The Five-Minute Marriage

by Joan Aiken

  “You say this information is surprising,” she remarked levelly to Mr. Penistone. “But I fail to understand why that should be. Were you not aware of my existence?”

  “My dear ma’am—”

  “I am supplied with plenty of documents to prove who I am,” she continued, opening her reticule. “Here is my mother’s wedding certificate—my own certificate of baptism—a letter from the Navy Office regarding the death of my father, Captain Carteret—some letters from my grandfather to my mother—and—and my own Certificate of Proficiency in Singing and the Musical Arts. If you find that these suffice to establish my identity, I hope that you may presently be good enough to conduct me to my uncle—for I have a letter of recommendation addressed to him personally.”

  She took another gulp of her Madeira. Both men, having exchanged rapid glances, were regarding her in fascinated silence, Mr. Penistone with eyes very much narrowed. Mr. Fitzjohn seemed almost to have ceased breathing, as if too many urgent matters were crowding for precedence in his mind.

  Since neither of them spoke, Delphie remarked after a moment, “Well? You seem to have nothing to say?”

  “Your credentials seem commendably complete. Miss—Carteret,” said Mr. Penistone, with a slight pause after the Miss. He glanced without much interest at the papers she proffered. “However I do, in fact, have two things to say. Firstly—your own birth certificate seems to be missing from these documents; Miss Elaine Penistone was doubtless married to Captain Carteret, but how are we to be sure—forgive me if I speak bluntly—that you are the product of the union? Do you not regard a birth certificate as a necessary proof of identity?”

  “Hardly, in view of all the rest, I should have thought.” Philadelphia replied, raising her own brows. “However, if you think it necessary, I am sure a copy can readily be obtained from the Record Office. I had not been aware that it was missing until I set out to come here. My mother, of—of late years—has become somewhat absentminded and scatterbrained—she tends to lose articles.”

  “Has?” Mr. Penistone’s brows shot even higher, if possible. “You are telling us, ma’am, that your mother is still alive?”

  “She was when I left London—no thanks to any help or kindness she has received from this family!” Philadelphia retorted bitterly. “It is on her account that I came hither. Permit me to say that if it were only for myself, I would have bitten my tongue off at the roots, sooner than make application—”

  Mr. Penistone’s lips silently formed a word that would have been interpreted as Humbug! But he only said,

  “And, pray, why did your mother not come with you? I assume that the lady who fell into the moat is not your mother?”

  “Certainly not—I should think you could see that!” Delphie said angrily. “She is Miss Baggott—a—a friend who has been so good as to bear me company on the journey. My mother was unable to come because she has been extremely ill, Mr. Penistone, at death’s door, in fact. Moreover, she holds this family in detestation. I have come without her knowledge.”

  “I am sorry to hear it,” he replied coldly, and fell silent, sipping his wine, studying her over the rim of his glass. She could not help being aware that Mr. Fitzjohn was doing likewise, and a flush crept into her pale cheeks.

  “Am I right in assuming that my great-uncle—that Lord Bollington is here in the house?” she asked. “May I inquire whether it will be possible for me to see him presently?”

  “No. It will not be possible, Miss—Carteret,” Penistone replied with harsh finality.

  Delphie’s flush turned to a burning spot on either cheekbone at this flat rebuff. However, controlling herself, she inquired in a level tone,

  “Oh? May I ask why not?”

  Mr. Penistone’s lips parted as if he were about to make some derogatory remark about impudent imposters. But Fitzjohn restrained him with a murmured word, and a hand on his arm; he said shortly,

  “You cannot see my uncle because at this moment he is dying.”

  “Oh!”

  After one soft, gasping sigh, Delphie was silent, turning over this utterly unforeseen situation in her mind. She found it hard to withstand a deep sense of chagrin and exasperation at her own dilatoriness. Had she but thought of taking this journey six months ago—even one month ago—or at any time during the last five years! But, she reminded herself, there would still have been no guarantee of a favorable outcome—though it could hardly have been less favorable than her chances appeared at present.

