Deirdre and Desire (18 page)

Deirdre sat miserably silent under Betty’s ministrations. She had always believed that had she managed to be free of Lord Harry, then her relief and happiness would know no bounds. She
never expected to feel as downcast and . . . yes . . .
silly
as this, for all the world like a spoilt child who boasts she does not care for a valuable toy, and yet cries bitterly when it is
taken away from her.

Furthermore, Lord Harry had
tricked
her. Deirdre now knew he had gone out of his way to appear stupid. Not only that. He had quite deliberately shown her that she was singularly badly
informed when it came to politics. Deirdre’s idea of discussing politics and world affairs had been a hazy notion of listening to someone’s views and promptly expressing those views to
the next person she met. She realized she hardly ever read the newspapers.

All she really knew about the Battle of Waterloo was stories passed from one to the other. Guy’s story of the battle she now discounted. He had probably never even been there.

Minerva was to blame, for Minerva had always laughed indulgently at Deirdre’s opinions and said, ‘Oh, little Deirdre is the
brains
of the family’, and what Minerva said
other people came to accept and before you knew it, you had been presented with a whole lot of virtues you didn’t really possess.

Minerva was apt to tuck people neatly into roles. Annabelle, beautiful and headstrong. Deirdre, intelligent. Daphne, the beauty of the family; modest and stylish. Diana, a wonderful way with
animals. Frederica, dainty and funny, a whimsical little thing.

And yet Deirdre had longed for Minerva to interfere and rescue her from marriage to Lord Harry. And Minerva had. Or rather her husband had.

Deirdre’s thoughts turned to her father. It seemed he had done his utmost to try to ensure her happiness, even though it meant he would be losing a rich son-in-law. Well, she forgave him,
but she still did not think much of him.

And Guy Wentwater? What about Guy who would be waiting patiently in the snow of Green Park at two in the morning?

Let him wait, thought Deirdre savagely.

Yes, she had been mad to make the arrangement. But why should she spend one second worrying about a man who had left her waiting and then had jeered and humiliated her in front of his
friends?

And yet, he
had
said he loved her.

How odd that Lord Harry should manage to wring the correct story from Guy, not knowing that Guy had not confessed to his motives of revenge on the Armitages. Lord Harry had mentioned
‘pressure’ but she could not imagine that entailing any physical violence. He was much too elegant and indolent a creature to resort to that.

During all this hard thought, Deirdre had been standing and sitting and standing again, to allow Betty to dress her and arrange her hair.

‘There!’ said Betty at last, slamming down the lid of Minerva’s jewel box. ‘I’ve never seen you look so pretty. When you cry, Miss Deirdre, it makes your eyes even
larger. Me, mine get all puffed up and red.’

Deirdre stood up and shook down her skirts, barely glancing in the looking glass.

She was wearing a slip of grass-green silk covered with a gauze overdress of a lighter green. A necklace of emeralds and dead gold was about her neck. One large gold silk rose had been cunningly
embedded in a nest of curls on top of her head, its curling green silk leaves edged with tiny emeralds.

The bodice of her gown was lined and stiffened so that her bosom was pushed up into two swelling mounds. Dainty little grass-green slippers were on her feet and heavy emerald earrings blazed in
her ears.

Betty, who considered the colour of Deirdre’s hair too violent, had pomaded it so that it was now a rich dark red.

‘You look like the fairy queen,’ laughed Betty, admiring Deirdre’s tilted green eyes and delicate bones. ‘I’ll fetch your fur-lined cloak for it’s mortal
cold. It’s a good thing you put on them new drawers.’

Deirdre was wearing the latest in long, skin-tight knitted wool drawers, an underwear fashion much in vogue to counteract the flimsiness of modish outer attire.

The semi-nudity of the last decade’s fashions was beginning to go as men once more wanted something to be left to the imagination. But, during the evening, clothes were still almost
transparent and some ladies still damped their muslin dresses, causing all sorts of lustful hopes in the masculine bosom.

Men often mistook all those hard and thrusting nipples as signs of hot pasion, instead of cold, hard gooseflesh which is what they were.

Deirdre was to be escorted by Lord Sylvester to Lady Godolphin’s home in Hanover Square. Lord Harry would meet her there.

