The Scandal of the Season (5 page)

Jervas answered Douglass's question. “I met His Lordship at St. James's, and he has bought a few paintings from me,” he said. “But I do not find that workaday artists, however mighty their patrons might be, are much taken into the confidence of the first families in the land. Everything is very merry when I meet my Lord Petre, and he flatters me a good deal and charms me into believing that I am the cleverest artist in the world. But I cannot pretend to know the first thing about the man's private character. The Petre family has done well, of course. They have stayed papists, and kept their titles and their land. Few families can boast as much.”

“They have kept all their property, have they?” Douglass asked sharply. “Lord Petre must have inherited a vast fortune.”

“I believe that he has,” Jervas replied. “And yet he is unattached—uncommonly selfish of him. Not a woman in London will spare the rest of us a glance until Lord Petre has been claimed.”

So Petre was not married. But everybody was in love with him. Alexander frowned, thinking of Teresa.

Douglass announced that he was late for his appointment in Piccadilly, and Alexander stayed in the studio while Jervas went downstairs with his friend.

 

He stared abstractedly at the portrait. Mr. Douglass's discomfort upon meeting had not, Alexander thought, been occasioned by his crippled frame but by his mention of traveling down by the Windsor Road. At first, when they were in the dining room, he thought little of it. But as soon as he saw Douglass raise his hand to his collar, he began to doubt. When they entered the studio, Alexander had glanced back down the staircase to where Douglass's surtout was thrown down on a chair. A fur collar lay there, curled like a living thing under the folds of fabric.

But what to make of it? Douglass had told them quite plainly where he had been that morning, and had made it clear that he had not even the most perfunctory notion of what a country road would be like on a freezing January day. Alexander would seem like a madman if he were to tell Jervas that he thought he had seen him from the coach. And seen him doing what? Talking to another man. What business was it of Alexander's if a person he did not know should lie about where he had been?

Jervas returned to the room, full of enthusiasm for the ball on Tuesday night.

“I never enjoyed myself so much in my life as at the last masquerade,” he said, throwing himself into an easy chair and gesturing to Alexander to do the same. “Music, dancing, wine—and women such as you have never seen,” he chattered, waving an arm around at his paintings. “Ladies are a good deal more willing when they are disguised,” he said with a smile.

“Tell me about these glorious creatures you keep gathered about you,” Alexander said, abandoning his thoughts of Douglass, and stepping up to one of the finished canvases. It was of a young woman, perhaps nineteen or twenty, and very pretty. But it was not the girl's beauty that made the portrait so striking. It was the freshness and vitality with which she carried herself, looking out at the world with brilliant eyes and a playful lift to her mouth.

“That is the Lady Mary Pierrepont,” Jervas replied. “Daughter to the Earl of Kingston.” A Protestant and a noblewoman, thought Alexander.

“She is to inherit a fortune,” Jervas continued, “but people say that she runs very wild. She has too much spirit for her father, to be sure—he cannot get her to meet the men he wants her to marry.” He shrugged, and added, “So he ordered the painting to show it to her suitors!”

Alexander smiled. He walked over to a picture on the easel that was finished but for some work on a draped plinth and pillar against which a young woman was, rather improbably, standing. She was exceptionally beautiful; so beautiful that it was impossible not to stand and stare.

“Now
she
is one of the most ravishing girls I have ever painted,” said Jervas, staring at the picture, too. “The popular press has named her as one of London's ‘Reigning Beauties' for the last two years. Her name is Arabella Fermor.”

“Oh!” said Alexander, stepping back and looking at him. “So
that
is the celebrated Miss Fermor. She is cousin to the Blount sisters who live at Mapledurham. They have mentioned Miss Fermor often, but I am astonished to see that her beauty has not been too warmly described.”

“It seldom is,” said Jervas, “when the description is given by a lady.”

A
rabella Fermor was looking at herself in the glass, considering on which side of her cheek the morning's beauty patch should be placed. She stepped back so that Betty, her maid, could tighten the robings on her stays. Arabella's lapdog, Shock, got up from his basket, gave himself a rousing shake, and trotted around to the other side of her bed. When Betty had made the last adjustment to her gown, Arabella picked the dog up and carried him down the stairs, leaving the room in disarray behind her. A footman gave Arabella her hooded mantle in the hall, and she wordlessly handed him Shock in return. Immediately he passed the animal off to another servant, and went to help Miss Fermor into the carriage.

Arabella, known to her friends as Bell, was blessed with an almost perfect face and figure—and had been told as much from the earliest age. But in spite of this, Arabella had not allowed her loveliness to be the ruin of her character. She had long known that she was very pretty, but that knowledge had not distorted her powers of perception or understanding, with the result that at the age of twenty-two she combined beauty and cleverness in almost equal parts.

She was well educated, having been provided as a child with a governess, and afterward with some expensive years at a convent school in Paris. And yet it was not formal education that made Arabella remarkable. She was distinguished rather by her capacity for observation and judgment, and for these she relied not on books and learning but upon life itself. Here again Arabella had been lucky. Her parents had taken up residence in a town house in the smart London parish of St. James's, and granted their eldest daughter as much access to life (at least as it was lived in this small corner of the world) as she ever could have wished for. Arabella had good manners, excellent conversation, and highly developed powers of social observation. She was, therefore, uniquely positioned to put her talents to the use for which they had been cultivated: the acquisition of a rich husband.

