by M C Beaton
“Be that as it may,” said Mr. Fordyce eagerly, “Lady Artemis is first anxious to see if she can persuade Mrs. Waverley into allowing the girls more freedom.”
“Then it was she,” said the earl, “who obviously manipulated Mrs. Waverley into taking them all to the opera last night!”
“Yes, and my poor Verity should have been in high alt, but she was cast down.”
“Really,” said the earl in a bored voice.
“Do you not wish to know why?”
“Of course,” lied the earl.
“She cannot bear to see the distress of Miss Fanny, and she noticed your savage coldness toward the girl.”
“My savage …? You have been reading too many novels. If I remember, I was all that was polite.”
“You were very frosty, and you glared at Miss Fanny so. I am surprised at you. Even if the girl is a foundling, there is no reason to take her in dislike. She is not responsible for her birth.”
“Let me say I am not angry with Miss Fanny because of her birth. There is something else …”
Mr. Fordyce hitched his chair forward and stared eagerly at the earl like a dog waiting for a bone.
The earl tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. He was about to say he would not discuss it. But he was longing to talk about it. He felt he had behaved commendably, and yet there was a niggling seed of doubt.
“If I tell you, you must promise not to tell anyone, particularly Lady Artemis.”
“I promise,” said Mr. Fordyce and crossed his fingers behind his back.
“Miss Fanny sent her housekeeper to seek me out,” said the earl. “I was let into the servants hall to have an audience with her. She told me, and mark this well, that she had been in the habit of taking jewels and pawning them for pin money. One jewel, a brooch, remained to be redeemed and she had not the ready. She appealed to me to buy it back for her.”
“And?” prompted Mr. Fordyce eagerly.
“And that’s it,” said the earl crossly. “I redeemed the brooch for her. She is a thief. There is bad blood there.”
Mr. Fordyce leaned back in his chair and looked at the earl in consternation.
“Are the girls not allowed any pin money?”
“No.”
“Well, then …” began Mr. Fordyce awkwardly. “It stands to reason …”
“You are forgetting one salient fact. She is a thief.”
“But think of her unnatural life. No freedom. Kept indoors.”
“The girls, as you very well know, were in the habit of escaping by the garden of your house. There was no reason for them to steal from their benefactress.”
“They probably didn’t see it that way,” pleaded Mr. Fordyce. “They probably thought they were just borrowing it.”
“Indeed! And just how did they intend to find money to get back the items?”
“Well, you are very hard. Very hard indeed. They are taken out of the orphanage and immediately draped with jewels and trinkets. They are so used to jewels that they do not really seem more than baubles and toys to them.”
“They knew the value of them enough to pawn them.”
Mr. Fordyce felt himself becoming very hot and angry. “It is easy for you to be high and mighty,” he snapped. “What if you yourself were in a situation where you wanted something and needed to steal to get it, would you not just take it?”
“Certainly not,” said the earl. He picked up his newspaper and rustled the pages.
“It is of no use talking to you,” said Mr. Fordyce, rising to take his leave.
“On that particular matter, none whatsoever,” said the earl.
Mr. Fordyce went straight to Lady Artemis and blurted out the whole thing. “Well, to be sure it is bad in one way,” said Lady Artemis, “but under the circumstances, the whole house is an invitation to theft. Mrs. Waverley often leaves brooches and necklaces lying around. If the girls were so very bad, they could gain their freedom by simply taking the contents of their jewel boxes and disappearing to the continent where they could live in luxury for the rest of their lives.”
“But Tredair is so hard, so adamant. I did not know he was such a cruel and unfeeling man.”
Mr. Fordyce was always anxious to put down his friend, for he had a lurking fear that Lady Artemis might become enamored of the earl again.
“Not like you,” she whispered, leaning toward him. His hands reached blindly for her, and soon they were busily engaged in their favorite sport.
The earl continued to read the newspapers, all of them, from cover to cover with great concentration. Fanny’s face had an irritating way of rising up between him and the printed word, but nonetheless he persevered. He was just perusing an advertisement that read, “A Young Lady of Respectability is desirous of procuring a situation as Companion. She has a knowledge of dressmaking and is prepared to make herself useful in any way, non-menial,” when he was interrupted by old Lord Struthers, who poked the earl in the chest with his cane and said, “Heard the news?”
