A Virtuous Lady (31 page)

He swung on his heel and strode purposefully toward the door.

This could not be happening, she thought wildly as she started to her feet. It was a nightmare, and in a moment she would waken from it. "Where are you going?" she cried out, her voice rising in panic.

He halted with one hand on the door jamb and turned to look at her with a sneer. "Back to my former existence," he replied cuttingly, "where, thank God, virtuous ladies are few and far between."

"B-but, what about last night?" she asked, her voice fading to a whisper.

His exaggerated bow was meant to be slighting. "Don't refine too much upon it, my dear. One swallow doth not a summer make." He dragged the door open.

"B-but when shall I see you again?" Briony persisted.

His eyes swept over her in an assessing, insulting appraisal. "Would 'never' be too soon, my love?"

The door slammed behind him and Briony recoiled as if he had struck her. She fell back on her dressing table stool, her mind numb with pain. She had lost him forever and she could not blame him for his desertion. What a fool she had been to jeopardize her only attraction for him—her unassailable virtue. She could never retrieve it. Damn her virtue!
she
thought bitterly. Why can't he love me for myself?

"Harriet? Oh my dear! Is it really you?"

At the patent distress in Briony's tremulous voice, Harriet stood arrested. She paused, the skirts of her cutaway, dusty rose redingote gathered in one hand as she prepared to alight from the Viscount Avery's crested carriage, which only a minute or so before had pulled into the drive of the Ravensworth mansion. Her head came up with a jerk and she was instantly struck by the vision of a woebegone Briony who, unmindful of the soft spray of drizzling rain, had stationed herself on the marble steps of the main entrance to Oakdale Court. Harriet's hand tightened on Avery's strong grip as she assimilated her cousin's careless appearance.

"Good God, Briony!" exclaimed Harriet, appalled at the spectacle of her fastidious cousin's neglectful aspect. "What in the world has happened to you?"

At the note of solicitude in her dearest friend's voice, Briony gave a strangled sob and hurled herself down the steps and across the drive into Harriet's outstretched arms, dislodging the pink confection of feathers and ribbons which was perched jauntily atop a cluster of flaxen curls.

"There, there!" commiserated Harriet warmly as she righted her lilting bonnet with one hand. "Cousin Harriet is here to look after you." She shot Avery a withering "I told you so" look over Briony's bent head which had him shrugging his elegant shoulders in mild perplexity.

Harriet held Briony at arm's length and examined her closely. "Good grief, girl! You look positively ill! What has that brute of a man done to you?" she demanded with feeling.

"N-nothing!
I've brought it on m-myself," stammered Briony with a watery, self-pitying sniffle. "Please don't blame Ravensworth."

"Where is he?" asked Harriet, her lips drawn tightly together and her glittering eyes scanning the house and horizon for a glimpse of the absent malefactor.

"G-gone, a
sennight
since, to London.
He n-never wants to see me again."

Harriet's small but shapely bosom heaved in hot indignation. "Nor shall he," she intoned in outraged accents, "for I shall send Avery to call him out for this infamous perfidy."

Into the shocked silence which followed these impetuous words broke Avery's smooth drawl, elaborately casual. "Shall we find shelter from this deuced drizzle, my dear, before we are soaked to the skin? Why don't you take Briony into the house and make yourselves comfortable while I see to the horses and baggage? Perhaps, on calmer reflection, we shall contrive to resolve this muddle without resorting to violence." He threw his wife a veiled look of warning.

"Oh please," said Briony, with appealing sincerity, "you mustn't be angry with Ravensworth. I failed him, you see. I betrayed him. I am not the innocent girl I once was!"

A look of sheer horror passed over the Viscount's normally saturnine visage. "Good God, Briony! This is shocking!"

"Don't be a
clothead
, Avery!" observed Harriet with a faint smile which divested the retort of any real rancor. "Briony exaggerates! Now go about your business and join us in an hour or so." She put a protective arm around the smaller girl's waist and ushered her up the short flight of stairs to the Ravensworth mansion, clucking soothingly and quite incomprehensibly as she went.

