Daisy (6 page)

“Don’t be too sure,” mocked the lazy voice, as the Duke settled himself back comfortably against the log.

“Have you never been in love?” asked Daisy curiously.

“Never,” he replied. “I leave that doubtful emotion to fools and poets. Love! What utter bosh. Love is nothing but a trick of the mind to make a baser emotion more respectable; greed, passion, or where the one wants a daddy to hide her from the naughty world and the other a mummy. Men of my class finally marry because they wish for heirs. They choose a girl of suitable fortune and birth, and if they’re damned dishonest or just plain silly or…”—here one yellow eye opened and stared at Daisy—“read too many romances, they persuade themselves they are in love.”

“Oh, you’re insufferable!” cried Daisy, jumping to her feet. “I may have made a mistake with the Earl, but let me tell you I feel in my bones that true love does exist and I—I’ll
prove
it to you!”

“Dear me!” He opened both eyes in mock alarm. “Don’t tell me you are going to swoon around in front of me with a lot of young men just to persuade me?”

“No. But you will recognize it when you see it. And I will not settle for less, Your Grace.”

“You may call me Toby.”

“Toby? That’s a name for jugs and collies.”

“Don’t be impertinent. My name is Tobias, the diminutive is Toby. Jugs, indeed! I will place a bet with you, my dear.”

“A bet? I have no money.”

“A lock of your pretty hair will suffice. Now, isn’t that romantic? I, in return, will give you one thousand golden guineas if you can prove to me that you have found the perfect love match. Prepare to lose your hair. Like the rest of us you will settle for money or companionship.”

Daisy held out her small, still work-roughened hand. He shook it solemnly and then settled back against the log and closed his eyes.

After a little while Daisy asked timidly, “Did the Earl behave to previous young ladies the… the way he behaved to me?”

No reply. She looked down and found to her exasperation that her noble companion had fallen fast asleep. She took a step forward and then sat down again. In the argument with the Duke, she had, for a few precious minutes, forgotten her hurt. She felt suddenly too frightened to face the house party alone. His Grace had at least given her a role to play to hide her wounds. She looked thoughtfully down at the sleeping figure. What an odd, uncomfortable man he was to be sure. But at the moment he seemed to be her only protector in a strange world. She decided to wait until he awoke.

The couple stayed motionless throughout the long day, the Duke silently asleep and Daisy bolt upright on her log, nursing her pain and feeling a slow, burning anger against her hosts beginning to take its place.

The long light was slanting through the trees and Daisy was just beginning to feel cold and stiff when the Duke awoke. He glanced at the heavy gold Hunter in his waistcoat pocket and then leapt to his feet. “My poor girl! I must have slept all day. I got to my rooms late last evening and then spent the rest of the night reading.” He stretched and gave a cavernous yawn. “Poor Daisy, you must be famished. We shall creep round to the kitchens and forage what has been left over from tea.

“Forward then! Daisy Chatterton starts her search for love.”

He chatted away, seeming in excellent spirits and Daisy envied him from the bottom of her heart. She wondered if she would ever feel carefree again.

She hesitated a moment and turned and looked back at the log.

“Have you left something behind?” asked the Duke.

“My childhood,” said Daisy sadly.

“But not your dreams,” he teased.

“No,” said Daisy slowly, “not my dreams.”

The couple caused a great flutter in the kitchens when they strolled in demanding tea—or rather His Grace was demanding tea while Daisy hung back in his shadow. “I don’t think I shall ever acquire an aristocratic manner,” she murmured to the Duke, “if it means putting a great army of servants to a lot of inconvenience.”

“Nonsense,” he remarked, perched on the edge of the kitchen table. “They love it. Highlight of their day. That right, Curzon?”

“Indeed yes, Your Grace,” said Curzon smoothly, adjusting his striped waistcoat. “A great event. We shall talk about it when we go home on our yearly visit to our little country hovels.”

Daisy looked at the Duke in alarm, unable to believe that he would let this piece of impertinence go unnoticed. But he only laughed and said, “Damned radical, Curzon. You’ve known me too long. I suppose what you mean is that we are being a damned nuisance. Come along, Daisy. Drink your tea like a good girl.”

Curzon, who looked hopefully at the pair when they had come in, dropped his eyes in disappointment. His Grace’s manner toward Miss Chatterton was fatherly to say the least.

