Penelope (6 page)

“I believe the mazy waltz is being danced there,” said Penelope. She had heard from the rich young misses of the Bath seminary that the waltz was a very
fast
dance indeed.

“It’s catching on,” said the Earl laconically. “But we have the celebrated Neil Gow from Edinburgh conducting the orchestra so we mostly still perform Scottish reels and English country dances. Ah, but I forgot. There is a
new
dance. It is called the quadrille and is danced by eight persons. In the first quadrille ever danced at Almack’s, there was Lady Jersey, Lady Harriet Butler, Lady Susan Ryder, and Miss Montgomery. The men were the Count St. Aldegonde, Mr. Montgomery, Mr. Montague, and Charles Standish.”

He paused and then said idly, “Would you care to go to Almack’s, Miss Vesey?”

“Yes,” said Penelope slowly. “Yes, I would. But it is not possible.”

“Why?” asked the Earl abruptly. “Why do you wish to go to Almack’s?”

Penelope sighed. He was being remarkably obtuse. “Why, my lord, does any female wish for a Season? Why does any young woman worth her salt wish to attend Almack’s? To find a husband of course!”

“I have only known you a short time, Miss Vesey,” said the Earl severely, “but somehow I would have thought you above the petty bartering of the marriage mart.”

“Then what else do you suggest I do?” said Penelope reasonably. “A comfortable home of one’s own is a better prospect than being employed as a drudge at some seminary. Besides, I should like children of my own. Marriage is the only career open to a lady in this day and age.”

“And does love not enter into your calculations?” demanded the Earl with a hint of a sneer.

Penelope looked vaguely across the summer picture of the park. “Oh, love!” she said at last. “No, my lord, I have no money of my own. Love is a luxury I cannot afford.”

She looked quickly up at his face and surprised the look of contempt in his eyes. “Why do you look
so
?” she demanded angrily. “It is easy for you to prate on about love, my lord. You have only to drop the handkerchief and any woman—with the exception of myself—would be glad to pick it up.”

“So I do not enter into your marital plans?”

“No,” said Penelope. “You are too high in the instep for me, my lord. Besides, you make me feel uncomfortable.”

“In that case, Miss Vesey, you need not have come driving with me.”

“Oh, but I had to,” said Penelope simply. “Aunt Augusta would have been so disappointed. You see, she has brought me to London and has bought me oh! so many beautiful clothes. She was very flattered by your invitation to dinner. It would have been cruel to disappoint her. I am being unfashionably honest with you, my lord, because I am sure there are so many other females who would enjoy your company immensely and it is not necessary to waste your time with me. I believe you are considered quite handsome,” she added in a kind voice.

“My fortune certainly is, and where my fortune leads, my face must follow,” he said dryly. “Tell me, Miss Vesey, did you sing that singularly naughty ballad the other night in order to disgust me?”

“Yes,” said Penelope with an infectious ripple of laughter. “Was it not dreadful? Papa’s friends were six-bottle-a-day men, you know, and would often sing it when they were in their cups and too far gone to notice a little girl in the corner of the room.”

“Your father?” The Earl frowned. “Was he by any chance a relation of Sir James Vesey?”

“His youngest son.”

“But good God, girl, the Vesey family would supply you with all the entrée you need!”

“My father was considered to have married beneath him,” said Penelope quietly. “Sir James took a dislike to Aunt Augusta in particular. He has shown no interest in me.”

The Earl fell silent. It was certainly not unusual on the part of Sir James in a world where people often cut their own mothers and fathers socially if they considered them not fashionable enough.

Penelope looked so calm and assured as she sat sedately behind him. He felt she should have at least made some fashionable effort to flirt. He suddenly wanted to make a crack in that beautiful and porcelain composure.

He turned and leaned towards her. “But have you considered what any marriage would be like to a man you did not love?”

“Of course,” said Penelope, resolutely banishing her adolescent dreams of a strong and handsome lover. “I should not see much of him at all, you see. If gentlemen are not at their clubs or their politics, they are on the hunting field.”

“Ah, but were I in love with someone,” said the Earl, forcing her to meet his gaze, “I would not leave her side for a moment.”

