The Five-Minute Marriage

by Joan Aiken

  Mr. Penistone’s somber countenance was lightened by a faint smile.

  “Are you finished, Jenny?” Philadelphia inquired rather hastily. “Then I think we should leave the gentlemen to their wine.”

  “Oh—very well!” said Jenny with evident reluctance.

  The two men rose and bowed.

  “Cowley will bring a tea tray into the parlor, unless you wish to return to the library?” said Fitzjohn.

  “Oh, the library, by all means,” said Philadelphia, who had noticed an ancient pianoforte in one corner of that room. “Let nobody be at the trouble of warming another chamber for us. We shall retire very soon, in any case.”

  “Lor’, Miss Delphie!” exclaimed Jenny when they were alone in the library and Cowley had brought the tray of tea. “You won’t want to be sharing my chamber now! I had but just thought of it! I should hope as how they’ve got a room more fit for a bride and groom than one where half the bed-curtains has been et by moths!”

  Philadelphia had given no thought to this aspect of her situation.

  “Oh—well—as to that,” she said hastily. “There are considerations why—circumstanced as we are at present—I will explain all later, Jenny, when we leave here—but in the meantime Mr. Penistone and I do not intend—”

  “What?” cried Jenny in amazement when she understood what Philadelphia meant. “Good Lord! No wedding night? Is that acos o’ the old lord lying a-dying? Well I never heard of such delicate scruples! Sure I honor you for them—for I know you’re all that’s ladylike, Miss Delphie—but I must say I don’t think nothing of a fellow as will allow his new bride to lie chill and lonesome on her bridal night! Sulky and black-browed though he be, I’d ha thought better of your gentleman than that! Why, there’s been chaps as come a-courting me—When I think me of my poor dear Sam—”

  Made voluble by the champagne and the wine she had drunk during supper, Jenny would have proceeded to expatiate on this theme, but Delphie, to discourage her, for she did not wish to embark on tricky explanations while the gentlemen might at any moment be expected to walk in, went over to the pianoforte. In a tattered pile of music she found a sonata by Mozart, and began to play it, very softly, out of respect for her uncle’s condition.

  She was soon lost in the music, which both soothed and cheered her, and she forgot her surroundings entirely until, halfway through the adagio movement, she was aware of a presence at her elbow, and turned her head to see Mr. Penistone standing beside her, wearing a many-caped greatcoat.

  “I am come to say good-by, ma’am,” he said as Delphie, surprised, lifted her hands from the keys. “Ah—urgent private affairs render it essential for me to leave for London immediately. “I—” He hesitated. “I would like once more to express the sense of obligation toward you under which I stand—”

  “Think nothing of it,” Delphie said calmly. “We have each gained a little, and lost a little. I daresay we shall not be meeting again, so I will take this opportunity of wishing you well. I hope—I hope that matters transpire favorably for you. Good-by!”

  She held out her hand frankly.

  He seemed surprised by her calm demeanor, but impressed.

  “I thank you, madam. And I, too, wish you every good fortune; I hope that on your return you discover your mother in better health. I—” He stopped again, glanced at the pianoforte as if seeking words, and said, “I shall always remember you. Adieu!”

  He took her hand, carried it to his lips, and then, saluting Miss Baggott, turned and left the room.

  A few moments later Mr. Fitzjohn came to wish them good night.

  “How is Lord Bollington?” Philadelphia inquired.

  “He is very weak, ma’am, and low; shortly after signing his will he underwent a Spasm, and then slipped into a kind of swoon; he still lies in that condition, and Dr. Bowles has bled him; the doctor remains with him at present, and I purpose sitting up all night in his antechamber.”

  “Ah well,” said Philadelphia, “in that case, as we are very weary, I think that we had best retire. I wish you as good a night as possible, sir.” She added with some irony, “I am glad that, at all events, the object of the performance has been achieved. Mr. Penistone must have gone off with feelings of considerable satisfaction.”

  “I believe so, ma’am,” said Mr. Fitzjohn stiffly, and left them.

