“I’m not at all surprised that Miss Westbrook should have been invited.” Miss Smith had called on her own today, Mrs. Smith being indisposed by headache. On the opposite sofa she sat very straight, hands clasped in her lap, clearly taken aback by the countess’s remarks. “We all had such a pleasant time at supper.” She threw a look to Kate, who’d taken a seat as near as she could to the dowager and had been reading to her from an Ackermann’s while Lady Harringdon inspected the invitation. “I could tell you made a good impression on Lady Cathcart, and certainly on Lord Cathcart. I heard him remarking to his wife on your delightful manners.”
Kate’s heart warmed at the loyal kindness of Miss Smith, at Lord Cathcart’s compliment, at his and his wife’s generosity in inviting her to their ball; even at her aunt’s befuddled suspicion of everyone’s motives. The Harringdon House parlor made an altogether pleasant place to be today. She’d had to be presented to the dowager all over again, but her grandmother had twice remarked on her beauty and seemed to be enjoying the story she was reading aloud.
“You’re a young, unmarried lady, Miss Smith, so I shall forgive a bit of ignorance.” Lady Harringdon gave one last look to Kate’s invitation, front and back. “But generally, when a gentleman remarks to his wife on the delightful manners of a beautiful girl with whom he danced at that evening’s party, she does not respond by distinguishing that beautiful girl with an invitation to her own social event.” With a flourish she set the invitations aside. “However, we shan’t worry that Lord Cathcart harbors any sinister designs upon Miss Westbrook, as he prides himself so on his husbandly constancy.”
“Do you recommend I accept the invitation, then?” She had every intention on earth of going to that ball, but a show of deference to her aunt’s opinion could only be for the good. “I’d hate to be a cause of embarrassment to Lady Cathcart.”
“By all means you must accept.” The countess took up her fan, which had dangled from her wrist while she’d studied the invitations, and snapped it open. “You’re not likely to ever have another such invitation, so seize it while you can, I say. Perhaps Lord and Lady Cathcart will learn they must review their guest lists together, to avoid any such mistakes in future.”
“I still think it probable the invitation is entirely deliberate.” What a good, noble-natured girl Miss Smith was, to dare Lady Harringdon’s disapproval by making this defense. “The viscount knew Miss Westbrook was a lady’s companion, and still invited her to his supper table. Why shouldn’t the viscountess have known, and still chosen to invite her to this ball?”
“I seem to have lost the thread.” The dowager Lady Harringdon spoke up, turning to Kate. “Is Cassandra going to a ball?” Cassandra was a lady in the Ackermann’s story.
“No, my lady, I fear it’s we who’ve wandered from the subject. I’ll return to Cassandra now, if I may.” She raised her eyebrows at her aunt, for permission.
Lady Harringdon nodded, with a smile of such approval as made Kate feel incandescent.
She read on about Cassandra, and hadn’t quite finished the story when Lord Harringdon and the footman arrived to help the dowager to her room. The countess said they must come back in a very few minutes, and the footman withdrew. The earl, though, stood just inside the door, waiting and presumably watching her read. She couldn’t see what was on his face, as she had to keep her eyes to the page. But when the time came for him and the footman to come help the dowager, he inclined his head to her and said thank you.
The small courtesy filled her with that same sense of triumph her aunt’s nod and smile had roused. More than that, it stirred up a hopeful vision of the day she might sit in this parlor as an accepted member of the family, addressing the Harringdons as Aunt and Uncle and Grandmother, watching with pride and keenest satisfaction as Papa and his Westbrook relations rebuilt the bridges they’d demolished so long ago.
This was what she would have lost, if she’d been discovered in that library with Mr. Blackshear. This was why the kiss had indeed been a mistake. All her hopes depended on her marrying a man of high rank and good connections. She couldn’t allow herself to forget again, not for so much as a minute.
She walked out with Miss Smith, and as soon as the front door had closed behind them, that young lady spoke. “I don’t mean to be critical of Lady Harringdon. She’s been most attentive to my mother since we lost my father, and I’m grateful for the interest she’s shown in seeing me well settled. But I do wish she would more often choose tact over candor.”
