“No.” She chuckled. “At one time, perhaps, it might have been. But I have learnt that life is seldom like the opera, everyone very, very good, or very, very evil, altogether in love, or altogether in hatred. We are a mixture of everything.”
“Just so. So you can listen with perfect equanimity to me when I say that yes, a little of my old admiration is there when I see her, but Anna, even if you had never come into my life, I would not have returned here alone to marry her. She broke my trust, and though I could admire her, I could never love her. I am sorry to have to say it. Perhaps Dr. Blythe would speak a sermon against me if he knew.”
She was not yet ready for jokes. “I wish I could find a way to get her to see that I mean her no ill, that we might begin again in peace. We would all be more comfortable.”
“We will all be more comfortable if she leaves my house.”
“You would not force her to return to the Groves?” Anna raised her head to look at him earnestly.
“No, no, she don’t deserve that. Her mother . . . well, least said, soonest mended. No, while you were in there dealing with her, I was sitting here deep in thought. Perhaps I ought to offer her a season in London as well. I did not yet tell you, but one of my letters this morning was notice from the Admiralty of my prize money for the action at Cape Trafalgar. It is not a fortune, but if I gave it to her, she could go to London and return to the smart set. I think she misses London, and if we get great good luck, some likely fellow with sufficient money and title will fall in love with her beautiful face, and take her off to his castle. As far from Yorkshire as possible, I hope.”
“Sending her to London is a fine idea,” she said. “I think she misses it, from a few things she has said.”
“Oh, that much is plain from all those bills I have been paying. If I give her that money she may be as tonnish as she likes, and if the result is she quits this house, we can turn those corner rooms into guest chambers or, who knows? One day they might be needed for another purpose.”
Anna had meant to wait, but she turned her face into his cravat, and murmured, “Perhaps sooner than you think.”
He straightened up, put his hands on her shoulders, and moved her so he could turn his good eye to her face. “Is that what I think it means?”
“Perhaps so,” she said, blushing fiery red.
He laughed, and hugged her, but gently, his mind ranging beyond the startling idea of fatherhood to his house, his estate, and . . .
“And that is another thing,” Henry said. “I am sorry to have to admit this, because the squire was always my friend. For a time I regarded him as the father I never had in my own, but age has brought me to the reluctant conclusion that his heart is as sound as it ever was, but his intellects are not up to snuff. At least, not as a likely justice of the peace.”
“Will he not bring his good heart to the task?”
“If only that were so! But I have been having to deal with him extensively on the question of enclosure, and some parish affairs that would be long and tedious to explain, the more because I am only beginning to comprehend them myself. If I believed he could bring a sense of justice with his good intent, I would throw myself behind him, but especially when he is in liquor—which is oftener than anyone knows, not that I blame him—he has a lamentable habit of agreeing with everything the last person said. Most often his wife. Would you wish for Mrs. Squire to preside over questions of justice?”
“No,” Anna said on an outward breath of horror.
“Just so.”
She turned to him. “You have found a better candidate?”
He colored a little. “My dear, you are looking at the candidate. Rackham insists, Ashburn too, Colby agrees with them, and even Aubigny roused himself sufficiently from his arcane studies to take me aside after a meeting recently between complainants in a question between certain town interests and a farmer, to beg me to apply. They promise to help me to it, and though I still am ignorant, I am discovering in dealing with the estate that it is not so very different from commanding a ship.”
She looked into his face wonderingly. “But would that not require you to stop here, and not return to the sea?”
“Can you tolerate an irascible one-eyed man underfoot?” he replied, taking her face into his hands to kiss her.
“I might,” she said, “if you give me a barouche-landau, a house in London, a parure of diamonds, and two dozen shirts.”
“You may have the shirts,” he retorted, and then his answering smile faded. “Along with the letter promising the prize money, the First Lord offered me an excellent sixth-rate recently bought into service, should my eyesight return. If this had happened three months ago, I would have closed with the offer at once. But all this morning, I have endeavored to discover when it was that this house, and all that appertained, became a home that I could not bear to leave. Look out there.” He pointed through the window.
Anna gazed out, her eyes widening in astonishment. Sometime in the past few days, the melted snow and the mud had changed. Everywhere she looked grew tender green shoots of grass, and the trees fuzzed softly with green buds. “My mother was right,” she whispered softly. “It is green. It is a wonderful green.”
“Oh, you have seen nothing yet. Just wait until summer. I have fallen in love with this land again, and this house, but that is because you are at the center of it. I love you, Anna.” He looked down into her face.
“Je t’aime, Henri.” And she repeated it in Italian, Neapolitan, and Spanish, kissing him after each.
“Here’s an idea,” he said, twining his fingers through hers. “We’ll get Blythe to let us marry again, this time properly. Even if everyone stares. My mother would love all the doings, and you shall have a ring that you have chosen.”
