to match her beauty,” said Honey.

“Oh, Miss Wetherall is extremely clever,” said the captain. “She drew a picture of Lady Jenkins’ cocker spaniel and it was that dog to the life. She embroiders exquisitely, and her voice! She sings like an angel.”

Honey felt at a loss. She wanted to jump up and down, and say, “Look at me!
I’m
a woman.”

“Does Miss Wetherall hunt?” she asked desperately.

“Gad, no! Too much of a lady to do that. I shudder to think of such a delicate angel riding out with us coarse fellows. It don’t bear thinking of.”

“I
hunt, as you very well know, Captain Jocelyn,” said Honey crossly.

He appeared to see her for the first time that evening. As he glanced at her, Honey became aware again of the dowdiness of her gown, and put a nervous hand up to her cropped curls.

“So you do,” he said indulgently, “but one don’t think of
you
as a lady, Miss Honeyford. I mean to say, don’t notice the difference on the hunting field. Lord, it made me laugh t’other day when old Harry Blenkinsop said you swore worse than his head groom.” Captain Jocelyn laughed heartily.

Honey felt herself diminishing in size before his loud laughter. She felt if she became any smaller then she might disappear altogether.

The supper room was very hot and very scented. The other ladies were wearing the thinnest of muslins. Honey’s gown felt scratchy and prickly against her skin.

After supper was finally over, Honey looked to her father, hoping he would say it was time to go home. But Mrs. Wetherall announced that the chairs had been cleared in the music room and that they were going to have an impromptu dance. Everyone, except Honey, hailed the news with delight. Gloomily, she watched Captain Jocelyn dashing off without even a fairwell to see if he could persuade Amy to dance with him.

Bleakly, Honey sat with the dowagers in the music room while couples began to form sets for a country dance. She felt very much the wallflower and moved away to sit behind a pillar.

“I’d better find someone to dance with,” came a man’s voice from the other side of the pillar. “John Anderson,” thought Honey. John and she were great friends. If she stood up and walked around the pillar, surely he would ask her to dance.

“Too late to get the fair Amy,” said another voice. “I saw your friend Miss Honeyford a moment ago. Why not ask her?”

A tremulous smile on her lips, Honey half rose from her seat. “Oh, not
her,”
said Mr. Anderson with dreadful clarity. “Fact is, she goes on like a man and, damme, she would probably
lead
. Good sort but hardly… well,
you
know.”

Their voices faded as they moved away.

Honey sat like a stone. She
hated
Amy Wetherall. These men had been her friends. She had enjoyed the warmth of their companionship. Now Amy, with her silly, flirty ways, had spoiled it all.

The music room disappeared momentarily in a blur of tears. Then Honey blinked them furiously away. Amy would shortly be leaving for London and then things could return to normal again. Would her father never come? It was unlike him to want to stay anywhere so late. But it was two in the morning before Honey was able to climb up into her father’s carriage and take the reins.

Sir Edmund seemed abstracted and did not say anything on the road home.

All Honey wanted to do was to put her aching, humiliated head down on the pillow and go to sleep. But no sooner were they indoors than Sir Edmund said, “I would like to talk to you about something important, Honoria, before you go to bed.”

Honey’s heart sank. He only used her proper name when he was worried or angry.

Then she brightened a little. To sit in front of the fire and drink brandy and smoke cheroots would take some of the bad taste of the evening out of her mouth.

But the first sign that tonight was not going to be as other nights started when Sir Edmund asked for the tea tray to be sent into the drawing room instead of the brandy decanter. He waited, motioning Honey to silence, until tea was served.

He looked at her long and gravely, and then he said, “I have made a sad mull of your upbringing. I would that your dear mama were alive.”

“I have no complaints, Papa,” said Honey, alarmed and anxious.

“No? Well, more’s the pity. It should have been you tonight with all the gentlemen clustering around. It broke my heart to see you look… such a…
frump.”

“Papa!”

“Yes, a frump, Honoria. I was ashamed enough of my own appearance. We have rubbed along together comfortably like two old bachelors, so comfortably that I had begun to forget you were a young lady of marriageable years.”

