Frederica in Fashion

by Beaton, M. C.

  Frederica was made ready in a very short time indeed but it was a full hour before Lady Godolphin considered herself ‘finished’ enough to go down. She was wearing a red-and-white-striped merino gown, cut low on the bosom and disgracefully short about the ankle. Over her fat shoulders she wore a fine Paisley shawl. Round her neck she wore a rope of pearls, and on her head a turban of gold gauze embellished with two tall osprey feathers.

  The Duke of Pembury had never really liked Lady Godolphin until that moment when she erupted into his library with Frederica in tow. She blasted the vicar with a long tirade about his loose morals with all the zeal of a Methodist, leaving the poor vicar, who had been about to castigate his daughter, speechless.

  At last, Lord Sylvester interrupted her. ‘I am anxious to return to my wife, Lady Godolphin. I think it would be best if I took Frederica with me.’

  ‘Minerva ain’t up to a Season,’ said Lady Godolphin. ‘I’ll take her myself. She can stay with me until things at that vicarage have been made respectable again.’

  ‘And what do you have to say to that, Freddie?’ asked Lord Sylvester. His voice was kind. Apart from his wife, Lord Sylvester liked Frederica the best of all the Armitage sisters.

  Frederica turned to Lady Godolphin. ‘Can I take Mary with me?’

  ‘Who’s Mary?’

  ‘The chambermaid with whom I worked.’

  ‘I have plenty of chambermaids.’

  ‘I wanted to take her as my lady’s maid.’

  ‘You can’t turn a chambermaid into a lady’s maid. My Martha is the making of me,’ said Lady Godolphin, revolving slowly so that her charms might be viewed to their fullest.

  Frederica gulped. ‘I could train her. I really could.’

  ‘Well, I ain’t paying her wages,’ said Lady Godolphin.

  ‘I will,’ said Lord Sylvester. ‘You may have your maid, Freddie.’

  Frederica hurtled across the room, and, reaching up, hugged as much of her brother-in-law as she could. The Duke of Pembury was amused. He wondered what the members of the London ton who were so in awe of the formidably elegant Lord Sylvester would think if they could see him at that moment.

  When the vicar had arrived with Lord Sylvester demanding his daughter Frederica Armitage, and implying that he, the duke, had abducted her, it had given the duke great pleasure to take the wind out of the vicar’s sails by telling him he believed the runaway daughter to be masquerading as a chambermaid in the household.

  ‘Lady Godolphin,’ said the duke, ‘since Lord Sylvester is anxious to return to his wife and since Mr Armitage has … er … affairs to deal with at home, why do you not stay here with Miss Armitage? My guests will only be with me for two weeks. After that, I will be travelling to London myself and can escort you.’

  ‘Charmed,’ murmured Lady Godolphin, throwing him a languishing look. The effect was rather marred by one of her false eyebrows which had slipped down over her right eye.

  ‘See here,’ spluttered the vicar, ‘I ain’t leaving a girl of tender years here.’

  ‘Better here than there,’ snapped Lady Godolphin. ‘Pembury ain’t a saint, but he don’t throw his leg over the servant girls.’

  ‘Who says I bedded Sarah?’ demanded the vicar.

  ‘I should think everyone between Hopeworth and Hopeminster by now,’ flashed Lady Godolphin.

  The vicar began hotly to protest his innocence. Frederica stood, dazed and bewildered. She would rather have gone to London with Lord Sylvester and stayed with Minerva. But Minerva needed rest. And Freddie, for all her timid nature, was no longer afraid of Lady Godolphin. It was very hard to be afraid of a lady who was championing one so fiercely. Also, she did not know what to make of the duke’s unexpected generosity. She only knew that under all her jumbled thoughts, she felt a warm glow.

  The duke did not know what to make of his generosity himself. As Lady Godolphin and Mr Armitage battled away, he glanced at the small, shrinking figure of Frederica and wondered what had possessed him to offer his home and his escort to a schoolgirl and to that outrageous Malaprop.

  Frederica felt very much a child, standing looking on while the grown-ups battled savagely over affairs that were still beyond her innocent comprehension. But she did not want Sarah as a stepmother.