As they were leaving Curzon coughed politely. “Perhaps if Your Grace could spare me a few moments of your valuable time…?”

“’Course. Run along, Daisy. I’ll see you in the drawing room with the rest of the zoo at seven.”

When Daisy had left, Curzon dropped his customary wooden manner. “It’s like this, Your Grace. Now, joking apart, you know I’m not a one to take liberties. I’ve known Miss Daisy since she was a babe, her being a member of our methodist chapel.”

“No, I don’t know Curzon. Methodist, eh! That explains a lot.”

“It explains why Miss. Daisy has turned out a pleasant-spoken, God-fearing girl,” said Curzon sharply.

“Well, out with it man. You didn’t waylay me just to read me a sermon. No. I can see something else in those beady little eyes. Philandering in high places. That’s what’s got you.”

“Exactly, Your Grace.”

“Well, she’s been hurt badly, Curzon, but she’s got a lot of character. She’s a nice stepper and won’t charge her fences.”

“Very sound in wind and limb,” said Curzon dryly. “We are not talking of a filly, Your Grace, but of a highly sensitive girl. I feel perhaps if I could employ a maid for her—one of her old friends—it might cheer her up.”

“Won’t that be a trifle difficult? She can’t really go around being chummy with her maid.”

“The girl I had in mind, Your Grace, would understand that, although she could be friendly with Miss Chatterton in private, but would need to be a correct lady’s maid in public. The girl I had in mind is a certain Amy Pomfret.”

“Oh, I remember. The dazzling blonde. Well, fix it up, Curzon, and warn this Amy about the Earl’s susceptibilities.”

“Very good, Your Grace. There is of course a question of salary…?”

“In other words, my lady won’t fork out. Tell everyone that Miss Chatterton’s father is paying for it. In fact—this is damned embarrassing, but in for a penny in for a pound—I’ll get my man of business to send Miss Chatterton an allowance through you as an old family retainer and all that. Tell Miss Chatterton it’s from dad.”

“But won’t Lord Chatterton, so to speak, spill the beans, Your Grace?”

“Not a hope. That old wastrel won’t dare show his face this side of the English Channel and he don’t care two pins for the girl.”

“Very good, Your Grace.”

“Well, man. What’s up now? Oh, I see. Relax, dear boy. My intentions are as close to indifferent as makes no difference. I have so many pensioners on my books, one more won’t make much difference.”

Curzon’s face broke out into a delighted smile. “Then perhaps, if I may, I will go upstairs and tell Miss Daisy the news.”

“Go, by all means,” said the Duke vaguely, already dismissing the matter from his mind.

Daisy stared at Curzon with surprise and delight. She was to have money, she was to have Amy. Already in her mind’s eye, she saw herself magnificently dressed and the fickle Earl sighing after her with regret.

“Amy can’t start right away, miss,” said Curzon repressively. “She’ll need to be trained first.”

But nothing could dampen Daisy’s flying spirits. “And my poor, dear father. And to think that all this time I have been thinking that he didn’t care for me. I must write to him right away.”

Curzon sent up a private prayer for forgiveness. “Your father left instructions, miss, for you not to write. He is a bad correspondent, he says, and any thanks would just embarrass him.”

“Oh, well.” Daisy’s face fell and then brightened. “But it is marvelous, Mr. Curzon, to find a father, so to speak.”

“Quite,” said Curzon, his face at its most wooden.

Daisy was left to fidget under Plumber’s administrations. At last the time had come for her to descend to the drawing room.

It seemed remarkably thin of company. Most of the guests had departed that morning to move to a house party in the next county. Captain Gerald Braithwaite lounged sulkily in a corner by the window, glaring out at the park. An elderly couple, a Mr. and Mrs. Chichester, were trying to interest the Duke in a horse and a faded debutante of indeterminate age fluttered on the edge of their group, making little birdlike jabbings with her nose to emphasize the salient points of the animal in question.

The Countess rose to her feet and ran across the room to Daisy and kissed her on the cheek. “My dear Daisy, another horrid, dreary dress”—and as Daisy stiffened—“now don’t go all rigid on me. Such a pretty girl must have some pretty clothes. This is my plan. Come and sit beside me and I’ll tell you.” She drew Daisy down to sit beside her on the sofa.

“Now, Davy and I have a big surprise for you. We have planned to give you a Season next year. What do you think of that?”

