The chaotic Miss Crispino

by Kasey Michaels

  “Basta!” Allegra interrupted just as Valerian was beginning to feel that Waterloo, when compared with the scene in the Dugdale drawing room, could only be described as a slight skirmish. “Enough! I wish for everyone to sit down—now—for I have something to say!”

  Valerian’s lips twitched appreciatively as all three Kittredges subsided into chairs, their attention directed to Allegra as she fussed momentarily with her skirts, prolonging the newly fallen silence until she felt her audience was ready to hear her speak. She was a minx all right, he knew, but he couldn’t help but feel proud of her at this moment.

  “Now, Nonno, Zia Agnes, Isobel—and you too, Gideon,” she began at last, looking piercingly from one to the other as she spoke, “I would have to be blind and deaf not to feel the strain my appearance has caused to come to this family, and I have decided it is time we cleaned the air.”

  “Cleared the air, imp,” Valerian corrected, his eyes flashing her a warning as he deliberately tried to keep her from saying anything in haste that she might repent later.

  “Cleared the air, yes. Thank you, Valerian,” she said tightly before turning back to her relatives. “Now, where was I? First of all, I think you should know more about me, as I am a stranger to you. For one, my disposition is not always so calm—”

  “I can vouch for that,” Valerian slid in neatly, propping himself against the side of Lord Dugdale’s high wing chair, his arms crossed against his chest.

  Allegra shot him a look guaranteed to freeze lava if it should ever again dare to descend from Vesuvius. “I am also, when sufficiently pushed, malicious enough to strike back twofold for any injury I sustain.”

  “I can vouch for that as well,” Valerian agreed happily as Allegra continued to glare at him. “But if it’s any consolation to you, Agnes, she doesn’t spit anymore.”

  “Don’t pay him any attention, Nonno,” Allegra cautioned her grandfather. And then she smiled as inspiration struck. “You see, Valerian is just angry because I refuse to love him.”

  “I’m what?” Valerian, who had thought he was at last prepared for anything Allegra might say or do—and who had actually believed himself to be in charity with her only a second earlier—belatedly closed his mouth and fought the urge to strangle the little vixen on the spot.

  “Don’t bother to deny it, Valerian.” Allegra’s lips twitched at his outburst and she lowered her gaze—not seeing the strange, cold look that had crept into Isobel’s watery hazel eyes.

  Gideon, however, noticed his sister’s involuntary flinch, and he did not bother to hide his glee. “How titillating, dear Cousin Allegra,” he crooned, his mouth just beside Isobel’s ear as he leaned over the settee. “Do go on.”

  Allegra shot Gideon a withering look, then turned back to her grandfather. “It is true. Valerian is deeply in love with me—as are so many men; a circumstance I find very troubling to my tender heart. But, alas, I cannot love Valerian, or any man. I am, you see, completely dedicated to my art.”

  “You draw pictures?” Lord Dugdale questioned blankly as Isobel—unnoticed again by any save her brother, who made a habit of storing up miscellaneous information he could possibly put to some malicious use at a later date—raised a hand to her mouth and bit down hard on her knuckle. “What do you draw, child? Pictures of castles and the like? I guess that’s all right. Prinny favors faces, though, and horses. Can you draw horses?”

  “I do not draw, Nonno,” Allegra answered patiently, still purposely avoiding Valerian’s sure-to-be-condemning eyes. He might have warned her against it, but she had to tell the truth. “I sing. Like my papà before me, I am a great singer. People pay money to hear me sing. I tell you this, not because I am proud, but because I wish you to know that I do not need your conscience money. If you were to disown me today as you disowned my madre twenty years ago, I should not starve. Orphan that I am, I can make my own way.”

  Gideon came around the settee to sit down beside his mother. “Well, good. She’s a resourceful puss, unlike my dear sister, who can only embroider slippers—and only ones with the same name on them at that. It’s settled, then. Cousin Allegra is to set herself up as the town warbler. But don’t think we’re completely without compassion, dearest cousin. You may still stay for dinner.”

  “Gideon,” Isobel said quietly.

  “Yes, sister mine? Is there something you require?” the young man responded, grinning widely in appreciation of his own humor.

