Lovesong

by Valerie Sherwood

  Carolina, moping about restively at the school, missing him, never guessed the truth. She thought he was spending restless nights dreaming about her, just as she was dreaming about him.

  She was living in a fool’s paradise. But she did not yet know it.

  Chapter 8

  Mistress Chesterton returned from Kent with her mouth in a thin straight line. She surveyed the school bitterly as she alighted from her hackney coach. Those plain straight walls were her future. Lord Ormsby was dancing attendance on someone else.

  The first person to greet her eyes as she came into the front hall was Carolina Lightfoot and sight of the girl brought her grievances against Lord Thomas Angevine to a head.

  “Carolina,” she said as she tore off a fur tippet that seemed to be choking her, “I ran across Lord Thomas while I was in Kent.”

  Carolina, who had just placed her foot on the bottom stair tread preparatory to ascending, turned and swept her headmistress a very correct curtsy. “Yes, Lord Thomas told me he was to be a member of the wedding party,” she murmured.

  “I think you should arrange to see less of him.” The headmistress’s next words were delivered petulantly. “Family friend or no!”

  “But—why?” gasped Carolina. Oh, she has found us out! she was thinking in panic.

  “Because he—” Jenny Chesterton had been about to say “he womanizes” but looking into that startled face she was sure in her heart that if she said anything like that, Carolina would go storming to Lord Thomas and then what would Lord Thomas do? He would make good his threat! “He—gambles,” she muttered, wishing she dared tell Carolina the truth. “I thought you should know it.”

  To her irritation, Carolina’s face lit up. So this was the real basis for all the gossip about him! He gambled! It explained so much: the shabby condition of his town house, the fact that his mother and sisters never came to London, his reluctance to present her in Northampton when his mother was probably hoping he would bring home an heiress of the first water to set his affairs in order!

  “I—I know he gambles,” she told the headmistress diffidently. “But it is truly his one bad fault,” she added earnestly. “I only came back to look for my Latin book. Class is about to start.”

  With a sense of outrage the headmistress watched her go. You came downstairs because you heard coach wheels stop and you thought it might be Lord Thomas come calling for you, she told Carolina’s departing figure silently. But she dared not warn her; she was too frightened about her own uncertain future.

  Skipping up the stairs, Carolina was jubilant. Mistress Chesterton was back from Kent, which meant Lord Thomas would be coming back too—indeed at any minute his coach might be pulling up at the front door and Lord Thomas’s athletic form would leap to the cobbles and stride up to bang the big iron door knocker. And now she knew his darkest secret—and it was something she could help him with, she was sure. There was so much else to do in life besides gamble— not that there wasn’t plenty of it in Virginia. She had been one of a group of interested watchers one night at the Raleigh when an entire plantation had changed hands over the dice.

  And even if he did not choose to abandon gaming, even if he ruined himself, she would love him still. She was thinking dreamily of a descent into a kind of roving romantic poverty as she walked down the hall and opened the door to the room she shared with Reba.

  Reba, looking bored with life, was seated on the edge of the feather bed. It had sunk with her weight and ballooned up around her striking crimson dress for Reba was partial to red. Now she looked up from buffing her nails with a piece of chamois.

  “Well, was it Lord Thomas?” she demanded.

  “No, only Mistress Chesterton. She was pulling off her furs as if they strangled her and she told me Lord Thomas gambles.”

  “All men gamble,” said Reba calmly. She held up her left hand and studied her nails. “Except my father. He schemes. And Mother won’t allow cards in the house even though they’re the fashion.”

  Carolina looked surprised. From an easygoing aristocratic background herself, she was always surprised when the remnants of Puritanism turned up in Reba’s. She had visions of Reba’s mother as a dour upright woman who wore subdued colors and starched aprons abrim with lace. A woman of vast housewifely virtues and sadly lacking in charm.

  “Well, at any rate we can expect Lord Thomas soon,” said Reba cheerfully, tossing away the chamois as they prepared to go to Latin class.

