Miss Determined, page 31
“A costume,” Phillip said, “and ‘the apparel oft proclaims the man.””
He’d hoped to lighten the moment, but Miss Brompton’s gaze narrowed. “You’ve read Shakespeare?”
“I’m familiar with the plays and sonnets.” How else was a country lad to endure English winters? “The Bard was paraphrasing Erasmus, vestis virum facit, who was doubtless paraphrasing the ancients. I had an adequate basic education, Miss Brompton, though classical literature never interested me half so much as farming.”
“Farming is good,” she said. “Gentlemen who take care of their acres are well received, but don’t prose on about it.”
They were back on safer footing, which disappointed Phillip inordinately, though his call had been, on the whole, successful.
“I should be going, shouldn’t I? I’ve had my polite two cups plus one, and I must not overstay my welcome.” He rose rather than put her through the effort of a polite demurral.
“Offer me your hand,” she said, gazing up at him. “Assist me to rise.”
Phillip stuck out his paw. “You are marvelously vital, fit, lithe, in the very pink and capable of standing without assistance, and yet, I have been remiss…”
She took his hand and stood, and shifted her grip to lace her arm through his. “Some women do need assistance to rise. Their apparel is confining, they are weary, their high-heeled slippers render their balance questionable. A gentleman offers.”
“You mean they’ve been laced too tightly. Foolishness that. Gratuitous torment. If a lady enjoys robust dimensions, then let her dress for her own comfort and to blazes with La Belle Ass-Whatever.”
He’d barely recognized the French words when Miss Brompton had uttered them earlier, and he’d defaulted to his own pronunciation.
The result had been La Belly Ass Whatever. Close enough.
Miss Brompton dropped his arm. She stared at his boots, which were the work of old George Deevers, not to be confused with his parent, Grandpa Deevers.
Her shoulders twitched, and Phillip feared the tea might have disagreed with her. His worry was relieved in the next moment, when a peal of laughter rang out over the music room, followed by a hoot and more laughter.
“Repeat after me,” Miss Brompton said, when her merriment had subsided. “La Belle Assemblée. Never that other thing. The whole French language is cowering in terror at your pronunciation.”
Phillip composed his features into his best imitation of the marquess on his dignity. “La Belle Assemblée.”
“You’re a good mimic. That will come in handy.” She tried for a return to her usual starch and decorum, but the citadel had been breached, and Phillip had peered over the walls.
Hecate Brompton was beautiful when she was on her dignity, but she was captivating when her crown slipped. Phillip resolved to compensate his new finishing governess for the Sisyphean labor of turning him into a lordling by giving that crown the occasion friendly nudge.
Or maybe frequent nudges. The least he could do for her, being a gentleman at heart and all.
* * *
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A Gentleman Fallen on Hard Times—Excerpt
Chapter One
Society addresses me as Lord Julian Caldicott, though as that aristocratic curiosity, a legitimate bastard, I bear no blood relation to Claudius, the late Duke of Waltham. Toward the end of His Grace’s life, when he and I were both using canes as more than fashionable accessories, we got on tolerably well.
Not so in earlier years, though let it be said both parties as well as my mother had a hand in instigating skirmishes.
I survived those battles and even weathered Waterloo in better shape than many. The worst blows to my body and spirit were dealt long before Wellington’s great victory, when I’d been held as a prisoner of war by the French.
The guns have gone silent, the ghosts have not. The best medicine for me of late is solitude and quiet. I was thus starting my day with an ancient Sumerian text involving agrarian metaphors and procreation when Lady Ophelia Oliphant sailed into my study like a seventy-four gunner bearing down on the French line.
“Julian, do instruct your butler that his harrumphing and stodging are pointless. I call only when you are on the premises, and his posturing will not serve.”
“I am at home because you pounce at an indecently early hour, Godmama. Good morning to you.” I drew a blank page over my translation—Godmama could read upside down and, I am convinced, with her eyes closed—and came around the desk to kiss her ladyship’s proffered cheek. She smelled of bourbon roses and mischief, and in my youth, she’d been one of my favorite people.
Her ladyship had known considerable sorrow, burying two husbands, a son, and a daughter, the latter two in their early childhoods. She banished life’s woes with a determination I envied, except when she aimed her schemes at me. Since I’d returned from the battlefields, she’d left me mostly in peace, though the look in her gimlet blue eyes said my reprieve was at an end.
