‘Nobody asked Susan to bring Harriet up to Town,’ said Mama, oblivious to everything but her quarrel with Uncle Hugo. ‘She knew exactly what my objections were and chose to override them.’
‘That was because they were foolhardy.’
‘No, they were not. Do you think I had any wish to see my own flesh and blood laced into the constraints that made me so unhappy as a girl and paraded about Town like some brood mare for idiot men to appraise? I brought her up to be completely free of all restraints normally imposed on the behaviour of females so she wouldn’t be stunted and Susan planned to undo it all in the space of two short months!’
Goodness. Harriet would never have guessed that Mama’s treatment of her stemmed from anything more than indifference. But now it sounded as though, all along, Mama had been following some radical approach to rearing her, so that she wouldn’t end up…well, as unhappy she’d been as a girl, by the sound of it.
‘She was perfectly happy at Stone Court,’ Mama was continuing, a touch inaccurately. ‘Bringing her to Town has been like shutting a wild bird into a tiny gilded cage.’
‘Then you will have no objection to taking her back there, then, will you, when you leave.’
‘None whatever,’ said Mama cheerfully.
‘Which you will be doing this very night,’ he finished.
‘Tonight? Oh, no. I have no intention of leaving Town just yet. I have not finished—’
‘Whatever it is you have not finished, madam, I give leave to inform you, you will not be doing from under my roof. To be blunt, you are no longer welcome to stay here. And neither is your daughter.’
‘That’s not fair, Hugo! Your quarrel is with me. Banish me if you like, but don’t vent your spleen on Harriet.’
Good grief. Now Mama was actually trying to defend her.
‘I thought you said she was like a wild bird in a gilded cage. Should I not, then, free her?’
‘Oh, don’t throw that in my face. You know as well as I do that she doesn’t see it like that. She wanted to come to Town, or nothing Susan said would ever have convinced me to give in.’
‘Nevertheless,’ he said, his face turning an interesting shade of puce, ‘you will both leave. As soon as I can have the carriage brought round.’
‘Don’t bother,’ Mama hissed, whilst moving between Uncle Hugo and Harriet as though to put up a shield between her daughter and this man’s anger. ‘We are perfectly capable of hiring a hack—’
‘If you think I am about to permit you to remove from my house in a hired hack and cause every Tom, Dick and Harry to speculate about what might have prompted such unprecedented behaviour,’ he bellowed, ‘you are very much mistaken.’
‘Still more concerned about appearances,’ Mama sneered, ‘than the welfare of your family.’ Having rendered him speechless with rage, Mama stuck her nose in the air and stalked up the stairs.
There was nothing Harriet could do but trot obediently up the stairs behind her mother. Though, when they reached the landing, she did not make for her own room, but followed Mama to hers.
‘Mama…’
‘Not one word, Harriet. If you think I will stay one moment longer in the house of a man who can lock girls in their rooms simply for asking a few innocent questions, then—’
‘Yes, Mama, I quite see that you have no choice, but to leave here…’ Indeed, Uncle Hugo had given them none. ‘It is just that I was wondering where we are to go. Isn’t it a bit late in the day to be thinking of returning to Stone Court? Even if Uncle Hugo is lending us his carriage for the journey?’
‘Did you not hear? I have no intention of leaving Town until I am good and ready. We shall only be going as far as St James’s Square.’ Which was where their London residence was situated.
‘But we haven’t written to have Stone House opened up. Everything will be under holland covers.’
Mama waved a hand, airily. ‘Then the staff will just have to remove them.’
‘What staff?’
Mama’s brow wrinkled. ‘There are some people there whose job it is to keep an eye on the place and forward any mail, aren’t there?’
‘Yes, but I think you will find there are only two of them. And they are quite elderly.’
‘Really, Harriet, I don’t see why you are throwing so many obstacles in the way. Unless it is that you wish to stay here. Is that it? Well,’ she continued before Harriet had a chance to answer, ‘I am afraid that is out of the question. You heard your uncle.’
