Lady Elizabeth's Comet

by Sheila Simonson

  "Our cousin is certainly causing a flutter amongst the matchmaking mamas," Anne observed.

  "Who?" I smiled at Sir Winton Peverel, who kissed his hand to me.

  "Clanross."

  "Clanross? Oh. Why should he not?"

  "No reason," Anne purred. "No reason at all, but I do think, sister dear, you might have hinted at his transformation. Keeping him to yourself?"

  I gave her a stony stare. "He was ill. He's better. What more is there to say? You met him when he came to Town last autumn."

  "Yes, but my dear, only look at him, knee-deep in bridesmaids."

  I did look. Clanross, having settled Aunt Whitby among her cronies, had paid his respects to Lady Dunarvon, been captured by Bevis and Lady Barbara, and now, Bab on his arm, was cutting a perceptible swath through Sarah's attendants. They batted their lashes at him and giggled. He and Barbara appeared to be carrying on a mutually delightful conversation. Unless I mistook the matter, Clanross was flirting shamelessly with Bevis's sister. And doing so, what was worse, with the aplomb of long practice. I felt betrayed.

  I swallowed. "He'll be wanting a wife. Why not Bab Tyrell?"

  "Why not?" My sister shrieked softly. "You are without doubt the most exasperating female our family has ever produced. I've been feeling sorry for you stuck down there with Clanross an invalid. But the man is downright personable, and don't tell me you haven't noticed. Look at Lady Dunarvon. She fairly quivers with satisfaction. If she were a bishop she'd be blessing them."

  "Then she's changed her tune," I snapped. "I'll lay odds she wouldn't even have presented Bab to him before he succeeded my father. What's more he knows it. Do you suppose he's likely to forget that?"

  "Yes," Anne said flatly. "He's not thickheaded."

  "You've changed your tune as well, I see."

  "I thought him awkward and not conversable," Anne pronounced, still watching Clanross and Barbara, who were laughing delightedly. "I did not consider him ill-favoured. You confuse my opinion with Kitty's."

  I was rescued before I could think up a suitable rejoinder. By Bevis. I fear I turned to him with more animation than I felt. I did not stop to question my motives.

  * * * *

  Bevis and I had been negotiating like wary armies since my arrival in Town. I would concede a point--show myself at Lady Ware's musicale, say--and he would promise to moot the question of my telescope to his father. The tension would ease, and we would lapse into the old comfortable style until some gibe or jest rang sour and we had again to parley. I loved Bevis. I did not doubt that my affection was at least potentially wifely until the fatal afternoon, less than a week after Sarah's wedding.

  The weather was bright if a trifle oppressive. People were leaving Town for Brighton or their country estates and the fashionable ranks had thinned. As Alice and I walked slowly along the Serpentine I had ample time to look at the two men coming toward us. They were much of a height and similarly dressed, and my first thought as I saw them in the distance was, 'There's Clanross. I must tell him about Jean's letter,' and then it struck me that I should have recognised Bevis first. I felt oddly embarrassed.

  Happily, Alice is shortsighted, and I composed myself before she saw them.

  "Oh. There's Clanross," she exclaimed, pleased. "Do tell him about Lady Jean's letter."

  I was hard put not to laugh.

  "And Lord Bevis, too," she went on. "What a pleasant chance."

  "You sound as if we'd seen neither in a month." We had all gone to Maria Puncheon's drum the night before.

  "Elizabeth, my little daffodil, you come before the swallow dares and take the winds of May with beauty."

  "March, not May. Do give over, Bevis. I collect you found that in Bab's book of extracts. Good afternoon, Clanross."

  "Elizabeth. Mrs. Finch." Clanross smiled. Quite an ordinary smile. My stomach flipflopped for no reason. I ignored it and described for Clanross Jean's epistle, which largely concerned the conduct of Tom-the-dog. "He appears to have eaten an old saddle leather, a pair of Jem's pattens, and Victory's blanket."

  "I know."

  "How?"

  "Maggie writ me."

  "Oh." Well, why not? "How's Maggie's spelling?"

  "Inventive. Does Jean spell remarkable with a 'c'?"