“I don’t suppose she’s ever had to learn tact.” She liked Lady Harringdon, blunt manners and all, but she could certainly sympathize with Miss Smith. “And I don’t think she truly meant to call you ignorant. Only to say that younger women don’t know as much about marriage as do their elders.”
“Oh, I didn’t think anything of that remark. What disturbs me is her carelessness in speaking to you. Was it really necessary for her to say that your invitation must have been a prank by the viscount, that you’re not likely ever to have another, and that Lady Cathcart is mistaken in granting you the consequence suited to an earl’s near relation?” She knew, then, that Lord Harringdon was Kate’s uncle.
“You’re kind to take my part.” They were walking up the square, in a northwest direction, and for a moment she kept her eyes lowered to the stones at their feet. “I don’t mind, though, because she’s right about the unlikelihood of the invitation. There are irregularities in my family that have prevented our being recognized in society, or by our nobler relations.” She made her voice steady and smooth. She didn’t usually go about offering this information to slight acquaintances, but with her relationship to Lord Harringdon already acknowledged, she would not try to hide the facts.
“I know. My mother told me, after we’d first met you.” She halted in her progress up the street, suddenly, bringing a hand out from her ermine muff and laying it on Kate’s arm to halt her as well. “And now I shall be guilty in my own turn of excessive candor.” Equal measures of apology and unswerving resolve lit her blue eyes. “Do you have something suitable to wear to Lady Cathcart’s ball, now that you’ll be an invited guest instead of Lady Harringdon’s companion? It occurs to me you might not own a true evening gown.”
Miss Smith must have recognized the gown she wore to the Astleys’ as the same one she’d worn when first calling at Harringdon House. Kate’s pride gave an inward wince. “I haven’t. I shall have to wear the same gown I wore at Lady Astley’s rout. I’ll change the pink ribbons for a different color and see if I can’t borrow my mother’s best shawl to make it more suitable for evening.”
“Don’t do that. You can borrow one of my gowns. We’re exactly of a height, and near the same size, I think.” Miss Smith’s whole face shone with entreaty. “You could come to my house that evening, and we could go together to Berkeley Square to meet the countess, and then on to the ball. It would be a favor to me. I hate dressing for parties. It would be so much more tolerable with company.”
The more Miss Smith piled on the protestations, the more glaring the fact: this was charity. She was pitying poor Miss Westbrook who didn’t have a proper evening gown, and trying to do her a good turn.
Kate hesitated. She’d never been in the habit of accepting charity from other young ladies. Rather, she’d been the one to tell them what colors best became them and how to arrange their hair. She’d been the one whose friendship was sought after.
Yet they hadn’t been friends, really, the girls with whom she’d associated at Miss Lowell’s. At best they’d been like ladies-in-waiting, hanging on her every word of wisdom concerning the latest style of bonnet, or what novels a fashionable girl ought to read. And that had come only after a lengthy, determined campaign to make them all forget her curious parentage and see her on her own merits.
Miss Smith had glossed right over the question of parentage. In fact she’d known, even before the rout at Cranbourne House, and she’d nevertheless greeted Kate warmly and listened to her op
inions on Pride and Prejudice. Was charity such a bad thing if it came with affinity and friendly feelings?
“You’re so kind to offer. I’d like that very much.” Kate felt strange and a bit shy, saying the words, but they sounded right.
Miss Smith beamed in answer, and for all Kate’s worthy intentions she could not help the usual private observation concerning how the forehead and chin detracted from what was really a perfectly beguiling pair of eyes.
Well, she was in a position to do something about that now, wasn’t she? There was no reason the charity in a friendship must go only one way. She hooked her arm through her friend’s and started up the square again. “Have you given thought to how you might arrange your hair for the ball?” she said, and her mind was filling already with agreeable visions of scissors and comb and an artfully placed ribbon in just the right shade of blue.
