Refining Felicity (9 page)

Effy was sitting in the drawing room with a middle-aged gentleman in a clerical collar.

‘Sit down, Lady Felicity,’ said Effy. ‘This is the Reverend Tobias Jiggs, a very famous evangelical preacher. Mr Jiggs, Lady Felicity Vane. You may begin.’

To Felicity’s horror, Mr Jiggs got to his feet and began to roar out a sermon on obedience and decorum and the role of a young woman in society. He had very thick lips and dribbled and spat as he spoke. The room was very cold. Effy had not ordered the fire to be lit, considering a cold drawing room as a sort of mortification that was good for the soul.

Shivering in thin muslin and bludgeoned by words, Felicity sat, wondering when this torture would end. The sermon went on all morning.

When it was over, she heard Effy say, ‘Delightful, Mr Jiggs. We shall expect you at the same time tomorrow. As you know, we planned to take Lady Felicity to a concert at the Argyle Rooms tonight, but we have cancelled the outing on your advice.’

Felicity escaped to her room, shaking with rage. Now more than ever was she determined to escape.

. . . they’ve made him a Dandy;

A thing, you know, whiskered, great-coated, and laced,
Like an hour-glass, exceedingly small in the waist,
Quite a new sort of creatures, unknown yet to scholars,
With heads so immovably stuck in shirt collars,
That seats like our music-stools soon must be found them,
To twirl, when the creatures wish to look round them.

Thomas Moore,
The Fudge Family in Paris

It was that Indian cobra which gave Felicity a quiet escape.

Humphrey, the butler, came upon a stranger in the hall. The stranger appeared to be a slim man with most of his face shielded by ginger whiskers.

‘Who are you, sir?’ demanded Humphrey suspiciously. ‘I heard no knock.’

Behind those whiskers, firmly secured with gum arabic, Felicity quailed. The butler’s gooseberry eyes were hard and suspicious.

‘I am Lady Felicity’s brother,’ said Felicity haughtily.

Humphrey spent his spare time studying the family trees of the aristocracy. He backed towards the bell rope, which hung in a corner of the hall. ‘Lady Felicity does not possess a brother,’ he said.

Before Felicity could summon up the courage to try to push her way past him to the door, there was an eldritch screech and cries for help from the drawing room upstairs.

Humphrey leaped for the stairs with amazing agility in one so fat and pompous. Felicity opened the door and let herself out and walked as quickly as she could down to the corner and turned into Oxford Street.

Upstairs in the drawing room, all was chaos.

Amy had hugged Mr Haddon’s present to herself. She had sent him a warm letter of thanks but had not told Effy, for Effy, she felt sure, would have sneered and said that no one ever sent
her
such odd presents. Gentlemen had always sent her flowers or poems. So Amy had put the cobra in a cupboard under the glass-fronted bookshelves in the drawing room.

Effy had been poking about, looking for a spare vase. She had opened the cupboard, found herself faced with the stuffed cobra, and had started to scream the place down. Everyone came running and the air was full of a babble of screams and cries. A footman, taking one horrified look at the thing in the cupboard, had fled to return with a blunderbuss. He fired at the cobra, but missed the cupboard completely and peppered a portrait of the third Marchioness of Ravenswood with a volley of nails.

By the time Effy was calm enough to hear Amy’s explanation, the Marquess of Ravenswood had arrived, unheralded, on the scene, having decided to make one of his impromptu visits to London.

He found himself hard put not to laugh as Amy proudly stood guard over the horrible stuffed snake and said defiantly it was
her
present and no one was to touch it.

Meanwhile, wild rumours were circulating in the servants’ hall, and the shaking chambermaid, Charlotte, was convinced someone was dead.

Her poor head, stuffed by Felicity with romantic tales, led her to believe that Felicity had taken her own life. She rushed up to the drawing room and flung herself weeping on the middle of the carpet and begged for mercy.