“How can it be a good morning,” she began, “when you look like a death’s head on a mop stick and your hair needs a trim? Young men today might as well be die-away schoolgirls for all they primp, lisp, and sigh. Back in my day, men could wear the most elegant fashions and still comport themselves like men. You lot, with your scientific pugilism and Hungary water, make me bilious.”
“The only pugilism I engage in of late is verbal, dear lady, and never a drop of Hungary water has touched my manly person. Shall I ring for a tray, or will you swan out the door before my poor, stodging Harris can heed my summons?”
“You wish.” She settled onto the sofa, her presence a contrast to the masculine appointments and closed curtains of my study. Godmama had been a beauty, to hear her tell it, and my mother—who would argue with the Almighty over the ideal order of the Commandments—did not contradict her. The former beauty still indulged in every fashionable whim her heart desired or her modistes suggested.
She donned pale silk when sprigged muslin would have done nicely, and she wore jewels during daylight hours. Her slippers, gloves, and reticules were exquisitely embroidered and usually all of a piece—today’s theme was roses and gold. No grand diva ever assembled her stage appearance as carefully as Godmama put herself together simply to disturb my solitude on a Tuesday morning.
My mother muttered about Lady Ophelia’s flamboyant style, but I was nobody to begrudge Godmama her crotchets. One coped with grief as best one could, as I, half of England, and much of the Continent had occasion to know.
“Cease pacing about, dear boy.” Her ladyship patted the place beside her. “I come to you in my hour of need, and you must not disappoint me.”
I settled a good two feet away from her ladyship. I wasn’t keen on anybody making free with my person, and Godmama was extravagantly affectionate. I had a valet. Sterling tended to my clothing, and I tended to… me. I was working up to allowing him to trim my hair, but until that day, an old-fashioned queue served well enough.
Though I have yet to obtain the thirtieth year of my age, my hair is snow white, a gift from my French captors. I owe the French army for my weak eyes, as well. My vision is adequate, but strong sunlight, London’s relentless coal smoke, or simple fatigue can cause my eyes to sting and water. Tinted spectacles help, though they add to the eccentricity of my appearance.
To my dismay, my looks render me far too appealing to frisky dowagers. Lady Ophelia likely found my situation hilarious.
“I have disappointed you any number of times, my lady. I’m sure you’ll weather another blow if need be, stalwart that you are.”
Before I’d gone for a soldier, she would have countered with a witty retort about her fortitude being the result of the thankless job of godparenting me, but now she frowned, glanced at the clock, and held her silence.
“What brings you to my door, my lady?”
For all her imperiousness, Godmama could be bashful. On behalf of others, she blew at gale force on the least provocation. When it came to her own needs, she was the veriest zephyr, though I suspected the contrast was calculated.
“The Season is ending.”
I refrained from appending a heartfelt thank God to her observation. “Will you join Mama for a respite by the sea?”
“Her Grace might find a respite by the sea. I find a lot of aging gossips. I’m off to Betty Longacre’s house party. Her darling girl failed to snag a husband, so Betty is compelled to take extraordinary measures. The chit goes on well enough, but she’s overshadowed by all those diamonds and heiresses and originals.”
Betty Longacre—Viscountess Longacre, in point of fact—was about ten years my senior. That she had a daughter old enough to be presented came as an unpleasant shock.
“What has any of this to do with me?” I asked. “I am firmly indifferent to the concept of matrimony, and even my mother has accepted that I will not be moved from that opinion.”
“You are an idiot. Your mother has other children to manage, and thus it falls to me to chide you for the error of your ways.”
I rose, a spike of disproportionate annoyance threatening to rob me of my manners. “Chide away, but your efforts will be in vain. We both know that I am not fit for matrimony, much less fatherhood, and there’s an end to it.”
I expected Lady Ophelia to fly at me, wielding eternal verities, settled law, and scriptural quotation at my preference for bachelorhood. Godmama remained brooding on my favorite napping sofa, confirming that even she conceded my unfitness for family life.
Her relative meekness came as a disappointment and a relief.
“I ask nothing so tedious as matrimony of you,” she said.
“Perhaps you ask me to make up the numbers at this house party, to lend whatever cachet a ducal heir has to the gathering. Thank you, no.”
I managed to make the refusal diffident rather than rude, and now Lady Ophelia did rise, though she paced before the hearth in a manner calculated to make my heart sink. This, too, was evidence of the damage done to me during the war, and of Lady Ophelia’s shrewdness. She’d noted my reluctance to sit near her, and I wished she hadn’t.