  But the day passed, and the next—it snowed, it rained, and the mixture turned to ice—and still Lord Thomas had not arrived. Carolina felt crushed. He must have gone away to Northampton for the holidays —and surely he had passed through London on the way, and yet he had not tried to see her, had left no message. He had gone away without telling her good-bye!

  Mistress Chesterton looked upon Carolina with fleeting sympathy and secret satisfaction. Perhaps the affair was over? Lord Thomas had certainly shown a marked interest in the Amberley girl in Kent.

  “Perhaps he stayed over in Kent,” she suggested at dinner when Carolina asked her diffidently if by chance Lord Thomas’s coach had passed her on the way back to London.

  “Yes, perhaps he did,” murmured Carolina. But she did not believe it. Nor did Reba, who greeted the suggestion with a thoughtful frown as she spooned up her inevitable small custard dessert. For Mistress Chesterton kept a lean table, her excuse being that the girls must not be allowed to grow fat and unmarriageable while they were in her charge.

  “You might go looking for him,” Reba suggested after dinner when she and Carolina were again alone in the big front bedroom they shared.

  Carolina, who was standing by the window watching the snow come down through the soft blue dusk, shook her head. She felt hurt that Lord Thomas had not come dashing back from Kent to claim her but—she told herself there could be good reasons, of course.

  “I—can’t do that,” she said in a voice muffled by pride.

  Reba’s father was not the only member of his family who schemed. Reba’s auburn head was cocked on one side as she thought. “Well, you could prowl the town without his knowing it, couldn’t you?”

  Carolina turned to give her a gloomy look. “No. Lord Thomas would recognize me even if I wore a mask. And anyway he’s seen most of my wardrobe— and yours too!”

  “I have something else in mind,” said Reba. “Do you remember the box I received for my Cousin George and did not bother to open? It is from his tailor and was delivered to me because George gave up his rooms when he went home to Hampshire and means to take new rooms when he returns next term to the Inns of Court.”

  Carolina knew that George was studying law at Gray’s Inn, one of the romantic stone buildings she had smiled up at when Lord Thomas took her walking in the gardens of the old Inns of Court. Like the law, they had been there since time immemorial, she had thought, although she had never been inside any of them or met Reba’s Cousin George, who had always been too much the young man about town to bother calling upon schoolgirls.

  “You aren’t suggesting that I dress up in your Cousin George’s clothes and roam the streets looking for Thomas, are you?” she gasped.

  Reba laughed. “Something like that. Although I had thought you might do it in, say, a chair? Or a hackney coach? At any rate, you could alight when you chose and have a look about without fear of Lord Thomas or any of his friends recognizing you.” Reba had never believed Carolina’s story about Lord Thomas “protecting” her from her friends to save her reputation; she was sure in her heart that all his closest cronies knew Carolina well by sight even if they did turn their heads away when she was near,

  “Oh, no—I couldn’t.” Carolina brushed the idea aside. “Besides,” she added with more conviction, “I am sure he has gone to Northampton.”

  “Are you?” asked Reba, amused.

  “Yes.” But she did not turn to face Reba lest Reba see the doubt mirrored upon her countenance. Instead she stared out at the falling snow.


  She was holding fast to something Lord Thomas had said. She had been sitting on the corner of his bed in the town house trying to pull on her stockings—no easy task for Lord Thomas kept tickling her and pulling her back into the bed.

  “I hardly dare stop by London on my way to Northampton for the holidays,” he had said, half seriously, as he played with her hair. “For if I see you again, I’ll never get me home in time for Christmas!”

  “You can ride harder,” Carolina had flung mercilessly over her shoulder.

  He had laughed in delight at her retort and hugged her to him, pulling her over on her back and easing the chemise she had just struggled into down off her shoulders again and over her breasts and leaning down to kiss both trembling pink nipples. “ ’Tis a hard ride this time of year in any event,” he told her in a rueful tone, “with the roads either slippery with ice or clogged with mud. No, I’m afraid to stop by to see you, wench—you’ll take my mind off home and family!”

  She had thought he was teasing at the time, but now she told herself bleakly that he had been serious. He had chosen not to see her on his way north and what construction could she put on that? That he no longer cared for her? No, she could not believe that—his eyes, his lips, his whole body had all told her otherwise such a short time ago.

