Authors: Of Paupersand Peers
Margaret shook her head. “None at all.”
“What a pity you did not see fit to linger long enough to inquire! I should have loved to hear what he had to say for himself. Oh well, there will be time enough for all that the next time you see him.”
“Don’t say such a thing, I beg you!” Margaret grimaced at the very thought. “I couldn’t—I can’t face him again.”
“You not only
can,
you
must,”
pronounced Lady Windhurst in a voice which brooked no argument. “You delivered a very public insult to the Toast of the
ton
in full view of a woman whose sobriquet of ‘Silence’ is not a tribute to her reticence, I assure you! We must do what we can to contain the damage, if you are ever to hold your head up in Town again.”
Propping her elbows on the table, Margaret buried her face in her hands. “Believe me, my lady, I have no desire to do so. I only want to go home!”
“And so you shall, eventually, but not until you have ridden out the scandal.”
“But how great a scandal can there be? No one even knows me!”
“Perhaps not, but everyone knows the duke, and then there is your sister’s approaching wedding to my nephew to consider. You haven’t the luxury of indulging your own feelings, my dear.”
Mild as this scold was, it affected Margaret with much the same force as a blow to the solar plexus. A scant few weeks earlier, she would have insisted that she had only her sister’s best interests at heart; since that time, however, she had discovered herself to be self-deluded. Even the longed-for match between Amanda and the duke (of which she had blithely informed his Grace, she now recalled to her chagrin) had been an indirect acknowledgement that such a personage would be unlikely to harbor matrimonial ambitions toward herself. And then, when the miracle occurred, she had rejected him as ineligible.
Ineligible!
“I have taken a box at the opera for tomorrow night,” Lady Windhurst continued, unmindful of her protégée’s inner turmoil. “The duke of Montford, among others, will be invited to join us. You must—you
must!—
be civil to him, no matter the blow to your pride. Remember, all eyes will be upon you.”
“Yes, my lady.”
A box at the opera, thought Margaret. A darkened box where one must be quiet and fix all one’s attention upon the stage. Perhaps it would not be so very bad, after all.
* * * *
She was wrong. It was torture from the moment he entered the box, greeting her with a tight little bow and a rather uncertain smile.
“Forgive me. Miss Darrington,” he murmured, taking the velvet-upholstered chair beside hers, “but if we are to silence the gossips, we must appear to be upon terms.”
“The duke of Montford?”
She had not known what she would say to him, but this surely was not the most auspicious of beginnings. “That is—I mean—”
“You have every right to be angry with me, but I assure you—”
“Shhhh!” A hush fell over the audience as the lights dimmed and the curtain rose.
“We cannot talk here,” James whispered under cover of the opening bars of the overture. “May I call upon you in the morning?”
Margaret struggled with herself. Surely there was nothing he could say, nothing he could do that would lessen her sense of betrayal. And yet, it had seemed for one brief moment as if she had glimpsed plain Mr. Fanshawe beneath the ducal veneer. But that was impossible, she reminded herself. The man she had known as Mr. Fanshawe had never existed. Margaret hardened her heart.
“I cannot see that it would accomplish any useful purpose. Surely prolonging this—this farce would only serve to increase our embarrassment.”
Having delivered herself of this unpromising reply, she fixed her attention very pointedly on the stage. Alas, not even the bawdy humor of John Gay’s
Beggar’s Opera
could prevent her thoughts from straying to the man seated beside her, so near that she might, if she dared, put out her hand and touch him. As if to prevent her from taking any such action, her restless fingers sought refuge in pleating her green satin skirts. And then, as Act I drew to a close, the tenor cast as MacHeath began to sing a familiar lyric. Margaret’s fingers clenched, crushing the satin folds.
Were I laid on Greenland’s coast, And in my arms embrac’d my lass
... It could not be—but of course it was. Part of the reason for the enduring popularity of
The Beggar’s Opera
lay in the fact that it incorporated familiar ballads known and sung throughout the length and breadth of England, from formal musical evenings in elegant private homes to boisterous crowds in public taprooms, from stately concert halls to the moonlit terrace of a modest country manor house . . .
And I would love you all the day, If with me you’d fondly stray Over the hills and far away.
