Lady Elizabeth's Comet (27 page)

Smiling, Clanross raised his hands in mock surrender. "Enough. I'll inspect your
collection. Do you return to Brecon tomorrow?" This last to me.

"At first light," I said, grim. "Are you coming home, too?"

He blinked at that, and it took me a moment to recall that he probably didn't think of
Brecon as home.

He didn't correct me. "For a night. I'm on my way to Ireland by way of Lancashire."

"Ireland!" The girls' faces--and mine, I daresay--fell.

"Why, yes. The Meath agent thinks it necessary."

"Aunt thinks it necessary," Willoughby interposed silkily. "Clanross has agreed to give
Mrs. Forster and her mother his escort to Dublin."

Charles and Cecilia chose that moment to make their grand exit. They were travelling as
far as Scarborough on their bridetrip. In the general laughter and confusion that followed I could
hide my despondency. Presently, Aunt demanded Clanross's attendance, and Miss Bluestone
took my sisters off.

It is not surprising that I developed an historical migraine and was no use to anyone for
the rest of that nightmare day. I did not even drag myself down to dinner. I couldn't bear to watch
the spectacle of Bella ensnaring Clanross.

* * * *

When we reached Brecon next day Clanross was there before us. He had spent the
morning with Mr. Moore and young Sholto. I gathered these news from my excited servants. Jem
offered to saddle Josephine if I wished to join his lordship for a little ride round Brecon--"as
usual." Usual? I wished it were. It was a heavy irony that my servants had taken the brief month
that spring when Clanross and I rode daily as somehow usual, when in fact it was a mere
interlude. How happy I had been. How sane. How unaware of what was happening to me.

I refused Jem's offer and retreated to my chamber to hide, but I couldn't hide forever. At
teatime I made myself go down to the withdrawing room on the theory that I was expected to
preside at my own tea table.

When I entered the room I discovered I was dispensable. Maggie and Jean, Alice and
Miss Bluestone--a clump of assorted houris--were happily engaged in giving Clanross tea.

"Hullo," I said glumly.

The ladies' faces betrayed surprise and dismay. Clearly, no one was expecting me.
Clanross rose, setting his teacup aside and drawing a chair for me. He looked very tall and brown
amid the crockery.

"Ah, Lady Elizabeth," Miss Bluestone murmured, "I daresay your headache has
moderated. What a blessing."

My headache was by then fiction. "Er, yes. Do sit down, Clanross." With no little
confusion, I sank into the chair Clanross had pulled for me.

"Shall you pour?" Jean's courtesy warred with her disappointment.

"Go ahead, my dear. You seem to have it well in hand. One lump."

She brightened and poured the tea with exquisite care. Maggie leapt forward with a tray
of dainty sandwiches and cakes.

"High tea, I see." I chose a macaroon.

Maggie regarded me anxiously. "We thought you wouldn't mind."

"We wanted to welcome Clanross home properly." Jean, half defiant.

Good God, was I such an ogre? I made my voice light. "A very good notion. I'm glad
you thought of it."

They both looked relieved--so did Alice. Miss Bluestone watched me calmly.

Clanross said nothing. He had resumed his place. I saw that my sisters had inflicted on
him a sticky concoction to which they were partial. Involuntarily I met his gaze. It said, plain as
day, "Yes, I know it's dreadful, but I intend to choke it down. Don't betray me." I smiled, and his
mouth relaxed.

At least there was some understanding between us still. I took a long breath. "I hope you
find everything in order at Brecon, Clanross."

"Yes. I'm obliged to you for smoothing young Sholto's path."

"Does he deal comfortably with Mr. Moore?"

"He's promising, or so I'm told, if he'll overcome his enthusiasm for four-course rotation
and dibbled corn."

"That is indeed a grave limit."

"We showed Clanross the dogs." Jean said.

"He said they were well grown. D'you think Una will have a litter soon, Clanross?" Una
was the name Maggie had bestowed on her wee red bitch, after careful reading of
The Faerie
Queen.

Clanross looked up from the girls' torte, which he had been dissecting with a slightly
harrassed air. "Er, not yet, Maggie. Have you put your rocks in order?"

