The Abandoned Bride (6 page)

“Bad as that?” The baron laughed, relaxing and stretching out his long legs. “Then I apologize, sir, for it wasn’t my intention to sulk. But I had hoped to have this business with
Robin resolved and I’ve met up with an unexpected impediment.” He frowned as he left off speaking.

At the questioning look upon the other gentleman’s face, he said with some irritation, “The young woman in question refuses to cooperate.”

“She must be a ve
r
y strong-minded female to resist your blandishments,” the older man said, smiling, but then his face grew serious and he reached out to tap the baron’s knee, as though to reinforce the importance of his next words. “Nick, my boy, let it be. Robin is his own master now. He’s of an age.”

“Marlowe’s sinking, sir,” the baron replied, just as seriously. “Even the King’s physician don’t give him more than a month. My aunt is weeping all over everyone in sight, including the gardeners if they come close enough, and it isn’t for Marlowe’s sake, as you might think, it’s all for Robin. ‘Ah where’s my boy,’ she cries, and looks accusingly at me as though I could produce him from a hat. And that isn’t so bizarre, sir, for I used to have some sway over him, far more than anyone in the family, you know, even more than you had, sir, and I can’t convince him to return. But his light lady might, if she would, but she won’t.”

“Then there’s no more to be done, my boy,” the older gentleman said gently, seeing how his visitor had fallen into a brown study.

“But there is, and I shall,” the baron swore, his face growing closed and hard.

“Robin is no green youth any longer,” the older gentleman mused, “and I’m not at all sure you shouldn’t just let him be. He may know best.”

“As he knew best when he ran off with that bit of muslin? Come, sir, it was good luck, not good sense, that saved him when she decided to sheer off. No, it’s clear that he stands in need of some counsel now.”

“He is your nephew, Nick, not your son,” the older gentleman said softly.

“But he hasn’t a father, or at least Marlowe might have sired him but he never did more,” the baron explained earnestly. “And who is there to guide him? At least I had you to set me straight when I was about to make a cake of myself in my youth, and you were not, strictly speaking, my father.”

Ah, that episode still rankles, the older gentleman thought, but he only said calmly, “I did marry your mother.”

“Devil take it, sir,” the baron muttered. “You know that’s not what I meant. I could not have had a better father than you had I ordered one up from the deity.”

Ignoring his stepson’s embarrassment, the elder gentleman went on, as though musing aloud, “I have not thought of that incident in years. That young woman you were involved with was a pretty little creature, I quite sympathized with you. In fact, it was not her lack of birth that disturbed me at all. You know I don’t place much emphasis on social lineage, and neither should you. Why just think of the odd branches on your own family tree: the Spanish lady that Elizabethan rogue brought back from his travels, the moneylender’s daughter your wastrel Royalist ancestor wed, your great-grandmother who came from a humble cottage. They only strengthened the stock, you know. Weak links tend to crop up in those socially-pure inbred families. Why look at the Bryants, they go back to the Normans, without a misalliance, and they haven’t produced a chin for generations.”

“Then why did you pay off my little filly to be rid of her?” the baron asked coolly, though his white cheeks had grown flushed during his stepfather’s discourse.

“Ah, because, as you well know, she had more than no breeding, she had no heart, and no morals,” the older gentleman said. He
paused and then asked quietly
,
“Does Robin’s light of love remind you of her? Then it’s no wonder you’ve become so exercised about it. Is she such a pretty little creature then?”

“
No,
”
said the "baron abruptly, “she is not.
”
He paused and then added bitterly, “She is beautiful.”

₄

The stagecoach driver was being extremely conscientious, or so at least one of his unhappy passengers thought. For the fellow seemed to be taking great care not to miss one rut or hollow in the road. Perhaps, Julia thought as she raised her hand again to secure her bonnet, he was doing some sort of audit for the government bureau in charge of public roads and it was
h
is duty to painstakingly record every deficiency in them. Then, when the coach lurched over a particularly deep depression, she clenched her teeth tightly to ensure that they did not rattle out of her head and left off thinking about the driver’s hidden motives and only prayed that her traveling cases were more securely anchored than their owner present
l
y was.