Arabella was in London when she received the letter from her cousin Teresa announcing that she and Martha were coming to town. Teresa and Arabella had been in Paris at the same time, and Teresa had greatly admired her cousin's worldliness and sophistication. Back in England, they had continued to meet periodically, tied by bonds of family and religion, but they had never been intimate friends. Teresa spent almost all of her time with her sister, Martha; Arabella was several years older than her own sisters, and saw very little of them. Neither did Arabella spend much time in her parents' company, busy as they were with social preoccupations of their own. She enjoyed being self-reliant, pursuing her life in London largely independently of her family and childhood friends. It had long been her intention to make a glittering match, to become the envy of the close-knit Catholic circles that she had always found so stultifying. But after two seasons in town she had met no one to inspire the kind of passion that she yearned to feel, and she had found herself withdrawing from romantic intimacies that she knew most girls would have been delighted to entertain. She had met rich men; she had met handsome men. But she had not fallen in love.

When Teresa's letter arrived Arabella at first thought little of it, but as the days passed she found herself looking forward to her cousin's arrival much more eagerly. In spite of her many diversions, in spite of her enviable independence, she had grown bored. Arabella did not imagine that Teresa herself would provide the variety and change that she sought, but it did occur to her that, in showing her cousin the town, she might encounter new scenes to refresh her world-weary gaze.

So it came about that on a Friday morning, when the Blount sisters had been in town for a few days, Arabella had dressed early and was stepping into her carriage, preparing to collect Teresa for a trip to the shops at the Royal Exchange.

The coach drew up outside the town house in King Street where the Blounts were staying, and after a minute or two Teresa came out of the house.

Arabella greeted her, kissing both cheeks.

“Hello, Bell,” Teresa replied. “How glad I am to see you.” She looked at her cousin appraisingly. Arabella was just as handsome as ever, she was disgruntled to note.

Arabella saw the glint of envy in Teresa's eye, and wished that she did not feel so gratified by it. “Where is Martha?” she asked.

“Abroad with our aunt and mother,” said Teresa. “They are gone to visit Mrs. Chesterton, exactly the sort of tiresome thing that Martha likes to do. Your gown is handsome, Bell,” she said. “Is it the one you wore at Mapledurham when I saw you last year?”

Arabella had noticed before that her cousin became competitive whenever she felt ill at ease.

“I haven't had that gown for quite some time,” she answered. “This is another in a newer style, without flounces.” She straightened out the lace fringe of her sleeve. Better pay Teresa a compliment in return. “Your hair looks well, Teresa. I suppose that your aunt's maid helped you put it up.”

“Not at all,” said Teresa. “Martha and I brought our maid to town.”

“Ah!” Arabella raised her chin in assent. That explained why her cousin's hair had been done in such an old-fashioned style. She wondered whether she ought to point it out to her, delicately of course.

But the carriage turned from Cheapside into Cornhill, and both girls were distracted by the sight of the Exchange. Teresa forgot her envy and unease, and gave a gasp of excitement. “What a magnificent building!” she exclaimed. “I had quite forgotten.”

Their coach was dwarfed by the immense stone front of the facade, its high arcades and columns reaching skyward beside the great formal arch. The massive windows of the first floor stretched toward a noble balustrade, and high above the whole was the tiered clock tower, piercing the sky like the dome of a cathedral and chiming out the hour of noon across the City.

Teresa swung the carriage door open, as sound and smell assailed her forcefully. Here at last! In London, on a glorious morning, the whole visit stretching before her. She caught the jingle of the muffin man's bell as he pushed through the crowd with a tray of hot cakes. A heavy thump as bales of cloth were thrown down from a cart. The stamp of hooves on the muddy straw when the carriages stopped, steam hissing off the horses' backs. A constant shrill of whistles from messenger boys. She could smell chestnuts roasting and the acrid smoke of the braziers; the spice of warmed cider; the piercing stink of fresh dung. She stood on the step of the cab, her breath misting in the cold air as she took in the scene. Then she jumped down to the pavement, thrilled to be in town and determined to make the outing a success.

Arabella lingered in the coach, retying the hood of her mantle and arranging the folds of her cloak. A gentleman in military uniform bounded across to the carriage and offered her his hand, and she it took with a smile, stepping out down to the cobbles. The man bowed and hurried on his way.

“Who was that gentleman, Arabella?” Teresa asked as they walked under the arch and into the courtyard.

“I've no idea!” she replied. “But he was rather handsome, did you not think?” Arabella now felt in much better spirits.

She took hold of Teresa's arm, and said, “The shops upstairs are always the best, but I think you will like the little stalls in the yard, too. Last time I was here I bought a yard of silk ribbon. I wonder if the woman will be there again.”