  The elderly manservant, Fidd, appeared in the doorway and stood, urgently signaling to Mr. Fitzjohn with his eyes.

  “Begging your pardon, Mr. Fitz,” he murmured, “Dr. Bowles has left master now, and Mr. Wylye is with him, and he wishes you to step up to his chamber. Also master’s been asking for the last hour if Miss Elaine is come yet. What shall I say?”

  “Thank you, Fidd—I will come up myself, directly. Where is Dr. Bowles?”

  “He’s a-gone to the young lady what fell in the water, sir.”

  “Ah—yes. Ask if he will be so good as to come to the library before he takes his departure, will you? And serve him with some refreshment.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Both men went out; Mr. Penistone and Miss Carteret were once more left alone together.

  “Tell me, sir,” she began, since he showed no disposition to speak, “why are you so rigidly disposed to put no credence in my story?”

  “Why?” He raised his gray eyes to hers, laughed shortly, and took another sip of his wine. “For a very simple reason, my dear ma’am. Because the real Miss Carteret has been supported and provided for by my great-uncle for the past twenty years—sixteen of them at the Queen’s Square Academy for Young Ladies in Bath. She was presented at Court two years ago under the sponsorship of Lady Bablock-Hythe, who was a friend of her mother’s. Her identity is established beyond question. And—I myself am engaged to be married to her.”

  “Oh!” said Philadelphia, rather blankly.

  3

  After about ten minutes, Mr. Fitzjohn returned to the library. He walked in with a somewhat hasty, uncertain step and, ignoring the constraint in which the other two were sitting, ignoring Delphie altogether, said to Penistone,

  “My uncle wishes to see you. And—and a letter has just arrived from Bath—from Cousin Elaine.”

  “A letter—?”

  “—I have it here.”

  Without another word, Mr. Penistone took the white oblong, broke the seal, and read the few lines written inside. Then he gave a brief, grim laugh, and tossed the paper over to Fitzjohn.

  “Can’t see her way to leave Bath until after the Assembly—”

  “Oh, my God!” With unsteady hands, Fitzjohn spread out the missive, and read it. The two men stared at one another.

  “What now?”

  “You had best come to him—he has been asking for you repeatedly.”

  They hurried out, taking no notice of Delphie, who remained absently gazing at the deplorably aged dogs huddled shivering about the fire. Was somebody fond of them? she wondered.

  During her previous silent interval alone with Mr. Penistone, she had been reviewing her situation with greater and greater amazement and indignation. On her first entrance into Chase, she had felt awkward, guilty, intrusive, embarrassed, wholly de trop; but now that she was mistress of some of the facts of the case, both her sense of outrage, and her spirit, grew rapidly.

  Some imposter had usurped her place! An imposter it must be, since she knew herself to be her mother’s true daughter, and had not the faintest doubt of her mother’s innocence and probity. But this imposter, this snake, reared and supported by Lord Bollington for so long, was without doubt the reason why her previous application had been so rudely rejected.

  But—given such a state of affairs—how would it be possible to prove her own and her mother’s claims? It must, Delphie supposed, mean having recourse to a lawyer—for there was plainly no help or sympathy to be obtained from any person at Chase
—and lawyers cost money ... unless one could be found who considered their chances of success sufficiently good to be worth his risk.

  Moving restlessly under the anxieties aroused by these ideas, she glanced toward the window and realized with dismay that dusk was beginning to fall; consulting her mother’s watch (another proof of identity—as if anybody cared—for it had the Penistone crest, a hand grasping a battle-ax, engraved on its back) she discovered that the evening was well advanced. And they still had made no arrangements for the night! She decided that it was her duty to return at once and see how Jenny did.

  Not a soul did she meet as she retraced her steps to the West Wing. Either this establishment was remarkably deficient in servants, or, which was more probably, they were all assembled in a distant region, performing services for their dying master.

  Delphie had taken the precaution of counting doors along the west passageway on her previous return journey and so was spared any trouble in relocating the chamber where Jenny lay—which by now, illuminated both by the fire and a sufficiency of candles, had attained quite a cheerful aspect.

