Джорджетт Хейер: April Lady

“Well, of course, I should try to dissuade her from doing what you don’t like,” said Nell doubtfully, “but it wasn’t at all necessary. Mr. Allandale’s scruples are so very strict that I am persuaded he would never ask her to do anything that might set up people’s backs.”

“Good God!” said his lordship. “What a slow-top! My dear, what does she see in him to hit her fancy?”

“I can’t think!” said Nell candidly. “Though I am sure he has many excellent qualities, and a most superior understanding.”

“Superior fiddlesticks! I never found him to be anything but a dreadful bore. I wish to God she would recover from this green-sickness! It’s quite impossible, you know: he has neither fortune nor expectation, and I’ll swear I never saw a couple less suited to one another. I should be a villain to countenance such an attachment. If his scruples are as strict as you tell me I collect I’ve no need to fear he may run off with her to Gretna Green?”

“Good gracious, no!” Nell exclaimed, startled.

“So much, then, for my aunt Chudleigh’s croakings!”

“Your aunt Chudleigh! Oh Giles, she was at Almack’s last night, and she gave me a terrible scold for permitting Letty to dance with Mr. Allandale!”

“What impertinence!”

“Oh, no! Though that is what Felix said. And also he told her to make her complaints to you, which was not very civil of him, but excessively brave, I thought!”

“I wonder what she imagines I can do to stop Letty? Short of incarcerating her at Merion—By the by, I must go to Merion next week. Useless, I suppose, to ask you to go with me?”

She showed him a face of sudden dismay. “Next week! But the Beadings’ masquerade—!”

He raised his brows. “Is it so important? For my part, masquerades at Chiswick—”

“No, indeed, but you did promise Letty she should attend it! It is the first she has ever been to, and she has had the prettiest domino made, and—and I must own I think it would be dreadfully shabby to tell her now that she cannot go!”

“Hang Letty! Can’t she—No, I suppose not. Very well: I won’t tease you to go with me.”

“I wish I might,” she said wistfully.

He smiled at her, but rather quizzically, and picked up another of the invitation cards. “A quadrille ball at the Cowpers’! How dashing! It will be a horrible squeeze: must we go?”

The post had brought her ladyship a polite reminder from Mr. Warren, Perfumier, that a trifling account for scent, white nail-wax and Olympian Dew, was outstanding. It had lain hidden by Lady Cowper’s invitation, and was revealed when the Earl picked this up. Only a few guineas were involved, but Nell instinctively put out her hand to cover it. The movement caught his eye; he glanced down, and she at once removed her hand, flushing, vexed with herself.

“What other delights are in store for us?” he asked, picking up another card. “Assemblies and balls seem to be in full feather: you will be knocked up by all this raking! Don’t drag me to this affair, I beg of you!”

“That? Oh, no! It is to be a petticoat-party. You—you will be present at our own dress-party, won’t you?”

“Of course.”

There was a short silence. After that one glance the Earl had not again looked at Mr. Warren’s account, but it seemed to his guilty wife imperative to divert his attention from it. She said a trifle breathlessly: “Cardross, what a very elegant dressing-gown that is! I think I never saw you wear it before.”

“Ah, I hoped you would be pleased with it!” he replied blandly. “And with me for letting you see it.”

“How absurd you are! It is certainly most handsome.”

“Yes, and wickedly dear—as dear as your feathered bonnet, though not, I fear, as becoming. You see how I lay myself open to strong counter-attack!”

“Oh, Giles!”

He laughed, and tickled her cheek. “Foolish little Nell! Is it very shocking?”

She heaved a sigh of relief, smiling shyly at him. “No, indeed it isn’t! Only it—it does chance to be a bill I had forgotten, and I was afraid you would be angry with me.”

“What a disagreeable husband I must be!” he murmured ruefully. “Shall I pay that bill with the rest?”

“No, please! It is a very small one—look!”

She held it out to him, but he did not look at it, only taking her hand in his, the bill crushed between his fingers, and saying: “You mustn’t be afraid of me. I never meant to make you so! I’ll pay this bill, or any other—only don’t conceal any from me!”

“Afraid of you? Oh, no, no!” she exclaimed.

His clasp on her hand tightened; he leaned forward, as though he would have kissed her; but her dresser came into the room just then, and although she quickly withdrew, the moment had passed. Nell had snatched her hand away, vividly blushing, and the Earl did not try to recapture it. He got up, his own complexion rather heightened, feeling all the embarrassment natural to a man discovered, at ten o’clock in the morning, making love to his own wife, and went away to his dressing-room.

Shortly before four o’clock that afternoon young Lady Cardross’s barouche was driven into Hyde Park by the Stanhope Gate. It was a very stylish vehicle, quite the latest thing in town carriages, and it had been bestowed on her ladyship, together with the pair of perfectly matched grays that drew it, by her husband, upon her installation as mistress of his house in Grosvenor Square. “Slap up to the echo,” was what Dysart called it: certainly no other lady owned a more elegant turn-out. To be seen in Hyde Park between the hours of five and six on any fine afternoon during the London season, driving, riding, or even walking, was de rigueur for anyone of high fashion; and before her marriage, when she had sat beside her mama in an oldfashioned landaulet, Nell had frequently envied the possessors of more dashing equipages, and had thought how agreeable it would be to sit behind a pair of high-steppers in a smart barouche, with its wheels picked out in yellow. She had been delighted with the Earl’s gift, exclaiming naively: “Now I shall be all the crack!”

“Do you wish to be?” he had asked her, amused. “Yes,” she replied honestly. “And I think I ought to be, because although Miss Wilby—our governess, you know says that it is wrong to set one’s mind on worldly things, you are all the crack, which makes it perfectly proper, I think, for me to be fashionable too.”

“I am persuaded,” he said, his countenance admirably composed, “that Miss Wilby must perceive it to be your duty, even.”

She was a little dubious about this, but happily recollecting that she was no longer answerable to her governess she was able to put that excellent educationist out of her mind. “You know how people talk of Lord Dorset on his white horse, and Mrs. Toddington with her chestnuts?” she said confidentially. “ Now they will talk of Lady Cardross, behind her match-grays! I should not be astonished if my barouche were to draw as many eyes as hers!”

“Nor should I,” agreed his lordship, grave as a judge. “In fact, I should be much astonished if it did not.”

Whether it was the smart turn-out which drew all eyes, or its charming occupant, Nell had soon experienced the felicity of attracting a great deal of attention when she drove in the Park. She became a noted figure, and never doubted that she owed this triumph to her splendid horses until her more knowledgeable sister-in-law remarked chattily, as she stepped into the carriage that day: “Isn’t it a fortunate circumstance, Nell, that you are fair and I am dark? I don’t wonder at it that everyone stares to see us: we take the shine out of all the other females! Mr. Bottisham told Hardwick so, and Hardwick says it is a compliment well worth having, because Mr. Bottisham is in general quite odiously censorious. I think,” she added, dispassionately considering the matter, “that you are prettier than I am, but on the other hand, I have a great deal of countenance, besides being dark, which is more in the mode, so I don’t excessively mind your being beautiful.”