  But then, why—?

  Gaming! He was a gamester! He had lost at cards. Heavily. And needed time to recoup, to raise new money. Nothing to do with her. So she lulled her sense of anxiety as she watched the snow fall upon London.

  The next day brought a piece of news that turned her face pale with shock, a humiliating piece of news for it was delivered to her in public before all the girls. Little Clemency Dane, whose brother had stopped by the school in London on his way down from Cambridge to Surrey for the holidays, had taken his little sister to the theatre in Drury Lane. Clemency was the youngest of the girls, quite immature, and given to blurting out things before she thought.

  “Guess who we saw at the theatre?” she cried, as she came running through the door in the lavish furs her wealthy family provided and ran into the girls coming down the stairs to supper. “And squiring the dashing Mistress Bellamy no less?”

  All the girls paused to hear who was squiring Mistress Bellamy for Mistress Bellamy was a beautiful actress, notorious for her affairs. Indeed she was credited with wrecking three noble homes, and by her excessive gambling ruining half a dozen wealthy men. Her doings were the gossip of London.

  Clemency, delighted to be the center of attention of the older girls, turned to Carolina, who was just reaching the bottom of the stairs. “It was your Lord Thomas Angevine!” she reported excitedly.

  Carolina almost missed the bottom step. “Oh, it couldn’t have been,” she protested, aware that all eyes were focused on her. “You must have been mistaken, Clemmie.”

  “No, I wasn’t!” Stubbornly Clemency held her ground. “I wanted to run and speak to him and ask him why he hasn’t been to see you lately but my brother said it wasn’t seemly and dragged me away.”

  “And well he should,” muttered Reba, glowering at Clemency. “Anyway,” she added loudly, “how could you be sure who anyone was in all that crush? Did you actually see his face?”

  “Well, no,” admitted Clemency, crestfallen. “But I certainly couldn’t mistake his clothes! That odd orange-colored suit and all that elegant gold braid and especially the fleur de lis on his cuffs—I saw those very clearly before John dragged me away.”

  The fleur de lis on his wide cuffs! That staggered Carolina. She had never seen cuffs quite like those and when she had commented on them, Lord Thomas had said they were of his own design. He always had a fleur de lis embroidered on his cuffs, he told her. A little habit he had picked up on the Continent—a kind of signature. And that odd shade of orange of his favorite suit. . . .

  Clemency Dane had seen Lord Thomas all right. And squiring the notorious Mistress Bellamy! Carolina felt sick for a moment, as if she might faint.

  “Come along,” urged Reba beside her. “She’s making it all up!”

  Clemency heard that and stamped her small booted foot. “I am not making it up!” she shrilled.

  All the girls were agog at dinner. Clemency sat sullen and pouting, wolfing down her food. But the rest of them whispered, sometimes casting a covert look at Carolina.

  Mistress Chesterton noticed the little knot of heads leaning toward each other, the buzz of voices unintelligible from the head of the table. She rapped her knife upon her trencher and spoke sharply.

  “Do not whisper, girls. Most impolite. What were you saying, Geraldine?”

  Geraldine Darvey, who had just wondered aloud if either of Mistress Bellamy’s two reputed children could be credited to Lord Thomas, jumped. “I was saying how I would miss London and all my friends here when my schooldays are over,” she said hastily.

  “A commendable sentiment.” Jenny Chesterton bobbed her chestnut curls and tried to conceal her boredom. She was trying to learn to speak in clichés and to maintain a wise expression, but it went against the grain in one who had played Blind Man’s Buff in her chemise in a room full of hearty half-drunk young bucks. Lord Ormsby had enjoyed rowdy games. . . . So, come to think of it, had she. She gave an inward sigh. That life was behind her, she supposed. And ahead lay years of what she considered martyrdom as a headmistress. In that her carefully cultivated autocratic manner would stand her in good stead; even though she was young it had seemed to keep the students somewhat in awe of her. All but a few. There was Carolina Lightfoot for instance, who looked directly at you and seemed to judge you for what you were inside and not for your stance of authority-—doubtless the Colonies bred that kind of insolence. She wondered briefly if Lord Thomas really had dropped the girl, and how she would take it if he had. Hysterics probably—but that could be dealt with by a good slap and smelling salts.

