Deirdre and Desire

by Beaton, M. C.

  ‘She has reason to be,’ said Deirdre, who, though she privately agreed with Lady Wentwater, did not like criticism of any of her sisters. ‘She has become even more beautiful than Minerva or Annabelle.’

  ‘Aye, and she knows it. Why, Guy! When did you arrive?’

  Deirdre gave a little gasp and leapt to her feet, turning to face the monster slave trader.

  Guy Wentworth stood smiling at her, looking so handsome, so normal, and so, yes, ordinary that Deirdre lost her fears and was able to drop him a curtsy with an air of composure.

  ‘Permit me to escort you home, Miss . . . Deirdre. It is Miss Deirdre, is it not?’ smiled Guy.

  Deirdre nodded, but added that she was perfectly capable of seeing herself home.

  To her annoyance, he walked with her to the door.

  ‘We have not seen you in some time, Mr Wentwater,’ said Deirdre, praying that he would leave her at the main door.

  ‘No, I have just returned from Paris. I finally sold out.’

  ‘Sold out? Then you were in the military, sir?’

  ‘Yes,’ he sighed, looking grave. ‘I know what you and your family think of me, Miss Deirdre. Have you ever considered the disgust I feel for myself? The barbarous trade I briefly engaged in was the senseless folly of a young man. I fought for my country at Waterloo. It was one way to prove to myself that I am not quite so evil.’

  ‘Oh, tell me about Waterloo,’ pleaded Deirdre, quite forgetting that she had wished only a moment before to be quit of him. ‘Everyone says such subjects are not fit for female ears. But it was a wonderful victory.’

  He gently took her arm in his and walked with her down the drive. His tale of glory and bravery and courage and death fascinated Deirdre, who hung rapt on his every word.

  She could not help admiring his tall, slender figure, the quiet elegance of his dress, and the hard lines about his mouth, ‘put there by suffering,’ she told herself.

  They reached the vicarage all too soon.

  He seemed to recollect his surroundings with a start. ‘Forgive me,’ he said in a low voice, ‘if I do not come any further. I do not wish to embarrass your family. In fact, I would be grateful if you would not mention that I am in Hopeworth. It will be our secret.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Deirdre breathlessly, for he had taken her hand and was holding it in a tight clasp. ‘But if I told them how brave you are, how you have made your amends . . . well, they would see things diferently now. As I do.’

  ‘I cannot risk losing a friendship so new and so precious to me,’ he said. ‘Other people might not have your generosity of spirit.

  ‘I have changed, Miss Deirdre. I have put away the shallow affections and affectations of my youth. The friendships I now crave are the friendships of the mind. Do you understand?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ breathed Deirdre.

  ‘Then I shall see you again. Perhaps you would care to walk with me tomorrow afternoon?’

  Deirdre hesitated only for a moment. Guy Wentwater was straight out of her private fantasies, a reformed villain, a man of the world, an equal companion, a soul-mate. She felt full of an aching, heady, suffocating exhilaration.

  ‘I will meet you in the churchyard,’ she smiled. ‘At two.’

  He raised her hand to his lips.

  ‘Until tomorrow,’ he whispered.

  He turned away and strode off down the road. Deirdre watched him for a few moments and then rushed indoors, up to her room, and threw herself face down on the bed, feeling her whole body throb in an aching turmoil of excitement and yearning. All the loneliness and boredom of her days had fled. Had she not known that if she waited there would be one special man? He had been a slave trader, yes. But so long ago. And he had made his amends and paid his debt.

  Nothing could spoil her idyll. Papa needed money and Guy Wentwater had money.

  Papa would come about. All he wanted was money to breed more and better hounds.

  The Reverend Charles Armitage sat in the Green Saloon in Lady Godolphin’s mansion in Hanover Square and poured out his tale of financial woe and the necessity of arranging a marriage between Deirdre and Lord Harry Desire.

  ‘There, there,’ admonished her ladyship when he had finished. ‘There’s no need to become historical. I can understand the practicality of an arranged marriage. We all need money,’ she added firmly, in case the reverend had any hopes of asking her for any.

  ‘So you’ll do it?’ asked the vicar. ‘You’ll house Deirdre and arrange this musicale?’

