Deception (Daughters of Mannerling 3) (5 page)

He nearly forgot his good intentions when his mother said ‘I entertained the Beverley twins, Abigail and Rachel, to tea.’

‘The devil you did!’ cried Harry wrathfully. ‘After what I have suffered at that family’s hands. Forced to rejoin my regiment . . .’

His father’s voice was like ice. ‘You were not only obliged to go back to the army because of your assault on Jessica Beverley but also because you sold property in London, signing my name, to entertain that whore of an opera singer you had in keeping.’

With a supreme effort Harry remembered his aim to get out of the army for good. ‘I am so sorry, sir,’ he said contritely, adopting the ‘little boy’ look which he knew usually went to his mother’s heart. ‘It’s the shame of it all, sir, that makes me long to blame someone, anyone else.’

‘Well, well,’ said his father, mollified, ‘we will say no more about the matter. Except for one thing. It would do you no harm to get on friendly terms with the Beverley family. If you do that, the locals will begin to think the scandal was blown out of all proportion and was all a hum.’

‘I will try,’ said Harry with every appearance of humility while he privately thought he would see the whole pack of Beverleys in hell first.

Lord Burfield descended to the drawing room that evening to join his hostess and her new guests. He was, despite Lady Evans’s description, prepared to find Miss Prudence Makepeace as someone quite plain and ordinary.

Prudence was standing by the fireplace, talking to Lady Evans. She had glossy brown hair, a creamy skin, large eyes, and a small mouth. Her figure was neat. She looked straight across at him and then delicately lowered her eyelids.

With that first sight of him, Prudence Makepeace had marked Lord Burfield down as her own. She had heard of his fortune, so he could not be damned as an adventurer, but she had not dreamed for one moment that he would turn out to be so devastatingly handsome. Prudence had had many opportunities to marry, but she had a high opinion of her own looks and intelligence and wanted only the best.

Lady Evans made the introductions. Mr and Mrs Makepeace were a comfortable-looking, undistinguished couple who were obviously rather in awe of their daughter. After some general conversation, Lord Burfield said to Prudence, ‘I was sorry to learn of your loss.’

‘Oh, you mean my fiancé? That was very sad,’ said Prudence. ‘I barely knew him. But it was sad all the same.’

‘Have you been in London recently?’ asked Lord Burfield.

‘We have just returned,’ said Prudence. She slowly waved an ostrich feather fan and her eyes flirted over the edge of it. ‘So tedious. I prefer the country.’

‘How refreshing,’ he said, not knowing that Prudence’s mother had found out from Lady Evans that Lord Burfield preferred country life to city life. ‘I am so used to young ladies preferring a life of balls and parties.’

‘But there is so much to do in the country.’ She gave a tinkling laugh. ‘Papa says my interest in the estate is quite
masculine
.’

Prudence had been well schooled in Lord Burfield’s likes and dislikes. But anxious that he should not question her about estates management, about which she knew nothing at all, she moved quickly on to one of his other loves – fine porcelain.

‘But my one reason for enjoying a visit to London is to find something to add to my porcelain collection.’

‘Indeed! It appears we have many tastes in common, Miss Makepeace. Did you acquire anything of interest on your last visit?’

‘I bought two vases of Vincennes-Sèvres porcelain, two vases with a light-blue background. They are in the Etruscan style. I also bought a Vincennes-Sèvres barometer and thermometer, each with ornamentation and precious painting, a table made of Sèvres porcelain, a commode with porcelain inlay, and a painting by Van Loo on a porcelain plaque.’

He raised his eyebrows and threw her a puzzled look. She could not have said anything wrong, thought Prudence. Had she not studied that boring history of porcelain from cover to cover?

‘I do not know how such pieces came to be in England,’ said Lord Burfield. ‘These items are enumerated in Madame Du Barry’s memoirs, and after her death, the rarest and most valuable, those you have just described, were declared national works of art by the French. May I ask in which sale room you purchased them?’