  “Now tell me,” cried Jenny, wild with curiosity, when they had regained their chamber, “what was all that about? Where is Mr. Penistone gone? There is something havey-cavey here, or my name is not Jenny Baggott!”

  But the two little maids, Meg and Jill, were there, with cans of hot water and warming pans, waiting to assist the grand London ladies undo their laces and curl their hair. A second bed had been introduced into the room and made up with sheets and pillows.

  “I will explain all in the carriage, Jenny, on the way back to London,” Delphie promised, slipping gratefully into the hot hollow left by the warming pan. “For indeed I am tired to death now, and can hardly keep my eyes open.”

  “Ay, to be sure, you do look pale and fagged,” Jenny acknowledged. “Your eyes are as big as filberts and you’ve got no more color to you than a clout. Very well—but tomorrow I shall expect a round tale, mind!”

  “A round tale you shall have!” Delphie drew the ancient and frail, but lavender-scented, sheet up to her chin and shut her eyes. The little maids extinguished all but one of the dimly burning lamps, and tiptoed away.

  For a moment, Delphie thought that she would not sleep; the day had been so full of extraordinary and unlooked-for occurrences that her thoughts were in a race, faces and voices jumbled together: Jenny falling in the moat; Jenny’s voice saying, “They was both of them drunk, a-dueling on the roof about a dairymaid called Prissy Privett”; Mr. Penistone’s voice saying, “She is hard and calculating to the tips of her nails”; Mr. Fitzjohn saying, “There is no time to be lost—my uncle’s state is critical.”

  Had she allowed herself to be pressed into a piece of disastrous folly? Would she have cause to regret this day for the rest of her life? Or would it all be forgotten—a strange, dreamlike episode, with no bearing on anything that followed after, save that her mother had now been secured of a competence to support her in comfort during her old age? Very likely I am refining upon it too much, thought Delphie and moved into a more comfortable position on the soft feather-mattress.

  A gust of rain slapped against the casement—for the night had set in wet and stormy—and she thought, Mr. Penistone will have a disagreeable ride back to London in this. For a moment his face swam in front of her closed eyes, with its mocking, satiric look; odd to remember that he had kissed her. Twice, she thought floatingly, my hand too...

  Then she was asleep.

  Breakfast next morning was served with much formality in the chilly dining room. There was a breakfast parlor, Fidd explained apologetically, but the furniture was all sheeted up and not in good nick; if Mrs. Penistone had no objection, since the household was all at odds...

  Delphie had not the least objection in the world. Her only wish was to be gone, and she ate her bread-and-butter and drank her coffee at speed, hurrying the dilatory Jenny, who was not at her best of a morning, and yawned like a kitten all through the short meal. While Jenny was finishing, Delphie seized the opportunity to walk around the room, inspecting the family portraits by the light of the stormy, shining May morning.

  She was amused to discover her own indubitable likeness in half a dozen of the faces along the wall; it was no wonder that both Fitzjohn and Penistone had been prepared to fob her off on Lord Bollington, even if they did not believe in her tale. Perhaps—she suddenly thought—they believed her to be some other bastard descendant of her grandfather; considering his other propensities this idea must be considered quite a likely contingency. The thought made her very uncomfortable.

  Over the mantel was the picture of a curly-headed girl in a short dress and kerchief, who stood with ankles crossed, leaning against a tree. Sh
e was laughing. Beside her on the ground were two pails and a dairymaid’s wooden yoke.

  “That’s Prissy Privett,” said Jenny, noticing the direction of Philadelphia’s gaze. “Wearing her dairymaid’s dress, do you see? Meg told me it was painted by Mr. Romney; he did it for the lord as was your grandpa—not the one she married in the end. She’s an impudent, forward-looking hussy, ain’t she?”

  “There is certainly something very arresting about her face!” Delphie remarked, standing in front of the portrait and looking up at it. “Taking, too! She looks so merry. She is pretty—not beautiful.”

  “Ay,” Jenny agreed, nodding, and she said after a moment, through a mouthful of bread-and-butter, “It’s queer, there’s naught special about her face—yet you’d know her if you met her in China!”

