Maulever Hall (8 page)

Easily distracted, Mrs. Mauleverer turned to admire the coronet of real and false hair that Marianne had built up on the top of her head. “Admirable,” she said, “you must do it for me every night of Lady Heverdon’s stay. What a talented girl you are, to be sure. My poor Martha’s nose is quite out of joint, is it not, Martha?”

It was all too evidently true. Martha had been flouncing about the room tidying her mistress’s clothes while Marianne usurped her function at the dressing table, and now slammed out of the room with some half-heard but all too obviously saucy rejoinder. “Oh dear,” sighed Mrs. Mauleverer, “that was foolish of me. I shall pay for it later. But come, my dear, I hear the second gong, and you know how Mark hates to be kept waiting.”

Following her, Marianne felt almost tempted to emulate Martha’s sauciness. She was tired of the way the whole household revolved around Mark Mauleverer and his crotchets. Following Mrs. Mauleverer into the drawing room, she saw at once that he was in one of the black moods she had learned to dread. Tonight, he would drink fast and take his mother up shortly on her sillier remarks, instead of merely ignoring them, or teasing her gently as he sometimes did. It was going to be an exhausting meal, with her part—that of peacemaker—one she was very far from wanting to play.

Mrs. Mauleverer, habitually blind to anyone’s feelings but her own, had not noticed her son’s drawn brows, and the flush along his scar that Marianne had learned to dread. She had contrived to grumble herself into a good temper by now, and merely greeted him with the usual teasing enquiry as to what he had been doing with himself all day.

“I rode to Exton,” he said shortly. “The election there is as good as over before it has even begun. I never saw such a farce. If it goes thus in the rest of the country, it’s goodbye, reform. The Duke will be back with a thumping majority, ready to misgovern the country till he dies. And the worst of it is”—he was talking as much to himself as to his mother
—
one cannot help respecting the Duke, since he only does what he considers to be his duty. I sometimes wish he had been killed at Waterloo.”

“Mark!” His mother was shocked out of her habitual complacency. “How can you say such a thing? I can remember when you thought the Duke a perfect God among men.”

“
Fifteen years ago!” His face was blacker than ever. “Come shall we go into dinner. I am ravenous. The crowds were too great in Exton for anything so mundane as eating: drink was
all they cared for, and there’ll be broken heads in plenty before
the election is over. I never saw such blatant treating.”

Watching, with relief, as he fell hungrily upon the lavish meal Cook had sent up, Marianne did her best to turn the conversation to less irritating channels. She had been reading
Anne of Geierstein
aloud to Mrs. Mauleverer in the evenings, and this seemed an innocuous enough topic: would Lady Heverdon care for it, she asked. He did not know.
“
But she is a passionate admirer of Lord Byron’s poems,” he contributed.

“Oh, admirable,” said his mother, “then she must find you the very image of Manfred and the rest of them, and won
’
t care a bit about
...”
Her eyes on his scar, which had suddenly gone livid, she stammered to a halt.

Marianne’s suspicion that this was forbidden ground was amply confirmed by his mother’s red confusion and his white, if silent, rage. Once again, she turned the conversation. “For myself
”
—she managed to keep her voice light—“I confess I much prefer Mr. Wordsworth, even at his most prosy, to Lord Byron’s melodramas, but then I am afraid I am not a very romantic kind of person.”

He laughed, his short, barking laugh: “That comes admirably from you, Miss Lamb, all wreathed in mystery as you are. Do you, perhaps, prefer Mrs. Radcliffe as a source to Lord Byron, who, after all, is blessed with a sense
of humor?”

“Of a particularly unpleasant kind.” At all costs, even in her anger, she knew that she must keep the conversation general. “So far as humor goes, I would rather have a page of Miss Austen than several volumes of Lord Byron.”

“Would you really? You surprise me, Miss Lamb. We shall be discovering next that even your first name is not truly yours, but merely borrowed from the swooning young lady in
Sense and Sensibility
.”

Suddenly, she was tired of these continued hints that she was merely pretending her loss of memory. “Well,” she said, “I confess that I may, sometimes, have found myself compelled to behave like the heroine of a romantic novel, but who are you, Mr. Mauleverer, to twit me with it? I hope you have never seen me swoon yet, which is, I suppose, the prerogative of romantic heroines, while you carry with you, plain for all to see, the evidence, that you have fought at least one duel, like the veriest Clement Willoughby of them all.” There. She had said the thing she knew most calculated to hurt him and now, appalled, awaited the explosion.

