Cressida (11 page)

Unfortunately, as is the case with most people, knowing that she was in the wrong did not make her any more reconciled to the situation, and when she took her leave of Sir Octavius shortly afterwards she was still quite unregenerate in her resolution to go to Gloucestershire at once and see what could be done in the matter of wresting Calverton Place from Rossiter’s grasp.

It did occur to her to wonder, as she was driving back to Mount Steet, why Sir Octavius had made such a point of seeing to it that she was made aware of Rossiter’s intention to purchase it, particularly as he appeared to feel that any interference in the transaction on her part would be not only ill-judged but unavailing as well. But she had no time to go into that matter now, her mind being entirely preoccupied with plans for arranging a journey to Calverton Place at the earliest possible moment.

On arriving back in Mount Street, she had the intention of putting those plans into effect at once by ordering her travelling-chaise to be made ready, instructing Moodle to pack up a suitable selection of clothes and other necessaries for the journey, and despatching an army of messengers to carry her excuses for all the social events to which she had accepted invitations for the next several days. But to her annoyance she was met at the front door by Harbage, with the news that Lord Langmere had called to see her a few minutes before and was awaiting her return in the drawing room.

“Bother!” she exclaimed under her breath, and walked into the drawing room at once, where she found Lord Langmere looking through a copy of one of Mr. Southey’s recent poems,
The Curse of Kehama,
with an expression of entirely lukewarm interest upon his face.

“Well, Leonard? What is it?” she enquired, dispensing with formal greetings as she came forward towards him across the floor.

He rose, putting the book aside, and with the expression of slight surprise that had appeared upon his face at the sound of her rather impatient tone deepening as he took in her heightened colour.

“Is anything amiss?” he countered. “You seem disturbed—”

“Well, I am!” Cressida admitted frankly, stripping off her gloves and flinging herself into a chair. “Would you believe it, Leonard?—that odious Rossiter is arranging to buy Calverton Place from my uncle! The entail is to be broken—I daresay you are not acquainted with my cousin, Walter Calverton, who is the heir, but he is as improvident a creature as Uncle Arthur, whom you
do 
know, and far more feckless—and Rossiter, of all men, is bargaining to buy the place! Of course I shall not allow it.”

“I am going to Gloucestershire at once to put matters to rights.”

“To Gloucestershire?” Lord Langmere sat down again, looking slightly staggered by this sudden announcement. “But, my dear Cressy, in the middle of the Season—is this really necessary?” he asked. “Surely your solicitors can handle the matter.

“My solicitors,” said Cressida, “cannot handle Uncle Arthur. I can. This will not do, you know, Leonard— Rossiter to have Calverton Place! It is quite unthinkable! If Uncle Arthur has come to any sort of agreement with him, it will simply have to be set aside. ”

Lord Langmere, perceiving by these words that there was more to the matter than had at first appeared, began to look serious.

“Has
an agreement been reached between them?” he asked. “If that is the case, I fear there is very little that you can do—that is, if Captain Rossiter wishes to hold your uncle to the bargain. ”

“I can offer him a good deal more than he has paid for the property himself,” Cressida retorted.
“That 
would do the trick with most men. Whether it will with Rossiter remains to be seen. But he shan’t have Calverton Place! I shall see to that, if it takes half my fortune!” Lord Langmere was looking increasingly surprised by her vehemence. “But surely it can’t mean so much to you,” he said. “You have never appeared to interest yourself—”

“Very well, then—I haven’t! But I never imagined before this time that Uncle Arthur would think of selling the estate—and to Rossiter, of all men!” She stood up abruptly. “I am sorry, Leonard, but I really
must
have things made ready for the journey, ” she said. “You didn’t wish to see me for any particular reason—did you?” Lord Langmere, suddenly looking rather rueful, said that as a matter of fact, he did.

“Oh?” Cressida looked questioning. “The Boltons’ evening-party? But I shan’t be able to attend, of course.” 
“Not
the Boltons’ evening-party.” Lord Langmere’s expression became still more rueful. “I am quite aware that this is not the propitious time to ask you,” he said, “but I had screwed up my courage to the sticking-point, you see, and I don’t know when I shall be able to do it again. Cressy, my dear,
will
you marry me and forget all about Gloucestershire and Calverton Place and everything else that threatens to separate us even for the space of four-and-twenty hours?”

