Penelope (3 page)

Penelope stared wide-eyed in amazement. “Why?” she asked faintly.

“You silly goose,” said Miss Frederica good-naturedly, rustling the letter. “Because she is exceeding fond of you. She is a delightful lady. Seventy-five thousand, I’ve heard. Delightful!”

“But aunt has no money!” exclaimed Penelope.

“She says here,” said Miss Frederica, waving the letter, “that she has inherited her late employer’s fortune.”

Penelope’s heart began to beat against her ribs. She did not want to go and live with Augusta. On the other hand a Season could mean a husband, someone young and kind and merry. And then … oh bliss! A home of her own. A home with the translucent bowls of flowers and crackling fires and
food
, masses and masses of food.
Hot
food.

The Misses Fry seemed to have taken her assent for granted and talked of school matters while they drank their tea. Penelope did not despise them for their sudden kindness to her now that she was to move up in society. It was only to be expected that they should fawn on her today despite the fact that they were bullying and humiliating her yesterday. It was the way of the world after all. She cheerfully ate two more cakes in quick succession and slipped two more in her pocket for little Mary, the scullery maid who shared Penelope’s meager diet. She then cheerfully thanked the sisters for the unexpected treat and retired to her room.

With the eternal optimism of youth, she began to tremble with excitement at the thought of her good fortune. Augusta Harvey was a poisonous, vulgar woman, but she, Penelope, was to have a Season, and she would not be
dancing
with Miss Harvey after all. The older woman would merely be the chaperone in the background.

The news of her good fortune soon spread quickly through the school. The governesses and richer girls who had always treated her with alarming condescension but liked her because she “knew her place” now became very affectionate indeed. Only Mary, the little scullery maid, crying dismally over her present of two cakes in the basement, seemed genuinely sorry that Penelope was leaving.

“I shall send for you, Mary,” said Penelope, giving her a fierce hug. “You shall be my lady’s maid as soon as ever I am married.”

And little Mary’s tears had dried because Miss Penelope was so pretty—why, she would be married after her first ball!

Penelope was lucky in her journey. The road was fair and conditions were good. She was too unused to comfort to mind the jolting of the cumbersome coach and too unaccustomed to compliments to object to the heavy badinage from the men on the roof of the coach, unaware that her air of shy good breeding had spared her from coarser gallantries.

The light was fading as the hack which she had hired outside the Bell Savage rolled into Brook Street. She tipped the jarvey with the last of her meager store of money and shyly walked up the marble steps and knocked timidly on the door.

A powdered footman answered the summons and ushered her into a large drawing room at the front of the house. He then departed to inform Miss Harvey of her arrival.

Penelope timidly looked about her. A thick carpet covered with pink cabbage roses quarrelled noisily with the screaming red and yellow stripes of the furniture. An overornate clock ticked away the seconds like a series of sharp reprimands. A row of Miss Harvey’s “ancestors,” bought at a countryhouse sale, stared down into the room as if amazed to find themselves in such vulgar surroundings. Some bad pottery figurines simpered and danced on various little cane tables and bowed to their counterparts on the mantelpiece.

Penelope crossed to the looking glass over the fireplace and frowned at her reflection, carefully removed her shabby bonnet and, finding a comb in her reticule, ran it through her curls.

Miss Harvey was announced, and Penelope swung round. Both women surveyed each other in silence.

Augusta reflected that the girl was much thinner than she had remembered and her face was too pale. But her hair was still as gold and her wide questioning eyes still as deep and startling a blue as they had been when last she saw her niece.

For her part, Penelope was thinking gloomily that Aunt Augusta was much the same despite a new, shiny nut-brown wig, rouged cheeks, and a fine collar of pearls.

“Welcome, my dear,” said Augusta, waddling forward. “I can see we’ll need to buy you some fine new dresses, heh! Of course it will cost me a prodigious amount of money, but there then, I always was a generous soul. Lady Courtland was only saying to me the other day, ‘La! Augusta, if you ain’t the soul of generosity,’ that she did!