“But there is nothing wrong with our life,” said Honey. “We are happy.”

“There’s no going back. I thank the good Lord that you are young enough, and what has been done can be undone. You must be trained to become a lady, Honey, a lady of whom I can be proud.”

“It’s that wretched Amy,” said Honey. “She has ruined everything. You were proud of me once.”

“I still am, in a way. No, do not blame Miss Wetherall. One day you will thank her for raising the shutters from my eyes. Do you remember your aunt, your mother’s eldest sister, Lady Canon?”

“Aunt Elizabeth. Yes, vaguely.”

“Last year she wrote to me offering to be your chaperone during the London Season. I refused, saying you were too young, but, in truth, I wanted to keep you by me. This very night I am going to write to Lady Canon to say you will be traveling to London to join her.”

“I cannot leave here,” said Honey, beginning to cry. “Amy will be leaving soon and then we can be comfortable again.”

“I can never be comfortable until I see you married to a good man who will appreciate your fine qualities.”

“But marriage! You have encouraged me to have an independent mind, to think for myself. Marriage means being a slave, tied at home, a lifetime of childbirth and illness!”

“Hush, child, you will come to long for marriage once you are away from my crude influence. It is no use crying, my child. My mind is made up.”

“I shall go to London if you wish, Papa,” said Honey, drying her tears. “But nothing, and no one, is going to turn me into a simpering, posturing miss like Amy Wetherall.”

“I think love might do what I have failed to do,” said Sir Edmund.

“Love! I will never love anyone, if by love you mean romantic love. It demeans a woman and turns her into a groveling lapdog, panting for the sound of the master’s footstep.”

“We’ll see,” sighed Sir Edmund. “Now leave me.”

By the time Honey awoke the next morning, she had managed to convince herself that her father had had a kind of brainstorm.

And it did seem during the following week as if Sir Edmund had forgotten about the whole thing. But the young men who used to call to chat with Honey and Sir Edmund were conspicuously absent.

Honey decided at the end of the week to go for a long country walk to release the nervous energy which had plagued her since the Wetherall’s party. She crammed a depressing beaver hat down on her curls and shrugged herself into her garrick, quite forgetting that she had sworn never to wear it again.

After she had walked several miles, she began to feel more relaxed and cheerful. She walked through the town, stopping to chat with various townspeople, and then, almost despite herself, she made her way out of the far end of the town toward where the Wetheralls lived.

“I am being very silly,” she chided herself. “The gentlemen must be engaged in other pursuits, which is why they have been absent. They cannot be spending all of their time
spooning
Miss Wetherall.”

As she rounded a bend in the road, the entrance to the Wetherall house was in front of her and there was a great commotion outside on the road as a carriage drew out. Every eligible man in the county was clustered around the gates. Amy Wetherall was leaving for London.

They were laughing and holding up gaily wrapped packages and flowers. The coach stopped and Amy stepped down into the roadway to receive her farewell presents.

Despite the chill of the day, she was wearing a round dress of fine French cambric under a pelisse of amber-shot sarcenet, ornamented with blue satin ribbons. Her Oatlands hat, which matched the pelisse, was tied with a checkered ribbon of blue on white and was surmounted with a bunch of tuberoses. Morocco shoes of light blue peeped out from below the fashionably short hemline. Long Limerick gloves were drawn up her arms to above the elbow, and her glossy brown curls were dressed forward on her forehead.

Honey turned and walked away quickly. She had long held the view that a lady should dress for comfort instead of being a hostage to fashion. But her own clothes now seemed simply eccentric. The gown she had worn to the musicale had been hot and scratchy. How much more sensible had been the loose, light muslins of the other female guests.

But by the time she returned home her spirits were quite restored. With Amy gone, life would return to its usual pleasant pattern.

The house looked dark and shabby. Why had she never noticed that before? Stuffed foxes glared down from glass cases in the hall and a huge stuffed pike was set over the fireplace. A wind had got up and moaned dismally in the eaves.

