Джорджетт Хейер - April Lady

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.”

Nell could not help laughing, but, with Miss Wilby’s precepts in mind, she ventured to suggest to Letty that such candour was a trifle improper.

“That is the sort of thing Aunt Chudleigh says,” observed Letty, unabashed. “For my part, I see nothing improper in speaking the truth. And you can’t deny that it is the truth!” She made herself comfortable beside Nell, and unfurled a pink sunshade. “We make a perfect picture,” she said complacently.

“I collect Lord Hardwick told you so!”

“Everyone tells me so!”

“Well, take care they don’t next tell you that you are abominably conceited,” recommended Nell.

“They won’t,” asserted Letty, with confidence. “No one I care a fig for, at all events, I daresay Felix might, for I never knew anyone so stuffy!”

However, when they presently saw Mr. Hethersett strolling in the Park there was nothing to be read in that stickler’s countenance but critical appreciation. Nell directed her coachman to pull up his horses, and when Mr. Hethersett came up to the carriage leaned forward to give him her hand. “How do you do? I hoped we might see you. Do you mean to go to the Beadings’ masquerade next week? Cardross has been obliged to cry off: isn’t it infamous of him? Will you dine with us, and give us your escort in his stead?”

He looked regretful, and shook his head. “Can’t,” he said mournfully. “Excused myself to Mrs. Beading. Told her I had another engagement. Not the thing to go there after that. Pity!”

She smiled. “You cannot hoax me into believing that you think so! Confess! You dislike masquerades!”

“Not trying to hoax you: happy to escort you anywhere! Not but what it ain’t the sort of party I like. If I were you I’d cry off, because you won’t enjoy it. Not just in your style.”

“I declare, you are the stupidest creature, Felix!” Letty broke in. “Why shouldn’t we enjoy it? It will be rare mummery, for we are all to wear masks, and—”

“Yes, a vast rout of people, and rompings!” interrupted Mr. Hethersett, in a tone of deep disapproval. “You may enjoy it: I never said you wouldn’t. All I said was, Lady Cardross won’t. Do you want a piece of advice, cousin?”

“No,” said Letty crossly.

“Mistake,” he said, shaking his head. “Not saying that ain’t an elegant gown: it is. Not saying that hat don’t become you: it does.” He left an ominous pause, during which Letty eyed him uneasily. She might despise him for what she considered his antiquated notions of propriety, but no aspirant to high fashion could afford to ignore his pronouncements on all matters of sartorial taste. He delivered his verdict. “I don’t like those pink ribbons. Or the feather. Insipid.”

“Insipid?” she exclaimed indignantly. She cast a glance down at the double row of pink knots which ornamented her dress of delicate fawn-coloured muslin. They exactly matched the feather than hung down on one side of a little straw hat which was turned up on the other side, and worn at a dashing angle on her glossy black ringlets. French kid gloves of the same pink completed a toilet which she had thought to be, until this painful moment, in the first crack of the mode. Doubt now entered her soul; she turned her anxious gaze upon her cousin. “It isn’t! You are saying it to vex me!”