The arcaded square of the Exchange opened up before them, filled with merchants and traders and hawkers of wares, mingling with people of all occupations and positions. All the ladies and gentlemen were walking arm in arm with friends or meeting new acquaintances across the yard. A pair of men in beaver fur hats bowed as Arabella pointed and exclaimed, “Yes, look! There is the silk lady again.”

Teresa turned to watch as a tiny old woman shook out a length of fabric that rippled open in the breeze like a fast stream. The winter sunlight, catching in its folds, made it shine like tin.

“How pretty!” she murmured, enchanted by the sight, and she would have stopped, but Arabella was moving on through the yard. She hurried to join her.

“You have probably not heard that Maria Granville is to marry Tommy Hawkins,” Arabella said, and Teresa was reminded of how very little news reached her in the country.

“Maria Granville?” she echoed. “I have not heard of her since we were in Paris.”

“She caused a great scandal last year—it was discovered that she and Edward Fairfax were in an intrigue.”

“An intrigue?” Teresa repeated. “You mean that they were…bedfellows?”

Arabella nodded. “But Fairfax married Lord Chester's daughter, and Maria was left high and dry.”

“So she is to marry Tommy Hawkins instead,” said Teresa thoughtfully. “There can't be much of a thrill in capturing a quarry so thoroughly worked over by every other girl in London. He had a nibbled look about him even when I met him in the country two years ago—he will have been half eaten by the time Maria gets him to the church door.”

Arabella smiled. “I am surprised that she managed to marry at all. Twenty other women might have told her that Fairfax was a scoundrel. But the girl thought that she had fallen in love!”

They stepped around a beggar who had lifted his crutch to block their way, and Arabella moved her skirts expertly to one side. “At one stage I heard talk that Tommy Hawkins was paying his respects to you, Teresa. You sent him on his way, of course…” Arabella had not meant to tease her cousin, but she found herself falling into the kind of talk that the fashionable set engaged in. To her surprise, Teresa caught the style quickly.

“Charles Stafford was overheard saying that he would shoot himself if you did not marry him, Bell,” she said. “That is quite a feather in your cap. He is said to be worth five thousand a year.”

“Then I am afraid that we must expect to hear at any moment the news of Charles Stafford's death.” Both girls laughed. They were beginning to enjoy themselves.

“Oh!” Arabella cried. “That sweet pippin-monger is here. Shall we buy some of his licorice?”

They looked over the bursting stall, with its boxes and baskets of Kentish pippins, pearmains, lemons, and pomegranates. They knew that they cut a fine sight, admiring the fruit and laughing at the little pleasantries made by the pippin-monger. Arabella ordered a pennyworth of crystallized ginger that she would never eat, conscious that she looked very well searching about for a coin in her silk purse. She noted with pleasure that two smartly dressed gentlemen were watching them from the cover of the arcade.

She was still searching for the penny when one of them walked over. He handed a coin to the stall keeper, took the paper of ginger, and gave it to Arabella. She looked up with surprise, noting that he wore expensive gloves and that his coat was adorned with a rich fur on the collar. When she thanked him, he cocked his head in response, but said nothing. More interested than she had expected to be, Arabella turned to look at his companion.

As their eyes met she shivered with an involuntary surge of excitement. She knew him! He was a tall man, with a high forehead and an even, well-bred nose and mouth. He wore no wig, and his dark curls were tied in a black ribbon at his neck. The expression on his face was calm and controlled—he was obviously much used to being looked at—but when he smiled at her it was with the open smile of a boy.

“Robert!” she exclaimed. “It is you, is it not?”

The gentleman started. But as he stepped forward into the yard, his eyes brightened with recognition. “How do you do, Miss Fermor?” he said. “You have become very beautiful.”

“I forget that we are no longer to be known as Robert and Bell,” she replied, composing herself. “How do you do, my lord?”

“A great deal better when you call me Robert,” Lord Petre answered.

Arabella touched a hand to her neck. “We were in the nursery when we saw each other last,” she said.

He took another step forward, saying, “The nursery—hardly! I was a great man of eighteen, returned from school in the certain knowledge that the world had nothing more to teach me. Do you not remember my swaggering about with my sword and snuffbox?”

Arabella looked at him teasingly. “Those items, at least, you appear to have retained,” she said.

“Do not make me ashamed of what I have become,” he protested, and Arabella thought how fine he looked, standing with his sword glinting in the winter sunlight. “When I knew you then, you were the brightest nymph upon the green, the object of every pining swain. And though you are now a great lady, I suspect that little else has altered from that time.”

Arabella wrinkled her brow. “You are right—I am changed very little,” she replied.

“I have been largely in the country since my father died,” he said thoughtfully, as if considering why they had not met before now.

Teresa stood awkwardly aside as Lord Petre and Arabella spoke, pushed backward until she felt the pippin-monger's stall against the hoop of her gown. She felt foolish, wanting to be gone, and she tried to step around Arabella so that she might at least wait in company with Lord Petre's friend. But he had slipped away, and in his place there was a little Gypsy acrobat with a monkey on his shoulder, who watched over their party with a leering grin. Teresa jumped backward violently, knocking into the pippen stall.