The Dreadful Debutante (The Royal Ambition Series Book 1)

by M C Beaton

  Mira sat down nervously and looked about her. There was a businesslike desk against the window and several shiny black leather and horsehair-filled chairs like the one on which she was perched. There was a large oil painting on the wall depicting a hunting scene and several smaller oils of horses. A stand in the corner held an assortment of whips, sticks, and riding crops. Stuck into the gold frame of the mirror over the fireplace were many invitations.

  There was a console table at her elbow with copies of The Sporting Life and The Gentleman’s Magazine. She flicked open The Gentleman’s Magazine and tried to find something to read.

  There was an article called “Observations on Hunting by the Late King of Prussia,” which seemed very boring even to an enthusiastic hunter like herself. She settled down to read a chilling article titled “Calculations on the Game of Life and Death.”

  The article claimed that half of all people born in the British Isles died before they reached the age of seventeen. More girls than boys died of the smallpox, it went on, and just as Mira had reached the bit where it explained cheerfully that most deaths could be expected to take place in March, the door opened and Lord Charles strode in. He was unshaven and wrapped in an oriental dressing gown, and his black hair was ruffled.

  Mira threw down the magazine and jumped to her feet with a glad cry of welcome, a cry that died on her lips when she saw the look of horror on his face.

  “What on earth are you doing here?” demanded Charles. “And dressed like a guy?”

  “But… but I wanted to see you,” said Mira. “And you were used to seeing me in boys’ clothes.”

  His blue eyes stared down at her. “That was when you were a child. Unless I am much mistaken, you are in London for your come-out.”

  “Yes, but… but…”

  “Then this is no way to go on.”

  “But we are friends,” wailed Mira, “and London is so strange and, in fact, quite terrifying. I thought perhaps we might have some fun. I have not been to the Tower.”

  “I think you should concentrate on getting your manners ready for your come-out,” said Charles, “instead of hankering after unfashionable places.”

  She looked uneasily at his handsome, regular features. “You are changed, Charles.”

  His manner softened. “You are a shameless scapegrace, Mira. Off with you before your parents find out what you have been up to.” He ruffled her frizzy hair. “I shall see you at your very first ball. It is at the Henrys’, is it not?”

  Mira dumbly nodded. Charles picked up a small brass bell and rang it, and when his servant answered its summons, he said, “Show Miss Mira out, James, and forget you ever saw her here.”

  Mira got up and followed the servant to the door. On the threshold she turned around, “Charles…” she began. But he said impatiently, “Go, and go quickly before you are seen.”

  Outside she stood on the pavement, irresolute. A newspaper blew along the street and wrapped itself around her legs. She tore it away and then with her hands in her pockets slowly began to make her way home.

  When she reached home, she was lucky in that there were no servants in the hall, so she was able to scamper up the stairs to her room, unobserved. She threw herself facedown on the bed, but she did not cry. Her mind searched desperately for an explanation for her beloved Charles’s cold behavior. And then she realized with shame that this was, after all, London, and it had been very shocking indeed to call on him at his home and dressed in such a way. Her childhood was behind her, never to return.

  The eve of the ball rushed on her in a last-minute flurry of dancing instructions and dress rehearsals. She could not help but become excited. Mira had never paid much attention to dress before, but now she was glad that her ball gown was so pretty. It was of white muslin, the finest India muslin, worn over a white silk underdress. There were so many intricate flounces at the hem that it seemed to foam about her feet when she walked.

  Finally they were ready to set out, and Mira was so caught up at the idea of Charles seeing her in her finery that she did not notice that Drusilla was looking exceptionally beautiful. Although the Markhams lived in a fairly grand style in the country, Mira was startled at the magnificence of Lord and Lady Henry’s mansion in Grosvenor Square, where the ball was being held. Lights blazed from top to bottom of the house. As they entered the wide hallway with its black-and-white tiles, she saw that the very hall was decorated with hangings of silk and banks of hothouse flowers. A double line of footmen in livery lined the wide staircase that led up to the chain of saloons on the first floor, which had been turned into a ballroom for the evening.

  They left their cloaks and joined Mr. Markham at the foot of the stairs. As they began to mount, Mira tried not to be afraid. Charles would be there. He would smile at her and dance with her, and after that everything would be all right.

  She and Drusilla curtsied to Lord and Lady Henry and then followed their mother and father into the ballroom. Their entrance excited a certain commotion, and Mira realized that quizzing glasses were being trained on her sister’s beauty. But what did it matter what the gentlemen thought of her sister? Charles had always rated her a tiresome little girl.

  After Mr. and Mrs. Markham had circled the floor, chatting to friends and acquaintances, Mr. Markham went off to the card room, and Mrs. Markham and her daughters sat down on gilt rout chairs at the edge of the floor, where dancers were performing the quadrille.

  Just as that dance ended, Mira saw Charles entering the ballroom, and her heart turned over. He looked so handsome in formal black. Surely there was no man in London who looked better.

  And he saw her, sitting there with her mother and Drusilla, and he smiled and began to make his way toward them.

