Elisabeth Kidd (22 page)

“But they concern
me
!’’

“You have just said you were not interested in these gentlemen—any of them, as far as I have been able to ascertain—although I have not yet heard from Lord D’Arcy. Am I not to be thanked at all for relieving you of the necessity to reply to them yourself?”

Sydney coloured at the mention of Lord D’Arcy, but even in her temper she knew it best not even to acknowledge his existence. At any rate, she was momentarily more incensed by those of Lyle’s shafts that had gone wider of the mark.

“You expect me to thank you? I am perfectly capable of performing my own refusals, my lord, and I will thank you only to allow me to do so!”

“Do not stamp your foot at me, Sydney. I am not one of your besotted beaux to be intimidated by your temper tantrums. Indeed, I wonder that the most ardent of them should be so eager to marry such a termagant. Didn’t Cedric teach you to be a lady, after all?”

Stung as much by the reflection on Cedric as for her own sake, Sydney said unthinkingly, “I suppose you’d rather I were more like Lady Romney—all smiles and simpering flattery. I wager she never refused you anything!’’

The last trace of good humour vanished from Lyle’s expression so quickly that it shocked Sydney, who took a step backwards but found she could go no farther on the small balcony. Lyle grasped her wrist with a grip that hurt her, but she was too stunned to cry out.

“No, I see I cannot blame Cedric entirely,” he said, his eyes no longer warm. “Nor can I longer doubt Vanessa, who warned me nothing could be made of you that was not there already. I looked for some vestige in you of my friend Owen, whom I loved, and I thought, for his sake, that I might love his daughter too. But it seems I was trying too hard to see a resemblance where none existed.’’

He let go her hand, dashing it against the railing of the balcony, but neither seemed to notice this. Lyle looked at Sydney in silence for a moment, seeming to regret his outburst, but when he finally spoke, he was calmer but no less cold.

“Very well, madam, you may have the right to refuse any further misguided suitors for your hand. I suggest, however, that you make up your mind to accept one of them very soon, for you delude yourself if you imagine you will be able to support yourself, and after this evening’s work—promise or no promise—neither you nor your troublesome family will receive any further assistance from me.”

With that, he turned and went back into the house, leaving the windows slightly ajar. Sydney noticed all at once how cold it was on the balcony, and that her hand was hurting her.

She waited only a few seconds before following Lyle back into the warmth of the ballroom. She looked around it for him, but he had already vanished.

Cedric Maitland, much to Lady Bridlington’s disappointment and mystification—since Cedric rarely failed to appear someplace when he had said he would do so—did not put in an appearance at her dinner party. Nevertheless, he passed a long and arduous night, consisting of activities that he fervently, and probably in vain, hoped he would speedily be able to forget.

He had begun the day in his usual manner, by rising early, spending three hours preparing himself to go out into the world—a practice which, however much it might be deprecated by less fastidious persons, served him in good stead during long days when he was not once obliged to check his toilette in a mirror—and setting out for his club.

It was then that he had his unexpected encounter with Lyle, which had—he admitted it—shaken him considerably, but which had not after all turned out so badly. To be sure, for such a naturally truthful and straightforward person as he was, it was rather discomforting to be obliged to evade Lyle’s questions as he had done. Lyle had not seemed to find anything amiss in Cedric’s answers, however—Cedric told himself—so that he was able to dismiss from his mind almost immediately the notion that something other than Sydney’s inauspicious acting debut might be troubling Lyle.

Indeed, it was not until after the Marquess had left Watier’s that the first inkling of an impending catastrophe communicated itself to Cedric in the form of a sartorial solecism committed by the normally impeccable—if in Cedric’s opinion, perilously close to insouciant—Sir Gavin Thiers.  This gentleman stuck his head into the door of the upstairs parlour where Cedric was absorbed in a copy of the Morning Gazette, which a previous occupant had discarded on a winged chair beside the window, and greeted him.

“Hullo, Maitland,” Sir Gavin said. “Mind if I come in? Need to ask you something.’’

Cedric eyed Sir Gavin’s waistcoat, which had an unbuttoned gap in its center, and remarked that he would happily admit him if he would finish dressing first.

