Miss Lindel's Love (12 page)

“It does seem a monstrous waste that so elegant a dress should only have one airing.” Maris looked over Lilah’s head into the pier glass. The wide, wide skirt narrowed abruptly to a fashionable body, trimmed over the shoulders with ribbon. She grinned at the remarkable picture she presented. “It’s enough to throw one into whoops when you collect that our grandmothers wore such things every day of their lives.”

“The hard part is learning to walk in them with any kind of elegance. One stumble and you lie on the ground with your hoop belling over you. I wore three petticoats when I was presented.”

“I only pray there’s no wind. With this hoop and a headful of feathers, I would go sailing down the street like a full-rigged ship.”

They giggled like sisters over that ridiculous picture. Lilah reached up to tap Maris’s hand. “I will say that in one respect I enjoyed this Season far more than my last. I am glad that I could share it with you.”

This tribute from the intensely reserved Lilah brought unaccustomed tears into Maris’s eyes. “I shouldn’t have been able to bear it if it hadn’t been for you. All this talk ...”

“Yes,” Lilah said, retreating as was her wont from too much notice. “Turn about or this hem will never be straight.”

The vast silken overskirt was at last pinned to Lilah’s satisfaction and Maris was stepping out of it before Mrs. Paladin returned. If she had been in alt before, her excitement now reached into the clouds. “Mercy, I could almost ask you to prick me with one of your pins, Lilah, for I am in such a state I hardly know whether I am awake or asleep. You’ll never guess what Lady Osbourne came to offer.”

They did not need to ask, for her explanation came with the next breath. “An invitation to visit her country home ... one of the showplaces of the country! Her third daughter is to make her presentation at the same Drawing Room as you, Maris. You, it seems, made a great hit with her at some party or other.”

“What is her name, ma’am?”

“Oh, mercy. I don’t...Cloris, or some such.”

“I didn’t know she was Lady Osbourne’s daughter. We were talking of the trial our parents inflicted on us by giving us such names as must give rise to comment.” Maris did not mention that Lilah had taken part in this conversation as well.

Mrs. Paladin took no notice of this interjection. “She further said that she had no opinion of ill-natured persons who play hob with the good names of young ladies which I thought most delicate. Such an opportunity for you two to make close friends with the future mothers of England.”

“I hardly think Lady Osbourne meant to include me in her flattering offer, Mother.”

“Hush, Lilah. Of course she did. How may I go to chaperon our dear Maris if you don’t come, too?”

“But I hardly need to make close friends with, as you say, the future of England.”

“You never can be certain,” Mrs. Paladin said with a lofty air of mystery. “You may yet have daughters of your own to establish creditably in the world. Maintaining those acquaintances through the years may serve them, if not yourself. Why, if I had not kept up a correspondence with Mrs. Lindel, I should not now have the pleasure of her daughter’s companionship. What a grief that would have been.”

Perhaps, Maris thought, the worldliness of London was beginning to infect her thoughts. Why else would she be so inwardly certain that it was not her companionship that Mrs. Paladin appreciated so much as the invitation Maris had netted. She sighed. “When are we to go?”

Three days later, after the nerve-wracking ordeal of a presentation to a weary-looking queen, Maris relaxed against the dusty squabs of a hired chaise.

Her head still ached from the weight of the feathers and she felt certain that the dent she could feel under her hair would never fill in. Nevertheless, it had been one of the high points of her life. She could imagine herself in thirty years regaling her grandchildren with her impressions of Queen Charlotte. She had been gracious and grandmotherly, nodding regally as each young lady approached and sank. Her response to the quickly becoming notorious Miss Lindel had been no less so. Maris herself had been blushing from the toes upward all the while.

“I wish,” she said idly, “that one of these clever people would find some way for a memory to be frozen forever.”

“A memory?” Lilah echoed.

“Yes. Some way that I could show my mother all that happened today. What I looked like, each step I took toward the queen, a memory frozen for all time.”

“Preposterous!” Mrs. Paladin said from her corner.

Lilah patted Maris’s hand. “We shall dress you again when your mother returns. Even the jewels, if we can borrow them for an hour one morning.”

