by M. C. Beaton
The faint look of strain on Mr. and Mrs. Chadbury’s faces escaped Lord Rupert. He had eyes only for Isabella. When he entered, she was seated at the window, the sun shining on her thick chestnut hair. She had changed into a lilac gown of French cut that emphasized the perfection of her figure, the deep neckline displaying the whiteness of her bosom.
She rose as he entered and curtsied low, murmuring that yes, indeed, she did remember Lord Rupert and had danced with him the evening before.
After a few courtesies and some brief conversation, Mr. and Mrs. Chadbury withdrew to leave the “happy” couple alone.
Isabella was once more seated. She had been hemming a handkerchief and a workbasket was open at her feet.
“You know why I am come?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, indeed.”
Isabella smoothed the unfinished handkerchief into a neat square and put it into her workbasket. As she bent over the workbasket, he stared down the front of her dress, his senses quickening. Well, better get it over with. He was about to go down on one knee when Isabella held up a hand.
“I am entertaining you, my lord,” she said, “because my parents told me to, but I fear I must reject your suit.”
At first, he was too astonished to be angry.
“Why?”
“Why?” echoed Isabella on a sigh. “I fear I do not wish to become married at present. I have nothing against you, my lord. After all, I do not know you.”
Her coolness, her very detachment, began to enrage him. He could hardly believe his ears.
“Do you mean you have the temerity to turn down my offer?”
“That is a harsh way of putting it, my lord, but in a nutshell … yes.”
Suddenly the anger left his face, and he laughed. “I know what it is, you sly puss, you are flirting with me. You are going to accept me anyway, so let us not play games.”
Her voice was cool and incisive. “I do not play games. I would suggest you do not prolong this distressing interview. I have no intention, my lord, of becoming your wife, either today or at any time in the future, near or far. Good day, my lord.” She saw the blazing anger in his eyes and reminded herself quickly that she was in a house full of servants and that her parents were probably outside the door.
“Then hear this, Isabella Chadbury,” he said. “No one rejects and insults Lord Rupert Fitzjohn and remains unscathed. One day quite soon, you will be begging me to marry you.” He bent over her, and she stared up at him, unflinching.
Then he turned on his heel and left the room. Isabella sat very still. Soon she heard the street door slam.
Mr. and Mrs. Chadbury came into the drawing room and surveyed their daughter. Mr. Chadbury was the first to speak.
“So another rejection,” he said. “And one too many. Listen to me, Isabella, you will now have a marriage arranged for you, and you will have no say in the matter. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Papa,” Isabella said meekly, although she did not believe a word of it. Her parents were too fond, too indulgent.
“Very well, we will say no more about the matter at present.”
And neither they did. So Isabella inwardly heaved a sigh of relief. Tomorrow she would be on the way back to beloved Cornwall, to her home, Appleton House. She could resume her favorite pursuits of walking, riding, painting, and sewing, and her parents would soon forget about getting her married off.
She gave a wry little smile. They could not know how she longed to be an old maid.
Once when she was sixteen, she had been full of dreams of love and romance. Although she had been too young to make her come-out, she and her parents had been visiting London to enjoy the plays and operas and were on their way back to Cornwall. They had stopped for the night at a posting house, seeing nothing very much of the other guests at the inn because they had their own suite of rooms that included a private parlor and dining room. Just as they were finishing dinner, the landlord came in to say that a party of young bloods and their women had descended on the posting house, adding significantly that it would be as well if the ladies kept to their quarters.
But when her parents were asleep, Isabella had become curious to have a closer look at these wild guests. She had earlier seen one of them in the courtyard below. He had been a young and dashing-looking man with curly fair hair and bright blue eyes, just the sort of man she often dreamed of.
She had therefore risen and dressed and had made her way along the open gallery outside her room, which overlooked the main courtyard. There was a jolly sound of music coming from the public dining room, and she remembered the landlord saying that the roisterers had taken it over for the evening.
All she wanted to do was to take a look round the door and see if she could see that beautiful young man. Like many sixteen-year-old girls, she enjoyed long romantic dreams. Perhaps he might see her and ask her to join the festivities.
The passage to the dining room was dark, but the door of the room was wide open, and she saw clearly what was going on within. Shocked and trembling, rooted to the ground, she stood and stared.
Some of the women were stark naked and were dancing wildly with flushed and drunken men. And her beautiful young man? Minus his breeches, he was rutting on the floor with a naked woman while his friends cheered him on. How she at last found the strength to move, she did not know, but she made her way back to her room where she was violently sick.
So that was what men were like. That was what they did! But not to her. Never to her. She could not tell her mother about what she had seen. Ladies did not know of such things, did not speak of them, did not even know the words to describe them.
Isabella had been delighted to find herself such a success in London when she had first appeared on the social scene. Naively, she had hoped that that would be enough to please her parents. But the very suggestion that she would not even have the courtesy to speak to the first of her suitors had made her normally mild and indulgent parents very angry indeed. And so Isabella had seen them one after the other, calmly rejecting proposals of marriage. It never crossed her mind that any of her courtiers might be hurt, or offended, or angry. Men did not really suffer from any of the finer feelings when it came to women. They played at it, like a game, sighing and sending flowers and poems. Isabella knew that under the elegant clothes and manners of the Regency beau lurked a slavering satyr. What had poetry and romance to do with what she had witnessed that evening? And the beautiful young man? He had asked her to dance during her first Season, and she had immediately pleaded the headache and asked to be taken home.
