by M C Beaton
“And why should you think I would redeem the brooch for you?” he asked when she had finished.
“Because … I thought … I thought you cared for me a little,” said Fanny.
“I cared for you more than a little,” he said. “But I cannot entertain any warm affections toward a thief. And you are a thief, Miss Fanny. Mrs. Waverley is eccentric and confines you to the house. You are little better than prisoners. But what would your lot have been had she left you in the orphanage?”
Fanny hung her head.
“Exactly. With no relatives to claim you, you would at best have become a governess if you were lucky or a companion, but more likely some sort of genteel drudge. Did you write me a letter?”
“No,” said Fanny.
“Yes. I should have known. But it does not matter now. Where is this pawnbroker?”
“In Oxford Street. At the corner of North Audley.”
“And do you have the ticket?”
Fanny took a crumpled ticket out of the bodice of her gown and mutely held it out to him.
“I shall go first thing in the morning,” he said, “and my servant will bring the brooch to Mrs. Ricketts.”
“Thank you,” whispered Fanny, brokenly.
“Then if that is all, I shall take my leave.”
“You don’t understand,” said Fanny urgently, taking hold of his sleeve. “You must understand …”
He firmly disengaged the clutching little hand from his sleeve and stood up. Fanny shivered as she looked up into his cold green eyes, as cold as the Atlantic.
“Good-bye, Miss Fanny,” he said. “We shall not meet again.”
She remained seated, her head bowed. The door closed quietly, and then she could hear him mounting the area steps.
“I heard him go,” said Mrs. Ricketts, coming into the servants hall. “Going to do it, is he?”
“Yes, Mrs. Ricketts. But he has now a bottomless disgust of me. He called me a thief.” Fanny burst into tears.
“Shhh. Quietly now,” said the housekeeper. “I often think Mrs. Waverley has the right of it. Men! Wenching and carousing and boozing and getting the pox and preaching morality. Tchah!”
She put an arm about the weeping girl and helped her from the room.
***
The next day Mr. Fordyce accepted delivery of a brand new brassbound telescope mounted on a stand and had it placed at the first floor window. He put a stool in front of it and focused it on the windows of Lady Artemis’s drawing room. He knew that she had a similar telescope, but he was surprised to see her sitting peering through it. For one moment it appeared to him as if his magnified eye was staring straight into the magnified eye of Lady Artemis. He left the telescope and walked away in confusion. When a servant arrived with a note from Lady Artemis some ten minutes later, Mr. Fordyce was almost frightened to open it in case she was accusing him of spying on her, for that is what he had been doing and why he had bought the telescope in the first place. “Dear Friend,” he read, “Come Quickly. I am in sore Distress, Yrs. V.A.”
His heart beating hard, Mr. Fordyce shouted for his valet, changed into his best coat, brushed cologne on his hair and eyebrows, and hurried across the square, trying not to break into a run.
He was ushered into Lady Artemis’s drawing room. She came to meet him, both hands outstretched. “I am a monster,” she cried, and flung herself against him. Mr. Fordyce patted her shoulder and murmured soothing rubbish in her ear—she was his pet, his darling, the most beautiful woman in the world.
At last she raised a tearstained face. “How can I aid you?” asked Mr. Fordyce. “You must not cry so.”
“I am in disgrace with Lord Tredair,” said Lady Artemis. “You must help me regain his affection.”
Poor Mr. Fordyce. All in that moment, he hated his best friend with a passion.
“I will do what I can,” he said stiffly. “But surely you are mistaken.”
Lady Artemis sat down on the sofa and patted the space beside her. “Come next to me,” she said, “and I will tell you all.”
As Mr. Fordyce listened, Lady Artemis told him about how she had gossiped and ruined the Waverley girls’ reputations.
Mr. Fordyce controled his burning desire to take her in his arms and kiss her breathless. He said, “I think Mrs. Waverley meant you to spread that scurrilous gossip.”
“But why?”
“She wants to keep them all to herself. Until recently they went nowhere but round the square for walks. She hates men and despises them. Tredair looks interested in Miss Fanny, so Tredair and all other threatening men must be kept at bay.”
