Gypsy Heiress (13 page)

A half hour later to the minute, my bedroom door opened and Lady Gwen entered, flew to my side, and smothered me in a hug.

“My poor little Liza, why did you not tell me that you didn’t want to have your hair cut because it is the tribal punishment for adultery? Alex has explained it to me, and I understand completely why it would be so repugnant to you. Society will just have to get used to you with knee-length hair!”

Lady Gwen’s statement was all the more amazing, because I hadn’t told Brockhaven about the gypsy law. I would have been too embarrassed to even think of telling him such a thing. It was evident that Lord Brockhaven knew more about my people than he had allowed me to believe.

And, as soon as I was given permission to keep my hair, my perverse spirit felt less need to clutch tight every inch of hair. Goudette came in and the three of us talked like three generals planning a military advance, until it was finally decided that if I could bear to have my hair trimmed to waist length (which I discovered I could), and snip some short ends near my face, Goudette could cause it all to curl and Lady Gwen could tell her friends that she couldn’t stand to have me cut it because it was really such lovely hair and perhaps it would set a new fashion, as Goudette called it, à la gypsy!

* * *

In the course of the last week, it came to pass that the soirée Lady Gwendolyn had planned to hold at Edgehill became the soirée that Mrs. Perscough planned to hold at Lambelle Manor. The switch had been the product of a Wednesday afternoon visit from Mrs. Perscough, who recommended that it might seem more natural if I was introduced to the local gentry at another house than Edgehill, and besides, it would show right off that Mrs. Perscough considered me an “invitable” in case any doubt of it lingered in the minds of the more socially insecure. It was her opinion that it was best to define me immediately as a sought-after rather than a seeker. Though I might not understand the delicacies of their social world, I got the point and was grateful, not only for the invitation and support, but also because I had found another person to chalk up as a friend in this strange new world.

I could see why Ellen considered Mrs. Perscough a second mother, for she was a warm and maternal lady, generous and acute. At our first meeting she told me how my father had led her out to dance at the ball her parents had given on her eighteenth birthday, and how all the young ladies had sighed over him, he was so handsome and dark and poetic. How impatient he had been with convention! How bored he had been with the ponderous formalities in his father’s home, and his father’s endless interference in his life! “Mark my words,” Mrs. Perscough’s mother had said. “One of these days the lad will run off, see if he won’t!” And, of course, one day he had.

That Saturday evening I was finished getting ready for the soirée before anyone else, and went to stand in the entrance hall underneath a red silk banner painted with three animate lions that had belonged to one of Brockhaven’s ancestors, a man who had sailed against Spain for Queen Elizabeth, and who had astonished his attendants by crawling from his deathbed to don armor so that he “could meet death like a gentleman.”

The hall floor was a pattern of pieced Italian marble in white and black that alternated like the squares of a chessboard. Ellen had told me that it was a thing she liked to do, when she was younger, to hop from side to side in the hall, trying to avoid touching the black squares and pretending that she was Princess of the Saxons and if she could so perform, the cruel Danish pirates had agreed to spare a helpless Saxon village. It was a very childish game, and I can’t think what made me try it, but I was just saving my fifth Saxon village when Lord Brockhaven came down the grand staircase.

“Good evening,” said Lord Brockhaven in a voice that was, for him, cordial. “Oh, no, don’t stop hopping for my sake. I’ve yet to see a child that can resist jumping on those squares. That’s why Gwen won’t have them waxed.”

I gathered myself up with dignity and dropped him an icy curtsy which in no way camouflaged my chagrin. I longed for the courage to ask him if he had thought of me as a child when he kissed me under the willow.

“Very pretty,” he said, crossing the floor to join me, and I wasn’t sure if he was referring to my curtsy, the new cut of my hair, or the dress I wore.

