Love's Harbinger

by Joan Smith

  “Oh, no! That’s not true! I admire him—I mean, a man who works his way up. I am not so priggish, Mr. Fletcher!”

  “No doubt he misunderstood something you said. Most people speak loosely. In the office Guy has a motto. He’s a great gun for axioms and mottoes. ‘We must write not only so that our meaning can be understood, but so clearly that it cannot possibly be misunderstood.’ Of course, no one is that precise in everyday speech,” he added.

  “You have a high opinion of your employer, I think?”

  “Guy’s the best friend a man ever had. I’d trust him with my life. Well, I have, more than once in Spain, and as you can see, I am still alive and kicking. The oddest thing is that he hates war, yet he was so good at it. I suppose he just hated more the possibility of being under Boney’s heel. And him half a Frenchie. Odd, is it not, the tricks life plays on us?”

  “Half French?” she asked, startled.

  “Yes, on his papa’s side. His father was Jean de Lamare. They changed their name when they escaped to England during the Revolution. Guy is short for Guillaume, of course.”

  “But it was only the aristocrats who fled from Robespierre!” she exclaimed.

  “No, he’s not of noble blood. His father was originally against the aristocracy—a member of the moderate Gironde party, but when Robespierre went to such lengths, his father spoke out against him and had to flee for his life. Guy hasn’t a good word to say for the aristocracy. He feels the Revolution in France was their fault, but, of course, the whole thing got out of hand in the end. No sane person ever intended for it to go so far.”

  “Guy actually grew up in France then,” she said.

  “He says he was old enough to remember the horror of it, too young to do anything about it. That is his definition of frustration: to recognize a wrong and be powerless to correct it. His greatest fear is that the insensitivity of the aristocracy here in England could lead to a similar sort of thing, but I think now that he’s met a few of our English aristos, he feels differently. He has no love for Prinney, but then who has?”

  When they reached the chamber, Lady Lynne had already entered. Guy held the door for Faith. She turned and looked at him, seeing him clothed for the first time in the new facts she had just learned. The Gallic strain was so obvious she wondered that she hadn’t guessed it. The British sangfroid was noticeably absent in him. His eyes glowed with a Latin passion. It lend an added allure, that touch of foreign glamour.

  “Thank you,” she said softly. A tinge of pleasant curiosity was in her expression. “And good evening. Or should I say au revoir?” she added.

  “Au revoir, by all means. At least I trust we shall be meeting again—very soon. Does your suddenly wandering into French mean Dick has been telling tales on me?”

  “Only a very short tale. I wish the walk had been longer,” she answered. “How does it come you never told us you were French?” A smile curved his lips. “No—don’t say it! We never asked.”

  “I try to avoid the obvious. I was going to say my name ought to have told you.

  “Oh, yes, from de Lamare, of course.”

  “No from on dit. I refer to my feminine alter ego. You look very lovely tonight in that blue gown, Faith. But just between us, I think I preferred you in the pale yellow you wore the night we waltzed. Was it only last night?”

  Dick had strolled a discreet few yards down the hall, but Lady Lynne turned to see what was keeping Faith and the moment was over. The chaperone was disgusted with herself when she saw the rosy flush on her niece’s cheeks and the soft gleam of pleasure in her eyes.

  “Nine tomorrow, then?” Guy said, including them both in the question.

  “Yes. Good evening.”

  Faith closed the door and Lady Lynne turned a sapient eye on her charge. “You’re looking very pleased with yourself, miss. Have you been taking my advice and casting your net in Guy’s direction?”

  “Certainly not. Mr. Delamar doesn’t want to marry me.

  “I see” was all the dame said, but the answer was as welcome as manna in the wilderness. She saw clearly that “I don’t want to marry Mr. Delamar” had become “Mr. Delamar doesn’t want to marry me.” She had only to remove the negative, and the thing was done.

  It firmed her decision to write a retraction of the engagement for the London papers. It ought to have been done sooner, before they left town. She did it that very night and had it posted to London. A broken engagement was an excellent excuse for their absence from the social scene during these few days if anyone began asking questions. She knew she was doing the proper thing, but lest her act cause a recrudescence of Faith’s love for Thomas, she delayed telling her niece about it.

