Juxon came to the end of his proclamation, and the talk on the balcony died down. It was not considered well-bred to chatter after this point in the proceedings.
“Gentlemen of Westmarch,” said the Lord Steward, “whom will you have?”
The forty-two called out, “Meriel Longmaster!” and Auriol was surprised at the leaping of his own heart at the sound of her name, at the sharp and marvellous reminder that he knew and loved her for what she was.
The Marquis, unaccompanied, threw open the great doors of the Moon Gallery and walked in. Her appearance caused a stir.
“My love, the oddest thing!” murmured a lady next to Auriol, who looked at her, though she was addressing her sister and not him.
Meriel was well known for her parsimonious attitude to dress, and since she reached her present height had worn the same old though beautiful black and silver coat at every re-election and first-rate ball. Now she was dressed in white, in the height of fashion. Her satin coat, strikingly embroidered with wreaths of black pineapples, fell from wide-padded shoulders in voluminous folds. It swept the ground at the back like a woman’s gown, and the heavy turned-back cuffs of its sleeves were over a yard in circumference. Underneath she wore a plain white tunic and knee breeches, a lace-edged cravat, and black silk boots. Auriol wanted to laugh and declare his love for her at the sight of the boots: he thought he might have guessed that if she tried to be modish, Meriel would calmly spoil the effect with one outlandish article. She ought to have bought a pair of white high-heeled shoes, but no doubt she would have thought such a discomfort an unforgivable extravagance.
He wished she had told him that she meant to change her lifetime’s habits at this ball; he thought he would have preferred her loving confidence to this agreeable surprise. But he was very pleased, and thought her impossibly noble and beautiful, and longed to be the first of those who would shortly kiss her hand. Under this desire there was a more disturbing wish: to go down and lead her out to dance, the Marchioness of Westmarch.
It had never occurred to Meriel that as a woman, she ought to have as much right to occupy her place in the Grand Closet as she now had as a man. In Auriol’s opinion, her tragedy had awakened an intelligence which might otherwise have remained undisturbed, but one thing which the revelation of her true sex had not led her to question even for a moment was the doctrine of the intrinsic unfitness of all women. It occurred to Auriol now that she should have that right, and the novelty and truth and thought of Meriel’s happiness in such a world made him blush. She ought not to accept that she was an impostor committing a sin. She ought not to believe that all females were poisonous, diseased. She ought to receive men’s homage in a ball dress and tiara, and he would tell her so.
“Meriel Longmaster,” said Juxon, speaking into her gently smiling face as she stood before him with her hand on the hilt of an ancient iron sword, “The Members of the Grand Closet, the Officers of the Guard, the Officers of the Household and the Prelate of Castle-town do beg that you will consent to serve this your twelfth year as Lord Marquis of Westmarch, Protector of the People.”
“I consent,” said Meriel, wondering what it would have been like to say she did not. “Gentlemen of Westmarch, I swear before the God of us all that I shall uphold the Revolution Constitution!” She looked up at the balcony, saw Auriol, and not thinking, did not even try to repress a radiant, teasing smile.
She went through the rest of the ceremony, the hand-kissings and bows and receiving back of her seal-ring from Juxon’s hands, with an appropriate expression of solemn boredom on her face.
An hour after Meriel had opened the ball, she and Auriol were seated on either side of a pretty little heiress, intoxicating each other by flirting with her.
“He is a monstrous deceiver, ma’am,” said Meriel. “He is no more able to perform creditably in a ballroom than an elephant. I beg you will not be wasting yourself on him.”
“An elephant, eh?” said Auriol to Meriel, and would have pressed her foot with his had the girl not been between them. “That, you see Maid Belvidera, is my reward for months of selfless devotion to my noble friend’s interest.”
“The fact is, ma’am, he is a toad-eater.”
“Oh, I am very sure he is not!” said the lady, quite indignantly.
Meriel laughed, delighted to see that Maid Belvidera preferred Auriol to herself.
“The next set is forming,” said Auriol, getting up and extending a masterful hand to the girl. “Now, Westmarch, use your superior consequence and insist on dancing with Maid Belvidera, and I shall have a mind to send you a message in the morning.”