  Mira’s green eyes shone as she watched him approach. All her social unease, all her uncertainties melted away. She knew herself to be a good dancer, better than Drusilla.

  And then just as Charles was nearly at their side, his eyes fell on Drusilla, who smiled at him, a little curved smile. She lowered her long lashes and slowly waved her fan.

  Charles bowed, and the ladies rose and curtsied. Charles had forgotten Mira’s very existence. His blue eyes were fastened on Drusilla’s face. “Can this be little Drusilla?” he asked.

  “My daughter has grown in looks,” said Mrs. Markham.

  Charles appeared to collect his wits. He bowed again in front of Drusilla. “Miss Markham,” he said, “would you do me the very great honor of partnering me in this next dance?”

  With one single graceful movement, Drusilla, lifted her train over her arm, and put her gloved fingers on the arm Charles was holding out.

  “Delighted,” she murmured.

  They moved off together, and Mira sat down again suddenly, her mind one black pit of misery. What did fun and companionship matter when one did not possess beauty?

  A young man came up to Mira and asked her to dance. She accepted, but all the time her eyes followed Charles and Drusilla, so that by the end of the dance, she could neither remember the name of the man she had danced with nor remember what he looked like. Misery made her look grim-faced, and so she was to have very few partners that evening. Charles showed no sign of wanting to dance with her. He danced twice with Drusilla and then spent quite a lot of time leaning against a pillar and watching her.

  When they all went in for refreshments, Mira walked beside her mother, a great anger against her sister rising in her tortured bosom.

  In the center of the room that was being used for refreshments, there was a fountain surrounded by a wide, shallow pool in which goldfish darted. Drusilla was standing there with a young man, laughing and flirting.

  A friend of Mrs. Markham’s called to her, and so with her mother’s attention elsewhere, Mira marched straight up to her sister and said belligerently, “I want a word with you.”

  The young man bowed and retreated. “What is it, sis?” asked Drusilla languidly.

  “I want you to leave Charles alone,” said Mira
. “You can have any gentleman you like. Leave Charles for me.”

  “You silly widgeon,” said Drusilla. “Lord Charles is not in the slightest interested in you. He has asked Mama’s permission to take me out driving, and I am going. So there!”

  Never had Mira known such sick jealousy. The room seemed to swim about her and her hands to move of their own volition as she suddenly pushed her sister backward, so that Drusilla, with a loud shriek, fell into the pool.

  Mira stood stricken, wondering whether she had run mad. Voices all about her were crying, “Shame!” Gentlemen were helping a now weeping Drusilla from the pool. Her soaking dress was clinging to her body, serving to make Drusilla appear even more entrancing in the eyes of the gentlemen.

  And then Mira heard Charles’s voice at her ear, saying with bitter contempt, “You are a disgusting hoyden, Mira. I am ashamed of you!”

  Then Mr. Markham was there to say the carriage had been summoned. Drusilla must be taken home immediately before she caught a chill. Voices rose and fell about Mira’s now scarlet little ears, voices exclaiming in condemnation at her behavior.

  Mr. Markham said nothing until they were home and Drusilla, wrapped in blankets, had been carried up to bed to be fussed over by her mother and the servants.

  “In here,” he said curtly to Mira, holding open the door of the library. Head bowed, Mira slowly walked in.

  “Will you send me home?” she asked.

  “That is what you deserve,” he said coldly. “Mrs. Markham is most insistent on it. She suggests you be returned to Mrs. Dunstable and confined to the house. I do not like failures, Mira, and you are not only a social disgrace but a social failure. Because Lord Charles Devere spoiled you by paying attention to you when you were a child does not mean he is going to trouble his head now with a hurly-burly miss. You will have, however, a chance to redeem yourself. You are to be kept indoors here for two weeks, two weeks in which you will study dancing, deportment, and manners. You have been overindulged as a child and allowed to run wild.”

  Mira wanted to cry out, “But I did it for you. You wanted a son. I tried to be that son.” But one did not express one’s feelings to one’s parents, and so she stood there, feeling her world about her lying in ruins. She felt too weak to protest, too weak to say that after what she had done, she could not face one member of London society.

  “You may go,” said Mr. Markham, and Mira turned and ran from the room, ran to the sanctuary of her bedroom, feeling a tight pain in her chest made by the tears that would not come, for the disgrace and the hurt were too much for tears.

  Chapter Two

  To Mira the following week was a species of hell. She stood at the window and watched Drusilla driving off with Charles, saw the glow of admiration in his eyes as he looked at her sister, saw bleakly the way Drusilla flirted with him. Then in the evenings there was all the fuss as preparations were made to take Drusilla to some ball or party. When she drove off with her parents, Mira was left alone with the servants to reflect on her social disgrace.

  Because of her one burst of temper, Charles was out there, at all the balls and parties attended by Drusilla and every other pretty girl in society, and she could only torture herself with thoughts of what he would say, how he would look, and how little he probably thought of her.