None came. He was looking at her oddly. “Do I owe you an apology, Miss Lamb? Perhaps I do. At all events, shall we cry quits and drink a glass of wine together?”

She could only stammer her own apology and gaze at him, dark eyes large with surprise over her wine glass. What an incomprehensible creature he was. But Mrs. Mauleverer, very much more predictable, was shifting uneasily in her chair. “My dear, I think it is high time we withdrew.” And then, as always, gratingly maternal, “you will not stay too long over your wine, Mark?”

They were hardly safe in the drawing room when she turned on Marianne. “Miss Lamb, how could you? Surely you must have known he got that wound at Waterloo?”

“No!” Horror-stricken, she could say no more.

“Yes,” Mrs. Mauleverer went relentlessly on. “It wrecked his life, my poor darling boy. Of course, I was against his volunteering; why should he, at seventeen! But his uncle was all for it, bought him the commission, and, I am sure, hoped that would be the last of him. There were many, you know, who thought the English Army would be mere mincemeat before Bonaparte. But he survived, my poor boy, to spite his uncle, and break his mother’s heart—and his own,” she added in characteristic parenthesis. “Did you not know that he was engaged, before Bonaparte escaped from Elba, to a most eligible young lady. I will not tell you her name—it is all ancient history now, and truly I do not blame her overmuch. He came back, looking so dreadfully—I tell you, his appearance now is nothing to what it was then—and with his sweet temper so marred with black rages. Well, what else could she do but ask to be excused from the engagement? But he has never got over it—at least, not until now. So you can see why I am so full of hope about Lady Heverdon’s visit. I do not really care what she is like, if she can make Mark forget his dreadful appearance—or
think
that she forgets it. Of course,
we
never mention it.” There was infinite reproach in her tone.

“Perhaps it would have been better if you had, ma’am.” Though horrified at what she had done, Marianne’s spirit had not quite deserted her. She was nerving herself for the apology she knew she must make.

She bolted into it as soon as Mauleverer joined
them,
crossing the room to meet him as he came in. “Mr. Mauleverer, I owe you the deepest possible apology. Will you forgive me? Your mother has been telling me
...”

“I am sure she has.” He cut her short. “I am only surprised
she had not before, but it is not a subject we are much given to discussing. As for your apologies; there is no need for them. I expect I richly deserved your rebuke. And after all, it does not much matter how I came to be so disfigured. The disagreeable fact is quite enough. I feel I ought myself constantly to be apologizing to you, or any other lady for the pain she must feel in looking at me.”

“Nonsense,” said Marianne.

“I beg your pardon?” He was not used to being addressed so abruptly.

“I said, ‘nonsense.’ Do you really think I, or any other young lady for the matter of that, could be so lily-livered as to be swooning-ripe for a little thing like a scar? And one gained so honorably too. You do us females less than justice, Mr. Mauleverer.” And then she remembered the girl who had jilted him, and felt herself blushing furiously.

But he was looking at her with unwonted kindness. “Thank you, Miss Lamb,” he said, “you give me new courage.”

He was thinking, of course, of next day’s meeting with Lady Heverdon. Tossing on her sleepless bed that night, Marianne wondered what the unknown beauty would really be like. That Mauleverer was oceans deep in love with her she no longer doubted for a moment, and his mother seemed to have resigned herself to the prospect of the match. But what of the gay young widow with the faintly tarnished name? Might she not think she could do better for herself than a scarred and short-tempered politician? But then, Marianne reminded herself, Mauleverer was Lord Heverdon if he would accept the title—might find he had to, willy-nilly ... It was none of it, somehow, conducive to sleep, and when, at last, it came, it was troubled by dreams, mounting to the familiar, recurrent nightmare of the terror
...
Only this time her pursuer was no longer an unknown figure, but, catching her at last, revealed himself as Mauleverer, now hideously scarred on both sides of his face.

