Endearing Young Charms Series

by M. C. Beaton

  “I would not wish you any other way,” said Delphine softly. “Come.”

  “Wait a bit,” he said, turning at the door. “I am forgetting my hard-earned winnings. You know, my heart, I was well on the way to making a fortune!”

  “Oh, Jules,” Delphine sighed. She had been about to add, “Will you never change?” but realized just in time that she never wanted him to be anything other than what he was at that moment.

  Maria Bencastle learned of the couple’s return to Marsham Manor and decided to pay them a visit to see if she could ingratiate herself into Delphine’s good graces.

  She had found herself a small house on the outskirts of Hegsley. But it was a lonely mode of existence. It was the very breath of life to Maria to interfere in someone else’s business. She could not bear living alone.

  She accordingly pasted a humble smile on her heavy features as Bradley answered the door of Marsham Manor.

  “I am afraid his lordship and her ladyship are abed,” said the butler.

  Maria’s eyes flew past him to the clock in the hall.

  Bradley gave an irritatingly Gallic shrug. “Milord needs his rest.” He smirked.

  “That man,” said Maria, turning on her heel, “is bone lazy!”

  Upstairs, in milord’s tumbled bed, Delphine turned her head and looked at him.

  “My love,” she ventured, “it is time to consider the wages for the itinerant harvest workers. Perhaps if we …”

  “No,” he interrupted. “I can’t be bothered. Garnett will see to it.”

  “You are bone lazy!” protested Delphine, unknowingly echoing Maria. “Don’t you have energy for anything?”

  He pulled her into his arms. “The only exertion I enjoy, my heart, is … this.”

  “Oh, Jules.” Delphine sighed, happily surrendering herself to the inevitable.

  “What a convenient marriage!”

  Part III

  Those Endearing Young Charms

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  For Max Brandt

  with Love

  Chapter 1

  Rain thudded down on the roof and chuckled in the lead gutters. Rain grew into small lakes in the middle of the lawn and turned the drive leading up to the front door of The Elms into a quagmire. Rain streamed down the misted windows of the drawing room and tumbled down the chimney in fat, sooty drops to spit on the fire.

  “Will it never end,” sighed Mary Anstey, putting down her sewing. “It has been raining for weeks and weeks.”

  “Only a week, Mary,” said her sister, Emily. “You are worried that he will be kept away by the state of the roads.”

  “No, it is not that,” said Mary slowly. “I think it is the weather that is making me feel so apprehensive. It has been ten years since I saw Captain Tracey. Ten years is a very long time. Now he is an earl. Just think! My Peregrine, the Earl of Devenham. Sometimes I’m frightened of meeting a stranger.”

  “He will be the same,” said Emily stoutly. “You have waited for him all these years, as he has waited for you.”

  Mary gave a little sigh and picked up her sewing. She and Emily, despite the difference in their ages—Mary was twenty-nine and Emily, nineteen—were remarkably alike. Although Emily was a lively blond beauty, and Mary sedate and brown-haired, they could almost have passed for twins. The years did not seem to have touched Mary, thought Emily affectionately. Her face was still young and delicate and sweet.

  Ten years ago Captain Peregrine Tracey had proposed to Mary Anstey, but her parents had refused to let her accept the hand of a penniless captain.

  Mr. and Mrs. Anstey were kind, cheerful, and extremely vulgar. They had sprung from modest beginnings. Mr. Anstey had made his money in the City as a merchant and had retired to the country at an early age to enjoy his fortune and to remove himself from “the smell of the shop.” He aspired to become a country gentleman, but failed to adapt to the country or to become a gentleman, since he was a pushy vulgar man. His wife supported him with equal vulgarity and insensitivity. Fortunately, their daughters had not inherited their coarseness but often found the many snubs their parents received from the local county very hard to take. They themselves had no friends, since they were not allowed to associate with the merchant class and were shunned by both gentry and aristocracy alike.