There were more screams and cries for explanation. Charlotte cried out that she had known they would drive Lady Felicity to her death with their persecution and they could kill her as well.

Amy took charge, pushing the shocked and enraged butler away. She smoothed the chambermaid’s hair and raised her up and asked her gently and patiently to begin at the beginning and tell them what Felicity had said, assuring the girl over and over again that Lady Felicity was well.

In a halting voice, Charlotte told her story, of how Felicity planned to escape, and of how she had bought her men’s clothes.

‘Get Lady Felicity here immediately,’ ordered the marquess.

They all waited. Then Humphrey returned to say Lady Felicity had gone.

‘You may pack your bits and pieces and leave immediately,’ said the butler to Charlotte.

‘No,’ said Amy. ‘The girl stays. Felicity’s played a wicked trick on the silly child. Now, where’s she gone?’

Humphrey surveyed them, a look of dismay on his face. ‘My lord,’ he said, turning to the marquess. ‘Just before I heard Miss Effy scream, there was a fellow in the hall. He said he was Lady Felicity’s brother. I said Lady Felicity did not have a brother and was about to ring for help when all the fuss started and I ran upstairs.’

‘It must have been that wretched girl in disguise,’ said the marquess. ‘What did she look like?’

‘But it could not be she,’ said Humphrey. ‘My lord, this person had whiskers.’

‘Have you never heard of false whiskers, man?’ demanded the marquess. ‘There is even a shop which supplies them to the cavalry. What colour were they? What was she wearing?’

‘It is dark in the hall, my lord,’ said Humphrey, ‘but a ray of sunlight shone on the whiskers and they appeared to be very red. He – she – was wearing a greatcoat with a nipped-in waist, a bottle-green colour I think, a very high collar, and top boots. The hat was an ordinary beaver with a curly brim.’

‘Get every man in this household out to search for her,’ commanded the marquess. He turned to the Tribbles. ‘Do not look so distressed, ladies. I shall go myself and try to bring her back.’

* * *

Felicity strolled along in the direction of the City, where she hoped to find a stage-coach to take her to Sussex. Spring had come to London. A warm wind was gusting and blowing down the streets, setting the striped awnings at the windows of the houses flapping and the buff-coloured blinds over the shops cracking and swelling, so that at times it appeared as if the Town were one great sailing-ship under full canvas, straining to leave port.

Whistling as she walked and enjoying her new freedom and the pleasure of her splendid disguise, Felicity had already forgotten about the Tribbles. That chapter of her life was over. Sussex and home and riding across the Downs on just such a splendid day as this lay ahead.

She went into a coffee house in Holborn and ordered a meat pie and a bottle of wine. She drank the whole bottle and felt tipsy and ridiculously happy as she set out again.

It was only when she made her way down to the Strand, now determined to have a stroll about London before leaving, that she realized that all mayhem could be breaking loose in one part of the Town while the other parts remained unaware of it.

A mob was rampaging down the Strand, smashing into any shops which had been foolish enough to remain open. Sobered with fright, she retreated back to Holborn and so on to Snow Hill and the City of London, the original walled London where all the commerce of the nation now took place.

She had just entered Candlewick Ward, when a constable seized her and demanded her name.

‘Felix Vane,’ said Felicity in as gruff a voice as she could manage.

‘Address?’

‘Bread Lane,’ said Felicity, remembering a City address from an article in the newspapers.

‘Householder?’

‘Yes,’ said Felicity, not wanting to have to tell more lies than necessary. For if she said she was not a householder, then that would lead to more and more questions.

‘Good, follow me. You will be sworn in as a special constable.’

‘What for?’ said Felicity, her knees beginning to tremble.

‘What for?’ echoed the constable contemptuously. ‘Why, to put down them murdering rioters.’