“Eh? Oh, beg your pardon. Funny thing, don’t know how it could have happened.’’

“You feeling quite the thing, Thiers?”

“Well, as a matter of fact—no. What I wanted to ask you was if you know a respectable sawbones.”

“That bad, eh?”

“It pays to be prepared.’’

“Seems to me your mother always went to Sir Henry Halford.”

“Oh, no, he wouldn’t do! He’d be bound to tell my mother. I need a discreet man, one who’ll take his fee and keep his tongue between his teeth.’’

Cedric’s eyes narrowed. “What are you up to, Thiers? Ain’t been called out, have you?”

“Me? No, no, not me! No such thing.”

“All right, all right, I ain’t going to pry. Rather not know, in any case. Try Dr. Stevenson, Upper Wimpole Street. He’s the man you want.’’

Sir Gavin rose at this, looking like a man relieved of a considerable weight. “Much obliged, Maitland.” He remembered to shake Cedric’s hand before bolting out the door again, but there paused to say, “You won’t mention this little conversation to anyone, will you?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Cedric, fully believing it.

Not very much later, however, Sir Gavin’s state of health was brought once again to Cedric’s grudging notice when, having fulfilled his morning’s obligations, he was strolling up St. James’s with a mind to spending an hour in Grosvenor Square. It was then that he glanced into a shop window, to behold Robin Wendt in the act of purchasing a container of the sort of oil used for lubricating small mechanical devices.

Cedric was struck on the instant by an Uncomfortable Suspicion. His inclination was to continue on his way, but since his way would lead him to Miss Archer—who he did not doubt was in some way behind his unexplained anxiety—Cedric decided he would be better off to find out the worst as soon as possible. He walked back down the street a few steps, and waited until Robin emerged from the shop and hailed a passing hackney.

Cedric then took action. He stopped the next cab to come along and directed the jehu to follow the preceding one, which—after an incredulous glance and a silver coin had been exchanged—the fellow did. Cedric soon found himself being driven over the neat brick streets of Bloomsbury, where patches of uncultivated meadow peeped out between rows of respectable-looking terraced houses.

“This really where you want to go, guv?” the impudent driver enquired. “It h’aint exactly the Rookery, but it h’aint no place for a flash Town gent like you either, is it? Cor! Nothin’ but fresh air and winder curtains!’’

Fortunately, Cedric was saved the added irritation of replying to this insolence when Robin’s hackney came to a stop alongside the entrance to a mews between two tall stuccoed houses. After the first vehicle had started up again, Cedric paid off his driver (who departed shaking his head at the queer whims of the nobs), and peered cautiously around the corner of one of the houses into the mews.

There he observed, unnoticed, Robin and his brother Carl rehearsing a most original, if rather stiff, dance consisting of measuring off a certain number of steps and then turning to face each other with raised arms. After studying this unusual posturing for several minutes, Cedric turned back the way he had come, on foot this time, his countenance so set in an attitude of contemplation that, by the time he had reached Berkeley Square, he had inadvertently cut three acquaintances (one of them a young lady, who burst into tears three steps farther on), nearly been run down by a phaeton-and-four in Bond Street, and soiled the sole of his right boot by treading unawares into a puddle.

As the afternoon was by now quite advanced, it was a persistent pang of hunger that finally recalled Cedric from his reverie. He reached his lodgings, ordered his boot cleaned and a light repast prepared, and ate this in pensive silence. He then startled his valet, who was already laying out Cedric’s evening dress in anticipation of his going out to dinner, by getting up and going out again without so much as a word of explanation.

As time was now of the essence, Cedric reluctantly put off the call he had intended to make in Grosvenor Square, remembering that in any case he would see Miss Archer at the Bridlington ball that evening—scarcely a tête-à-tête, but that could not be helped. Instead he set out—in a hackney again so as not to be recognized by anyone—to call at a small but respectable-looking house in Upper Wimpole Street, the occupant of which was more than willing to tell Cedric what he knew—possibly because Cedric let it drop that he was to serve as the second for the other principal in the affair of honour lately discussed with Dr. Stevenson in those very rooms.

