Adventuress

by Beaton, M. C.

  ‘Alas, no one yet has mastered his recipe, and so the only place you can find such a drink is at Limmer’s. Here we are!’

  Emily was beginning to feel faint with the strain of waiting.

  She was a sitting on an an ornately carved gilt chair on a little raised dais in the front parlour. This throne-like effect had been created for her by Rainbird and Angus.

  Her hair was dressed in one of the new Roman styles, with a fall of glossy ringlets from a knot at the back of her head and swept severely back at the front to show a tiara of diamonds and pearls to advantage.

  Her gown was one she had bought in Bath. It had orginally been a modish creation of oyster satin but had been embellished by a London dressmaker with pearl embroidery, which managed to make it look somewhat like a coronation gown. It had a square décolletage, cut daringly low to expose the top of her breasts. Her long silk gloves were clasped with ‘elastic’ bracelets of pearl, the elasticity being supplied by small gold springs. Around her slim neck, she wore a collar of diamonds and pearls to match the tiara. Rundell & Bridge, the jewellers, had been delighted with the sale of the tiara and collar to Miss Goodenough, for with the current craze for cornelian, coral, amber, garnet, and jet, they had been wondering if they would ever sell another diamond again.

  In a chair placed lower than Emily’s ‘throne’ sat Mrs Middleton, her nose beginning to twitch with nerves.

  Standing behind Emily, his hands behind his back, was Mr Goodenough, looking more like a butler on duty than the master of the house.

  ‘No one is coming,’ said Emily at last. ‘No one. Tell Rainbird to send the orchestra home, Mrs Middleton.’

  With a sigh of pure relief, Mrs Middleton got to her feet. But at the same time, Rainbird threw open the door and announced, ‘The Earl of Fleetwood and Mr Jason Fitzgerald.’

  Mrs Middleton collapsed back into her chair.

  Fitz and the earl bowed before Emily, and then stood looking at her.

  Emily looked back, wondering desperately whether princesses plunged into light chitter-chatter or whether they maintained a noble silence. She settled for silence.

  Fitz was gazing with awe on Emily. It was rare to see such flawless, unpainted skin, such magnificent eyes, such a beautifully rounded bosom.

  The earl began to look amused. He opened his mouth to say something to break the silence, and then closed it again, thinking it might be entertaining to see how long Miss Emily could maintain her role.

  There was a loud pop as Rainbird opened a bottle of champagne, but Emily’s beautiful eyes kept their fixed look.

  Rainbird offered glasses of champagne to the earl and to Fitz. Fitz absent-mindedly took his glass without once removing his eyes from Emily’s face.

  The orchestra, consisting of four violinists and one elderly gentleman seated at a small spinet, were crammed into a corner of the back parlour behind a forest of hothouse flowers.

  ‘Play!’ hissed Rainbird, hoping to lighten the atmosphere.

  The musicians began to play a slow, measured pavane that somehow seemed to intensify the silence between guests and hosts rather than dispel it.

  Rainbird dashed down to the kitchen and seized Joseph, who was dressed in his best livery and about to go upstairs to take up his position. ‘Get your mandolin, Joseph,’ said Rainbird, ‘and play something bright and lively. Dave, get your best suit on and act as page. Alice and Jenny, you must act as footmen tonight.’

  ‘But it’s as quiet as the grave up there!’ cried Jenny.

  ‘I feel in my bones that many people will be coming,’ said Rainbird. ‘Oh, hurry, Joseph, or Miss Emily will continue to sit there like a statue, and the gentlemen will take their leave!’

  Giles, Lord Fleetwood’s butler, decided to take his leave before he was pressed into service. Upstairs, Mrs Middleton coughed genteelly and tried to think of something to say. Emily sat rigidly, looking straight ahead. She and Mrs Middleton had decided earlier not to drink anything at all in case it dulled their wits. Now Emily longed for a glass of champagne but was frightened to say so. The earl’s eyes were dancing wickedly but he made no sound. Fitz stood transfixed, like a man in a trance.

  Mr Goodenough was so unused to making any social conversation with anyone other than Emily that he remained quiet, feeling it was not his place to break the silence first.

