Lady of Quality

by Джорджетт Хейер

  “I am not accustomed, sir, to listen to the sort of language you use!” she replied frostily.

  “Oh, is that all? A thousand pardons, ma’am! But your brother did warn you, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, and also that you don’t hesitate to ride rough-shod over people you think beneath your touch!” she flashed.

  He looked surprised. “Oh, no! Only over people who bore me! Did you think I was trying to ride rough-shod over you? I wasn’t. You do put me out of temper, but you don’t bore me.”

  “I am so much obliged to you!” she said, with ironic gratitude. “You have relieved my mind of a great weight! Perhaps you will add to your goodness by explaining what you imagine I have done to put you out of temper? That, I must confess, has me in a puzzle! I had supposed that you had come to Bath to thank me for having befriended Lucilla: certainly not to pinch at me for having done so!”

  “If that don’t beat the Dutch!” he ejaculated. “What the deuce have I to thank you for, ma’am? For aiding and abetting my niece to make a byword of herself? For dragging me into the business? For—”

  “I didn’t!” she broke in indignantly. “I did what lay within my power to scotch the scandal that might have arisen from her flight from Chartley; and as for dragging you into the business, nothing, let me tell you, was further from my intention, or, indeed, my wish!”

  “You must surely have known that that fool of a—that Clara Amber would write to demand that I should exercise my authority over Lucilla!”

  “Yes, Ninian Elmore told us that she had done so,” she agreed, with false affability. “But since nothing Lucilla has said about you led me to think that you had either fondness for her, or took the smallest interest in her, I had no expectation of receiving a visit from you. To own the truth, sir, my first feeling on having your name brought up to me was one of agreeable surprise. But that was before I had had the very doubtful pleasure of making your acquaintance!”

  The effect of this forthright speech was not at all what she had intended, for instead of taking instant umbrage to it he laughed, and said appreciatively: “That’s milled me down, hasn’t it?”

  “I sincerely hope so!”

  “Oh, it has! But it’s not bellows to mend with me! I warn you, I shall come about again. Now, instead of sparring with me, perhaps you, in your turn, will have the goodness to explain to me why you didn’t restore Lucilla to her aunt, but kept her here, dam—dashed well encouraging her in a piece of hoydenish disobedience?”

  This uncomfortable echo of what Sir Geoffrey had said to her brought a slight flush into her cheeks. She did not immediately answer him, but when, looking up, she saw the challenge in his eyes, and the satirical curl of his lips, she said, frankly: “My brother has already asked me that question. Like you, he disapproves of my action. You may both of you be right, but I set as little store by his opinion as I do by yours. When I invited Lucilla to stay with me, I did what I believed—and still believe!—to be the right thing to do.”

  “Fudge!” he said roughly. “Your only excuse could have been that you were bamboozled into thinking that she had suffered ill-treatment at her aunt’s hands, and if that is what she told you she must be an unconscionable little liar! Clara Amber has petted and cossetted her ever since she took her in charge!”

  “No, she didn’t tell me anything of the sort, but what she did tell me made me pity her from the bottom of my heart. Little though you may think it, Mr Carleton, there is a worse tyranny than that of ill-treatment. It is the tyranny of tears, vapours, appeals to feelings of affection, and of gratitude! This tyranny Mrs Amber seems to have exercised to the full! A girl of less strength of character might have succumbed to it, but Lucilla is no weakling, and however ill-advised it was of her to have run away I can’t but respect her for having had the spirit to do it!”

  He said, rather contemptuously: “An unnecessarily dramatic way of showing her spirit. I am sufficiently well acquainted with Mrs Amber to know that she would not indulge in tears and vapours if Lucilla had not offered her a good deal of provocation. I conclude that the tiresome chit has been imposing on her aunt’s good-nature yet again. Mrs Amber has frequently complained of her wilfulness to me, but what else could she expect of a girl brought up with excessive indulgence? I guessed how it would be from the outset.”