Fortunately, the doctor had not been informed of the identity of the other second and saw no reason to doubt Cedric’s word. Not so fortunately, while he was able to tell Cedric the time and place agreed upon for the meeting—Paddington Green at half-past five the next morning—Cedric was left to discover for himself the identity of the fourth man concerned. He had guessed, from having seen Robin Wendt being instructed by his elder brother in the fine points of pistols, who one of the principals was—but who could Thiers be acting for? This problem he solved by means of an exercise his friend the Marquess of Lyle might have declared foreign to him—Cedric sat down on a bench in a small square near Dr. Stevenson’s surgery and applied logical thought to it.

He was regretful afterwards that it was impossible to boast to anyone of the success of this unusual but remarkably simple—once he’d got the hang of it—endeavour. Unfortunately, just as he had reached a satisfactory conclusion and was feeling particularly pleased with himself, he looked up to find a familiar figure approaching him from the other side of the street. Such was Cedric’s bemused state of mind that it did not even occur to him this time to attempt to bolt; he was, rather, conscious of a sense of release.

In the end, Cedric did not attend the Bridlington ball, being fully occupied with the results of his cogitations and the happy meeting in Upper Wimpole Street, and was furthermore unable to call upon Miss Archer until the following morning. This he did at an exceptionally early hour, although as he had anticipated, Sydney was awake and fully dressed—if somewhat disheveled of coiffure—and in her anxiety for news took no notice of the rarity of Cedric’s being abroad at eight o’clock in the morning—nor even of the fact that it was he and not Carl or Robin who came to report to her.

“Cedric!” she cried when she opened the door to him. (Having been hovering near it for more than an hour, she did not need to hear the knocker.) She pulled him inside, led him into the drawing room, closed the door behind them, and whispered fiercely, “Have you come—do you know what has happened?”

“Nothing much, actually,” Cedric said, seating himself on a sofa and examining the hurried arrangement of the fobs on his waistcoat. “Whole thing turned out to be a tempest in a teapot—so to speak.” Cedric did his best to sound a little disappointed.

“What do you mean?”

“Perfectly true, take my word. D’Arcy never showed up.”

“He backed down?”

“Well—not exactly. They’d been waiting around for him nearly an hour when his man came running up to say he’d been accosted by footpads on the way to the meeting.”

Cedric recalled this event with relish for a moment, and added almost gleefully, “Knocked him out and stole his pistols. Freshly oiled, too.”

“Thank goodness!” Sydney slumped back into her chair and heaved a sigh of relief.

Cedric continued his carefully constructed story, which he found very satisfactory to relate, in spite of the necessity of leaving out the most delightful details, and of the fact that Sydney appeared to take no interest whatever in it, having once ascertained that no one had been seriously hurt.

“The doctor earned his fee anyway, patching D’Arcy up. We left him—found him, that is—on the side of the road about half a mile from the Green, sitting up and holding his curls and moaning. When the doctor examined him, he fainted away. Thiers took him home, and the rest of us—them—had breakfast at my place. Wilkins made an extra large one—don’t know how he thought of it, but I’m glad he did. Never so famished in my life. That young cousin of yours had a fine appetite too, considering he’d been looking a little green around the gills an hour before. I imagine he didn’t eat much yesterday.’’

Midway through the recital, Sydney had looked up, as if realizing for the first time who it was that stood—or rather lounged negligently on the sofa—opposite her. When her look grew more intent, Cedric came to a halt and looked back at her with what he hoped was a composed gaze. There was a moment’s silence.

“Cedric—” Sydney began, at which the gentleman so addressed left off being composed, leapt to his feet, attempted to make his apologies for disturbing her at such an hour, and began sidling towards the door, tripping over the foot of the sofa as he did.

“Wait!” Sydney got up, grasping Cedric by the sleeve—a gesture over which he quite forgot to remonstrate with her—and demanding of him, “Cedric, were you responsible for stopping the duel?”

“Eh? No, certainly not! How was I to know D’Arcy was going to be waylaid like that?’’

“But you did go to Paddington to stop them.’’

‘‘ I wasn’t anywhere near the place!’’

“You just said you were!’’

“I did?”

Sydney took a step closer. “Yes, you did! I had no notion where the duel was to take place—until you told me!”