Because it would have been a disaster not to adorn oneself for such an occasion, Mrs. Paladin had rented a very fine copy of an elegant parure. Draped in a necklace of fish-scale pearls and sparkling paste with matching bracelets, fully three inches wide, and chandelier earrings tied on with pink silk, Maris had been the equal of any other girl, to the eye at least. Some of them, Lilah had assured her, even those with the longest lineages, were wearing jewelry just as simulated as her own.

“I hope we may,” Maris said. “I would love for Mother to see the entire array.” Tucked into her elegant bodice, more dear than even real jewels would have been, was a letter from Mrs. Lindel, wishing her daughter every success and informing her of her immense pride in Maris’s accomplishments. That her duty to one daughter upon Sophie’s relapse had kept her from this great event would be, she said, not a grief but a regret. Maris had written at once that nothing in the world was more important than Sophie’s recovery. If that required Mrs. Lindel’s presence, then she would not feel even regret.

“When you marry,” Mrs. Paladin said, “you may have your portrait painted in your wedding gown and I’m certain your husband will bestow the family jewels upon you. I have heard a tale that the Danesbys still possess a great many Elizabethan and even medieval jewels. The present viscount’s ancestors were famous dandies, you know. If that is what they called them then,” she added, pondering historical realities. “At any rate, men wore a great many more jewels even than women in those days.”

“I have heard similar stories,” Maris said, ignoring the implications in this speech. “But no one in Finchley believes them.”

As they went south, the crowded streets of London became ever busier until fading out at last into rural beauty. Maris begged to have the windows down. She breathed in what felt like her first lungful of clean air in weeks. But Mrs. Paladin fetched out her handkerchief and complained of the dust, so up went the windows. One stuck, rather, and Maris thought Mrs. Paladin would die of an apoplexy brought on by coughing. Yet, because it had rained the day before, there was actually very little dust. The fields looked like velvet in a dozen shades of green.

Durham Home commanded respect by size alone, for certainly architectural merit had passed it by. Bits of it were brick, quite a lot of it- was half timbered, one wing comprised the Palladian ideal while attempting, like a grand dame come down in the world, to ignore the questionable neighbor in early English attire across the way. A history of England in stone, the great house snaked and twisted like a dragon across the acres.

In the vestibule their hostess met them amid masses of deep oak woodwork relieved with cream marble, veined with chocolate. After greeting them, Lady Osbourne escorted them to their rooms herself. “We began holding a house party after the Drawing Room when my first gel was presented. She’s Mrs. Holdenough now, though we have hopes of dear Robert being mentioned in the next Honor’s List. They, alas, are still in Lisbon.”

Mrs. Paladin hung upon her hostess’s every utterance as though her words held the key to salvation. She expressed herself delighted with everything, from her north-facing room to the view over the stable yard. Maris felt that Mrs. Paladin wouldn’t have objected if her room had been
in
the stable so long as her hostess bore a title.

“Please notice, my dears, this little plan of the house.” Lady Osbourne picked up a piece of paper from the topmost pillow on the bed. “We have thirty-two bedrooms here spread over all three floors. Even frequent visitors can become lost so I had my secretary draw these. It seemed the most sensible solution to the difficulty of people wandering in an hour late to dinner.”

Looking at Lady Osbourne’s plump, red, and confident face, Maris had no doubt that this plan was indeed the most rational and efficient system. She would not have permitted anything less.

“Oh, I don’t need that,” Mrs. Paladin said. “I’m sure I could never forget after the marvelous times I had here last Season.”

“No one ever believes they’ll need a map,” Lady Osbourne said patiently. “But every year someone invariably loses himself. Even Lord Osbourne has been known to become confused and he was born in this house. Keep the map in your reticule, dear Mrs. Paladin, just to humor a hostess.”

“The girls and I will be happy to obey you. Yes, girls?”

“Of course.”

Leaving Mrs. Paladin to rest after the journey, Lady Osbourne deigned to explain the strange floor plan of her home. “Partly it is the fault of Lord Osbourne’s family. Every one of them wished to leave a mark on the house. Later, if you wish, you may see the banqueting hall which is confidently believed to be from the original castle built in the twelfth century. The interior, however, is pure Henry the Eighth. The only finer one in England is at Hampton Court.”