Yes. And she was fairly sure everyone in the house had heard him as well. ‘I do not wish to stay here, no,’ she said, suddenly realising that it was the truth. She was sorry to be causing her aunt even more distress by the manner of her leaving, but there would be certain compensations. Mama would soon be so wrapped up in whatever she was doing that she would not care what Harriet did as long as the household ran smoothly. In fact, to judge from that impassioned speech earlier, Mama would positively encourage Harriet to do exactly as she pleased. At any rate, Mama would most certainly not expect her to attend any more balls where she would be ignored by decent men, hounded by fortune-hunters and made a game of by scoundrels like Lord Becconsall.
She would, in short, have far more freedom than she ever would have in a more conventionally run household. And she could use that freedom to investigate what had happened to Aunt Susan’s rubies. Which would be a far better way of showing her gratitude than simpering at so-called eligible men and learning to do embroidery.
‘I am just thinking of the practical details, that is all,’ said Harriet. ‘Like getting meals on the table and freshly laundered sheets on the beds. That sort of thing.’
‘You were born to be a housewife,’ said Mama, scornfully. ‘Whereas I, if I found the place not to be habitable, would merely remove to a hotel until—’
‘Until I have managed to engage enough staff to make our lives comfortable at Stone House’ said Harriet with an acid smile. She might have misjudged Mama’s motives for treating her the way she had done so far, but she hadn’t suddenly turned into someone else.
‘Precisely,’ said Mama, the insult gliding right off her impenetrable self-consequence. Leaving Harriet understanding exactly why Uncle Hugo found Mama so infuriating.
She whirled away before she said something she might later regret and went to her own room to pack.
She hadn’t been in there for long before someone scratched at the door and came in. She looked over her shoulder to see Maud.
‘I’m come to help you pack, miss,’ she said, looking apologetic. ‘Leastways, that’s what Mrs Trimble said I was to say.’
‘Are you not, then, going to help me to pack?’ Harriet looked in frustration at the armoire stuffed with ball gowns, walking dresses, carriage dresses, pelisses and spencers, and shook her head. ‘It will take me a week to do a competent job of it, Aunt Susan has bought me so many things.’ And it wasn’t just the armoire. There were two dressers and a chest full of stockings and shawls and gloves and dancing pumps dyed the exact shade of the trimmings on her ball gowns, not to mention various other accessories she hadn’t possessed when she first came to London. ‘I am never going to fit everything in my trunk, anyway.’ Not that she wanted to, actually. Not considering how many of her earliest purchases had been such disasters.
‘Mrs Trimble is having Fred fetch down a couple of bags from the attics you can use to put your essential items in, then we’ll pack the rest of it and bring it on later.’
‘Oh, yes. Very practical.’
‘No, don’t go looking at me like that, my lady, we are all that sorry you are having to leave like this. It ain’t—I mean,’ she said, flushing, ‘it isn’t right, turning you out along with your mother, when you didn’t have any choice in things.’
‘I had already angered his lordship,’ said Harriet, pulling
open a drawer and wondering what she ought to consider essentials and put in the bags being brought to her for that purpose. ‘He was just looking for an excuse to evict me.’
‘Yes, and that’s the other thing,’ said Maud, coming to her side and pulling out a selection of undergarments that Harriet could see were exactly what she should have thought of herself. ‘Once you leave this house, he won’t be able to stop you asking about the theft of her ladyship’s jewels, will he?’
‘No.’ Harriet lifted her chin. ‘And if you’ve come to plead with me to stop, then I have to tell you—’
‘No, it’s just the opposite,’ said Maud, rolling up a pair of stockings and reaching for another. ‘We’ve been talking, below stairs, and have reached the same conclusion. We know it weren’t any of us, but someone must have switched her ladyship’s jewels, ’cos we can’t none of us believe it was her. And, like you, we’d like to see her name cleared.’
‘What?’
