The Wicked Marquess (6 page)

“Why have you taken that poor young man in such disfavor?” asked Nonie, after they returned to the noisy street.

Miranda wrinkled her nose, less at mention of her suitor than at the smell of the town, which had strong overtones of horse manure. “You’ll not persuade me that you don’t find him a dead bore.”

“But I don’t. I enjoy his conversation. He has a wide-ranging curiosity and a fine intellect.”

Miranda glanced at her reflection in a shop window. She wore a spencer of lilac sarcenet, a walking dress of white muslin with a gathered flounce above the hem, and a tucked silk bonnet with lace fills and a ribbon knot. She hardly expected to encounter Sinbad in the shops, but it paid to be prepared.

What had they been discussing? Ah. “Then you may marry Mr. Atchison, since you like him so well.”

“It’s not me the man is dangling after!” Nonie protested. “I trust you jest.”

Miranda seldom jested. Now that she considered the situation, Mr. Atchison might suit Nonie very well. “You’ve been going on about what a paragon he is.
And
you have been telling me that it’s unnatural for a young woman not to be eager to wed.”

“I’m hardly a young woman,” Nonie replied repressively. “It isn’t the same thing.”

“Why not?” Once Miranda took a notion into a head, it was not easily cast out. “We can just as easily find a husband for you as for me.”

From what Nonie had seen of husbands, she wasn’t sure she wanted one. “You are absurd, Miranda. I had my season, and I didn’t take. Unlike yourself, I never had much to recommend me, neither looks nor wealth.”

“It isn’t true that you have no looks!” Nonie’s plain muslin gown was set off quite nicely by the yellow straw bonnet and amber-toned Paisley shawl that Miranda had insisted she borrow. “You could be very pretty if you made a push. Moreover, if a gentleman truly loved you, he wouldn’t regard your lack of wealth.”

She was an old ewe dressed lamb-fashion, Nonie thought unhappily. And Miranda was amazingly naïve.

Which misapprehension to challenge first? “I am too old for Mr. Atchison,” Nonie pointed out.

“Fiddlestick!” retorted Miranda. “Thirty isn’t as old as all that. Nor is Mr. Atchison so very young. I can’t imagine that when you made your come-out you didn’t catch the eye of some gentleman.”

Naturally, Miranda could not imagine it. No gentleman in Miranda’s vicinity could keep his eyes off her. “So I did.”

“Yet here you are. What happened?”

Nonie disliked to remember. “His parents couldn’t approve of the match.”

 “So what if they didn’t?” persisted Miranda, puzzled. “You could have run off to Gretna Green.”

Nonie disliked even more to hear her charge speak so blithely of runaway marriages. “And I would consequently have been ruined! Eloping was never an option, at any rate. He dared not defy his parents lest they disown him. I perfectly understood his decision to break off our connection. Romantic as is the notion, one cannot live on love.”

Here was yet another example of what happened when a person let herself be governed by misguided people. Miranda took her companion’s arm. “Poor Nonie. Was your heart quite broke?”

“Hearts don’t break,” Nonie replied repressively. “We only feel as if they do.”

The day had grown overcast with the combination of smoke and fog and soot so common to these streets that it had given rise to a popular color called London Dust. Nonie’s reflections suited the weather, as she progressed from love lost – yesterday she had tumbled foolishly in love with the first gentleman who cast his eyes in her direction; today she was a preacher of homilies, lamenting her bygone youth — to thinking of her future, a topic that kept her from many a good night’s sleep. Nonie’s upbringing had not equipped her to make her way in the world. She possessed a smattering of the classics, unusual in a lady, and a modicum of French; she was able to write an elegant if eccentric hand, and to solve simple sums. If she could play the pianoforte tolerably well, her gift for watercolors was nonexistent. Her only real accomplishment was her needlework.

She was, in short, an unexceptionable female, dull as ditchwater and as poor as a church mouse. Despite all her skill with her needle, and Miranda’s good intentions, neither of them could fashion her into a silk purse.

Miranda was also brooding, but not about her companion’s romantic disappointment. She was pondering her most recent encounter with the sort of gentleman who regularly broke hearts. Benedict could have had his way with her, had he wished. She had been a moth drawn to his bright flame.