When the coach had righted itself again, the fair-haired young woman attempted to do the same herself. Julia whispered a polite “Excuse me” to the matron on her left, who had taken most of her weight when the movement of the coach caused the passengers to sway like trees in a tempest. Then she bent and felt about the floorboards with her hands as her fellow passengers were doing, in an attempt to help the fellow immediately opposite her in his search for his dislodged spectacles.

They had been riding without a stop for quite some time, and by now had exhausted all their expressions of ill-usage. Really, Julia thought wearily, as she accepted a curt “Thankee” from the fellow to whom she handed the wire-rimmed spectacles, there can be few more foolish situations than finding oneself packed into a coach in a random pair, sitting facing two other complete strangers, and then being shaken vigorously every few moments for endless hours. If one then added the effects of a sultry early summer’s day to the experience, Julia thought miserably, one could get the general impression of what one’s fate might be in the afterlife if one were very wicked in this one.

She had been traveling for two full days now, and it seemed that even when the coach stopped to change horses, the scenery still swam before her eyes. The only comfort she could take from the experience was a mean one, for it was only her gratitude that she had the funds to sit within the coach, and not ride atop it as those less fortunate or more foolish, were doing. But yet, every jolting, bone-shaking mile brought her closer to London. So she sat back and closed her eyes, and felt the warm wind from the partially opened window upon her face, and tried to leave the coach, if not in her person, then at least in her mind.

Julia thought that despite her present discomfort, she had a great deal to be thankful for. She had not, after all, had to leave Mrs. Bryce before she had heard from her employment counselors in London. Two days after she had packed her bags, a letter had come summoning her to them. The letter had hinted of several suitable positions that had arisen, so Julia could at least save face when she presented it for her employer’s inspection. It was a very little thing, to be sure, but on such small details, much pride may be spared. For instead of seeming to be fleeing, she was able to depart in a very dignified manner.

It had been a wrench to leave young Toby, but both Julia and her employer were able to comfort themselves secretly with the thought that children forget quickly. It may well be so, but still, though Julia was never to know it, Master Toby eventually grew to be a devil with the ladies, a source of great embarrassment to his family, and only settled down to respectability when he found a golden-haired, ice-eyed lady of his own to wed.

Julia’s departure was also made more bearable by the fact that by the day she left, the mustard fields had left off their riotous celebration of spring and had gotten down to the serious business of growing. So she felt no tug at her heart when the coach trundled off out of the village, past now mundane acres of mere vegetable fields.

Still, she had been unable to leave without one last attempt at setting her record straight. After she had shaken hands with her former mistress, and Toby’s distressed sh
r
ieks at her departure had faded enough as his nurse bore him back shrieking to his nursery so that normal conversation could be heard, she had said, firmly facing the issue, “Ma’am, no word that the baron spoke of me was true. He was sadly deranged, you know.”

But Mrs. Bryce had only stared at her as though she were the one who were unbalanced. She mustered up enough countenance to say stiffly, “Good-bye, Miss Hastings, I wish you well.
”
And then she left before Julia could utter another traitorous word. She made it clear she felt that even if such a thing as insanity among the upper classes were possible, it was only another prerogative of the nobility. So most people would think, Julia had mused sadly as she stared at Mrs. Bryce’s retreating back, and so she would be sure not to mention the incident to anyone else, lest by her own insistence on the matter she should convince her listeners that she were at fault.

Another jolt of the coach, this one accompanied by a rather piercing scream from one of the hapless topside passengers, interrupted Julia’s reveries. Since the coach continued on its way and nobody could be seen flying past the dusty windows, the general consensus of the inner passengers was that it had been caused by an understandable attack of nerves, and no great harm had been taken by anyone above. But now Julia could see that they had reached the outskirts of London itself, and now she firmly put aside her memories and concentrated on the future.

