by Fiona Hill
Fortunately for Mockabee, his prey was so innocent as to require very little in the way of dissimulation about his object. He pursued his inquiry into her financial standing in pretty much the most direct way possible, troubling with delicacy only to prevent her blurting out at dinner that she and Lord Mockabee had had the most interesting discussion imaginable about her money. “Lord Seabury controls your fortune?” he asked. “How vexatious that must be for you!”
“Dear me, Lord Mockabee! I have not got a fortune! Papa died quite destitute, poor thing. He had no head for affairs, my Aunt Meredith says. What made you suppose I had such a thing as a fortune, you silly creature?” the lamb continued coyly.
“Now that you ask, I cannot remember!” said he, as if very much amazed. “I am curious to know, then, why it is your cousin Seabury undertakes to maintain you, dear ma’am.”
“But he acts as my guardian,” she replied at once.
“Yes indeed, but if he holds no funds in your name, how is he to pay for that lovely muslin shawl, and those pretty slippers?”
She smiled at the compliments and said, “But since he acts as my guardian, must he not pay for those things?” Miss Meredith was really so absurd as never to have asked herself, hitherto, why indeed Seabury should maintain her, or how much the undertaking cost.
“I fear the revelation will shock so nice a sensibility as yours, but in fact there are many young ladies in your position who are permitted by their relations to starve.”
“Permitted to—angels defend us!” cried Amy. “How can such things be?”
Lord Mockabee shrugged his narrow shoulders; it was well, he considered, that he had had this interview with Miss Meredith. It appeared she was practically a pauper after all, though it might be supposed that Seabury would continue her support as long as need be—perhaps he even meant to give her a dowry.
Amy interrupted these thoughts. “I am glad to know,” she observed, “in view of such things, that I shall always have Lady Beatrice to depend upon as well.”
“Ah, is it she, then, who—who is so generous?”
“Not yet,” Amy exclaimed, her brown eyes sparkling; “but when…that is, if she were to die, I should probably come into all she has.”
“How pleasant for you,” Mockabee observed. “Who, after all, could spend it to more advantage—I mean, the way you carry off that rich gown, for example, is utterly splendid. So it is all decided between good Lady Beatrice and yourself?”
“Oh no, not yet. I should never dare to broach the subject myself, sir! And she never mentions it either.”
“Then what has put it into your head—?”
“That I shall inherit? My aunt, of course. She has often expressed her conviction that I am to be the chief beneficiary. She says Lady Beatrice was very fond of my mother—her sister, you know—and that when it comes time for such matters to be decided, she will never leave the money to Seabury. Why he has a ton of it already! What should he do with more?”
“Well asked,” murmured his lordship, his dark glance resting intently upon her face. Amy blushed under this searching gaze, which she supposed to be a loving one, but which was actually full of calculation and contempt. A remnant of that expression had still lurked in his black eyes a moment later, when Caro’s light tap and quick entrance caused them to turn towards the door. She had found the effect, diminished though it was, rather chilling. Lady Beatrice propelled her swiftly forward, however, so she had little time to contemplate its significance. A minute afterwards Amy had been whisked away to attend to her aunt Beatrice’s correspondence, and Caro was left with Mockabee alone.
“Lady Caroline,” he addressed her, before she had thought of anything to say, “I have never seen such high colour in your cheeks. It is most becoming!”
“I thank you; but it is not of myself I wish to speak, sir,” said she, the uncomfortable sensation she invariably felt in Mockabee’s presence returning to her now.
“There is some particular person of whom you do wish to speak?” asked he sharply.
“There is,” she said, and paused. “Lord Mockabee, I must beg you to forget, in so far as such a thing is possible, whatever association you and I may have had save one.”
The baron was far too crafty to imagine that Caroline referred to her early, childish passion for him, but he chose to pretend otherwise. “Let bygones be bygones,” he answered promptly; “I should never be so foolish now as to meet your favour with indifference, my lady.”
