Deirdre and Desire

by Beaton, M. C.

  ‘Fah!’ said the vicar, rising, picking up his steaming hat and cramming it on his head.

  ‘Let us not part in anger,’ pleaded the squire. ‘Join me for supper, I beg you, and let us talk this thing over.’

  The vicar marched to the door and then turned.

  ‘“Better a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.” Proverbs, Chapter fifteen, verse seventeen.’

  ‘Oh, Charles . . .’ began the squire, but the vicar had already made his exit.

  A ride through the night did little to improve the Reverend Charles Armitage’s temper. The squire’s sorrowful, reproachful face kept rising in front of him as he spurred his horse in the direction of the vicarage. He had felt a new man these past two years. An important man. One of the peerage. By virtue of his daughters’ successful marriages, he was invited to all the best houses.

  He felt he had regained his youth. And if his corsets pinched and the paint on his face made his skin itch, these were mere pinpricks set against the heady exhilaration of feeling he was one of the bucks and bloods.

  He stomped into the tiny, dark hall of the vicarage and was pulled up short by the sight of his daughter, Daphne. She was standing in front of the hall looking-glass, staring at her reflection with a rapt expression on her face.

  ‘Go to your room, miss,’ snapped the vicar, ‘and stop endlessly preening yourself. And send Deirdre to my study.’

  Daphne leaned forward, closer to the glass, and patted one glossy black ringlet into place.

  ‘Yes, Papa,’ she said vaguely as she drifted towards the stairs.

  ‘Grumph!’ said the vicar. He shoved his head round the door of the vicarage parlour. His wife was lying on a sofa. She raised a brown mask of a face in his direction.

  ‘Gad’s ’Oonds!’ shrieked the vicar. ‘What . . . ?’

  ‘It’s mud,’ said his wife, moving her lips as little as possible. ‘’Tis said to be most beneficial.’

  ‘Pah!’ snorted the vicar, pulling shut the door and crossing the hall to his study. Mrs Armitage, when not suffering from some imaginary illness or other, was always trying out beauty remedies. He rang the bell for Betty, the housemaid, and demanded a bottle of white brandy and a jug of hot water. The maid went to light the fire but he growled that he would do it himself. As soon as the brandy had arrived, he poured a generous measure into a pewter tankard and added hot water. Then he threw another measure of brandy over the sticks in the grate and struck a lucifer. The fire went up with a satisfying whoosh, nearly singeing his eyebrows. He tossed on a log and settled himself behind his cluttered desk.

  The door opened and Miss Deirdre Armitage walked in. The vicar looked at her, sighed, and looked quickly away again. Everyone called Deirdre a beauty but her father always thought, uncomfortably, that his daughter reminded him of a fox.

  She had thick, shining red hair and green eyes, not the emerald green of Lord Sylvester, but a peculiar jade green like sea-washed glass. They were slightly tilted at the corners. This, together with her short straight nose, high cheekbones and pointed chin gave her an elfin appearance. She had a small, high, firm bosom, a tiny waist, and thin, fragile wrists and ankles. But there always seemed to be some inner joke amusing Deirdre and that was what made the vicar think of a fox. He sometimes thought her sly.

  ‘Well, Papa,’ said Deirdre, sitting down opposite him, ‘and how was Squire Radford?’

  ‘How did you know I’d been to squire’s?’

  ‘Because your coat is in the hall, Papa, and it is wet, and you look guilty and in a bad temper which is the way you always look when you come from Squire Radford.’

  ‘See here, my pert miss, it’s time you guarded that tongue o’ yours. No man wants a carroty-pated clever shrew for a wife.’

  Those green eyes of Deirdre’s that gave so little away studied him intently.

  ‘I am to have a Season next year, Papa,’ said Deirdre at last. ‘Minerva has promised to bring me out. I . . . am . . . looking . . . forward . . . to . . . it . . . very . . . much,’ she added, slowly and clearly.

  ‘Oh, ah,’ said the vicar studying the bottom of his tankard.

  ‘And I shall not put myself through any of the miseries Minerva and Annabelle endured. I shall know when I am in love with a gentleman.’

