Animating Maria (4 page)

Maria was about to say huffily that she had no interest in engaging the Duke of Berham’s affections but remembered just in time her plan to ensnare him and then repulse him. Instead she said, ‘His grace seems too lofty and proud to consider any young lady good enough for him.’

‘The way I see it,’ said Miss Sunningdale earnestly, ‘is that he is quite old. In his thirties. That is the time when bachelors suddenly decide to marry. One has only to be there at the right time, if you see what I mean.’

Maria grinned. ‘Then let us hope this is the right time for you too, Miss Sunningdale.’

They turned about to walk back to the inn. Miss Spiggs hesitated. She longed to have a comfortable gossip with Miss Sunningdale’s maid and yet felt she would be lowering herself by doing so. But both Maria and Miss Sunningdale were walking at a brisk pace and so she contented herself by limping behind and pretending the Sunningdale maid did not exist.

‘Are you bound for London as well?’ asked Miss Sunningdale.

‘Yes,’ said Maria.

‘With your parents?’

‘No, I am being sent to the Tribble sisters in Holles Street.’

‘I have heard of them,’ remarked Miss Sunningdale cautiously. ‘But you look like a terribly nice lady to me.’

‘Which means?’

‘The Tribble sisters advertise their services. They say they can manage difficult misses.’

‘Oh,’ said Maria in a worried voice. ‘Is that generally known?’

‘Yes, for they are highly successful. But there has been murder done in that house, and all sorts of exciting mayhem. I do envy you. Are you very wicked?’ she asked hopefully.

‘Not in the slightest,’ retorted Maria. ‘My parents do not feel up to the task of puffing me off and so engaged the Tribbles. That is all.’

‘Pity. I have never met anyone wicked.’

‘And do you want to?’

‘Oh, yes. Life is so very dull. Nothing exciting ever happens.’

‘This is an adventure,’ pointed out Maria. ‘You are stranded in an inn with a handsome duke.’

‘Of course you are right. Perhaps I am just stupid. Perhaps all sorts of wildly exciting things happen to me, only I do not notice them.’

They walked amicably together to the inn and Maria proposed they should have some refreshment in the coffee room. She dismissed Miss Spiggs with relief.

As they sat down together, Maria wondered what Miss Sunningdale really looked like. The poke of her bonnet was so deep, it was like peering down a tunnel.

‘I feel we shall become friends,’ said Maria’s new companion. ‘You may call me Frederica.’

‘And I am Maria. Tell me, Frederica, what do you plan to wear to this ball?’

‘I have a very beautiful gown. Pale-blue muslin. Do you think the duke will like pale blue?’

‘I am sure he will,’ said Maria.

‘The trouble is,’ said Frederica, taking little birdlike sips of coffee and then putting the cup down and staring at Maria earnestly, ‘I am not up to the weight of the duke. My father is a rector and although we are going to stay with my godmother, Lady Bentley, who is very grand, I do not have a very large dowry.’

‘The duke is surely very rich.’

‘Indeed, yes, Maria. But when did even a rich aristocrat marry anyone without much money?’

‘I do not know. My parents are not of the first stare, or,’ added Maria gloomily, ‘of the second.’

‘Never mind,’ said Frederica. ‘There are so many gentlemen here and so few ladies that we shall be the belles of the ball. Good gracious! Here is the duke himself.’

Maria looked up quickly. The duke, accompanied by two gentlemen, had just walked into the coffee room. He was taller and grander than Maria remembered. He was wearing a curly brimmed beaver on his head and had a many-caped coat slung about his shoulders. He talked for a few moments to his companions and glanced about the coffee room. His eye fell on the two girls and he recognized Maria.

But his gaze was cold and indifferent. He did not even nod. He turned about and left the room with the two men following him.

‘Oh, dear,’ said Frederica bleakly. ‘Not much hope there.’

Maria nodded and drank her coffee while inwardly fuming. Then a smile curled her lips. He could hardly avoid her that evening. There just weren’t enough ladies to go around.

After dinner, Maria was helped into her ball-gown by Betty. Betty was in raptures over the transformation but Miss Spiggs held up her hands in shock. The neckline was too low, she said. And all that green silk embellishment! So common!