My gown was a soft white, trimmed at the bodice in gold Brussels lace and at the hem with braiding, with an overskirt embroidered in glittering golden threads. Lady Gwen had spent twenty minutes last night at dinner discussing what jewelry would be fetching and appropriate for me to wear to the soirée, and she had ended by choosing a small pearl hairpin that Ellen had received as a confirmation present. Lady Gwen herself had affixed it to a thick curl above my ear. After she had left, I had looked in the mirror, and thought how Ellen’s pin matched my dress well, both artfully demure, soft and subtle, and revealing instead of colorful and concealing like the clothes I had been raised in. I had pulled the pin from my hair and replaced it with one of my own: a crescent moon of hammered gold and uncut topaz gems that had belonged to my mother.

I should have known that Lord Brockhaven would notice it at once. Reaching up his hand, he touched the golden ornament and said, “That you didn’t borrow from Ellen.”

“No, I didn’t. I suppose you don’t approve of such things.”

“That depends whether it’s on my ward,” he said, viewing me with mocking eyes, “or on my mistress.” He lifted one of the curls that Goudette had labored so lovingly over and said, “It’s beautiful. Like the woman who wears it.”

A graceful compliment was the last thing I expected from him, and it threw me completely off stride. In a feeble way, I replied, “It’s kind of you to say so,” though I suppose my eyes said much more. It was extraordinary, the power he had to send my emotions into fierce confusion, and produce in me happiness and pain and languor by turns as though he had poured down my throat dose after changing dose of potions that captured and usurped my will. The fancy frightened me, as did the feelings that came with it, and to compensate, I told myself to stop being foolish, and reminded myself that I was unused to young men and gorgio manners, and that I must stop letting myself be overset by Brockhaven’s smallest twist of whim. Suddenly I wished I had confided to Ellen about the kiss.

“Then you aren’t going to ask me to change it?” I said with a forced smile, to make some remark, any remark.

“Did I say that? I’m afraid, my girl, that you look more like you’re about to appear as chief goddess and love idol at a pagan fertility rite, than an unassuming young female endeavoring to attend an evening with the cream of the local squirearchy.”

My smile was more natural as I said, “From what I’ve learned from Ellen, the aforementioned unassuming young females not only assume a lot more than their parents credit, they also know a lot more as well!”

“Or,” suggested Brockhaven sardonically, “so they assume.”

* * *

Lambelle Hall was a red-brick manor house built early in the last century and much refurbished in the last ten years by Mrs. Perscough for the comfort of her large family. The entrance hall was filled with baskets of flowers, and the wainscotted hallways were redolent of beeswax and lemon polish, and lined with large oil paintings in the style of Stubbes that portrayed the ponies ridden and loved by the young Perscoughs. It was a lovely, homey place, and yet my stomach knit into knots as we reached the long drawing room door, and our party was announced by a footman, whose stentorian tones had probably qualified him for the post. My fingers curled involuntarily, and Robert, who was escorting me, said, “Brace up, my girl! Where’s that brave gypsy spirit?”

“At Edgehill, I think. Let’s go back and look for it.”

“Now, now, none of that,” commanded Robert, leaning toward me and speaking in a low tone. “I’m going to look after you, and there’s Gwen and Ellen to hover around too. There are only two things you need to remember. One’s when you meet the squire, tell him immediately that you admire his scholarship excessively.”

“But, Robert, I’ve never heard of his scholarsh—”

“Hush and listen, will you? The second thing is: give Peregrine Absalm the sharpest setdown you can manage as soon as he makes you his first indecent proposal.”

“His first
what
?”

“You heard me. Be quiet. We’ve about reached the reception line.”

I reflected with nervous irritability that it was just like Robert to say something to wrack my nerves to bits, and decided to put both very odd bits of advice from my head.

But when I was introduced to Squire Perscough, I stood trembling as he twitched his two black caterpillar eyebrows, looked down his very long nose, and said, “What do you have to say for yourself, young lady?” I grabbed at Robert’s words like a body sinking in quicksand reaches for a clump of swamp grass, and vowed meekly that I had heard of his scholarship. For a moment, I thought I had made a terrible mistake, for he waggled those awful eyebrows furiously and turned beet red.

“You have, have you?” he trumpeted. Silence fell on the room, all ears tuned to his voice, all eyes turned to us. Then he clapped me on the back, set me on the window seat, demanded two glasses of champagne from a hovering footman, and said, “Young lady, I take my recognition where I can find it.”

