Cecilia Or Flight From A Shadow

by Catherine Bowness

  Soon she no longer needed Mr Merdle to stand behind her – indeed she rather wished he would not for he could see quite as well as she how her winnings were mounting.

  It was then that she discovered that some of the ladies-only engagements, when Cecilia was far more lax in her attention, provided opportunities for play – without Mr Merdle hanging over her. Unfortunately, as soon as she began to take what had begun as a simple amusement more seriously, the luck deserted her, and she began to lose.

  Again, at first, she thought nothing of it, although it was disappointing, for she was sure she would soon come about. It was only when she began to have to write IOUs that the full horror of her situation began to impress itself upon her.

  She had been provided with a small amount of pin money by her mother before she left England, money intended for the purchase of trifles and, not being much given to a desire for fripperies, had spent almost none of it before arriving in Switzerland. Now it had all gone – and the IOUs were mounting up. She did not dare to ask her cousin for the money for he would be bound to want to know what she wanted to purchase and offer to get it for her. She could not tell him that she had lost it at cards! Nor did she dare confess to her chaperone for, although she was not so afraid of her disapprobation, she knew that Cecilia had no money but what she earned and, since she had been working for only a very short time, could not possibly have accumulated enough to discharge even one of the horrid promissory notes.

  She wondered if she dared to ask Endymion for help. He, according to his sister, was accustomed to playing and not without experience of losing. But how could she when she wanted so terribly to impress him?

  Cursing herself for betraying her anxiety to Cecilia, it was with a heavy heart and a reluctant step that she climbed into the carriage that evening. She had been tempted to cry off with a headache because she knew that she would be bound to meet several of the ladies to whom she owed money. She had grown to hate these people who at first had seemed so kind and entertaining. In the end, she found she did not dare as she knew Cecilia would not only insist on staying with her but would, in the end, winkle the truth out of her.

  By the time the carriage arrived, she not only had a headache but felt so sick with apprehension that she stumbled as she went down the steps and had to be steadied by her cousin.

  Entering the building, she was convinced that several of these gorgons were looking at her in a threatening manner; indeed, one of them, a Madame de Maillée, approached her barely ten minutes after they arrived and asked her, in a low voice, when she was intending to settle her debt.

  “Oh, very soon!” Helen replied as airily as she could achieve. “I am only waiting for my allowance to arrive from England.”

  “Indeed? I have no wish to badger you, you understand, but I am a little short myself this month and have to pay my dressmaker’s bill in the next few days if she is not to tell my husband how much I have spent!” The lady, a large-eyed woman somewhere between thirty and forty, fixed Helen with a stare which was hard to avoid.

  “Oh, I am sorry!” Helen said hopelessly.

  “Why do you not come with me now and see if you can win some of it back?” Madame asked, now in a wheedling tone so that Helen suspected that the poor woman did indeed have debts of her own and could not pay them until either Helen had settled hers or she had managed to win money off some other unfortunate.

  Not knowing what else to do, and by this time positively burning to recoup some of her losses and thus expunge a portion of the guilt which was threatening to overcome her, Helen went with her temptress – and lost a whole lot more.

  Having been forced to scribble more promissory notes, she pushed back her chair and fled from the room, terror in her heart and tears of humiliation beginning to form in her eyes.

  As she blundered from the room, she ran into a man.

  Chapter 35

  It was Endymion.

  “Why, what’s the matter?” he asked.

  “Oh,” she cried, “oh, it is too terrible!” And now the tears began to run down her cheeks and she could feel her colour rising and her headache increasing until she was afraid her head would burst.

  “My dear!” he exclaimed, enfolding her in his arms as though she had been a child. “Would you like me to find Cecilia?”

  “No, oh no, pray do not! I could not tell her!”

  “What is it? Can you tell me?”

  She raised her eyes to his face and the hectic colour increased until she was sure she must look like a beetroot; she nodded.

  “Come on then; let’s go somewhere where we won’t be disturbed. Take my arm so that we will not arouse suspicion.”

  He tucked her hand into his arm and hurried her away from the throng and into an exceedingly small side room.

  Shutting the door behind them, he remarked how fortunate it was that there was at present no one there and besought her to tell him quickly before they were interrupted.

  “Oh, I cannot!” she exclaimed, breaking away from him and stumbling across the tiny room to reach the window where she laid her burning cheek against the cool glass.

  “I think you had better,” he replied. “Come; it can’t be that bad unless – have you killed someone? That would be bad!”

  “No, of course I have not! I – I have been playing cards and I lost.”

  “Oh, is that all? I’m constantly losing although recently I’ve been winning. How much have you lost? Would you like me to lend you some money? I have quite a lot at present.”

  “No; oh, it is far worse than that – I have given people IOUs.”

  “Have you, by Jupiter? I’ve done enough of that in the past to know how worrying it can be,” he said more gently, suddenly realising that what he had taken to be one game where she had lost, perhaps, pennies, was a great deal more serious.

  “Yes, and I haven’t any money at all and don’t know how I will settle them – and now there is a horrid woman, Madame de Maillée, who is badgering me to pay at once – and I cannot! I don’t think I’ll ever be able to! I may as well cast myself into the lake!”