  “Then I wonder at it that you should have given your ward into her care!” exclaimed Miss Wychwood hotly. “One would have supposed that if you had had the smallest regard for her welfare—” She stopped, aware that she had allowed her indignation to betray her into impropriety, and said: “I beg your pardon! I have no right, of course, to censure either your conduct, or Mrs Amber’s!”

  “No,” he said.

  Her eyes flew to his in astonishment, a startled question in them, for she was quite taken aback by this uncompromising monosyllable.

  “No right at all,” he said, explaining himself.

  For a perilous moment, she hovered on the brink of losing her temper, but her ever-ready sense of the absurd came to her rescue, and instead of yielding to the impulse to come to points with him she broke into sudden laughter, and said: “How unhandsome of you to have given me such a set-down, when I had already begged your pardon!”

  “How unjust of you to accuse me of giving you a set-down when all I did was to agree with you!” he retorted.

  “It is to be hoped,” said Miss Wychwood, with strong feeling, “that we are not destined to see very much more of each other, Mr Carleton! You arouse in me an almost overmastering desire to give you the finest trimming you have ever had in your life!”

  Her laughter was reflected in his eyes. “Oh, no, you would be very unwise to do that!” he said. “Recollect that I am famous for my incivility! I should instantly give you your own again, and since I am an ill-mannered man and you are a well-bred woman of consequence you would be bound to come off the worse from any such encounter.”

  “That I can believe! Nevertheless, sir, I am determined to do what lies within my power to bring you to a sense of your obligations towards that unfortunate child. For fobbing her off on to Mrs Amber, when she was still a child, there may have been some excuse, but she is not a child now, and—”

  “Permit me to correct you, ma’am!” he interrupted. “I should undoubtedly have fobbed her off on to Mrs Amber if she had been left to my sole guardianship, but it so happens that I had no choice in the matter! My brother appointed Amber to share the guardianship with me; and it was the expressed wish of his wife that, in the event of her death, her sister should have charge of Lucilla!”

  “I see,” she said, digesting this. “But did you also delegate your authority over Lucilla’s future? Were you willing to see her coerced into a distasteful marriage?”

  “No, of course not!” he replied irritably. “But as marriage doesn’t come into the question I fail to see—”

  “But it does!” she exclaimed, considerably astonished. “That is why she ran away from Chartley! Surely you must have known what was intended? I had supposed you to be a party to the arrangement!”

  He stared at her from under frowning brows. “What arrangement?” he demanded.

  “Good gracious!” she uttered. “Then she never told you! Oh, how—how unprincipled of her! It makes me more than ever convinced that I did the right thing when I kept Lucilla with me!”

  “Very gratifying for you, ma’am! Pray gratify me by telling me what the devil you are talking about!”

  “I have every intention of telling you, so you have no need to bite off my nose!” she snapped. “For goodness’ sake, sit down! I can’t think why we are standing about in this absurd way!”

  “Oh, can’t you? Did you expect me to sit down before you invited me to do so? You do think me a ramshackle fellow, don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t! I don’t know anything about you!” she said crossly.

  “Except that I am famed for my incivility.”

  She was obliged to laugh, and to say, with engaging ho
nesty, as she sat down: “I am afraid it is I who have been uncivil. Pray, will you not be seated, Mr Carleton?”

  “Thank you!” he responded politely, and chose a chair opposite to hers. “And now will you be kind enough to tell me what is the meaning of this farrago of nonsense about Lucilla?”

  “It isn’t nonsense—though I own anyone could be pardoned for thinking so! I collect that you don’t know why Mrs Amber took her on a visit to Chartley Place?”

  “I didn’t know she had taken her there, until I received a blotched and impassioned letter from her, written from Chartley. As for the reason, I don’t think she divulged it. It seemed to me a perfectly natural thing: Lucilla’s own home is in the immediate vicinity, and until her mother’s death she was as much a part of Iverley’s household as her own, and no doubt formed friendships with his children—particularly, as I recollect, with Iverley’s son, who is the nearest to her in age.”

  “Are you quite positive that she didn’t tell you of the scheme she and the Iverleys hatched between them?” she demanded incredulously.