Meriel made a large and graceful gesture. “I protest, I am by far too great a coward to risk such a shocking thing. He is the devil of a fellow with his pistols, ma’am. You see how he thinks nothing of forcing my hand.”
“A little more quickness, Westmarch, and you would have had the honour of leading Maid Belvidera out, not I.”
“He is an insufferably insolent creature,” sighed the Marquis.
“I do not see,” said the girl, “how a man may be both a toadeater and insufferably insolent, Marquis.” She blushed and looked innocent.
“Two sides of one coin, ma’am. I retire from the lists disconsolate, but I shall claim you later in the evening.” She rose, kissed Maid Belvidera’s hand, smiled up at Auriol, and watched him lead the girl away and take his place in the column of dancers.
Turning round, she caught sight of Maid Belvidera’s mother, Mistress Corinna, who was seated some feet away. The woman’s expression was of mixed hope and petulance: hope because the Marquis had flirted with her daughter, petulance because only Auriol had taken her into the set. Meriel thought she must have seen the fond look she had had on her face when watching the couple, and presumed it was intended for her daughter. Yes, thought Meriel, if I have to be at Castle West, I prefer to be the most important man in the place, because it’s an excellent game.
Mistress Corinna looked in the Marquis’s direction again; their eyes met, and she gave Meriel a carefully controlled smile of deep obligation. Meriel thought it her duty to walk over to her.
“I must congratulate you on your daughter, ma’am. She is a most charming girl, she’s taken very well, has she not?”
“Why, so I hope, Marquis.”
“To be sure she has, Mistress Corinna, and no one could wonder at it,” said Dianeme Sandeman Grindal, putting her head round Meriel’s outsize shoulder at that moment, and looking openly mischievous. “What a shocking flirt you are, my lord!”
The Marquis’s bland acceptance of this interruption forced Mistress Corinna to look delighted.
“So there you are, Dianeme, I haven’t been able to come within reach of you all evening, it’s you who are the shocking flirt,” said Meriel. “Impertinent, too. Devilish fetching, that comb in your hair.”
“Well, to own the truth I think it makes me look like a quiz, though it’s becoming to some, I don’t deny, but one must be in the mode, ain’t that so ma’am?”
“Indeed, Mistress Dianeme, in the proper mode.”
“And you look as fine as fivepence yourself, Westmarch.”
Mistress Corinna’s attention was distracted at that moment, and Dianeme and Meriel bowed and walked off arm in arm in search of wine and ratafia.
“Ain’t you vastly obliged to me for rescuing you, my lord? She’d have kept you by her side all evening if she could. Lord, I was fit to bust my stay-laces when I saw how she looked when I came up! How quickly she did put on a smiling face, to be sure.”
“You’re a minx, Dianeme.”
“Ay, very true, I wonder why you bear with me?”
This was a serious question, and it took Meriel aback, for Dianeme had never asked it before. Seeing that they were surrounded by people deep in their own conversations, trying to make themselves heard, Meriel said, “Well, you were a novelty, ma’am, singular, and you always will be, to me. I am not likely to meet anyone — who talks in your style, wit
h just your candour, ever again.” For a second or two she felt depressed. “And if that was what attracted me to you when Philander brought you here, that and your being shunned by the ton, it was your good heart made me stay your friend. Surely you know all this? And the fact that you seemed to like me from the first and I had no need to pretend with you.”
Dianeme patted Meriel’s arm, and said, squinting across the crowded floor at the dancers, “What a fine figure of a man Knight Auriol is — but there’s no doubt he don’t look his best in a ballroom, not at all events when he’s got a little squab of a girl for his partner.”
“Very true, I’ve often told him he’s an elephant. Come, here’s your ratafia!”
“Mr Grindal says it’s low, a taste for ratafia.”
“Only outmoded. My mother will drink nothing else, as you know. D’you wish me to dance with you?”
“Well, of course I do! My reputation would be ruined if you didn’t give me one dance at least. They’d think you had tired of me, my lord, cast me off, out into the cold with you, hussy!”