The first tremulous awakenings of love and romance had been nipped in the bud by that dreadful party at the posting house. She would never forget it. She would remain cool and chaste and virginal for the rest of her life. She had friends in London of her own age. She had never confided in one of them. Ladies did not speak of such matters in a social world hedged in by euphemisms. Being sick with drink was described as “cascading,” and flatulence as “voluntary posterior declamations.” Any man in this hard drinking age who suffered from delirium tremens would describe one of his fits casually as the Horrors. The ton abounded with “Don’ts,” although there were odd double standards. One did not say “legs” to another lady. That would be impolite. Everyone knew that. And yet Isabella had heard two middle-aged duchesses arguing over which of them had the best legs, ending up with hitching up their skirts for a competition. It was hinted that love could take place outside marriage, but woe betide any married woman who was foolish enough to be found out. A great many ladies of the ton committed adultery, but they would gleefully turn and rend the reputation of one of their more unfortunate sisters who had been discovered by her husband to be conducting an affair. Ladies were expected to be sensitive, delicate creatures, never to be found guilty of any coarseness; yet at a grand dinner party Isabella had attended with her parents, several of the ladies had risen from their seats during the dinner and had gone over to a commode in the corner of the dining room to
relieve themselves. Of course one did not comment on it for a lady did not see such things.
So Isabella kept the secret of the posting house locked up inside her brain.
All she had to do was to wait until they were all comfortably settled at Appleton House once more and then persuade her parents that there was little point in taking her to London for another Season.
She would have been reassured had she known that her parents had already decided that she had had her last London Season, but she would have been distressed to know the plans for her future.
“We must discuss this affair with our acquaintance. Some young man from the Duchy would be suitable,” said Mrs. Chadbury.
“Perhaps not necessarily so young,” said Mr. Chadbury. “But I cannot think of anyone at the moment. We’ll ask Tremayne.”
The Earl and Countess of Tremayne were at that moment seated in the shabby morning room of their Cornish Tregar Castle. Parts of the cliff outside had begun to crumble into the sea, and yesterday two end rooms in the east wing had disappeared with a great rumble. They had not been important rooms. In fact they had not been in use for some time, but the earl and countess felt it was the beginning of the end. Soon more cliff would crumble, taking more rooms with it. “And then us,” said the countess. Although it was breakfast time, she was drinking champagne, which she considered the only thing to restore her shattered nerves. She was a small, dainty woman with hair of an improbable gold. Her husband was a large and shabby creature, rather childlike, who looked out at the world in an occasionally baffled way as if wondering why the good Lord should continue to pile such misery on him. “It’s like the plagues of Egypt,” he remarked. “Next thing, it’ll be raining frogs, mark my words.”
“Silly old cliffs,” the countess said petulantly. “Why can’t they stay where they are? And no money to do anything about it. If we had money, it would not matter if this drafty, miserable place sank to the bottom of the briny deep.”
“The what?”
“The sea, precious.”
“Oh.”
“If only Harry were here,” the countess went on, “he would know what to do.”
Lord Harry was their only son. They had a seventeen-year-old daughter, Lady Lucy, who at that moment had just joined them and was filling a champagne glass for herself, guessing that her parents were too worried about something to notice what she was drinking.
“Don’t see what Harry could do about the demned cliffs,” remarked the earl. “Stand there like King Canute.”
“King Canute ordered the sea to go back,” Lucy pointed out. “He didn’t do anything about cliffs. Why can’t I have a Season?”
“Can’t afford it,” her mother said. “Maybe next year. Harry wrote and said something about prize money.”
Lucy brightened, and then her face fell. “But this dreadful war might go on for a hundred years.” She was a plump, cheerful girl, rather slatternly in her dress.
A footman came in and handed a letter to the earl.
He opened it and read it carefully. “The Chadburys are back.” he said. “Request the pleasure of our company for dinner.”
“Thank goodness for that,” said the countess. “They keep a good table. Pity they don’t have a son for Lucy. Do they say anything about an engagement for Isabella?”
“No.”
“That means she hasn’t taken again,” said the countess. “All that fortune and beauty. But she’s a cold fish, that girl.”
“Not with me,” said Lucy. “We always have fun.” She hiccupped.
“Stop drinking champagne,” the countess snapped. “I am drinking it for medicinal reasons. Do you know a part of the east wing went over the cliff last night?”
Lucy brightened. “I must go and look. How do you mean, went over the cliff? You make it sound as if someone had shoved it.”
“The cliffs, dear Lucy, crumbled.” The countess sighed and raised her small, dainty, slippered feet and rested them on the back of a shabby deerhound that was snoring on the floor. “Look if you must, but don’t fall over.”
Lucy scampered off, and a footman brought in the morning’s post.