That was sufficient to set them off, and presently they dragged him up to the schoolroom
to view their hoard. Miss Bluestone led the way.

"His lordship will not object if you remove the tea things, Agnew," I murmured. "The
cakes, that is. Yes, that one."

Agnew cleared the glutinous torte away and deftly removed the other remains as well.
High tea in the servants' hall this evening.

Alice chattered.

When I heard the schoolroom expedition end in a commotion in the hall, panick
galvanised me. I dashed to the door, leaving Alice in mid-sentence.

I found the right words to persuade Clanross to come back to dinner. He meant to leave
early in the morning--for Ireland and Bella Forster.

On the surface the meal was pleasant. Certainly, Alice and the twins enjoyed it, and
Clanross appeared to. I think Miss Bluestone was almost as uncomfortable as I was.

I had, however, regained my social faculties, and I contrived to keep the conversation
light and remote from topics that might cast a damper--like Ireland and Bella Forster. Clanross
was composed, as he had been the previous afternoon.

Maggie and Jean had almost three months of daily drama to report to him. As they
chattered I watched Clanross. He had a fatal capacity for listening well. I learned more of my
sisters' feelings and thoughts at that dinner than I had observed all summer. How did he do the
trick?

It was not that he sat on the edge of his chair with eager questions bursting from his lips.
On the contrary. Unlike Willoughby, however, he didn't look bored, or seem to demand an
audience himself. When a question was called for he supplied one--gravely offered and a little
surprising so that the speaker was spurred to fresh revelations. It was a rare gift--one that must
often be a mixed blessing.

When Clanross finally took his leave I determined to go part of the way with him.

The sunset was particularly beautiful that evening, casting a rosy glow on everything,
including my burning cheeks. We walked a good ten yards in silence. He seemed disinclined to
speak, and I was groping for words. "Clanross?"

"Yes."

I looked at his face, calm and remote in the failing light, and cried craven. "Er, shall you
be gone long?"

"I don't know. There are problems in Meath."

"That's odd," I said at random. "Is the agent unreliable?"

"I've had rumours..." He broke off and continued in a cool, remote voice. "The demesnes
are rack-rented. I don't like that, and I don't care for what I hear of wholesale evictions near
Killeggan." He added, with careful justice, "The agent is efficient, certainly."

"Papa never felt obliged to go to Ireland." I bit my lip. Why must I always say the wrong
thing?

"I know. That's one of the problems."

I was too depressed to reply.

"Have they sent you the galleys of your article to correct?"

The change of subject disconcerted me. "Er, yes. Ages ago. It comes out next
month."

"I look forward to reading it."

"It's kind in you to take an interest," I muttered.

He stopped dead and looked down at me with something akin to exasperation in his
face. "I ooze kindness, of course. One of my many sterling virtues. Does it never occur to you
that your discovery is interesting in itself?"

"I daresay you think me a great fool."

"I think..." He broke off, and I did not learn what he thought. After a pause, he said in a
flat voice, "I think you're an excellent astronomer, and that I should say good evening, or we'll be
escorting one another up and down the path to Brecon until dawn. Good night, Elizabeth."

"Good night." I extended my hand. "I wish you a safe journey." He did not bow over my
hand but took it in a brief, warm clasp that was wonderfully comforting. "Goodbye."

I watched him out of sight in the dusk. He didn't look back--that was not his style.

I needed an excuse to go to London in time for Clanross's entry to the House of Lords.
For more than a month I brooded over the problem. I toyed with counterfeiting a toothache, but I
was sure Alice would drag me off to her practitioner in Grantham if I complained. I considered
announcing that I was to attend a scientific meeting at Montague House. I even thought of
inventing an illness for Anne, though, in view of her attitude toward me since my refusal of
Bevis, no one with any sense would believe she had asked for me.

Miss Bluestone rescued me. Late in September she announced that the girls' wardrobes
wanted refurbishing. I agreed and said I would take them to Grantham.

"If you insist, my lady, but I rather think it time they accustom themselves to a more
fashionable milieu."

"Fashionable?" I stared.

