The Scandal of the Season (22 page)

 

When Alexander and Martha had turned off toward the water garden for their walk, they saw Lord Petre and Arabella setting out for the meadows. Alexander watched Lord Petre's strong gait and confident smile jealously, wishing that he were leading a young lady off into the hayfields, all smiles and excited anticipation, while his rivals looked on longingly. Then he realized, ruefully, that he would not have known what to do next. His crumpled body made him ashamed. But would it have mattered less to him had he been the baron, and Lord Petre the draper's son? When Dame Fortune dealt her cards, why must it always be with such a cruel hand? He glanced at Martha, who looked dejected, too.

“Wherever they are going, I am sure they are enjoying themselves no more than we are,” he said, and her face brightened at the compliment.

Alexander thought about Lord Petre's suggestion for his next poem. This scene would certainly make a fine satire. A hunchbacked knight-at-arms with a damsel on his arm—both looking enviously after the heroic lord and lady as they rushed off for a tryst in the meadows. He smiled and made a mental note of the image, then remembered with a frown that it had been two days since he had looked at his writing. The weeks were slipping away—it was nearly June. He wondered whether people were buying the
Essay on Criticism
yet. Tonson was probably hiding it away in the back of his shop. He must go by and urge him to put it on display.

“Do not despair of making a name for yourself, Alexander,” said Martha suddenly. Alexander looked at her. How had she known his thoughts?

“You must remember that whatever people appear to be in public, their private selves are different. Lord Petre, I believe, is a serious man, capable of reflection and judgment, however he might carry on with Arabella. And the other men of your acquaintance are the same; I feel sure of it.”

“My dear Patty,” Alexander replied. “You are right, I fear, that my reputation will ultimately depend on the opinion of men like Lord Petre. The fashionable world looks to the wealthy for its judgments; they are willing to forget that the Baron of Ingatestone is a Roman Catholic.”

“The world is willing to overlook any fault in a person who possesses a fortune,” Martha answered.

“Well, if I
do
write a poem about Lord Petre's circle, everyone must appear in the most heroic light. This is clearly no moment for candor.”

She laughed. “Perhaps not in poetry, but in life there could not be a better. Some firm words with my sister, perhaps, telling her not to walk alone with men like James Douglass.”

“Douglass! What a blackguard that man appears.”

“Caution, Alexander!” Martha warned. “He may be nearer than you think—we have come to the Lime Walk.”

Alexander was about to speak again, when Martha burst out, “But there she is! Upon the bench ahead. And I believe that she is crying. What can be the matter?” She broke away from Alexander and rushed toward her sister.

Alexander looked at Teresa. She sat beneath the dappled shade of the limes, the bright leaves making half-transparent shadows around her; the light tinting her silk dress to a delicate green. Her hands played restlessly with the ribbon of her wide-brimmed straw bergère, and the attitude in which she sat made Alexander think of the day in the garden at Whiteknights, so long ago. He knew that she would not look up at him with a happy welcome now.

Martha was sitting on the bench beside her, a hand upon Teresa's. “What is wrong, dear?” she asked. “What happened?”

“I thought you were in the water garden,” Teresa said with a sniff.

“Where is Douglass?” Martha demanded.

“He is gone. Just this moment gone. I said that I would stay to rest—I am rather tired.”

“But Teresa, you have only been walking for half an hour in the shade,” said Martha. “You could not be tired. Why did Mr. Douglass not wait with you?”

“As soon as we had walked away Mr. Douglass said, ‘I'll wager you would rather be Miss Fermor than Miss Blount at this moment.' You know how he speaks. I said something foolish. Then Mr. Douglass began to pay me a great many compliments about the superiority of my person to Miss Fermor's—and I started enjoying myself. It does not seem fair that Arabella should be the only one of us to receive compliments from men. But some of Mr. Douglass's remarks were very free indeed, and so of course I asked him to stop.”

Her distress brought Alexander a return of all his old emotions: tenderness, affection, disappointed hope. How long they had troubled him, though of late they had become more a matter of habit than of real compulsion. But how powerfully he felt them now, making him think that his love for her was as much a part of him as his crooked back and frail body.

“Mr. Douglass made a great many promises, Patty,” Teresa was saying. “There was something very charming about him—and when he begged me to come away in a carriage, I thought that it might be an adventure. But then he told me that Bell is Lord Petre's mistress.” Her voice reached a high-pitched crescendo.

“He said”—she gave a teary gulp—“he said that I should give up all thoughts of Lord Petre until he tires of Bell! Then he added something very lewd indeed about our going in the carriage together—and when I pulled back from him he walked away.”

Alexander snapped out of his reverie. Lord Petre and Arabella! How much mischief that pair would cause before the season was over.

He stepped forward and extended a hand to Teresa. “You must congratulate yourself for standing firm against Douglass's advances,” he said. “You have shown strength of character. Far more strength, it seems, than your cousin Miss Fermor.”

Martha glanced at him gratefully.

Teresa drew herself up and said, “If I were Arabella, I should not become Lord Petre's mistress. I should choose to be chaste.” But she started to cry again. “So Alexander thinks it is true, Patty,” she wailed. “He believes that they
are
lovers. What if Lord Petre marries her? She will be a baron's wife.”

“If he has promised to marry her, Teresa,” Alexander interjected, “I fancy that your cousin Bell has not reckoned with the objections of Lord Petre's family. And until that obstacle has been overcome, she is nothing but plain old Miss Fermor.”

“If Arabella has become Lord Petre's mistress, then it is
her
heart that we must be concerned with, not the baron's,” Martha added.

Teresa said nothing, but Martha continued, “We must go home immediately. Will you be so kind as to hand us into our carriage, Alexander?”