Rather in awe of her tall and handsome brother-in-law, Deirdre sat very stiffly beside him in the carriage on the road to Lady Godolphin’s.

‘You look enchanting tonight,’ said Lord Sylvester, studying the little fairy-like creature that was Deirdre. ‘I am glad to see some colour in your cheeks. Lord Harry told me
he had sent a notice of the termination of your engagement to the newspapers.’

‘Yes,’ said Deirdre in a small voice. ‘Thank you, Lord Sylvester, for interceding on my behalf.’

‘Think nothing of it. I was surprised to observe you seemed to be
afraid
of Lord Harry.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Deirdre quickly. Then all of a sudden, she became weary of lying. ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I was. I do not know quite why,’ she added.

‘You certainly have nothing to fear from Lord Harry,’ said Sylvester gently. ‘He is one of the kindest men I know.’

‘Yes,’ said Deirdre in a suffocated voice.

Deirdre remembered why she was so frightened of Lord Harry. She was frightened of him because of what happened to her body when he touched her. But her silly dream-love with Guy was what had
made that physical reaction seem so terrible.

But Lord Sylvester and Minerva were very much in love. There was a radiance about them when they were together. And yet, their love seemed to be of the purest. They never even held hands that
Deirdre could see.

Perhaps there was a love which did not involve physical contact, thought Deirdre naively. The fact that her sister and brother-in-law had a son meant nothing to Deirdre since she did not know
how babies were conceived.

She knew how the beasts of the fields went about it, but if anyone had ever told her that it was the same performance between humans, well, she simply would not have believed them.

And so Deirdre was sure her emotions when Lord Harry held her had nothing whatsoever to do with love. Lust, yes. Even Papa on his rare appearance in the pulpit pointed out lust was a dangerous
and disgraceful thing and one of the worst of the seven deadly sins.

The carriage stopped and Lord Sylvester helped her to alight and saw her safely to the door. He made his apologies for not entering to see Lady Godolphin but explained he was anxious to return
to his wife.

Deirdre heaved a sentimental sigh. A little hope came back to her. Perhaps one day, some man would love her as Lord Sylvester loved Minerva: a pure and precious love, free from the hot, heaving,
sweating emotions of lust.

Lord Harry had not yet arrived so Deirdre took it upon herself to explain to Lady Godolphin that their engagement was at an end.

‘Oh, lor’,’ said Lady Godolphin. ‘Your nipples is off!’

Deirdre glanced down at the bosom of her dress, and then realized Lady Godolphin meant ‘nuptials’.

‘Didn’t he want you?’ asked Lady Godolphin sadly.

‘We decided we should not suit.’

‘Ah, love.’ Lady Godolphin sighed gustily. ‘I try to forget it but all the poems remind me. Never read poetry, Deirdre. It’s too sad. Listen to this one,

There was a little silence.

‘I do not think I have heard that one,’ ventured Deirdre cautiously.

‘It’s by Lovelace,’ said Lady Godolphin in surprise. ‘You know, the man who wrote the thing about, “I could not love thee dear so much, loved I not horrors
more.”’

‘Oh,
that
one,’ said Deirdre, realizing that if one sorted out Lady Godolphin’s malapropisms, it might take all day, but at least one could understand what she was
talking about.

‘Will Mr Anstey be joining us this evening?’ asked Deirdre, hoping he would not for she had taken him in dislike and thought it disgusting for a woman of Lady Godolphin’s great
age to have such a young, if unprepossessing, lover.

‘No,’ sighed Lady Godolphin. ‘He has made a fool of me. He has held me up to Reticule. He went off to live with Lady Chester who must be a hundred if she’s a day. So now
society thinks he was only hanging around my skirts for my money.’

‘Is there no one else?’ asked Deirdre, hating to see the normally robust and cheerful Lady Godolphin look so woebegone.

‘No,’ said Lady Godolphin. ‘I’m too old.’

‘Not you!’ Deirdre wanted to scream. It was horrifying hearing Lady Godolphin admit to being old. Although Deirdre had often longed for the reprehensible old sinner to settle down
and act her age, there was something appalling in the fact that she was obviously now trying to do just that. Even her gown was subdued, being of brown silk shot with gold. A turban of modest
proportions covered her head, and, wonder upon wonders, she was wearing
no paint at all.