  “No, no, don’t do that! It can’t be that bad! Here, come and sit down and tell me all about it.”

  He led her to an exceedingly small and rather shabby sofa, pushed up against the wall. When they were both seated upon it, they found themselves so close that their legs were touching all the way from hip to knee. If she had not been so terrified, she would have been absurdly excited to be sitting pressed up against him; as it was, she tried to look away, conscious of her burning, tear-stained face.

  “Do you know how much it all comes to?” he asked.

  “No. It is all in their horrid foreign money so that I don’t really understand it,” she admitted.

  “Oh, it’s probably less than you think then. The units of Swiss money are much smaller than English. How many IOUs have you written?”

  “I don’t know that either!”

  “Do you remember to whom you have given them?”

  “Yes! They haunt my dreams, those horrid women!”

  “You had best tell me their names and let me deal with it. As I say, I have been enjoying a run of good luck recently and can probably pay them off – unless of course you owe a king’s ransom.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so – I don’t know. But you can’t do that! Why should you?”

  “Because I would like to; only, if I do, you must promise me not to play for more than sous in future. The thing is it’s easy to keep going back to the tables again in the hope that your luck has changed when, really, if you have lost, that is the time to stop.”

  “I never want to play again!” she declared.

  “Hmn; I’ve often said that but it’s difficult not to, especially if you rather want the money.”

  “I’ll pay you back.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know! Are you going to ask me for an IOU?”

  “No, of course not. Do you know why I’ve started playing again?”<
br />
  She shook her head.

  “Because I thought, if I could win a lot, I would be a more eligible parti.”

  She stared at him. She was not an attractive sight; her lips slightly parted, her pale eyes unfocused and her skin blotched by tears.

  He raised one finger and smoothed the swollen skin beneath her eyes before dropping the finger to touch her lips. She began to tremble but still she said nothing; he bent his head and kissed her, full on the quivering lips.

  Cecilia had not seen her brother arrive, but she did, after a time, notice Helen’s absence.

  She began to look around, increasingly frantically, and eventually set off to search in all the side rooms, in one of which she met Lord Merdle, who was engaged in a game of cards. There was no sign of his son.

  She waited by the door until the hand was completed and his lordship had lost his stake before approaching him.

  “My lord,” she began tentatively and was shocked when he turned a white and exceedingly angry face towards her.

  “What the devil …?”

  “I am sorry to disturb you, sir, but I was wondering if you knew where your son is.”

  “Why the devil should I? I suppose he is grown up.”

  “More or less, I should think,” she could not resist retorting, annoyed to be greeted so rudely by a man who had set himself up as one of her admirers.

  “What do you mean by that?” Something in her face alerted him to the source of her anxiety and he said, “Where is your charge?”

  “With your son, I should suppose.”

  “Not much good as a chaperone, are you?” he sneered. “But then what could one expect from a person from your stable?”

  “What do you mean by that?” she asked, only too afraid that she knew exactly what he meant but suddenly so angry that she hardly cared if the scandal were broadcast.

  By this time the other players were becoming impatient and one of them asked if his lordship planned to continue to play or if he was leaving, in which case could he please settle his debts immediately.

  “I’m still playing!” he snapped. “Deal me in! This woman is leaving!”

  The other players looked appalled as Lord Merdle hunched his shoulder at Cecilia and jerked his chair closer to the table, putting it down on her foot as he did so.

  She gave a suppressed scream and said, with icy politeness, “I cannot when I am pinned to the ground by the leg of your chair, my lord!”

  “Damn you!” he exclaimed, jumping up, an action which initially ground the chair more heavily into her foot.

  She turned white with pain and, stepping back out of reach, swayed so alarmingly that several of the other players leapt to their feet to come to her aid.

  “For God’s sake apologise, Merdle!” one man said. “That’s no way to speak to a lady – and now you’ve hurt her!”

  “She’s no lady,” his lordship exclaimed with an ugly expression. “Her father had two wives!”

  The effect of this announcement was not perhaps quite what Lord Merdle had expected. There was a collective frown on his audience’s faces until the same man said, “Not that unusual surely? And hardly a reason to insult the lady!”

  Lord Merdle, looking relieved that the poor response to his information was merely a question of having been misunderstood, offered clarification.

  “At the same time!”

  Now there was a reaction: a hiss of collective sucking-in of breath.

  Cecilia’s defender rallied gamely, saying, “Well, that’s not her fault, is it?”

  It was on to this scene that Lord Waldron walked a moment later in search of his cousin.

  “What’s not her fault?” he asked, noting the atmosphere of shock as well as the white-faced and trembling Cecilia.

  “Merdle has accused her father of bigamy!” the spokesman explained.

  “Certainly not her fault,” the Earl agreed robustly. “Probably nonsense! Old gossip – pernicious but untrue!”

  “No, my lord,” Cecilia said in a thread of a voice. “I am afraid it is true, but my mother was his true wife. He married the other one later.”