The squire, so I learned, had spent the better part of the last twenty years developing a one thousand page document in support of his assertion that William Shakespeare was married in the parish church a mile from Lambelle, a theory that was based in its entirety upon the squire’s discovery of an entry in the Episcopal register in 1582 which alleged the issue of a marriage license to one W. Chas. Pierre, which the squire said any idiot could see was the phonetic spelling of an underlettered church clerk for William Shakespeare. Pierre wasn’t an English name, was it? No, it was French, and what would a Frenchman be doing getting married in a British church in the year of 1582? He’d be married in France, wouldn’t he? Unless I’d be wanting to be damned unpatriotic and attribute Shakespeare’s plays to some misplaced Frenchman! I said that I did not, and the squire looked extremely pleased with me, said I was a likely lass with more in my head than most silly things my age, offered to lend me a copy of his treatise and handed me to his wife with the admonition that he bet I’d like to be spending my time with the young people.

He was wrong; there was nothing I wanted less. Still, Ellen came to my one side, and Robert took the other as he had promised, and I soon discovered they were as invincible an armor as any. Ellen might be shy in a group, but she was very well-liked by both sexes, and I could see that Robert was easily the most popular blood of the young set, as well as the chief arbiter of taste. It was very clear that anyone who was unkind to me would be so at their social peril.

Robert guided the talk into such unalarming topics as the upcoming festivities to celebrate May Day and who was going to London for the finish of the season. While Robert and Ellen directed their remarks frequently to me and encouraged others to do the same, they left no chance for the conversation to become more personal, or for anyone to ask me questions that might be awkward. I was to be given the generous opportunity to wait and catch my breath and to sit and observe without fearing that I would need to defend myself.

As I began to separate out the faces, Peregrine Absalm was one of the first to which I put a name. I would have noticed him even if Robert had not mentioned his name to me as we came in because to be noticed was a thing into which Mr. Absalm put a great deal of effort. He was a tall young man and good-looking in a heavy, hard-jowled sort of way. I guessed his age to be about two years under Robert’s and everything he did seemed to be centered around proving that he was a young man who had
seen it all
. He held a wineglass that he let dangle from his fingers with such artistic negligence that you’d think he’d spent a month practicing it. He threw back his head like a rearing stallion when he laughed. When he talked, he made a habit of letting fall a few carefully chosen profane words and then apologizing profusely to the ladies present, to bring home the point that he was accustomed to the company of females of a far more risqué order. His companions received each peculiarity with the tolerance of old friends, though Peregrine’s sister, a prim girl in pink, did sometimes say, “Peregrine, will you
stop
? Or I shall tell Mama!” which crimped some of his better efforts.

Then there was John Lennox, a tall, rakish blond with a long neck and tumbling blond curls, who had a quick, secretive grin, made some of the funniest puns I had ever heard, and was a third cousin to Robert and Lord Brockhaven. Julie Aldgate had a habit of tossing her head to and fro while she talked to make her curls bounce, and I wondered why her mother didn’t tell her to stop, until I met her mother and discovered that she had the same habit. Ellen’s closest friend was a girl named Claire, who was pretty and lively and made much over by the men; Claire’s younger sister was Roberta, though everyone called her Bobby, which she seemed to like. There were the Nettel twins, good-natured young men who both affected the use of a quizzing glass, which made it quite startling to be beheld by the two of them at once.

Before dinner was announced, I had been introduced to more than forty people and acquired a miserable headache.

There is a custom of the gorgio aristocracy that is called “leading the ladies in to dinner,” which reminded me of “leading the cows to the pasture” as if we couldn’t be trusted to find our way there on our own. During this process I was left unattended for long enough to give Peregrine Absalm the opportunity to rub his omnipresent dangling wineglass against my arm suggestively and leer at me with the lecherous precision of a randy goat.

“You glorious creature! They say that gypsy women can take whatever men they choose as lovers. Is that so, sweet dream?”

His words and manner afflicted me with a variety of emotions, the most prominent being amazement that anyone had garnered such a fallacious notion about the privileges accorded gypsy women.