  Behind the dignified mask of her face, Emily was trembling with fright. She wondered if she would ever be able to speak again.

  The Earl of Fleetwood looked devilish with his black, black hair and those slanting blue eyes. His evening dress was so exquisite, so faultless, so impeccable that he seemed twice as handsome as Emily had remembered, and twice as terrifying. And Mr Fitzgerald was just as bad. Emily had never been so close to an Exquisite before. Fitz was so extravagantly dressed with his nipped-in waist, his embroidered waistcoat, and his huge starched shirt collar that he did not seem quite real to Emily. Mr Fitzgerald’s face, she noticed, was as highly painted as that of a female member of the Fashionable Impure. I am, thought Emily with an inward shudder, facing Decadence on the Hoof!

  There was a noisy altercation in the back parlour and then the sombre music died away.

  Lord Fleetwood was just deciding the fun had gone on long enough. It was time to bow and leave. Then the jaunty, dancing melody of a popular Italian song filled the room, with Joseph’s sweet tenor singing the words.

  A faint tinge of colour appeared on Emily’s white cheeks and she smiled suddenly. The amused look left the earl’s eyes and he stared at her, much as his friend had been staring at her.

  ‘By Jove, that’s a jolly tune,’ said Fitz.

  ‘May I have some champagne, Rainbird?’ asked Emily.

  ‘I would like a glass as well,’ said Mrs Middleton.

  ‘I think I’ll sit down,’ declared Mr Goodenough. ‘What do you think, gentlemen? Will our new Prince Regent settle down, now he has attained the regency at last?’

  Fitz crossed over to Mr Goodenough’s side and began to gossip. Emily took a glass of champagne and smiled again, shyly this time, at the earl. ‘I think I should like to walk about for a little,’ she said.

  Emily promenaded up and down the small room with the earl while Mrs Middleton fell into step behind her, anxious to correct any lapses in genteel speech if need be. But it was very hard to remain unobtrusive because of the very smallness of the room. Mrs Middleton would no sooner get behind Emily and the earl than the couple would both turn and swing round, nearly colliding with her. Mrs Middleton decided Emily appeared to be doing very nicely and so she retreated to a corner and sat down.

  Mr Goodenough was becoming quite animated as he discussed his hero, the Prince of Wales, who had only just been made regent. Fitz humoured Mr Goodenough by listening politely to his praises of the prince, although he reflected cynically that the dissolute and greedy Prinny hardly deserved such accolades. Also, half Fitz’s mind was occupied in wondering what the earl was saying to Emily.

  ‘You appear to be lucky in your chef,’ said the earl to Emily as they swung about to traverse the room for the sixth time. ‘There are some delicious smells arising from the kitchen.’

  ‘He is very good indeed,’ said Emily. ‘Not only with French dishes, but with our traditional English ones. His sirloin of beef is done to a cow’s thumb.’

  ‘Indeed!’ said the earl, startled at the common expression which had dropped so gently from Miss Emily’s pink lips.

  Rainbird passed with a tray of glasses of champagne. Emily put her empty glass on the tray, took a full one, and drained it in one gulp. ‘I was very thirsty,’ she said apologetically, remembering too late she was supposed to sip it.

  ‘It is a problem finding a genuine French chef,’ said the earl. ‘So many of them claim to be French who have never been south of Dover.’

  ‘MacGregor, the cook, is Scotch,’ said Emily, ‘but a real treasure and not a bale of flat cater traes. I mean,’ she explained with a deep blush, ‘that he is genuinely a good ch
ef and not . . .’

  ‘Like false dice,’ said the earl, completing her explanation. ‘I am well versed in cant, Miss Goodenough, but I am surprised that you are so well acquainted with it. Do you plan to bring it into fashion?’

  Emily took a deep breath and decided to lie. She was already acting a lie. What would one more falsehood matter?

  ‘You must forgive me, my lord,’ she said. ‘English is not my first language.’

  She looked up into his eyes as she spoke and saw little imps of mischief dancing in them as those blue eyes of his looked down into her own.

  ‘You are fortunate, Miss Goodenough,’ said the earl, ‘for I speak many foreign languages. In which one would you like to converse?’