  ‘Oh, love. You’ve been reading novels again. Love has little to do with a good, sensible marriage.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Deirdre firmly, ‘it is everything. As a man of God, Papa, you would naturally never dream of forcing one of your daughters into a loveless marriage contract.’

  ‘Minerva was prepared to,’ pointed out the vicar crossly.

  ‘She was fortunate she did not have to do it,’ said Deirdre. ‘What did you wish to speak to me about?’

  The vicar thought rapidly. No need to cross swords with Deirdre until he had seen this Lord Harry Desire. Perhaps nothing would come of it. And he could always wait until one or both his sons-in-law returned from Paris. But he had asked them for money before, and he knew that this time Lord Sylvester Comfrey might take over the management of the vicarage lands himself as he had threatened to do last time. And Lord Sylvester considered the vicar’s private hunt an extravagance.

  ‘I just wanted to tell you I am off to Town in the morning,’ he said grumpily. ‘So be a good girl and look after your mother and sisters.’

  ‘Oh, Papa,’ said Deirdre, her strange eyes shining in the firelight, ‘take me with you. Please. It is so boring here. Daphne is no fun any longer. All she does now is droop in front of the looking-glass.’

  ‘No. You’ve your duties. You’ve got to read to Lady Wentwater. Then you’d best take some cordial to Mrs Briggs what’s poorly.’

  ‘What about your sermon?’

  ‘Let Pettifor handle it.’ Mr Pettifor was the vicar’s overworked curate. ‘Time enough for you to be jauntering to London when Minerva gets home.’

  When Deirdre reached the privacy of her room, she found her hands were shaking. She knew the vicarage finances were at low ebb. She knew her father probably planned to rescue them by marrying her off to some rich man who would provide a large marriage settlement. Then she smiled to herself and began to relax.

  Although she had met many young men when she had visited her two sisters’ homes, not one of them had shown more than a passing interest in her. She knew she was always damned as a blue-stocking but that suited her very well. Deirdre was an intense romantic and believed in the marriage of true minds. She was content to wait. And Minerva would not allow Papa to force her into any marriage she found distasteful.

  ‘If she complains to Minerva, then Minerva will put a stop to it,’ mused the vicar as he set out for London on the following morning. ‘Well, I’ll put a spoke in that wheel. I’ll give a guinea to John-postboy to drop her letters to Paris down the nearest well until I give him leave to do otherwise.’ His conscience gave a sudden, vicious stab. But he started to recite the names of his hounds like a litany to comfort himself. Not one would have to be sacrificed if his plans came out right. He had made a few mistakes in breeding, but now he was sure he was on his way to owning the best pack in England. Women were always bleating about love and marriage anyway. It was an attitude. The poor dears were supposed to think that way. Now he, Charles Armitage, had never loved his wife and if he could put up with her plaguey maunderings and moanings for all these years, then so could anyone else, he reasoned, rather incoherently. And women were the lesser breed. Definitely.

  Like Lord Chesterfield, he considered women to be ‘children of a larger growth’, and ‘a man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them as he does with a sprightly forward child.’

  By the time he had reached Town and had made use of his daughter Minerva’s town house, he was once more happy within himself.

  Barbered and pomaded and laced into a pair of Cumberland corsets under a sky-blue coat of Bath superfine and the latest thing in canary-coloured pantaloons,
the vicar creaked and swaggered his way down St James’s Street and turned in at the door of White’s.

  White’s Club had changed little since the vicar’s salad days, although the entrance had been moved lower down and the old doorway turned into a bow window. The subscription fee had been raised to eleven guineas and the entrance fee from ten to twenty guineas. Beau Brummell passed fashionable judgement on London from his seat in the bow window.

  Swift had called White’s ‘the common rendezvous of infamous sharpers and noble cullies’ but White’s was, in fact, the club. Certainly it was the place to hunt down such an Exquisite as Lord Harry Desire.

  The club was remarkably quiet although it was three in the afternoon. It transpired there had been a heavy gambling session the night before and no doubt everyone was still sleeping off the effects. He espied Colonel Brian, and, after some hesitation, approached him.