  As long as Emily could remember, Mary had lived for the arrival of the post. At first, Mrs. Anstey had confiscated all letters from Captain Tracey, but as the years went by and Mary remained a spinster, she was allowed to receive them.

  Emily had been allowed to read a few of them. They all seemed rather cold and formal and, since Captain Tracey was serving in the peninsula, taken up with descriptions of the Spanish countryside. She secretly wondered at Mary’s devotion to a man whom she, Emily, inwardly damned as a cold fish. She also wondered if Mary was aware that the vicar, the Reverend Peter Cummings, was madly in love with her.

  When Mr. and Mrs. Anstey received the news that the despised captain had fallen heir to an earldom, their joy knew no bounds, and, of course, they themselves wrote to assure the new earl of a warm welcome.

  He replied to them—not to Mary—saying he would be returning in November and would appreciate it if they would make immediate plans for the wedding.

  It was a sharp lesson to young Emily in the ways of the world. All the county had accepted invitations to the wedding because Mary was to marry an earl. Emily did not see how her parents could bear to ask all the people who had snubbed them so unmercifully in the past, but Mr. and Mrs. Anstey were so triumphant at their daughter’s social success that they seemed not even to trouble their heads with such petty considerations.

  The earl was to arrive on the following day; the wedding was to be the following week. Emily found it hard to reconcile Mary’s description of the shy young captain who had courted her ten years ago with the chilly, autocratic, formal letters that had arrived over the years. But then, everyone seemed to write very high-flown, stilted English.

  Mrs. Anstey bustled into the room. She was a small, fat woman whose discontented face showed faint traces of the beauty she had had as a girl. She wore a starched muslin cap that stuck out at all angles, as if the laundress had given the cap a fright from which it had never recovered. Until the splendid news of the captain’s elevation to the peerage, Mrs. Anstey had been inclined to bully her gentle older daughter, expressing loudly that it was a disgrace to have an old maid in the family, and God forbid that Emily should become an ape leader as well. Now her manner had changed to that of a fond and doting mama. She tiptoed around Mary the way one does around a sick person and addressed her in a meek whisper rather than in vulgar and strident tones.

  On days like this, Emily longed to find out that she and Mary had been adopted and that they surely could not have come from such a parent. But she had only to glance up at the portrait of mama above the fireplace to see that Mrs. Anstey, painted as a young bride, had had all the beauty of both Mary and Emily before fat and discontent had ruined her features.

  “At least we have nothing to be ashamed of,” said Mrs. Anstey, plumping herself down on the sofa. “The earl will find everything here to be of the finest.” She looked complacently round the drawing room as she spoke. Emily followed her gaze and sighed. Everything in their home was constantly being changed. There were no comfortable old chairs, not one stick of furniture remaining from the days of her childhood. Only last spring, all the furniture had been taken out to the lawn and burned, including a pretty Hepplewhite escritoire of which Mary had been so fond.

  Everything was now in the Egyptian mode, a fashion that had dominated the salons of London for some time and was now fast losing popularity. Emily reflected that what was not striped was sphinxed. Sphinxes’ heads
ornamented the tables and chairs and glass sphinxes’ heads winked from the pilasters on the fireplace.

  The Elms was a large, square box of a house, diligently kept free from any ivy or other creepers that might have softened the stark red of its brick outer walls. It was set back from the road which led out of the village of Malden Grand toward London. It had belonged to a Squire Haband, a man fondly remembered by the local county. The Ansteys had never met the squire, since he had died some months before Mr. Anstey purchased the house. Emily sometimes imagined him as a jolly and rubicund John Bull, not knowing that during his lifetime Squire Haband had been a rather nasty man and highly unpopular. He was only remembered fondly by the local county as a way of pointing out to the mushroom growth of Ansteys that they did not belong.

  Mary was to be married in the local church. The Ansteys had been Nonconformist but had changed back to the established church on their arrival in the country, Mrs. Anstey insisting that the Church of England was more genteel.