But he hadn’t wished. True, he had kissed her, but not really. Not the way he would have kissed any of his thousand mistresses. Nor the way he would kiss Lady Cecilia. Miranda had been informed by one of her maidservants that proper kisses involved some queer interplay of tongues.

She wanted one of those kisses for herself. Shocking in her, Miranda admitted, but there was little point in lamenting the blood that flowed through one’s veins. The women of the Russell family could no more resist the call of passion than they could sprout wings and fly. Even though tumultuous emotions adversely affected their perceptions and romantic rascals all too often transformed into slimy toads.

Nonie couldn’t say which was more depressing, her future or her past.
At least she had gainful employment for the moment, however long that moment might last, which probably wouldn’t be much longer if Miranda persisted in unexplained disappearances, as from Lady Underwood’s musicale. Nonie didn’t believe for an instant that Miranda had gone to the ladies withdrawing chamber. She consoled herself that there had been no shrieks of outrage from gentlemen skewered on hatpins. “A penny for your thoughts,” she ventured.

A penny? Not for a thousand pennies. “I was hoping we might visit Mr. Astley’s Amphitheater, or Mrs. Salmon’s Waxworks. But that can wait for another day.” Nonie wanted to visit Oxford Street, and Nonie had had her heart broken, and so to Oxford Street they would go.

Miranda would purchase gifts. Nonie would protest that she didn’t want to take advantage. Miranda would point out that Nonie must acquiesce or make Miranda, and thereby Miranda’s uncle, very cross. And then Miranda would take her companion home and prepare some woodroof to cheer the poor woman and make her merry and take away the melancholy she refused to admit she had.

It was her own fault, of course. A little resolution had been called for, but Nonie was a cabbage-heart.

There was no reason why Nonie shouldn’t still make a good match. Miranda would put her mind to the business once she had settled her own fate. “Nonie,” she said abruptly, “just what does it mean to be disgraced?”

Nonie abruptly forgot the confusion in Oxford Street, the street-lamps enclosed in crystal globes, the enticing shops. “Disgraced?” she echoed.

“Disgraced,” Miranda repeated. “You and Kenrick are always warning me of the dire consequences of misbehavior, and I am uncertain just what those consequences are.”

Nonie was encouraged by this somewhat belated sign of interest in the matter. “To be disgraced would be dreadful. You would lose the
entrée
to the best society. Everyone that matters would whisper behind your back and cut you in the street. Believe me, Miranda, it is most important to show that you have a proper way of thinking, and to conduct yourself in the most unexceptionable manner, and to be painstakingly discreet.” Hard to imagine Miranda made into a marvel of discretion, but it was Nonie’s duty to make the attempt.

Miranda had stopped paying strict attention after the phrase ‘lose the entrée’. “I shouldn’t be able to show my face in London?” she inquired.

Nonie grew even more encouraged. “Just so,” she said.

Miranda gazed into a shop window displaying the best English glass. “No gentleman with a proper sensibility would marry me?”

 Perhaps those countless lectures on self-restraint and decorum had not fallen on deaf ears. Maybe Nonie could leave off fretting, to some extent. “You would become ineligible for marriage with anyone of consequence. A young woman must take care to protect her good name lest she be forced to withdraw into obscurity.”

“I see,” murmured Miranda.

Nonie hammered home the point. “Only the most desperate of fortune-hunters would continue to dangle at your heels. Such men have few principles where their pockets are concerned.”

Those aspiring suitors would not dangle long, suspected Miranda, once they understood that she was resolved to remain unwed. She wheedled Nonie into visiting a Ladies’ Bazaar for the Sale of Miscellaneous Articles; and after that persuaded her to inspect the wares of a linen-draper and a silk-mercer, a dressmaker and a milliner and a corsetiere. A bookseller came next, where Miranda treated herself to Langley’s
New Principles of Gardening,
along with Withering’s
A Botanical Arrangement of all the Vegetables Naturally Growing in Great Britain with Descriptions of the Genera and Species
according to
Linnaeus
, both of which she already owned, but had been forced to leave behind. Nonie’s scruples, and the footman, had been buried under a large number of parcels by the time the ladies paused to enjoy an ice and watch a curious advertising device roll down the street. Three immense pyramids, painted all over with hieroglyphics, displayed fanciful portraits of Isis and Osiris, accompanied by cats and storks and apes, from which the observer was meant to conclude that a superb panorama of Egypt had been placed on view.