Margaret closed her eyes against memories too sweet, too painful to contemplate. She opened them on the second stanza, when the female playing Polly joined in, and surprised on James’s face an expression of such anguished longing that her breath caught in her throat. In the next instant it was gone, however, and she was left to wonder if it had ever really been there at all.
* * * *
Of the ill-assorted group occupying Lady Windhurst’s box, only one could truly be said to be enjoying himself. Certainly her ladyship took no pleasure in the comic action onstage, being too concerned with assessing the interaction (if one could call it that) between her young protégée and his Grace. Even Amanda, who usually entered wholeheartedly into anything musical, had bigger fish to fry on this occasion, for having heard, from her sister’s lips, the tale of Mr. Fanshawe’s masquerade, she now engaged her fiancé in a
sotto voce
lovers’ quarrel over his failure to inform her of this interesting development.
Lord Torrington, however, appeared to be in fine fettle, humming tunelessly along with familiar melodies and tapping his foot at apparently random intervals throughout the unfamiliar ones. Between acts, he exerted himself to engage the elder Miss Darrington in light flirtation. To his immense gratification, he was aided in this endeavor by that young lady herself, who found his endless supply of charming trivialities a welcome alternative to the strain of conversing with the man she still could not think of as a duke.
Given so much promising material with which to work, Lord Torrington must perhaps be forgiven for drawing the obvious, albeit entirely erroneous, conclusion.
“James, my lad,” he said, dropping by the Montford town house for a brandy before returning to his own rooms in the Albany, “I’m thinking of becoming leg-shackled.”
James, decanting the promised beverage into two snifters, looked up with mild interest. “You, married? Surely you jest!”
“Never more serious, I assure you. You will stand up with me in church, will you not?”
“I should consider it an honor,” declared James, handing his friend one of the potbellied glasses. “But who, pray, is the unfortunate female upon whom you intend to visit this calamity?”
“The Darrington chit.”
“You’ll catch cold at that,” James cautioned, perching on one corner of an elegant mahogany desk. “She’s engaged to Perry. Sorry to disappoint you, old fellow, but I thought you knew.”
“Not that one—t’other. Her sister.”
James had been idly swirling his brandy around in its snifter, but this pronouncement stayed his hand, leaving both him and the spirituous liquid reeling to find their equilibrium. “You wish to wed
Margaret
Darrington?”
“You find it so hard to believe? Not the diamond her sister is, I’ll grant you, but dashed if I don’t think her bone structure is superior. She’ll age well—better than her sister, mark my words. Besides,” he added with simple pride, “I think she fancies me. Don’t want to disappoint a lady, you know.”
“She—she told you this?”
“Lord, no! A gently bred female wouldn’t speak of such things.” With a rare flash of sensitivity, Torrington added, “I say, you haven’t any objection, have you? Mean to say, I wouldn’t want to poach on another fellow’s preserves, and all that.”
James’s smile was bleak, and his voice devoid of all emotion. “No, I—I have no claim on Miss Darrington’s affections.”
“Just as well, I daresay, for it’s as plain as a pikestaff she don’t fancy you, not above half.” Unaware of having delivered a home thrust, he drained his glass and set it down on the desk. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d best toddle on home. I’ve got a proposal of marriage to make in the morning. Keep a clear head and all that sort of thing, don’t you know.”
James could not afterwards recall saying goodbye to Lord Torrington, but he must have said all that was proper, for that young man eventually departed, apparently none the wiser, and James was left alone to stare at the brandy still untouched in his glass.
It’s plain as a pikestaff she don’t fancy you . . .
James could almost envy Torrington his happy obtuseness. What was plain as a pikestaff to James was that Margaret Darrington had once fancied him very much indeed—but not enough, alas, to marry an itinerant tutor without a penny to bless himself with. Oh yes, she might still care for him, but he was not at all certain that, presented with an offer of marriage from a belted earl, his pragmatic love would not put the demands of her purse above the desires of her heart.
James reminded himself that he might have received a very different answer had he told her the truth while he had the chance. But no, he had been quite determined that she must accept him as plain Mr. Fanshawe. He had claimed a previous disappointment in love as his excuse, but call it by whatever name he would, it all amounted to the same thing—false pride. King Solomon, Sophocles, Heywood— all warned their readers of pride’s eventual downfall, and how right they were! He, at least, would find it cold enough comfort when he stood up in church and watched her become Countess of Torrington.