“But now Tredair despises me for gossiping. What am I to do?”
Mr. Fordyce thought quickly. He thought so hard and fast he could practically feel his mind jumping through hoops like those performing dogs at Astley’s Amphitheatre. If only Tredair could marry Fanny, then Tredair would no longer be a rival.
“The first thing,” he said slowly, “is to gossip about Mrs. Waverley, to ruin her reputation by putting it about she lies about her girls so as to keep the men away. Let me think … and the reason she does this is to … is to … ah, I have it! … is to keep all suitors away because although the girls are not her daughters, they are of noble birth and each holds an enormous dowry. Make her hatred of men a joke.”
Lady Artemis twisted the fringe of her stole in her fingers. “Do you think that would answer? I confess to a certain admiration for Mrs. Waverley. She talks a great deal of sense.”
“About men being dreadful beasts?”
“No-o. But about it being a man’s world and us the underdogs, the lap dogs of society, she calls us. A woman should be able to court a man, just as a man is able to court a woman.”
“But women do do that,” said Mr. Fordyce with a fond smile, “in their pretty little ways.”
“Like a dog standing on it’s hindlegs for attention,” said Lady Artemis. “Now if I were to say to you, I wish to kiss you, Mr. Fordyce, you would be alarmed and back away and put me down in your mind as a forward woman.”
“Try me,” said Mr. Fordyce.
“Very well,” said Lady Artemis, beginning to look amused. “Kiss me, Mr. Fordyce.”
She looked at him with laughter in her eyes, expecting him to be embarrassed.
He seized her in his arms and kissed her passionately, kissed her as he had dreamed of kissing her since he first set eyes on her. She let out a mumble of protest but his lips were insistant, searching, passionate, his body now pressed against her own was throbbing and pulsating. Her own body began to respond, and she kissed him languorously back. Clasped together they slowly rolled off the sofa onto the floor.
At one point Lady Artemis surfaced briefly from the sea of passion to wonder why such a normally correct and shy young man should be writhing on top of her now naked body, his own naked from the waist down, but with his coat still on, his waistcoat and his cravat as impeccable as it had been when he arrived.
At last, she lay lax and sated under him. Her hands slid over his naked bottom and she sighed. It had been so long. “We must dress,” she said. “What are you doing?”
For Mr. Fordyce was urgently tearing off the rest of his clothes. He had a neat trim muscular body, now totally naked as he bent over her again.
“Mr. Fordyce!” exclaimed Lady Artemis. “You cannot possibly … I have not had breakfast. Oh, Mr. Fordyce … !” Her voice faded away as he energetically rode her protests into extinction in an orgy of lovemaking on her drawing room carpet.
By midafternoon the happy couple were finally redressed, engaged to be married, and plotting ways to restore the Waverley girls’ reputation. Any desire for Lord Tredair had faded completely from Lady Artemis’s mind, but she still had a guilty conscience and was anxious to make amends.
“I will drive out on my calls,” she said sleepily, “and start to gossip. I suggest you do the same and start in the clubs. But I must do more. I shall then call on Mrs. Waverley again. If she thinks h
er girls’ reputation is utterly ruined, then perhaps she may take them to the theater again or some such place she considers educational.”
“My love, before I gossip, I am going to get a special license and put a notice in all the newspapers of our betrothal.”
“Not yet,” said Lady Artemis, shaking her head.
“But why?”
“She is a disciple of Mary Wollstonecraft. That woman finally got married, if you remember, and disappointed all her acolytes who felt she had betrayed them. Silly, because the wigeon was as much in thrall to any man by simply living with him and bearing his children. Let me arrange something and then we will tell the world.”
“You promise?”
“I promise,” said Lady Artemis, stretching like a cat. “Oh, I promise.”
***
But it was the next day before Lady Artemis felt strong enough to call on Mrs. Waverley. All her guilty conscience returned as she sensed the sadness in the Waverley mansion. She did not know it, but although the brooch had been returned, Felicity and Frederica were worried about Fanny who trailed about, looking half alive.
