Rules for Being a Mistress (8 page)

Rose suddenly shrieked in alarm. Kneeling up in the window seat, she pressed her nose against the glass. “Oh, no! It is Sir Benedict Wayborn! He is coming here!”

Instantly, Lady Matlock was on her feet, marshaling her forces like a general. “The nice gentleman who found you in the road and brought you home? Yes, I think he will do
very
nicely. Don’t just sit there, child! Go and wash your face. Put on your blue gown. Hurry!”

“No, Mama, please!” begged Rose. “He’s so old. And I am sure he does not like me.” She looked out the window again. The baronet had stopped at another door. “He has stopped two—no, three—doors down. Who lives there?”

Lady Matlock was furious. “Serena! He ought to have called on
me
first.
She
may be the daughter of an earl, but
I
am a countess. More to the point, he spent four hours in a closed carriage with my daughter—and I am not even acquainted with him! He has a duty to call on me first! But that is how it is.” She sniffed. “No one has any manners anymore.”

“Perhaps he will marry Serena,” Rose suggested happily. “She is
quite
as old as he is!”

“If not older,” said Lady Matlock, but that was only spite. Anyone who possessed a copy of the Peerage could easily discover that Lady Serena Calverstock was only thirty.

Lady Serena received Benedict graciously in her elegant drawing room. She was just emerging from mourning for her sister, Lady Redfylde, and she looked charming in a lavender gown with a jabot of black lace at her throat. Her black hair was worn in a topknot with a frisette of glossy ringlets on her brow. As a debutante, her ivory pallor, raven tresses, and cool violet eyes had made her portrait one of the most admired in the National Gallery, and she was still considered one of the handsomest women in England.

They exchanged the usual pleasantries over strong black China tea.

“What brings you to Bath, Sir Benedict?” she smiled.

“Duty, I’m afraid,” he admitted ruefully. “My brother has managed to get himself elevated to the peerage, leaving my little baronetcy quite without an heir. Suddenly, I find myself in want of a wife, Lady Serena.”

Serena inclined her head. “I saw your brother’s name in the List of Honors. Tell me, does his lordship mean to build a fort somewhere with archers on the battlements, or will he be content to live in London as a man of fashion?”

Benedict suppressed a shudder of revulsion. “It is a bought title, of course. A wedding gift from his father-in-law. A Glaswegian whiskey merchant, and the girl’s not even pretty.”

“You wrong Lady Kensington,” Serena chided him. “Heiresses are always beautiful, or didn’t you know that?”

He smiled briefly. “I am glad my brother married money, at least. I was terrified he’d make some disastrous love match with an actress, like your poor cousin, Lord Ludham.”

“Lady Ludham was an opera dancer,” she corrected him without rancor. “
Pamela
was the creature’s name, if you please!” She laughed discreetly.

“How relieved you must have been when the divorce petition sailed through Lords.”

Her violet eyes widened. “I, Sir Benedict? Why should I be relieved?”

“It cannot have been easy watching an opera dancer take your mother’s place,” he said quietly. “Forgive me. It must be a painful subject. I should not have mentioned it.”

“I never met the famous Pamela. I spared myself the degradation of curtseying to
her ladyship
. As you know, I had no brother, so Felix inherited. I went to live with my sister and her husband immediately after my father’s funeral. Isn’t it curious? When Papa died, I lost my father and my home all in one day. Likewise, when Caroline died, I lost my sister and my home in one fell swoop. It seems to be my lot that, whenever there is a death in the family, I lose…everything.”

“It must be something of an adjustment to live alone,” he hinted blandly.

She replied, “It must be something of an adjustment to find yourself without an heir.”

“I mean to marry as soon as possible,” he said. “I might advise your ladyship to do the same. Then you would not have to adjust to living alone.”

She looked down at her hands. “But I have been single so long that no one thinks of me! I can not compete with these seventeen-and eighteen-year-old debutantes. They seem to be getting younger every year.”

“Quite,” said Benedict.