  “Yes, there is. I’d like your silence, Gideon,” Isobel suggested succinctly, her thin, sallow face so pinched it reminded Allegra mightily of a Tuscany olive left too long in the sun.

  At this point, and high time it was for the man to make a move, Baron Dugdale took the conversational bit firmly beneath his teeth. “Odds fish, but she’s got all her mother’s fire! Mary was my daughter to the bone—and a rare handful, which should have told me that once she’d made up her mind to marry that I-talian bloke, I shouldn’t have tried to stop her. Well, the apples don’t fall that far from the tree, like they say, and what you get with the mother you’re just as likely to see in the daughter. I’m going to enjoy you, Allegra, even though we probably will fight like cats in a sack most of the time.”

  “Thank you, Nonno,” Allegra said, feeling the threat of tears behind her eyes for the first time since she had left Naples. “But please don’t think I wish more than a roof over my head. I can make my own way without having you push Zia Agnes and her children out into the gutter.”

  “If that’s where they belong, then that’s where they’ll land,” the Baron answered shortly, glaring at his sister. “But if they behave themselves—” He allowed this last sentence to dangle, waiting for Agnes to pick up his hint.

  He didn’t have long to wait. “I have never been known to be less than civil, Denny,” she said, lifting her pointy chin. “If you wish me to take Mary’s child under my wing, I shall be happy to do so. What is it you want me to do? Educate her in the ways of polite society? Teach her the intricacies of acceptable behaviour and prudent speech? Introduce her to the finer points of modest dress—to stays?”

  “Stays?” Lord Dugdale ejaculated, his gaze resting on Allegra’s remarkably fine figure. “What would she be wanting to truss herself up like a Christmas goose for, I ask you? If it’s her chest that’s bothering you, Aggie, I think you’re fair and far out there. She has a lovely chest—probably comes from all those deep breaths singers take, don’t you think, Valerian? Valerian? Now where the devil did the fellow go?”

  They all looked to where Valerian had been standing just a few moments earlier, but he wasn’t there. Without his dinner, without bidding any of them farewell, he had gone.

  “How rude!” Agnes exclaimed, aghast.

  “Oh, dear. Do you think Cousin Allegra’s silly remarks upset him?” Isobel questioned, her voice hopeful.

  “He was aboard ship a long time. Probably decided he needs a woman,” Gideon offered helpfully, if only to watch his sister’s thin cheeks go pale.

  “A woman, is it, nevvie?” the Baron snorted. “And what would you be knowing of women—you who never got close to any save the Queen of Hearts?”

  As the Kittredges and her grandfather launched themselves into yet another argument, Allegra sat on the footstool, staring into the middle distance, a decidedly pleased smile on her face.

  For Allegra knew where Valerian had gone. He had gone to ground, in order to get away from her. But he would be back. Oh, yes. One way or the other, he would be back.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT TOOK slightly less than three days for Allegra, always a highly emotional girl, to fall totally in love with Brighton. The bracing sea air that made her feel so alive, the crash of the surf, the winding streets and lovely narrow houses—all this and more Allegra enjoyed during her lengthy daily walks along the Steine with a grumbling Betty in tow, complaining that she would doubtless have to spend the remainder of her wretched life brushing crusted sea salt out of her new mistress’s hair. />
  But more than anything else, Allegra had fallen under the enchantment of the Prince Regent’s Marine Pavilion. It reminded her of a snow-white castle out of some marvelous fairy tale, a glorious confection of swirling onion-shaped domes, pinnacles, minarets, and intricate lacelike embattlements that seemed too delicate, too ethereally beautiful to be real.

  But even more than the sea air or the neat houses or even the fantasylike Pavilion, Allegra fell in love with the Prince Regent. She had not seen him, of course, for he was in seclusion, only a few months having passed since the tragic childbed deaths of his daughter, the Princess Charlotte of Wales, and his grandson, and no one really saw him.