Lilah’s room was across the hall from her mother’s and next door to Maris’s. “How charming,” Lilah said, moved by the Chinoserie hangings and wallpaper. Her wink at Maris told her how much Lilah appreciated the difference between this elegantly and cohesively furnished room and the bits and pieces, odds and ends decor of their rented home.

“You
said the house is only partly the fault of your husband’s ancestors,” Maris prompted her ladyship.

“Ah, yes. The rest is the fault of his grandmother. A dear woman but she carried her vaunted eccentricity too far. She believed that so long as she continued to add to Durham House she would never die. Folly. Though, to be fair, she did live to one hundred and three according to the parish records. Fortunately, she died before she could bankrupt us entirely.”

Lady Osbourne lingered in the doorway while Maris looked about her own quarters. The calm blue and white toile was soothing and the tester bed had a mattress deep enough for any fairy tale. “I hope, my dear Miss Lindel, that I am not overstepping the bounds of courtesy if I make mention of an unpleasant fact.”

“This is your home, Lady Osbourne. You need not apologize for anything you say here, surely?”

The older woman nodded at Maris with a glint of favor. “Cloris approved of you. She is the highest stickler for propriety I have ever known—how she came to be my child is a mystery. Perhaps it is this age in which we live. When I was a girl, plain-speaking was the order of the day.”

“I trust honesty will always have a place. What fact is it that you wish to mention, ma’am?”

Lady Osbourne came in and closed the door firmly behind her. She was not a slim person and the straight-falling folds of her pale orange robe did little for her figure. Her once-red hair showed streaks of white, though she did not seem older than Mrs. Paladin. “You are gossiped about, child. People are saying things that, now that I look closely at you, cannot be true. Yet, such is the way of the world, that most people will believe what they hear.”

Feeling her cheeks grow warm, Maris nevertheless looked her hostess in the eyes. “I know there is some sort of story making the rounds but I do not know what it is. Mrs. Paladin says I should take no notice.”

“Elvira Paladin is the most single-minded creature alive. She all but ruined her own daughter’s chances last year by her stubborn refusal to see the facts when they do not fit with her desires. She was like that even as a girl and it saddens me to learn that she has not changed.”

“You knew her when she was a girl?”

“Yes, my dear. And your mother as well. I’m sorry to hear that your younger sister remains in indifferent health.” Lady Osbourne stood smiling at her with increased warmth.

“How do you ...then it was not for Cloris’s sake that you invited me?”

“Partially, partially. As I say, I respect Cloris’s opinion when it comes to other girls. You are all, I beg your pardon, very much alike to me much in the way that one puppy is very like another save to the eye of love. I hoped very much that your mother would be able to accept my invitation for this evening but she wrote to me that it was quite impossible and asked me to invite Elvira instead.”

“You wrote to her in Yorkshire?”

“It’s not the moon, child. She further asked me to take her part in explaining the circumstances in which you find yourself.”

“She knows about that? She hasn’t written to me about it and I...”

“You didn’t wish to trouble her? It was kindly thought of but folly. Children cannot shelter their parents from the harshness of the world for it is always far too late by the time they begin. Sit down, Maris. I can’t imagine why we are standing here in this ridiculous way.”

When Lady Osbourne had informed Maris of what was being whispered about her, she sat back in shock, hot moisture springing into her eyes. “It’s so unfair,” she said, her voice shaking. “I never did ... I never could! Oh, it is unconscionable. And to say such things about Lord Danesby... always so kind, so much the gentleman.”

“He showed a severe lack of tact when he turned off Flora Armitage. One would have expected better from a man of his address. I do not care for her myself—a very immoral character—but I confess I felt some pity for her. That, naturally, was at an end the moment she dragged you into this miserable affair.”

“Lord Danesby himself acknowledged that he handled her badly, ma’am.”

Lady Osbourne’s sandy brows rose to incredulous heights.
“
You
have discussed this matter with Lord Danesby himself? When? Where?”

Maris soon put Lady Osbourne in possession of everything that had happened. Every meeting with Lord Danesby, from St. Paul’s onward, was discussed in detail. Lady Osbourne steepled her forefingers and pressed them to her lips when asked for her advice. “I had no notion your friendship had progressed so far.”