“I understand you rescued Lady Matlock’s daughter on the road from Chippenham,” she said, smiling. “Naturally, everyone is dying to wish you joy. A very pretty girl, but so young! Too young, I think, to be pitchforked into society. But…very pretty, I grant you.”

“You are wrong when you say that no one thinks of you,” said Benedict.

Serena blushed.

So Fitzwilliam was right, he thought. The lady is on the market.

He stayed with her only twenty minutes, the prescribed time for a social visit. In his view, the call went very smoothly. The ice was broken, at any rate.

Wednesday passed with nothing more interesting to report than a stroll in the Sydney Gardens, but Benedict began Thursday with a feeling of complacency. If tonight’s ball concluded on a note of accord between himself and Lady Serena, he saw no reason why he could not propose to her on Friday. It was a little soon, perhaps, but not, he thought, too soon for propriety’s sake. After all, he had known Serena before he ever set foot in Bath.

Most of the morning was taken up in grooming. Benedict sat in his black dressing gown wanting a cheroot as his hair was cut and his sideburns were trimmed. His fingernails were trimmed and buffed to a high sheen, and, even though no one but Pickering was going to see them, so were his toenails. Usually Benedict paid little attention to Pickering as he fussed about, but today he watched him like a hawk.

He startled Pickering by suddenly demanding, “
What
is that foul concoction?”

Pickering had been humming a cheerful little tune as he applied the special nourishing hair tonic to the roots of his master’s luxuriant black hair. It died now. Sir Benedict had never questioned him before. It was disconcerting to hear the special nourishing hair tonic described as a “foul concoction.”

“Foul concoction?” Pickering echoed tremulously.

“You’re
dyeing
my hair!” Benedict roared the accusation. “Pickering, how
could
you?”

Pickering clutched the black bottle to his breast protectively. “Now, Sir Benedict,” he said soothingly. “Everyone does it.”

“How long have you been doing this to me?” Benedict demanded furiously.

“I don’t recall the particulars—”

“Damn the particulars! How long?”

Pickering’s memory improved. “It was about the time that Master Cary disobeyed you, and enlisted in the Army as a private, Sir Benedict. You began to go gray at the temples—quite prematurely, of course.”

“Good God!” said Benedict. “I wasn’t even thirty when my brother went to Spain. That was nearly ten years ago! You have been dyeing my hair black for
ten years
?”

“Master Cary would give anyone gray hairs.”

“You will stop dyeing my hair at once, Pickering,” Benedict commanded, getting up from his chair. “Only fops and old women dye their hair. I am neither, I trust.”

Pickering was apologetic but firm. “It would be most unwise to stop now, Sir Benedict. Your roots are already beginning to show,” he gently explained. “It will be so very noticeable when you bow to the ladies. Not at all the thing when one is looking for a wife. One never gets a second chance to make a first impression, you know.”

“Pickering, I could
kill
you!”

“You will thank me for this when you are married, Sir Benedict. Ladies always say
nay
to Mr. Gray. Mr. Gray, go away, they say. Come back, Mr. Black.”

“Oh, shut up!”

Pickering shut up.

Unable to watch the rest of the demoralizing operation, Benedict leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “I’m too old for this,” he muttered. “I should have lived in the Middle Ages. I could have traded a few cows for my neighbor’s daughter.”

“You are
not
too old for Lady Serena,” Pickering assured him. “Why, she’s thirty, if she’s a day, and clinging to it like a burr. And if that black hair is her own, then I’m the King of France! I’ve seen her maid in the apothecary’s shop.”

“Are you saying that Lady Serena dyes her hair?”

“Not only that, sir, but I have seen her maid buying white lead and belladonna drops.”

“But those are poisons, surely.”

“They are only poisonous if one ingests them, sir,” Pickering said confidently. “Ladies—and some gentlemen—routinely paint their faces with white lead. It’s perfectly safe. As for the belladonna, a few drops in the eye enlarge the pupil, for a more speaking glance.”

Benedict shook his head in amazement. “What else do women do for the sake of beauty? Clean their teeth with bluing?”

“Certainly. And they bleach their skins, too.”

Benedict looked at himself in the mirror. “You haven’t been bleaching
me,
have you?”