He reached for the bell pull and ordered a new bottle of brandy brought up to the study, then closeted himself therein with his books and his violin. For the next five days, he saw no one, and scarcely touched the food left on a tray every evening outside the study door. Indeed, only the music of the violin drifting through the closed door testified to his presence at all, prompting his housekeeper to say (more than once) that she had served the dukes of Montford for almost thirty years, but if she heard “Over the Hills and Far Away” one more time, she would be forced to give notice.
Chapter 15
The sun was setting as the hired post-chaise rolled up the drive to the door of Darrington Place. Aunt Hattie, alone in the stillroom putting up the last of the summer gooseberries, wiped her juice-stained hands on her apron and stepped outside to see who the visitor might be. To her great surprise, the carriage door was thrown open before the wheels stopped moving, and her eldest niece flung herself from the vehicle and into her aunt’s arms.
“Margaret! My dear, whatever is the matter?”
For no sooner had Margaret seen the familiar and beloved figure coming forth to greet her than that usually stoic young lady had burst into quite an uncharacteristic display of tears which was now rapidly reducing the front of Aunt Hattie’s starched apron to a sodden mess. Thus adjured, Margaret sobbed something incoherent into her aunt’s shoulder, of which the only intelligible words were “the duke of Montford.”
Aunt Hattie fumbled in her pocket for a shilling for the driver. As the carriage pulled away, she steered Margaret into the house and divested her of bonnet and pelisse as if she were still a very little girl. “Oh, did you meet the duke, then? Tell me, what does he look like?”
This question had the happy effect of enabling Margaret to dry her tears sufficiently to say, “He looks exactly like our own Mr. Fanshawe.”
“Really?”
breathed Aunt Hattie incredulously. “Why, what an
astounding
coincidence!”
In spite of her misery, Margaret was obliged to suppress a smile. “No coincidence, my dear, I assure you. Mr. Fanshawe and the duke of Montford are one and the same. He deceived me. He deceived us all.”
“Oh. Oh, dear. I suppose I should have known.”
“Nonsense! Why should you?”
Aunt Hattie twisted her hands in her apron. “Because, you see, I had a letter from Mr. Fanshawe—the real Mr. Fanshawe, that is. It seems he was very ill and could not come to us, and somehow our Mr. Fanshawe—the duke, I should say, although I must say that sounds very odd—took his place.”
“Are you telling me that you
knew
he was not really Mr. Fanshawe?”
“Yes, but the poor boy begged me so pitifully not to tell that I put the letter in the fire.”
“Aunt Hattie, how could you? Why, we might have been murdered in our beds!”
“Nonsense! Anyone could see dear Mr. Fanshawe would never hurt a fly. That is, the duke would not; as for the real Mr. Fanshawe, I’m sure I don’t know, for I never had the opportunity to meet him, but you checked out his references very thoroughly, and if you deemed him a suitable man to have charge of our Philip, then I’m sure—”
“Aunt Hattie, why didn’t you tell me he was the duke?”
“Oh, but I didn’t know! Very slow-witted of me, I’m sure, for he has the Weatherly nose. I daresay I was led astray on account of his being so very fair, when the Weatherlys are always dark. I wonder if he can be a throw-back to poor Lord Robert’s dairymaid? I believe she was reckoned to be very beautiful.”
“But Auntie, you should have told me that Mr. Fanshawe was—was not who we believed him to be!”
“I suppose I should have, but we had all grown quite fond of him by that time, and Philip was doing so well with his studies, so what harm could there be in keeping him?”
“You cannot ‘keep’ a human being as you would a stray cat!” protested Margaret, torn between exasperation and amusement. “And as it turns out, there was indeed harm— indelible, irreparable harm.”
“If that is true, my dear, I am sorry for it,” said Aunt Hattie, looking chastened. “But what—?”
Margaret, awash with shame at the memory, raised a hand to her eyes as if to block out the painful image. “I very obligingly informed Mr. Fanshawe of my hopes that Amanda might make our fortunes by marrying the duke.”