“Take that cane away,” said the earl. “What news?”
“The Marquess of Pilkington has just spoken in the Lords.”
“The Marquess of Pilkington is always speaking in the Lords.”
“But he caused a sensation. Did you know he was a foundling?”
“No. He has always been regarded as the eldest son of the Duke and Duchess of Hadshire.”
“Exactly. But it transpires they adopted him. This damn Waverley woman everyone’s gossiping about has touched him on the raw. He made a powerful speech. He said a wretched woman, he referred to her as Mrs. W., had tried to ruin the reputation of her charges by telling the world they were foundlings and so trying to puff herself up by appearing a noble and charitable lady. ‘I am a foundling,’ booms Pilkington. ‘I was adopted! And yet, am I not an aristocrat? All this business about aristocratic blood and heredity traits is rubbish. It is upbringing and money that provide the bronze.’ He ranted on and then finished up by crying, ‘Let no one say that one Englishman is not as good as another.’ Of course, the Whigs in the lower house got to hear of it and when the old boy emerged, they took his horses away and pulled his chariot through the streets themselves, shouting, ‘Liberty! Equality!’”
The earl felt a sudden sick feeling of dread. “Excuse me,” he muttered and ran from the club. He called at Mr. Fordyce’s house in Hanover Square. Mr. Fordyce was not at home. The earl hurried across the square to Lady Artemis’s house.
“Is Mr. Fordyce here?” he shouted to the butler.
“Yes, my lord. In the drawing room. But, my lord …!” The earl pushed past him, as the butler tried to bar his way, and hurtled up the stairs and flung open the double doors of the drawing room.
It was, he thought, as he quickly slammed the doors shut again and stood with his face flaming, the most complicated piece of sexual intercourse a man had ever been unlucky enough to witness.
“I tried to tell you, my lord,” said the butler gloomily. “I tried to warn you.”
The earl made his way back down the stairs. But the drawing room doors opened and Mr. Fordyce, now decently clad in a dressing gown, popped his head out. “Thought it was you,” he called. “What’s amiss?”
“Come down here, man, and I’ll tell you,” said the earl.
Mr. Fordyce pattered down the stairs in his bare feet and led the way into a salon off the main hall.
“I am sorry I burst in on you,” said the earl, “but the matter was most urgent.”
“Don’t mention it,” said Mr. Fordyce airily. “Verity didn’t see you. Thought it was one of the servants. No need to upset her.”
“The fact is this. I need your help and Lady Artemis’s help to persuade Mrs. Waverley to remove herself from town and quickly too.”
“Why?”
“I should think the mob will be around to attack her any moment now.” He told Mr. Fordyce of the marquess’s speech in the House of Lords. “So, don’t you see,” finished the earl, “this is just the
sort of excuse the mob needs for looting and burning.”
The earl waited until Lady Artemis and Mr. Fordyce got dressed. Soon the three were hurrying across the square to the Waverley mansion, the earl glancing at the sedate couple beside him and trying to banish that picture of them in the drawing room from his mind. He wondered where his friend had got the idea from. The frescoes at Pompeii?
Mrs. Waverley was in her drawing room with the three girls when Mrs. Ricketts introduced Lady Artemis, Mr. Fordyce, and the earl.
Before Mrs. Waverley could start to protest about the unheralded visit, the earl succinctly outlined the problem.
Mrs. Waverley tossed her head. “I shall not run before the mob,” she said, her eyes flashing.
Frederica cast a rather malicious look in the direction of Mrs. Waverley and asked, “Is the mob going to tear us all to pieces?”
“No,” said the earl. “They regard you girls in the light of heroines. It is Mrs. Waverley’s blood they are after.”
“Good,” murmured Frederica, and picked up her sewing again.
Mrs. Waverley turned a muddy color. “You are exaggerating, my lord.”
“Not I. I should estimate you have a bare half hour in which to escape.”