“Dear sir, that is not what I mean at all,” she said, openly annoyed. “I allude to the circumstance of our being neighbours in the country—acquaintances in the way that all neighbouring landowners are acquaintances. I pray you will attempt to consider me in that light for a moment; nothing more and nothing less.”
“I shall do my possible,” said he, curious to hear her out. “But may I say first, that I am really delighted to be private with you for once. I regret that we must play at cards among so many others; if not for that, next Saturday should beckon to me like a perfect paradise. You make such a pretty boy!”
“Please, Lord Mockabee, this is a miserable start at forgetting our associations. I must speak with you about Miss Meredith. I am concerned for her happiness.”
“If there is anything I can do to ensure the happiness of a friend of yours, dear ma’am, I beg you will name it!”
“Then cease to tease Amy with your attentions,” said she flatly. “She does not know the difference between lighthearted banter and a sincere regard, and I am afraid she will someday learn it most distressingly.”
“My dear Lady Caroline,” he replied after a pause, “I should like to know what exactly leads you to suppose my attachment to Miss Meredith is insincere.” He leaned forward upon this and showed his teeth in a not very agreeable grin.
But Caro waved all this away with an impatient sweep of her hand. “Good Lord,” she ejaculated, “I hope you do not take me for such a fool as to suppose otherwise.”
“Your concern for Miss Meredith, madam,” Mockabee observed drily, “seems hardly borne out by your opinion of her attractions.”
Exasperated, Caroline clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Naturally my interest in Amy’s welfare is mostly of a general nature. She is young, and therefore requires protection no matter who she may be. She is connected to my family, and therefore has a demand upon me particularly.”
Mockabee took this in. “And you do not believe,” he persisted, “that I am seriously attached to her?”
“Not for a moment,” said she, fixing him boldly with her large green eyes.
He was silent a full minute. “Well, you are correct,” he brought out finally. “Miss Meredith is very pretty, and very sweet, but she is scarcely a match for me. You, Lady Caroline, are more in my line, for example.” With this he stopped and eyed her carefully with that bright beady glance Miss Meredith found so fascinating.
“Dear sir, I hope you are joking,” she said slowly.
Suspiciously undaunted, he assured her he was not.
“Then it is my unpleasant task to inform you that you, for example, are not at all in mine.” She had not quite given up on securing a promise from him that he would leave Amy Meredith alone, but she had to admit to herself it looked more doubtful every moment. Her judgement, moreover, was clouded by an increasing disgust with Mockabee. Apparently there was no length to which he would not go to irritate her.
Lord Mockabee answered her rebuff with nothing more than an incredulous sneer, as if to say, inclination bows to necessity, and if it were convenient you would find me attractive enough.
“In any case,” Caro resumed, at last despairing of a reply, “you admit that you have no serious attachment to Amy. Will you then be so good as not to encourage her admiration of you? I beg you will,” she forced herself to add. “She is extremely silly, and wilful, and may easily be hurt.”
“You require me to be unkind to her?”
“I request you simply to lea
ve her alone.”
The sitting-room was quiet for some moments.
“I came to Hampstead only to see you,” Mockabee brought out suddenly. “You are all that drew me here.”
Caro jumped from her chair, all the growing fury in her overflowing at once. “Impertinent!” she cried out vehemently. “Even if he had such a motive, no gentleman could ever say so.”
“You beg a favour strangely, dear ma’am,” Mockabee said icily. He still sat, though she stood, watching her with a wary, dangerous-looking expression. “I could swear that so far from imploring, you are actually angry with me.”
“I am angry with you, but that is not a reason for you to neglect your duty as a gentleman—towards Miss Meredith or me.”
“My duty as a gentleman?” he echoed mockingly. “Is this the Lady Caroline Wythe so widely famed for her unconventionality? So mannish in her pursuits? So free in her demeanour? The champion of liberality? The season’s loveliest eccentric?”