I was improving in many regards, though the pace of my recuperation was glacial.
“One does not wish to be insulting,” she said, “but I assisted Betty with the house-party guest list. The numbers match quite well, thank you, and if we allowed a ducal spare to lurk among the bachelors, the other fellows would all hang back, assuming you had the post position in hand. All I ask is that you escort me down to Makepeace. Maria Cleary will be among the guests, and we were bosom bows once upon a naughty time. I have not seen Maria for eons.”
As best I recalled, the Longacre family seat was a reasonable day’s travel from Town in the direction of the Kentish coast.
“Since when do you need an escort, Godmama? Any highwayman who accosts your coach would get the worst of the encounter. You’d scold him into submission and demand his horse for your troubles.” Or she’d brandish her peashooter at his baubles.
“You don’t get out much,” Lady Ophelia said, “so I forgive you for ignoring the fact that former soldiers are swarming the countryside. They can’t find honest work, many of them have come home to families incapable of supporting them in the shires, and the dratted Corn Laws have driven the cost of bread to the heavens. We all thought we wanted peace, but we didn’t plan for the reality. Thanks to the great and greedy men charged with ordering the nation’s fate, English highways are unsafe these days.”
During the Season, I did not get out socially at all if I could manage it, but I read the papers. I corresponded with some of my fellow former officers and a few who still held their commissions. I paid courtesy calls on the widows of my late comrades and the families of fallen subordinates—those who would admit me.
I had a platoon of sisters, cousins, and in-laws who were very active in Society and who made their duty visits to me.
Godmama had a point. The peace following Waterloo was creating violent upheaval in Merry Olde England, for the reasons she’d alluded to. Napoleon had claimed to rule by conquest, and the British economy had thrived on war as well. Without the French threatening our southern coast, the great military appetite for everything—from canvas to cooking pots, wool to weapons, chickens to chaplains—had dried up in the course of a year.
Britain had emerged victorious from two decades of war appended to a century of war, only to find herself fantastically in debt and ruled by a buffoon serving as regent for a mad man. The populace that had made endless sacrifices in the name of patriotism was now deeply discontent for many of the same reasons that had fueled revolution in France.
The rich had grown very rich, while the poor had grown very numerous. The government’s response was to counter potential upheaval with real oppression, which, of course, contributed to greater unrest.
The Corsican was doubtless enjoying a good laugh over the whole business, while I… I did not bother my pretty head with national affairs, though I did bear an inconvenient fondness for my godmother.
“I shall see you safely to Makepeace,” I said, “then take my leave of you. You can travel back to Town in company with some of the other guests who will doubtless return this direction.”
She pushed aside a curtain to let in a shaft of morning sun. Had she taken a knife to my eyes, the result would have been less painful.
“Your staff is remiss, Julian. These windows require a thorough scrubbing. If your windows are this filthy as summer approaches, I shudder to contemplate their condition in winter.”
I rooted about in my desk drawer for my blue-tinted spectacles while all manner of profanity begged for expression.
“I shall pass your insult along to my housekeeper. She will delight to know that you, she, Harris, Sterling, and my neighbors on all sides are in agreement.”
“The light hurts your eyes,” Lady Ophelia said. “That’s why you lurk like a prisoner in an oubliette, isn’t it? Your mother hasn’t said anything about you having vision problems.”
Because Mama did not know my eyesight was in any way impaired. Only my older brother knew, and as the ducal heir, Arthur had been consuming discretion before he’d first thrust a spoon into runny porridge. Arthur was the family strategist, also our patriarch, though he was barely six years my senior.
“The physicians assure me the impairment to my eyes is temporary. I see well enough. Bright light is painful, though, hence the tinted spectacles.”
She bustled toward me, and I steeled myself to endure a hug, but her ladyship merely patted my cheek with a gloved hand.
“Your secrets have always been safe with me, Julian. That hasn’t changed, and it never will. We leave on Thursday, and I will hope for cloudy weather. We can keep the shades down, though you shall not smoke in my traveling coach.”
“I don’t smoke anywhere.”
She collected her reticule, scowled at my window, and scowled at me. “You used to smoke. All young men do.”
“I used to do a lot of things. I’ll be on your doorstep by eight of the clock.”
Thus did I embark on a journey that would involve far more than a jaunt to the Kentish countryside and test much besides my ability to endure bright sunshine.
* * *
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Grace Burrowes, Miss Determined