  “No,” he replied. “I am not positive that she didn’t, but I was unable to decipher more than the first page of her letter—and that with difficulty, since she had spattered it with her tears! The second sheet baffled me, for not only did she weep over it, but she crossed and recrossed her lines—no doubt with the amiable intention of sparing me extra expense.”

  Her eyes had widened as she listened to him, but although she was shocked by his indifference she could not help being amused by it. Amusement quivered in her voice as she said: “What an extraordinary man you are, Mr Carleton! You received a letter from your ward’s aunt, written in extreme agitation, and you neither made any real effort, I am very sure, to decipher that second sheet, nor—if the blotches did indeed baffle you—to go down to Chartley to discover precisely what had happened!”

  “Yes, it seemed at first as though that hideous necessity did lie before me,” he agreed. “Fortunately, however, the following day brought me a letter from Iverley, which had the merit of being short, and legible. He informed me that Lucilla was in Bath, that her aunt was prostrate, and that if I wished to rescue my ward from the clutches of what he feared was a designing female, calling herself Miss Wychwood, I must leave for Bath immediately.”

  “Well, if that is not the outside of enough!” she said wrathfully. “Calling myself Miss Wychwood, indeed! And in what way am I supposed to have designs on Lucilla, pray?”

  “That he didn’t disclose.”

  “If he knew that Lucilla was staying with me, he must have written to you after Ninian’s return to Chartley, for he couldn’t otherwise have known where she had gone to, or what my name is! Yes, and after Ninian had given Mrs Amber the letter I had written to her, informing her of the circumstances of my meeting with Lucilla, and begging her to grant the child permission to stay with me for a few weeks! I should be glad to know why, if she thought me a designing female, she sent Lucilla’s trunks to her! What a ninnyhammer she must be! But as for Iverley! How dared he write such damaging stuff about me? If he talked like that to Ninian I’m not surprised Ninian ripped up at him!”

  “Your conversation, ma’am, bears a strong resemblance to Clara Amber’s letter!” he said acidly. “Both are unintelligible! What the devil has Ninian to do with this hotch-potch?”

  “He has everything to do with it! Mrs Amber and the Iverleys are determined to marry him to Lucilla! That is why she ran away!”

  “Marry him to Lucilla?” he repeated. “What nonsense! Are you trying to tell me the boy is in love with her? I don’t believe it!”

  “No, I am not trying to tell you that! He wants the match as little as she does, but dared not tell his father so for fear of bringing about one of the heart-attacks with which Iverley terrorizes his family into obeying his every whim! I don’t think you can have the least notion of what the situation is at Chartley!”

  “Very likely not. I haven’t visited the house since my sister-in-law’s death. Iverley and I don’t deal together, and never did.”

  “Then I’ll tell you!” promised Miss Wychwood, and straightway launched into a graphic description of the circumstances which had goaded Lucilla into precipitate flight.

  He heard her in silence, but the expression on his face was discouraging, and when she came to the end of her recital he was so far from evincing either sympathy or understanding that he ejaculated, in exasperated accents: “Oh, for God’s sake, ma’am! Spare me any more of this Cheltenham tragedy! What a kick-up over something that might have been settled in a flea’s leap!”

  “Mr Carleton,” she said, holding her temper on a tight rein, “I am aware that you, being a man, can scarcely be blamed for failing to appreciate the dilemma in which Lucilla found herself; but I assure you that to a girl just out of the schoolroom it must have seemed that she had walked into a trap from which the only escape was flight! Had Ninian had enough resolution to have told his father that he had no intention of making Lucilla an offer it must have brought the thing to an end. Unfortunately, his affection for his father, coupled with the belief—instilled into his head, I have no doubt at all, by his mother!—that to withstand Iverley’s demands was tantamount to murdering him, overcame whatever resolution he may have had. As far as I have been able to discover, the only notion he had was to become engaged to Lucilla, and to trust in providence to prevent the subsequent marriage! The one good thing that has emerged from this escapade is that Ninian, finding, on his return to Chartley, that his fond father had worked himself into a rare passion, without suffering the slightest ill, began to see that Iverley’s weak heart was little more than a weapon to hold over his household.”