  The elderly colonel had been the paramour of Lady Godolphin, a distant relative of the vicar’s wife who had brought out Minerva. Lady Godolphin, that ancient Mrs Malaprop of society, had believed the colonel to be married, when in fact his wife was dead. The colonel had put all that right by asking her to marry him. He had been accepted. For a month afterwards, Lady Godolphin had talked of little else but the preparation of her torso – her word for trousseau – and then, quite suddenly, it had all fizzled out. The gossips would have it that the colonel had jilted her. But no one could find the truth of the matter since both parties refused to discuss the subject.

  ‘I say, Colonel,’ said the vicar breezily, ‘I haven’t seen you this age. You do not seem to be in plump currant.’

  For the colonel looked sadly woebegone.

  The colonel looked carefully at the painted and groomed vicar for several moments and then his face cleared. ‘Charles Armitage!’ he exclaimed. ‘I would not have known you.’

  ‘Course not,’ said the vicar with awful vanity. ‘I’ve growed fashionable.’

  ‘Quite,’ said the colonel nervously, taking a step back to escape from the overpowering smell of musk which hovered round Mr Armitage like a great yellow cloud. ‘How are your girls? Well, I trust?’

  ‘Minerva and Annabelle are in Paris.’

  ‘The whole of society seems to be in Paris,’ sighed the colonel. ‘The town is remarkably thin of company. It will be a drab Little Season.’

  ‘I plan to call on Lady Godolphin later,’ said the vicar airily. ‘Care to accompany me?’

  The colonel shook his head sadly, and looked at the floor.

  The vicar was longing to ask him the reason for his disaffection with Lady Godolphin, but the thought of his real reason for being in the club made him drop the question he had been about to ask, and demand instead, ‘Know Harry Desire?’

  ‘Slightly. I saw him a minute ago.’

  ‘I would like an introduction,’ said the vicar. ‘I have a private and personal matter I wish to discuss with him.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Colonel Brian. ‘He is in the coffee room. If you would do me a small favour in return . . .?’

  ‘By all means.’

  ‘When you call on Lady Godolphin, tell her Arthur sends his warmest regards. No. Do not ask me anything.’

  ‘“Arthur sends his warmest regards,”’ repeated the vicar impatiently. ‘Now, lead me to Desire.’

  Lord Harry Desire was sitting barricaded behind a newspaper in the coffee room. He looked up as the colonel stood behind him and cleared his throat. Colonel Brian then introduced the vicar and took his leave.

  The vicar sat down opposite Lord Harry and studied him intently.

  Lord Harry stared back, his gaze empty, blue and limpid.

  He was not quite the fashionable rakish Exquisite the vicar had expected. The first thing that struck the vicar was the man’s incredible beauty. Lord Harry had thick, black, glossy hair falling in artistic disarray over a broad white forehead. His blue eyes were clear and innocent like the eyes of a child. The lids were curved, giving him the lazy, sensual look of some classical statues. His mouth was firm, but there was a certain air of languid effeminacy about him caused by the girlish purity of his skin and by the slimness of his tall figure.

  His clothes were beautifully tailored, reflected the vicar with a pang of envy. His bottle-green coat sat on his shoulders without a wrinkle and his buff-coloured pantaloons looked as if they had been painted on to his legs. His hessian boots shone like black glass. His cravat rose from above his striped waistcoat in intricately sculptured folds.

  ‘You’re younger than I thought,’ said the vicar abruptly.

  ‘I am remarkably well-preserved for my thirty years,’ said Lord Harry earnestly.

  ‘Aye well, just so,’ said the vicar.

  There was a long silence. Outside, someone was murdering Mozart on a barrel organ.

  ‘Well, well,’ said the vicar, rubbing his chubby hands together. ‘Well, well, well,’

  Lord Harry continued to survey him with a pleasant smiling look.

  ‘You must wonder what it is I want to speak to you about,’ said the vicar desperately.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Lord Harry gently. ‘I never wonder about anything. It is too fatiguing. And I am sure you will tell me in your own good time.’

  The vicar looked at him in irritation. Then he thought instead of the nabob uncle’s fortune and leaned forwards and patted Lord Harry’s knee in an avuncular manner.

  Lord Harry looked at the vicar, looked at the hand on his knee, and looked at the vicar again. His expression did not change, but the vicar’s face reddened and he hurriedly withdrew his hand.

  ‘See, it’s like this here,’ said the Reverend Charles Armitage, beginning to perspire, ‘I heard you was in need of getting married so you could inherit your uncle’s fortune.’

