Deirdre and Desire (5 page)

At last the evening meal was over and the girls collected their bed candles from the table in the hall and mounted the stairs to their rooms.

With the departure of Minerva and Annabelle from the family nest, Daphne and Deirdre each had a room to themselves, while Diana and Frederica still shared their old room.

The storm had died down. Deirdre opened the window and leaned out. The chill fresh air smelled of damp, rotting leaves and evergreen.

The figure of a man appeared beyond the high hedge which bordered the vicarage garden, his stock gleaming whitely in the darkness.

‘Guy,’ murmured Deirdre, her heart beginning to hammer against her ribs.

She threw a cloak over her shoulders and crept out of her room and slowly down the stairs, walking on the edge of each foot so as not to make a sound.

The rumble of her father’s voice, and her mother’s faint high-pitched replies filtered through the parlour door.

She stood very still in the hall. Betty and cook would still be in the kitchen. The hall door was not yet locked and bolted for the night. She would have to try to get out that way and pray that
she did not make a noise or that her father would not choose to look out the parlour window as she made her way down the drive.

The hall door opened with a snap of its hinges like a pistol shot. Deirdre froze, already thinking up excuses. But the voices in the parlour went on, and the clatter of dishes sounded from the kitchen.

She slipped quietly out, forcing herself to take time to close the door slowly and carefully behind her. She made her way down the drive, keeping to the black shadow of the yew trees, for a
treacherous moon was bathing everything in a silvery glow.

The iron gate wailed like a banshee, but Deirdre could no longer school herself to wait for possible repercussions. She let it swing behind her with a clang and ran out into the road, looking
this way and that.

No one.

She gave a little gasp of disappointment, and then a gasp of fear as an arm came from behind and slid round her waist. She whirled about.

‘Guy!’

‘I thought you might see me and come looking for me,’ he whispered. ‘Walk with me a little way. Will they miss you?’

Deirdre shook her head, thinking how handsome he looked in the moonlight with his teeth gleaming white and his eyes glinting in an exciting way.

Her father’s remark about a fox after the hens came into her mind, and she said nervously, ‘I
hate
this furtive meeting. Oh, how I wish you could call at the vicarage and that
papa would be
sensible.
’

‘I came because someone told me your father was chasing you with a whip,’ he said in a low serious voice. ‘I could not sleep. I was worried about you. Believe me, I do not like
these clandestine meetings either.’

‘Is it not amazing,’ said Deirdre softly, ‘we should become such friends? It is as if our minds were twins.’

‘I think it is because I am tired of simpering, giggling females,’ said Guy. ‘I admire a woman with a
brain.
Oh, I confess your sister, Annabelle, dazzled me with her
beauty, but that was before I learned some sense.’

‘Yes,’ said Deirdre in tepid agreement. She would have liked Mr Wentwater to say he was dazzled with
her
beauty as well as her brain.

‘Oh, Mr Wentwater,’ said Deirdre, stopping in the moonlit lane, and clutching hold of both his hands, ‘I must tell you. The most dreadful thing has happened.’

The wind sighed over their heads and a shower of damp leaves blew about them.

‘Tell me. Why was your father chasing you? If there is anything I can do to help?’ said Guy, pressing her hands and holding them to his chest.

‘Papa has a marriage
arranged
for me. I am to go to London tomorrow and stay with Lady Godolphin so that some creature called Lord Harry Desire can look me over, check my teeth, and
say whether he will have me or nay.’

‘This is outrageous! Your father already has two rich marriages in the family. What does he need with another?’

Deirdre sighed and the wind over the high hedges on either side of the road seemed to pick up the sigh and send it blowing across the bare autumn fields. ‘We are in low funds again,’
she said.

‘Papa spends a great deal of money on the hunt. This Lord Desire must marry in order to inherit his uncle’s fortune, he needs a wife, Papa needs the money, I am to be the
sacrifice.’