Alexander did so, and then turned back to the park, puzzling over the feelings that the day had produced. During the last weeks he had been thinking of Teresa less and taking solace in Martha's companionship more. But when Teresa had cried, his desire for her had been as powerful and vivid as when he was a boy. Perhaps, then, it would never leave him—even when he looked at her in anger, it would always be with the anger of love. His affection for Martha was founded on respect and understanding. But having felt all that he had for Teresa, how could he ever think of preferring her sister? He would be untrue to both of them at once.

As he walked along the main avenue that extended out to the pasturelands in the west, he saw Lord Petre and Arabella sneaking back from their tryst. They looked out of breath and uncomfortable, and there was a good deal of hay adhering to the back of Miss Fermor's dress and hair. Lord Petre led Arabella by the hand into his carriage, and, as Alexander watched them, all the subtleties of his reflections were set aside. He felt instead a jolt of envy and pure longing.

 

Arabella had failed to remember that her mother had told her to be home half an hour before. She was so unused to her parents paying her any attention that the request had barely registered when it was made, but she now recalled that her mother had arranged for her to have a carving lesson. Learning to carve a joint of meat was a feature of every well-regulated English girlhood, but Arabella had managed to escape it by being sent to Paris at the age of twelve. Only belatedly, therefore, was she to acquire the ancient art. She wondered why her mother had suddenly decided upon such a course, and speculated that it was because she had finally noticed that her daughter had been three seasons in London without a husband to show for it. Arabella smiled to think that the expediency of the carving lesson was already unnecessary. But she supposed that it would do no harm; even as a baron's wife she would carve the joint at dinners.

When she entered their town house her mother called from the parlor, “Arabella, is that you? You are late for your lesson, and your father wishes to see you immediately.”

Making no reply, she gave a cheeky smile to the footman and pressed her finger to her lips. As she sprang lightly up the stairs her mother called again, “Arabella? Arabella!” Her footsteps were heard in the hall as she came to look for her daughter, but she soon retreated again to the parlor.

Arabella arrived in the parlor ten minutes later in a clean cap and gown, and her mother was just coming to the end of a sally against the butler: “—and I know that the footmen merely shake the spilled salt back into the cellar at the end of dinner, to serve again tomorrow,” she was saying. “'Tis full of crumbs, and it will not do. And the knives and forks are to be
removed
from the cloth before it is bundled up. I saw you shake the tablecloth onto the street so that the beggars could have the scraps of our meat and bread. That is all very well, but you need not give them cutlery to eat it with!”

“Though it would be more convenient for the beggars,” Arabella's father interjected, and her mother shot him a hard look. They always conducted themselves in this way in front of the servants—her mother barking out directions and her father making mocking rejoinders. She felt a little sorry for her mother as she saw the butler yawning to suppress a laugh.

But Mrs. Fermor did not notice it, and began to give instructions for their dinner party the following day. “For the first course a fillet of veal,” she said, “a fricassee of lamb, a dish of peas, and a sallet of herbs. Then we shall have beefsteaks and a game pie, with asparagus—”

“My dear, I do not think that the company will be expecting peas as well as asparagus,” Mr. Fermor cut in. “They will think it indigestible. A joint of beef will do very well instead.”

His wife ignored him. “There shall be peas and asparagus, bought tomorrow from the market,” she said. “Mind that there are three whole pigeons in each pie, for otherwise it shall make but a paltry dish. We shall have whipped syllabub, orange cream, and strawberries for the dessert.”

When the butler left Mrs. Fermor said to her husband accusingly, “You were rubbing your teeth when we dined at my Lord Leicester's on Tuesday.” He frowned at her in response. “Mrs. Molyneaux saw you, and mentioned it to me,” Mrs. Fermor continued. “And 'tis not civil to be twice in one dish. I observed that the Duke of Bedford was twice in the ragout, but that does not serve you for an excuse. Arabella, do not scratch yourself.”

“I did not, ma'am,” Arabella replied, feeling little pieces of straw itching her back. She remembered Lord Petre's face when she threw the hay at him, and smiled. But her father turned and spoke to her in a severe tone.

“Arabella, I hear from the butler that you have been ordering bottles of water from Islington,” he said. “What do you propose to do with it?”

“I propose to drink it, sir.”

“To
drink
it? What an absurd notion.” Arabella reflected that it was only to be expected that her parents would be opposed to her new scheme.

She scratched herself again, and her mother said, “Do
not
be scratching, Arabella.” She scowled at them both. How could she make them see that she must have water to drink if she had any hope of being thought fashionable?

“Lady Salisbury daily drinks spa water and says that she was never healthier,” she said.

“What need is there for you to drink water,” Mr. Fermor asked scornfully, “when there is plenty of small beer in the larder?”

“On the subject of drinking, Mr. Fermor,” his wife interrupted, “the habit you have caught, of throwing down your liquor as though into a funnel, is an action fitter for a juggler than a gentleman.”

Once again, Mr. Fermor made no reply. He turned back to his daughter, and said in a voice that would brook no argument, “If my Lady Salisbury believes that the drinking of water will improve her constitution, I congratulate her,” he declared. “And when you are married to a baron, and have an establishment of your own, you may drink as much water as you please. But for the present, you will follow the regime that has kept your mother and me healthy these twenty-five years.”

Arabella smiled indulgently in reply. Little did her father know that her situation would resemble Lady Salisbury's, sooner than he could possibly imagine.

“Arabella, I would like you to attend more carefully to your skills in carving than you have been doing,” her mother said. “When I was your age, I was carving the joints for large parties at dinner, twice or thrice a week.”