  Lord Harry surveyed him blandly. The vicar felt himself becoming angry. Why didn’t the young clod say something? This was worse than he had imagined it would be. Better get to the point.

  ‘I have this daughter, see. Deirdre. Eighteen. Beautiful. I ain’t got the blunt, you need the wife, what say we strike a bargain?’

  A flicker of something glinted in his lordship’s blue eyes and then was gone.

  ‘Indeed!’ he said politely.

  ‘Well?’ said the vicar impatiently. ‘What about it?’

  ‘Does she have red hair?’ asked Lord Harry, looking vaguely in the direction of the chandelier. ‘I can’t abide red hair.’

  ‘Dye,’ decided the vicar to himself. He thought briefly of God the way one thinks of a nagging, bullying parent, slightly closed his eyes, took a deep breath and said, ‘No.’

  ‘And she is in Town?’

  ‘No,’ said the vicar. ‘But she will be. In four days’ time.’

  ‘I met your eldest daughter,’ mused Lord Harry. ‘Lady Sylvester Comfrey. Very beautiful and very wise. She told me how she despised men who put pride in dress before pride in leading a virtuous life.’

  ‘Oh, Minerva will have her little joke,’ said the vicar jovially, privately cursing his eldest for her priggish moralizing.

  ‘Is your daughter – Deirdre – vastly clever?’

  The vicar looked at Lord Harry from out of the corner of his little shoe-button eyes and wondered whether Lord Harry wanted a clever wife. Lord Harry looked back with an expression of absolute vacancy on his beautiful face.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said the vicar. ‘Very womanly. Pretty little thing. Domesticated. Been well-trained. See here,’ he went on, improvizing rapidly, ‘she will be staying with Lady Godolphin next Monday and we shall be having a little musicale. Perhaps you would like to attend?’

  There was a long silence. A bluebottle, brave survivor of summer, buzzed against the glass. A log shifted on the fire and several clocks began to chime the half hour.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lord Harry at last. ‘I will be there.’

  ‘Good, good, send you a card,’ gabbled the vicar, now desperate to escape.

  Lord Harry raised one long, slim, white hand as th
e vicar rose to his feet.

  ‘You are sure your daughter’s affections are not otherwise engaged?’

  ‘No,’ said the vicar, glad to be able to tell the truth at last. ‘Deirdre’s never even looked at a man, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Lord Harry pleasantly.

  ‘Well, don’t trouble your brain with it,’ said the vicar, patting him on the shoulder. ‘We look forward to the pleasure of your company on Monday.’

  ‘What an idiot!’ muttered the vicar to himself as he left the club. ‘Never mind. He’s a manageable idiot and Deirdre will be quite happy with a complacent husband.’

  He set off at a brisk pace in the direction of Lady Godolphin’s house.

  He needed all the help he could get!

  TWO

  Deirdre Armitage sat reading a novel she did not like to Lady Wentwater whom she did not like either.

  The drawing room was dark and musty. Lady Wentwater was white and doughy and musty. As she read, Deirdre wondered about Lady Wentwater’s nephew, Guy. No one had seen him in the county since the time it had seemed he was enamoured of Annabelle.

  Rumour had it that the vicar had frightened him away. Guy Wentwater had said he was a slave trader, and although he had long quit that ghastly means of earning money, the Armitage family were happy that he chose to stay away.

  Then Deirdre’s thoughts turned to the story she was reading. It was called Ludovic’s Revenge by A Lady of Quality and Deirdre judged it quite the silliest tale she had ever read. Everyone seemed either to turn scarlet or go ‘ashen pale’. Men and women fainted with amazing regularity and there wasn’t even a decent ghost.

  Deirdre took a quick glance at the clock. Then she closed the book firmly.

  ‘It is late, Lady Wentwater,’ she said. ‘I must return home.’

  ‘Then come tomorrow.’

  ‘Daphne will come tomorrow,’ said Deirdre, privately vowing to give her sister’s hair a good yank if she did not.

  ‘Oh, Daphne. I will need to shroud every looking glass in the house or I won’t hear a word out of her,’ snorted Lady Wentwater. ‘Too taken up with herself, she is.’