‘Stow it,’ said Maria with a bluntness worthy of Miss Amy Tribble. She twisted this way and that in front of the glass. The new neckline of the gown was edged with green silk leaves which she had cut out of the green silk gown. The same leaves formed a band about the sleeves and decorated the hem between the flounces. Betty arranged the green silk roses Maria had made in her hair and then clasped a necklace of coral about her neck.

There came a great commotion from the courtyard outside. Maria went to the window, opened it and leaned out. Carriage after carriage was arriving in the courtyard below and ladies were descending, beautiful and groomed ladies, expensively gowned ladies, dipping their feathered heads as they climbed down from the carriages, lifting their skirts high above the mud of the yard with a prancing step, like circus ponies, thought Maria.

Maria drew her head in and rang the bell. After some time, a breathless chambermaid answered its summons and to Maria’s questions replied that the Dowager Duchess of Berham had been entertaining a large party of friends and they had all decided to drive over and attend the ball. A great matchmaker was the old duchess, said the chambermaid. She never gave up trying to find a bride for her son and kept inviting some of the fairest ladies in the land in the hope of persuading her son to marry one of them.

Maria thanked her and then sat down. She smoothed down her gown with a nervous hand. Was it too provincial? Would these grand ladies recognize a provincial gown hurriedly made over?

The sheer idea of the duke even asking her for one dance now seemed ridiculous.

‘I think it is time we left,’ said Miss Spiggs. She was wearing a mud-coloured gown and a pleated cap of depressing grey georgette. Maria thought her companion looked as inspiring as a rainy day.

‘Where is the diamond pin I gave you?’ asked Maria.

‘I put it away safely,’ said Miss Spiggs. ‘Someone might snatch it from my bosom at the ball.’

Maria giggled at the thought of anyone being bold enough even to approach Miss Spiggs’s formidable bosom. Miss Spiggs’s breasts were pushed up so high by her whalebone corsets that she looked as if her chin were resting on a mud-coloured pillow.

They made their way downstairs to the assembly room at the back of the inn. Banks of hothouse flowers from the duke’s estate scented the air. Masses of candles were blazing and a large fire had been lit at either end of the room.

Not only the duke and his mother’s friends were present along with the stranded travellers at the inn, but everyone else from the villages round about. It was to be a real country ball, run on democratic lines that would have shocked London society had it taken place at, say, Almack’s. A country dance was in progress. The major-domo was calling out cheerfully, ‘Cross hands and down the middle,’ and a flushed and sweating farmer was leading an elegant and aristocratic lady down the set.

Maria looked about for Frederica Sunningdale but did not see her.

Then she felt a hand on her arm. ‘Maria,’ said a voice. ‘It is not so very frightening after all. There are quite a lot of very common people here.’

Maria turned about. Without her poke-bonnet, Frederica was revealed as a very pretty girl. She had a glossy mop of jet-black curls, wide blue eyes, and a neat figure.

‘Let us find somewhere to sit down,’ said Maria, ‘before this set ends.’

‘Come and meet my parents,’ urged Frederica. ‘I think we should forget about the duke, do not you? So many grand and beautiful ladies!’

‘You are right,’ said Maria with a sigh. ‘I doubt if he knows we exist.’

*   *   *

‘Who is that very beautiful girl over there?’ said the duke’s friend, Lord Alistair Beaumont. He swung his quizzing-glass on its long chain in Maria’s direction.

‘Do you find her beautiful, Beau?’ asked the duke, raising his eyebrows. ‘I have met her. Name of Kendall. Farouche and noisy and pert. Quite vulgar.’

‘Oh, I should never have asked you,’ mourned Beau. ‘You find fault with every female in Christendom. Well, I am going to find out for myself.’

He moved away and shortly could be seen bowing over Maria and asking her to dance. The duke frowned. Miss Kendall had refused his charitable and magnanimous invitation to dinner. She needed a set-down and it looked as if she was not going to get one. Beau was tall and broad-shouldered, and extremely handsome. Of course, Miss Kendall did look remarkably beautiful in that splendid gown. If one did not know her, then one might make the folly of accounting her a diamond of the first water. He frowned awfully. Why had she refused his invitation to dinner? She was a nobody. He had made it his business to find out about her. No one who was anyone had heard of the Kendalls of Bath. Yes, he had behaved badly by kissing her, but surely his invitation to dinner was apology enough.

