Lady John (7 page)

They rolled and Guiles took the first move. Olivia, with a
lucky roll next, was able to clear his home field and take an unguarded point.
Guiles smiled at her and rolled again; Olivia was conscious that their activity
was the focus of much attention.

“Do you not play the back this time, my lady? Then I think I
must do so.” Guiles handed her the dice and awaited her play.

As the game progressed Olivia began to take the advantage.
Guiles, trapped in her home field with two points still out of the game, made a
poor roll and protested comically.

“Tschk, carefully, Guiles.” The voice which cut the silence
was Menwin’s, cool and amused, almost insulting in its tone. “Your opponent has
all the wiles of her sex. Should she fail to take the game she can smile and
plead feminine confusion until she makes herself out the winner. Women are
adroit at saying one thing and doing another.”

Everyone round the backgammon table turned to look at him,
and the Duchess and Mrs. Martingale, seated across the room chatting in subdued
voices, ceased to talk. Lord Christopher regarded his friend with amazement.

‘‘Come on, Matt, don’t spoil sport. If my sister plays the
game well, she plays the game well.”

“Precisely what I meant,” Menwin said carefully.

“Can he be foxed?” Lady Susannah muttered audibly to her
husband.

“I beg your pardon if I have disturbed your concentration,
Lady John. If you lose the game you may blame it on me.” Menwin bowed slightly
in Olivia’s direction.

“But you have not disturbed me one whit, sir.” Olivia
smiled, but her voice was icy. “I should scorn to place blame on another, in
any case. Your roll, sir?” She offered the dice to Guiles, and if her hand
shook slightly as she did so none thought fit to mention it.

“I never met a woman who was true but one,” Menwin said
lightly, with the air of one quoting from an authority. “And she lied.”

“But how unfortunate for you, Menwin,” Lady Susannah drawled
repressively, and Kit came up behind his guest to lead him a bit away from the
crowd.

“What’s come over you, Matt? I’ve never seen you the worse
for your wine before.”

“I’m not jug-bitten, Kit,” Menwin said ruefully. “I beg your
pardon, and your mother’s as well, if you will convey it to her. I don’t intend
to explain any of my behavior, except to say that I did not expect to see Miss
Martingale—I beg your pardon, Lady John—again. I was rather surprised.”

“Must you needs include the entire party in your
startlement, gudgeon?” Kit prodded. “May I take your apology to Olivia as well?”

“Surely, surely. Say something pretty to her by all means,”
Menwin said sarcastically. “Tell her how greatly I regret my bad manners. That’s
true enough. I think I had as well retire now, while everyone thinks I’m merely
foxed. And Kit, I think I shall have urgent business in London tomorrow
morning. Sorry to behave in such an idiotish fashion, but it’s for the best.”

Behind them came the sound of muted applause: Olivia had won
her game. Menwin wheeled on his heel and left the room.

“I cannot conceive of what has come over him,” the Duchess
admitted some minutes later. “I have never known the boy to be deliberately
provocative before. And as for you, Livvy—” she began forcefully.

“I know, I was no better, answering him in such a fashion. I
beg you to believe I am fully conscious of my transgressions, ma’am. But now,
might I retire? All this brangling has me quite knocked up. If you like,” she
added conciliatorily, “I’ll talk with you more of this tomorrow.”

Without having the appearance of a cruel and unfeeling
hostess the Duchess could not easily deny Olivia’s request. She gave her
permission sharply, irritated to be so balked. “But if you think to make up a
story to tell me on the morrow, love, you had as well forget it. I shall know
if you do. Now, go along and get some sleep.”

Lord Menwin rose early the next morning and was gone from
Catenhaugh before any of the party there had risen, much to the disgruntlement
of his valet and the amazement of his groom. He made the trip from
Cambridgeshire to London in something under four hours, which breakneck pace
allowed him to avoid thinking of Catenhaugh, Brussels, or the quick sting of
surprise and happiness he had felt in meeting Olivia Temperer, which had been
as quickly followed by cold anger.

Roberts, the groom, remarked that his Lordship was in
remarkably poor temper.