“Bills, bills, bills,” grumbled the earl, flicking through them. “Oh, here’s an interesting one. Could be from Harry.” He opened it up and read it quickly. “Listen to this. He’s at Portsmouth! He had the fever and was invalided home from the Peninsula, but he said the voyage back did him the world of good and he should be with us shortly, although he thinks he has to stay in Portsmouth for about another ten days.”
“Hooray!” cried the countess. “We’ll have a party.”
“With what?”
“Oh, I’ll sell something.” She looked around vaguely. “I’ll ask Stokes. He’s awfully clever at selling things.” Stokes was the butler. “Have some champagne, dear. This calls for a celebration.”
So the earl took champagne and stayed drinking with his wife until Lucy returned and said acidly that they had better both go and lie down or they would be as drunk as sailors at the Chadburys’ dinner.
Unlike the earl’s castle, Appleton House, home of the Chadburys, was relatively modern with a fine Palladian front looking out over landscaped gardens and was a good two miles from the sea. But when she was younger, Isabella had always envied Lucy. It seemed much more exciting to live in a ruin of a castle on the edge of the cliffs.
Mr. and Mrs. Chadbury had exquisite taste. The tall, cool rooms were filled with the finest furniture, paintings, sculpture, and objects d’art.
The earl and his family had been invited to come at five o’clock to sit down to dinner at six, the Chadburys feeling that the new fashionable dinner hour in town of seven o’clock was just too late for the country. Isabella and her parents were seated on a long terrace at the front of the house, awaiting the arrival of their guests.
“How odd!” remarked Isabella. “I see them in the distance. They are on foot! And they appear to be punching one other.”
It had all been the earl’s fault. He had declared that they were all losing the use of their limbs by driving here and there in carriages. Horses and carriages were a needless expense, and so they should walk the ten miles to Appleton House.
The countess would never have agreed had she remembered it was ten whole miles. The day was fine, and they set out with a cursing and grumbling old retainer carrying the lamp that was to light their way home. After five miles, the countess began to complain that her feet hurt. She was wearing old-fashioned shoes with high red heels which, her husband was quick to point out, were the problem and not the distance.
“Do so be the gurt distance,” moaned the old retainer, “and a curse be on you and yours.”
Lucy swung round. “Shut your mouth you old fool or I will shut it for you,” she snapped. She marched on but pretended not to notice when a clod of earth thrown by the enraged old retainer went whistling past her ear. The servants had not been paid for ages, so as the countess pointed out, one must allow them their little grumbles and foibles.
They were just approaching Appleton House when the earl began to whimper. “I have corns. Bless me, why did I ever think of this scheme?”
“Yes, why did you?” the countess demanded, punching him on the arm.
“Gurt old fool,” muttered the old retainer. Lucy, who would not take any criticism of her father from anyone other than her mother, kicked the old retainer in the shins, and then ran to catch up with her parents who were now running toward the house, both having decided that was a good way to shorten the distance.
The old retainer stumbled after them, stooping occasionally to pick up stones and turf to throw at them and fortunately missing every time.
“Oh, heaven!” cried the countess, sinking down into a chair on the terrace beside Mrs. Chadbury. “My poor broken feet. My darling, Sophia,” to Mrs. Chadbury, “get one of your well-trained minions to fetch me a bowl of mustard and water for my feet.”
“That’s for colds,” Isabella said, highly amused.
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“No, no, my duck. Mustard and water for the feet and brandy for the inside of me, and I shall be a new woman.”
Isabella tried not to laugh as a bowl of water and mustard was placed at the countess’s feet. Lady Tremayne kicked off her high heels, pulled off her stockings, deposited a pair of worn red garters on the table, and sank her feet into the water with a loud “Aaah!” of pleasure.
The old retainer tottered forward and helped himself to a glass of brandy.
“That’s a bit forward of him,” remarked Isabella.
“Horrible old thing, isn’t he?” said Lucy. “But he’s been with the family for years and hasn’t been paid in ages, so we let him have a lot of license. Oh, you’ll never guess. Part of the east wing fell into the sea last night.”
“What on earth happened?”
“Part of the cliff fell away.”
“But, my dear Lucy. Your life may be in danger.”
“Not yet. My apartments are in the west wing.”
Isabella looked at Lucy with affection. Lucy’s face was shiny, and her gown was shabby. Her hair was frizzy and auburn, and her face was dusted with freckles. She lay back in her chair comfortably while Isabella sat bolt upright as she had been trained to do by a severe governess. Miss Chadbury, a lady’s back should never touch the back of the chair!
The air was warm and sweet and smelled of roses and newly cut grass. Bats fluttered about overhead in the twilight, and Lucy thought it odd that bats should fly about Appleton House instead of round Tregar Castle, her crumbling family home.
She became aware that her parents and Mr. and Mrs. Chadbury were rising to their feet.
“Dinner?” she asked.
“Not yet,” said Mrs. Chadbury. “You girls stay here. We have business to discuss.”
“What business, I wonder,” Lucy mused when they had gone inside. “Papa cannot be asking your father for money because he never asks people he likes for money. What was the Season like?”