“And of course you ain’t the type of gel to forget a bit of Christian gratitude when you is wed to a fine Lord. You’ll always remember your old auntie what took you out of the gutter? Course you will,” she rattled on before Penelope could protest that the seminary in Bath was hardly the gutter. “ ‘Cause I’m going to dress you proper. I would’ve taken care of you before, but I hadn’t the money and that’s a fact. You’ll hear some say I poisoned the old man so’s to get his money, but I assure you that was not the case since the old quiz a-took of an apoplexy and died proper in his bed but this is London and them society tongues is wicked.”

She actually paused for breath, and Penelope said tremulously, “I am sure I shall always be grateful to you, Aunt.”

“That’s my girl,” wheezed Miss Harvey, plunking her great bulk down on the sofa and smiling from ear to ear. “Now for the best bit of news. Me and you has been asked to none other than the Earl of Hestleton’s for dinner tomorrow night. I got a fine dress made up for you but, now that I see you, it’ll maybe need taking in a peg or two. Now this here Earl is the catch of the Season and a pretty little thing like you will catch his eye, that’s for sure. You’re not to pay any attention to his young brother, the Viscount, who is by way of being a friend of mine. ‘You’re like a mother to me, Augusta,’ says the dear boy. So he has told the Earl he wants to entertain us to dinner, but the Earl, he’s not too keen on the idea, but as soon as he sets eyes on your loveliness, it’ll be right and tight and you leave your auntie to fix the marriage settlements good and proper.”

“But, Aunt,” protested Penelope. “I do not know this Earl. He may take me in dislike!”

“Then it’s up to a clever puss like you to see he does not,” said Augusta with her smile at its widest. “I don’t want you to be
fast
, mind, but a gel can always do discreet things, you know, bend forward and let your dress slip a little. Discreet little pressure of the hand, heh! Tie your garter and then pretend you didn’t know he was in the room, heh!”

Penelope blushed painfully. “I must know, Aunt,” she said firmly, “whether you have brought me to London for the soul purpose of seducing this Earl?”

“Lord love you, no! As God is my witness,” cried Augusta, raising her dirty, plump arms to the painted ceiling, “it’s just such a chance for you!”

Penelope sighed. She found her aunt more pushing and vulgar than she had remembered, but perhaps the Bath seminary had made her too missish in her ideas.

“I will do my best for you, Aunt,” Penelope said dutifully.

“That’s all I ask,” said Augusta. “Just do what Auntie tells you and never forget where your bread and butter comes from or the good Lord above will strike you dead for your ingratitude. He often does that, you know,” she added in a conversational voice. “He seeks out the sinner even here in St. James’s and He strikes ‘em dead as doornails. And you don’t want to be a-burning in hellfire with demons a-sticking pitchforks in your naked body, do you? No, I thought not. People don’t. So you run off to bed like a good girl—the housekeeper will show you to your room—and get a good night’s sleep for we’ve a great deal of shopping to do on the morrow. Good night, my child, and may the angels attend your rest.”

Penelope dutifully kissed the rouged cheek presented to her and meekly followed the housekeeper out and up the wide carpeted stairs to the uncarpeted and sparsley furnished bedroom above. Augusta did not believe in spending money on furnishing the rooms that nobody but the inmates of the house were likely to see.

A few streets away in an elegant mansion in Berkeley Square, Roger, Earl of Hestleton was wrestling with both his cravat and his temper while his young brother lounged in a chair beside the dressing table and watched his efforts.

“Not like you to make such a mull of it,” said Charles laconically.

The Earl swore and ripped the muslin from his neck and held out his hand to his valet for another cravat. “If I were not so upset and puzzled by your strange behavior,” snapped Roger, “I should have this pesky cravat completed in a trice. As it is, I am taken up with wonder over my dear brother’s dinner invitation. I keep asking and asking and each time you become more evasive. Why, pray, is one of London’s most pushing mushrooms to grace my dinner table?”

“Oh, she’s not so bad and I hear her niece is a beauty,” said Charles, shifting in his chair and avoiding his brother’s eye in the mirror. “You’re not usually so high in the instep.”

“Not when it comes to rank,” said the Earl, completing the arrangement of his cravat in the Mathematical, “but I certainly am when it comes to manners and elegance of mind and from what I have heard, Augusta Harvey has neither.”

“Well … well,” said Charles, rising to his feet, “the invitation is issued and that’s that. It’s only one evening, that’s all.”