‘You heard,’ said Maud, with unusual pertness. ‘Now, listen, miss, ’cos we mayn’t have much time. I’m to tell you our suspicions and what we’ve worked out so far, and then it’s up to you. We can trust you not to lay any blame on any of us, can’t we?’
‘Yes!’ Harriet’s heart was beating so fast she felt a little shaky. She hadn’t dreamed her renewed determination to clear Aunt Susan’s name would have borne fruit so swiftly.
‘Well, a few years back, in 1812, to be precise, ’cos Mrs Trimble looked it up in her journal, there was this girl come to work as lady’s maid. Ever such a quiet little thing, she was. Would barely talk to any of us. Well, at the time, we all thought she was just shy. But now…’ Maud shook her head, lips pursed. ‘Even the way she left was suspicious, now we come to look back on it.’
‘Suspicious? In what way?’
‘Well, she said she was leaving on account of she got a better offer. But she wouldn’t tell us where she was going. Nor she didn’t ask for references neither. At the time, as I was saying, we just thought it was all of a piece with the way she was. But the thing is,’ said Maud, going to the armoire and taking a rapid inventory of its contents before lifting down one of the day dresses with the fewest ruffles and bows, and laying it on the bed. ‘Thing is, there’s been no sign of her anywhere, ever since. Like she vanished off the face of the earth,’ Maud finished as though she was reading aloud from some sensational story.
‘We did think she must have gone back to Bogholt, the village where she said she come from, ’cos she certainly hasn’t got work with anyone in London.’
‘Do you mean that—have you in fact been looking for her?’ Harriet lifted down her riding habit and tossed it on to the bed with the selection Maud was choosing for her.
‘No, but see, footmen get together for a heavy wet down now and then. And butlers have their own watering holes. And they talk about…’ She blushed and shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, what I mean is, if they get a new girl come to work for them, they talk about her. Whether she will…um…’ Maud blushed.
‘Let them kiss her?’
Maud nodded, clearly relieved not to have to explain the way footmen gossiped about the female staff they worked alongside. ‘And if they are pretty, and so on. Now Jenny—that’s the girl who come up from Norfolk—the footmen from here had all been talking about what a cold, starchy kind of girl she was. She gave Peter a real sharp set-down once or twice, apparently. And he reckons, if she’d gone to work anywhere else and someone else tried to flirt with her—not serious, mind, just in the way of having a bit of a laugh, for Mrs Trimble won’t permit anything of that sort below stairs,’ Maud put in hastily, as though Harriet might suspect the staff of doing nothing but flirting all day long, ‘well, they’d have got the same reception. And they would have laughed about it over a heavy wet of an evening.’
Now that Harriet could believe. Young men, of whatever station, seemed to delight in making sport of young females and sharing their exploits with their peers appeared to be all part of it.
‘So, you think she might have gone home? To Norfolk, was it you said?’
‘Well, if she did that, why did she say she had got a better place? No,’ Maud shook her head vigorously. ‘We think she’s gone to ground somewhere. With the proceeds from Lady Tarbrook’s rubies. And you, miss, are the likeliest one to be able to find out where that somewhere is.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Jack did a complete circuit of the ballroom on the pretext of exchanging a few pleasantries with all his old army cronies, as well as every single member of his club that he could spy. But eventually he could see he had no choice but to surrender to the necessity of approaching Lady Tarbrook. Who looked about as eager to speak to him as he had been to have to ask her the one question uppermost on his mind.
‘Good evening,’ he said, bowing over her hand. And coming straight to the point. ‘Lady Harriet not here tonight? I was so hoping to be able to dance with her again.’ Or, to be more precise, to making her dance with him again. It wasn’t going to be enough, he’d decided about the time he was putting the finishing touches to his neckcloth earlier that evening, to simply flirt with other women. Or dance with other women. Since that was what she’d indicated she wanted. No, what would be a far more fitting revenge would be to challenge her and force her to choose. The rules governing the behaviour of young ladies were incredibly strict. If she refused to dance with a perfectly eligible man, then she could not dance with anyone else for the rest of the ball. Which would put her in bad odour with her aunt.