“Dianeme, you’re incorrigible.”
Dianeme was amazed by the Marquis’s mildness, a good-humour which amounted to utter indifference. She had expected him to be either coldly unpleasant or, just possibly, vastly amused. She had had to summon up real courage to make her joke and see the result, and she wondered what, in Meriel’s opinion, constituted going beyond the line.
Before the next dance began, Dianeme asked after Berinthia. Meriel had confided in the Grindals about Berinthia’s marriage to Hugo, giving no reason but that she had arranged the business because she did not want to marry her cousin herself. Both Philander and Dianeme had thought Meriel chilly, changed for the worse, though they approved the plan. “Is your mother reconciled?”
“No. Well, yes, after a fashion, but she will never forgive me.”
“She’ll be finding another bride for you soon, I’ve no doubt,” said Dianeme, shrugging her shoulders as she closely watched Meriel’s face.
“I have forbidden it.”
“Oh.”
Meriel smiled. “I daresay that sounds hatefully pompous.”
“Masterful, my lord.”
The fiddles on the balcony struck up another tune, a quick, rustic but currently fashionable air which Meriel much preferred to the more formal music of before. “Come,” she said, for she was not engaged for this dance, and took Dianeme on to the floor.
From opposite sides of the hall, Auriol and Juxon watched tenderly over her as she spun round with her stout and unsuitable partner. She was the only dancer in white, and the only person in the room with bright red hair, hair which had always disturbed Juxon, because he thought it both ugly and too noticeable, Meriel’s only physical flaw.
Though Meriel was drawing attention to herself tonight, showing off her vigour and beauty under the chandeliers in a way which might be thought dangerous, Juxon and Auriol grew increasingly certain as they watched her that she was safe now, secure in her happiness, established for life in her masculine part. Both felt a twinge of regret that they did not understand: Auriol thought that perhaps his was a fear that she would not always need him, whereas he, poor as he was, would always need her. Hackneyed metaphors came alive when he looked at her. She had swept him off his feet and woken him from sleep, and how could he not be grateful? He did wish, with a strength that surprised him, that it were possible to dance with her.
The music came to an end and those on the floor parted, smiling, with flourishing bows or curtsies. Juxon had turned away to speak with an old man before the dance finished, but Auriol, still attentive, saw Meriel walking off in the direction of the bench reserved for Saccharissa’s Maids of Honour. On impulse, he followed her.
Meriel was a little put out to find that Maid Rosalba, with whom she had been wanting to dance all evening for the sake of past emotions, was not in her place. Auriol’s appearance at her side surprised her.
“I wished to ask Maid Rosalba to stand up with me,” she explained. “Did you observe her in the last set? I didn’t, and you know she is obliged to remain here if she is not dancing. Penalties of office.”
“Do you know, I had the same notion. I’d like to dance with her.”
“Would you? Oh, but you must yield to me! She is my —” Meriel stopped, knowing that Rosalba was nothing. With great difficulty, she refrained from touching Auriol’s hand.
He smiled and at that moment, Rosalba arrived on the arm of an ugly young man, who kissed her fingertips and murmured something complimentary before quitting her. Both Meriel and Auriol, seeing her, decided that her pink dress and chaplet of roses did not become her: simultaneously, they moved towards her. As soon as she set eyes on the Marquis, the smile on Rosalba’s face became fixed.
“Maid Rosalba, are you engaged for this dance? May I have the honour?” said Meriel.
Rosalba curtsied, and her expression did not change.
Auriol wished to partner Maid Rosalba now because a little while earlier, he had overheard her saying to one of her friends that for her part, though everyone was in transports over the Marquis’s new dress, she could not think white an eligible colour for a man. She had added that if he were not of such exalted rank, everyone would think that the Marquis had a good deal of self-consequence, despite his casual manners. Auriol had been very much shocked. He wished to save Meriel from the girl’s impertinence, and from possible hurt.