“One evening too much,” said the Earl, placing a diamond pin carefully in the snowy folds of his cravat and turning abruptly to face his brother. “Are you in dun territory again, Charles? Is this why you are encouraging this woman?”

“No!” said Charles sulkily. “Didn’t I give you my word? You could at least trust your own brother’s word.”

The Earl surveyed him in silence and then a singularly charming smile lit up his harsh features. “Come, now, Charles,” he said. “I am not such an ogre that you cannot confide in me. If it is not money, then are you interested in Augusta’s niece?”

“No!” shrieked Charles. He then added in a quieter voice, “No. It is just that Augusta Harvey has been exceedingly kind to me. She’s not that bad you know, and people are too hard on her. Well, you will see for yourself tomorrow.”

He looked hopefully into his brother’s rather austere features, and sighed. Charles knew that the Earl would be horrified by Augusta. Charles had not yet met Penelope, but he was sure she would prove to be as impossible as her aunt.

P
ENELOPE WAS EXHAUSTED
, bewildered, and hungry by the time the hack deposited her along with her aunt on the Earl of Hestleton’s doorstep.

The day had been filled with visits to buy hats, shawls, fans, shoes, dresses, pelisses, and wraps. She had been pushed, prodded, turned, and pinned until her head whirled. Augusta Harvey had not stopped once for meals. “During the Season,” she had said with her usual crocodile smile, “you may eat your fill in someone else’s house. ‘Tis the done thing.”

In all this whirl of shopping, Penelope had been torn between gratitude towards her aunt for her splendid new wardrobe and distaste for her vulgar, pushing ways. Madame Verné, the dressmaker, had discreetly suggested that Miss Harvey’s niece was in need of new underthings. “Why?” Augusta had demanded with great aplomb. “I ain’t wasting money on what don’t show.”

Now, despite the courage engendered by a beautiful white silk dress embroidered at neck and hem with tiny rosebuds and a completely new coiffeur of artlessly rioting curls, created for her by Monsieur André, the court hairdresser, Penelope heartily wished the evening were over.

She wished this more than ever as they were ushered into the Earl’s drawing room. The exquisite furniture, the fine paintings, the beautifully subdued colors—all made Augusta Harvey appear at her worst. Miss Harvey was dressed in all the glory of green and white stripes with a multitude of bows and tucks and flounces.

An applewood fire crackled on the hearth, and two fine chandeliers cast a flattering glow over the room.

Charles lounged into the room, looking self-conscious. His face lightened when he saw Penelope, and he made her his best bow. Penelope saw a pleasant looking young man with a weak face, impeccably dressed in long tails and evening breeches and a cravat so high that he had difficulty turning his head. He sported a great number of fobs and seals on his waistcoat and nervously took snuff in rapid delicate little pinches from an enamelled snuffbox. To Penelope’s surprise, the Viscount seemed to be as nervous as she was herself, and she set herself to put him at his ease, asking him questions on London life and succeeding so well that Augusta’s grating question came as a shock. “And where, young man,” demanded Augusta, rudely breaking into the conversation, “is your brother?”

Penelope looked at her in surprise and Charles flushed. “Roger will be here directly,” he mumbled. “I promised you …”

Augusta became aware of Penelope’s amazed stare and laughed shrilly. “The dear boy,” she said, patting the Viscount on the cheek. “I’m like a mother to him, ain’t I just?”

“How touching!” said a cold voice. “But Charles is out of short coats after all and does not, I think, need a substitute mother.”

The Earl of Hestleton stood framed in the doorway. Penelope looked up and found he was staring straight across the room at her. He was a very tall man with a thin, white, high-nosed face and peculiarly light gray eyes, almost the color of silver, under heavy, drooping lids. His expression was austere and harsh, his hair an unusual copper color with red lights which glinted in the light from the chandeliers. He was dressed in a close-fitting black evening coat and black satin knee breeches with diamond buckles on his shoes. A magnificent diamond pin winked in the folds of his snowy cravat.

Penelope dismally decided that he was one of the most terrifying-looking men she had ever seen. She hurriedly cast down her eyes and studied the toe of her slipper.

The Viscount made the introductions. The Earl gave Miss Harvey a very slight bow and Penelope a lower one. She looked up once more into his eyes only to find her wide blue gaze trapped and held by that hard silvery stare.