  Allegra loved him because he was suffering, and her emotional Italian heart felt a high degree of simpatia for a man in mourning. But she felt even more in charity with him because Prinny, no matter what his faults, loved music. He loved music so much that, even in his grief, he allowed his most excellent German musicians to play outside on the Pavilion grounds in order to entertain the citizens. Allegra had been immediately enthralled to hear the great works of composers such as Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven wafting through the windblown trees, and when the band broke into a familiar Italian sinfonia, she ached with the desire to hum along.

  But if she had learned nothing else in her first days in Brighton, Allegra had learned it was not wise to call too much attention to herself. Brighton might be lovely, but the people she met along the Steine were very strange indeed. They were displaced Londoners all, Betty had told her, hangers-on of the Prince Regent who would follow the great man to the ends of the earth, simply for an invitation to the Pavilion.

  Mostly older, the women were a sad, over-stuffed collection of molting peahens, while the gentlemen seemed to vary in age but no inclination, eyeing Allegra as a hungry wolf would eye a spring lamb. The younger women who passed by, some of them with faces painted as if for the stage, were, according to Betty, “milliners.” Allegra, although not familiar with English customs, had no difficulty in understanding that these ladies’ closest proximity to bonnets came about only when they were wearing them.

  Betty, who had lived in Brighton all her life, became a veritable fountain of information for Allegra, who could not seem to locate the bottom of her deep barrel of questions about the town in which her mother had grown up.

  “She must have loved my papà very much, to leave such a wonderful place,” Allegra said to Betty as they stood outside the Pavilion, watching as a weak sun glinted off the main onion dome and danced against the stained-glass windows.

  Betty was quick to correct her. In 1796, the year Mary Catherine Dugdale had slipped down a rope made of knotted bed sheets and into the arms of her Italian lover, the Marine Pavilion had been little more than a discreetly amended farmhouse, a modest residence the Prince shared with Mrs. Maria Fitzherbert, “the lady he should have stuck with, rather than that terrible Lady Jersey or the naughty Princess Caroline, and most especially not any of those fat old hens that roost with him now.”

  Yes, according to Betty things were a lot different in 1796, even if the Prince’s rowdy bachelor friends sometimes pulled silly pranks on the townspeople and kept everyone up half the night with their drinking and rowdy ways.

  “It was that bad when that Lady Jersey got her hooks into him, missy,” Betty told Allegra as they sat together in the latter’s bedchamber near midnight of her fourth evening in England, the two of them rapidly having gone past the usual mistress-maid association. “It was Lady Jersey what stole the Prince from Mrs. Fitzherbert and then talked him into marrying that German person, who was mother to Princess Charlotte, Lord rest her dear soul. And where was her mother when poor Princess Charlotte breathed her last? Nowhere to be found, that’s where!”

  “Yes, Betty,” Allegra responded, handing the maid a sugarplum. “I have already heard your opinion of Princess Caroline and her travels with her Italian Chamberlain. What I want to hear about is Brighton itself.”

  “We had some hard times after your mother left. I blame it all on that terrible Lady Jersey, who started the fuss in the first place. You know, the people of Brighton so loved Mrs. Fitzherbert, and so disliked Lady Jersey, that when Lady Jersey’s coach passed through the streets the citizens hissed at her and called her names. The Prince didn’t much care for that, and the year your mother left he didn’t even come to Brighton, but went to Bognor with his terrible lady. It was as if the whole world had forgotten us. Shops closed. People moved away. Your grandfather, the Baron, was so beside himself he nearly sold this house and moved to London. We all suffered mightily in the next four years, until he made it up with Mrs. Fitzherbert and came back to Brighton.”

  “And is Signora Fitzherbert still here with the Prince?” Allegra asked, her mouth full of sugarplums as she sat cross-legged on the bed. “And if she is, who are all the fat ladies you mentioned?”

  Betty screwed up her plain-as-pudding, face. “Mrs. Fitzherbert is still here, but she finally had enough of the Prince’s goings-on and refuses to see him.” Betty leaned forward in her chair to impart quietly, “I hear he still wears a likeness of her in a locket around his neck, the silly old fool.” She sat back once more, folding her arms. “But no, the Prince spends his time now with fat old women like that Lady Hertford and that other one before her, Lady Conyngham. He does not want a wife now, missy; he longs for a mother who will tell him that he is a good boy.”