He released her hands and turned a little away from her so that his face was in the shadows. Deirdre waited, straining to hear him say that he would marry her himself.

‘I had hoped,’ he said at last, ‘that we might come to know each other better . . . that I might establish myself with the county and come to be on calling terms with your
family. We have really only just met.’

He gave an awkward laugh. Deirdre shivered and pulled her cloak tightly about her shoulders.

‘But,’ he brightened. ‘There is no guarantee this Lord Harry will want to marry you. Then you may return home and we can all be comfortable again.’ He chuckled. ‘I
am sure you will know precisely just how to give him a disgust of you. An intelligent woman like yourself . . .’

‘Oh, Guy, how our minds do run together,’ said Deirdre, forgetting her disappointment in him. ‘That is
exactly
what I plan to do.’

‘You must return,’ he said, tucking her arm in his and leading her back towards the vicarage. ‘I do not want your father to get out his pack and hunt me out of the county
again.’

‘What!’ Deirdre stood still, and Guy cursed himself for the temporary slip. She obviously had not heard of his humiliation at the hands of the vicar. She must never know how much he
hated her father for that day when he had been hounded, literally, down the summer roads with the vicar’s pack in full cry behind him. She must never guess how he had dreamed and plotted
revenge. She must never guess that her one attraction for him was that he saw her as an instrument of revenge.

‘Papa did
what
?’ pursued Deirdre.

He laughed and tugged at her arm so that she had, perforce, to fall into step beside him. ‘You misunderstood me. I meant, I
hope
Mr Armitage doesn’t hunt me down. A joke, you
see.’

The parlour lamps were out and the house was in darkness. It would be even more difficult getting back, thought Deirdre. For this time, she did not know where her father was.

But the magic of Guy’s presence gave her courage. She glanced up at the firm line of his jaw, the whiteness of his clean linen, his handsome profile, and felt almost unworthy of such an
escort. He was worlds removed from her ranting, vulgar father and his petty machinations.

‘Goodnight,’ he said softly, holding open the gate, and pulling it gently closed behind her.

She turned and faced him through the bars of the tall gate, feeling the cold bite of the iron on her ungloved hands.

‘Goodnight,’ she echoed softly.

He leaned forwards, and she leaned towards him as well. He kissed her very gently through the bars; a fleeting, chaste kiss.

Deirdre’s face blazed with naked love and adoration and Guy watched her intently, feeling a surge of power.

Deirdre floated into the house, not even noticing that the hall door was still unlocked, not even trying to creep quietly up the stairs.

Had her father confronted her at that moment, then Deirdre would have confessed her love, and her idyll with Guy Wentwater would definitely have been over.

But no one met her on the stairs and she reached her bedroom without seeing a soul.

For a long time she sat beside the window, lost in dreams.

Tomorrow, she would go to London. On Monday, she would meet Lord Harry Desire.

And if she played her cards aright, she would be back home very shortly after that, unengaged, and free to pursue her romance with Guy.

After such a failure, her father would surely be glad to marry her off to
anyone.

THREE

‘If you do not help me, Betty,’ said Deirdre Armitage severely, ‘I will make sure you slave at the vicarage until the end of your days and die a
spinster.’

‘If you don’t do as vicar says,’ sniffed the maid, Betty, ‘then you won’t be getting married to anyone neither, what with Mr Armitage not having any money and Miss
Minerva and Miss Bella being gone to heathen parts.’

‘Lady Sylvester and Lady Peter to you, miss,’ said Deirdre tartly. ‘Don’t be a grouch, Betty,’ she went on in a wheedling tone. ‘Everything will be all right
when Minerva and Bella come back from Paris – Paris isn’t heathenish, Betty. Think of the hats! – and I will
make
papa let you marry your John. But if you aid Papa in
forcing me to wear that terrible wig, then I shall do all in my power to encourage him in the idea that we cannot afford to pay John Summer any more money.’