  "Upon my word," Bevis interrupted, "charming as your coltish sisters may be, my dear Lizzie, I can't help feeling that we might find a livelier topic for discourse."

  "What say you to my telescope?"

  "Drat your telescope."

  We glowered at each other, but neither of us meant to pursue the subject in front of Alice. She still didn't know of our betrothal.

  Clanross did know. He diverted the conversation to other channels and presently dropped behind with Alice, leaving Bevis and me to our privacy. I wasn't sure I was grateful.

  "Have you spoken with Dunarvon?"

  "Blast it, no. How can I, without revealing our engagement?"

  "Use your ingenuity."

  "How?" he asked bitterly. "Dear Papa, naming no names, should you greatly object to my marriage with a telescope?"

  "That's unfair."

  "Is it?"

  "Yes. I told you I had discovered a comet. Do you know how few people in this kingdom can say that? It ought to convince you I'm not a mere amateur."

  "I wish you were."

  "Oh, do you? I wonder why."

  "I've no desire to find myself the butt of my friends' jokes."

  I stopped dead. "You will explain, if you please."

  "Dash it, Liz, you know very well what a figure I'll cut. If it were painting you'd a passion for, or poetry or music or even politics, no one would think it odd, but astronomy!" He grimaced. "All those blasted computations. It ain't womanly."

  "What a blessing, then, that my article will be published in my maiden name. I'd certainly dislike casting a shadow on the noble name of Tyrell."

  "Now, Liz...what article?"

  "Why, the monograph I writ describing my discovery." Mindful of the Brighton coach, I had arranged to sign only my initials, but I was too angry to explain that.

  "You will retract it at once."

  "You're mad!"

  "I'm very sorry, Elizabeth. If I'd known..." He took a breath and spoke in carefully reasonable tones, "You must see, my dear, it just won't do. The future Viscountess Bevis to be bandying her name in a public journal? No, at that I do draw the line."

  I was struck dumb. I stood for a hideous time staring into his worried blue eyes. With a word he had reduced my achievement to the level of skittish misbehaviour, as if I had been found scribbling a column of gossip for the Morning Post.

  Alice and Clanross caught up with us. "Dear Elizabeth," Alice chirruped. "Should we not return? Dear Lady Whitby..."

  "The devil fly away with Lady Whitby," I said through clenched teeth.

  "Elizabeth!" Alice stared.

  "Liz!" Bevis's voice was anguished.

  I didn't care. I felt as if I might be sick. Everyone was staring.

  Clanross watched me, too, frowning. At last he said quietly, "I think it would be prudent if we all withdrew to some less public place, Mrs. Finch."

  Alice was making noises of acute distress, and Bevis said something I didn't hear. I felt as if I might faint for the first time since I was eighteen and had danced all night in a hot ballroom.

  "Elizabeth?"

  I took Clanross's arm, clutching at it.

  "No, really, Tom." Bevis sounded more himself. "You can't just bull in like that. I'll take Lizzie home."

  Clanross paid no attention. His arm felt hard and reassuring beneath my gloved hand. As we walked slowly toward the carriageway the ground steadied beneath my feet. I still shook, however, and I began to be really nauseated. I wondered if I would disgrace all my names, present and potential, by casting up my accounts in Hyde Park.

  I also wondered, drearily, why I had fancied Bevis would be pleased with me. I knew very well my avocation was unnatural in a woman, but I had been in the
habit of thinking that, if I showed ability, my skill would overcome everyone's loathing. Clearly not. I believe Bevis would have allowed me to continue my work, even then, but his chagrin at the thought of my taking public credit for it was deep and unfeigned. He was horror-struck. Rightly so, I thought, tears pricking my eyes. What a fool I was.

  We reached the drive and I became aware that Clanross had hailed someone.

  A phaeton drew up, and Sir Winton Peverel's high-nosed features peered down at us.

  "Ah, Peverel, I believe you are acquainted with Lady Elizabeth Conway."

  "Clanross, isn't it? Servant, Elizabeth. Bevis, Mrs. Mmmm." His voice sharpened. "I say, not looking quite the thing, is she?"

  "No." My cousin covered my clutching hand briefly with his own. "The heat--very oppressive today. Could I prevail upon you to drive Lady Elizabeth home?"