  Her gaze passed scathingly over Carolina and softened as it fell upon Alice Lapham. A lovely girl, Alice. So docile, so sweet. She was completely unaware that under the table sweet Alice had just kicked Polly Moffatt, to make her lower her voice as Polly stage-whispered, “But does Mistress Bellamy know about Carolina?”

  Reba heard and frowned. Seated beside Carolina, she stabbed at her pigeon pie and kept up a vivacious nonstop conversation about fashion dolls, and how her London dressmaker had received a new shipment of them from Paris. But Carolina showed little interest in fashion dolls. She sat silent beside Reba, answering only in monosyllables, staring down at her plate. She felt her life had ended.

  Thomas was false to her. He had come back from Kent—but only to squire a famous actress about the town. A woman more experienced, more scintillating, and doubtless—from a man’s point of view—more desirable. He had forgotten her. . . . The pain of it pierced clear to her heart. She felt like weeping, like gnashing her teeth and rending her clothes, the way women did in plays. And now it came back to her stabbingly—something Thomas had said when that woman had called him a murderer. He had said, “Her younger sister drowned last winter in the Thames. I was not even in the city at the time.” And then he had said, “When she followed me to my house in the night and I promptly sent her home in my coach, she became so upset that she leaped out of the coach and threw herself oft the bridge before my coachman could stop her.” He had been lying to her even then! And she—fool that she was—had been too blind to do more than bob her head at everything he said. She had believed him! Her face grew hot as she thought about it.

  It didn’t help that as they all trooped upstairs after supper, little Clemency Dane, still smarting from Carolina’s disbelief and Reba’s disdain, flounced up to deliver a parting shot.

  “If you’d let me finish before,” she said with a toss of her childish curls, “I could have told you that I asked my brother if that wasn’t Lord Thomas Angevine. And he said he didn’t know but that he’d seen the same fellow last night at the Star and Garter with her, and since Mistress Bellamy is so beautiful he inquired who she
was and was told that it was a famous actress from Drury Lane which this gentleman in orange had brought to the Star and Garter these past several nights, and he’d understood he brought her here because she loved to gamble and there was usually a dice game going on in the common room. And my brother heard several gentlemen chuckling about it, and they said that she was reduced to gambling at inns ever since she had overturned a table full of money in a fit of rage at one of the gaming houses when she lost. Afterward she was barred from all the gaming houses who used to let her in and that was why the gentleman in orange brought her to the Star and Garter!”

  Head high and with enormous dignity, Clemency picked up her expensive bronze skirts and swished past Carolina and Reba up the stairs.

  “I've a mind to box her ears!” said Reba, glaring after her.

  But Carolina had no mind to box anyone’s ears. Her desolate gaze followed Clemency, who probably didn’t know what havoc she had created. It was true then, for she had no reason to doubt indignant little Clemmie. With an aching sense of loss, she plodded on up the stairs. It was a relief to reach her room and throw herself down upon the bed.

  “Don’t grieve for him, Carolina,” Reba advised pityingly. “He isn’t worth it.”

  Carolina turned sideways on the bed and looked at her. Her cheeks were tear-stained. “The awful thing is that I really don’t know,” she said huskily. “I know Clemmie thought she saw him, but did she? Did she really?”

  “There’s one way to find out,” said Reba steadily, eyeing her.

  “Yes.” Carolina sat up with decision. If Lord Thomas was still in London and squiring an actress about, she wanted to know it! “There’s one way to find out. Where is that suit of your Cousin George’s?”

  The tailor’s box, when Reba opened it, surprised them both. Carolina’s gray eyes widened as Reba drew out an ice green satin suit heavily decorated with silver braid.

  “But it’s gorgeous!” she gasped. “I wonder your Cousin didn’t stay in London to collect it!”