And so it was that Lady Felicity Vane, with fixed bayonet and drawn sword, found herself marching over Westminster Bridge surrounded by men equally armed to put down the rioters. She wanted to know why the mob were rioting, she desperately did not want to have to shoot anyone or to have to plunge that wicked-looking bayonet into someone’s breast, but was frightened to speak lest her voice should give away her sex.

The sun beat down, her head throbbed in time to the beating of the drums, and she wondered whether she would come out of the whole business alive.

But as it turned out, she was to be more at risk from her fellows than from the rioters. The mob had massed in St George’s Fields. But no sooner did they hear the drums and see the sun glinting on the bayonets of the forces of law and order than they quickly dispersed. Not a shot was fired. Felicity sighed with relief. Now all she had to do was march quietly back and return her weapons to the City armoury and find that stage-coach.

But once she had got rid of her weapons, she was quickly surrounded by her fellow warriors, who declared their intention of getting as drunk as possible and then raising the skirts of every tart to be found within the walls of the City. They went on to describe in graphic detail what they would do to said tarts, and Felicity choked and tried not to vomit in front of them.

‘If you will forgive me,’ she said, finding her voice, but trying to keep it on as low a register as possible, ‘I must be on my way.’

‘Stuff,’ said the leader of her persecutors. ‘You’ll have a few bumpers first.’ They were out in the street now and he had taken her arm in a strong grasp.

‘Oho, nephew,’ said a languid voice. ‘I wondered why you were late for dinner.’

Felicity looked up into the mocking eyes of the Marquess of Ravenswood. Her companions fell back before the magnificence of the marquess’s dress. White as paper behind her whiskers, Felicity fell into step beside the marquess. They walked in silence until the marquess stopped outside a coffee house. ‘I think we should have some conversation before I return you home,’ he said.

He led the way into the coffee house and found them a table in the corner. He ordered coffee and biscuits.

‘How did you find me?’ asked Felicity sulkily.

‘If you saw those ridiculous whiskers of yours in the clear light of day, you would know they are as red as a Runner’s waistcoat. There were many people on your road to the City who remembered an odd-looking fellow with scarlet whiskers. I caught up with you just as you were being pressed into service. I decided to follow you, for tempers were running high at that point and I did not want to risk ruining your reputation by unmasking you. I waited until you had returned to the armoury and then picked my moment.’

‘I was going home to Sussex,’ said Felicity, hanging her head.

‘And you were making sure to do it in such a way as to cause the most distress and trouble,’ he said severely. ‘That chambermaid you gulled with that farrago of lies. Did you never think of her? She thought you had been killed and was prepared to follow you to the grave. She nearly lost her job, which in these days would have been tantamount to killing her. There is no future for a chambermaid turned off without a reference.’

‘I did not think she would have told anyone anything about being party to my escape,’ said Felicity, enraged with guilt.

‘You did not think of anyone other than yourself, and you never have,’ said the marquess. ‘You are a colossal bore. Unwomanly women always are. You will go back to the Tribbles and you will behave. Do I make myself clear?’

‘You have no right to interfere in my life,’ said Felicity.

‘I do not want to have anything to do with you,’ snapped the marquess. ‘But I do not like to see the Tribbles tormented and teased by a spoilt brat like you. You have neither looks nor charm nor wit. Try to do as they say and keep your mouth shut and perhaps some poor fool will marry you for your dowry, for you have nothing to offer a man other than money.’

Felicity gasped with shock and rage. ‘I’ll show you,’ she said, between her teeth. ‘Just you wait! I shall drive some man mad with passion.’

The marquess leaned back in his chair and began to laugh. Finally he said, ‘If you could only see how you look, sitting there in that horse-collar with those ghastly whiskers and vowing to drive some man mad with passion.’ He was so amused he did not realize Felicity had begun to cry. Salt tears dribbled down among her whiskers. She took a mouthful of coffee and managed to control herself.

Now she hated the marquess more than the Tribbles, more than anyone in the whole wide world.

Outside, the marquess hailed a hack and directed it to Holles Street.