  ‘I must ask you to restrain yourselves,’ said the duke at last, his cold voice cutting across the squabble.

  The vicar and Lady Godolphin fell silent.

  ‘I would like matters to be settled in some way,’ said Lord Sylvester. ‘I have already been away from my wife for too long. Frederica. What do you think? Do you wish to remain here?’

  Frederica looked at the duke. But he was not looking at her. He was standing with his arm along the marble mantel, gazing into the fire. If she returned with Lord Sylvester, surely she could be of help in taking care of Minerva. On the other hand, Lord Sylvester and Minerva were so very much in love that any third person seemed like an intruder. The duke looked up at Frederica, and smiled, his eyes holding her own for a brief moment.

  ‘Yes,’ said Frederica breathlessly. ‘Yes, I will stay with Lady Godolphin.’

  ‘I think you may safely leave matters to me,’ said the Duke of Pembury. ‘Miss Armitage will come to no harm in my care.’

  Black eyes met green in a steady stare as the duke and Lord Sylvester took each other’s measure. Then Lord Sylvester suddenly smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do think it safe to leave Frederica with you.’

  Lady Caroline James was in a very bad temper indeed. Without precisely asking her to leave, the duke had pointedly remarked that her invitation had been a mistake and that he was sure she would not have accepted had she known.

  Nonetheless, she had great hopes of reanimating the duke’s affections, but Lady Godolphin had made her continued stay impossible with her loud, vulgar remarks.

  Then there was that wispy Frederica-thing. Lady James hated Frederica Armitage and blamed her for her own enforced leave-taking. That girl had masqueraded as a chambermaid under another name, and when she had been unmasked, instead of being packed off in disgrace, she had aroused knight-errant feelings in the Duke of Pembury that no one had hitherto suspected existed.

  Had the duke not decided to try to pretend to be a saint in front of the colourless Miss Armitage then he would surely have looked once again on her own undoubted charms with affection.

  But Lady James was clever enough not to stay in a place where she was being shown to increasing disadvantage. She made a graceful and affectionate leavetaking, and did it so well that the duke had smiled at her for the first time and had said very warmly that he hoped to call on her in town.

  Lady James’s ego had, however, been sadly bruised. Only now was she realizing how much the end of her lucrative affair with the Duke of Pembury had hurt her. While she had been his mistress, society had fawned on her and courted her. Once the affair was over, it became all too clear that she was regarded, despite her title, as a member of the Fashionable Impure. Lady James now craved respectability almost as much as she craved money and jewels. When the invitation to Hatton Abbey had arrived, she had hoped he not only meant to renew the affair but perhaps to propose marriage as well. Before her affair with the duke, Lady James had always been the one to terminate the affair, enjoying the white-faced misery of her rejected lovers. She had not wanted to marry again. Now, she longed for marriage.

  She took out her temper on the servants at the posting house where she had decided to break her journey on the road back to London.

  She raged when she found there was no private parlour available. She stormed that she would not eat in the common dining room. While she berated the poor landlord, the noise of her tirade through the open door of her bedchamber attracted the attention of a tall gentleman who was making his way along the passage.

  He stepped into the room. ‘May I be of service, ma’am?’ he asked. ‘I have a private parlour. You are welcome to it, or, better still, I would esteem it a great honour if you would be my g
uest for dinner.’

  Lady James smiled, a wide cat-like smile. The man was handsome and well-dressed, and she badly needed proof that her charms were still as potent as ever.

  ‘I should be delighted … Mr …?’

  ‘Wentwater,’ said the man. ‘Guy Wentwater, at your service.’

  Perhaps the vicar of St Charles and St Jude, the Reverend Charles Armitage, felt his fall from respectability as keenly as Lady James.

  Frederica had given him a rather scared little ‘goodbye’ and had made it quite obvious she preferred to stay in a houseful of strangers rather than return to Hopeworth with her father.

  When Mrs Armitage had been alive, the vicar’s affairs had been brief and discreet. But Sarah’s lusty youth and blooming looks had made him throw discretion to the winds.

  Since he had travelled to Hatton Abbey in Lord Sylvester’s carriage, John Summer had had to drive over in the vicarage carriage to bring the reverend home.

