Georgette Heyer - Sylvester

She looked at him for a moment, hurt and surprise in her eyes, and then turned away, and walked over to the fire. It seemed so needlessly cruel, and so unlike him, to taunt her when he knew her to be distressed that she felt bewildered. It was certainly a taunt, but there had been no mockery in his voice, only anger. Why he should be angry, what she had done to revive his furious resentment, she could not imagine. She found it a little difficult to speak, but managed to say: ‘I am afraid I have. I seem always to be tumbling into a scrape. Hoydenish, my mother-in-law was used to call me, and did her best to teach me prudence and propriety. I wish she had succeeded.’

‘You are not alone in that wish!’ he said savagely.

The harsh, angry voice was having its inevitable effect on her: she began to feel sick, inwardly shivering, and was obliged to sit down, digging her nails into the palms of her hands.

‘You tumbled into a scrape, as you are pleased to call it, when I first made your acquaintance!’ he continued. ‘It would be more correct to say that you flung yourself into it, just as you flung yourself aboard that ship! If you choose to behave like a hoyden it is your own affair, but that is never enough for you! You don’t scruple to embroil others in your scrapes ! Thomas has been a victim, I have been one-my God, have I not!-and now it is your grandmother! Does she cast you off? Do you think yourself hardly used? You have no one but yourself to thank for the ills you’ve brought on your own head!’

She listened to this tirade, rigid with shock, scarcely able to believe that it was Sylvester and not a stranger who hurled these bitter accusations at her. The thought flitted across her brain that he was deliberately feeding his wrath, but it was overborne by her own anger, which leaped from a tiny spark to a blaze.

He said suddenly, before she could speak: ‘No-no! It’s of no use! Sparrow, Sparrow!’

She hardly heard him. She said in a voice husky with passion: ‘I have one other person to thank! It is yourself, my lord Duke! It was your arrogance that caused me to make you the model for my villain! But for you I should never have run away from my home! But for you no one need have known I was the author of that book! But for you I should not have flung myself aboard that schooner! You are the cause of every ill that has befallen me! You say I ill-used you: if I did you are wonderfully revenged, for you have ruined me !’

To her astonishment, and, indeed, indignation, he gave the oddest laugh. As she glared at him he said in the strangest voice she had yet heard: ‘Have I? Well-if that’s so, I will make reparation! Will you do me the honour, Miss Marlow, of accepting my hand in marriage?’

Thus Sylvester, an accomplished flirt, making his first proposal.

It never occurred to Phoebe that he had shaken himself off his balance, and was as self-conscious as a callow youth just out of school. Still less did it occur to her that the laugh and the exaggerated formality of his offer sprang from embarrassment. He was famed for his polished address; she had never, until this day, seen him lose his mastery over himself. She believed him to be mocking her, and started up from her chair, exclaiming: ‘How dare you?’

Sylvester, burningly aware of his own clumsiness, lost no time in making bad worse. ‘I beg your pardon! you mistake! I had no intention-Phoebe, it was out before I well knew what I was saying! I never meant to ask you to marry me-I was determined I would not! But-’ He broke off, realizing into what quagmires his attempts to explain himself were leading him.

‘That I do believe!’ she said hotly. ‘You have been so obliging as to tell me what you think of me, and I believe that too! You came to Austerby to look me over, as though I had been a filly, and decided I was not up to your weight! Didn’t you?’

‘What next will you say?’ he demanded, an involuntary laugh shaking him.

‘ Didn’t you?’

‘Yes. But have you forgotten how you behaved? How could I know what you were when you tried only to disgust me? It wasn’t until later-’

‘To be sure!’ she said scathingly. ‘ Later , when I first made you a victim, embroiling you in my improper flight from Austerby, and next wounded your pride as I daresay it was never wounded before, then you began to think I was just the wife that would suit you! The fervent offer which you have been so flattering as to make me springs, naturally, from the folly that led me to thrust myself into your affairs, and so make it necessary for you to undertake a journey under circumstances so much beneath your dignity as to be positively degrading! How green of me not to have known immediately how it would be! You must forgive me! Had I dreamt that my lack of conduct would attach you to me I would have assumed the manners of a pattern of propriety whenever you came within sight of me! You would then have been spared the mortification of having your suit rejected, and I should have been spared an intolerable insult!’

‘There was no insult,’ he said, very pale. ‘If I phrased it-if it sounded to you as though I meant to insult you, believe that it was not so! What I said to you before, I said because the crazy things you do convinced me you were not the wife that would suit me! I wanted never to see you again after that night at the Castlereaghs’-I thought so, but it wasn’t so, because when I did see you again-I was overjoyed.’

Not a speech worthy of a man who made love charmingly, but Sylvester had never before tried to make love to a lady seething with rage and contempt.

‘Were you indeed?’ said Phoebe. ‘But you soon recovered, didn’t you?’

Nettled, he retorted: ‘No, I only tried to! Stop ripping up at me, you little shrew!’

‘Phoebe, don’t you mean to change your dress?’ said Tom, entering the room at this most inauspicious moment. ‘Keighley took your valise up-’ He broke off, dismayed, and stammered: ‘Oh, I b-beg pardon! I didn’t know-I’ll go!’

‘Go? Why?’ Phoebe said brightly. ‘Yes, indeed I mean to change my dress, and will do so immediately!’

Tom held the door for her, thinking that if only Sylvester, interrupted in the middle of an obvious scene, would drop his guard, grant him an opening, he could tell him just how to handle her. He shut the door, and turned.

‘Good God, Thomas! This sartorial magnificence! Are you trying to put me to the blush?’ said Sylvester quizzingly.

They left Dover just after eleven o’clock, by which time Miss Marlow had quarrelled with both her escorts. Emerging from her bedchamber in the guise of a haughty young lady of fashion she encountered Tom, and instantly asked him whether he had recovered the money he had left in his portmanteau. Upon being reassured on this point she asked him if he would hire a chaise for their conveyance to London. ‘No,’ said Tom, never one to mince his words. ‘I’ve got a better use for my blunt!’

‘I will repay you, I promise you!’ she urged.

‘Much obliged! When?’ said Tom brutally.

‘Grandmama-’

‘Mighty poor security! No, I thank you!’

‘If she will not do it I’ll sell my pearls!’ she declared.

‘That would make me cut a fine figure, wouldn’t it?’

‘Tom, I don’t wish to travel at Salford’s expense!’ she blurted out.

‘That’s easily settled. Sell your pearls, and pay him!’

She said stiffly: ‘If you won’t do what I particularly wish, will you at least request the Duke to tell you how much money he has expended on my behalf since we left Abbeville?’