Joan Smith: Imprudent Lady / An Imprudent Lady

Next day he stuck to his resolution, and prepared himself in the morning to pay her a visit. He was amazed to find himself a little nervous. Not in a missish quake, of course. He had supped with princes and dined with princesses, flirted with duchesses and countesses without a qualm, but he did feel a qualm at calling on this little lady no one had ever heard of. The thought had taken hold that she would be judging him, as she so obviously had judged her uncle, and found him wanting. What would she write of himself if she decided to slip him into one of her books? “A gentleman who brought Society to its knees with the aid of an eye patch and a piece of doggerel…" No, she would cut closer to the bone than that.

But when he was later confronted with the live novelist, the qualm seemed to have transferred itself from his bones to hers. She looked quite thunderstruck to see him in her saloon, but not so surprised that she failed to warn the butler there was no need to disturb Mr. Elmtree. No more than he did she want that tongue ruining their visit. Her mother, a sensible but not remarkable woman, sat with them for ten minutes, at the end of which time Dammler repeated the mention of a drive. “I will take good care of your daughter, ma’am,” he assured Mrs. Mallow.

“Prudence is pretty well able to take care of herself,” she replied.

“She is well named,” he smiled.

Prudence looked at him closely. At that instant she realized he was mere flesh and blood. The most pleasing combination of flesh and blood ever seen, perhaps, but a mere mortal after all. Her awe of him fled like a small cloud before a howling wind.

“I wonder how many times you have had to listen to that platitude,” he said as they went out the door.

“More times than I care to remember.”

“And it isn’t true either,” he said, giving her a hand into the carriage. It was far and away the grandest carriage Miss Mallow had ever been in. Papa had kept a little gig, and Uncle Clarence had a lumbering old coach that had been in the family twenty years. Dammler's was a spanking new one, shiny with a crest on the side. Silver mountings gleamed everywhere, and in the interior the seats and squabs were covered in real tiger skin.

“Oh, how savage!” she laughed.

The carriage seemed suddenly to be in very poor taste. “I am not prudent either, to have put my pelts to such a base use. I’m sorry I didn’t keep them for rugs.”

“Surely walking on them is no more noble than sitting on them?” she remarked.

It was a mere nothing-a thoughtless comment to fill time until they should be moving, but again it made him feel foolish.

“Why did you call me imprudent?” she asked, trying not to show in too obvious a manner her interest in this magnificent carriage. There were little doors and silver pulls mounted on the side, which raised her curiosity. “To have treated your uncle Elmtree so was a shabby trick, Miss Mallow.”

She looked at him in amazement. Could it be he considered meeting himself such a treat he felt her uncle to have been deprived because she told the servant not to call him? Certainly Clarence would think so, but for Dammler to suggest it himself was a piece of pride she could scarcely swallow without chewing it a bit.

“What have I said to make you hate me already, ma'am?" he asked. “I intended to be on my best behaviour. You must own you gave him a fine raking in The Composition.”

“Oh, you mean you read it?” she asked.

"Indeed I did, as soon as I could tear it out of Hettie’s hands. I lent it to her,” he added, not considering it a real lie, as he had no notion of returning the gift.

“Oh, but he never guessed, nor would he if he ever got round to reading it. How did you figure it out? My changing him to a woman fooled everyone else. Not even Mama suspected.”

“I saw what you were up to at once. Bach’s fugues are the Mona Lisa, and the baroque counterpoint is her foreshortening. I don’t think you worked in an analogy to the eyelashes, did you?”

It was horrid to laugh at Uncle Clarence, but so very nice to have someone who understood and did not disapprove, that she could not suppress a smile. “No, nor the symbols either-they are a recent innovation.”

“Lawrence will snap it up in no time,” he warned her with a quirk of his black wing of eyebrow, and a conspiratorial smile.

“And claim it for his own-that is another of his tricks to be watched out for. He took to putting on a bit of impasto to highlight the nose as soon as ever Uncle Clarence invented it.”

“Plagiarist! He’ll be posing them in three-quarters profile with their hands folded if we don’t keep a sharp eye on him. I adored your books. You are a real artist with words.”

She flushed with pleasure, but demurred, “It is yourself who is the acknowledged artist.”

“Humbug-don’t try to gammon me. They’re claptrap, Miss Mallow, and you know it.”

“Oh, indeed they are not! They are stunning tales. I like them excessively.”

"That is not what I hear,” he wagged a finger at her. “Now that you are famous you must watch your tongue. And it will take some watching, too, I’ll wager. I have it on good authority Miss Burney was chagrined at your impudence, and Lord Dammler is certainly offended at your criticism of him. Especially as it was so very much to the point.”

“Oh, but I didn’t…”

“Didn’t claim you must send your heroine off to the moon, since I had grabbed the world for my playground? Of course you did. Hettie’s tongue runs like a river, but she doesn’t lie.”

“I-I was only funning, you know.”

“I know, now that I have met you. Come to know you a little I mean.” He was anxious to know her better. She was different from anyone he had met since returning to England. “I wish you will tell me all about The Cat in the Garden. Who is she?”

“She, as you might guess now that you are on to my trick, is a man-a horrid old nosey Parker who lived near us in Kent. He was a bachelor of a certain age-funny how they haven’t the reputation for malice and spite we spinsters have, but they are just as bad. He was always peeking over the hedge when I had company.”

“So you are Emily. I didn’t suspect that.”

Emily was a lively young lady with much of Prudence in her. “No, I made her up,” she said, remembering she had been something of a beauty. “I just used the circumstance of a nosey person making mischief and fabricated from there.”

“I don’t think I could do that.”

“Surely you made up at least half of the adventures you wrote about. They could not all have happened to you."

"They all happened to somebody. Some of them I had second hand, but I didn’t make any of them up out of whole cloth. That is the leap of imagination that defies me.”

Prudence looked skeptical. “I didn’t think, from reading your works you would stick at anything.”

“I have been taken for Marvelman because of the name I chose. He was not meant to be me. The cantos were just scribblings to wile away time when I was bored of an evening. It can be boring far away from company, or in the thick of it, for that matter.”

As they entered the park, a sensation was caused by the appearance of Dammler’s carriage. It was recognized and every second vehicle they passed wanted to stop for the occupant to have a word with him. There was no guessing from his smiling face and joking conversation that he was bored. Certainly Prudence was not. She hadn’t had such a day before in her whole life. Dammler introduced her to a few notables, but usually he just said a few words and drove on.

“How do you find life in a fish bowl?” he asked with a disparaging smile during a brief interlude when he was let alone.