Mrs. Waverley’s defences crumpled. “But where?” she wailed. “Where can we go?”
“I have a very pretty house at Brighton,” said Lady Artemis. “We shall all travel there.”
“Good,” said the earl. “I shall send you on your way.”
Lady Artemis and Mr. Fordyce exchanged glances. “Better come with us,” said Mr. Fordyce. “You can’t abandon us. The ladies may need protection on the road.”
The earl nodded reluctantly and began to rap out orders.
Fanny stuffed clothes and jewels into a trunk, her heart beating hard. She tried to tell herself that her excitement was at the prospect of escaping from London and nothing to do with seeing the earl again.
The earl’s servants, summoned by one of Mrs. Waverley’s housemaids, arrived as well and the whole house was in an uproar. It was a full hour before three heavily laden carriages moved out of the square. All around Hanover Square, the houses already stood shuttered. The news of a possible attack by the mob had gone around the square like wildfire.
Mrs. Waverley sat in the carriage as it moved off, white and shaken. She could only be glad amidst all her distress that the Earl of Tredair had not once looked at Fanny.
Fanny, Frederica, and Felicity were content to watch the passing scene. Each was silently blessing the mob. They were to see Brighton. They were to stay in Lady Artemis’s house where surely Mrs. Waverley could not have a say in how things were done. Lady Artemis was frivolous and would want to entertain. Fanny thought about how Lady Artemis and Mr. Fordyce kept gazing into each other’s eyes. They were obviously very much in love. She remembered how she had thought she loved the earl. She must have been weak in the head. That haughty aristocrat would not stay in Brighton very long. He would disassociate himself from such unfashionable company as soon as possible. Fanny wrenched her mind away from the earl. She would be able to visit circulating libraries and walk about the shops, and she would look upon the ocean for the first time.
Mrs. Waverley’s heartbeats slowed to a regular pace as the miles between them and London grew longer. She had no intention of residing very long with Lady Artemis. She herself would find a house to rent and take her precious girls with her before they became too accustomed to the pernicious and frivolous ways of society.
In another coach Lady Artemis and Mr. Fordyce swayed companionably together with the movement of the carriage. “What are we to do about Tredair and Fanny?” asked Lady Artemis.
“You know, my love,” said Mr. Fordyce, “he is not a free spirit like us. Quite a Puritan. I think we should forget about them and get married as soon as possible.”
“I would like to see him knocked from his high horse,” said Lady Artemis. “I would like to take him somewhere far away and steal all his money so that he had to thieve to get something to eat.”
The earl was driving his own coach, sitting up on the box, wrapped in gloomy thought. He thought it infuriating that Fanny’s downcast face should make him feel so guilty. Here he was involved with eccentrics and he detested eccentrics. He had refused an invitation to Lord Wirt’s the other week. Everyone else who had been invited was eager to go because Lord Wirt never saw his guests but lived in a sort of corridor between the walls of his mansion and spoke to visitors through a small aperture. The earl detested such odd behavior and thought that people who encouraged it by visiting the old freak were just as bad. Now he was stuck with Mrs. Waverley, whom he damned as being the worst type of eccentric.
***
Lady Artemis’s Brighton house faced the sea. Dinner that evening was supplied by a nearby hotel. It should have been a merry party, thought Lady Artemis bitterly, had it not been for that old frump, Waverley. The girls were beside themselves with excitement at their first view of the sea and had begged to be able to go out, but that lady had refused point blank. Not only that, instead of expressing herself in flattering terms of gratitude to her hostess for her rescue, she had said she would go out on the morrow to find a house of her own.
At last, it was all too much. The girls were picking at their food. Lord Tredair’s face looked as if it had been carved out of stone. Lady Artemis excused herself and went up to her bedroom and ferreted in a large medicine chest until she found what she was looking for.
Mrs. Waverley had insisted the girls drink nothing stronger than lemonade. Lady Artemis handed a sachet of powder to her butler and told him to mix it in a glass of lemonade and hand it to Mrs. Waverley. She also handed the butler a guinea to wipe the look of consternation from his face.