  ‘Yes, provided you repay me when you can,’ pointed out Lady Godolphin. ‘You still look worried. What is the matter?’

  ‘It’s her hair,’ said the vicar gloomily. ‘She’ll need to dye it. Desire can’t abide red-heads.’

  ‘No need to dye,’ said Lady Godolphin. ‘Wear a wig. I always do.’

  She patted her flaxen wig complacently. Like the vicar, she battled the increasing years with a great deal of paint.

  Lady Godolphin was in her late fifties, squat, with a bulldog face buried under a layer of blanc and rouge.

  ‘He don’t like clever misses either,’ went on the vicar.

  ‘Deirdre’s a bit of a chatterbox,’ said Lady Godolphin. ‘Can’t understand half what she says. Last time she was here, she was prosing on about bacon and I thought she meant pigs but it turned out she was talking about some Elizabethan philanderer.’

  The vicar recollected his message. ‘Saw Colonel Brian at White’s today,’ he remarked casually. ‘Sends his warmest regards. Said, “Arthur sends his warmest regards.”’

  ‘Oh, he did, did he?’ said Lady Godolphin airily. ‘Trouble with Arthur is, he’s too old for me.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the vicar hopefully, waiting for more.

  But Lady Godolphin returned to the subject of Deirdre. ‘Deirdre always was a bit wild, she and Daphne. Is Daphne still a hoyden?’

  ‘No, she’s grown vain. Looks at herself in the glass and does little else.’

  ‘Ah, a narcotic,’ said Lady Godolphin, nodding her great head wisely.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A narcotic. Really, Charles, did they teach you nothing at Oxford? He was one of them Greeks what was so beautiful he wouldn’t even have anything to do with echoes and he fell in love with his reflection in a pool, and since he couldn’t marry his reflection, he pined away and turned into a narcotic. It’s that yellow and white flower.’

  ‘I don’t have anything to do with echoes either,’ said the vicar in bewilderment.

  ‘Oh, stoopid, echoes was not a them but a her.’

  ‘It’s all heathen talk,’ said the vicar righteously. ‘And a fat lot o’ good it did them Greeks either. Where are they now? Hey? Slavin’ for a lot o’ Turks.’

  ‘In any case,’ said Lady Godolphin firmly, ‘you bring Deirdre to me and I’ll have her married off in no time. Why, only think what . . .’

  The door opened and Lady Godolphin broke off and simpered girlishly and played with the sticks of her fan.

  A young man entered. He was thin and gawky but dressed in the height of fashion, from his frizzed and pomaded hair to his boots with their high heels and fixed spurs. He walked forwards with that peculiarly rolling gait forced on anyone who wears fixed spurs. He wore more scent than the vicar and the vicar’s musk met a strong aroma of ‘Youth in Springtime’. It was as if two great fog banks of scent had merged, blotting out every other scent in the world.

  ‘My . . . er . . . friend, Mr Anstey,’ said Lady Godolphin, simpering quite horribly.

  The vicar left as soon as he could. ‘Poor Colonel Brian,’ he thought. ‘So that’s the reason.’

  The vicar of God told himself that perhaps he ought not to introduce his daughter to such a household. The huntsman dreamed of a pack which would outclass the Quorn, scented the wet, rotten bracken of damp November days when the wind blew from the east, saw his hounds bunched together ‘so close you could cover them with a table cloth.’ The huntsman won.

  The vicar had expected D
eirdre to treat the news of her forthcoming visit to London and the glowing description of the superior qualities of one Lord Harry Desire with suspicion and with her usual impertinent questions.

  Never had he expected outright rebellion.

  ‘No, Papa,’ said Deirdre firmly. ‘I wish to remain here.’

  ‘Why?’ demanded the vicar, almost pawing the ground.

  ‘Because my duty is to stay home and care for my sisters,’ said Deirdre with a saintly expression on her face reminiscent of her sister, Minerva, at her worst.

  ‘Piffle,’ said the vicar. ‘That’s your best gown you got on. It’s a fellow. Who’ve you been fiddling about with as soon as my back is turned?’

  ‘There is no one, Papa,’ said Deirdre. How could she explain to this father of hers, who appeared to have harboured not one spiritual thought in the whole of his life, the purity of her friendship with Guy Wentwater? How could she explain the excitement of shared ideas, the tender sweet awakening of love so far above the petty lusts of men?