Lord Alistair Beaumont, Beau to his friends in particular and to London society in general, was intrigued by Miss Kendall. She was so graceful, so sensuous, and yet she had a dreamy faraway look in her eyes. Maria was still plotting revenge on the duke, but Beau did not know that.

It was not possible to engage in much conversation during the complicated set of a noisy country dance, although it went on for half an hour, but when the dance was over, he begged to be allowed to take her into supper and was surprised by the slight look of dismay in her eyes and the short hesitation before she politely accepted his invitation. Beau, like his friend the duke, was used to being chased by women rather than having to chase them himself. He did not know Maria had been hoping for an invitation from the duke.

He next asked Frederica to dance. Frederica accepted gracefully. Her last partner had been the village butcher who had trodden on her toes, and they were still aching.

The duke, at last mindful of his duties, invited the vicar’s wife to dance, and when that dance was over he moved about the guests seated around the room, talking to first one and then the other.

He found himself growing increasingly annoyed with Miss Kendall. Men were now vying with each other for dances with her, and then he saw Beau moving forward to lead her into supper.

His partner for supper was his own mother. He felt very old and stuffy.

‘Who’s that fetching gal with Beaumont?’ asked his mother, her faded eyes peering across the supper room.

‘A Miss Kendall, Mama.’

‘Interesting-looking gal. Out of the common way. Might do for Beau. Time he settled down. Kendall? Kendall? Pushy couple of mushrooms accosted me in the Pump Room in Bath. Bragging on about their beautiful daughter and how they were paying a fortune to them Tribble twins to puff her off.’

‘The Tribbles, Mama? The sponsors of the difficult and impossible? What is up with Miss Kendall?’

‘Don’t know,’ said his mother vaguely, turning over in her mind all the Bath scandals she had heard. ‘Oh, I think I have it. Ain’t a virgin. Lost it to Harry Templar at Comfreys’ hunt ball. In the pantry, of all places. Wouldn’t think there would be enough room.’

The duke leaned back in his chair, a smile curling his lips. So the dewy-fresh and dreamy Miss Kendall was not what she appeared. And to think he had felt guilty for having kissed her.

He hoped for her sake her parents had a great deal of money. Even the famous Tribbles would find it hard to marry off a young girl who had shamefully and openly lost her virginity.

‘She told me she was engaged to a ship’s captain,’ said the duke. ‘If she is already engaged, why does she need a Season?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ said his mother. ‘Maybe the captain heard the scandal and cried off.’

Beau, the duke noticed, was gazing adoringly at Miss Kendall. His friend would have to be warned. The duke was apt to take care of his friends with the same patronizing kindness as he took care of his tenants. So far he had never done anything to interfere in Beau’s life, which was possibly why Beau was one of his very few close friends.

After supper, Maria was surrounded by a crowd of men begging her for the next dance. Beau shrugged ruefully and walked away to join the duke.

‘Step aside with me a little,’ murmured the duke. ‘There is something I must tell you.’

They strolled together out of the assembly room and into the quietness of the hall.

‘What is it?’ asked Beau lightly. ‘You look deuced serious.’

‘I must put you on your guard against Miss Kendall.’

‘I think you should stop right there,’ said Beau angrily. ‘You said she was common and vulgar and she is neither. She is one of the most enchanting girls I have ever met.’

‘Mama heard that Miss Kendall lost her virginity in the pantry at the Comfreys’ hunt ball. She is being sent to the Tribbles.’

‘Fustian! Who are the Tribbles?’

‘You are out of touch.’

‘I have been travelling abroad, as you know.’

‘They are spinster ladies who reside in London and charge a vast sum to bring out so-called difficult girls.’

‘I cannot believe you,’ said Beau. ‘Oh, not about the Tribbles, but about her not being a virgin.’

‘I am not in the way of relating vicious slander, and neither is my mother,’ said the duke.

‘No, I suppose not,’ said Beau gloomily.

‘Cheer up, my friend. If she is so careless with her favours, perhaps you may have them without marriage.’

Beau shook his head sadly. But when they returned to the ballroom, they arrived on the scene just as Maria had decided to begin to flirt to see if she could attract the duke’s attention.

Beau saw the roguish looks she was casting at her partner and his heart sank. Still, she was such a beautiful creature that the least he could do was to get a kiss from her.

But he could not get near Maria for the rest of that evening, she was so besieged by partners.