Belle of the ball

by Donna Lea Simpson

  "You are lucky," Arabella said, enviously. "Your own establishment, with just darling Sheltie to deal with."

  Eveleen gazed at her friend with an expression of understanding in her brilliant blue eyes. "Ah, but I am a spinster of many more years than you, my girl, and independently wealthy."

  "Eve, my dear, you are twenty-nine, not thirty-nine!"

  Lady Swinley bustled over at that moment. "Why, hello, Eveleen." She looked her daughter's friend over critically. "Put on a few pounds, have you not?"

  "Mother!" Arabella gasped.

  "Never mind; listen to me. Lord Pelimore has just entered. Look lively, my girl. He has created quite a stir." She hustled away again, with just a motion of her head toward the stairs.

  "My heavens," Eveleen exclaimed. "Have you ever seen so much flashing teeth and eyes and batting eyelashes? You would think the man was the catch of the year instead of an ugly, snuff-addicted old man! I had heard he was on the lookout for a wife, but I never envisioned this . . . this hubbub! I pity the poor girls who must go after him. What did your mother want, bringing him to your attend—" Eveleen's words trailed off as she gazed at her friend.

  Arabella stayed silent; she could not meet her friend's gaze.

  "Never say—do not tell me you are entering the matrimonial stakes for old Lord Pelimore?"

  "I am afraid so, Eve. I very much fear it is true."

  Three

  "What on earth could induce you to do such a mad thing, my dear girl?" Eveleen's voice, faintly inflected with an Irish lilt, was filled with incredulous wonder. "You are not thinking that at three-and-twenty you are past anything better? If so, I assure you that you are not quite at such desperate ends yet."

  "Some of us are not independently wealthy and must marry," Arabella said, stung into a precipitate reply by her friend's mocking tone. She glanced around hastily at the crowd, hoping no one had heard their indelicate conversation. One did not speak of money, even if one was desperately in need of it. It just was not done.

  "Oho! It is money, is it?" Eveleen regarded her silently for a moment. She had always been blunt, and no subject was off limits. "Are you and your mother under the hatches, then?"

  It went against the grain to confess all, but if not to Eve, her dearest and closest friend, then to whom? "We are." Arabella lifted her chin, desperately trying not to feel the shame attendant on poverty. "And it is up to me to repair our fortunes, and we only have this Season to do it" It did not even need to be said, she knew, that all must be kept in confidence. Eveleen might like to listen to gossip, but she was not without sensitivity, and she was fiercely loyal to her friends.

  "How comes it that even with no other heirs to snatch Swinley Manor from under the widow and child's bottom, that you and your mother should be so undone?"

  Eveleen referred to the fact that the barony had lapsed after Lord Swinley's death. There was no male heir known, and so the manor house and land, including farm, timber, orchards, and other enterprises, had stayed with Lady Swinley. It was a gray area in law, and there was some dissenting view that the Swinley tide and lands should revert to the throne, but there had not been much interest from any quarter, and there was really nothing to take that was not encumbered with mortgages. Arabella did not honestly know what had happened and said so to her friend, her words smothered among the hubbub of lords and ladies arriving and chattering to friends they had not seen through the long winter.

  "Mama claims that Papa left the estate in a bad way," Arabella continued, moving out of the way for Lord Stibblethorpe, a clumsy and usually drunken marquess, well known for his corpulence and smell. Luckily he was already married, or her mother would have included him on the list. She drifted back toward Eveleen and they both turned to watch the marquess make his way through the crowd like a fishing scow among elegant sailboats. "But it just seems so unlikely," she continued. "I mean, I did not spend overmuch time at Swinley Manor as a child, you know. Mama didn't have much use for a little girl under her feet, and so I spent most of my holidays at my cousins' home in Cornwall. Their father is a vicar, and I stayed at the vicarage for some months every year. But I just wonder how it can be that Papa left things so involved when it is the only thing he did—managing the estates, I mean. I do not remember any sign of gambling; he spent little time in London, and then only at Mother's behest. So what can have happened to all the money?"

