The English Witch (10 page)

"Well, I only hope we do not wear you out, Miss Ashmore. You have just got to London"—a perfectly heartbreaking sigh—"and now you must be dragged off again. You have only had a very little respite from Basil and now must be thrust into his company once more." Lady Deverell shook her head sadly over this, as one who could not account for the naughty behaviour of Providence.

"Then Basil is coming as well?" Lord Arden asked with a covert glance toward Miss Ashmore.

"Why yes. Didn't I say so? Well; perhaps I didn't. That curry plagues me so." And with another tragic sigh, the viscountess floated away.

"So," Basil was saying, as he played with the note he'd received that morning—nearly a week after the dinner to which he'd not been invited. "It isn't enough they bid me come and be roasted by all my relations at once, but they must have Will, too, and Jess. Well, we know what that's all about, don't we?"

Freddie didn't know, but he nodded sagely nonetheless.

"And if they mean to push her off on the first peer who comes along, it's not my trouble is it?"

Freddie shook his head.

"Arden's welcome to her. But I am not about to keep Jess amused while he woos Miss Ashmore. I'm not Hartleigh's court jester, after all."

Freddie was halfway into a nod but stopped suddenly and blinked instead. "Don't mean you're not coming?"

"I am not."

"But they ain't seen you in three years, and we're going."

"I'll be very sorry to lose your company, Freddie, but my family must learn that I am no longer to be ordered about, here and there, at their whim. Why, they make up some claptrap about a young woman in dire straits and dispatch me off to rescue her. Dire straits. I'll tell you who's in dire straits—anyone who comes within a mile of her tongue, that's who."

"Seemed amiable enough to me. Alicia likes her."

"Freddie, your beautiful wife is so good-natured that she can discover no less in all those she meets."

Such praise could not fail to gratify one who saw his wife as the paragon of every sort of perfection and virtue. Even
so, Freddie could not willingly forego his friend's company. He made a stammering attempt to change Basil's mind.

"No, Freddie, I can't do it. I'd see you in another month or so, no doubt, when you come back to town. I will not play the fool again, even to accommodate
you.
Besides, I have business to attend to."

"Business? This time of year?"

"Oh, yes. I must see about a house, of course, for I don't intend to live in a hotel forever. But more important, I've just met a perfectly charming barque of frailty, and if I go away now, there are half a dozen others ready to take my place in her mercenary affections. Such business cannot wait. Jess must contrive to entertain herself, and you must find consolation in the company of your beautiful wife."

Lord Tuttlehope returned home bluedevilled. He was the happiest of husbands, but he'd missed his clever friend dreadfully. Now to learn that he must endure that friend's absence until the Little Season at least… There was no understanding Basil lately. They'd only seen him twice in the two weeks since he'd returned. It was most disappointing, and so he told his wife.

"Oh, Freddie," she said, "whatever are you thinking? Of course Basil is coming."

"Not at all. Said he wasn't."

"Oh, he never means half what he says. You know that, dear. Maria says he'll be there, and so he will."

Lady Deverell, of course, knew everything. Quite like Lady Bertram in that respect. A couple of oracles they were. Nonetheless, Freddie stoutly maintained that Basil would not appear.
"She'll
be there, you know, and he can't abide her."

"Whom do you mean, darling?"

"Her.
Ashmore's girl."

"Basil can't abide her?" Lady Tuttlehope's eyes opened wide with astonishment. "But she's so beautiful—and so clever and amiable."

"Hates her," her husband insisted. "Said so. Won't be made a fool of."

"So that's why he hasn't gone to see his aunt. Yet, what kind of excuse is it, when he's been away three whole years? Then I hope he shan't come after all, the mean thing. For he's sure to be unpleasant to Miss Ashmore, and then I shall have to hate him. I think she's lovely, and I hope she marries Will. Did you see the way he looked at her the other night? It made my heart flutter."

Lord Tuttlehope was a generous-minded man, but he did not like his wife's heart to flutter on anybody's account but his own. He blinked unhappily, and the tactful Alicia moved quickly to reassure him.

"Oh dear," she said, after a few very pleasant minutes had passed.

"What? What is it?"

"You came home looking so troubled, dear, that I forgot all about Marianne's letter."

"All well, I hope," her husband responded, though he really couldn't care less at the moment. He wanted more coddling.

"Quite well. Though she does say Mama has been very tiresome about her coming to us for a Season. Poor girl— she'd so much rather stay at home with her books."

"Quiet, sensible girl." Lord Tuttlehope dimly remembered Marianne as the least terrifying of Alicia's three younger sisters.

"Yes. And she writes to say that Papa has brought guests with him. You'll never guess."

"Can't think who."

"Miss Ashmore's Papa. And a young man—a Mr. Burnham. Very agreeable, Marianne says. He knows heaps about old things—history, you know, dear—and must talk the livelong day about it, for she crossed an entire page telling me about the something wars. It begins with a 'p,' I think something like 'Penelope'—but it's much too hard a word to remember."

Her husband couldn't think what it was either and didn't especially want to know. He had much rather be assured again about Lord Arden and so found a way to stammer back to
th
at subject and be comforted accordingly.

The post must have been doing a brisk business that day, for Alexandra also had a letter from Westford. It was not from Marianne Latham—Alexandra didn't know that young lady—but from Sir Charles. And, as was the case with most of the baronet's communications, it was annoying.

The long and the short of it was that he'd found out that Mr. Trevelyan was a perfectly dreadful young man. Sir Charles had found it out from Mrs. Latham, who, in the course of apprising him at unnecessary length of her dear daughter Alicia's highly satisfactory marriage to a baron, had also some choice words to bestow on the subject of the baron's good friend, Mr. Trevelyan.