  She thought of the meeting in the churchyard, of his serious grave voice, of the way his blue eyes met hers in a direct and open look.

  ‘It’s no use bamming me,’ she went on. ‘You’ve got a marriage arranged for me and all because you have squandered good money on a silly pack of dogs.’

  ‘WHAT!’ Never had the vicar dreamed of hearing such a piece of blasphemy from one of his own daughters.

  They were standing in the vicarage garden, facing each other across a flowerbecl, their breath hanging in the frosty air like smoke.

  ‘I’ll get my whip,’ said the vicar grimly. He turned on his heel and strode into the vicarage.

  Deirdre stood frozen to the spot. He would not dare!

  The vicar emerged brandishing his whip.

  Deirdre turned and ran.

  After her, hallooing and shouting came her father. Attired in a ridiculously thin muslin gown and thin silk slippers – for Deirdre had been loitering in the garden in the hope that Guy Wentwater would stroll past and see her – she picked up her skirts and fled off down the road with the vicar in hot pursuit.

  Deirdre scrambled over a stile beside the road and set off over a ploughed field, feeling like a hunted fox.

  The vicar’s cries died away behind her, but she was still too shocked at the violence of her father’s behaviour to slacken her pace.

  Her dress was torn and muddy and her slippers were ruined. Her red hair flew about her face as she stumbled over the frost-hard earth of the fields behind the village, heading for the grounds of the Hall where her uncle, Sir Edwin, lived, knowing instinctively that that would be the last place the vicar would think of looking for her.

  She scaled the mossy wall which bordered the grounds, hoping that one of her uncle’s gamekeepers would not shoot her in mistake for a poacher.

  The woods on either side of her were quiet and dark and still. Deirdre listened hard but could no longer hear any sound of her father’s noisy pursuit. She stood still, her heart beating hard. What would happen when she returned to the vicarage, as return she must? There was no Minerva to intercede for her.

  She was filled with a sudden, suffocating hatred for her father. Why couldn’t he behave like the clergyman he was supposed to be? The vicar of St Ann’s in Hopeminster was a quiet, scholarly, aesthetic man, quite unlike her father. When the vicar wasn’t reeking of musk he smelled of the stables and seemed to be perpetually covered in dog hair.

  The whole vicarage smelled of damp dog, thought Deirdre savagely. Here she was with a whole new love; trembling, innocent and fragile. And there was the vicar, scouring the lanes of Hopeworth for her with his whip in his hands.

  ‘No one understands me except Guy,’ whispered Deirdre to the uncaring trees.

  In desperation, she sank to her knees and prayed to God for aid. She prayed long and feverishly while a pair of squirrels chattered above her head and a curious rabbit stared at her with unblinking eyes.

  And then, all at once, He spoke to her. She could hear a voice in her head telling her exactly what to do.

  She must return to the vicarage and apologize to her father and say she would go with him to London. While there, she would make sure this Lord Harry Desire took her in such dislike, he would never want to see her again. Then when she returned in respectable disgrace to Hopeworth, she would seek out Guy and ask him to elope with her.

  A great calmness descended on Deirdre. It is quite amazing how the Almighty can occasionally tell people to go ahead and do exactly what they want to do anyway. Only very devout people manage to muddle along as best they can without hearing voices or the whirr of wings.

  Feeling exalted and noble, Deirdre brushed down her skirts and made her way back home.

  The vicar was already feeling ashamed of his outburst of anger. By the time he had cooled himself off with several glasses of shrub at The Six Jolly Beggarmen, he had decided to return home and wait for Deirdre. When she returned, he would simply order her very calmly and quietly to see to the packing of her trunks. His cool dignity would overawe her.

  But to his relief – for this calm and dignified picture of himself was beginning to fade by the time he reached the vicarage – Deirdre was waiting to give him a very pretty apology.

  The vicar’s normal shrewdness deserted him before the pleasure at having got his own way so easily.