With each phrase Caroline’s wrath increased. The worst of it was that Mockabee was right, after a fashion. She had created and cultivated what really amounted to quite a wild character for herself. Her tobacco smoking, her solitary drives, her snuff taking, her calculated bluntness at London gatherings—all these, coupled particularly with Mockabee’s experience of her as a card-player, distinguished her from other gentlewomen, set her apart as a person to be dealt with not under the normal habits and laws of society but in some more original, less accepted manner. It was not fair in her to break the rules of social intercourse only to invoke them later, when they became convenient. Lord Mockabee was (in outward behaviour at least) no more ungentlemanly than she had been unladylike. He did not know that she gambled with him only to teach him a lesson, that all his losses would be returned to him intact; he did not know that she already regretted the scheme profoundly. Only she and Lady Beatrice—and Angela—were aware how calmly her eccentricities had been contrived, how little they reflected her true nature.
It was not until hours later, however, that these significant facts became clear and coherent in Caro’s thoughts; at this moment, they were no more than dim blurs. The only point she was acutely conscious of was that she had been misunderstood: the idea that she herself had engendered and fostered the misunderstanding had little reality. She spoke out of a deep, stinging sense of injustice to herself and snapped out, “If I were in fact a man I should challenge you to a duel. As it is I cannot do so; but you shall answer for this, depend upon it. Somehow you shall.” With these words she turned on her heel and left. She did not even see Sir Sidney Pettingill in the corridor, but walked directly past him on her way to her chamber. Poor Pettingill stood for five minutes rooted to the spot, wondering vainly if her failure to return his greeting had been meant for a snub, and if so why; and if not, how she could possibly have overlooked him. It made him feel very small indeed, and it was a comfort to him to find Lord Safford in the library shortly afterwards, and to engage with him in a stimulating discussion of the enforcement of the game laws.
Caroline meanwhile was shut into her bedchamber, pacing about in a fury, then flinging herself on the bed to cry. She was incensed by the memory of Mockabee’s words to her; but the recollection of hers to him brought painful frustration and remorse. What a dolt she had been to hurl that last threat at him! She had no means of carrying it out. It only made her appear an imbecile. Of course she could appeal to some gentleman who might champion her cause—Edgar Gilchrist would jump at such a chance to serve her, for example, or even Seabury…But what sort of a cause was it? As her passion tired itself out, leaving reflection in its wake, she began to realize it was a very muddy one at best, if indeed it could be called a cause at all. What had the baron done to her? Been forward; that was all. He had not attempted to touch her, had not accused her of anything he might not reasonably believe to be true. He had not insulted her. The more she examined their interview, the more she felt she had erred—not only on that day, but in all her dealings with Mockabee. If he had played a stupid trick, she ought to have ignored it. If he had declined to apologize for it, once she had been fool enough to bring it up, she ought either to have insisted on an explanation or declined to know him. Having failed to do either, but instead chusing some confused middle course, she ought never to have contemplated revenge on him. Having contemplated it, she ought never to have started to carry it out—and having started, ought not to finish. This was where reflection caught up with the present. Was it possible to reverse herself? she wondered dubiously. Lord Romby would be furious if she cried craven and deprived him of his games of brag. They had counted on at least three more before the fleecing could really be considered successful. Besides, it was Caro herself who had started the whole affair; to oblige her, in part at least, Romby had invited both Deatherage and Wolfus to become embroiled in a scheme that was far from wholesome. The mere planning of how to signal to one another—memorizing that folded hands meant a pair-royal, and leaning forward a high one, and leaning back a low one, and so many other details—all this had been extremely tedious. The old earl was certain to squawk if she bowed out prematurely—particularly since he had been playing with her money; and how much more so if she tried to persuade him not to find a replacement, but rather to curtail the games altogether?
No matter, she decided suddenly: it must be done. But immediately she came to this conclusion she felt it was not enough. Lord Mockabee’s losses from the first game must be restored to him, and—he really ought to be told what had happened. She reached the second half of this resolution with much more reluctance than the first. The money was nothing; no one had ever intended to keep it. But the confession of an aborted revenge was very different from the victorious unveiling she had formerly envisioned. Perhaps, she reconsidered, it would be enough simply to return his five hundred pounds; but how to achieve this was another question almost as puzzling as the morality of the first.
