by M C Beaton
Constance was still wondering whether she had actually said the dreadful thing she thought she had just heard issuing from her own lips, but she marshalled her wits with a heroic effort and plunged into a long tale of the death of Aunt Maria and Lady Amelia’s letter. Then she put a faltering hand up to her forehead as the full effect of the champagne hit her. “I-I f-feel very faint,” she stammered. “It’s so hot in here.” She swayed and he caught her in his arms, looking down with amusement at the wide, magnificent hazel eyes which were staring dizzily up into his own, and despite himself he tightened his grip.
A faint seductive perfume came from the slight body in his arms and he realized with a slight shock that she smelled of soap. Extreme cleanliness in a female was a refreshing and exciting novelty, and it was only when she began to tremble slightly that he came to his senses and held her away from him.
“You are lucky, Miss Lamberton,” he said, “that I am used to dealing with slightly tipsy debutantes. Sit down and calm yourself. We shall talk together until you feel more the thing.”
Constance sank down and buried her face in her hands. “I am so ashamed,” she said in a muffled voice. “Aunt told me not to touch wine. ‘At the last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder.’”
“Just so,” commented his lordship with a blink. He was not used to females quoting the Bible, particularly after they had been held in his arms. “But you will learn how to keep a clear head when you grow more accustomed to it. Now tell me, do you enjoy being a companion? You are well-treated?”
“Oh, yes,” lied Constance quickly. “My duties are simply to chaperone Lady Amelia.”
“I am surprised that Amelia Godolphin should tolerate such a pretty companion.”
“Pretty! Me?” said Constance naively. “Oh, thank you.”
Lord Philip sat down in the chair opposite and looked at her thoughtfully. Certainly the girl was elegantly gowned and coiffured. It appeared there was a softer side to the fair Amelia he had not discovered before.
“I knew your father well,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “I can remember you—just. You were a pretty little thing. Always hiding behind chairs when I and my noisy friends would come to call. Sir Edward was a great huntsman but, I fear, an inveterate gambler. Was your aunt kind to you?” he asked abruptly.
“In her way,” said Constance slowly. Her head was beginning to clear and it felt strangely natural to be sitting talking to this elegant lord. “She was very strict, and we read nothing but the Bible and Mr. Porteous’s sermons, you know.”
“Sounds curst dull,” commented Lord Philip. “Well that’s all over now. A girl of your age should be enjoying balls and parties. Have you attended Almack’s?”
“Oh, no,” said Constance. “I fear Lady Amelia has not been granted vouchers.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” he said drily. “Would you care to go?”
“Of course,” said Constance with a sudden infectuous grin lighting up her face. “Who wouldn’t?”
“Perhaps I can arrange something,” he said slowly. “I have some influence with the Patronesses.”
“Lady Amelia would be so delighted!” said Constance, clapping her hands and thinking to herself that a happy Amelia might be a more amiable mistress.
“Very well,” he said rising to his feet. “I shall try. Now I must join the party or my sister will never forgive me. I shall escort you.”
“No, oh no! You mustn’t!” cried Constance in alarm. “Lady Eleanor told Lady Amelia I had not been invited and that there was no room available for me and asked—Mr. Evans, is it?—to put me somewhere until the entertainment is over.”
Lord Philip’s mouth folded in a hard line. “I am sure you are mistaken,” he said grimly. He held out his hand. “Come!”
But Constance held her ground. It was not the formidable Lady Eleanor who frightened her but Lady Amelia. She guessed shrewdly that Lady Amelia would be incensed to see her companion in the company of the man she hoped to marry.
“I am still feeling unwell, my lord,” she said firmly. “I would be much happier staying here. Do please go.”
“Very well,” he said, looking at her thoughtfully. Constance stared up into those green eyes and felt a strange fluttering feeling in her stomach and a weakness in her legs but put it down to the effects of the champagne.
Lord Philip made her a courtly bow and left.
The musicale had finished and the guests had congregated in the supper room. He paused on the threshold. His sister came sailing up to meet him.