  Emily looked at him miserably wondering what to say, but she was saved by Rainbird, who threw open the door to the front parlour and began to announce new arrivals.

  They came in droves, pushing and shoving to get in, apologizing for being late, the ladies lisping and cooing and the rnen bowing, waving lace handkerchiefs, and flicking little snuff-boxes open.

  The earl backed away as Emily was surrounded by eager and curious London society.

  Emily found she was not expected to say anything but merely to listen and smile. Joseph’s jaunty music continued to liven the rooms of the thin house, which was slowly being crammed with people.

  The earl caught Fitz’s eye and signalled they should take their leave. Emily had retreated to her throne and was holding court as men and women clustered around her. Then, just as the earl was edging his way through the press to make his farewells, one excitable young miss waved her glass in the air and half the contents went over Emily’s gown and the other half on the breeches on Lord Agnesby, an elderly fop who was standing next to Emily.

  Emily dabbed at the spilled champagne on her gown with a handkerchief and said mournfully in her clear, carrying voice, ‘Dear me, I am soaked through to my dicky.’ There was a startled, shocked silence, for to refer to one’s petticoat as a dicky was to use the lowest possible form of slang.

  Trying to cover up her obvious gaffe, Emily made matters worse by turning to Lord Agnesby and saying, ‘I trust your breeches are not ruined.’

  There was an indrawn hiss. No lady ever let that word ‘breeches’ fall from her lips. She might coyly refer to them as inexpressibles but never by any other name.

  Emily’s social future hung in the balance.

  Then into the silence came the Earl of Fleetwood’s pleasant husky voice. ‘Your Royal Highness,’ he began. Then he started and appeared to collect himself. ‘I beg your pardon, I mean Miss Goodenough. Mr Fitzgerald and I wish to thank you for a handsome entertainment. I shall call on Your . . . on you tomorrow in the hope I can persuade you to come driving with me.’

  There was a little excited fluttering and whispering about him. One young lady hissed excitedly to her friend, ‘I told you she was a princess. After all, our dear Princess Charlotte talks as if she had lived all her life in a stable!’

  The earl and Fitz bowed and withdrew. It took them quite ten minutes to fight their way out.

  ‘Whew!’ said Fitz, mopping his brow after they had walked a little way away from the house. ‘You saved her. You certainly saved her. What an angel, but what language! Who do you think she really is?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the earl thoughtfully. ‘But I mean to find out!’

  Emily thought her guests would never leave. She smiled until her face felt stiff. She was deeply grateful to Mrs Middleton, who, enlivened by several glasses of champagne, was talking away with great panache, and fielding all the questions thrown at Emily like a social expert.

  Emily managed to murmur to Rainbird that she was anxious for the evening to be over.

  Rainbird retired to the back parlour, told Joseph to stop playing, and the sulky orchestra that it might resume its labours.

  The orchestra began where it had left off with that dreary pavane. As steady as a dead march, the measured notes fell on the guests’ ears.

  It is only the right music that can soothe the savage breast and lie sweetly on the spirit. The orchestra’s selection was like a death’s head – slow and mournful notes to remind society of the futility of life and the instability of the spleen.

  At first they began to leave in ones and twos and then in great groups. There were a few gentlemen who seemed deterrnined to worship at the shrine of Emily’s beauty forever, but when Rainbird stopped passing around with glasses of wine and champagne, it occurred to them that the night was still young and that Emily could be worshipped just as easily on the morrow. Soon the last carriage had rolled off down Clarges Street.

  Emily and Mr Goodenough retired to a corner of the dining room upstairs and left the servants to clear up the mess, Emily wondering if she would ever get used to being waited on.

  ‘Well, that went very well, my dear,’ said Mr Goodenough. ‘But it might have turned out to be a disaster had not the Earl of Fleetwood stepped in. You do have an awful tongue, Emily. And you should have warned me you meant to pass yourself off as a princess.’

  ‘I know,’ said Emily. ‘I should be grateful to Fleetwood, but there is something about that man which frightens me. I sometimes suspect he knows exactly who I am and is laughing at me, and, yes, laughing at society at the same time for being such fools as to believe my story.’

