Elisabeth Fairchild (27 page)

“Oh Fanella! Did he really?” Aurora held in the sound of her astonishment with some difficulty. “But, my dear, this is wonderful! Mamma will be so pleased. She had expected me to snare a Duke, and here you have snatched him right out from under my nose.”

The two women opposite them exchanged a telling look.

Fanella sighed. “I’m sure his offer is not to be taken seriously,” she said in a very small voice, leveling a serious look at Aurora. “I would not have you breathe a word of it to anyone.”

“Not even mother?” Aurora hissed.

“Especially not mother,” Nell insisted.

Chapter Twenty

Beau was turned away from Ursula Dunn’s door on more than one occasion by the very housekeeper with whom he had taken meals as Mrs. Dunn’s coachman. The woman gave him the same fish-eyed stare, nose in the air, every time he came to call on Fanella.

“The young ladies are not at home to callers,” she said, with a righteous indignation, and before he could get anything more out of her pinch-purse mouth, the door slammed in his face. As he made his way down the steps for the third time in as many days, Toby called out to him. He was standing in the ivy bound gate to the Mews.

“She’s gone, sir.”

“Mrs. Dunn?”

“Nay, Miss Nell Quinby, sir. It’s she you’re after, ain’t it?” He winked knowingly. “I am also guessing you wouldn’t mind me telling you where she was off to.”

“I will not argue with that. I really m-m-must speak to her you know.”

Toby nodded wisely. “Miss Nell’s gone home to her mum’s, with the sister. Left two days ago.”

“Two days ago? Good Lord! Thank you, Toby. I must be off.”

Beau set out that afternoon for the cottage near Godstone, where the Quinby’s had taken up residence. He went with misgivings, and just as he had been at Ursula Dunn’s, he was turned away.

“She’s no desire to speak to you, my lord,” Aurora met him at the door, stiffly polite, like a mastiff who would refrain from biting him if only he would leave them in peace. Meticulously correct, she escorted him to the gate.

On his way there, Beau stammered out his apologies, both for his pretending to be a coachman, and for leaving London before being introduced to her.

Aurora tossed her head. “You have wounded my sister’s heart, your grace, far more than mine. You have confused if not destroyed her trust.” She smiled in a brittle way, as if her lips objected to such an arrangement. “She has told me that she was ready to become a coachman’s wife, despite the fact she knew it would have broken our mother’s heart for her to do so. She has told me, too, that she refused your offer because of her feelings of responsibility with regard to my family’s welfare.”

Beau nodded. “A-And yet, she would refuse me still, when I might do much to improve the state of all of your a-a-affairs.”

Aurora looked at him with unguarded surprise. “It was not some heartless jest then, this proposal?”

Beau blinked at her, amazed he should be asked such a thing. “A jest? A-Am I sunk so low in your sister’s estimation?” He observed some movement in the second story window that looked out over the hedgerow, and focused on it with interest. “I am quite h-hopelessly in love with your sister,” he admitted candidly. “My intentions are honorable, if not my methods.”

Aurora softened. She too glanced up at the window above them. “Do you mean to try to win her back again?”

He regarded her intently. “Have I any hope of doing so?”

The eldest Miss Quinby held out her hand to him, one eyebrow archly raised. “You will never know, my lord, until you try. You have my best wishes, and my belief that ’Nella still cherishes some feeling for you. She would not suffer so, cared she nothing for you.”

Beau winced. “I would relieve that suffering, you know. Do you think p-p-perhaps we might arrange my introduction to your mother?”

Aurora tilted her head, to regard him, as if for the first time. “I do not think that is too unreasonable a request,” she agreed. “As long as you are the one to explain to her all that has transpired.”

Beau frowned. “She knows naught of this?”

Aurora shook her pretty head. “She will never know, unless you tell her. ’Nella will not say a word, and she has sworn me to secrecy.”