“So you have finally deigned to arrive, dear brother,” she said, kissing the air somewhere in the region of his cheek.
“I have been here for some time and I have been most charmingly entertained,” said Lord Philip with a mocking smile. “I dropped into the library on my way and who should I meet but little Constance Lamberton…” his voice grew harder “… banned from the festivities by some toplofty cow.”
“How dare she!” spluttered Lady Eleanor. “She was not invited, and she is nothing more than a kind of servant.”
“She did not describe you so,” said her brother grimly. “The description is mine alone, I assure you, and it fits you very well. You make so many people unhappy by your snobbery, Eleanor. It was a shabby thing to do!”
“How dare you preach manners to me,” gasped his sister, her face becoming mottled. “George shall speak most strongly to you.”
“Don’t go bullying poor George, and don’t fuss Evans either with your plots and plans to marry me off. When I take a bride it will be someone of my own choosing and not some simpering, inbred milk-and-water miss.”
“No,” sneered Lady Eleanor. “Some lightskirt like Amelia Godolphin, no doubt.”
“Amelia Godolphin has at least a kind heart where Miss Lamberton is concerned,” said Philip. He saw Amelia approaching and gave her his warmest smile. Amelia smiled back at him from under her long lashes and he caught his breath. She really was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He turned his well-tailored shoulder on his fulminating sister.
“Walk with me a little, Lady Amelia,” he said, taking her arm. He was about to relate his meeting with Constance but something prompted him to hold his tongue. Amelia thought her rages and jealous scenes well hidden, and would have been amazed to know that they were frequently talked about in about every polite drawing room in London. Instead he said, “I hear that you have engaged Miss Lamberton as companion.”
“Yes, indeed,” sighed Amelia. “She is rather a tiresome little girl, but she is by way of being a relative and, my dear lord, she had no home—utterly destitute—I felt I had to do something for her. Of course, she could have just lived with me, but then, these terribly religious girls feel they must earn their bread. La! She is forever quoting scripture. I fear she thinks I am shameless.”
“And you are?” teased Lord Philip in a light voice, but looking down into her beautiful face with such intensity that she felt a pleasurable thrill.
She gave a delicious trill of laughter and cast down her eyes.
“I am eminently respectable, my lord,” she said, giving his arm a playful rap with her fan.
“I am very pleased with your concern for little Miss Lamberton,” he said in a low voice. “I would be honored if you would allow me to drive you tomorrow. Shall we say three o’clock?”
“Delighted,” murmured Amelia, keeping her eyes lowered to hide their triumphant gleam. So Mrs. Besant had been right after all! The little Lamberton had her uses.
When Constance, much sobered, finally was allowed to leave the library and return home with Lady Amelia, she was surprised to note that her mistress was in a singularly charitable mood. Not only that. When the Comte Duval made one of his late-night calls, he was firmly told that my lady was too fatigued to receive him.
Perhaps, thought Constance, my life in London will not be so bad after all.
Chapter Five
In the following days, Lady Amelia’s
seemingly rapid rise to respectability amazed social London.
She was often seen in the company of that notoriously high-stickler, Lord Philip Cautry, and always chaperoned by Miss Constance Lamberton. Miss Lamberton’s late papa had been a trifle rake-helly, chattered the dowagers, but no one could deny that Miss Lamberton herself was a very prim and proper miss.
Amelia’s cup of happiness was full when, only a week after the musicale, vouchers arrived from the haughty Patronesses of Almack’s for both herself and Constance. Amelia opened her purse-strings wide to buy herself the most expensive and elaborate toilette in London—to Constance’s immeasurable relief, since it gave her a brief holiday from her constant dressmaking.
With the exception of the butler, the servants at the house in Manchester Square had come to respect the quiet and well-bred Constance. And although Constance sometimes felt her life was not her own, being, as she was, at Amelia’s autocratic beck and call from morning till night, her days began to seem easier than they had ever been since the death of her father. Added to that, she was cheered by the continued absence of the Comte Duval.