  It was a pert, pointed, laughing face, with rounded, blooming cheeks and bold brown eyes; the hair was drawn up into a pile of nut-brown curls under a tiny muslin cap with a cherry ribbon.

  “She do look like one to get what she wanted,” Jenny observed.

  “But she didn’t,” said Delphie.

  “Sure, she did! She married a lord.”

  “But then he was so unkind to her that she died—and her children were bastards. Poor girl—I truly pity her.”

  At this moment Fidd returned to the room, and glanced up at the portrait somewhat disapprovingly.

  “How does my uncle do this morning, Fidd?” Delphie asked him.

  “He is still very poorly, ma’am. Dr. Bowles is still with him, and so is Mr. Fitzjohn. He sends his respects and asks you to excuse him for not coming down to say good-by.”

  “Pray take mine back,” said Delphie.

  “I am come to tell you, ma’am, that your carnage is waiting beyond the bridge, and I have instructed Cowley to have your bags carried down.”

  “Thank you, Fidd,” Delphie said, wondering how much it would be proper to lay out in vails to the various servants.

  Anxieties on this score held her silent and preoccupied throughout the departure from Chase, and she was relieved when Fidd, bowing, said in what seemed quite a friendly manner,

  “Good-by, ma’am. I hope we see you again in happier circumstances,” and shut the carriage door on them.

  “Well now!” cried Jenny, as the carriage rolled away from the bridge. “A round tale you promised me, and a round tale I am determined to have. Why would you not speak last night? Why did your bridegroom set off directly after the wedding and ride away through as wet a night as ever drowned ducks? Why would your uncle not speak to you? Why did you never mention him before? What about your Mamma? Why—?”

  “Stop, stop!” cried Delphie, laughing—her spirits had risen mercurially as soon as they had left the gloomy silence of Chase Place behind them.

  Already the whole of yesterday seemed like a page from another life.

  “One question at a time, please! And, first and foremost, I must bind you to strict and absolute silence about the circumstances of last night, Jenny—please not to mention a word of anything that happened, not to a single soul—not even to your sister. Will you promise me that?”

  “In course—if I must!” cried Jenny, round-eyed. “But why ever not, i’ mercy’s name?”

  “Because, firstly, that was no real wedding, Jenny—it was all a piece of playacting!”

  “Playacting?” exclaimed Jenny, thunderstruck. “How can that be? It seemed real enough—the ring was real, the parson was real—”

  “No, he was not, Jenny—he was just some acquaintance of Mr. Fitzjohn’s, dressed up in parson’s clothes.”

  “What a take-in! Are you truly sure that it was all make-believe?” Jenny still seemed full of doubts.

  “Sure as sure, Jenny.”

  “I don’t believe it!” Jenny declared. “For, if it wasn’t real, what’s this I brought away in my pocket?”

  And she pulled out a piece of paper which, unfolded, purported to be a special marriage license (and looked remarkably like one) recording the nuptials of Gareth Lancelot Penistone, bachelor, and Philadelphia Elaine Carteret, spinster, as celebrated by Wm. Blackstone, Suffragan Bishop of Bengal and Southern India.

  “I thought as how it should stay in your keeping, so I just pocketed it when no one was looking,” Jenny explained with quiet satisfaction.

  5

  Mr. Browty’s carriage made such excellent time up to London that Delphie concluded the coachman was eager to return to the peace and quiet in Russell Square attendant upon his master’s absence in Paris. They were back in Greek Street by midafternoon; Delphie thanked the driver, and found herself ascending the familiar stairs with a most curious sensation of depression and flatness.

  She had been received at Chase Place with no particular civility, and with a contemptuous disbelief in her story such as must affront every sensitive feeling; she had taken her great-uncle in immediate dislike, and the most she could wish for him was a true repentance of his various misdoings, and a reasonably peaceful conclusion to his sufferings; she had been dismayed by the scandalous nature of such portions of her family history as had been unfolded to her; she had been obliged to take part in a masquerade which offended her principles, infringed upon her dignify, and left her in a most invidious position; she had taken no particular liking to either of her two cousins; yet, despite all these evils, she felt that she had come back from the expedition with some positive gains—although she could not precisely define to herself the nature of these benefits.