“No, indeed, Sir Benedict,” Pickering assured him. “Fortunately, you are naturally pale, like all true English gentlemen. No one would ever mistake you for a laborer.”

“Heaven forbid,” said Benedict.

The ballroom presided over by Mr. King was one hundred feet in length, supported by Corinthian columns and decorated with neoclassical friezes. Five enormous glass chandeliers hung from gilded compartments in the ceiling, the brilliance of their white candles reflected and magnified by the enormous mirrors at either end of the room.

The right sleeve of his dress coat had been neatly pinned back, and he disdained to wear a glove on his remaining hand, but other than that, he was in correct evening dress. The musicians had already assembled in the gallery when Benedict arrived, but Mr. King had not yet given the signal to begin.

“You will dance with Sir Benedict if he asks you, Millicent,” Lady Dalrymple hissed.

Miss Carteret’s headdress of saffron-colored plumes towered over her mother, and, indeed, over her brother. She had worn her canary yellow satin gown specifically to seduce Lord Ludham. She had no intention of wasting it on the amputee. “Sir Benedict makes one queasy, Mama,” she protested. “That nasty stump! I’ll be sick, I know it.”

“Hush! He will hear you.”

Benedict had excellent hearing, but he gave no sign that he had heard this exchange.

“Here he is, Millie,” cried Lady Dalrymple, seizing him by the arm as he tried to slip past. “She is longing to dance with you, Sir Benedict. My son Frederick you know. Freddie holds the seat for Little Wicking, of course, in Cumberland. Why, you must see one another all the time in Parliament.”

Freddie Carteret, who spent as little time in the House of Commons as possible, and even less than that with his constituents in Cumberland, bowed. Lady Dalrymple’s youngest son was good-looking in a harmless, silly way. He was blind as a mole, but too vain to wear spectacles. He bumped into people constantly, especially buxom young women.

“Ah! The famous Sir Benedict Wayborn, champion of the common man,” he said, baring his yellow teeth in an ironic smile. “I have heard you described as the New Cicero…but you have never yet won an argument over
me,
sir!”

“Arguing with you would be a complete waste of my time,” Benedict agreed.

These pleasantries had scarcely been exchanged, and, what with this and that, Sir Benedict had not yet been prevailed upon to ask Miss Carteret to dance when Mr. King and Lord Ludham came bustling up to them. “Lady Dalrymple, his lordship has expressed a desire to be acquainted with your amiable daughter. May I present the Earl of Ludham to you?”

Miss Carteret’s moment had come at last, and she made the most of it, throwing her shoulders back and smiling as well as she could without revealing her less than perfect teeth.

Benedict recognized Serena’s cousin as the gentleman in the blue coat from the Pump Room. As before, Lord Ludham seemed to be in search of an elusive someone, and, even as he said everything a gentleman ought to say to the viscountess and her daughter, his blue eyes scanned the crowd eagerly.

“Do you dance, my lord?” Millicent asked him breathlessly, not willing to leave the matter entirely to chance. The question came perilously close to soliciting the gentleman, but it was still within the bounds of propriety—just.

“I
do
dance, Miss Carteret,” his lordship replied. Miss Carteret’s lips puckered in a smile, but her delight was soon replaced by less agreeable feelings, as his lordship continued, “And, if Miss Vaughn will be attending tonight’s ball, I shall ask her for the honor, for she is the most beautiful creature I ever saw! I understand she is a great friend of yours, Miss Carteret. How fortunate you are in your acquaintance! I intend to ask her for the first dance. I would dance them both with her, but, I understand, that is not at all the thing.”

Lady Dalrymple pretended to misunderstand his lordship’s meaning. She was all smiles. “Of course, my lord. Millicent will be delighted to give you the first dance.”

“Indeed, my lord,” cried Millicent, blinking rapidly.

“I’d ask you, Miss Carteret,” Ludham replied, “but I must keep myself free, in case Miss Vaughn arrives late. Indeed, I came here tonight with no other purpose but to dance with your good friend. Is she coming, do you know?”

Lady Dalrymple glared at Mr. King.