He’d been hoping to pitch her into a maelstrom somewhere between the devil and the deep blue sea. And now he felt cheated. How was he going to plague the life out of her if he couldn’t even find her?
‘Now that her own mother is in Town,’ Lady Tarbrook said, with what looked like a forced smile, ‘naturally she will be taking her about.’
‘Yes, I noticed that she wasn’t sitting with you. But surely you must have some idea whether she will be attending tonight? Did she not say?’
‘I should perhaps explain,’ she’d said, her smile growing even more strained, ‘that my sister and niece have removed to Stone House. So I am no longer aware of what their plans may be.’
That all sounded plausible. And yet there was a touch of desperation lurking in Lady Tarbrook’s eyes which convinced him she was not telling him the complete truth. And he recalled the way Harriet’s uncle had called her out of the drawing room, with a face like an offended prune, for the purpose of giving her a trimming, if all the shouting he’d subsequently heard was any indication.
Whatever had the little minx been up to? Well, if she could sneak out of the house alone, at dawn, to indulge in an orgy of forbidden galloping, what other crimes might she not have contrived to commit?
He bowed over Lady Tarbrook’s hand, murmuring all that was necessary to convince her that he accepted her version of events at face value. But inside he was whistling a jaunty air as he quit the ballroom, which no longer contained anything to hold his interest. He couldn’t wait to find out what she’d done to provoke her uncle to wash his sanctimonious hands of her. Because that, he suspected, was what the old rascal had done.
* * *
So, next morning, early, he headed north towards Grosvenor Square where Archie was currently putting up with Zeus—probably in more ways than one.
‘And to what,’ said Zeus, laconically, ‘do we owe the pleasure of your company?’
‘I’ve come to collect Archie,’ he said, with complete honesty. ‘He said he wanted to call upon Lady Balderstone. The famous lady scientist.’
Zeus had, predictably, pulled a face and claimed a prior commitment. So it was only he and Archie who set off, on foot, for St James’s Square a few minutes later.
‘Now, you just give the butler your name and tell him you met her ladyship at that lecture we went to, and tha
t she asked you to call whenever you liked.’
‘B-but she didn’t…’
‘She meant to. I could tell from the way she was talking to you that she’d be glad to welcome you into her house whenever you chose to pay a visit.’
With any luck, she’d be so excited to hear Archie’s name that she wouldn’t bother enquiring who his friend was. So that Jack would be able to get into the house without Harriet hearing about it. It would be like a kind of ambush.
His heart beat in anticipation throughout the short walk to Stone House. For once they’d gained admittance to the drawing room, the two scientists would naturally draw apart from any other callers, as they launched into the kind of conversation that nobody outside the scientific community would understand. They would become so engrossed in their talk that they wouldn’t notice anything going on around them, short of a grenade exploding, he shouldn’t wonder. Archie would, in short, provide perfect cover for his sortie upon Lady Harriet.
His plans met with a check when they mounted the front steps only to find there was no knocker on the door.
‘Are you sure Lady T-Tarbrook told you they’d c-come here?’ Archie stepped back from under the roomy portico to peer up at the white-stuccoed façade. ‘Don’t look to m-me as though anyone is in residence.’
Jack’s heart sank as he followed Archie’s gaze and saw that all the blinds were half-drawn.
‘Are you sure she didn’t m-mean they’d gone b-back to the c-country?’
‘No!’ He rejected the notion with every fibre of his being. She couldn’t have gone back to the country. Not before he’d had a chance to…to…
His stomach turning over, Jack stepped smartly up the front steps and pounded on the door with his clenched fist.
The sound echoed through what sounded like an empty hallway beyond. And, no matter how hard he pounded, there were no answering footsteps. No sign that anyone was coming to let him in.
Convenient Bride for the Soldier & the Major Meets His Match & Secret Lessons With the Rake (9781488021718) Page 37