And if she occasionally wondered why she felt so breathless and shy in the presence of Lord Philip, she put it down to her own naivity. Lord Philip was, after all, one of the most fashionable leaders of the London scene, and almost rivalled Mr. Brummell in social power.
Lady Amelia was particularly charming to Constance when Lord Philip was present, and Constance sincerely hoped that Lord Philip would marry Amelia, transferring her own half awakened, first trembling feelings of love for the handsome lord into duty.
For Constance did not know she had fallen in love with Lord Philip at that first meeting in the library. She only knew it was right and proper and dutiful to wish the best for her mistress. And Constance certainly believed Lord Philip to be the best.
Although no novice when it came to dealing with the fair sex, Lord Philip found himself becoming increasingly enamored of Lady Amelia. She had persuaded him that her “affair” with the Duke of Glendurran had merely been a misguided flirtation, and Society, in its usual wicked way, had believed the worst. He rarely noticed the quiet constant companion whose dark beauty was overshadowed by the more flamboyant coloring, dress and manners of her mistress.
It was he who had prevailed on the Patronesses to issue the prized vouchers.
He was preparing for the ball which was to be Lady Amelia’s first Wednesday appearance at Almack’s for some years, when his friend, the Honorable Peter Potter, was announced.
Peter Potter tried to aspire to the same heights of elegance as his friend, but he was notoriously absentminded, and Lord Philip, looking at his friend as he tied his cravat, was amused to notice that Peter was wearing an impeccable black evening coat and a snowy cravat atop a pair of canary colored Inexpressibles and Hessian boots.
“You’ll never get past the door of Almack’s in that rig,” said Lord Philip, tying his cravat in an intricate combination of the Irish and the Mathematical—two collateral dents and two horizontal ones.
“What’s up with it?” said Peter, wandering vaguely around his lordship’s dressing room and nearly tripping over a small table. “I look all the crack. Weston made it.”
“Your trousers, man,” said Lord Philip patiently. “Even the Prince Regent couldn’t get into Almack’s with trousers on, you know.”
Peter glanced down at his legs and then stared at his canary yellow trousers as if he could not believe his eyes. He was a tall, thin young man with a shock of fair hair and a weak, pleasant face like that of an amiable sheep. “Gad’s Oonds!” he said, still gazing in horror at his nether limbs. “I don’t know what servants are coming to these days. I told him to lay out my breeches. But he will no doubt be along presently.”
Peter’s excellent valet was in the habit of following after his master with a valise full of clothes in order to remedy whatever fashionable disaster his absentminded master had thrown on before leaving the house.
“I hear you’re about to be leg-shackled,” went on Peter, abruptly forgetting about the trousers and collapsing his long, bony length into a chair. “It’s not often I remember gossip, and I don’t remember who told me except that it was several people and I said to myself, I said, ‘Not old Philip,’ I said. ‘Mistress, yes. Wife, no.’ Not that she isn’t beautiful, but then so was that opera dancer you had in keeping. Anyway, that’s what I said. Although she is trying so hard to become respectable—even dragging that poor little companion around with her at all hours, and all that bullying. You know, ‘Fetch me my shawl, Miss Lamberton. Oh, Constance, don’t yawn. I declare you are the worst bore. I have dropped my fan, Miss Lamberton. Pick it up! You must remember your duties.’ Sickening, I think, don’t you? So you can’t possibly want to marry that. So that’s all right. Are you going to Watier’s tonight after the ball? You know, it don’t look at all like you. I mean, standing there with your mouth open. I mean…”
“What on earth are you maundering on about?” snapped Lord Philip, who had, indeed, been staring at his garrulous friend in amazement. He had not heard the first part of the monologue, only the end. “Has someone been saying I’m going to wed Constance Lamberton?”
“No. Though you could do a lot worse. Have you noticed her eyes? Well, I have. I am a great connoisseur of beauty,” he ended, simply and infuriatingly.
“Peter,” said his lordship, sitting down in a chair opposite. “I have been paying Lady Amelia a great deal of attention. Is that who you mean?”