  Some of the young men of the county had been attracted by the beauty of the Anstey girls, not to mention their large dowries, but their parents had done all in their power to nip any budding romance. For the more Mr. and Mrs. Anstey craved social recognition, the more determined the local aristocracy and gentry became that they should not have it.

  Until, of course, the announcement of Mary’s forthcoming marriage to the Earl of Devenham.

  Mr. Anstey came into the room and joined his wife on the sofa. He was as thin and spare as his wife was fat. He was dressed in what he considered to be the first stare. But his collar was too high and his waistcoat too short, and patches of pink scalp shone through his teased, frizzed, and pomaded hair.

  “That’s that,” he said, rubbing his hands. “Hired two more footmen. His lordship shall not find us wanting in any of the comforts and elegancies of life.”

  Emily looked at her father curiously. “Will you not find it a trifle embarrassing, Papa, to face a gentleman whom you considered unsuitable when he first proposed to Mary?”

  “No,” said her father, all innocence. “Why should I? He was unsuitable then. He is not unsuitable now.”

  “Cannot one like people for their character rather than their rank, Papa?” pursued Emily.

  Mr. Anstey wrinkled his brow and pondered the question. “No,” he said at last. “No one does. ‘Tain’t the way of the world.”

  “Mr. Cummings does not think thus,” said Mary quietly. The Reverend Peter Cummings was the local vicar.

  “Oh, that’s his job,” said Mrs. Anstey vaguely.

  Emily felt she must escape. The furnishings were too new. Everything seemed to shout its newness and brashness at her. Even her mother’s portrait had been recently “touched up.” The huge looking glass on the wall facing the window doubled all the newness and glitter of the room.

  Murmuring an excuse, she removed herself to the library at the back of the hall. But even this room looked as if the decorators had just packed up and left. Books bought by the yard from the bookseller shone in serried ranks of gold and calf behind the glittering plate glass of the new bookcases. New magazines with hard, shiny covers were neatly stacked on a hard, shiny table. Emily sat down on one of the new horsehair-stuffed chairs, leaned her chin on her hand, and thought hard.

  At first, the return of Mary’s beau had seemed very exciting. Like a romance come true. Had she not sighed with sentimental appreciation over the tales of how the great Duke of Wellinton had finally wed the love of his life, Kitty Packenham, so many years after his first offer of marriage had been turned down? Perhaps it was the incessant drumming of the rain that caused this sudden feeling of foreboding. Emily adored her elder sister, but she often felt that Mary was like a defenseless child in a harsh world. Sensitive to a fault, Mary often suffered deeply over the slights and snubs given to her parents. Emily herself felt better able to shrug them off, and she viewed local society with a cynical gaze.

  Mary had certainly shown an unexpectedly stubborn turn of mind when she had repeatedly and resolutely refused a Season in London. The following April was to see Emily herself launched upon society, and she had not refused. She yearned to escape from home, and the only way for her to achieve that was to marry. Emily dreamed of setting up her own establishment under the indulgent eye of a suitable husband, and then sending for Mary to come live with them. Now, of course, that would not be necessary. Mary had promised in her gentle way to launch Emily into society. But before that blessed day arrived, Mary would be gone from The Elms, taking with her all her gentle companionship and leaving Emily to endure the long, boring, lonely days driving about the country with her mother.

  Mrs. Anstey made calls on all the local notables, despite the fact that they were practically always “not at home.” Emily would try to ignore the glances of pity and amusement exchanged by the footmen as the inevitable snub was delivered. The fact that after Mary’s marriage they would probably be received everywhere did not excite her in the least. There was no one among the local county she wished to call friend. She felt she would never forgive them for their cruelty. For, much as she disliked her parents’ parvenu manners, Emily nonetheless loved them dearly and imagined they suffered when, in fact, they did not mind very much at all.

