Refining Felicity (3 page)

There were halloos and cheers from outside. She crammed the newspaper back in the drawer and went to the window. A party of young bloods on horseback, headed by the countess’s daughter, Lady Felicity, were riding through the rose garden. A Scottish gardener like an infuriated gnome was jumping up and down and howling at their disappearing backs in a fury.

Lady Baronsheath sat down again, her legs trembling. What on earth was she to do? Felicity’s first coming-out ball was that very night, and instead of beautifying herself, she was tearing up the rose garden with the noisiest of the male house guests.

It was all her husband’s fault, thought Lady Baronsheath bitterly. He had wanted a son, he had always wanted a son, and she had not been able to give him anything other than one girl. So he had proceeded to treat the girl as if she were a boy, and he had indulged her every whim. Now he was all set to sail to America for an extended visit, leaving his wife to take Lady Felicity up to London for her first Season.

And there should be no need to do that at all, thought Lady Baronsheath crossly, with such a marital prize on the doorstep. The Marquess of Ravenswood, their neighbour, had recently returned from the wars. He was handsome, elegant, and rich. He was a trifle old, being in his thirties, and Felicity was nineteen, but surely an older man was what she needed to curb her. All Lady Baronsheath’s dreams of seeing her daughter engaged to the marquess on the night of the ball had long since vanished. The marquess had already met Lady Felicity and appeared to despise her, and his very presence always seemed to make Felicity worse.

Sometimes the sheer exuberance of her husband and daughter made Lady Baronsheath feel faded and washed out. The house was an elegant one, quite modern, built in the Palladian style, with graceful wings springing out from either side of the classical main building. The rooms were light and beautifully furnished. But the whole place always smelled of damp clothes and horses and dogs. Felicity rode almost every day, always dressed in men’s clothes.

The ball was to be held in the chain of state saloons that made up the first floor of the central building. Already from above came the faint strains of the orchestra, rehearsing a waltz. Lady Baronsheath tried to console herself with the thought that a Felicity in evening dress and with her hair up would perhaps appear enchanting in the marquess’s eyes and that, with luck, he had not heard of her reputation for being the hoyden of the hunting field.

She did not think so, but she had to hang on to that hope to give her courage for the evening ahead.

And now the dreaded country first appears;
With sighs unfeign’d, the dying noise she hears
Of distant coaches fainter by degrees,
Then starts and trembles at the sight of trees.

Soames Jenkins,
The Modern Fine Lady

Lady Felicity Vane meant to behave well. She had noticed her mother’s anxious face, her worried looks, her nervousness over the success or failure of this ball. So Lady Felicity had made up her mind to look as beautiful as possible and to flirt and simper like the very best of daughters. She would charm this Marquess of Ravenswood and accept his hand in marriage. All young ladies tried to marry well; all good misses owed that much to their fond parents. Besides, if Lady Felicity married Ravenswood, then she would not be taken away from her beloved hunt. Priding herself on her practical mind and never pausing to think that the marquess might have other ideas, Lady Felicity, with unusual and alarming docility, allowed her maid, Wanstead, to prepare her for the ball.

Wanstead had withstood Lady Felicity’s humours longer than most. She was a tough elderly country-woman with few graces and a hide like leather. In the past, nurses had come and gone, and then a succession of governesses, driven away by Lady Felicity’s practical jokes and wild behaviour, but Wanstead had remained for three years now. Her greatest asset was that she was hard of hearing. The noise of Felicity’s tantrums did not disturb her, and she had developed a bobbing, weaving motion from learning to avoid thrown hairbrushes, curling tongs, and other missiles.

Felicity adored her father and tried very hard to behave like the young rip he would have liked for a son. She had once put on a very pretty gown with frills and lace to please her mother and her father had laughed and laughed and had said she looked like an organ-grinder’s monkey. This was the first time since that humiliating incident that Felicity was making any effort to look like a young lady.

Patiently she sat before the toilet table while her hair was pomaded and curled, while she was scented and powdered.

She was a tall girl with thick black hair, a thin, tanned face, and large greenish-grey eyes. She had a generous mouth and a deep bosom. She was not beautiful by fashionable standards, which demanded a plump, dainty figure, a dimpled face, and a tiny mouth. She had high cheekbones, a great disadvantage in an age where women wore wax pads inside their cheeks to achieve a Dutch-doll look. But with her black hair dressed in a Roman style and with her thin and athletic figure attired in floating white muslin, she managed to attain a certain regal air. Good health gave her skin a glow and made her hair shine with blue lights.

Felicity had her instructions. She was to wait until the guests were assembled in the hall and then descend the staircase. The staircase was a double one and she was to walk down on the right-hand curve, one hand resting lightly on the banister, and with her head held high. A footman would follow her, holding a branch of candles. Felicity was now quite excited at the idea of making an entrance. And at the back of her mind, although she did not quite know yet what it was, was the hope that her father, seeing his daughter as an attractive young lady, would give up his longing for a son. Although he doted on Felicity, he always made her feel as if she had usurped the place of that dream-child.

She had caught a glimpse of the Marquess of Ravenswood the day before, when she had been out riding. Some of his men had been digging a drainage ditch on Plump’s field on his property. As Felicity rode past, the marquess, who had been giving instructions, took off his coat and seized a spade and started digging himself. She noticed, not for the first time, that he was tall and powerfully built. A lord who was not too high in the instep to dig his own ditches would make an amiable husband. Felicity thought of a husband as being someone like her father, who would allow her free rein. She knew that romance did not enter into an aristocratic marriage. Their lands bordered the marquess’s. It would be a sensible business partnership.

From downstairs came the strains of a waltz. Felicity felt a tremor of excitement and ran to the long looking-glass in her room and twisted this way and that to make sure the tapes of her gown were correctly tied.