V

The whole house shone. The footmen were in dress livery and powdered wigs, the maids in clean striped dimity gowns and aprons, and Mrs. Mauleverer was resplendent in a morning dress of purple
gros de Naples
,
whose enormous gigot sleeves were supposed, Marianne assumed, to make it clear that she never did a hand’s turn of work around the house. Marianne herself was wearing, rather reluctantly, one of her new dresses, a simple figured muslin that the mild June weather made highly suitable. She had seen to it that the whole house was fragrant with flowers from the cutting garden and had herself arranged the huge flat bowl of pansies that perfumed the state guest chamber where once the unlucky Duke of Monmouth had slept.

Lady Heverdon, it seemed, had been visiting in the district, and had told Mauleverer that she would be with them early in the day, but the slow, warm hours passed without any sign of her. Mark Mauleverer hovered about restlessly, teasing his mother and Marianne with repeated questions about the preparations they had made, and making himself, Marianne privately thought, almost ridiculous by his anxiety for his guest
’
s comfort. Tired of this, she retreated at last to the servants’ quarters, where she found the cook in a state of simmering anxiety over her saucepans. The sacred hour of six o’clock dinner was drawing near; surely Lady Heverdon would not be late for that? Soothing these anxieties as best she might, Marianne suggested various means by which the elaborate meal might be retarded, if this became necessary, without undue disaster, but the cook’s lowering brow warned her of crisis to come, and she returned, with a sigh, to the front of the house. Mrs. Mauleverer was hovering in the main hall from which all the principal rooms opened. “What shall I do, my dear?” she asked. “It is high time to be changing for dinner, but if I go up, Lady Heverdon is sure
to arrive, and I shall not be there to greet her. But you know
how long I take to dress.”

Marianne did, and knew too how it flustered her to have to hurry. She urged her to go on and dress. “I will wait here,” she said, “and act as your deputy if it is necessary.”

Mark Mauleverer, appearing from his study, seconded her. “I cannot think what can have detained Lady Heverdon,” he said, “but do you go on upstairs, Mamma. Miss Lamb and I will form an amply sufficient reception committee, and you know it takes me no time at all to change. Nor Miss Lamb either, I suspect.”

If true, this was not exactly flattering to Marianne, who received it with a faintly mocking half curtsy and pointed out that Lady Heverdon, too, would doubtless wish to change her dress before she dined, and they would therefore have plenty of time. “Do not worry, ma’am, I will make time to come and do your hair for you in the way you like it.”

Thus reassured, Mrs. Mauleverer at last withdrew. Her son took an anxious turn about the hall. “I cannot think what keeps Lady Heverdon,” he said again. “I hope she has not met with an accident. I wonder if I should ride out to meet her.”

“If you do,” said Marianne reasonably, “she is bound to come another way; you will miss her and there will be no one here to greet her.”

“What a sensible girl you are, Miss Lamb. You have the answer to everything. I cannot think how we got on without you!”

Once again, ironically curtsying for the compliment, she found it an unwelcome one. How tiresome it was to be so sensible. But Mauleverer was looking more and more anxious and she did her best to comfort him. “After all,” she said, still reasonably, “Lady Heverdon will hardly be traveling alone. Even if she should have met with an accident, there would be someone she could send.”

“Of course there would. I am tormenting myself quite needlessly, I am sure. No doubt she has encountered friends on the way.”

“Or found herself late in starting. It is often difficult to get away from one’s hosts.” The hall clock struck a quarter to six. “I think, if you will excuse me, I had best go and commune with the cook; there is disaster brewing, I am afraid, in the kitchen.”

But he had turned away from her to stride down the hall to the front door, still open on the mild evening. “Yes,” he
said, “it is a carriage. She must be coming at last.” He stood in the doorway, evening sunshine bringing out auburn lights in his dark hair and striking ruthlessly across the scarred cheek, but, for once, Marianne thought, he had forgotten himself in the excitement of the meeting. As for her, she hovered more modestly near the main stairway. Her part would be to come forward when the first greetings were over, and act housekeeper in guiding Lady Heverdon to her rooms. But, inevitably, however much she disliked it, somehow she must watch the meeting.

An elegant plum-colored traveling carriage came
rat
tling
along the drive and drew up at last in front of the house, and while Marianne noticed that the four horses showed no sign of hard driving, Mauleverer hurried forward to anticipate the servants in opening the carriage door and helping
h
is guest to alight.