Erect in serviceable bombazine, she met my eyes without blushing. "Mrs. Finch and I
are agreed. It takes some years to form a sense of fashion and that is a matter in which my own
judgement is deficient. I acknowledge it. You, I believe, were guided by your stepmother. Mrs.
Finch has pointed out that you are now the proper person to guide your sisters in matters of
appearance. I believe your eye for colour is exact, and you'll allow, my lady, that with their hair
they'll require careful dressing by the best modistes."

My colour-sense had more than once rescued my taste, which is otherwise
undistinguished. I eyed Miss Bluestone with suspicion. "Send them to Anne. She'll know what
young girls are wearing."

"Young girls are wearing muslins," Miss Bluestone said mildly. "They always do. That's
not quite the point, my lady. I'd like my charges to see the range of fashions to be had in Town,
to learn to judge a bolt of cloth for quality and to have some notion of which gewgaws to reject.
Jean has lately developed a passion for coquelicot ribbons which cannot be said to suit her."

"Oh dear, no." Why resist? "We'll all go. In a sennight."

"A fortnight would be better."

"Oh, would it?" Parliament were to sit in three weeks.

Miss Bluestone took the gloves off. "Jean and Margaret wish to see his lordship take his
seat."

I said nothing.

"So do I," she added. "If Mr. Featherstonehaugh can obtain places for us."

I gave up even the pretence of resistance. "Why did you not say so at once, ma'am? All
this nonsense about fashion..."

There I had gone too far. "I might wish it were nonsense," Miss Bluestone said, kindly
but firmly, "but for young ladies of their station it is not. Let's kill two birds with one stone.
Besides," and she added the clincher, "their pelisses are beginning to fray at the seams and their
wrists stick out."

I threw up my hands in mock surrender.

* * * *

I was grateful to Miss Bluestone when I wrote Anne, for educating Jean and Maggie into
clothes-sense was a project my sister could undertake with enthusiasm. Otherwise, I daresay our
reception in her household would have been cool.

When we reached Town at last, I had cause to regret the pretext of our coming. Anne
insisted on a systematic campaign of shopping that would have done credit to the intellect of a
Bonaparte. Our mornings seemed destined to be filled with raids on cloth warehouses and our
afternoons with sieges of fittings. I was definitely included in the Forlorn Hope.

Anne did not mince words. "I've resigned myself to a spinster sister but not to a
frump."

"Anne!"

"I won't be seen with you in a gown obviously purchased to celebrate the battle of
Vitoria."

As Vitoria was now at least five years past, that was a base slander, but I know when it's
time to retreat. I resigned myself to being poked with pins. I even allowed Anne's mincing M.
LeFleche to deal with my hair. Fortunately, he did not crop it. When Anne's last trumpet sounded
I could always cause Dobbins to pull it back in a knot as usual.

When the first of my evening gowns was delivered, Anne sent out cards for what she
called a nice little dinner--twenty couples and a three-piece string ensemble. It was by then the
day before Parliament were to sit, so the evening was bound to be political as well as musical.
She had invited Clanross--and Bella Forster.

To add to my
crise de nerfs,
Jean and Maggie sulked because Anne had not
included them among her guests.

"But darlings, do you like to sit at dinner for three hours?"

"Yes." Maggie set her jaw.

"We have proper gowns now even if they are dismal old muslin." Jean had tried to hold
out for shot silk. "We could put our hair up."

"No, absolutely not. You're not even sixteen."

They both looked injured.

"I
know your manners are unexceptionable and that you wouldn't squirm and
giggle, but Anne doesn't. It will be a gathering of important political personages. You can't
blame her for avoiding the risk."

It was clear they could blame her and did.

"Perhaps you could join the ladies afterwards for half an hour or so."

Maggie brightened.

Jean's face assumed a calculating expression. "Then may we put our hair up?"

"No! The withdrawing room, muslins, hair down. That's my last and best offer."

"Well..."

"What think you, Miss Bluestone?" I turned to the governess, conscious abruptly that I
had banished her to the schoolroom as well as my sisters.

She said tranquilly, "It's a good plan. Jean and Margaret won't wish to stay up very late.
We must rise betimes if we're to arrive at Westminster Hall before the worst of the crowds."

"Bless you," I said
sotto voce.
"I'll ask Anne directly."