Cressida, with the sensation of being in the sort of dream in which all sorts of important, frightening, and triumphant things happen to one at the most vexingly unsuitable moments, felt both her hands being taken in an urgent masculine grasp, and only by exercising great presence of mind did she manage to avoid being enveloped in a full embrace.

“Leonard—no!” she said, quickly stepping back a pace. “At least, I don’t mean
no,
exactly, but—but you are quite right: this is
not
the time, she went on, astonished to find herself speaking almost as incoherently as a girl in her first Season receiving her first offer. “You have taken me quite by surprise—”

If Lord Langmere had been capable upon his own side of speaking sensibly, he would have told her that any young woman who, having received the extremely marked attentions he had lavished upon her over a period of several months, professed surprise over their culminating in an offer of marriage was being either idiotish or intolerably missish. Not being capable of such rational thinking, however, he merely found her confusion captivating and attempted again, this time more successfully, to take her in his arms.

“Oh,
dear!”
said Cressida. “Really, Leonard, you mustn’t! I must have time to think!”

“You have had quite enough already,” said Lord Langmere firmly. “You must have known how I feel about you—”

But by this time Cressida, calling upon the reserves of experience gained in half a dozen years of dealing with importunate suitors, had matters well in hand again, and said with equal firmness that she hadn’t.

“Had enough time, that is,” she said. “You
can’t
ask someone to marry you when she is on her way to Gloucestershire and expect her to give you a sensible answer.”

“But you needn’t be on your way to Gloucestershire,” Lord Langmere protested, making another attempt to embrace his love and finding himself, he was never to know exactly how, standing quite alone in the middle of the floor while his love made some slight alterations to her coiffure in the mirror above the green jasperware Wedgwood fireplace.

All very cool and Londonish, his lordship, who considered himself to be genuinely in love, albeit somewhat past the age of violent romantic fancies, thought bitterly. But that was Cressida, who was well known never to give any of her suitors the satisfaction of putting off her elusive ways and standing still to be properly kissed.

As for Cressida herself, she went upstairs, having dismissed Lord Langmere very kindly with a promise to let him know his fate the moment she returned from Gloucestershire, and for all of five minutes was very cross with herself for having been so ridiculously missish as not to have given his lordship a plain, round answer and thus put them both out of their misery.

Now, she thought, she would have to worry herself all the way to Calverton Place and during her negotiations there with her uncle as to whether she should or shouldn’t; but to say the truth, in the bustle of her preparations for her journey she had forgotten all about poor Lord Langmere within a quarter of an hour, and did not think of him again until she was getting into bed that night in the very comfortable bedchamber of the Oxford inn where she broke her journey—which, if his lord-ship had known of it, he might or might not have considered a propitious omen.

Having spurred her postillions on to their best efforts from the time she left Oxford, Cressida was able to arrive at Calverton Place well before the dinner hour on the following day.

It had been several years since she had been in the Cotswold country, and the sight of honey-coloured stone houses with moss-covered slate roofs set beside little streams spanned by miniature bridges, of lanes decked in the pink and gold of lady’s smock and cowslips, and of the long, sweet green-grey sweep of the high wold rippling off into the distance, filled her with an exhilarating and nostalgic sense of being very young again, the green girl who had freely wandered these hills and woods, and who had come with mingled trepidation and anticipation to Cheltenham’s neat terraces and stucco villas. London fell from her as if it had been no more than the elegantly fashionable redingote of slate-coloured twilled sarsnet she was wearing, and by the time her chaise turned in at the gates of Calverton Place she would not have been surprised to look down and see it replaced by a schoolgirl’s plain round kerseymere frock, defaced by bramble tears and berry stains from a day’s ramble in the woods.

Calverton Place was a classical seventeenth-century mansion built of pale gold limestone and set across the bottom of a deep, tree-planted valley, with hills rising behind it. There was a recessed central block with shallow projections at each end, and a pillared entrance over which the Calverton eagle spread enormous wings from the pediment above. Even when Cressida first remembered it, the park had been overgrown and the gardens neglected, but it had been going gently from bad to worse ever since, until now it had rather the look, she thought, of having done it on purpose, like the impenetrable thicket that had sprung up to protect the Sleeping Beauty’s slumber in the fairy tale.