Mr. King said hastily, “I
did
try to tell his lordship that your ladyship and Miss Carteret are not acquainted with Miss Vaughn. However—”

Ludham laughed. “Of course they are acquainted, King,” he scoffed. “I have
seen
Miss Carteret and Miss Vaughn walking together, in Milsom Street, arm and arm.”

“Oh, Miss
Vaughn
!” cried Lady Dalrymple. “I thought you said Miss Fawn! Miss Vaughn, of course, is Millicent’s dearest friend. They have been knowing one another forever. We stayed with the Vaughns in Ireland for two months last summer. Such delightful people! The mother is English, of course, which helps. The girls became friends at once, but then, Millicent has such a sweet and generous nature. She makes friends wherever she goes. Why, they were Christian-naming one another within three days.”

“What is her Christian name?” Lord Ludham asked.

Lady Dalrymple batted her eyes. “Why, Millicent, of course. We call her Millie.”

“What an extraordinary coincidence!” exclaimed Ludham. “Miss Vaughn and your daughter having the same name.”

“Oh, was it Miss Vaughn you meant?” Lady Dalrymple sniffed. “She has a very silly name, I’m afraid. Cosima. It’s too ridiculous for words. Poor Miss Vaughn! She has never been presented, you know, and I daresay she never will be. Not our sort, really. But we
quite charitably
took her under our wing.”

Benedict made no comment; after all, it was a woman’s prerogative to change her mind. Lady Dalrymple was well within her rights to deny this Miss Vaughn one day and claim her the next. It was no concern of his.

“Cosima,” Lord Ludham said, pleased. “I’ve never met a Cosima in the whole course of my life. It’s Italian, isn’t it?”

“Such pretentious people, I know,” said Lady Dalrymple. She placed her fan on Ludham’s arm. “But I do pity them. The mother, Lady Agatha, as she calls herself, is ill, which prevents poor Miss Vaughn from going anywhere much. The father, Colonel Vaughn, has deserted them completely. Gambling debts, I’m afraid. Miss Vaughn and her sister are as good as portionless, and all they have to live on is Lady Agatha’s tiny little annuity. They have lost everything.”

Lord Ludham did not seem to find anything disagreeable with this picture. “Oh, she has a sister, has she?” he said eagerly.

“A mere child,” Lady Dalrymple sniffed. “Wilful and wild. Lady Agatha can do nothing with her, and there is no money for a governess. I daresay Miss Vaughn will make someone an adequate governess herself, when the mother goes, and she is forced to earn her bread. When the time comes, I shall be more than happy to find her a place in some respectable household.”

“I am glad to hear that the Vaughns are not without friends,” Benedict said dryly.

Lady Dalrymple had forgotten that Sir Benedict had been present in the Pump Room when she had denied knowing the Vaughns. She remembered now, horribly, but there was nothing she could do about it. “I consider it my Christian duty to help the Miss Vaughns of the world,” she said sweepingly. “It is especially hard on the pretty ones, I think. Their vanity leads them so quickly down the wrong path, if they have no money.”

Millicent could no longer contain her spite. “They are so poor, my lord, that they have
no credit
in any of the shops in town. Miss Vaughn is obliged to pay in cash wherever she goes! You mentioned Milsom Street, my lord. Well, it was very shocking for me to see Miss Vaughn actually
pay
for her ribbons. I have not seen her since; I daresay she is too ashamed to see me.”

“I don’t care if a girl has twenty thousand pounds or twenty,” said Ludham. “I’m a simple man. I like Miss Vaughn, and I want to dance with her. I am not mercenary.”

“No!” cried Lady Dalrymple. “Nor am I! What I cannot bear is being deceived!”

A slight frown appeared in Ludham’s eyes. He was not the cleverest of men, and, this being the case, he had been deceived often enough to know that he disliked it as much as Lady Dalrymple did. “Deceived, madam? In what way were you deceived?”

“The Heiress of Castle Argent, they called her in Dublin!” Lady Dalrymple complained bitterly. “Anyone would think she was fabulously wealthy the way they talk about her over there. Anyone would think she was the Queen of Ireland.”