When Menwin’s phaeton drew up before his house in Hill
Street and Roberts took the ribbons, Menwin made straight for his office with
directions to the butler that he did not wish to be disturbed. Five minutes
later, finding nothing upon his desk but bills and notes from his grandfather,
he would have been glad of any interruption, and thought seriously of
countermanding his orders in hopes that some distracting business would come
up. None did, however, and faced with the choice of brooding over his own
behavior at Catenhaugh and dealing with his mail, Menwin opted for the latter.

Two polite but inexorable requests for payments from his
father’s creditors. Three polite and not yet so desperate pleas from his own
tradesmen. A note from a friend inviting him to a gaming party. And the letter
from the Earl of Mardries. Menwin hesitated some minutes before plucking up
that missive and reading it. It cannot be said that the contents cheered him,
although it was but an invitation to dine, or rather, a command for his
presence at his earliest convenience. “I’d as well to get it over with,” Menwin
thought grimly, and wrote a short note of reply in which he promised to do
himself the honor of calling upon the Earl and Countess that evening. He was in
the midst of signing, blotting, and sealing the note when Brigham, the agent he
had inherited with his father’s business, rapped nervously on the door and
craved admission.

“Forgive me for troubling you, m’lord. But as you had
returned to Town I thought I might bring one or two things to your attention.”

His one or two things appeared to be a sheaf of accounts,
which Menwin eyed without enthusiasm. “Well, what new debts of my father’s have
you discovered now?”

Brigham exchanged a look of sympathy with his employer. “Only
a few, my lord, but what with some late debts from your brother’s estate—”

“Damnation, am I to be saddled with Richard’s debts too?”
Menwin barked. The agent, a timid man who, to do him justice, had tried
unavailingly to curb the extravagances of the late Viscount and his older son,
leaned away from Menwin’s wrath. “No man, for God’s sake, I’m not angry with
you. You have done an excellent job of keeping me out of the poorhouse these
last twelve months. Had I any fortune to speak of, I would reward you from it.”

“Things are not in such desperate straights, my lord,”
Brigham said diffidently. “Granted, you are not in a position to make
indentures upon your income to any great degree—”

Menwin tossed the bills he had received that morning to the
agent, who picked them up, read them, and smiled a peculiar, sourish sort of
smile.. “Your father was used to the very best, my lord.”

“It would have been better had he learned to compromise his
tastes just a trifle,” Menwin agreed sardonically. “Now, listen Brigham. You
have hemmed and hawed and tried to make me feel that matters were not so dark
as they appeared. Do you have any basis for that belief, or are you trying to
soften the blow?”

Brigham temporized. “My lord, you understand how the estate
has been set up?”

“I know that I am next thing to a pauper,” Menwin replied
evenly. “How bad is it, and what must I do to recover myself?”

Brigham studied his master for a moment or two, as if
determining whether unvarnished truth would engender as much wrath in his
present employer as it had in the past one. “It’s bad enough, my lord,” he said
at last. “Not but what you can rally again if you wish. Your late father was in
the habit of spending as he liked, with very little regard to what monies were
available. If you were to pay all his debts, all your debts, and those debts of
Richard Polry’s which have been forwarded to you as guarantor, it would, I
fear, take up your income entirely for the next three years or so. That is, of
course, assuming that you lived entirely by other means and accrued no new
debts to add to the total of those outstanding.”

Menwin glared angrily at the handsome portrait of his father
that adorned the wall opposite his desk. “About £25,000, is it?”

“But you need not, indeed, you cannot be expected to take
such an action. Most of your creditors will be happy to wait for payment with
only a small token to assure themselves of your Lordship’s intentions. In six
or seven years, with the assistance of several of the moneylenders, you could
be free of all encumbrances. That is, if you can stomach living at half your
income during that time.”

Six years made up a fifth of Menwin’s age; what Brigham
considered so eminently suitable a solution sounded like imprisonment to him. “Completely
free?” he asked at last. “I should dislike to find that I was still owing some
slippery cents-per-center a monkey in back interest.”