  Chapter Seven

  When the ladies opened their door in the morning to go downstairs, they saw that a door across the hall, three or four rooms down, was open as well.

  “Good timing!” Lady Lynne smiled. “That is Guy’s room—the one he is sharing with Fletcher. He pointed it out last night when we came up.” She lingered for a moment till he came out, and Faith waited with her, her heart beating unsteadily.

  It would be hard to say which was the more surprised when a young female, garmented in gaudy apparel that revealed her calling, issued from the door across the hall. She had tousled black hair and a mucous, caterwauling voice.

  “A whole sovereign! Why, thank you ever so,’’ the black-haired girl exclaimed, and laughed a rowdy laugh.

  Faith stared and her aunt rushed in to whitewash the interlude. “Fletcher’s doings,” she scoffed angrily.

  “They were both sharing that room!” Faith said. Innocent though she was, she had heard of lechery and was aware of what the woman represented.

  From behind the door, a man answered. The door not only concealed his identity but muffled his voice as well, though his words were distinguishable. “Sure it’s enough? You had a hard night.”

  “I’ve had worse. Look me up any time you’re in the neighborhood,” she said saucily, and turned to leave.

  Lady Lynne pushed Faith back into the room and closed their door. As soon as the female had passed, however, she opened it again—to see Mr. Fletcher just coming up the stairs, giving the lie to Lady Lynne’s story.

  Unaware of the contretemps, he stopped to say good morning. “Shaft won. A big majority—it’s no surprise. I’ve arranged a parlor for breakfast any time you ladies are ready. I’ll just give Guy’s door a knock. He had a little business to attend to before leaving.”

  Faith gave him a haughty stare and said, “I believe you’ll find Mr. Delamar is finished with his business now.” She turned a brusque shoulder on the poor innocent man and strode down to the parlor. Had she been less upset, she would have remained in her room, but before this excellent snub occurred to her, she was already seated in the parlor and the gentlemen had entered.

  When Fletcher told Guy that Lady Faith had turned into a block of ice overnight, he suspected she had seen the female but naturally hoped otherwise. He entered the parlor wearing a wary smile and expressing the hope that they had slept well. His own hagged condition—bleary eyes, pale cheeks—was put down to his visitor and the smile to the same reason. It was a very satisfied smile.

  “Very well, thank you,” Faith said, but her eyes skewered him to the spot. “I trust you also enjoyed your night.”

  “Enjoy is hardly the right word,” he objected. “We had some success.”

  “So had Mr. Shaft, I hear,” she replied, and picked up the menu. “Just coffee for me. Something has turned my stomach. I couldn’t eat a bite.”

  “Perhaps it’s just as well,” he replied, assuming an indifference to match hers. “You weren’t looking forward to the ferry crossing, as I recall. I don’t have a weak stomach myself. I’ll have gammon and eggs. How about you, Dick?”

  “I don’t have to cross water. I’ll have beefsteak and a rider. That’s an egg atop,” he explained to the waiter.

  Foreseeing a difficult day, Lady Lynne ordered the
same. She trusted that if Delamar was a libertine (and what man was not, at heart?), he was at least clever enough to have invented a story to satisfy Faith by now.

  To give him an opening for his tale, she asked, “So you had no luck with Shaft last night?”

  “We did and we didn’t,” he said, but his smile didn’t look like failure. “We got him foxed enough to admit to a couple of dyed-in-the-wool Tories like Charles and Fletcher that he had rigged the election by the old tried-and-true stunts. Proving it is more difficult. If I understand his ravings aright, his returning officers went into the counting room with their pockets stuffed with ballots marked in his favor. They substituted them for real ballots, snaffling the others into their pockets when they had a chance, but that’s only verbal admission and by a man who wasn’t quite sober. We have no tangible evidence.”

  “So what is the outcome to be?” Lady Lynne demanded.

  “Why, the outcome is that he will have to be unseated on some other charge.”

  “Such as?” Lady Lynne asked eagerly.

  “Such as . . . this,” he said, and tossed a letter onto the table.