When the coach at last achieved the stage stop, Julia got down quickly and commandeered her luggage without a moment’s pause. She had traveled this way before, and by now she well knew that a young female obviously traveling alone, arriving from the countryside, and moreover, not being met upon her arrival, was often in danger of being considered fair prey by many sorts of urban predators. So she ignored the helping hand offered by a well-dressed gentleman, turned her back upon the sweet-faced woman who offered her a tentative smile, and kept on walking to a line of hackney carriages when another rather dashing young female attempted to stop her by miscalling her, with every evidence of recognition and delight, “Mary, my dear Mary!”

She was sorry to be so hard, but if they were only well-meaning folk, they would understand, and if they were not, then she had saved herself a great deal of difficulty. Julia told the coachman the direction of Mrs. White’s boarding house, and reflected that it was from her sojourns there that she had achieved such wisdom. Mrs. White ran a respectable facility, and there were always a few mature unemployed females in residence at her establishment. They had been the ones who had seen to Julia’s education in matters to do with unprotected young women. These older, wiser females did not think it at all out of the way that Miss Hastings, although still in her extreme youth, should know all about the mistresses of houses of ill-repute, sporting ladies, and dissolute gentleman of London and their many and various means of luring innocents to their moral downfall.

If Julia had been a young debutante, she would have known nothing about the likes of the infamous Mother Carey and her chicks in their expensive bawdy house, nor would she have known of the human birds of paradise gentlemen of leisure selected for their adornment and then discarded through their tedium in much the same careless manner as they selected and discarded snuffboxes. But though all of Julia’s tutors were respectable gentlewomen, and indeed many of them were the daughters of clergymen, not one of the elder women Julia had encountered at Mrs. White’s had spared her shocking and cautionary tales of physical and moral danger. Indeed, after one look at Julia’s face, hair, and form, many of them had considered her immediate enlightenment about such matters in the light of missionary work.

Mrs. White’s house was a narrow gray townhouse which had once been in a fashionable section of town, but which now gathered its skirts nervously in from its iron railings as the surrounding neighborhood became decidedly more common. Julia accepted her traveling bags from her driver, stepped through a squealing throng of urchins at play, ignoring one cheeky lad’s cry of “Ooo, pretty lady, ’ave you got a moment?”, and knocked upon the door.

In a few moments, Mrs. White appeared. She took one look at her visitor’s tired face, and then she said, a bit sadly, “Ah yes, Miss Hastings. Do come in, I’ve your room ready, indeed I prepared it the moment I received your letter.”

But as she led Julia to her spare and tidy room on the third floor, she thought, Poor lass, she’s failed again. Yet Julia, seeing the flowered wallpaper, the neatly made bed, the pitcher and washstand all exactly as they had been before, felt not at all like a failure, but rather intensely grateful, for she had reached a refuge and she had a chance to start again.

Acting upon her guest’s instructions, Mrs. White sent her maid-of-all-work to waken Miss Hastings just as the clock chimed seven. Although Julia could have afforded several days of leisure, she could not wait to secure a new position. It was not her purse she was concerned about, it was her spirit. She had discovered that the more time she took between posts, the less pleased she was when she secured one. Idle times were the ones in which she was most su
s
ceptible to bouts of self-pity and thus were the ones she sought to avoid the most diligently. So she donned her best severely cut black walking dress, brushed her hair until it gleamed like trapped sunlight in its plaited chains, and went down to breakfast. As soon as she had had her last morsel, she resolved that she would walk to the Misses Parkinsons’ office, for she could see that it was a fine day.

But no sooner had she swallowed down the first of her eggs, when old Miss Constable, a pensioner who was living out her days at Mrs. White’s and always took a dawn constitutional, came bursting into the dining room to banish all thoughts of plans or posts or interviews. “It is over!” the old woman gasped in a reedy voice as she brandished a newssheet, so breathless and disheveled that it was clear she had actually run back to the house. “See, see for yourselves! The Duke has won out! Napoleon is vanquished
.
”