Dinner ended this solitary interlude, but before she rejoined the others Caroline had determined that the properest course of action was to take the whole business and lay it before Lady Beatrice. Caro had never taken counsel of anyone before save her brother, Lord Inlowe, since early childhood; this was consequently a quite revolutionary plan for her. Even Angela had never been asked to advise her, so thoroughly was her ladyship accustomed to independence. Lady Lillian Inlowe had felt positively slighted by her sister-in-law’s refusal to consult her, even in matters where the merest common sense dictated that Lillian must know more. What put it into Caroline’s head, at this late date, to bare her soul to Lady Beatrice was her extreme contrition—that and the knowledge that the marchioness was the very essence of practicality, and was certain to suggest a reasonable solution with a minimum of shocked outcry.
She could never have anticipated the response Lady Beatrice actually gave her though, for (when at last, just after mass on Sunday, she secured a private interview with her) the good old lady absolutely screamed with laughter. It began with a reddening of the already red face, grew gradually into a huge shaking of those well-cushioned sides, and ended in shrieks and tears. After a most frustrating interval, when Lady Beatrice could finally speak, Caroline was told that Lord Romby and Beatrice had perpetrated the exact same trick on a gentleman of their acquaintance some forty years before.
“Can this be true?” asked Caro, astonished. “Lord Romby never breathed a word of it!”
“It is gospel, my dear; believe me. My brother is too much a rascal to tell you, no doubt; he adores to make things difficult, you know. But we most certainly did fleece Lord James Barstone—may he rest in peace—forty years ago and more. Did it very well too, I may say,” she added, wiping her eyes with a corner of her handkerchief. “Took him for ten thousand pounds.”
“Ten thousand pounds! I assure you, I had in mind no ambitions to match that. My goal was two thousand, or less if need be.”
Lady Beatrice resoundingly pshawed this trifling sum.
“But why
did you and Lord Romby do it? Did you give the money back?” Caro pursued, all curiosity.
“Dear me, I hardly recall why, though it seems to me it was something to do with a cock-fight. As for giving the money back, certainly not. He owed it to one of us anyway; Romby, I guess.”
Lady Caroline felt somewhat vertiginous at the sudden revelation of this ancient crime. Though musty, it was still scandalous, and took a little getting used to. “I feel very silly now,” she said after a moment, “with my paltry five hundred pounds. You must think me a perfect ninnyhammer.”
“Oh phoo; in this thin-blooded day and age it is a wonder you attempted any scheme at all, gal. Why our little trick was nothing compared to Barstone’s revenge!”
“What did he do, ma’am?”
To her surprise, Lady Beatrice seemed suddenly agitated. She even stuttered a bit when she answered, “Well, now that I think of it I do not suppose I had best tell you my dear. Of course it is a very long time ago, but—allow me to assure you, in any case, that he succeeded very well in putting me in my place.”
Caroline would have liked to press, but she felt the discourtesy of it and refrained. Instead she brought the conversation back to her present situation vis-à-vis Mockabee, soliciting Lady Beatrice’s opinion of how she must act.
“First of all, it is ridiculous to consider revealing the plot to him,” said the old lady briskly. “When you have seen as much of the world as I have you will know the value of keeping your mouth closed as much as possible. Certainly one ought never to open it to incriminate oneself!”
“But I feel I ought to do some kind of penance—” Caroline began weakly.
“Fustian,” was the reply. “Even if it were wise, or good, a confession is hardly practical in this case. How could you confess without implicating my brother, and Deatherage, and Wolfus?”
This difficulty had not yet presented itself to Caroline. Its introduction now made her realize how selfish her desire to own her sins before the baron really was. She murmured her acquiescence and reverted to the question of the money.