The house, too, when she reached it and alighted from her chaise, had the same rather delightfully melancholy air of having been deserted by humanity for countless centuries—an effect that was somewhat spoiled by the appearance, in response to her knock, of an incongruously young and fresh-faced butler whom she had never seen before, and who stared in obvious surprise at her travelling-chaise, from which Moodle was in the act of extracting her dressing-case, while one of the postillions dealt with the other luggage.

“No, I’m not expected,” Cressida said cheerfully, in answer to the butler s mutely questioning face. “Is my uncle in? I am Miss Calverton. ”

The butler, standing aside for her to enter the hall, said he regretted that Mr. Calverton was not in, but that it was certain he would return soon, being only gone out to show the gentleman about the park.

“The gentleman? You
don’t
mean—you
can’t
mean —Captain Rossiter?” asked Cressida, slightly taken aback.

“Yes, miss, said the butler, and looked a trifle nervously at Moodle, who had followed Cressida into the house and was gazing about in grim disapproval at the hall, which had had all its good pieces sold—and what was left, her accusing eyes told him, was sadly in need of polishing. “May I ask, miss,” he enquired, once more addressing Cressida, “if—if you are expecting to stay— “Well, it does make it a bit awkward that my uncle is not here to ask me, but I am,” Cressida said frankly. “Perhaps I might have the Blue Bedchamber—”

The butler, looking even more nervously at Moodle, who was now radiating scorn over his lack of “manner,” said he was afraid Captain Rossiter was occupying the Blue Bedchamber at present.

“What—is he
staying
here?” Cressida exclaimed, a trifle indignantly. “Oh, very well, then—the Green.” The butler’s fresh-coloured face grew even pinker and he stammered, with an apprehensive glance at Moodle, that he was very sorry indeed, but the Green Bedchamber, too, was occupied.

“By a Lady,” he amplified his statement, so obviously capitalising the word that Cressida immediately understood that a lady of title was involved.

“Oh?” she said, intrigued, wondering what odd sort of party her uncle had got up for Rossiter, or if “the Lady” had perhaps come with Rossiter himself. “A Lady?”

“Yes, miss. Lady Letitia Conway,” said the butler, which startled Cressida so much that she exclaimed involuntarily, “Good God, what is
she
doing here?”

For Lady Letitia was an elderly cousin of Arthur Calverton’s who resided in Cheltenham, went in largely for charitable works, being unmarried and with a great deal of time on her hands, and was considered by her cousin Arthur an infernal bore.

The butler, apparently feeling that answering Cressida’s question was above and beyond the call of duty, said he couldn’t take it upon himself to say, but added helpfully that she had arrived the evening before. He kept to himself the interesting fact that Lady Letitia, too, had obviously not been expected, and that a quarrel of titanic proportions had taken place between her and her host in the library that morning, of which he had unfortunately been able to overhear only the less interesting portions consisting of his employer’s rejoinders, since Lady Letitia, being a “Lady” in every sense of the word, never raised her voice, and would no doubt, if called upon to do so, have pronounced even the dread ecclesiastical curse of Anathema Maranatha in the mild, confidential tones suitable for a drawing-room tête-à-tête.

But this piece of information would have been lost upon Cressida even if he had volunteered it, for, having ascertained that Lady Letitia was at that moment in the library, she went off at once in that direction.

The library at Calverton Place was a large square apartment hung with gilded leather, now sadly darkened by time, and with a fine plaster ceiling typical of its period, boasting a central oval wreath of tightly packed foliage and flowers. Two striking torcheres in the form of undraped nymphs balancing scallop shells on their heads flanked the Italian marble fireplace, and sitting bolt upright beside one of them, in an attitude of resigned disapproval that might have been evoked by their shameless proximity, or might, on the other hand, have arisen out of the apparently disagreeable thoughts that were occupying her at the moment, was Lady Letitia Conway. She was an excessively thin female with a long, mildly melancholy face, dressed in a shapeless and unfashionable frock of some grey material and with her grey hair untidily arranged upon the top of her head.