The Chocolate Debutante (16 page)

“It has been nagging at my mind that Mrs. Palfrey seemed remarkably well informed about your household. One of your servants is not loyal. She must have known exactly when and how to deliver that note. Had you not been asleep, you would have demanded to know the contents, would you not?”

“Oh, this is too much. We must return.”

“As you will. But you must allow me some time to turn my carriage in this press.”

Although he completed the operation quite quickly, Harriet felt they were taking an age to return to Berkeley Square.

Once there, she hurried before him into the house. The butler in answer to her questions said that Miss Susan had gone to lie down. Mr. Courtney had called but had stayed only ten minutes.

“Did you see him leave?” asked the earl.

“No, my lord, but Miss Susan sent for me and told me that she had sent Lucy out to buy silks, Mr. Courtney had left, and that she was going to her room and did not want to be disturbed.

Her face grim, Harriet mounted the stairs, followed by the earl. “Would you like me to go to her bedchamber?” he asked.

“No, she is my niece and I will deal with her.”

They stood together for a moment outside Susan’s bedroom door. “Better get it over with,” said the earl, and threw open the door.

Charles Courtney and Susan were lying on top of the bed together, arms tightly around each other, mouths devouring each other. They had all their clothes on, which should have relieved Harriet, but she was too shocked at Susan’s abandonment to see clearly. She would have run to the bed to pull Susan from it, but the earl drew her back.

“Wait!” he commanded.

He said softly, “Susan is still an innocent and you may say too much while you are so shocked. Leave this to me.” He raised his voice and shouted, “Miss Tremayne orders that both of you present yourselves in the drawing room as soon as you have made yourselves respectable.”

Harriet allowed him to lead her downstairs. “Now, now,” he said gently. “It is not so terrible. They
are
betrothed.”

“He was eating her, or that’s what it looked like.”

“People deeply in love do kiss like that.”

Harriet blushed a deep, mortified red. “I have failed as her aunt, as her chaperone. Such behavior is not that of a lady.”

“If such behavior were not that of a lady, then the population would decline rapidly and the aristocracy would die out.”

“Passions are for the vulgar.”

“A stupid idea. Search your own heart, Harriet. Think of the kisses we exchanged at Hampton Court.”

Harriet twisted a fold of her skirt in her fingers and looked at the floor. It suddenly occurred to her at that moment, despite the turmoil of her feelings about Susan, that he had kissed her and she had kissed him back, and yet he had said no word of love.
He had not declared his intentions.
He
should
have declared his intentions. He had not. And she had been prepared to go out with him that very day and unescorted by any maid or footman, too. She colored again, unaware that he was watching her with affectionate amusement.

The door opened slowly and Charles and Susan entered hand in hand, looking sheepish.

“Young man,” said Lord Dangerfield, “it would be as well if you went this day and got a special license. I am sure Miss Tremayne will agree with me. You may make the explanation to your parents and Miss Colville’s parents purely romantic. To put it bluntly, if you do not hurry up, you will be leading a pregnant girl to the altar. No! I know you have kept within reasonable bounds so far, but how long will it last?”

“I am so dreadfully sorry,” said Charles.

Susan walked forward. “Pooh! What a fuss about nothing.”

“You tricked me, Susan,” said Harriet. “Mr. Courtney, I am sadly disappointed in you. I am shocked. Take yourself off. Until the wedding, which I trust will be as soon as possible—and how I am to explain that to her parents I do not know—you are to behave yourselves.”

“Yes, ma’am,” mumbled Mr. Courtney.

“I will leave you, too,” said Lord Dangerfield, “but I am going only as far as the servants’ hall to see if I can find out which one was reporting your movements to Mrs. Palfrey. Do not be too hard on your niece, Miss Tremayne. Such things may shock your sensibilities, but they are very human.” He smiled at her, but she turned her face from his.

After an hour’s diligent questioning, Dangerfield discovered that a housemaid had left Harriet’s employ the day after Susan’s abduction, that she had often been absent from work, and that she seemed to have more money than a servant of her class should have. Satisfied at last, he returned upstairs to be told by the butler that Miss Tremayne had gone to lie down and begged to be excused. He told the butler to make sure Miss Tremayne learned the name of the guilty servant and also that she no longer had anything to fear, and took himself off.

At two o’clock that same afternoon, Sir Thomas Jeynes called on Miss Barncastle, and when he was ushered in, was delighted to find two other ladies there. He wanted an audience larger than that of Miss Barncastle for what he planned to do.

He was introduced to Miss Teale and Miss Carrington. Having not met Harriet in her dowdy days, he was amazed that such a fashionable lady, although such a prosy one, should have such dull and staid friends. But, he reflected, the duller and plainer, the better.

“We are not acquainted, Sir Thomas,” began Miss Barncastle, “but my maid tells me you have urgent news for me concerning a friend.”

“Yes, indeed. May I be seated?”

“Pray do. Some wine, or tea, perhaps? The tea is fresh.”

Sir Thomas said graciously that he quite doted on tea, although, in fact, he seldom drank anything less heady than wine.

He flipped up his coattails and sat down. It was a dismal room, he thought, glancing quickly around, redolent of good works and good thoughts. The tables were covered in heavy leather-bound tomes. The ladies all had their workbaskets out and had been knitting dingy clothes in the dingy colors ladies always chose when knitting for the poor, as if a bright color might corrupt the lower orders.

He accepted a cup of tea, took a sip, pronounced it delicious, refused a seed cake, and said, “I am come about your friend Miss Tremayne.”

Miss Barncastle bridled slightly. In fact, thought Sir Thomas uncharitably, she looked remarkably like a horse.

“Oh, dear,” said Miss Teale, all aflutter—an almost pleasurable flutter—“has something
bad
happened?”