‘’Bout time you started to care for your looks, my lady,’ grumbled Wanstead.

‘Must you always be complaining?’ snapped Felicity, colouring up.

There was a scratching at the door. Wanstead opened it. The footman with the branch of candles. Time for Felicity’s grand entrance.

Felicity walked out and along the corridor, followed by the footman. Behind the footman came Wanstead, calling out, ‘Short steps, my lady. Do not stride along like that. Mince, my lady. Mince!’

At the top of the double staircase, Felicity paused and looked down. Faces were turned up to her: her mother’s, pale and anxious; her father’s, florid and amused. And then she saw the Marquess of Ravenswood. He was very handsome indeed, thought Felicity with a little stab of shock. She had not had a chance to see him in evening dress before. He had thick fair hair cut in a fashionable Brutus crop, a strong body, broad shoulders and slim hips and fine legs, all in the glory of Weston’s tailoring. His arrogant high-nosed face briefly turned up to where Felicity stood. Beside him was a beautiful diminutive blonde, all in pink. The marquess glanced up at Felicity with a look of amused contempt and then turned back to his companion, who was laughing up at him.

Felicity thought the marquess’s glance of contempt was because she looked like a guy. Her pleasure in her appearance fled. She felt gawky and clumsy. The fact that the marquess might have heard of all her exploits and had taken her in dislike did not cross her mind. She felt it was just like that awful time when she had put on that pretty gown and her father had sneered at her. All of this took but a moment.

Felicity swung a leg over the polished banister and slid down the staircase, vaulted over the polished carved heraldic beast on the bottom post and landed lightly in the hall, to cries of shock from the ladies and roars of noisy approval from the hunting crowd.

The evening was a nightmare for Lady Barons-heath. Not once did the marquess ask Felicity to dance. He was flirting with Miss Betty Andrews, the lady in pink. He took Miss Andrews in to supper, while Felicity was partnered by Tommy Lush, a hard-swearing, hard-drinking vicar who appeared to have forgotten that his wife was present.

Felicity drank too much at supper. Her eyes were glittering and her thin cheeks flushed. She appeared to be having a marvellous time. It would have eased Lady Baronsheath’s distress had she known her daughter was feeling bewildered and miserable, but she did not. Felicity’s behaviour was so like the earl’s, the earl who was bawling with laughter and slapping everyone on the back and telling warm stories.

The earl was to set out on the first stage of his journey to America in the morning. Lady Baronsheath would be left behind with the horrendous job of preparing Felicity for her London Season. She had prayed that Ravenswood might propose, that
anyone
might propose, so as to make such an ordeal unnecessary. But now she would have to go through with it.

It was when a half-drunk Felicity started whooping her way like a Highland savage through a Scottish reel that Lady Baronsheath slipped away to the drawing room and took out the crumpled newspaper and smoothed out that advertisement. She sat down and began to write. One of the grooms would start out for London that very evening. Lady Baronsheath felt she needed all the help she could get.

Amy was down in the dark pit of the kitchen, toasting cheese, when the letter arrived. A round of Cheshire cheese had been Mr Haddon’s latest present. It had arrived two days before, and already Amy and Effy were sick of cheese but felt, for reasons of economy, that they must try to eat it all.

She heard the drawing-room bell jangle and looked up in irritation at the row of black bells on their wires over the kitchen door.

It was typical of Effy to go on as if they still had a house full of servants.

Amy climbed the stairs slowly. She was feeling very tired and her back hurt. That morning, when she had looked in her glass, she had found two large crow’s-feet stamped on the puffy flesh under her eyes. Amy needed spectacles, but felt that the getting of them would underline her age, and so she had sat up reading the night before, squinting at the pages of a romance by the light of one tallow candle. Hence the crow’s-feet.

Effy was sitting before a blazing fire in the drawing room, attired in the thinnest of muslins.

‘I can see your garters,’ growled Amy, slumping into a chair opposite. ‘Christ! I’m tired.’

‘Language! Language!’ admonished Effy.

‘Slut on ye,’ said Amy with a massive shrug. ‘What’s in the letter?’

‘The shop kindly sent it round to us because they had a delivery to make in Oxford Street hard by. It is from the Countess of Baronsheath. She needs help in the bringing out of her daughter, Lady Felicity Vane.’

‘Huzza!’ cried Amy, kicking her big feet up into the air. ‘Why are you not overcome with delight, Effy?’

‘Because her ladyship summons us to Sussex, to Greenboys House.’

‘Then we must set out,’ cried Amy. ‘This very day!’

‘But it is in the
country
,’ wailed Effy.

Effy hated the country with a passion. Streatham, with its promise of riches to come, had just been bearable. But Sussex was the
real
country, with trees and grass and birds and all those other weird things. The country to Effy meant social failure. Life was in London, London was the centre of the universe; the country was hell.

‘You will have to be brave,’ said Amy. ‘We are going to a stately home, not a shepherd’s hut. How much money should we demand? She will need to pay us something in advance. And think of the advantages! Lady Baronsheath will not be interviewing us
here
!’

‘I feel a spasm coming on,’ said Effy faintly. She gave a strangled noise and toppled out of her chair onto the floor.

Amy got up and twitched the letter out of her sister’s hands, then sat down and began to read it carefully. Effy sat up, looking outraged.

‘How can you be so heartless, Amy?’

‘Umm,’ said Amy, still reading. Then she looked up. ‘You’d better go and change into something decent, Effy. No need to look like a tart.’

‘I do
not
look like a tart!’

‘Yes, you do. Your garters are made of pink wool, and the knitting in the right one is cobbled. And you haven’t any drawers on.’