“YOU MAY choose any of the gowns, as fancy strikes you, but I had a particular one in mind.” Miss Smith—or Louisa, as Kate was now to call her—bustled about her dressing room three nights later with the unstudied poise of someone entirely accustomed to having a dressing room of her own.
And a bedroom of her own, for that matter. Kate had been introduced to three charming younger Smith sisters, but they proved to have their own quarters down the hall. No trace of sisterly presence intruded, either in the neatly arranged bedroom or in this anteroom, where the dressing table sat just where Louisa wished it to be and the gowns were all pretty, festive, and free from the depressing company of any grim-colored Quakerish garments.
Granted, it would take a great deal to depress the magnificence of the gown currently offered up for her consideration. It was made of red silk, the most vibrant shade of red imaginable, with no ruffles or flounces or ribbons to take one’s attention away from the color and cut. The only decoration to speak of, if you could even count it as decoration, was a demi-train. She’d never worn a gown with a train of any kind.
She took a deep breath, clasped her greedy hands behind her back, and forced out the words courtesy demanded. “Wouldn’t you rather wear that gown yourself, and be the one to make the fine impression?”
“To be honest, it’s a bit bolder than I like. I don’t mean it’s not respectable. The neckline is entirely decent even without a chemisette. Only I didn’t realize, looking at the pattern picture and the fabric separately, quite how it would come out. It draws the eye, you see, and I prefer to not have so many eyes upon me. Whereas I expect you’re used to that condition.” She smiled, not the smallest trace of envy visible. “Do try it on, at least. If it doesn’t suit you we’ll go through these others until we find one that does.”
That settled it. If she had anything to say in the matter, Louisa would learn tonight just how enjoyable it could be to have many eyes upon her. “Thank you. I cannot imagine wanting to try on any other. But since you’ve deprived me of the pleasure of choosing by offering me a perfect gown on the first try, I insist you let me help you choose your own. And let me look at ribbons as well. I’ve been thinking since I first met you of how well your eyes would look with the right shade of blue nearby.”
The next half hour passed in all the happy industry of putting on pretty clothes—with the help of a genuine lady’s maid!—and then Kate exercised her talents in the matter of Miss Smith’s toilette. There was indeed a ribbon in a felicitous indigo shade, of a width to make it a proper hair ornament and of such length that the trailing ends would flutter when Louisa danced. Better yet, there was a gown in a similar deep blue satin, and a necklace of dark sapphires, everything conspiring to bring out the color of her eyes. Best of all, the curls, when Kate sheared a few strategic locks of hair at the front, not only disguised the proportions of the forehead but fell and twisted in rather bewitching, unruly fashion. She looked suddenly intriguing and full of mischief; a lady Romantic; Byron’s long-lost devilish younger sister.
“I’m not, though,” she said when Kate had voiced the observation. “And I’m not interested in the attentions of any gentleman who would approach me in hopes of my being wicked—in hopes of my being anything I’m not.”
“Mightn’t a gentleman approach you under that misapprehension, though, and then, after some conversation, discover he likes your true character even better?” Kate had been standing to the left, arranging a narrow lock of hair to cover one of the hairpins that secured the ribbon. The maid—who ought really to have imposed a new arrangement on Miss Smith’s hair long ago, on her own initiative—had gone off to dress Mrs. Smith, leaving them free to speak as particularly as they wished. Now Kate sent her attention to her own reflection in the mirror at the dressing table and made a minute adjustment to one of her sleeves.
The sleeves, short and gathered into puffs, sat wide as could be without falling off her shoulders. You could see almost the entire curve of shoulder into arm, echoing the curves of bosom framed and set off by the square-cut neck.
Louisa was right: it wasn’t indecent. She’d seen just as much flesh—more, in fact—exposed on a number of women at the Astleys’ rout. Still, she’d never been quite so conscious of her bosom before.
Well, she’d been fairly conscious of it in the Astleys’ library, when she’d thought Mr. Blackshear might mean to put his hands there.
Mr. Blackshear would be at the ball tonight. He’d assured Papa of that, though that conversation had taken place somewhere about the Inns of Court. He hadn’t been to the house since the day he’d been there with Lord Barclay. It felt odd to know she’d be seeing him again—and he seeing her, in such a gown.