“Of course,” said Peter vaguely, staring out of the window to where the parish lamps flickered and wavered in the blue dusk.
“I find Lady Amelia to be a charming and spirited girl of exceptional beauty who excites a great deal of spite and jealousy among less favored ladies of the ton,” said Lord Philip severely. “Perhaps the meek Miss Lamberton has put about these stories of bullying.”
“I wrote a poem about it,” said Peter, beginning to fish around in his pockets. “Must be in my other coat.”
“About Lady Amelia?”
“Who? Oh, her. No. Twilight in London. Very moving. I remember it begins…”
But fortunately for Lord Philip, Peter’s gentleman’s gentleman appeared with the missing breeches. Peter wandered off into the bedroom to change, and Lord Philip wondered why a bit of the anticipation he had felt had fled. That was the trouble with these mealy-mouthed, religious little girls who were forever quoting scripture, thought Lord Philip nastily, forgetting that Constance had only quoted the Bible once, they always found someone to set up to play the bully. He felt quite disappointed in Constance.
Unaware of Lord Philip’s angry feelings towards her, Constance sat demurely at Almack’s that evening with the other chaperones and admired him from afar as he danced with Lady Amelia to a sprightly Scottish reel. He had an excellent leg, thought Constance dreamily, but it was a pity that he so often looked—well, Satanic, with his jet black hair, high-nosed white face and those odd, glittering green eyes.
Amelia’s blond beauty looked as delicate and fragile as porcelain as she weaved nimbly round Lord Philip in the figure eight.
They shall soon be married, thought Constance, and perhaps Lady Amelia will ask me to be her bridesmaid. I shall make myself… oh… ever such a pretty dress and perhaps Lord Philip will notice.… “Will notice what?” demanded a savage voice in her mind. “He never notices you now, so why should he even notice you at his own wedding.”
And Constance flushed slightly and felt very sad, and did not yet know why.
Lord Philip happened at that moment to glance across the room at her. The flush on her cheeks lent her face some much needed color and she looked young and remarkably beautiful as she sat studying the figures on her painted fan among the older, turbanned chaperones. Her dress was of a misty, smoky blue muslin which had formerly belonged to Amelia. Her creamy shoulders rose above the low neckline and her jet black hair was pinned in a demure little coronet on top of her small head.
She wore no jewelry, but had pinned a little bunch of fresh violets in her hair. She had the fragile, translucent beauty of a spring flower.
Lord Philip gazed down at Lady Amelia who was pirouetting under his raised arm and frowned. He suddenly wished Amelia would not wear quite so much jewelry or such revealing dresses.
Before the dance separated them, he asked, “Why is Miss Lamberton sitting with the dowagers? Does she not approve of dancing?”
All Amelia had to do was say, “Yes,” and Lord Philip’s slight interest in Constance Lamberton would have died. But Amelia considered Philip to be very high in the instep and wished to appear equally so. “Her place is with the chaperones,” she said haughtily. “She is merely fulfilling the duties for which she is paid.”
With that she tripped off in the figure of the dance and left Lord Philip to perform his part while his busy mind began to consider the implications of what she had said.
He did not wish to ask Constance to dance himself—he was very aware of his rank and his old name, and someone of his standing did not seek out little companions at Almack’s. But Peter, now, never noticed who he was dancing with—or so Lord Philip believed. Anyway, he owed it to the memory of Constance’s dead father to at least see that she was socially entertained.
He found Peter dreamily propping up a pillar under the musician’s gallery. Peter was not a popular partner for he frequently forgot which lady he had asked to dance.
“Peter—you are not engaged at present. Why do you not ask Miss Lamberton for a dance?” said Lord Philip.
“Why not ask her yourself?” countered Peter lazily.
“Because I am already engaged to dance with several other ladies,” said Philip. “Go to it, man. You said, after all, that she had beautiful eyes.”
“So I did,” said Peter. “Where is she? Ah! She looks just like a London twilight in spring, all smoky blue and gold.”
Lord Philip stared insolently across the room at Constance who lowered her eyes. “I don’t see any gold,” he remarked.