  Eveleen shrugged. "I cannot imagine, my dear, but I am sorry to hear about your troubles."

  Lady Swinley was at that very moment giving her significant looks that urged her to go greet Lord Pelimore, still enveloped by a crowd of frothy pale gowns and bare white arms, all belonging to girls being introduced by their hopeful chaperones. But Arabella did not think that was the way to gain the old man's attention. All of those girls would blend into one another after a few seconds; he would not be making any choice this very evening anyway. There were better ways to gain a gentleman's attention, as a veteran of the London Season knew.

  **Who is that good-looking, very rough gentleman over there who is staring at you?"

  Eveleen's voice broke Arabella out of her reverie, and she glanced over to where her friend looked.

  It was him! It was the fellow from the shop; and she had thought never to see him again! He was dressed in evening clothes this time, very correct in black, Beau Brummelish, and even more devastatingly handsome. And yet there was still that about him that made Eveleen call him "rough." His straight dark hair was still too long, his hands, no doubt, still callused, and he seemed to be fresh from some wild place where evening clothes and evening manners were irrelevant and faintly silly.

  And yet he did not look silly in evening clothes. He looked rather magnificent, rugged and powerful like a handsome wolf among a flock of bleating sheep. And he was staring at her with arched brows and a significant look.

  "That is no gentleman," Arabella said, acidly, turning her gaze away and clutching her shaking hands together to stop their quivering. She told her friend the story of how she had met him, and how he boldly had introduced himself after that and tried to buy her gloves for her. Eveleen was the only one to whom she had confessed the whole story of her disgrace at the Farmington estate—she and Eveleen corresponded throughout the winter—and her subsequent worries about being ostracized from London company, so her friend understood the background of her snubbing by the Snowdales already. While Arabella spoke, she wondered if he was still looking her way, and then called herself a widgeon for even caring.

  "So you do not know him, properly?"

  "No, not at all. We have not been formally introduced. I cannot imagine what he is doing here, but I would not put it past him to march in here unannounced and uninvited like some—"

  "Well, he is coming this way, regardless," Eveleen said, her voice holding a hint of laughter.

  Flustered and panicked, Arabella glanced around. He was indeed coming their way across the marble floor, and with that devilish grin on his face, as if he dared her to run. Well, she would not run from him. She was not afraid of him; what was there to be afraid of but this strange fluttery feeling in her breast, a feeling she had never had before and could not identify? She would meet him with equanimity and put her nose up at him, give him the cut! That would put him in his place.

  He was coming; he was going to accost her in the middle of the Parkhurst ballroom ... he was going to . . . going to walk right past her! With a taunting grin on his face and a wink of his eye, he walked right past her and joined Lady Parkhurst.

  Arabella snapped her fan open and applied it vigorously to work on cooling her flaming face. She caught Eveleen's laughing look. "The man is impossible! He knew I thought he would accost me, and deliberately walked this way to taunt me!"

  "Impossible," Eveleen said, eyeing him as he appeared to charm Lady Parkhurst. He bowed low over die hostess's hand and kissed it. "Impossibly tall, impossibly handsome, impossibly irresistible."

  Tardy, Arabella said, "If you think him so, then you
should take him in hand and tame him."

  Smiling, Eveleen drifted away, saying over her shoulder, "Perhaps I will. I have a feeling it would be worth the effort."

  She joined Lady Parkhurst and the unknown gentleman, throwing one last, saucy look back to her friend. Arabella put her nose in the air and retreated to the chaperones' area.

  Finally the dancing had begun, and Arabella had been engaged for almost every dance so far. She had always had her own court of admirers, and they flocked to her again this Season, complimenting her, flattering her on her looks and new dress. If the compliments were more in the line of how little she changed over the "passing years" she would ignore that for now.