“Not if I handle the business for you, my lord,” Brigham
assured him. “I think you will find that most of those gentlemen would be very accommodating
to your Lordship.”

“They might well,” Menwin agreed. “They must know my family
intimately. And I suspect they are all waiting for me to succeed to the
Earldom. My grandfather’s estate could swallow my father’s debts and never
notice the lack.”

Brigham allowed, a trifle cagily, that this might well be
so. The interview continued a little while longer, while Mr. Brigham detailed
his current management of Menwin’s accounts, requested his signature on several
papers, and left assuring him that matters were by no means bleak. When the
agent was gone, Menwin relapsed into brooding silence again. There was nothing
for it, he decided at last, but to go to his grandfather and lay the case
before him. The thought of living on half his income did not scare Menwin, but
the idea of borrowing heavily from the moneylenders did, despite all Brigham’s
assurances. A talk with his grandfather would earn him a thumping scold in
which phrases such as “in my day” and “young men with no sense of what they owe
their families” featured largely; Menwin was sufficiently well acquainted with
his grandsire to believe that no amount of logic, not even the fact that his
personal debts were less than a tenth of the whole mess, would mitigate the
tongue-lashing. And of course, after he endured the lecture there was no
guarantee that Lord Mardries would decide to give him any assistance at all.

The more he considered these matters, the more tempted
Menwin was to go round to one of the clubs, or to some hell, and drink himself
into a state unsuitable for his grandmother’s drawing room. The only good thing
about a consideration of his financial affairs, he concluded dourly, was that
it drove the subject of Olivia Temperer from his mind. He was determined to
remain angry with her, and only now wished that she had not looked so damnedly
pretty. Pretty in mourning worn for John Temperer, he reminded himself, and
that was enough to fuel his anger at her again. It was safer to think of his
debts.

At seven thirty punctually Menwin, starkly handsome in full
evening dress of black superfine, presented himself in Montagu Square for his
grandparents’ inspection. He had timed his arrival to a nicety, reckoning that
to arrive too early would give the Earl an opportunity to begin his scold; that
to arrive too late would put him in a worse temper; whereas to arrive precisely
at dinner time meant that the party must eat and engage in civilized
conversation for an hour or more before his grandfather could come to scold
him. By that time Menwin hoped that wine and a good dinner would have taken the
edge off the Earl’s ill temper.

He was surprised to find that he was not the only visitor to
Polry House. When announced in the sitting room Menwin bowed gracefully to his
grandmother, greeted his grandfather, and noted with dismay that his Aunt
Chloris was part of the party. Since Chloris Bellingside had the happy knack of
keeping his grandsire in a perpetual state of ill humor, Menwin regarded her
presence there as something like a curse. He was further unsettled by the fact
that Mrs. Bellingside virtually fawned upon him this evening.

“Matthew,” the Earl of Mardries, a spare, sourish man in his
late sixties, summoned him. “Come here.”

Obediently Menwin joined the older man before a man and
woman who looked familiar to him, but whose names he could not place.

“Make you known to my grandson Menwin,” the Earl was saying.
“Matthew, this is Lady Whelke,” Menwin bowed over her hand. “And Whelke.” The
two men exchanged nods. Then Lady Mardries rose to suggest that the party go in
to dinner, and Menwin found himself taking Lady Whelke in. If she seemed
disappointed that it was the grandson and not the grandsire who led her to
table, Lady Whelke strove to hide her feelings under a series of platitudes,
served up with a girlish manner which did not befit her appearance. She was a
stout, short-necked, red-faced woman who smelled of Denmark lotion and Olympian
Dew, and appeared to have an ironclad memory for any chance remark passed by
any of the Princesses at the last Drawing Room. In the twenty yards between the
sitting room and the dining room Menwin came to dislike her excessively.

Lord Whelke, who led Lady Mardries to table, appeared a much
less garrulous sort; he did not speak a word between the soup and the port,
save to request the salt. He appeared good tempered and agreeable, but had no
conversation to support this appearance. And Lord Mardries, Menwin noted with a
sinking heart, had given his arm to Mrs. Bellingside and was countering her
fatuous remarks with increasingly testy ones of his own.