“You think our marriage was a mere rehearsal, then?” She smiled.
“I do. You are now to play the proper role of a bride, and a lady of rank, while I strut about in my new role as bridegroom, one-eyed baron, and justice of the peace. And just as we accustom ourselves to our lofty status, we will be thrown into new roles, as parents, and so we shall dance the new pattern. Did not Shakespeare say that all the world is a stage?”
She laughed, and made unspoken answer.
Copyright & Credits
Rondo Allegro
Sherwood Smith
Book View Café 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61138-428-4
Copyright © 2014 Sherwood Smith
Cover illustration © 2014 by Vicente Lopez y Portana
Production Team:
Project Coördinator: Sherwood Smith
Cover Design: Pati Nagle
Copy Editor: Tadiana Jones
Proofreader: Phyllis Radford
Formatter: Vonda N. McIntyre
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Sherwood Smith writes SF, fantasy, and romance.
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DANSE DE LA FOLIE
Free Sample Chapter
Sherwood Smith
Book View Café Edition
August 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61138-193-1
Copyright © 2012 Sherwood Smith
www.bookviewcafe.com
ONE
It is said that the quadrille was first a military exercise performed by pairs of horsemen before the admiring court. Only later did it migrate to France in the form of a lively dance performed by two couples in squares.
The more stately quadrille that came to England was still a few years off when my story begins; imagine the opening strains playing a sprightly air in celebration of the hunting season in the first year of the new nineteenth century, deep in the county of Hampshire.
My first heroine, the Honorable Miss Clarissa Harlowe, smiled to discover with the morning post the new edition of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Poems. She looked forward to taking advantage of the last gasp of summery weather by reading in the garden, but before she could excuse herself, the butler entered the ladies’ breakfast room with a summons from his lordship for his eldest daughter.
Lord Chadwick seldom interfered in the lives of his offspring. Clarissa’s step-mother and her half-siblings looked surprised—everyone exhibited surprise except Aunt Sophia, who made a business of folding her napkin, with enough smugness in her countenance to serve as warning.
Clarissa went straight to the library, a room only used for interviews. Her father stood before the fire, a tall, fair-haired, hawk-nosed man dressed by preference in riding clothes. Not ordinarily given to any pursuits that, as he put it, “rattled his brain,” he eyed his eldest daughter with brow-wrinkled bafflement.
“Here, girl,” he greeted her, “that’s a fine gown.”
Clarissa smiled a little at the spurious compliment, and curtseyed. “Thank you, Papa. You sent for me?”
“Now, girl—Clarissa—you’re deuced—ah, very modest, which is what everyone wants in a girl, and you’ve prodigiously shining parts.”
To hear herself thus complimented for precisely those intellectual qualities she’d been scolded for by her aunt might have inspired another smile, except Clarissa now suspected she was not going to like the intent of this interview.
“Shining parts, reading, and the like,” Lord Chadwick added, with a vague wave of his riding whip toward the undisturbed books resting on the shelves around them.
He eyed his daughter’s inquiring expression, harrumphed, and took refuge in defense. “Your mother was always buried in a book. Which is why I let your grandmother the duchess pick your governesses, though monstrous interfering I found it, and as for that sour-faced French one, hey day! What a fright that woman put me in every time she poked her nose into a room. As if your step-mama couldn’t have found a better . . . well! What’s past is past, and I don’t mean to be criticizing her grace.”
For a moment an expression akin to fear furrowed his features, as if the redoubtable dowager were listening through the keyhole, and he hastened on. “But here I thought it settled that you would make a match with the Wilburfolde boy. Good thing on all sides. Doubtless your grandmother thinks so as well, if only we knew,” he added somewhat hastily.
Ordinarily Clarissa would have been diverted. She alone of her family was very fond of her awe-inspiring grandmother, but now with her future at stake she turned the subject back, asking quietly, “Has Lord Wilburfolde called on you to that end, Papa?”
Lord Chadwick took a couple of hasty strides across the room, then paused to kick at a log in the fireplace with the tip of a glossy boot. “Yes, with his Mama. Yesterday, while you and the girls was at the vicar’s. Made his offer, with prodigious punctilio. I said I’d speak to you, and send your answer over this afternoon.”
“Did you inform him that I have stated that I have no present wish to marry, Papa?”
“I did. Lady Wilburfolde put that down to modesty. Said she likes that in a lady. Wouldn’t want anyone at The Castle who was not bien élevée, and you were the finest young lady in the parish, and there was a lot more on that order. Here, you don’t mean to refuse, do you?” At Clarissa’s nod, he frowned. “I can’t write that! Devil take it, what a monstrous position to put me in.”
“Papa,” Clarissa said softly, “when I was small you promised I should not be made to marry anyone I did not favor.”