  At first it had felt like any other Season, but then her mother dragged her away to the ladies' withdrawing room and angrily asked her when she was going to get down to the business at hand, which was catching a husband, most likely Lord Pelimore, before some other widgeon had him locked up tighter than a dowager's jewel chest.

  Pleasure in the evening was over, and Arabella set herself to charming the gentlemen, but it seemed that the harder she tried, the more difficult it became. Apart from her looks, it had always been her gay flirtatiousness that had attracted the men, she supposed, but she could not seem to find the right lightness. She felt herself trying too hard; her laughter sounded forced, her banter strained, her voice feverish. More than one gentleman had fled her company the moment the dance was over with just the barest of civility.

  All the gentlemen clustered around the newest diamond, a Lady Cynthia Walkerton, another lovely blonde; she flirted and teased and had her choice of men begging her for the next dance. The Honorable Miss Swinley, diamond of years gone by, was left on the sidelines watching more than once as the evening wore on, for after all, she could dance with no gentleman more than once or twice and her court was soon depleted, especially as more and more gentlemen drifted off to the card room or to Lady Cynthia's side.

  And so she tried harder. Working through the figures of the dance with Sir William Drayton, she gaily said, "So, Sir William, how pleasant to see you again this year Shall some lucky lady find you ready to set down in parson's mousetrap this year?"

  'P—p—parson's mousetrap?" The man goggled visibly. "I d—d—don't intend to m—m—marry this year, M—M—Miss Swinley."

  He had never stammered before. How odd. They parted and came together again to the beat of the lilting country tune as the flickering lights of the chandelier winked and twinkled above them. "Ah, but no gentleman intends to marry, isn't that true?" She smiled up at him, putting all her effort forth to be charming and witty. He paled.

  And just at that second she caught the mystery gentleman’s eyes on her—what was the name he had introduced himself by?—from his position on the sidelines, as if he could read what was happening. She swiftly looked away and gazed up at her dance partner with a lingering smile that made his eyes goggle again.

  "T—t—true? I d—d—don't know."

  The moment the dance was over, Sir William escorted her back to Lady Swinley's side and bolted off to the card room, not to be seen again that evening. So far, she was having a lot of luck with the gentlemen, all of it bad. And always the tall gentleman’s eyes were on her. He seemed invariably to be in her line of sight, and she freely admitted that he stood out, quite literally, head and shoulders above the other men.

  His hair, still that same unfashionable length from the day before, was dark and straight, falling below his collar onto his shoulders, and his features were strong, his nose slightly beaky, his cheekbones high. Arabella had to admit to herself that he epitomized masculine good looks, to her thinking. But there was more to him than just his looks. There was an intelligent sharpness in his eyes—they were a clear gray, she remembered— and his air was confident without being swaggering, as if he was comfortable with himself on all levels and did not need to make a show about it.

  But it was his smile that stayed in her memory even when she looked away from him. It transformed his face as sunlight does a landscape, changing it from brooding to beaming in one breathtaking instant.

  And she would have to stop mooning about an ineligible man who infuriated her for some inexplicable reason. She was there to meet the man she would marry, whoever he might be, and she must get down to the serious business of finding him. She could not count on good luck forever. Myriad things could go wrong: Lord Conroy could come to London and speak openly of the whole mess, or some intimate of the Farmingtons' could speak of it, or word could get around about the Swinleys* financial dilemma. Any one of those events would be death to her plans.

  Eveleen joined her that minute, fresh from the dance, her cheeks glowing from the exercise and her blue eyes bright. "That will do. Captain Harris," she said to her scarlet-coated escort. "You may go and flirt with the younger ladies, now that you have done your duty by the confirmed spinster."

  The man bent close to her ear and murmured something, a gallantry, no doubt, and she giggled and tapped him lightly on the arm with her fan. He turned and retreated in the direction of blond and beautiful Lady Cynthia. Eveleen took a deep breath. "Well, and so you are unclaimed yet again?"