  They slavishly endured the laws of society as meted out by their neighbors and were confident that the day would arrive when they would be accepted.

  Then there was the vicar, Mr. Peter Cummings, to consider. He was obviously very much in love with Mary, a fact of which Mary did not seem in the least aware.

  Emily became aware of a strange glow in the room. She turned and looked at the window.

  The rain had stopped.

  She walked over and raised the sash. Sweet, rain-scented air flowed into the room, bringing with it the fragrance of evergreen and damp leaves. A pale watery sun shone through the skeletal branches of the great oak by the hedge. The puddles on the lawn turned into lakes of molten gold.

  Emily stretched, raising her arms above her head, and took a deep breath, waiting for the anxiety in the pit of her stomach to disappear.

  But her dark, uneasy mood would not lighten like the day outside. She remembered the Earl of Devenham’s chilly, formal letters.

  Then her anxiety crystallized. She was afraid.

  Emily Anstey was very much afraid that this earl returning from the wars would bear no resemblance to the shy young man who had stolen Mary’s heart away.

  The false spring gilding the November day had tempted Mary Anstey to leave the house. With a calash over her hat to protect her head in case the rain should return, and pattens on her feet to raise her above the mud, she walked rapidly in the direction of the village. Above the trees towered the spire of St. Martin’s. Mary Anstey was seeking sanctuary from her troubled thoughts, hoping the peace and solitude of the church would take away the worries and anxieties that had come to plague her after the initial excitement of her forthcoming marriage had died down.

  She walked around the church on a narrow, well-worn path and let herself in by a side door.

  The church was still and empty, faintly scented with incense, charcoal, old paper, and damp hassocks. A few candles flickered in the cool, dim light, and a double column of arches soared up and vanished into the blackness at the roof.

  Instead of entering the family pew, Mary sat down on a little rush-bottomed chair at the back of the church. She tried to let her mind float away from its worries, off into the dimness of the church, but all the little anxieties kept nagging at her brain.

  I am old, she thought. Ten years older since he saw me last. I am practically an ape leader, yet he will be considered in his prime. I know his pride was deeply hurt by Papa’s rejection of his suit. Oh, dear! I do remember Peregrine had a great deal of pride—brave and touching in a young man. But what if that pride has hardened into arrogance? I am so nervous I can hardly remember him. But I am very lucky, she chided herself. It is sinful to be so ungrateful. I am marrying the only
man I have ever loved. Dear Emily will be able to come and live with us.…

  A shadow crossed her face. She had always assumed Emily would always be with her. But what if her husband had other ideas?

  She looked up with a start to find the vicar, Mr. Cummings, surveying her anxiously.

  “I was thinking so hard,” said Mary, rising to her feet and dropping him a curtsy, “that I did not hear your approach, Mr. Cummings.”

  “You look distressed,” he said. “It must be a very worrying time for you.”

  “But I am very happy!” exclaimed Mary. “I am to finally marry the man of my choice.”

  Mr. Cummings’s eyes were level with her own. Mary thought she had never before noticed how blue they were or how kind. He had a square, boyish face, although he was in his late thirties, and an unruly thatch of fair hair, which had a habit of sticking straight up from his head no matter how much he tried to water it down.

  “I should think,” said Mr. Cummings, turning his eyes away from Mary’s face to stare at the traceried panels of the alms box, “that it must, however, cause some worry and concern to be seeing one’s fiancé for the first time in ten years. But everything will be all right when you do see him.”

  “Do you really think so?” asked Mary, with a sudden rush of gratitude. “I was worried, and how very perceptive of you to guess. But you are quite right. It is the waiting and … and … wondering that make me nervous.”

  “It is a very fine thing to be marrying an earl,” said Mr. Cummings, almost as if he were trying to convince himself. “One should not think of such worldly matters as rank and title, but at least you are not being forced into a distasteful marriage. That I do not think I could bear.” The last sentence was said in such a low voice that Mary did not hear it.