  “I am wholly uninterested in Ninian, or in any other young cub!” said Mr Carleton trenchantly. “I accept—on your assurance!—that the pressure brought to bear on Lucilla was hard to withstand. What I do not accept, ma’am, is that her only remedy lay in flight! Why the devil didn’t the little nod-cock write to me?”

  She fairly gasped at this question, and it was a full minute before she was able to command her voice sufficiently to answer it with composure. “I fancy, sir, that her previous experiences of writing to you for support had not led her to suppose that any other reply to an appeal to you for help would be forthcoming than that she must do as her aunt thought best,” she said.

  She observed, with satisfaction, that she had at last succeeded in discomfiting him. He reddened, and said, in a voice of smouldering annoyance: “Since the only appeals I’ve received from Lucilla have been concerned with matters quite outside my province—”

  “Even an appeal for a horse of her own?” she interjected swiftly. “Was that also outside your province, Mr Carleton?”

  A frown entered his eyes. “Did she ask me for one? I have no recollection of it.”

  It was now her turn to be disconcerted, for she found that she could not remember whether a refusal to permit her to have a horse of her own had been one of Lucilla’s accusations against him, or merely one of Mrs Amber’s prohibitions against which she had not thought it worth her while to protest to her uncle. Fortunately, she was not obliged either to retract or to prevaricate, for, without waiting for a reply, he said: “If she did, I daresay I did refuse to let her set up her own stable. I can conceive of few more foolish notions than to be keeping a horse and groom in a town—both, I have little doubt, eating their heads off!”

  Having discovered the truth of this herself, she was unable to deny it, so she prudently abandoned the question, and cast back to her original accusation, saying: “But am I not right in believing that your custom is to refer every request Lucilla has addressed to you to Mrs Amber’s judgment?”

  “Yes, of course you are,” he replied impatiently. “What the devil do I know about the upbringing of schoolgirls?”

  “What a miserable sop to offer your conscience!” she said.

  “My conscience doesn’t need a sop, ma’am!” he said harshly. “I may be L
ucilla’s legal guardian, but it was never expected of me that I should be concerned in the niceties of her upbringing! Had it been suggested to me I should have had no hesitation in refusing such a charge. I’ve no turn for the infantry!”

  “Not even for your brother’s only child?” she asked. “Don’t you feel any affection for her?”

  “No, none,” he replied. “How should I? I scarcely know her. It’s useless to expect me to become sentimental because she’s my brother’s child: I knew almost as little about him as I know about Lucilla, and what I did know I didn’t much like. I don’t mean to say that there was any harm in him: no doubt there was a great deal of good, but he had less than commonsense, and too much sensibility for my tastes. I found him a dead bore.”

  “Well, I find my brother a dead bore too,” she said candidly, “but however much we rub against each other there is a bond of affection between us. I had thought that that must always exist between brothers and sisters.”

  “Possibly you know him better than I ever knew my brother. There were only three years between us, but although that’s a mere nothing between adults, it constitutes a wide gulf between schoolboys. At Harrow, he formed a close, and, to my mind, a pretty mawkish friendship with young Elmore. They were both army-mad, and joined the same regiment when they left Harrow. From then on I only saw him by scraps. He married a pretty little widgeon, too: she wasn’t as foolish as her sister, but she had more hair than wit, and a mouth full of the sort of pap I can’t stomach. I knew, of course, when he bought Chartley Manor that the bosom-bow friendship between him and Elmore was as strong as ever, and I suppose I should have guessed that such a pair of air-dreamers would have hatched a scheme to achieve a closer relationship by marrying Elmore’s heir to Charles’s daughter. Though why Elmore—or Iverley, as by that time he was—should have persisted in this precious scheme after Charles’s death is a matter beyond my comprehension! Unless he thinks that Lucilla’s property is just the thing to round off his own estate?”