Mary Balogh - Slightly Wicked

He chuckled softly, closed his hand about the box, and then felt almost overwhelmingly sad.

Judith returned home in the last carriage with her grandmother, who had been slower than everyone else getting ready to leave and had twice asked Judith if she would be so good as to run back up to the room in which she had changed to make sure she had not forgotten anything. It was very late by the time they arrived at Harewood. All the guests had retired to their rooms for the night. Aunt Effingham was waiting in the hall. “Judith,” she said in awful tones, “you will assist Mother to her room and then attend me in the drawing room.”

“I am coming too, Louisa,” her mother said.

“Mother.” Lady Effingham bent a stern gaze on the old lady though she attempted to soften her tone. “It is late and you are tired. Judith will take you up and ring for Tillie if she is not already there waiting for you. She will help you undress and get into bed and will bring you a cup of tea and a draft to help you sleep.”

“I do not want my bed or a cup of tea,” her mother said firmly. “I will come to the drawing room. Judith, my love, may I trouble you for your arm again? I daresay I sat too long in the rose arbor this afternoon.

The wind has made all my joints stiff.”

Judith had been expecting the scold that was obviously coming. She could hardly believe herself that she had had the temerity to act before an audience—Papa would surely have sentenced her to a full week in her room on bread and water if she had ever done such a thing at home. She had even taken her hair down. She had acted and she had reacted to the audience, which had given her its total, undivided attention even though she had not been consciously aware of it. She had been Lady Macbeth. The audience had liked her and applauded and praised her. What she had done could not have been so very wrong. Everyone else had entertained the company, not all of them with music. She was a lady. She had been as much a guest of Lady Beamish as anyone else.

Lady Beamish had called her hair glorious and beautiful. How else had she described it? Judith frowned in thought as she climbed the stairs slowly with her grandmother while Aunt Effingham came behind.

I would compare it to a gold-tinged, fiery sunset .

Lady Beamish, though she had perfect manners, was not given to frivolous, flattering compliments, Judith suspected. Was it possible, then, that her hair could be seen that way? A gold-tinged, fiery sunset. . .

“These earrings pinch me almost as badly as those others,” her grandmother said, pulling them off as they entered the drawing room. “Though I have been wearing them all evening, of course. Now where shall I put them so that they will not be lost?”

“Give them to me, Grandmama,” Judith said, taking them from her and putting them safely inside her reticule. “I will put them away in your jewelry box when we go upstairs.”

Horace was in the room, she saw at a glance, sitting on the arm of a chair, a glass of some dark liquor in his hand, swinging one leg nonchalantly and looking at her with insolent malice. Julianne was there too, dabbing at her eyes with a lace-edged handkerchief.

“Are you feeling better, Horace?” Grandmama asked. “It is a great shame you were indisposed and had to miss dinner and the entertainment in the drawing room afterward.”

“Indisposed, Grandmama?” Horace laughed. “It was the indisposition of boredom. I know from past experience how insipid evenings at Lady Beamish’s can be.”

Judith, her stomach knotted with revulsion, tried not to look at him or hear his voice.

“It was a horrid evening,” Julianne said. “I was seated half a table away from Lord Rannulf during dinner, yet he did not protest the seating arrangement even though he was in his own grandmother’s house. And I thought Lady Beamish was promoting a match between us. I daresay he persuaded her to keep me away from him. He does not like me. He is not going to offer for me. He did not even applaud my performance on the pianoforte any more than he did Lady Margaret’s even though I played much better than she did. And he did not call for an encore. I have never been so humiliated in my life. Or so wretched. Mama, I hate him, I hate him.”

“There, there, dearest,” her mother said soothingly. But it was clear her mind was on other matters than her daughter’s distress. Her bosom appeared to swell to twice its size as she turned on her niece. “Now, Miss Judith Law , you will kindly explain yourself.”

“Explain myself, Aunt?” Judith asked as she seated her grandmother in her usual chair by the fire. She would not be cowed, she decided. She had done no wrong.