Rosalba’s adoration of an ideal Meriel had turned in the last few weeks to dislike and fear. Under the influence of Mr Marling’s rough affection, Meriel’s neglect, and the other Maids’ gossip, her fantasies of becoming a Marquis’s sophisticated mistress had first disappeared and then come back as evil memories of herself and of vanished horizons. Rosalba blamed Meriel for the disillusion and shame she felt, not herself, or Mr Marling, with whom her worldly interest lay. She had persuaded herself that the Marquis had gone some way at least towards deceiving her, and Auriol, guessing this, thought she was not the nice child Meriel imagined her. He thought her a spiteful little hypocrite.
How could I have thought red hair and those eyebrows fascinating? said Rosalba to herself. He is more like a woman than a man, and no one could say that of Mr Marling.
“But I too wish to beg you for the honour, ma’am,” said Auriol. He did not acknowledge to himself that one of his reasons for wishing to dance with her was causeless, frightening jealousy, a desire to separate her from Meriel. It was unmanly to be jealous of a girl like Rosalba Ludbrook simply because long ago, Meriel had pitied her.
“Oh,” Rosalba said. She had seen the two of them pretending to be rivals over Maid Belvidera Urquhart, and remembering that pretty scene, she tightly clutched her fan. “Do you, sir? How very k-kind you are.”
“Come, Maid Rosalba, will you not favour me above this great gaby here?” said Meriel, with a good deal of warmth in her eyes. She was delighted that the girl was obviously reconciled to her marriage: a week ago she had seen Rosalba voluntarily tuck her hand into the crook of Mr Marling’s arm, and smile up into his face. When she saw that, Meriel’s vague guilt about her former feelings had quite disappeared.
You think to impress me, sir, but you do not! thought Rosalba, looking at the Marquis. She said, “Yes, Marquis, for it would so add to my consequence to be seen standing up with you and not with Knight Auriol!” and looked flirtatiously at Auriol.
“Why ma’am, you are learning to be quite a woman of the world,” said Meriel, raising her eyebrows. “I should like very much to add to your consequence.”
The smiling glance she gave Auriol made it clear to him that she knew he did not want her to dance with Rosalba for some reason of his own, but that she intended to do so all the same. Auriol walked off and tried to think of some woman whom he would not find repulsive as a dancing partner; he did not mean to spend the whole evening watching Meriel and wanting her.
The next dance was slow and stately; Rosalba performed it gracefully, and the Marquis with c
ompetence. Their conversation was as efficient as their dancing; and so was that of Berinthia and Hugo, two places up in the column.
“What a vastly agreeable ball this is, Marquis,” said Rosalba.
“I confess I am enjoying myself vastly more than I’m in the habit of doing. You are my partner, after all.”
“Why Marquis, how absurd you are, to be sure!”
“No, indeed!”
They were separated then by the movement of the dance, and crossing over towards each other again, satin coat and dress skirts billowing behind them, they felt very far apart. What ought I to have done if I had been all she supposed? thought Meriel, touching Rosalba’s damp hand in passing. The qualm was brief but unpleasant. Looking at the formal little face in front of her, coming up again, she thought that profoundly believing herself to be a man at heart, she did indeed quite naturally find certain women attractive. The problem was merely that not being ostensibly a man, she could do nothing about her desire, could not do justice to women, which was a thousand pities. Never would she revel in the knowledge that she was of the same sex as her love if a pretty girl were actually to kiss her. In fact, she would be terrified of such a woman, and might even feel disgust. Meriel had not fully realised this till now, and she supposed her awareness was all due to Auriol.
At that moment, she passed within eavesdropping distance of Hugo and Berinthia.
“You quite put me to the blush, sir,” said Berinthia loudly, perfectly pale-faced, and Meriel wondered at the ability of women to lie and be cold just as and when it was demanded of them. It was demanded of them all their lives, and then men mocked or criticised them for it, just as they criticised them when they told the truth.
Berinthia was weary. She had danced twice with Hugo, and would do so a third time in order to cause satisfactory speculation. Meriel would be made to wait until the last quadrille to lead her out. In another two weeks the comedy would be over: Castle West would be persuaded that theirs was a case of passion, and the announcement of her betrothal to Hugo would be sent to the Westmarch Gazette.
The Marquis of Westmarch Page 16