  “Not in that case a proper marriage,” the Earl said derisively. “Merdle’s just making trouble. Come, Miss Moss, have you forgotten you promised to stand up with me?”

  “No, my lord.”

  She allowed him to take her hand, tuck it into his arm and lead her out of the room.

  “The scandal?” he asked.

  She nodded. “I should have told you. I am not a fit person to be in charge of your cousin.”

  “I’m not sure you are,” he agreed humorously. “You seem to have mislaid her. Where is she?”

  “I don’t know; that was why I went in there – I was looking for her.”

  “I’ve noticed she’s become very tight with Merdle’s son,” he said. “Is that why you thought she might be in a card room? He’s often to be found there. Have you seen him recently?”

  “No; I’m afraid they may be together and, while that is neither unusual nor inappropriate, their having disappeared from view is worrying. She has not formed an attachment to him so that I find it difficult to believe she would consent to withdraw somewhere private.”

  “Indeed; my impression of the young man is that he is fairly harmless – under the thumb of his far less pleasant parent and not well equipped to say ‘boo’ to a goose. I too have noticed that he follows her around and, although she sometimes rewards him with a smile or a comment, she generally spurns him. That sort of behaviour can, on occasion, lead to something distinctly unpleasant.”

  “I thought him harmless too, but his father having just proved that he, at least, is not, I suppose one is bound to judge the son less favourably.”

  As they spoke, they were walking together, her hand still tucked into his arm and his hand holding it there, from one room to another.

  “Perhaps they’re outside,” she suggested. “Should we look in the garden?”

  “I suppose we’ll have to if we cannot find them inside, but it’s very cold. Let us first complete our circuit of the house.”

  Failing to find Helen in any of the rooms with which he was familiar, Waldron eventually resorted to opening every door they saw as they patrolled the ground floor and thus, eventually, came upon his cousin, who was still sitting very close to Endymion, hands entwined, on the small sofa.

  “There you are!” the Earl exclaimed. “We have been looking everywhere for you.”

  At the same time Cecilia said, “What are you doing here, Dym?”

  “I should have thought that was obvious.”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” she snapped, adding in a different tone to Helen, “We have been searching for you for some time. I know I have been an excessively negligent chaperone – and will of course resign forthwith – but you really should not go into a small room with a gentleman, let alone sit pressed up against him on a sofa! As for you, Dym, I thought you knew better than to get into a situation which compromises Miss Lenham’s reputation.”

  Helen and Endymion ignored most of this, and, fixing upon the one point which struck them, exclaimed in unison, “Resigning? Why?”

  “Lord Merdle has just told everyone of Papa’s scandalous behaviour so that I can no longer continue to pretend to be a suitable person to look after his lordship’s cousin, particularly since I have been so careless as to allow you, Helen, to become isolated in a tiny room alone with my brother!”

  “We have not done anything improper,” Helen said, blushing, “or not very much. And why should your father’s behaviour prevent you from being my chaperone? Dear Cecilia, I don’t want you to resign. Must she, Horatio?”

  As she spoke, Helen rose and went towards Cecilia.

  “No, of course she not only need not, but should not. Merdle said something unpleasant but I don’t think we need to refine upon it,” Waldron said soothingly. “But I must reiterate what Miss Moss has said, Helen: you should not be sitting alone with a gentleman in a small
room.”

  “But he is part of our household!” Helen argued.

  “He is not, however, related to you. In any event, to my mind your denial that nothing improper has taken place is disingenuous for anyone can see that you have been engaged in all manner of impropriety: your hands were entwined when we came in and your expressions indicative of a good deal having gone on. I can only be glad I find you both fully clothed,” the Earl said severely.

  Endymion stood up and said, “I am sorry, my lord. I fear you will think I have taken advantage of your extreme kindness and generosity towards my family. I tried – I truly did try very hard – not to act upon or indicate by any means whatever how strongly I felt towards your cousin. I have wanted to marry her almost from the moment we met and, although I am persuaded you think me wholly unsuitable, I can only say that I will look after her devotedly and do my utmost to make her happy.”

  “Don’t be an idiot!” Cecilia cut in. “What in the world can you offer her?”

  “Most importantly, my love,” he said simply, but, having thrown this emotionally satisfying but materially deficient offer into the ring, added on a different note, “And, as a matter of fact, dearest Cissy, I am now in possession of a not inconsiderable fortune since winning it off your admirer last night.”

  “My admirer? Whom do you mean?”

  “Well, I know you have a whole string of them and, indeed, if he has just revealed our shameful family secret, I can only suppose this one has changed his mind about you. Did you laugh at him or something? Is he suffering from wounded pride?”

  “Lord Merdle? I don’t think he ever admired me – he only pretended to and did so in a wholly artificial manner - but now I am certain of it. On the contrary, I think he detests me – very likely all of us. Did you say you took a large sum off him last night?”

  “Yes; I’ve never won so much before! I’ve finally pulled off a king’s ransom – or what I suppose might ransom a fairly minor king of a poor country. In any event, I have fleeced Merdle and he went away looking positively sick so that I think I may have beggared him. I shall never play again, I swear, for fear of losing it all!”