At that moment, Lord Harry was announced.

Apart from casting a look of gloomy lechery at his legs, Lady Godolphin behaved like a sad and respectable dowager.

Lord Harry kissed Deirdre’s hand.

Deirdre looked at him with something like awe, seeing him for the first time as many women saw him.

He was wearing a dark blue evening coat with pearl-coloured kerseymere breeches with strings to the knees, white silk stockings and thin pumps.

His only jewel was one enormous diamond pin in his cravat, which might have looked vulgar on another man, but only added to Lord Harry’s air of magnificence.

His thick glossy black curls, Grecian profile, clear blue eyes and tall slim figure were enough to seduce the eyes of any lady with a clear brain and normal digestion.

Deirdre held on to her idea of that pure and celestial love as a barrier to all those nasty, gurgling churnings around her insides, and the prickling nervous feeling in the palms of her
hands.

‘So you are not to be married?’ asked Lady Godolphin after they had all been helped to glasses of wine.

‘No,’ said Lord Harry equably.

‘Then you had better return my present,’ said Lady Godolphin. ‘Cost me a mort of money.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Lord Harry and Deirdre in chorus, and then they looked at each other and laughed.

Lady Godolphin’s present to them had been an enormous oil painting of a singularly well-endowed Roman matron stabbing herself in a half-hearted way while she rolled her eyes upwards to a
stormy sky. She was wearing only a thin wisp of gauze about her massive thighs which seemed to stay up by magical means since she was stabbing herself with one hand and pointing up to heaven with
the other. Various hirsute and swarthy Romans rampaged about the background, avenging her, or something-or-other. Lord Sylvester had said it was probably meant to be Lucrece, since Lady Godolphin
had proudly presented it as a French picture, called Le Crease.

Lady Godolphin gloomily shook her head at them both, muttering something about the folly of youth, and said it was time to leave.

It was with some surprise that they discovered Lord Harry’s high-perch phaeton drawn up outside with his Swiss manservant, Bruno, hovering on the backstrap instead of a groom.

‘My dear Desire,’ said Lady Godolphin. ‘An open carriage! In
this
weather!’

It had not snowed very hard during the day so there was only a thin coating on the ground. Snowflakes were falling through the foggy air; large, light, lace snowflakes drifting slowly down under
the flickering lights of the parish lamps.

‘We are only going a step,’ said Lord Harry cheerfully. ‘I have plenty of rugs and hot bricks.’

‘But there is barely room for three,’ wailed Lady Godolphin.

‘What! A sylph like yourself? Come along, Lady Godolphin.’

Grumbling awfully, Lady Godolphin was pushed from the back and pulled at the front until she reached the high perch of the seat. Lord Harry sat on one side of her and Deirdre on the other.

Deirdre gazed about her dreamily, thinking it was wonderful to be perched so high above the London streets, watching the hypnotic dance of the light snowflakes.

She had the beginnings of a sort of excited, suffocating feeling, such as she used to have at Christmas.

Christmas past had been rather disappointing. The boys had come home from Eton and had become very grand, strutting around like Bond Street beaux, and affecting languid airs which sat comically
on their cheerful schoolboy faces.

Lord and Lady Brothers’ mansion was a blaze of light. Thin strains of music drifted out into the foggy air. After all the worry and self-hate and tension of the past months, Deirdre felt
her whole body and mind begin to relax. She would enjoy this one evening. She would imagine she was a respectable young miss with her handsome fiancé and not a disgraceful widgeon who had
only such a short time ago been hell-bent on ruining herself.

As they mounted the staircase to the ballroom, Lord Harry slipped her engagement ring into her hand. ‘Put it on,’ he whispered. ‘All the world will know tomorrow we are not to
be married but tonight we do not wish to be badgered by questions.’

Deirdre nodded and slipped on the ring.

More than ever before she was conscious of admiring eyes, envious eyes, jealous eyes as the ladies of the ballroom watched her enter on Lord Harry’s arm.

Lord Harry danced beautifully. Deirdre found it very hard to pay attention to her steps or listen to her partners when Lord Harry always seemed to be in her direct line of vision, flirting
outrageously with one female after another.