As a direct result of having explained himself to Nell’s mother, Beau set up residence at the White Hart Inn for a fortnight. For as many days, he was cordially invited to visit the Quinby cottage. Each day, he went in hopes of speaking to Nell. With him, came flowers, and baskets of hothouse fruit, and boxes of specially blended tea. But, while Mrs. Quinby served him untold number of cups of that very tea, along with biscuits, scones, crumpets and jam, and Cat grilled him about every detail with regard to the Whip Club, as well as the horses he rode and drove, and Aurora kindly sat and chatted with, and made a point of informing him as to her absent sister’s well-being-- Fanella, whom he yearned to see, ignored him completely.

She went for walks whenever he was expected, or took the pony into the village on errands. They passed one another in the lane on more than one occasion, but in each instance she pretended not to see him as he raised his hat, and called out to her.

“I return to London tomorrow,” Beau informed Aurora when the weeks had flown. “I can leave my responsibilities untended no longer.”

Aurora bit her lip in disappointment. “I see,” she said. “I am sorry.”

Beau held up his hand, and in it a folded screw of paper. “No a-a-apologies, please. I a-a-am not surprised I am so reviled by your sister. I am discouraged, but not yet b-b-beaten. Give her this, if you will. Perhaps she will be more inclined to read of my contrition than to hear it from my lips.”

With hope like a dying ember in his heart, Lord Beauford returned to London.

While he himself no longer came to the Quinby Cottage, deliveries arrived almost daily in his stead; baskets of hothouse fruit, and flowers, as well as current copy of news from London, and fashion plates, sheet music and books of poetry. And with each delivery, came a creamy envelope addressed to Fanella, bearing the waxed seal of the Duke of Heste.

These letters, like the one left in Aurora’s care, went unopened. Fanella refused to so much as acknowledge the correspondence. She would have refused the fruit and flowers, but her mother would not allow it.

“I quite liked the Duke, Fanella, my love,” Mrs. Quinby explained. “He is extremely well-mannered, generous to the extreme, and while I will not force you to accept his advances, my dear, neither will I do anything to discourage the suit.”

The fruit was eaten, the books read, the news and fashion plates examined with interest, and the flowers filled all rooms but Fanella’s. She made a great pretense of ignoring the showering of gifts, until the day that a packet of sheet music was delivered. Even then, she did not make any effort to pick out Mr. Beethovan’s works herself on the pianoforte, only listened very keenly when Aurora had a go at it. But, as the first few bars filled the drawing room, the same bars of music that she had heard ringing through the trees in what was left of old Anderidon, she fled the room, tears in her eyes.

The mounting pile of letters from the duke, Fanella stacked very neatly, one atop the other, on the table by the window in her room, and when they threatened to tumble down, so many were there, she bound them up in three neat piles, with blue ribbon, and tucked them away in her stocking drawer.

Her mother tried on more than one occasion to reason her into reading them. In all other ways an obedient daughter, Nell refused. Aurora pleaded with her to reconsider. Nell turned a deaf ear. Cat scolded. She was dying with curiosity to know what so much correspondence from any gentleman could have to say. Nell ignored her. The letters remained unread.

Sometimes numb, more often icily angry, Nell was determined never to allow the Duke of Heste opportunity to wound her shattered heart yet again.

When no answering epistles were forthcoming, Lady Beatrix Cowper took up her pen to address both Nell and Aurora, expressing her dismay in the way things had worked out. She extended an invitation to all of the Quinby’s to come and winter with her in London, for she had no desire for word to continue to fly about that their two families were at odds with one another. Gossip was such a nasty business.

Aurora and Cat were thrilled. Nell was not. Her wounded pride, and the ache in her heart, left her unbent to kindness. She could not find it within herself to agree to such a plan.

Cat was furious, and Aurora ready to argue the point, but

Mrs. Quinby quieted them both. “You must give your sister time to stop hurting, time to see clearly the sagacity of such a plan,” she chided gently. “Fanella cannot fail to realize in the end, that the best way to go on, is in making just such a visit.”