  What was Delphie’s surprise to discover that Miss Baggott, far from reclining in bed, was up and nearly dressed, hard at work fastening the innumerable buttons of an azure-blue brocade evening gown with a demi-train and adorned with a great quantity of false pearls.

  “Ah, there you are, dearie; what a mercy you are come back, I was just commencing to think that I must ring for Meg or Jill again,” observed Jenny, desisting in her struggles with relief. “Well-meaning gals, both of them, but that clumsy you wouldn’t believe! Be so kind as to do up the middle button, love—I have managed all the rest.”

  “But—do you intend to come downstairs, then?” Delphie said in astonishment “What about your inflammation of the lungs?”

  “To be sure I must come down! Since the gals told me his old lordship’s lying a-dying, I couldn’t be so thoughtless as to leave you to eat your supper all alone with two young men (for that’s all the company there is in the house, they tell me)—could I now? Unchaperoned? Why, it would be enough to sink your reputation forever; my conscience would be nagging at me for the rest of my days,” Miss Baggott said virtuously. “O’ course after my being so nigh drownded, I had ought to lay down on the bed, I know that, but there! I was never one to desert a friend in time of need!”

  And she favored Delphie with another large wink.

  “Come, bustle about, my love! The maids told me they keep country hours, here, dine at three, sup at eight—you had best get yourself changed. And you need not be troubling your head about our quarters tonight—I have bid the servants fetch another bed into this chamber, so there can be no quizzing talk about our visit—all’s right and proper if we share the same room, nothing havey-cavey about that!”

  Delphie doubted if there would be such talk, but thanked Jenny for the prudent forethought. She herself, since Mr. Penistone’s revelation, had doubted the propriety of their remaining at Chase at all—so unwelcome as they must be—but Jenny’s firmness dispelled any hesitations on that score.

  “The sawbones said I must on no account stir out of doors until daybreak, or it might be the death of me,” announced Jenny firmly.

  “Do you really think it needful to change our dress? You are so very fine! It is more than likely that we shall be served with a tray of soup in the library,” Delphie said doubtfully.

  Not if Miss Baggott had any say in the matter, proclaimed the gleam in her eye, but she merely replied,

  “Certainly it is needful! We want them to see that we know’ what’s proper. If there is trouble in the house, we should pay all due respect. Make haste; I’ll curl your hair in ringlets.”

  Delphie, however, preferred to keep it in her plain bands, which her companion sniffed at, as the most unmodish style possible—but she did admit that in Delphie’s position, since it was her great-uncle who was dying, a plain style might be more suitable.

  While Delphie swiftly donned her white crape gown, Jenny, who appeared to have a positive genius for extracting information from the servants, imparted what she had learned of the family situation.

  “Mr. Fitzjohn is the son of the natural son of your grandpa, the Fifth Viscount Bollington—did you know that? What does that make him to you, then?”

  “His father would be my mother’s half brother,” said Delphie, working it out. “We are therefore cousins, or half cousins.”

  “His father was the agent here, and so is he, now,” Jenny went on. “I think it monstrous unjust, do not you, that he don’t come in to the title, just because his Pa was a bastard? La, my dear, your grandpa seems to have been a sad old rip, from what I learn! Did you know that he died in a duel?”

  No, Delphie certainly had not.

  “A duel? Are you sure?”

  “Sure as sartin! In this very house, too. With his own brother, what’s more! Over a girl, into the bargain—a dairymaid, will you believe it! Plenty of the older servants remember it still, Meg said. It was a most shocking scandal. But since the actual death was an accident, Accidental Death was the verdict brought in at the Crowner’s Quest—otherwise brother Mark would ha’ been charged with manslaughter and couldn’t ha’ come in to the title. But he did both—he took the title (for his brother’s son had died at sea) and he married the girl, Prissy Privett, that all the ruckus had been about! She’d had two children already, bastards both, by his brother—only think! And then married t’other one, but had no more. There’s a portrait of her in the dining room, Meg says. I’d be curious to see her—the bold-faced thing!”