  ‘You cannot hope to marry an earl,’ said Mr Goodenough with a little sigh. ‘It is not likely you will see him again. He did not seem very much interested in you and only stayed for a little.’

  ‘Why cannot I marry an earl?’ asked Emily curiously, although she herself had never thought such a thing possible. ‘When we first hit on this plan for a Season in London, you said I could marry a duke.’

  ‘We are dreamers,’ said Mr Goodenough. ‘But even dreamers such as we must face reality. It is not just because Fleetwood is an earl, it is because he is a very rich earl. Should, say, he propose to you, then I should be confronted by a battery of his lawyers, all firing questions at me, talking about marriage settlements, and demanding particulars of your ancestry. No, no. A poor gentleman – well, not too well-heeled – is what you require. A poor gentleman’s lawyers, if he can afford any, are not going to disaffect a good parti with probing questions.’

  ‘Then it is as well Fleetwood does not interest me.’ Emily laughed. ‘What is this business about this house being unlucky?’

  ‘Ah, we should have known there was a reason for the low rent. I gathered from various guests that all sorts of frightening things have gone on under this roof: a beautiful girl murdered, her murderer unmasked while trying to kill one of the tenants, a family ruined, and even a dreadful suicide.’

  ‘What was the dreadful suicide?’ asked Emily faintly.

  ‘That of the former Duke of Pelham.’

  ‘Merciful heavens! I am surprised anyone dared to call!’

  ‘Oh, they felt the bad luck only applied to those who live here. I do not believe in such stuff and nonsense. Do you?’

  ‘No,’ said Emily stoutly.

  But when she went to bed that night, she asked Joseph to light the way upstairs, and lay awake for quite a long time, watching the patterns made by the rushlight on the ceiling, and remembering that mischievous mocking look in the earl’s eyes.

  ‘Trouble is coming,’ thought Emily with a shiver. ‘I can feel it!’

  SIX

  Come to our fête, and bring with thee

  Thy newest, best embroidery!

  Come to our fête, and show again

  That pea-green coat, thou pink of men!

  Which charmed all eyes, that last surveyed it;

  When Brummel’s self inquired ‘who made it?’

  THOMAS MOORE

  ‘And how was your drive in the Park with the fair princess?’ asked Fitz the following evening as both gentlemen with their bicornes and canes tucked under their arms made their way to the opera.

  ‘I did not have an opportunity to take Miss Goo
denough driving. Her drawing room was packed with curious society, all content to stare at her as if she were a freak at Bartholomew Fair. I presented my compliments, promised to call again when I should find her not so besieged, and took my leave,’ said the earl.

  ‘She must be enjoying all the attention.’

  ‘Not she,’ said the earl, tossing a coin to a crossing sweeper. ‘She remained calm and stately, but at the back of her eyes was a flicker of fear. Our princess is not only not a princess but, I should think, of quite common clay. That uncle of hers looks as if he should be a servant rather than a gentleman.’

  ‘Come now! You are too harsh. I found Mr Goodenough very gentlemanly.’

  ‘But there is a deference there, a whole attitude of service. It is hard to explain.’

  ‘Perhaps Miss Goodenough is a princess. That would explain her unease and her odd English.’

  ‘She did try to tell me English was not her first language. I do not believe it. Now, our young ladies of the ton affect to be shy and timid and to have excessive sensibility, but you can tell from their eyes that they know their station in life and know what is due to them. This afternoon, I intercepted several glances cast by the fair Emily in the direction of her butler, glances of appeal between equals. Yes, I think I shall find Miss Goodenough is an adventuress.’

  ‘Is that such a terrible crime? Society abounds with opportunists, and most of them not half so pretty.’

  ‘Not a crime in my eyes, unless she proves to be a servant who has run off with her mistress’s dresses and jewels. Low origins are one thing, servants another. When Clarissa was found dead, that staff of mine tattled and gossiped fit to beat the band.’

  ‘You must often wonder who actually killed your poor wife.’

  The earl’s face wore a closed, hard look. Then he said, ‘Let us talk of better things. My book will be out next week. Do you think I shall be savaged in the Edinburgh Review?’

  ‘Only if you have pilloried the reviewer,’ said Fitz.