“I suppose someone could make my acquaintance in the way you describe, but I’d prefer a gentleman who cared to know me even without being struck by my misleading looks.” Louisa picked up the scissors from the dressing table and frowned at them, turning them over in her hands. “I wish there were other ways to find a husband besides these balls and gatherings where everyone is evaluating each other with thoughts of marriage already present. If I could come to know a man as a friend, first, without worrying over whether he was a good dancer, or whether I’d chosen the gown that best became me—if we could learn the turn of each other’s minds; speak without any calculation of whether an opinion might diminish one’s appeal to the other; if I could come to admire his good qualities, and he mine, without any thought of possession, then love, if it did come, would have the most solid foundation on which to rest.”
“But … could love follow on such a beginning? Once you’d got used to thinking of him as … a brother, almost … it seems improbable you could ever be romantic about him. Or he about you.” That wasn’t how people fell in love. Indeed there’d be no falling at all in what Miss Smith described.
“I don’t know. Have you read Emma?” Her friend looked up, setting the scissors aside again. “Mr. Knightley and Emma were very much like brother and sister for most of the book—indeed they were relations of a sort, his brother having married her sister—and still they fell in love. Don’t you find that a terribly romantic idea? Love stealing in to overtake two people who’d believed they were merely friends?”
“It didn’t steal in, exactly, though. At least not for Mr. Knightley.” It seemed dreadfully important, of a sudden, that she dismantle Louisa’s contention point by point. “He’d known for years that he loved Emma. I’m not sure one can even say love stole in upon her, so much as she matured over the course of the story to recognize what had probably been in her heart all along.”
“Perhaps you’re right. But I shan’t stop wishing for a marriage in which I could know my husband had seen me first as a friend.” Louisa peered into the mirror and fussed with her forehead curls. “When the romantic feelings ebbed, then, as I gather they generally do, we would still have the friendship to sustain us.”
Kate’s agitation all drained away, and for a moment she was simply speechless. What a miserable way for a young lady to think of marriage! How could you enjoy friendship with a husband who’d fallen out of love with you? Wouldn�
��t you always feel you were picking at the stale crumbs of what had once been a banquet? Were you to stand by, perhaps, and wish him well as he took a mistress and lavished all his passion and affection on her? How could you—
She caught herself. She had no right to be appalled, she who was planning to make the loftiest match she could, without any interference from her heart. She who meant to lure a husband with her beauty, and see him shackled by marriage vows while he was still in the throes of foolish, unreasoning infatuation. He probably would take a mistress, her entrapped marquess, once the first flames of fancy had died down.
Well, she was prepared for that. She would console herself with thoughts of her sisters’ consequence, and with a costly new gown or two. But Louisa’s situation was different. She had a family of fair distinction and, by all appearances, a fine dowry. There was no reason for her to approach marriage with such pallid hopes.
Kate pulled up a chair beside her friend’s, and sat. “Romantic feelings don’t always ebb. I have reason to know. My father fell hard for my mother when he went to the theater one night and saw her on the stage. Even before they’d exchanged a word, he had it in his head to marry her. It sounds like the worst sort of youthful folly—indeed, so she told him in the beginning—but he’d made up his mind to attach her affections, and through perseverance and personal merit, he did.” The story embarrassed her, usually, with its romantic excess, even apart from the embarrassment of the social mesalliance.
Louisa, though, did seem to have a romantic streak—even if her idea of romantic ran to Emma and Mr. Knightley—and would benefit by hearing how married love could endure. And she already knew the scandalous outline of the story and had sought Kate’s society nevertheless.
She pressed on. “They’ve been married three and twenty years now, and they continue to exhibit such affection for one another as must mortify their grown-up children.” But oddly enough, having said the word, she didn’t really feel mortified at all. Rather a warm sort of pride spilled through her, at the thought that her own parents could be a beacon of encouragement to a girl who owned sapphires and lived in South Audley Street.
Cecilia Grant - [Blackshear Family 03] Page 18