Mrs. Waverley received Lady Artemis. She was bored and was looking forward to resuming her teaching. “I myself can attend, dear Mrs. Waverley,” said Lady Artemis, “but I fear you have disgraced yourself, and I might be the only lady prepared to come here.”
“I?” said Mrs. Waverley awfully. “How so?”
“You told us of the sad background of your girls but … er … someone talked.”
“Tut tut,” said Mrs. Waverley complacently. “But why am I in disgrace?”
“Well, to be sure, society thinks you are monstrously cruel to have betrayed them so. For had you kept quiet, society would have believed them to be your daughters.”
Mrs. Waverley waved a fat hand dismissively. “No matter. We do not go out.”
Lady Artemis looked at her slyly. “Exactly,” she murmured. “The mad Mrs. Waverley.”
“Mad?”
“Oh, yes,” said Lady Artemis sweetly. “Quite, quite mad. What has she to fear, they ask. How can someone of such strong principles fear the world so much? In fact, they are now saying you lied about your girls so that they would be tied to you for life and never leave you.”
“What nonsense!”
“But, of course, if you were to give them the lie …”
“How?”
“But taking the girls about. They need not go to balls and parties. There are plenty of educational interests in London. There is the museum with the Elgin marbles.”
“I do not care what society thinks.”
“Oh, but you should,” said Lady Artemis. “No one is prepared to listen to the views of a woman they consider maliciously mad.”
“I do not believe you,” panted Mrs. Waverley.
“Then send out cards again to one of your soirées. Even your own friends will not attend.”
“Please leave me,” said Mrs. Waverley. “You are talking nonsense.”
The next day she sent out cards to her friends, Miss Pursy, Miss Baxter, and Miss Dunbar. All sent replies refusing to attend and offering no apology.
Now Mrs. Waverley had all the isolation she thought she had craved. She tried to console herself with the girls company at dinner, but Fanny was wan and silent and Felicity and Frederica quietly angry about something.
“I cannot stand this atmosphere!” Mrs. Waverley burst out at last. “Have I not given you everything? My love, my home, my riches?”
The Waverley girls remained silent.
“Speak, I command you!”
Frederica looked at her and said coldly, “You told the whole of London we were foundlings and bastards. May we know your reasons for doing so?”
“I only told someone in confidence. I did not mean any harm.”
“If you wish us to shun men,” said Frederica, still in that icy voice, “then let us have freedom of choice. You say women are little better than slaves, and yet you have bound us more into slavery than any married drudge.”
“That is not true!”
“Oh, yes it is,” cried Felicity. “What is our life to be now? You must tell everyone you lied. And then you must allow us to go out like the free women we should be. If you do not, then people will say you are a mad eccentric.”
This was exactly what Lady Artemis had said. Mrs. Waverley began to cry noisily, occasionally peering through the hands, which covered her face, in the hope of seeing any softening in the three pairs of hard eyes that looked at her.
“What am I to do?” she said at last.
“You will go about on calls,” said Frederica firmly, “and you will tell everyone that some jealous cat spread lies about us, and that we are, in fact, your real daughters. Only Lord Tredair will know that not to be the case.” She flicked a glance at Fanny. “I suggest you summon him here and tell him to keep his mouth shut.”
“I cannot do it,” said Mrs. Waverley, desperately trying to regain control. “We are happy as we are.”
“Look at us,” commanded Frederica, her voice dripping with contempt. “You have pushed us too far. We are now prepared to throw ourselves on the mercy of that orphanage, but before we do, we shall blacken your name in London so much that the mob will throw stones at your windows.”
“And,” said Felicity dreamily, “they may even drag you out in the street and stone you, too.”
“Unnatural, unfeeling monsters!” screamed Mrs. Waverley.
Fanny stood up. Of the three, she was the hardest, the most bitter. “You have until tomorrow,” she said. “And do not ever write letters and say they came from me again.”
“You have been seeing Tredair behind my back!” howled Mrs. Waverley.