  She lifted it up and read it hastily. “The fool! Why would he put it in writing?” she demanded.

  Faith was goaded into interest and took the letter written and signed in Mr. Shaft’s own hand, from her aunt to read of an arrangement that for the vote of a Mr. Silas Barnes, he would promise Barnes the position of city clerk. “Patronage—is that illegal?” she asked, careful to direct her question to Mr. Fletcher.

  “When it occurs in the opposition party, it is called bribery, which is indeed illegal,” he assured her.

  “How did you get the letter?”

  “Shaft had it in his jacket pocket. He must have realized how dangerous it was and asked Barnes to give it back. He meant to destroy it, of course, but . . . well, he was in his cups last night and he didn’t do it. This is not the only vote he bought, but one is enough to prove the point.”

  “What did you do, pick his pocket?” she asked. Her tone was far from approving.

  “No, a . . . friend did it for us. A female, actually,” Guy admitted.

  “The one we saw at your door this morning?” Lady Lynne demanded. She was still on speaking terms with Guy and posed her question to him.

  The scowl he turned on her might have intimidated a more sensitive soul, but it didn’t faze Lady Lynne in the least. “You saw Millie, did you?” he asked. He risked a glance at Faith and had a good view of her averted jaw, set like Portland cement. “She stopped in for a minute this morning after—that is, before leaving the inn. Well, Willie is a bachelor, you know. It stands to reason that he’d want to celebrate his victory. And once he’d settled on Millie, we had a quiet word with her.”

  The cement jaw turned toward him. It unstuck long enough for Faith to say, in frigid accents, “I think it was a despicable thing to do.”

  “Are you referring to Willie Shaft or to me?” he asked bluntly.

  “Both. Mr. Shaft has at least the excuse of being disguised.”

  “I consider public drunkenness an added offense myself. If I remember rightly, your attitude to a bachelor’s entertaining a woman in his room was more lenient in London,” he reminded her. “I did what I had to do. It is a case of the end justifying the means.”

  “What justifies the end? Who are you to play God with a man’s career?”

  “I am playing Justice, not God. We get the politicians we deserve. I don’t deserve Shaft. If God wants to strike me dead and prevent my turning this letter over to the lord lieutenant, the Duke of Graveston, for handling, I shan’t have a word to say against it.”

  “You do draw the line at overruling God, do you? I am surprised,” she snipped.

  “What will happen to Shaft?” Lady Lynne asked.

  “He’ll be disqualified from serving his term—perhaps arrested and convicted of bribery, depending on how much influence he has. A new election will be held, and with the stink the Harbinger means to raise over the affair, the rerun will be handled with a deal more discretion.”

  “Couldn’t you just threaten Shaft that if he doesn’t resign . . . I am thinking of the man’s reputation, his private life,” Lady Lynne said.

  “We are discussing his public life,” Guy answered grimly. “When a man puts himself up for public office, he must set an example. He ought to be like Caesar’s wife, above reproach. Politics needs the best men, not the scum.”

  Faith listened and felt a shiver dart up her spine. The man was implacable. He would have his story, and never mind who suffered. The easier way was not his way, not when there was a good story in it. “That should make lively reading,” she said tartly.

  “It will,” he promised. “I see you ladies are displeased with me. It’s the Shafts of the country who have brought us to the plight we’re in.”

  “Our plight does not seem all that wretched to me,” Faith said.

  “You are one of the ten thousand, Lady Faith. In a country of ten million, ten thousand enjoy your privileges. That’s one in a thousand, one tenth of one percent. For every Lady Faith, there are a thousand unfortunate Millies, is another way to look at it.”

  “How convenient for you bachelors!”

  “The man’s a criminal. I don’t have to justify what I’m doing,” he said angrily.

  And Thomas, as far as Delamar was concerned, was just another criminal. He’d be equally intransigent with Thomas—even more so, given his hatred of aristocrats. Her feminine compassion was stirred on Mr. Shaft’s behalf. Her own part in unmasking him was a further burr. Why had she done it? It was Delamar’s air of rectitude that had impressed her, but how much of that air was real, honest rectitude and how much an excuse to persecute his enemies, to pillory them in print? And on her own side, she had to admit that she had helped him as much to gain his good opinion as to curb political chicanery.