After two large goblets of Ravensworth's Madeira, reserved "for special occasions only," Briony's spirits began to revive. Nothing ever seemed so bleak when she had her cousin's capable counsel to guide her. The news of Harriet's nuptials she greeted with the first rush of unimpaired happiness she had experienced since the morning Ravensworth had taken himself off.
But no sooner had she uttered the conventional rhetoric, "I wish you happy," when a fresh outburst threatened to overcome her.

"There, there! Tell Cousin Harriet everything," said Harriet with such motherly concern that Briony's barely controlled trickle of tears became a veritable deluge. By dint
of a little coaxing and a great deal of persistent questioning, Harriet at long last unraveled the mystery of Ravensworth's iniquitous desertion.

"Well, I don't see anything to be so glum about," she said bracingly after Briony's near incoherent recitation had come to an end. "It's just a lovers' quarrel."

Briony was not impressed with this logic. "It's no use, Harriet. I've ruined everything. Don't you see? He fell in love with my innocence, my virtue, and they are lost to me forever. I've destroyed his love."

"Pooh!" retorted Harriet
dampeningly
. "What
gammon!
If you had even a peck of worldly wisdom, you wouldn't be in this fix now." She deposited her empty goblet on the low, leather-topped table flanking her high-backed tapestry chair and began to rummage in her reticule. After a moment, she withdrew her hand and extended a diamond-studded, gold filigree snuffbox.

Briony gazed at the exquisite trinket in gratifying admiration. "It is perfection," she breathed.

"Avery's wedding gift to me," said Harriet shyly. "Do you care to partake?'

Briony's pleasure gave way to incredulity. "Do you say that Avery thinks it proper in his wife to take snuff?" she asked, diverted for a moment from her unending troubles.

"Certainly!
Avery is no prude. He is a broad-minded fellow and he likes his wife to cut a dash in society." Harriet's breast puffed up with exaggerated pride. "Don't tell me you've given it up?"

Briony extended her fingers and retrieved a pinch of the aromatic powder. She rubbed it delicately between her fingers close to her ear in the acceptable manner and sniffed delicately. "No. But Ravensworth does not permit it."

Harriet gaped at Briony in astonishment. "Does not permit it? I cannot believe my ears! That my cousin should be so lacking in gumption! I never thought to see the day when you would let anyone bully you, least of all a man of
Ravensworth's
kidney."

Briony's
spine stiffened at the unwarranted censure she heard ill her cousin's curt tone. "I permit no one to bully me, Cousin Harriet," she responded in quelling accents. "And I take exception to your remark about my husband. Lord Ravensworth is a far better man than you give him credit for. If you only knew how much he has
exefted
himself to put the estate in good heart these last weeks. I admit that his temper may be a trifle unsteady . .
.very
well, ferocious then," she amended on seeing Harriet's elegant eyebrows elevate in
scepticism
, "but in this instance," she went on earnestly, "acquit him of wrongdoing, if you please. The fault must be laid entirely at my door."

Harriet looked thoughtfully at her cousin.
"If you say so, dear.
Then if you had to do it over again, you would tell Ravensworth that Caldwell is an American and let him hand him over to the authorities?"

"No, of course not!
How could I?"

Harriet persisted. "Then how did you do wrong? Are you saying that you are damned if you do and damned if you don't?"

"Yes! I don't know! What does it signify?"

"Only this, my pet.
You have tumbled into many scrapes but, to my knowledge, never until now have you permitted the irascible Lord Ravensworth to have the last word. Right or wrong, you always stood up to him. And he admired you for it! Now look at you! You are like a whipped dog with its tail between its legs. Not a spark of the former bold hussy who netted the sought-after but oh-so-elusive fleet-of-foot lord."

"I? A bold hussy?" queried Briony, laughing at the nonsensical soubriquet for a demure Quaker miss like herself.