“Yes, I have. But if it is any comfort to you, he despises me and does not wish to see me again.”
Silently, the Waverley girls left the room. Mrs. Waverley sobbed and yelled, occasionally tilting her head to one side to listen in the hope that just one would return to comfort her. But no one did.
Chapter Nine
Great waves of gossip about the Waverley girls pounded the shores of society. They were not bastards, they were Mrs. Waverley’s legitimate daughters. They were some noble lord’s by-blows. Mrs. Waverley had tried to glamorize herself by lying about them. They were fabulously rich and even when they sat down to breakfast, they were dripping with jewels.
Lady Artemis had a box at the opera and by nagging and manipulating, she persuaded Mrs. Waverley to accept her invitation and bring the girls along.
Mrs. Waverley was secretly eager to find out that no damage had been done. And when they reached Lady Artemis’s box, such seemed to be the case. All sorts of people crowded the box, asking for introductions. For the one piece of gossip that had really stuck, was that the Waverleys were fabulously rich, and that idea of riches drew even the highest sticklers like moths to a flame.
“I told you I should make things come right,” whispered Mrs. Waverley to Fanny after the second interval, but Fanny turned her head away and did not reply.
The earl was in the box opposite. Mr. Fordyce, who was escorting them as well as Lady Artemis, had waved to his friend several times, but the earl merely nodded and did not make any attempt to come and join them.
Lady Artemis stole anxious little glances at Fanny’s sad face. She herself was wildly happy. She no longer saw Mr. Fordyce as a rather pleasant young man of no significant income, but as a powerful Adonis. And like most people in love, she wanted everyone around her to be happy.
The Waverleys unlike everyone else, were not attending the ball that always followed the opera. Mr. Fordyce and Lady Artemis walked down the stairs with them to escort them to their carriage. They met the Earl of Tredair. He smiled warmly at Mr. Fordyce and Lady Artemis, nodded coldly to Mrs. Waverley, glanced with contempt at Fanny, who blushed miserably and looked away, and ignored the other two girls completely.
“Now I feel really wretched,” said Lady Artemis later at the ball, wondering h
ow she could ever have chased after such a cold, haughty fish as the earl. “Did you not mark the way Tredair looked at poor Fanny? I felt ready to sink. I am surprised he should be so high in the instep. He obviously still believes all that gossip about her birth. There must be something I can do.”
“Leave him to me,” said Mr. Fordyce, pressing her hand. “And I am afraid he is the one who has absolute proof that the gossip is true.”
He decided to visit the earl on the morrow and see if he could learn the reason for Tredair’s sudden disgust of Fanny.
He knew he would probably find the earl at White’s at eleven in the morning. The earl liked to settle down in the coffee room at that time while the rest of the members stayed at home and slept off the memory of their gambling losses.
The earl looked up as Mr. Fordyce approached him and smiled lazily, “How goes your pursuit of Lady Artemis?”
“Successful. You may congratulate me!”
“Then I do. When is the wedding to take place?”
“As soon as possible.”
The earl fought down a qualm of unease. He thought Mr. Fordyce was much too good for Lady Artemis. He remembered his own harsh words to Lady Artemis.
“And when is the betrothal to be announced?” he asked.
“Well, that’s just it,” said Mr. Fordyce. “My beloved is all heart.”
The earl felt his own eyebrows rise cynically, but pulled them down into place and adopted an air of polite interest.
“We cannot announce anything until we are sure all is well with the Waverley girls,” said Mr. Fordyce.
The earl’s face hardened. “I do not see that the affairs of that odd household should stop you putting an announcement in the newspapers.”
“Lady Artemis—Verity—is bitterly ashamed of the damage she did by gossiping about them at that breakfast.”
“You amaze me,” said the earl.
“She feels if the betrothal is announced, Mrs. Waverley will no longer grant her admittance. Mrs. Waverley belongs to the brand of bluestocking that believes marriage a betrayal of their sex.”
“Since she herself has had the experience of marriage, you would think she would leave her sex free to find out for themselves.”