‘Not a sale room,’ said Prudence quickly. ‘My father’s agent bought them for me from a French émigré.’

‘Strange,’ he said, half to himself, and Prudence stifled a little sigh of relief when dinner was announced.

Unlike the Americans, who still kept to the old ways and had the sexes segregated at dinner, they all sat at the same table but with the ladies down one side and the gentlemen down the other.

Lady Evans kept a good table. The first course was green pea soup, removed with a haunch of lamb, larded and glazed with cucumber sauce, haricot of mutton, breast of veal and stewed peas, a sauté of sweetbreads and mushrooms, raised pie à la française, friçassee of chicken, neck of venison, beef olives and sauce piquant, and fish removed with rump of beef à la Mantua.

The second course consisted of larded guinea fowl, peas, blancmange, macaroni, currant-and-raspberry pie, omelette soufflé, chantilly cake, french beans, and hare.

Prudence, who actually had a notebook in her room in which she had written down all Lord Burfield’s likes and dislikes, which her mother had gleaned from Lady Evans, had learned that he detested the modern fashion of ladies’ picking at their food. So she ate with every appearance of a hearty appetite. But her trim figure owed more to tight lacing than nature and she began to feel her stays digging into her. Her face grew red and then white. A footman placed a portion of larded guinea fowl in front of her. She stared at it dismally and then fell into a dead faint, her head resting on her plate and the guinea fowl buried in her hair.

Footmen carried Prudence back into the drawing room and laid her gently on the sofa. Lord Burfield had risen to his feet but Lady Evans snapped, ‘Do sit down, Rupert. Let the ladies cope with it.’ She knew just why Prudence had fainted, thought her a silly girl, but nonetheless considered her an excellent match for Lord Burfield and therefore did not want him to see any more of the girl when she had bits of guinea fowl in her hair and gravy running down her cheeks. The reason for Lady Evans’s partiality was because, unknown to her, Prudence had a notebook on
her
likes and dislikes also in her room, her mother having told her that Lady Evans had influence with this Lord Burfield, and so Prudence had been able to charm Lady Evans shortly after her arrival by talking on topics dear to that lady’s heart.

Lady Evans thought briefly of this Abigail Beverley who had made some sort of impression on Lord Burfield. But she was evidently highly well-informed and intelligent, and no gentleman liked that. Prudence, thought Lady Evans comfortably, was a sensible girl with a great deal of common sense, and common sense was a good thing but actual knowledge was a dangerous thing!

The day before the ball, Rachel was showing every sign that she would be well enough to go. She smiled at Abigail and said, ‘Miss Trumble has been an angel. She did manage to stop me fretting or I might have continued to be too ill.’ She looked curiously at her twin. ‘You have been very silent on the subject of the ball. Are you not excited?’

‘We have been so long out of society,’ said Abigail, ‘that I fear I must have become accustomed to seeing no one.’

‘I asked for you a few days ago,’ said Rachel, still looking at her curiously, ‘and you could not be found. Miss Trumble feared you had disobeyed orders and gone out walking on your own. When you came to my room later you looked as if you had some secret you were not sharing with me. Where did you go?’

‘I went to look at Mannerling,’ said Abigail reluctantly.

‘Oh, you should not!’ cried Rachel. ‘We have been such fools. I hope no one saw you.’

‘Someone did. A gentleman. A Lord Burfield. He is staying with Lady Evans.’

‘Dear me, Abigail, he will no doubt have heard the country gossip about us and will have already regaled Lady Evans and her other guests with a story about how he found you, unaccompanied, haunting your old home.’

Abigail blushed.

‘But perhaps,’ suggested Rachel hopefully, ‘you did not tell him who you were.’

‘I am afraid I did, and yes, he evidently knew all about us and he said Mannerling did not look anything out of the common way to him.’

‘Oh, dear.’ Rachel had conjured up a picture in her mind of this Lord Burfield as an elderly gentleman. ‘Why on earth did you go to Mannerling, Abigail? We must put all that behind us. We are comfortable here, and Mama must have money to buy those splendid ball gowns. We shall be all the crack again.’