‘But I’ll get the blame o’ it!’ wailed Betty.

Deirdre was about to make her curtsy to Lord Harry Desire.

She had told Lady Godolphin that Betty would manage very well as lady’s maid. Betty had been told to curl and arrange one of Lady Godolphin’s second-best, nutty-brown wigs and to
make sure not one offending red curl escaped from beneath it.

The gown which had been chosen for Deirdre by her father and Lady Godolphin was of white muslin embroidered with rosebuds, a dressmaking masterpiece which combined innocence with decadence to a
nice degree. The bodice was cunningly boned at the back and fitted at the front to push up Deirdre’s breasts into two mounds over the low neckline. The skirt was short enough to show almost
the whole of her ankles.

‘I know what to do,’ said Deirdre. ‘I will drop this wig in the basin of water and say it fell off my head when I was washing my face.
I
will take the blame. Come
now. I will wear this scandalous dress.’

Betty had not been told of his lordship’s aversion to red hair.

So after scowling doubtfully at Deirdre’s hair and then at the wig, she suddenly smiled and said she was sure Lady Godolphin had ‘been in her altitudes’ when she gave the
instructions. Anybody could see Miss Deirdre would look much better with her own hair, although it was a pity the rosebuds on her dress were so
pink
, not to mention the broad pink sash which
tied under her bosom.

In other circumstances, Deirdre would have been terrified because, in a way, she was to be guest of honour. The
musicale
was simply a piece of stage management. But her aching, tender,
delicate love for Guy Wentwater made her feel she could endure anything.

Instead of chiding herself for the speed with which she had fallen in love with a man of doubtful reputation, like many dazzled lovers before, she only prided herself on ‘falling in love
at first sight’. And like many another love-blinded girl, she was convinced that the rapport of her mind and Guy’s was a rare and precious phenomenon.

She stood patiently while Betty dressed her and arranged her hair in an elaborate Grecian style, taught her by Annabelle’s lady’s maid.

Satisfied that the combination of pink and white muslin with her flaming red hair was sufficiently repellent, Deirdre completed the effect by putting a pink silk stole about her shoulders.

‘I look quite dreadful, Betty,’ said Deirdre gleefully, as she pirouetted in front of the long glass.

Betty surveyed her young mistress. The maid thought privately that Deirdre had never looked better. The pomade she had added to Deirdre’s hair had darkened it to a deeper red, and the pink and white gown showed her excellent bosom and delicate ankles to perfection. The odd combination of
pink and white with her red hair and green eyes made Deirdre look oddly and excitingly exotic. Betty decided it would not be wise to praise Miss Deirdre Armitage. Too much vanity had nearly ruined
Miss Annabelle and was well on the way to ruining Miss Daphne.

‘You’ll do,’ was all Betty said, and Deirdre went downstairs satisfied that her appearance was quite horrible.

Lord Harry Desire was lounging in quite the latest manner on a sofa in the drawing-room. It was hard to tell from the beautiful blankness of his expression what he was thinking.

At one point, he did put up his glass and stared about the room in a dazed sort of way.

With the exception of the still-not-present Deirdre Armitage and Mr Anstey, Lady Godolphin’s simpering cicisbeo, there was no one else present under the age of fifty.

Lady Godolphin had not wanted his lordship’s eye, or Deirdre’s for that matter, to be attracted by anyone else. Even the soprano who was to star at the
musicale
was fat,
florid and fifty and her accompanist turned the pages of the music with a shaking, liver-spotted hand.

Lord Harry recognized old Lady Chester who looked and smelled as if she had been brought out of moth balls for the occasion.

High cracked voices discussed humours and agues and spleen. Lady Godolphin looked the youngest present. She was enjoying herself because all this creaking old age about her made her feel
rejuvenated.

But she joined in the conversational illness competition with relish by saying her doctor had told her she had rheumatism but she herself was convinced it was Arthur’s Eitis.