  “How did the death take place—my grandfather’s death?”

  “They was both of them drunk, a-dueling on the roof about Priss Privett: Lord Bollington, your grandpa—Lancelot, his name was—and this one that’s dying now, his brother Mark. Lancelot missed his footing and fell off into the moat. Just like me, only fancy! Only he fell from higher, and was killed.”

  “Good God!” said Delphie. “My mother’s father died in such a way? What a thing! I wonder Mamma never mentioned it.”

  “Like as not,” pointed out Jenny, “it happened after she’d left home? Or maybe ‘twas all hushed up—as much as they could, that is. The gals said this one got the place, but little good it did him, for the ill talk and slights from neighbors soured his nature. And though he married the gal, Priss Privett, he used her so badly that she died not long after, and he never wed again. Put off the whole female sect by what had gone before, seemingly. Maybe she played him false too.”

  Unraveling and assimilating this tangled and gloomy tale, Delphie began to feel less surprise at the callous abandonment of her mother. After the rather scandalous death of the father, it was no wonder that the runaway daughter should be neglected and out of mind. Mrs. Carteret’s father, presumably, had made no provision for her in his will, and the guilty (by intent if not by deed) brother who succeeded him would have even less reason to do so. “And where does Mr. Penistone come in?” Delphie inquired.

  “Aha! He’s the one for you to fix on, dearie! (Though for my own part, I prefer t’other fellow; he has a better pair of shoulders on him, to my mind, and is more like my Mr. S. what’s gone; besides which, I never could abide those brusque, bony, bracketfaced fellows.) But Mr. Gareth is the Heir, now—since your great-uncle Mark has none of his own, and Mr. Fitz is the son of a bastard and can’t succeed. Mr. P. don’t live here—has a manor of his own at Horsmonden—he just rid over for the death.”

  “Whose son is he, then?” inquired Delphie, draping a plain scarf of white crape over her shoulders.

  “It seems there was yet another brother to your grandpa, a good bit younger than the other pair—Gareth, his name was, the Honorable Gareth Penistone (he’s dead now) and he had a son who was this Mr. Gareth’s father.”

  “I see. Perhaps he is my cousin once removed.”

  “Too bad he ain’t removed altogether,” said Miss Baggott roundly. “For I don’t fancy his haughty airs
above half—and besides—think of it—if it weren’t for him you’d be the Heir, you’d be Lady Bollington, lovie—for poor Mr. Fitz don’t count.”

  Philadelphia felt some pity for poor Mr. Fitzjohn, unreasonably debarred from the succession by the accident of his father’s base birth, but said, laughing,

  “Girls cannot inherit, in any case, Jenny! If there were no other heir, I believe the title would die out.”

  “What a hem shame! Well, in that case, love, you’d best marry him,” Jenny said matter-of-factly.

  “Even that is out of my power, I fear! He is already betrothed.”

  And betrothed to whom? Delphie wondered. She did not immediately disclose to Jenny that there was another claimant for her place. The intelligence was too new, and too upsetting. It made her feel thoroughly uncomfortable. She wished to go on digesting it in the privacy of her own mind for a while.

  But she found herself unexpectedly impressed by Jenny’s shrewd, clear grasp of a family situation not, after all, her own, or at all the kind to which she was used; Miss Baggott was showing qualities hitherto quite unsuspected, and her company was decidedly welcome.

  “Are you ready to come down, Jenny?”

  “Not on your Oliphant—nor I shan’t be for another twenty minutes sartain,” cheerfully replied Jenny, who had pulled a pair of curling tongs out of her portmanteau, heated them over the fire, and was building her shiny black hair into an amazingly elaborate arrangement. “But do you go on ahead, if you wish, love—and tell ‘em I’m clemmed after my ducking! None of your trifles on trays for me—I want a proper bang-up supper—after all, we are staying under a lord’s roof! And in the dining room, not the library,” she added as Delphie, chuckling, started for the door.