“Very bad,” said Sir Thomas portentiously, and the ladies shrieked in dismay.

“Have you heard of the Earl of Dangerfield?”

Miss Barncastle said, “We saw Miss Tremayne being driven along Piccadilly by a wickedly handsome man. I overheard someone say that he was the Earl of Dangerfield.”

“I need your help, ladies, to save
Miss Tremayne’s very soul.
”

How they gasped and hovered around him, offering him more tea and cake.

“No, no, I thank you,” he begged.

“Is she in peril?” asked Miss Teale, who was a secret reader of the kind of novels the others affected to despise.

“Deadly peril.”

“Her life?” cried Miss Carrington.

“Worse than that. Her virtue.”

“Alas, I knew only bad would come of poor Harriet venturing into corrupt society,” mourned Miss Barncastle, or, rather, her voice mourned while her eyes gleamed with excitement.

“Tell us about poor Harriet,” urged Miss Teale.

“Miss Tremayne has fallen in love with Lord Dangerfield. Lord Dangerfield never proposes marriage, only a
carte blanche.
”

“Mercy! You must warn her,” gasped Miss Carrington.

He stared at the floor and then put a hand to his brow. “Alas, I am not indifferent myself to Miss Tremayne. She might think I was jealous.”

Three pinched faces looked back at him, three minds thinking that it was the outside of enough for Harriet Tremayne to have a handsome earl after her without having snared this extremely attractive man as well. But then three minds promptly refused to believe that they had anything other than good thoughts.

“Do not worry,” fluted Miss Barncastle. “We will go to dear Harriet directly. She must be
warned.
”

Sir Thomas took out a large handkerchief and covered his face as though overcome with emotion. “You are too good,” he said in a stifled voice. “Dangerfield is even betting them in the clubs that he can have Miss Tremayne.”

When he took his leave after being pressed to “call at any time,” he felt he had done a good job. He only hoped he had spiked Dangerfield’s guns in time. It would be irritating in the extreme to learn that the man had already proposed.

Harriet was feeling more comfortable. Charles had gone to get a special license. She had sent an express letter to Susan’s parents saying they must get ready to travel to London. She said that because of pressing family affairs, Mr. Charles Courtney wished to be married as soon as possible. After worrying for some time about what Charles’s parents would think of the rushed wedding, she decided that as Susan was the female catch of the Season, they would probably have no objections at all. That proved to be the case when a letter arrived a few moments later from Mrs. Courtney stating that she would be calling on Harriet the following day to discuss the guest list.

So Harriet was just about to give herself up to the luxury of dreaming of the earl, when she learned that Miss Barncastle, Miss Teale, and Miss Carrington had called. She told the butler to send them in, although she found she really did not want to see them. But she felt guilty at having ignored them for so long.

As soon as she saw their grim, disapproving faces, she knew she had made a mistake.

She forced a smile on her face as three pairs of eyes took in the modishness of her gown and the glossiness of her curls.

“We are come on a serious mission,” began Miss Barncastle. “You are encouraging the attentions of Lord Dangerfield.”

Harriet’s eyes were like ice. “What I do is none of your concern.”

“But it is,” said Miss Teale. Desire to humble Harriet made her inventive. “My brother, John, is bon ton, as you know, and au fait with what is going on in society. He said that Dangerfield was laying bets in the clubs that he could
have you
outside marriage.”

Miss Barncastle and Miss Carrington looked at Miss Teale in admiration, realizing that if one of them had said they knew what was going on in the clubs of London, then Harriet would not have believed them.

“We are so sorry for you, poor misguided thing,” cooed Miss Barncastle.

Harriet looked at their sanctimonious faces, and fury, like bile, rose in her throat. She rang the bell. When the butler answered it, she said, “The ladies are leaving. Please escort them out.”

“I realize you are upset,” said Miss Carrington, “but on calmer reflection you will thank us.”

Harriet snapped.
“Get out!”
she shouted.

When the door was closed behind them, she sat very still, too frightened to move, as if she had just fallen off a tall building. She felt stiff and sore with grief. At last she rose and went to the mirror. In it she saw the old Harriet, dowdy Harriet, spinster Harriet.

How he must have laughed about her with his friends! Her normal good sense had deserted her. Having hitherto shunned the marriage market because she firmly believed she preferred to stay single and independent, she had never realized that she had escaped from life into the dull embraces of ladies of the salon in South Audley Street. She knew only that she had no reason to disbelieve them.

Love can blind people to reality and make the most intelligent stupid. And so Lord Dangerfield, on being told for the second time by Harriet’s stone-faced butler that she was “not at home,” came to the furious conclusion that Harriet had been playing some game with him, leading him on only to snub him. She was such a frozen spinster, he thought savagely, that her niece and the amorous Mr. Courtney in bed together must have overset her mind. Harriet’s bitter thoughts had also worked against Sir Thomas. She could no longer believe that any man was interested in her, and so he had been refused admittance as well as the earl.

A day before the arrival of Susan’s parents, Susan emerged from her dream of love to take in the fact that her aunt was miserable and tetchy. Lucy, the maid, had told her dismally that Miss Tremayne was no longer a credit to her talents as lady’s maid, and now wore only the simplest of toilettes and was refusing to see Lord Dangerfield every time he called.

Susan also realized that Harriet was turning down many invitations. She had thought this was because of the flurry of wedding arrangements and pinnings for the wedding gown but, observing her aunt sharply, she noticed that Harriet was indeed looking wretched.

After the dressmaker had been dismissed, Susan sat down on the sofa beside Harriet and took her aunt’s hands in a firm grip. “You are looking so blue-deviled,” she said. “I thought it was because of all the wedding arrangements, but has it something to do with Dangerfield?”