“What,” her aunt asked, “was the meaning of that vulgar spectacle you made of yourself this evening? I was so ashamed I scarcely knew how to keep my countenance. Your poor uncle was speechless all the way home in the carriage and shut himself into the library the moment we returned.”

“Oh, dear me, Cousin,” Horace said, sounding mildly amused, “whatever have you been up to?”

But before Judith could form any reply to her aunt, her grandmother spoke up.

“Vulgar, Louisa?” she said. “Vulgar? Judith bowed to persuasion as all the other young people did to entertain the company. She acted out a scene, and I have never witnessed finer acting. I was amazed and delighted by it. I was moved to tears by it. It was by far the best performance of the evening, and clearly everyone else— almost everyone else— agreed with me.”

Judith looked at her grandmother in astonishment. She had never heard her speak in half so impassioned a way. She was actually angry, Judith could see. Her eyes were flashing and there were two spots of color in her cheeks.

“Mother,” Aunt Louisa said, “I think it would be best if you stayed out of this. A lady does not take her hair down in public and draw everyone’s attention her way with such .. . theatrics.”

“Oh, tut, tut,” Horace said, lifting his glass in Judith’s direction. “Did you do that, Cousin?”

“A lady does take her hair down at night,” the old lady said. “When she goes sleepwalking she does not take the time to pin it up first. Judith was not herself tonight, Louisa. She was Lady Macbeth . It is what acting is all about, immersing oneself in the character, bringing that character alive for an audience. But I would not expect you to understand.”

Judith was amazed that her grandmother did.

“I am sorry if I displeased you, Aunt Louisa,” she said. “But I cannot apologize for offering some entertainment to the company when both Lord Rannulf Bedwyn and Lady Beamish urged me to do so. It would have been impolite to be coy. I chose to do what I thought I could do well. I do not understand why you feel such an aversion to acting. You are like Papa in that. No one else this evening appeared to be scandalized. Quite the contrary, in fact.”

Her grandmother had taken one of her hands in both her own and was chafing it as if it were cold.

“I suppose, Judith, my love,” she said, “your papa has never told you, has he? Neither he nor Louisa could quite forgive your grandfather for what he had done to them, and they have both run from it all their lives. Though neither of them would even have life if he had not done it.”

Judith looked down at her with a frown of incomprehension.

“Mother!” Aunt Louisa said sharply. “Enough. Julianne—”

“Your grandfather met me in the green room at the Covent Garden Theater in London,” the old lady explained. “He said he had fallen in love with me even before that, when he saw me acting onstage, and I always believed him even though all the gentlemen used to say that or something similar—and there were many of them. Your grandfather married me three months later and we had thirty-two happy years together.”

“Grandmama?” Julianne was openly aghast. “You were an actress! Oh, this is insupportable. Mama, what if Lady Beamish discovers the truth? What if Lord Rannulf does? I’ll die of shame. I swear I will.”

“Well, well,” Horace muttered softly.

Her grandmother patted Judith’s hand. “I knew when I saw you as a child,” she said, “that you were the one most like me, my love. That hair! It so horrified your poor papa and your mama too, suggesting as it did a flamboyance unfitted to a child from the rectory—and suggesting too that you might have inherited more than just that from your scandalous grandmama. When I watched you tonight, it was like looking at myself almost fifty years ago. Except that you are more beautiful than I ever was, and a better actress too.”

“Oh, Grandmama,” Judith said, squeezing the plump, ringed hand beneath her own. Suddenly so much of her own life made sense to her. So much .

“Well, I will not stand for it, miss,” Aunt Louisa said. “You have shamed me and my young, impressionable daughter, before houseguests I selected from the very cream of society, before Lady Beamish and the son of a duke who is courting Julianne. I would remind you that you were brought here by the kindness and charity of your uncle. You will remain here for the next week, when I will need you to tend to your grandmother. Tomorrow I will write to my brother and inform him that I am severely displeased with you. I daresay he will not be surprised. I will offer to take one of your sisters instead of you. This time I will ask specifically for Hilary, who is young enough to learn her place. You will be going home in disgrace.”