  Diana and Frederica accepted the news of Deirdre’s forthcoming trip to London with all the aplomb of two little girls who were used to their elder sisters jauntering about in the great world. Both still attended the seminary at Hopeminster, the vicar’s plans for hiring a governess having never come to anything. Daphne alone seemed shaken out of her narcissistic calm, and started to write out a long shopping list for Deirdre which contained, it appeared, the name of every beauty cosmetic to be had in London.

  Mellowed by several glasses of port, the vicar leaned back in his chair after supper and surveyed his family indulgently.

  He caught Deirdre looking at him with the sort of blazing green gaze he had seen in the eyes of cornered animals. But as soon as she noticed his suddenly sharpened expression, Deirdre immediately cast her eyes meekly down and presented a demure picture of a dutiful daughter.

  Deirdre felt she was seeing her father for the first time. Her acid eye took in the glory of his too-tight coat, his flushed face, the creak of his corsets. Her very biting contempt was armour to her bruised soul. Such a father deserved to be deceived. And her mother had never been any help, wrapped up as she was in her various ailments.

  All at once, she became aware he was talking about Guy. ‘I hear young Wentwater’s back,’ said the vicar. ‘Strange thing about the Wentwaters. Lady Wentwater came to live here nigh on twenty years ago. No one’s ever heard of a Lord Wentwater and she don’t figure in the peerage. I’ve asked her time and again about her late husband, but she always goes deaf. But she’s a harmless old lady. Pity the same can’t be said about her nephew.’

  ‘Hardly, Papa,’ said Deirdre sweetly. ‘Since no one in their right mind could call Mr Wentwater an old lady.’

  The vicar looked at her sharply but she had cast her eyes down again.

  ‘Hey, well,’ he said. ‘So long as he don’t come nosing around here like a fox after the hens. How Bella could have been so stupid as to even look at the man . . .’

  ‘We all thought him well enough,’ pointed out Mrs Armitage languidly, ‘until he told us the nature of his trade. You yourself could find no fault with him up until then, Mr Armitage.’

  ‘That’s fustian. I . . .’ The vicar broke off and stared at the ceiling in a puzzled way. ‘How can it be leakin’ in here. Better run upstairs and see if the bedrooms are flooded.’

  It’s not the rain,’ said Deirdre. ‘It’s Betty. She’s crying,’ she added as the maid whipped herself out of the dining room.

  ‘What’s she got to cry about?’

  ‘Crying is quite beneficial to the eyes,’ said Mrs Armitage, with sudden enthusiasm.
‘It exercises the retina.’

  ‘Betty is crying,’ said Deirdre, loudly and clearly, ‘because she was promised two years ago that she could leave our employ and marry John Summer.’ John Summer was the vicarage coachman. He also acted as groom, whipper-in and kennel master.

  ‘Well, she’ll just need to wait,’ said the vicar testily. ‘Can’t have servants marrying. Never heard of such a thing. We can’t afford another maid at the moment, and we can’t afford to pay John Summer enough to set up a household. So there!’

  Deirdre thought bitterly of the vast amount of money that had gone to buy new hounds and new hunters and opened her mouth to make an acid retort. But then she remembered her plan and kept silent.

  At last the evening meal was over and the girls collected their bed candles from the table in the hall and mounted the stairs to their rooms.

  With the departure of Minerva and Annabelle from the family nest, Daphne and Deirdre each had a room to themselves, while Diana and Frederica still shared their old room.

  The storm had died down. Deirdre opened the window and leaned out. The chill fresh air smelled of damp, rotting leaves and evergreen.

  The figure of a man appeared beyond the high hedge which bordered the vicarage garden, his stock gleaming whitely in the darkness.

  ‘Guy,’ murmured Deirdre, her heart beginning to hammer against her ribs.

  She threw a cloak over her shoulders and crept out of her room and slowly down the stairs, walking on the edge of each foot so as not to make a sound.

  The rumble of her father’s voice, and her mother’s faint high-pitched replies filtered through the parlour door.

  She stood very still in the hall. Betty and cook would still be in the kitchen. The hall door was not yet locked and bolted for the night. She would have to try to get out that way and pray that she did not make a noise or that her father would not choose to look out the parlour window as she made her way down the drive.

  The hall door opened with a snap of its hinges like a pistol shot. Deirdre froze, already thinking up excuses. But the voices in the parlour went on, and the clatter of dishes sounded from the kitchen.