She saw for the first time what the young men of the district must have seen—this odd, dark, gloomy house with its frumpish daughter. She had a picture of the Wetherall’s place, bright with flowers and candles, and Amy, charming and flirting, every movement delicate and studied.

The footman, George, who had just opened the door into the hall from the nether regions, looked more like a poacher than a footman. His livery started off well above the waistline, being of faded claret laced with silver, but from the waist down, he was dressed in stained moleskin breeches and a pair of Sir Edmund’s old hunting boots.

“Master wants to see you in the library, Miss Honoria,” he said.

Honey let him help her out of her garrick and then she went into the library where her father sat before a small, smoking fire. He had a letter in his hand.

“Sit down, Honoria,” he said, and Honey’s spirits plummeted at the sound of that “Honoria.”

“I sent an express to Lady Canon, and she has done me the courtesy to reply by the same. She says she will be delighted to take you in hand as soon as possible. I told her in my letter that I would be sending funds so that you may have a grand London wardrobe.”

“Oh,
need
I go, Papa? If I promise to go next year….”

“There is a mercenary side to all of this,” sighed Sir Edmund. “The truth is, I do not know how to manage the land to make a profit. These valuable documents called leases are binding on the landlord, but wholly inoperative on the tenant. Because the tenant farmers do not know how to manage the land either, and scorn all new improvements, they end up paying me half the rent they owed to my father. I am afraid the reputed honesty of the British farmer is a mere fiction. When I try to find what they have in pocket, they declare their capital is someone else’s—their aunt’s, uncle’s or grandmother’s—and so the rents stay very low. The rent once put down is very difficult to get up again when they continue to plead poverty, and my agent, John Humphries, is too lazy and easy-going.

“It would help to have another man in the family, a son-in-law. To put it bluntly, a son-in-law with money.”

“But you should have told me this before,” wailed Honey, aghast.
“I
could have studied agriculture and learned all the new improvements.”

Sir Edmund sadly shook his head. “The farmers and John Humphries will not take orders from a mere girl.”

“I
hate
being a girl,” said Honey passionately. “I wish I had been born a boy.”

“Your odd upbringing makes you think so,” said Sir Edmund. “Honey, do not turn into a country bumpkin.”

“Papa,” said Honey, blushing. “You were wont to say I had a fine mind.”

“And so you have, my child, which is why Lady Canon should find you teachable.”

“But anyone can learn what girls like Amy Wetherall learn—to play, draw, sing, dance, make wax flowers, bead stands, do decorative gilding and crochet work. And what good is that? A man cannot profit by a woman who can only bead slippers.”

“Nor can he profit by a young girl who knows Greek and Latin,” said Sir Edmund dryly. “In your mother’s day, any young girl was expected to know as much about housewifery as the servants. But you have not even been trained in that. Honey, it is a woman’s role in life to marry and bear children.”

“Unless she is lucky,” said Honey, jumping to her feet and beginning to pace up and down. “I
despise
young ladies like Amy Wetherall.”

“Odso? Then why so jealous of her?”

“
I
! Jealous? Of that… that… posturing, simpering miss?”

“Yes, jealous. Jealousy is the one character defect that everyone claims everyone else has except themselves. There is no need to become a simpering miss, and the man who would want a wife like that is not the son-in-law for me.”

“I am being sent off to the Marriage Mart like a cow!”

“Like a very lucky young girl. Have you not passed by that vast new edifice in Kelidon that they nickname the Bastille? That, my dear, is the workhouse. Think of the young women in
there
before you start sulking over fine balls and fine company.”

Tears sprang to Honey’s eyes. “You are harsh, Papa.”

“I am being deliberately harsh so that you will take your leave with better grace. For you leave tomorrow.”

“I have made no preparation. I
cannot
leave tomorrow.”

“But I have. You have little to pack since you have nothing that is suitable. The only thing that concerns me is that I have not been able to find a woman in the town who could act as a lady’s maid.”

“I have never had a maid. I do not need one.”

“You will have two grooms and the coachman. But it is not fitting for a young lady of Quality to stay at a posting house without a female companion.”