“Aye, and so I promised all you girls.” He flung his riding whip on a side table and ran his fingers through his thinning blond locks. “But you know, you’ve got to marry someone, and out of all my pack of brats I thought you was the least headstrong and had the most sense. What’s against young Wilburfolde?”
“Nothing at all,” Clarissa said, though she was thinking of Lady Wilburfolde. But it seemed indelicate as well as impolite to refuse a gentleman because one had taken a strong dislike to his mother. “We’ve scarcely met above twice. But I was serious when I said that I do not wish to marry.”
Her father eyed her with baffled exasperation; the truth was, of all his pack of brats she caused him the least trouble. She wasn’t a Diamond like the rest, so one would have thought she’d be glad to find a leg-shackle ready to hand. “Every girl says that,” he replied. “Until she’s asked. The females are all agreed it’s a good match.”
Clarissa suppressed the urge to retort that they could marry him. She apologized, temporized, and endured the short-lived storm of her father’s temper, for she knew that it arose out of vexation, not real anger. Her Papa was too fond of his family (and too indolent) to remain angry long.
Clarissa was dismissed to resume her breakfast while Lord Chadwick went out to ride his temper into cheer again. As expected, her aunt scolded with all the fretful vehemence of the person whose cherished project has been smashed. Aunt Sophia’s tangled sentences about gratitude, expectations, and the care older and wiser heads took for heedless youth showed no sign of coming to a natural end, moving Clarissa’s pretty step-mother, who cherished peace even more than Papa, to murmur, “Clarissa, dear, did I not understand that you were agreed on this marriage?”
“Not I, Mama,” Clarissa replied firmly.
Lady Chadwick blinked, then turned to look at Aunt Sophia. “Well! Odd, how one gets these impressions . . . wasn’t it you, Mrs. Latchmore, who said so?”
Clarissa kept quiet. She knew that her aunt had been busy on her behalf, and while she sympathized with her aunt—no one could wish to end up an indigent widow, living on her younger brother’s charity—she was not willing to sacrifice her life so that her aunt might make herself out to be a matchmaker, a person of interest in county society.
Aunt Sophia raised her voice to the pitch of righteous anger. “What, pray, is amiss with Lord Wilburfolde, that you should be so nice in your tastes at your age?”
Clarissa was caught. She could not, especially before the wide eyes of her young half-sisters, declare that she had yet to meet a gentleman with whom she wished to share anything more intimate than a book.
“I do not wish to be married,” was all she said.
o0o
Two months later, Clarissa reflected on how she ought to have foreseen that a young lady setting herself up in opposition to her betters would cause her aunt to ring such a peal that Papa would take steps to restore order to his house.
Aunt Sophia ought to have foreseen that her brother would remove all the causes of contention.
Clarissa had always wanted to travel, but the difficulties in France had made that impossible. Papa told Clarissa that she could visit her maternal aunt while peace was talked of, and told his sister that she would be delighted to accompany her niece.
So here they were ensconced on her Papa's yacht in the middle of winter weather.
Aunt Sophia put her cup down with a clatter.
“Clari
ssa!” Her voice sounded like the last, quivering gasp of a dying Christian Martyr. “My love,” she added, clasping her hands fervently to her impressive, lace-ruched bosom.
The drama of this gesture was missed by Clarissa, who was gazing out the broad stern windows at the last of the harbor, diminishing behind them.
“Clar-issa!”
The thrilling moan on the first syllable once again evoked arenas and raging lions, but the pettish rise of issa made Clarissa think of a shed full of squabbling hens.
The older woman lay back on the cushions, assuming the look of patient suffering that she had demonstrated before her mirror when her vexatious brother insisted she must go on this horrid jaunt.
But Clarissa saw only that her aunt’s claim of faintness accorded a trifle oddly with the rich crimson of her plump cheeks. “Your pardon, Aunt?”
“Oh, Clarissa,” Aunt Sophia moaned.
“I’m sorry, Aunt Sophia. I am looking forward to traveling, and seeing a little of the world.”
“In winter, with French revolutionaries hiding in every bush? I just pray we do not end up on the guillotine!”
“I do not believe that the French would use the guillotine against English ladies.” Clarissa leaned forward earnestly. “Since peace is all but declared, this is the only opportunity to travel that has come my way, I am grateful that Papa furnished this opportunity. If you are ill, dear aunt, you could return home. I really believe that my father’s steward, my maids, and the men who sail the yacht, will see me safely across the Channel into Holland, and Aunt Beaumarchais’ hands.”
Aunt Sophia gave a loud, comprehensive sniff, which effectively expressed her disdain for this host of nominal persons. “I would be Failing in my Duty if I did not see you safely there.” The capital letters were clearly enunciated. “No, I do not wish to go, but no sacrifice is too large for my family! I was taught that a true lady always performs her duty. Just as I did when my sainted Papa made a match for me with my sainted Latchmore, though I hardly knew him—had not met him above twice, and that in company.”
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