Miranda nudged her companion. “How does a lady persuade a gentleman to kiss her?” she asked.

Nonie tore her fascinated attention from the pyramids. “Did you not just apply your hatpin to an admirer who tried to do precisely that?”

“Not him!” retorted Miranda. “How does a lady persuade a gentleman to kiss her when he doesn’t wish to do so?”

Nonie could not imagine there was a gentleman alive who didn’t wish to kiss Miranda. She puzzled over the identity of this paragon of restraint. Mr. Burton? Mr. Dowlin? Could Mr. Atchison be so very upright?

“Mooncalfs, all of them!” scoffed Miranda. “They would kiss me at the drop of a button, if I let them. I had in mind a more mature person. One with knowledge of the world.”

Nonie’s stomach knotted. Mature, worldly, gentlemen weren’t prone to dangle after marriageable misses, not with intentions that were honourable.

She took some comfort from the circumstance that the gentleman under discussion didn’t seem to share Miranda’s interest. “If you want someone to kiss you, you must pretend that you do not like him above half.”

Miranda frowned at this odd logic. Before she could request further enlightenment, the ladies were interrupted by the clatter of carriage wheels. An antiquated crested coach, drawn by a beautifully matched team of grays, rolled to a stop at the end of the street.

A liveried groom leapt to open the coach door. A diminutive female gingerly descended into the street. She was very old, with sunken features and snapping dark eyes and a flower-shaped beauty mark stuck high on one rouged, powdered cheek. Her antique riding habit boasted a ruffled chemise front and lapelled waistcoat and a domed hoop-skirt. A tall hat adorned with green ribbons and bows and flowers perched atop an extravagantly curled white wig.

Draped over one fragile old shoulder was a black-masked feline, which appeared to be either snoozing or dead. Even Nonie so forget her manners as to stare.

The lady’s step, if slow and unsteady, was determined. She tottered to a halt in front of them, raised her quizzing glass, inspected Miranda. Miss Russell elevated her own eyebrows and returned stare for stare.

 “Lud! ‘Tis an impudence,” the old woman said, and let her quizzing glass drop. The feline opened sky-blue eyes, gazed unappreciatively at its surroundings, and gave voice to a startlingly human-sounding complaint.

Chapter Eight

Lady Cecilia Montague was in excellent spirits due to a double dose of laudanum and ingestion of an imprudent amount of Arrack punch, a potent mixture of grains of the benjamin flower mixed with rum. Vauxhall was famed for the beverage, along with slices of ham so thin that it was said the carver could cover the entire garden with the meat from a single pig. Ceci didn’t even mind that her escort was lost in reverie. His presence was immensely gratifying. Lord Baird ranked the pleasure gardens alongside such pedestrian entertainments as Astley’s Amphitheater and Mrs. Salmon’s waxwork shop.

It augured well for their future together that he indulged her in this manner. They would rub on comfortably enough, after they wed. Ceci looked forward to the day when she might venture out-of-doors without fear of encountering some indignant creditor. She would be able to breathe freely only after her debts were paid.

Those debts were the sole reason Ceci would consider marrying again. She had been married to poor Harry – God rest his soul – and that should surely be marriage enough for anyone.

She raised a finger to smooth away the frown that had formed between her elegant dark brows. At eight-and-twenty, Ceci never forgot that she was far past her first youth. Try as she might not to grimace and squint, thereby creating unattractive creases, sometimes she couldn’t help herself. Who wouldn’t grimace when threatened with bailiffs at the door?

It was all poor Harry’s fault. God rest his soul. Harry, so extravagant and undisciplined, with his fondness for reckless living and his spendthrift ways, his tendency to take everything to excess. It had not been in Harry’s nature to dwell upon responsibilities, or even to consider the limits of his wealth. He had lived for today, leaving tomorrow to fend for itself. And then tomorrow had come, one disastrous occurrence succeeding another, until Harry fled the country in a packet ship that capsized in heavy seas – such was his abominable ill luck – with all aboard it drowned.

Ceci glanced cautiously around. She hoped none of her creditors were lurking in the crowd. Though Benedict Davenham might have been persuaded to marry a lady up to her ears in bailiffs, the Marquess of Baird would not, no matter how perfectly formed those ears might be. Nor would it reflect well on his lordship if his mistress was imprisoned for debt, which was hardly fair, because he had been more than generous with her.