Penelope felt suddenly breathless and awkward. She rapidly held her fan in front of her face. “Since we shall not be seeing
anything
of each other in the future, my lord, we should not be talking like this.”

The Earl studied the top of her frivolous hat as she bent her head and lowered her fan to her lap and stared at its painted pictures.

“Jobbins!” said the Earl, without removing his gaze from Penelope. “There is a fine oak tree about a hundred yards to your left. Go and count the branches.”

“Very good, my lord,” said his groom, Jobbins, with a grin, and climbed down from his perch.

The Earl waited a few moments and then asked gently, “Do you know why I sent Jobbins away, Miss Vesey?”

“No,” said Penelope in a small voice.

“Because I wish to kiss you.”

“Oh!”

“Is that all you can say?” teased the Earl. “’Oh.’”

“I appeal to you as a gentleman,” said Penelope primly, “not to take advantage of our isolated position.” Their quarter of the park was deserted, the fashionable throng having made their way to parade their carriages in the Ring.

“But I am about to take advantage of our isolated position,” the infuriating, teasing voice went on.

Penelope sighed. “Oh, go ahead. I am not going to make a cake of myself by fleeing across Hyde Park on foot.” She shut her eyes and screwed up her face. He looked down at her for a second in some amusement and then took her very gently in his arms. He kissed her eyelids and the tip of her small straight nose, and then his wandering mouth suddenly clamped down over her own. Penelope’s last coherent thought before she was carried away on a buffeting sea of emotions, and tremblings and strange, tortured virginal passions was that Sir James Vesey might have had some point in thinking they were a vulgar family. No lady would behave so. No lady would feel so.

At last he raised his head and the world of sunlight and trees and grass came swirling back. She looked up into his eyes and found them as hard and cold as the winter sea. Why should he look at her like that? It was his fault after all.

The Earl brusquely summoned his groom and set his horses in motion. “We shall join the fashionables, Miss Vesey,” he said coldly, “and then I shall take you home.”

Roger, Earl of Hestleton, was furious. The girl had succeeded in awaking a series of emotions he had considered long dead and buried. Had Penelope made some flirtatious remark, he would have snapped her head off. But she sat very quiet and still and rather white-faced. He slowly became aware that he had behaved very badly indeed and set himself to make amends.

As they joined the series of glittering carriages in the Ring, he asked lightly, “Well, Miss Vesey, here we have the cream of society. What do you think?”

Penelope looked about her, wide-eyed, her recent distress temporarily forgotten. It was a glittering spectacle as the dandies and their ladies promenaded to display their elaborate toilettes and spanking carriages pulled by the finest horses. Many ladies were driven in a little carriage for two persons, called a vis-à-vis. This gorgeous equipage had a hammer cloth, rich in heraldic designs, powdered footmen in smart liveries, and a coachman who looked as stately as an archbishop. Then she laughed, “I feel like a poor child looking in the window of a pastry cook’s. I suppose I shall always be outside, looking in.”

“Would you like to attend Almack’s?” asked the Earl abruptly.

“You have already asked me that question,” said Penelope patiently.

“I mean—
really
attend.”

“Of course.”

“I can arrange it,” he said simply.

Penelope looked at him, wide-eyed. “How?”

“Like this,” he said with a charming smile lighting up his austere face. He inched his carriage forward and then began to introduce Penelope to various notables. Names and titles flew about her bewildered ears, hard eyes stared and speculated, jealous female eyes flicked back and forth from the Earl’s face to her own, dandies bowed and simpered, Corinthians stared and leered.

Obviously the Earl of Hestleton had great social power. When it was discovered she was Augusta Harvey’s niece, though it caused some rapid blinking, it did not seem to make much difference to the polite, if formal, reception given to her by the fashionable set. If the Earl of Hestleton found nothing to disgust him in Augusta Harvey, then neither would they. From being a vulgar, pushing mushroom, Augusta was elevated in their minds to the rank of a tedious eccentric, and after all, there was always some new butt around to receive the barbed attention of society.