  Over breakfast, there was more discussion of the night’s doings, but Faith hardly listened and said nothing. She remembered the angry lurch of her heart when she saw that woman issuing from Guy’s room. It was worse than seeing the red peignoir in Thomas’s flat. Were all men so horrid? How long had she been there? Long enough to do more than hand him an envelope, she figured. He wouldn’t have sent Fletcher downstairs if that had been all their business together.

  As they were in a hurry, there was no dawdling over breakfast. The ladies went upstairs to prepare their valises, while Guy gave some last-minute instructions to Fletcher before the latter returned to London. Lady Lynne, worried that she had been precipitate in mailing the cancellation of the engagement, immediately lit into her charge for her morose behavior at breakfast.

  “That’s a poor way to nab a fellow, miss! You’d think he’d stolen money, like Thomas, to judge by your Friday face.”

  “I expect he did worse than that, Auntie. Why did he send Fletcher away when that trollop was in his room?”

  “The man is a bachelor, for goodness’ sake. Men have appetites that you know nothing about. Don’t they teach you chits anything in your seminary? All that sort of thing will stop once he’s shackled—or it will if his wife has her wits about her.”

  “Then you do think he was . . .”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me. What’s the harm in it? It’s not as though that Millie person were an innocent girl. Entertaining gentlemen is her business. He paid her. What more do you want of him?”

  “Less hypocrisy,” Faith said. Her jaw again assumed its frozen, mulish angle. “He shouldn’t preach so much piety if he’s no better than the others. I thought he was something special—a war hero, a self-made man, a good man.” Thomas at least had never assumed any air of rectitude. She knew him for a gazetted flirt.

  “Pooh!” was her aunt’s answer to what she considered pious fustian. “He is an excellent parti. There isn’t a man alive who don’t chase after skirts when he’s away from home, Faith, and the sooner you learn it, the better. Why, if that is all that concerns you, you obvi
ously don’t know much about Thomas Vane.”

  “What about him?” she demanded swiftly.

  “Lud, he’s the worst womanizer in London. With his looks, he had his pick of them all, and he didn’t turn down many, I can tell you.”

  “But you said he was unexceptionable!”

  “He is—was unexceptionable for you. Do you think it’s easy to find a husband for a country chit with no dowry to speak of and no extraordinary beauty? Your papa, the gudgeon, insisted on a title into the bargain. I’ll tell you something I had hoped to keep from you, for otherwise you’ll return to Mordain Hall a spinster. Thomas was not all that hot to have you, my girl. His papa insisted he marry or he’d not pay his debts. It was debtors’ prison or you—those were Thomas’s choices. It comes to seem he preferred a life of crime to marrying you, so you need not mount your high horses because Guy Delamar had a lightskirt in his room. There’s a time to be wide awake and a time to close one eye: For you, this is a time to close one eye and not look too sharp out of the other.”

  Faith stared at her aunt with a disbelieving look. “But you said Thomas was unexceptionable! He told you he would be desolate if I refused him!”

  “Aye, so he would. A mighty unpleasant hole, debtors’ prison.”

  “He said he loved me,” she added on a whisper.

  “Hah! I wish I had a shilling for every silly chit he said that to.”

  “Then why are we here? Why are we following Thomas?”

  “Because he has my five thousand guineas, that’s why. And because I hoped you might nab Delamar, if we could get him alone, away from more desirable ladies,” Lady Lynne said baldly. Of course she did not mention her first hope of attaching him herself.

  Faith turned away and began to shove clothing into her valise. Tears pricked at the back of her eyes, but by holding her breath and counting, she restrained them. Thomas didn’t love her. He had never loved her. She was a last resort—no more. His handsome, dashing face, those eyes that had looked deep into hers and told her she was “a darling,” had lied. She had been made a dupe by him and her aunt, and had made a fool of herself by praising him to Delamar. She wished she could crawl into the valise and have someone close and lock her inside, to avoid meeting Guy again. Not that he was any better!