  "Delighted," Winton murmured. "Always happy to see Lady Liz. Staying at Featherstonehaugh's in Cavendish Square, what?"

  Clanross handed me up, steadying me. "I think Mrs. Finch should come too, Peverel, if you've no objection."

  Winton assented--after a slight hesitation. He was far too fashionable to relish being seen with two ladies above a certain age. There was a bustle as Alice squeezed in beside me. I was beginning to come to my senses by then, but I did not protest Clanross's high-handed arrangement. I wanted privacy--to go to my room and think.

  I mastered myself sufficiently to give Clanross my hand and a rather wavering smile. "Thank you, Tom."

  He said nothing. As we drove off I glimpsed the two men standing side by side looking after us. Bevis's blue eyes were dark with worry and guilt. I could not read Clanross's expression at all, but the picture of the two men stayed in my mind for a long time afterward.

  Chapter 19

  Bevis came to Anne's house later that afternoon bearing roses and retractions. He would speak with Dunarvon immediately. He was a beast to cause me pain. I could have half a dozen telescopes if I wanted them.

  I listened to him sadly. What was the use? I knew what I had to do.

  He wound down at last. "Liz, forgive me. Don't look like that."

  "Like what, Bevis?"

  "As if you've lost your best friend."

  I blinked back too easy tears. "My dear, I think I have. You must see it won't work. I'll always be as I am--cross-grained and selfish and unwomanly. If it weren't my work it would be something else. I'm not fit to be anyone's wife, least of all yours."

  "Don't say that, Liz!"

  "Please hear me out, Bevis. In my cross-grained, selfish way, I do love you. Enough, perhaps, to give up my work entirely but not enough to like the sacrifice. I'd make a most unsatisfactory martyr."

  "Dash it, I don't want you to give it up."

  "You think that now because you're feeling guilty."

  "And so I should." He jumped up and began pacing the room. "Good God, Liz, we can work it out."

  "No. I don't really want to try. We've been the victims of old habit and a mutual panic over letting too much time run by us. We were thrust together at Brecon. With your mind on Clanross's health and your father and your own wish to wed, and mine on my plaguey spyglass, our feelings coursed along unhindered by common sense, as the sap riseth in the spring. Alas, I do love you, but I won't wed you for any consideration. I'd make a miserable viscountess, and I'd make you miserable as well."

  "I don't believe that," Bevis said miserably.

  "Bevis, my dear, you do believe it, or you will when you have time to think." You believe it, I added to myself, or you wouldn't have laid down the law on the one thing I care about.

  When he did not respond I said in rallying tones, "Come, it's not so dreadful. How fortunate we didn't announce it."

  He looked sullen. "You had no intention of going through with it from the first."

  "I assure you I was mentally choosing my bridesmaids at your sister's wedding. And decking them with jonquil ribbons."

  "Liz!" It was a cry from the heart, and I could not but be moved.

  My eyes filled, and I said shakily, "You'd best leave, Bevis. Now. I won't change my mind again."

  He extended his hand to me, pleading, and indeed he was very beautiful, with his glossy brown hair tossed in a Windswept and his kind blue eyes sad.

  "You've said you love me."

  Suddenly it was more than I could bear. I sprang up and made for the door. "I do. You're lovable. I can't help myself. But I won't marry you, Bevis. I was wrong to think I might. Goodbye." I fled the room in disorder, cannoning into Anne and Alice in the hall. I didn't stop to explain.

  Indeed, as I found later, I couldn't explain to Anne. She consoled Bevis, who told her everything. In Alice's presence, worse luck. Whilst I was up in my chamber weeping for my lost womanhood, Anne and Alice were below lamenting my lost wits.

  I need not recount the tedious scene Anne enacted me. I told her I meant to go back to Brecon as soon as possible to observe a meteor shower. The meteors would not commence to fall before the end of July, but she needn't know that.

  It was not the sort of argument to calm her. It made her so furious she could think of nothing more to say and flounced off to complain to Featherstonehaugh of my fecklessness.

  When Alice came in just before dinner, I had passed from fury to self-pity and back to fury. I took one look at her face and said dangerously, "If you utter one word of reproach, Alice..."