  Mira was even banned from the drawing room when Drusilla’s admirers came to call, and then at the end of that first week, she heard Mrs. Markham say complacently, “Lord Charles is only the younger son of a duke, but he will do very well for Drusilla. Has he asked you yet for permission to pay his addresses?” And Mr. Markham replied in an amused voice, “Not yet. But he will. He will.”

  So Mira began to move about in a dream of what it had been like in the past, remembering Charles’s every word and expression.

  At the beginning of the second week, the weather was still unexpectedly fine, and Drusilla and her parents set off to a picnic in the Surrey fields. Mira was told to practice her scales on the pianoforte. She itched for freedom, and though she had sworn never to don masculine clothes again, she put them on, hung over the banisters, and waited until the hall was empty of servants, and then slipped out into the London streets.

  Somehow she found her steps taking her in the direction of South Audley Street. Although she knew Charles would probably be at the picnic, she had a sick desire to stand outside his house and to walk on the same pavement he walked on every day. But there was something cheering about the weather, about the sunshine and the scudding little breeze, which drove white clouds across a blue sky far above the grimy chimney pots of London.

  She turned into Grosvenor Square and was halfway round it when she stopped to listen to a noisy altercation. A tall gentleman with arresting good looks and a powerful figure was berating a protesting groom. The groom was saying that he did not know where my lord’s tiger had got to, and my lord was complaining crossly that he was due at a curricle race and needed his tiger.

  Afterward Mira blamed the sunshine and the light breeze, which appeared to have made her reckless. There was also the desire not to be shamed Mira, the social disgrace, but someone else entirely.

  She marched boldly up to the curricle, pulling her hat firmly down over her eyes as she did so, and said in what she hoped was a Cockney accent, “I’ll be yer tiger, my lord.”

  A pair of cold gray eyes stared down at her. “Experience, lad?”

  “Tiger to Mr. Markham, sir, of St. James’s Square.”

  “Very well. Hop up. I have wasted enough time as it is. But if you prove not to know what you are doing, you will get a whipping.”

  Mira sprang nimbly onto the backstrap and hung on for dear life as the carriage surged forward. They went as far as a point on the Great West Road just beyond the village of Knightsbridge, where her driver slowed his team and joined several other drivers and carriages. She dutifully nipped down and ran to the horses’ heads. She discovered from overhearing the conversation that her driver was the Marquess of Grantley. The diminutive tiger holding the heads of a team of horses next to her jeered, “Can’t your master buy you a livery?”

  “’Is tiger’s sick,” drawled Mira laconically. “Standing in.”

  Then she found her temporary master looking down at her. “Name?” he demanded.

  “Jem,” said Mira.

  “Well, Jem, we are about ready to start.”

  Mira was never to forget that race. Never had she been driven so fast. Houses and nursery gardens and then countryside seemed to pass in a blur. They were ahead of the others almost from the start, and Mira shouted and yelled with exhilaration, all her worries forgotten.

  When they drove into an inn yard after the marquess had easily won the race, Mira felt she was Jem and that sad girl Mira was someone she had once known. She jumped down and ran to the horses’ heads, and then when the marquess had climbed down, she expertly unhitched the team of four and said, “I will see they are rubbed down, my lord, and watered.”

  “Good lad,” he said. “The job is yours if you want it,” and without waiting for a reply, he strode into the inn.

  Mira saw to the horses, glad now that so much of her misspent youth had been passed in the stables.

  Then one of the other tigers approached her. He was a wizened little fellow with a twisted white face. He looked as if he had been born old.

  “Your master cheated,” he said.

  Color rose in Mira’s face. “We won fair and square!”

  “Cheated! Cheated!” jeered the tiger. The other tigers and grooms gathered around.

  “You lying churl,” said Mira haughtily, forgetting her role and her Cockney accent.

  “Put up yer fists,” growled the tiger.

  “A mill! A mill!” shouted the onlookers gleefully, and began to lay bets.

  The marquess, emerging from the inn, saw with some amusement that his new tiger was squaring up in the inn yard for a fight. The tigers were crying to Mira to take off her coat, and she was refusing, clutching it ti
ghtly about her. One boy tried to tear the coat off her back, but she jerked herself away and shrugged it back on—but not before the startled marquess had caught a fleeting glimpse of a very female bosom.

  He marched forward, seized Mira by the scruff of her neck, and frog-marched her off to his carriage, shouting over his shoulder to the onlookers, “I have no time for brawls.” He tossed a guinea to a watching groom. “Fetch my team and hitch them up.”

  The groom stared in awe at the gold and then ran off to get his horses. The marquess kept his hold on Mira. “You stay exactly where you are,” he said softly. When his team was hitched, he ordered curtly, “Jump up,” and the terrified Mira, who felt she really ought to run away, obeyed him.

  He drove off for a little way and then cut off the gravel surface of the Great West Road and down a leafy country lane. He finally commanded his team to stop. Mira jumped down and ran to their heads, hoping against hope that if she continued in her role, her true identity would remain undiscovered.