  The vicar heard the tale of Sarah’s unfaithfulness with a mixture of relief and anger. He was relieved that he now had a perfect excuse for getting rid of Sarah. He was furious that that old thorn in the flesh of the Armitages, Guy Wentwater, had had the nerve to come back.

  Guy Wentwater had been courting Annabelle, but when the Armitages found he was a slave trader, they had forbidden him to call, and the vicar had subsequently hounded him out of the country. He had returned to try his luck with Deirdre, but had failed. Deirdre had made a fool of him. He had then gone to America after shooting his partner in crime, Silas Dubois, through the head. Since Dubois had been about to be accused of attempted murder, it was understood that Wentwater had shot him in self-defence, and so Wentwater had left for America a hero. The vicar now heard with grim satisfaction the end of Wentwater’s hopes of marriage to Emily. Sir Edwin had for a long time turned a deaf ear to his brother’s complaints about Guy Wentwater. He would need to pay heed now.

  As they approached Hopeworth, the vicar was reluctant to go straight to the vicarage where Sarah had been locked in her old room by Mrs Hammer. His conscience, in the shape of Squire Radford, loomed up in his mind’s eye. Better get that confrontation over with. Besides, he would need the squire’s help.

  John Summer took the carriage on to the vicarage and Ram, the squire’s Indian servant, let the vicar into the hall of the squire’s pleasant cottage ornée. The squire was in the library, sitting in a high-backed chair wearing an old-fashioned chintz coat and knee breeches.

  ‘Sit down, Charles,’ he said in a mild voice. ‘We have much to discuss.’

  Looking rather like a sulky child, the vicar sat down.

  ‘I’m more sinned against than sinning,’ began the vicar.

  ‘I was prepared to marry that girl, and she ups and cuckolds me with Wentwater. Why did ye not warn me that Wentwater was back? I thought Edwin might have had the decency to tell me as well.’

  ‘I gather he only arrived a few days ago and has only just left. I have, as you know, been kept indoors with rheumatism and so I am behind hand with the gossip.

  ‘But on the other hand,’ said Squire Radford, pouring his friend a glass of wine, ‘the idea of marriage to you must have turned a girl like Sarah’s head. She was threatening to dismiss all your domestics once you were married. She has made no secret of the fact that you had carnal knowledge of her, Charles.’

  ‘She zaggerates,’ said the vicar. ‘Why ain’t she with child then? Answer me that.’

  ‘Green elm, Charles. An old country remedy.’

  ‘Never heard o’ it. Do they dance round it at midnight, or what?’

  ‘No. They insert a small plug of it and the green elm swells up inside to form an effective stopper.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said the vicar wisely, but truth to tell he had no knowledge of how this simple country method of birth control worked. He had only a vague idea of what caused the birth of a child as far as the inner workings of a woman’s body were concerned. One put it in, had some energetic exercise, and if a baby resulted, then it all went to show one was not sterile or barren.

  But he did grasp that Sarah had taken steps to ensure she did not get pregnant. ‘Must be a tart,’ he growled. ‘Stands to reason.’

  ‘I was merely speculating about the reason for her lack of pregnancy. The point is … what are you going to do about the girl now, Charles?’

  The vicar looked amazed. ‘Do with her? Turn her out o’ doors, of course.’

  ‘On the contrary, you may be forced to marry her.’

  ‘And just who is going to force me?’

  ‘Your conscience, Charles. Had you treated the silly girl like a servant, then she would not have entertained ideas above her station. Nor would she, I am persuaded, have leapt so easily into bed with Wentwater. If you do not marry her yourself, then a marriage must be arranged for her.’

  ‘Get someone to take my leavings,’ said the vicar.

  ‘Really, Charles! Do you not have one spark of feeling for the girl at all?’

  The vicar sighed heavily. The clock ticked and the rain which had started to fall beat against the windows. The truth was he now wished he had never set eyes on Sarah. And yet he could not believe his luck the night she had walked into his bedroom, claiming she had seen a ghost. He had had a delicious time of it comforting her. The fact that one so gloriously young should seem to favour him had quite gone to his head. But men like the squire would never understand that there were girls who were quite as adept and cunning at the game of seduction as any man alive.