Daisy muttered her thanks and something about now having money of her own, but the Countess swept that irrelevant detail aside. “
I
am going to choose you
the
most marvelous gowns. See—I have the magazines all ready!”

Daisy caught the brooding glance of the Duke of Oxenden, and remembered his cynical words, “They’re always extravagantly generous to their victims.” But she sat with her head bent, looking unseeingly at the fashion plates before her and thinking that dreams
did
come true, but in all the wrong ways. Here she was sitting with her head next to the Countess’s while the Earl smiled at them indulgently from across the room.

Well, she would play their game and take her Season and become the most beautiful woman in all of London. She would not rest until the fickle, smiling Earl had fallen in love with her. Then she would toss her head and laugh and walk away. The dream was so strong that she did actually toss her head and laugh. The guests looked startled with the exception of the Duke.

She had an uncomfortable feeling that he had just read her mind!

There was one week to go until the beginning of the London Season, and the servants scurried around the great castle, already preparing for the annual departure to the Earl of Nottenstone’s town house.

And Daisy was still in love with the Earl.

All winter long, she had pined and suffered as his careless laugh rang through the castle and his careless hands occasionally patted her on the waist or head, as if she was his pet hound. She had not seen the Duke of Oxenden since the night she had chosen her wardrobe.

Daisy had saved her allowance and bought the Earl a diamond pin for Christmas. He had held the bauble up to the light, laughing and teasing her for being so extravagant, and had then put it aside and forgotten about it with the ease of a spoiled child discarding an expensive but unwanted toy. Curzon had fumed and had threatened to have her allowance stopped. She would have been better employed buying the Duke of Oxenden a present. But when the startled Daisy had stared at him and asked, “Why?” he had been unable to reply.

Amy Pomfret had turned into a highly efficient lady’s maid and a constant comfort to Daisy in her struggles to cope with her bewildering new world. Curzon had given Daisy daily lectures on protocol and Amy had supplied her with thumbnail sketches of all the eligible bachelors, gleaned from the gossip of the servants’ hall.

The Countess had planned Daisy’s coming out ball for the beginning of the Season but, of late, Daisy had noticed that her hostess had been returning to her old snappish ways and was constantly in the company of a Russian Count, Peter Petrovich.

The Count, a restless, dissipated man, seemed to have joined the household permanently, despite the Earl’s constant and overt efforts to dislodge him.

One morning shortly before their departure for London, Daisy awoke very early despite her late bedtime of the night before. It had been a horrid evening, she reflected. The Countess had complained all through dinner about the expense of Daisy’s Season until that much-goaded girl had told her aristocratic host in no uncertain terms to forget about the whole thing and then had escaped upstairs to have a hearty cry on Amy Pomfret’s sympathetic bosom. Daisy was young and feminine enough to want a ball of her very own and to have it snatched from her at the last minute—and because of her own temper—was bitter indeed.

She heard voices below her and crossed to open the window to see who was abroad so early in this nocturnal household. Her heart missed a little beat as she spied the fair hair of the Earl on the terrace below her. Hope sprang eternal and Daisy was about to throw off her wrapper and get dressed so that she could join him and have him to herself for a little, when his voice stopped her.

“Come with me and I will pick a rose to match the roses in your cheeks.”

Daisy’s hands flew to her own cheeks as all the horror of that sunny morning flooded back into her mind. She walked to the window again. She just had to see who the latest “victim” was. She watched in petrified silence as Amy’s blonde curls came into view below her.

“You shouldn’t be flirting with me, my lord,” Daisy heard her laugh.

“Oh, God, I’m not flirting. Can’t you see I’m mad about you?” Daisy winced at the passion in the Earl’s voice.

“Well, then,” teased Amy. “Give me my rose.”

He plucked an early white rose from the edge of the terrace and placed it in Amy’s blonde hair. Then he drew the girl close to him and began to kiss her as if he and Amy were the only people in the world.

Bitter tears began to run down Daisy’s cheeks. A loud scream from below echoed around the castle. “Is there no end to this!” screamed the Countess’s voice, unconsciously echoing Daisy’s thoughts. The couple broke apart. The Earl was scarlet with rage, but Amy seemed remarkably unperturbed. She straightened her lace cap with its frivolous bows and gazed calmly at the enraged Countess.