But, Nell did not realize. Safe in Godstone, she backed away from any thought of facing up to Lord Beauford or his family. And, in her safe solitude her spirits sank to their lowest ebb. Respite came in the form of a great packet of gossipy letters from Aunt Ursula, who missed her nieces company most dreadfully. The packet extravagantly included separate letters for everyone. Two were addressed to Nell. The first was written in Ursula’s crablike scrawl, and recounted her overwrought feelings with regard to the duplicity of the Duke of Heste, whom she admitted she could no longer judge too harshly, for despite her snubbing him, and refusing to so much as receive the flowers he had sent her, the duke had gone to great lengths to find her an excellent coachman for the duration of her stay in Brighton, whose wage he had paid in advance, and the lovely new bay was so well-tempered, and such a perfect match to her own, that she could not completely revile the man who had made him available to her.

Aunt Ursula empathized with Nell’s disappointed hopes, and decried the nasty gossip that should be circulating about both of her unfortunate nieces. Tearfully, she recommended that if her darling niece would not reconsider the Duke’s offering of marriage, which she understood to be real enough, she must at least take advantage of Lady Cowpers’s invitation to stay the season in London. Such an honor could not but do all of the Quinby’s standing some good. In addition, she suggested that perhaps Fanella would be interested in the offer extended her in the enclosed letter, which she had seen fit to forward.

This second letter was from a Lady Anne Elliot, who thanked Nell prettily for her own correspondence with regard to the old horse, Boots. The horse was, she said, quite content in his new home, his task no more than to pull a cart on occasion for the children, whom he seemed happy to allow the straddling of his broad back. She was welcome, the letter told her, to come and visit old Boots whenever she should so desire, and in addition, she was encouraged to write and inform Lady Elliot if she knew of anyone responsible who might be looking for a position as companion to a wealthy peer, who was quite as dotty about animals as she would appear to be. There was an opening she knew of, that must be filled.

Nell’s sisters vociferously encouraged Nell to go.

“Go on, Nell. I should very much like to know what has become of Boots,” Cat insisted.

“Yes, do go,” Aurora agreed, with perhaps a little too much enthusiasm. “Some time away from home cannot but lift your spirits.”

“It will take your mind off of--other things,” her mother suggested with an odd little smile, and then she offered to write a letter to Lady Elliot announcing Nell’s imminent arrival.

Realizing that her refusal to forgive Lord Beauford had been more than trying to her family, Nell got the feeling that they would all be glad to see the back of her for a time. So, she packed her bags, and sent them away by courier, all the while thinking that she had been behaving in a rather juvenile fashion since her return from Brighton. It occurred to her, if only for an instant, that perhaps it would be best if she agreed to a Season with Beatrix Cowper. The white-hot embers of her hurt and anger might cool, given limited exposure to the man she still thought of as Beau Ferd.

For now, once again, Cat navigated the dogcart along the lane to the White Hart Inn, and Nell, her thoughts touched by poignant memories of the last time she had traversed the same road, climbed aboard the post. Aurora had kindly packed a hamper with treats for the trip, and as she hugged Fanella and pressed the basket into her lap, she whispered, “You must return to us our old happy ’Nella, my dear. Have a good trip, and give old Boots a hug.”

It was not until the coach was well under way that Nell opened the lid of the hamper, and saw that Aurora had rifled her stocking drawer. Topping the fruit and sandwiches were three blue-ribbon bound stacks of unopened letters.

As though a viper had been revealed to her, poised to strike at her hand, Nell snapped the lid on the hamper closed again. And yet, as the miles flashed by, and memories of her coaching experiences with the man she had called Beau Ferd, welled to the surface of her mind, Fanella found herself drawn time and again to opening the basket lid, that she might peek at the creamy promise of the letters. What did he have to say to her? She could not deny some curiosity.