  She had bidden Jenny a swift good-by in the shop, thanked her warmly for her company, and again anxiously enjoined upon her the most absolute discretion (a quality in which she had cause to fear that Jenny was not too well endowed) regarding the events of the last twenty-four hours.

  In her mother’s apartment Delphie was relieved to discover a scene of the most orderly placidity. Mrs. Andrews was knitting in front of the hearth, where a small fire burned, and some delicate invalid mess was cooking in a pan on the hob; while Mrs. Carteret, exquisitely neat and tidy (wearing a new frilled peignoir made from the dove-gray jaconet, and a tatted cap of net over her gold-gray curls) reposed on the bed, and read Volume Two of a novel entitled The Orphan of the Wilderness, which Delphie had procured for her before setting off to Kent.

  “There you are, dearest,” said Mrs. Carteret tranquilly, as if Delphie had just stepped outside the door for a minute. “You cannot imagine what an affecting work this is! I quite long to know what will occur in Volume Three, and how it will all end! I have been reading this last three hours, I do believe. Mrs. Andrews said I might as well defer sending out the invitations for the ball until tomorrow, so that I may finish the book first. The poor Orphan! Her plight reminds me so much of your own, my darling.”

  Delphie gave her mother a kiss, and quite agreed that the invitations for the ball need not be sent out immediately. (Indeed she trusted that they need never be sent at all.) She was delighted to find her mother so wrapped up in the fictional adventures of the Orphan that there seemed no necessity to give a verbal account of her own activities; for it would have taxed her forthright and candid nature very considerably to give any version of the last day’s doings which did not contain at least enough untruth to prevent her mother from suffering a Spasm, knowing the elder lady’s dislike of anything connected with Chase. Complete silence would be much easier. Delphie therefore cordially thanked Mrs. Andrews for the evident care which she had taken of her patient, and was on the point of paying her and saying good night, when Mrs. Andrews remarked,

  “There’s a note for you on the mantel, Missie; a manservant brought it yesterday, two hours or so after you had left.”

  “I wish it will be an inquiry about lessons,” Delphie said, breaking the seal. “So many of my pupils are gone out of town for the Easter Holidays that I find myself with too much time on my hands.”

  The note, inscribed in a small, ladylike hand on paper topped by a coronet, was not a request for lessons, but a polite and peremptory invita
tion from a Lady Dalrymple that Miss Carter (misspelled) should entertain the guests at an evening party Lady Dalrymple proposed holding on the following day; she was not aware if Miss Carter was in the habit of performing in this manner, but Lady Dalrymple’s friend Mr. Browty had spoken so highly of Miss Carter’s talents that Lady Dalrymple felt sure it would be well within her power and that she could not fail to please. A fee of five guineas for the evening was suggested, as well as refreshments, and she signed herself, Yrs, Letitia Dalrymple.

  The date of the party was that very evening, Delphie realized with some alarm. She had better go: receiving no word to the contrary, Lady Dalrymple would no doubt be expecting her. She was not in the least accustomed to giving such performances, and felt decidedly nervous at the prospect; but the fee offered was more than she would normally charge for half a dozen lessons—not counting the refreshments! It would be folly to refuse, Delphie thought, for she and her mother were still drastically short of money. There had, after all, been no actual financial benefit from the visit to Chase—nor could any be expected until after Lord Bollington’s death and the execution of his will—occurrences of which the imminence could only remain conjectural. At all events, they had not taken place yet.

  Moreover, Delphie’s performance at this party might lead to other such engagements—or, preferably, to the acquisition of new pupils.

  Glancing at the clock on her mother’s mantel, Delphie saw that there was little time to be lost if she were to be ready at the appointed hour.

  She said,

  “Should you have any objection, Mamma, if I were to go out again for—for an engagement? That is if you, Mrs. Andrews, would be able to remain with my mother during the evening?”