Penelope was then introduced to two of the patronesses of Almack’s and, luckily for her, to two of the most amiable, Lady Sefton and Lady Cowper. Both patronesses decided that Penelope’s behavior was unexceptionable and allowed that she was quite pretty although it was a pity she was so unfashionably fair.

The Earl’s suggestion that vouchers for Almack’s should be sent to Penelope was met with a pleasant “perhaps” instead of the open horror which would have met such a request had it been made by any other. Such are the fickle vagaries of fashion.

As they drove from the park, Penelope had forgotten her desire to be free of the Earl’s company and turned a glowing face up to his. “Oh,
thank
you,” she breathed.

“’Tis nothing,” he said, looking down briefly at the enchanting face turned up towards his. “It will all be worth it to see Miss Harvey’s debut at Almack’s.”

Penelope bit her lip. He had not really been kind. Only indulging in a fit of whimsy. And the kiss, the memory of which still made her feel weak, had meant nothing to him.

She sat in silence until he deposited her in Brook Street. She must marshal her wayward thoughts and take full opportunity of her new social status and find a husband. Some kindly country squire would suit admirably.

“Y
OU
must not
fidget, madam,” said the artist, Mr. Liwoski.

Augusta gave him a sulky glare. She was paying him for his services, wasn’t she? But Miss Stride had said that Mr. Liwoski was the best and cheapest that Soho could provide, and since Penelope was in the room, she contented herself by turning her eyes to the card rack on the mantelpiece where two vouchers to Almack’s were prominently displayed.

It had been like a dream come true. Penelope had said shyly that it was because of the kindness of the Earl of Hestleton, but Miss Augusta Harvey had put it down to her own new genteel image and, of course, the wily Miss Stride had encouraged her in that idea.

Penelope sat silently on her favorite corner of the window seat, content to watch Mr. Liwoski at work. A day or so ago he had completed a series of quick thumbnail sketches and was now starting on his canvas, laying down the ground surface of thin wash, a “brown sauce” he called it. He then occasionally wiped it with a rag to bring out the masses of light on the brow and the cheekbone, carefully checking the likeness from time to time. He had told the fascinated Penelope that a difference of quarter of an inch in the brushstroke, say on the lips, could make a mouth sinister or cruel if one were not very careful.

He was a thin, threadbare young man, who perpetually looked in need of a good meal which was, in fact, often the case.

Penelope watched his deft expert movements and dreamed of the evening at Almack’s to come.

She had taken dancing lessons in the art of performing the quadrille and the waltz. That very evening she would walk through the doors of Almack’s. She wondered if the Earl would be there. Try as she would, she could not forget that kiss. She should not have responded to it. But then the Earl should not have kissed her in the first place. Maybe he knew his advances would not be rejected, thought poor Penelope with scarlet cheeks.

His brother, Charles, had already engaged her for the first dance. He was vastly different from his austere brother, reflected Penelope. He was a frequent caller and always seemed to treat Aunt Augusta with a mixture of flattery and fear.

It was indeed very strange. But the behavior of so many people in London seemed strange. The famous dandies were not the elegant gentlemen that Penelope had been led to believe. She had already seen many of them as they sauntered down Piccadilly and Bond Street. There seemed to be nothing remarkable about them but their insolence. Generally middleaged, with rude, ill-bred manners, they were neither good looking, nor clever, nor agreeable. They swore a good deal, never laughed, and had their own particular brand of slang. The sportsmen, the Corinthians, seemed just as bad. Where the dandies minced, they swaggered and although their oaths were the same, they were pronounced in louder voices.

The young men, like Charles, who tried to ape the dandy set unfortunately copied their bad manners and their ridiculously exaggerated dress. The Earl, decided Penelope, could not be a dandy. He was too well-dressed. He could turn his head in the high confines of his cravat, and his coats were not tailored so that his collars bunched halfway up the back of his head.

Penelope became aware that Mr. Liwoski was packing up his materials. “After I have completed your portrait, madam,” he said to Miss Harvey, “I would be grateful if you would commission me to paint your lovely niece’s portrait.”

“Humph! We’ll see,” was all Augusta would say. She looked at Penelope and cast a meaning look at the clock. Penelope rose obediently to her feet. It would take the rest of the day to prepare for the all-important evening ahead.