"And it's no good," wrote Sir Charles in his crabbed script, "that Mr. Latham makes excuses for him. Nor can I think what excuse to make for
you,
Alexandra. Trevelyan is, and has been for all his adult life, one of London's most notorious libertines. I must believe you either the greatest fool or the most deceitful daughter there ever was. How, I ask, could the man be secretly engaged to you when three years ago he was so busy trying to get himself engaged to Mr. Latham's niece—or former niece—I cannot make out what the relations are in that family. Everywhere I turn, I hear nothing but scandal. If I were not kept here on important business, as Mr. Latham expresses interest in investing in my Albanian work, I would come and take you away immediately. Still, while I am here some matters can be put in train, and in a few more days I expect that Randolph and I can come to London for you."

There was more, a great deal more, and all of it unpleasant. Alexandra was scowling at the letter when Lady Bertram entered the room. "Good heavens, child, what dreadful news is it?"

The younger woman made no answer, but simply handed her the document so she might see for herself. Lady Bertram read it, glared, then crumpled the letter in a ball and tossed it into the cold fireplace. "Don't trouble yourself, my dear," he said. "No one is going to cart you off anywhere like so many bushels of corn. You're in England now, Alexandra, and among friends."

"But Papa—"

"—is only in bad humour because he hasn't any bits of ancient rubble to be poking at. This is nothing to distress yourself about. Go now. Will arrives shortly to take you for a drive, and you haven't even begun to dress. I will send Emmy up to you directly."

Smiling, Alexandra pointed out that it did not require two full hours to make herself ready.

"Then find something to do, there's a dear girl. I must write some letters."

Ordinarily, Lord Arden would not have taken his Intended to Hyde Park—certainly not at five o'clock—since this would announce her existence to every bachelor still in town. For ornately, the party was scheduled to leave for Hartleigh Hall the following day. He trusted, therefore, that when she next appeared in the park, it would be as his wife.
What a glorious marchioness she'd make!
And when the Respected Parent finally stuck his spoon in the wall, she'd make an even more stupendous duchess.

Accordingly, Lord Arden set himself to being even more agreeable than usual, though it scarcely seemed possible, and suppressed his boredom when she firmly turned the conversation from gossip to politics. Nor did he patronise her (at least not very much) when she went on to talk so earnestly of literature, though he didn't listen either. He was too busy imagining what it would be like to have a beautiful bluestocking as his hostess. Fondly, he pictured her astonishing his aristocratic colleagues with her harangues. He even envisioned her teaching an assortment of handsome children—some green-eyed, some grey-eyed—to lisp Greek and Latin.

Yes, a beautiful wife who was slightly eccentric was even better than a beautiful wife who was much like everyone else. Thus, though he barely heard five words out of every twenty, he fancied he was quite in love with her mind as well as everything else about her.

In this state so closely approaching the platonic ideal, he felt generous towards his fellows. His heart went out to the elegant gentlemen who stopped to stare as they drove past.
He especially pitied his cronies who charged at them every few minutes, greeting him so warmly and begging to be made known to his attractive companion. It was only when Trevelyan appeared that his spirit of generosity ebbed away.

Trev was polite, certainly. But Lord Arden did not care for the way those devious cat eyes raked over Miss Ashmore, especially since that raking made the lady turn colour and lose her composure—and more especially since nothing his lordship had said or done had aroused so strong a reaction. It was, moreover, some time before she fully recovered. After Basil left, she seemed to have some trouble putting her sentences together—she who'd been so eloquent on the subject of Mr. Wordsworth only moments before.

His lordship was determined to help her along. "And so what do you think will become of Byron's poetry now that he's married?" he asked. "Do you think that wedded bliss will dull his sharp tongue?"

She appeared to shake herself out of a trance to answer him. "I haven't yet had an opportunity to read very much of his work. But from what I've heard recently, there's little bliss in that marriage."

"I fear you're right. But then, many of us maintain that he was bound to make a poor husband. Some are improved, even reformed, by marriage. Others, like Byron, are only made worse by it."

It occurred to her that perhaps it was not really Lord Byron he was speaking of, but someone else. Yet her features remained blank as she asked him to explain.

"Because it makes them feel 'cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd.' And so they must run away to lose themselves in some desperate pursuit of pleasure."

"You speak so knowingly, my lord. Do you, too, view marriage as a prison?"

"Ah, you mean to trick me, Miss Ashmore. For if I say I do not, you'll throw my long bachelorhood in my face. And if I say I do—why, then, what will you conclude about my intentions towards yourself?"

Such a query was meant to be answered in one way only: with a coy claim of ignorance. His lordship then enlightening her in proper form—perhaps on bended knee, though it would be deuced awkward in the phaeton—the matter would be settled. Miss Ashmore might then turn her thoughts to her trousseau, and he—why, to any of those myriad subjects far too taxing for the minds of young ladies.

But Lord Arden received no claim of ignorance, coy or otherwise. Miss Ashmore stared at him for a moment as though he had asked whether he might stand on his head. Then, in the voice of a schoolmistress, she answered, "I would not presume to judge your lordship's behaviour or intentions, and most especially not on such
short acquaintance.
It was only your opinion I sought."

The emphasis she placed on the words told him plain that he'd leapt ahead of himself and had better leap right back. He had not expected this setdown, but then he reminded himself that she was a tad eccentric after all, and that was one of her charms. And so, the obedient student gave as his opinion that marriage improved partners who were well suited and worsened those who were not. In Byron's case, he went on, there was a moody, restless nature to begin with and too-early fame and adulation to compound the problem. In fact, he pointed out, if all those who shouldn't think of marrying didn't, it would be easier for better-suited persons to find each other.

"You think then," she asked, "that these ineligible individuals should be driven from Society? Or perhaps should be made to wear a badge of some sort to warn the unwary away?"