  "You make me sound like a parcel that no one wants," Arabella said, waspishly.

  Chuckling, Eveleen said, "Why do you think they call us 'on the shelf when too many years have passed and we have not married? We are goods, chattel to be bartered while we have worth and forgotten when we are no longer fresh."

  Arabella glanced at her friend in shock. "That is revolutionary talk."

  "I am Irish; it comes naturally." Eveleen, her eyes blazing with mischief, scanned the ballroom as she spoke. "Look," she said, nodding toward the chaperones' area. "There is Leticia Parkhurst. Thirty-one, rich, tided, and yet she is not married. Her fault? She waited too long, and now no one wants her. And yet I happen to know that despite her sour looks, she is intelligent, witty, and once she has had a glass or two of wine, outrageously funny!"

  "But this is just the way things are," Arabella said, ever practical. "A woman only has so long to have children, and must marry young. And a woman must marry! What would we do if we did not marry?"

  "Paint, write, teach, doctor, soldier, travel, work, play—all the things that men are free to do without the constraints of womanhood. If only we were allowed! The pity is, that women like Leticia have been so inculcated with society's pressures, that she feels herself a failure for not marrying, as does her mother and all of our set."

  "And the other things men do without constraint?" Arabella could not help herself from asking, though she blushed at the turn her thoughts were taking.

  "You mean love? Or at least, making love?" Eveleen said, bluntly. "Would it not be lovely to do that without constraint, choosing whom one wanted, dallying here and there like the fat bumblebee drifting over the lovely flowers." She had a dreamy look on her face.

  Shocked to the core, Arabella gazed up at her friend. "I ... I do not know what to make of you when you speak like that. Eve."

  "Of course you do not. You have been indoctrinated into the belief that women have only one purpose, and that is to bear some man's children. We have no passions, no desires." Eveleen's handsome face was set and grim, her eyes no longer dreamy or mischievous, though a smile was still pasted on her lips. "If we paint, we are patted on the head and told how nice it is that we can dabble; if we are politically astute, our only recourse is to marry and bully our husbands into being our cat's-paw. Any hint of passion and we are condemned as loose. It is outrageous and unfair."

  "I did not know you to be so bitter, nor did I realize that you like men so little." Arabella felt a little of her world shift. People were so hard to read. She would have ventured to say that Eve, a woman she had known since her first Season four years before, was exactly what she seemed, a care-for-nothing flirt who enjoyed making her way through the London Season dancing and having a wonderful time. She had known from early in their acquaintance that Eveleen intended not t
o marry, but had viewed it as just some private quirk, and not a broad philosophy. But it seemed that there was some guiding principle to her life that Arabella did not understand. "With that feeling, I am surprised you wish to stay in London so badly.'*

  "Do you think I stay here for this?" Eveleen said, sweeping one graceful, gloved hand out to indicate the expanse of the ballroom. "No, this is why my father makes me stay, else he would drag me back to Ireland and forcibly marry me off to some toothless farmer who does nothing but scratch and spit He is hoping that my dowry will catch me an English tide, though I would rather see Bedlam than marry some thin-blooded, knock-kneed English coronet Do not mistake me; I like men well enough—they have their charms and purposes—but not to wed."

  "Then why do you stay?"

  "I stay because of a band of like-minded women who work for the freedom of other women." There was a glint of hard determination in Eveleen's glistening eyes.

  "What do you mean 'like-minded women'? And freedom from what?"

  "Like-minded women—women who believe that others of our sex have more reason to exist than merely as men's chattel. And the freedom we seek is freedom from—" She stopped and chuckled. "Well, now, I think your uncouth admirer is watching you again."

  For the first time since he had come to her attention, Arabella had actually forgotten the stranger's whereabouts, and she looked up in shock to find his laughing eyes upon her He was standing with Lady Parkhurst once more, and they were talking about her. He pointed, actually pointed! The height of ill manners.