  He thought of Sarah as some unfortunate indulgence, like getting too drunk, an excess best forgotten.

  But he said, ‘Of course I’m still fond of the girl. I’d best go speak to her and see what can be arranged.’

  The vicar looked hopefully at the squire as he spoke. But for once the squire had no easy solution to one of the vicar’s problems.

  ‘What of Frederica?’ asked the squire.

  The vicar helped himself to more wine, pleased to have a respite from the topic of Sarah. He enlarged on Frederica’s adventures, ending up complaining it was a sad day when his daughter elected to stay with a rake rather than return home with her own father.

  ‘Pembury,’ said the squire reflectively, making a steeple of his fingers and looking over the top of them at the vicar. ‘Very wild, he was. Settled down now, I hear. Rich and handsome. A devil with the ladies. Likes highflyers. And yet he ups and offers little Frederica house room and, not only that, he says he will escort her to London.’

  A gleam of hope appeared in the vicar’s little eyes. ‘D’ye think …?’

  ‘Not for a moment, Charles. Not for a moment. Flying much too high. No, I fear it pleases our grand duke to be kind to a schoolgirl. But what effect will his attentions have on someone so dreamy and romantical as Frederica? After you have done your best for Sarah, I think you should travel to town to enlist the support of your other daughters to find a young man for Frederica.’

  ‘But only Minerva will be there for the Season.’

  ‘Then write to the others. They will rally round.’

  ‘Easily done,’ said the vicar. Then his face fell. ‘I wish the problem of Sarah would prove to be as easy.’

  The vicar lingered over his wine for as long as possible, hoping the squire would offer to accompany him to the vicarage, but when the squire showed no signs of leaving his comfortable fireside, the vicar at last made a reluctant departure.

  The Reverend Charles Armitage walked with head bowed through the driving rain. He had not felt quite so guilty or miserable since the death of his wife. He turned in at the lych gate and walked into the church yard. With dragging feet, he approached his wife’s grave.

  Slowly, he removed his hat. ‘It wasn’t my fault, Mrs Armitage,’ he said. ‘You know how flighty Sarah is. Why does the man always get the blame? The thing is … what am I to do? I wouldn’t have been in this mess if you’d been alive. Frederica’s gone off me something terrible. You know I was always faithf
ul to you in my way. Never fouled my own doorstep before this. But what am I to do with the girl?’

  The rain thudded down on the grave and trickled like tears down the white marble face of the angel perched on the headstone.

  But Mrs Armitage had never been able to solve any of the vicar’s problems when she was alive, largely because she never really listened to any of them, and, although all at once he missed her sorely, he knew all he was likely to get from standing in the pouring rain addressing her headstone was a bad case of rheumatics.

  With a gusty sigh he turned away and let himself into the gloom of the church. He got down on his knees with great reluctance to pray. If His eye was on the sparrow, then He certainly knew all about the sins of one country vicar.

  The vicar racked his mind for some sort of sacrifice to placate this God whom he always saw as a William Blake creation, all beard and bushy eyebrows, rather like an elderly military man, prone to gout.

  He had given up hunting before, but God hadn’t seemed to be particularly interested in that sacrifice. The obvious answer was to marry Sarah. He groaned aloud at the thought. He had a sudden vision of what Sarah would look like in ten years’ time, fat and blowsy and shrewish.

  ‘Not that,’ he pleaded aloud. ‘Oh, God, if only someone would marry the girl.’

  ‘I will,’ said a voice behind him.

  The vicar gave a superstitious shiver. ‘Who is there?’ he whispered.

  ‘It is I … Mr Pettifor.’

  ‘What are you doin’ sneaking up on a man at his prayers?’ demanded the vicar, springing to his feet, and then letting out another groan as pains shot through his stiff, cold legs.

  ‘You did not notice me, Mr Armitage,’ said Mr Pettifor. ‘It seemed an answer to my prayers when I heard you. I am prepared to marry Sarah Millet, if she will have me.’

  The vicar turned and muttered a hasty ‘thank you’ in the direction of the altar. Then he turned back and beamed at his curate.