  "Who am I to reproach you, Lady Elizabeth?"

  "Oh, good God, my friend, as I supposed."

  "If I were," she said with dignity, "I'd have known of your agreement with Lord Bevis."

  That was true. I couldn't very well say, "I'd have told you, but I was sure you'd write the wonderful news to both my married sisters and half my acquaintances, and blab to Aunt Whitby."

  * * * *

  Aunt Whitby. Horrors.

  All my tragedies are followed by farce, a major flaw in my character. I had no sooner patched up a truce with Alice but I must prepare to do combat with Aunt over a snug family dinner. There was no hope at all of keeping my heinous crime from Aunt.

  The dinner party consisted of my brother-in-law, Clanross, and three of Featherstonehaugh's political cronies on the male side. On the distaff, Anne, Alice, Aunt, and Aunt's spinster niece, Miss Whitby, who was forty and faded and showed me whither I was trending.

  Dinner began at a fine impersonal level. The talk consisted largely in Featherstonehaugh and allies, Anne, and Aunt, calling loudly for sterner and yet sterner measures of coercion in the manufacturing towns, whilst Alice and Miss Whitby addressed themselves to the roast mutton.

  Clanross listened to the cry for blood with an expression of faint distaste on his otherwise unrevealing features. He sat opposite me and down one--if that is clear--on Anne's right, as befitted his station.

  I was in disgrace between two of the placemen. I never did distinguish among them. A, B, C, and my brother-in-law, D. D for Dog. Grrrrrr. My mood, needless to say, was vile. I did not look forward to the massacre of which, after we had withdrawn, the ladies would make me the centerpiece.

  In the midst of her clarion calls for a stout defence of the Propertied Classes, my aunt kept darting glances at me that boded ill. Well, I would give as good as I got. I stabbed an inoffensive morsel of mutton savagely and looked up to find Clanross watching me across the rim of the épergne. His eyes were grave. I contrived a feeble smile. After all, I was not angry with him unless he, too, meant to reproach me. I lowered my gaze to my plate and continued to push my meat about. He was Bevis's friend.

  Featherstonehaugh was defending suspension of Habeas Corpus in peacetime. I closed my ears. They were all such bores with their pompous justifications of self-interest. They must, it seemed, suspend the constitution in order to save it. Wonderful logic. Surely Clanross found it as absurd as I did.

  I stole another glance at him, but he listened courteously to that and to my aunt describing the Gordon Riots in gruesome detail and to my brother-in-law dwelling
on an election fracas in his constituency. Neither asked Clanross's opinion. They took his assent as a matter of course. I longed to kick him under the table. He was altogether too tame-spirited.

  As I formulated that judgement he belied me.

  One of the cronies--A, B, or C, I don't recall which--concluded a monologue on the uses of mounted fencibles in putting down mobs and, in a fit of generosity, asked whether Clanross thought mounted troops superior to infantry.

  "In crowd dispersal?" He took a sip of wine. "If by superior you mean bloodier-minded, I should say yes."

  "You disapprove the cavalry, my lord?"

  "Not at all. I thought you were looking for slaughter, sir. A mounted man with a sabre has a natural advantage over an unarmed opponent on foot that a mere infantryman can't hope to match, even with a bayonet. I daresay an agile fencible could spit half a dozen citizens in the time it would take a line of infantry to charge."

  Aunt Whitby cackled. "Go to it, boy!"

  Clanross regarded her without enthusiasm. "I'd rather not, ma'am. The bloodthirstiness of the civilian mind never ceases to amaze me."

  Aunt gave a surprised snort. Featherstonehaugh cleared his throat. "Well, well, my lord, you can have little experience of the mob, after all."

  "On the contrary, I was in the north for nearly two years and in Ireland for one." He looked from one placeman to the other, frowning. "I think my experience is comparable to that of any serving officer in garrison. I saw several near riots in Lancashire, too. In no case was the temper of the people improved by the sight of a scarlet coat."

  Featherstonehaugh's jaw dropped. "Upon my word."

  Clanross raised his brows.

  "You're a dashed Radical," my brother-in-law uttered, more shocked than angry. "Good God, Clanross, what would you have, anarchy?"

  "Peel's civil police sound a sensible solution."