"Who changed her appearance like a chameleon, Miss Truly Virtuous one minute and Flagrant Femme Fatale the next?"

"Well, yes, but I had good reason!"

"Whose reputation was in tatters because Miss Truly Virtuous walked as bold as
brass
before the eyes of the whole ton into the opera box of London's most notorious courtesan?"

"Harriet, that's not fair. I was only doing my duty, and you know it!"

Harriet calmly disregarded her cousin's heated avowal. "A sleeping beauty," she went on coolly, "who had the temerity to catch forty winks in a Bed of Dalliance which every well- breeched rake and
roue
in town was hot to procure."

"But not when I was in it!" said Briony horrified. "It was
Harriette
Wilson they coveted, not the bed. Besides, how was I to know?"

"That doesn't signify," responded Harriet primly. "Think of the scandal if the story ever got about. But that's not all by any means."

"Oh?" said Briony noncommittally, her lips thinning.

Harriet was not discouraged by Briony's obvious lack of interest in pursuing the subject. "No! Far from it! Who, I ask you, was practically ravished by an amorous lord and ran for protection to the arms of a
naked
gentleman, and who was discovered by her unsuspecting friend behind the locked door of this same gentleman's bedchamber?"

"He wasn't
completely
naked!" Briony protested.

"Oh wasn't he?" Harriet asked
,
her voice coated with disappointment "Then I have been sadly misinformed. But to continue . . ." At this point she bent a very knowing look upon her cousin, who had folded her arms warily across her chest. "Who was given a slip on the shoulder by no less than the heir to a dukedom who could have his pick of any Covent Garden
lightskirt
or titled lady of questionable virtue in the realm?"

Briony gasped. "How did you know?"

"Avery, of course," drawled Harriet without the
slighest
show
of remorse for oversetting her cousin's fragile composure. "My dear, these little peccadilloes do not happen to gently bred, milk-and-water misses. Would such a specimen hide a handsome young gentleman on her husband's estate and sneak off in the middle of the night to keep a secret tryst with him? Now I ask you!"

Briony hung her head in shame. "Put like that, I can see that my conduct has been highly irregular. No wonder Ravensworth holds me in such disgust. You are right, Harriet. I am a bold hussy and quite unfitted to be his mate."

"Haven't you been listening to a word I've said? Ravensworth don't want a well-bred, spineless, pattern card of rectitude for his wife. That sort would bore him to tears in less than a
sennight
. Contrary to what the misguided Marquess may have told you, he admires your spunk. Don't kowtow to his wishes. He doesn't really, in his heart of hearts, want to tame you. Believe me, Briony, I know about such things." At this point, Harriet smiled enigmatically at some private reminiscence.

Briony opened her mouth to deny the truth of Harriet's reasoning but a sudden, blinding flash of enlightenment surged through her brain and she fell back against the cushions of the settee in breathless wonder. "It's true! It's true," she said as if she could not believe it.

"Well of course it's true. What did you think?" asked Harriet prosaically. "That he fell in love with your Quaker principles? Oh, I'm not saying that that wasn't part of your attraction, but as I recall, at your first encounter you swept the gentleman off his feet in a runaway carriage and we all know how
that
got started."

"No, no," said Briony, her dimples flashing. "That was our second encounter. The first time I met him, he kissed me."

Harriet's jaw dropped and she gazed at her cousin with an expression of mingled respect and horror. "The deuce he did! Briony, how could you let him?"

"How could I stop him?" countered Briony with a faint blush and, to cover her confusion, turned away to rearrange a posy of fragrant yellow rosebuds which decorated an end table at her elbow.

"Well I never! No wonder he was mad for you notwithstanding your dreadfully prudish airs and graces. He must have seen behind that sober front you present to the world! Lucky for me, Avery has no real notion of the tear-away character behind that prim exterior. But never mind that now! What we need is a plan of action, a strategy, a campaign to bring the battle to a speedy and successful conclusion."