Lady Artemis saw the butler hand the glass of lemonade to a footman who placed it in front of Mrs. Waverley.
Mrs. Waverley was prosing on, quoting that bore Wollstonecraft. “The man,” intoned Mrs. Waverley, “who can be contented to live with a pretty, useful companion, without a mind, has lost in voluptuous gratifications a taste for more refined enjoyment. He has never felt the calm satisfaction that refreshes the parched heart, like the silent dew of heaven, of being beloved by one who could understand him. He …”
Lady Artemis leapt to her feet. “Ladies, gentlemen,” she cried. “I give you a toast. The King.”
Everyone rose to their feet and raised their glasses. “The King!” Mrs. Waverley took a sip from her lemonade and made to sit down. “And the Queen!” said Lady Artemis. The queen’s health was duly drunk. “And the Prince Regent,” said Lady Artemis desperately. Sip, sip went Mrs. Waverley. “The rights of woman!” called Lady Artemis. Mrs. Waverley beamed and drained her glass.
“As I was saying,” began Mrs. Waverley again, “women are kept from the tree of knowledge … the rational hopes of women are to be sacrificed to render women an object of desire for a short time. Women …”
Her voice trailed away and she put a hand to her head. “Excuse me. I feel dizzy. The journey.”
“Girls!” said Lady Artemis. “Mrs. Waverley is ill. Assist her to her room.”
Mrs. Waverley was a heavy woman. It took all the energies of the Waverley girls and two footmen to get her up the stairs.
By the time the girls had returned, the lemonade had disappeared to be replaced by champagne.
Outside the sun was sinking lower over the sea. Lady Artemis saw the wistful look Fanny cast at the ocean and said gaily, “I am sure you young ladies would benefit from a brisk walk before bedtime. Do put on warm wraps for the wind has become chilly.”
“You had better escort them, Tredair,” said Lady Artemis. “My poor Mr. Fordyce is feeling faint as well.”
She pressed Mr. Fordyce’s foot under the table in warning as he opened his mouth to protest.
“Very well,” said the earl with obvious reluctance. “I shall go straight to bed on my return. I thank you now for your hospitality, Lady Artemis. I shall
be gone to London in the morning by the time you rise.”
“And that’s that,” said Lady Artemis when they had all gone. “I could shake him. Just look at those girls!”
The Waverley girls were running up and down the shingle, dodging the waves. The earl was sitting moodily on a rock watching them.
“I don’t think he cares for Fanny,” said Mr. Fordyce.
“Oh, he does. I am sure of it. I want her to be happy. I only gossipped to spite her, you know. I did not know then I should love you.”
“Well, at least Miss Fanny has a little moment of freedom,” said Mr. Fordyce. “How convenient Mrs. Waverley fell ill.”
“Stoopid! I drugged her.”
“I say!”
“Do you know what I would like to do?” said Lady Artemis dreamily. “I would like to drug Tredair and Fanny and take them far away too … Oh, I know, my aunt has a house several miles from here up on the downs, quite isolated, and she is abroad at the moment. I would leave them there and take all Tredair’s money and force him to find his own way back. I would leave money in the house so that he would have to take it to get them home.”
“He would think nothing of that. He would drive back out as soon as he had deposited Fanny and pay the money back.”
“But they would be thrown together, don’t you see? Something would have to happen. He would be compromised.”
“He would know we had drugged him.”
“He couldn’t prove it.”
“You are as mad as Mrs. Waverley.”
Lady Artemis began to cry. “If you loved me, you would help me.”
“My sweet. Anything. Only don’t cry.”
Mr. Fordyce hugged her and caressed her, confident that she would forget all this crazy nonsense after a good night’s sleep.
***
“Psst!”
Mr. Fordyce started awake.
“It is I,” whispered Lady Artemis. “Get your clothes on, my love. We have work to do.”
“Certainly,” said Mr. Fordyce cheerfully, jerking her on top of him and fumbling with the tapes of her gown.
“Not that!” she said, slapping at his hands. “I have drugged Tredair and Fanny. Now we have to move them to my aunts house.”