  Allegra sniffed a time or two and wiped at a tear with the back of one hand. “He sounds so sad, Betty, and so alone. It must be terrible to be a prince forever when you long to be King. Oh, I know he must be a terrible man, but he loves beauty so much, in both form and music, that I cannot believe you English understand him. In Italy we have many great men—lovers of art and music and literature—who are not always very nice people. Why, just think of the Medici! That may be the price of genius, don’t you think?”

  Betty sniffed as well, but not to stifle the threat of tears. “My sister Clara once worked as housemaid at the Pavilion, missy. Clara told me she spent the whole of the time with her back to the wall so as not to be pinched by this genius of yours. No, missy,” she ended firmly, “he should have stayed with Mrs. Fitzherbert. She knew how to keep him in line. But you’ll see it all for yourself soon enough, I wager. The Baron is one of the Prince’s closest chums here in Brighton, and the whole lot of you will probably be going over there for dinner any time now.”

  This brought Allegra’s attention away from the Prince and onto one of her favorite subjects: food. Valerian had already told her a little about the enormous feasts that lasted for hour upon hour, and she looked forward to an evening in the great Pavilion’s Banqueting Room.

  “One hundred and sixteen separate dishes for a single banquet, Betty!” she exclaimed, rubbing her flat belly. “All eaten beneath a huge chandelier suspended from the claws of a ferocious dragon clinging to a plantain tree on the ceiling! Oh, yes, Nonno has already told me a great deal about this magnificent Banqueting Room. It all sounds so grand that I cannot believe the Prince Regent is English. There must be a secret Florentine lurking about somewhere in his family tree, to have him love beauty and food so much.”

  “If there is, I wouldn’t mention it to your grandfather,” the maid advised, reaching for one last sugarplum. “From what I’ve heard below-stairs, even though he’s that tickled to have you here with him, he still isn’t so happy with anything I-talian.”

  Allegra popped the last sugarplum into her mouth, then leaned forward, squinting at the maid. “What have you heard, Betty? The terrible Kittredges don’t worry me, but I should not like to think my nonno is still harboring a grudge against my poor papà.”

  Betty’s dark eyes slid away from Allegra’s searching gaze. “Nothing, missy, I heard nothing. At least nothing important. Just something about how he missed you and your mother all those years you were traipsing all over that heathen country like a band of gypsies, following your da from one place to next just so’s he could s
ing. That’s all. Yes, I’m sure now that was the whole of it. My, it’s late, missy. Would you like for me to turn down your bed?”

  “Betty?” Allegra felt ill suddenly, which might have been due to the niggling feeling that something she wasn’t going to like was about to happen. It also could have been due to the fact that, between them, they had succeeded in eating an entire candy dish full of sugarplums, but Allegra didn’t think so.

  “Yes, missy?” Betty was looking decidedly pale as she fidgeted in her chair.

  “My nonno sent a note to me this evening, saying he wishes for me to meet with him in his study after luncheon tomorrow. I thought we were going to talk about Madre again, as we have done every day since I arrived. We aren’t going to be talking about her tomorrow, are we?”

  Betty rose and made a great business out of whisking bits of sugar from the satin bedspread. “Please, missy, don’t ask me to say more, because I really don’t know. The Baron had his solicitor here this afternoon and Bates, one of the footmen, heard the master cursing and yelling about I-talians. So I don’t really know why he wants to see you or what the two of you will be talking about.” She straightened up and looked her new mistress, her new friend, straight in the eye. “I only feel sure you probably aren’t going to like it. I’m that sorry, missy. Truly I am.”

  THE NEXT MORNING dawned gray and misty, with a fog rolling in from the ocean. The weather matched Allegra’s mood, for she had spent a restless night wondering about her grandfather’s summons, only to fall into a fitful sleep near dawn that included a strange dream in which Valerian Fitzhugh figured prominently.

  They had been running through the streets of Brighton, she and Valerian, with some unknown assailant hard on their heels. It was very dark, so that no matter how often Allegra looked behind her, it was impossible to learn the identity of their pursuer. Her hand clasped tightly in Valerian’s, all she could do was run, and keep on running, even though she was singing an aria at the top of her lungs at the same time.