But Abigail was not comforted by that thought. She was beginning to dread this ball. She had enjoyed Lord Burfield’s company but now the thought of him talking about seeing her at Mannerling was making her begin to fear the looks and contemptuous stares she was now sure would be cast in her direction.

When the Beverley sisters were gathered in the parlour ready to set out for the ball, Miss Trumble beamed on them with pride. Even Lizzie, who was never accounted much of a beauty because of her red hair, looked ethereal in leaf-green muslin with a wreath of ivy leaves in her hair. Belinda was in blue muslin, her black hair shining under a little Juliet cap. Rachel and Abigail were both wearing white muslin, but Abigail’s was trimmed at the neck and hem with little silk rosebuds and she wore a coronet of silk rosebuds on her head, and Rachel’s gown was trimmed with silk ears of corn. She wore a gold circlet on her hair, which Miss Trumble had dressed in one of the latest Roman styles. Miss Trumble had been determined that, on this great occasion, the twins should not be dressed alike.

But Lady Beverley could only see that her daughters were not bedecked in precious jewels as they had been at the great balls at Mannerling, and Miss Trumble’s quiet remark that no young unmarried miss was expected to wear any ornaments grander than coral or seed-pearls did not seem to comfort her.

They were helped into their warm cloaks, shawls, and wraps by the maids.

It was a frosty, moonlit night, and the horses pulling the rented coach struck sparks from the hard road with their hooves.

Lady Beverley was in a bad mood. Her parsimony had made her stop short at ordering a new ensemble for herself, for she considered her plum velvet gown and velvet turban, which had served her for several years, fine enough. But her nose was put out of joint by her governess’s modish gown of lilac satin and lilac silk turban with a dyed ostrich feather curled round the edge. Lady Beverley did not like the idea of being outshone by a servant. She contented herself by saying she was sure dear Lady Evans must have made a mistake and would be shocked to see a mere governess arriving as a guest.

When they alighted from the carriage, the girls stood for a moment looking up at the house. It was a large Elizabethan mansion with many mullioned windows. ‘Quite fine in its way,’ said Belinda, ‘but not a patch on Mannerling.’

‘No,’ agreed Miss Trumble, ‘I doubt if this pleasant mansion has the power to turn intelligent young ladies into silly misses!’

‘Remember your place, Miss Trumble,’ said Lady Beverley awfully. ‘You are not allowed to make sneering remarks about the great house that was once ours.’

Miss Trumble ignored her and followed her charges into a vast gloomy entrance hall, smelling of woodsmoke and damp dog. They left their cloaks and wraps in a room off the hall and then were led through a chain of corridors to the ballroom, which was a modern extension added to the back of the old house. Miss Trumble hoped she had schooled her girls in etiquette as diligently as she had schooled them in learning. There were many offences against English manners which could be committed by the unwary foreigner or the green girl. The three greatest were these: never put your knife in your mouth instead of your fork; never take up sugar or asparagus with your fingers: and
never
spit anywhere in the room. An adventurer in London society actually went undetected and was able to pass himself off as a man of rank because of the single circumstance of picking up an olive with his fork rather than his fingers. Tremendous importance was attached to trivia.

The ballroom was large and square, with a chalked floor and two fireplaces at either end. Branches of candles burnt on the walls and a great candelabrum blazed overhead. Despite the chill of the evening outside, the room was very warm indeed.

Lord Burfield, looking across the room, was in no doubt that the Beverley sisters had arrived, even though he did not recognize Abigail at first glance. Their beauty outshone that of every other lady in the room. It was not so much their looks as a sort of radiance that surrounded them. He had thought Abigail a very pretty girl when he had met her outside Mannerling. Now, as he singled her out from the others, he thought her quite the most beautiful creature he had ever seen.

Prudence, too, had noticed the arrival of these charmers. ‘Find out who they are?’ she whispered to her mother.

‘I have just heard someone remark that they are the famous Beverley sisters.’