Scandalous Brides: In Scandal in Venice\The Spanish Bride (19 page)

“Well, my lady,” Daisy answered, briskly hanging the black gown up in the wardrobe. “Things can be lively around here, too.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. Lady Haversham’s poodles escaped and tried to eat some of the vicar’s prize hydrangeas a month ago. Ever since then we have heard about nothing but greed and stealing in the Sunday sermons. And the Misses Allan just returned from wintering in Brighton, just bursting with all the gossip they heard there and eager to spread it about. It’s almost Venice, without the art.”

Elizabeth giggled helplessly. “Daisy, you always could lift me from my sulks! How is it you did not marry while I was away?”

“It was like this, my lady—no one asked me.”

“Me, neither.” Elizabeth sighed. “Except for Ottavio Turino, but that does not count. He asks every lady to marry him when he is in his cups. We are better off not married, anyway, believe me.”

It was Daisy’s turn to giggle. “Oh, Lady Elizabeth, what people you met! But what shall you wear to supper? Jenkins says the vicar is coming to dine.”

“Reverend Bridges? Oh, something very wicked I should think. Something to welcome myself home properly. What about that green velvet with the gold lace? And do be sure to tell Jenkins to have plenty of wine on hand.”

“My lady!”

Elizabeth looked back out at the garden, sunset pink now. “I know that everyone here is expecting a scandal now that I have returned; I may as well oblige them. I’ve nothing better to do.”

Two hours later, a new woman from the travel-stained, weary waif emerged to greet the vicar in the Blue Drawing Room. She had missed supper, but had no intention of missing the Vicar altogether.

She had exchanged her modest carriage dress for green velvet and gold lace, which Bianca, in a fit of economizing, had created by modifying the Carnivale costume Elizabeth had worn the night she met Nicholas Hollingsworth. Her hair was swept up from her bared shoulders and held by golden ribbons; a faintly glistening powder had been dusted across the daring décolletage.

In the firelight of the drawing room she almost glittered, like a strange Italian painting dropped into the decorous manor.

She was not the pastel-clad miss Mr. Bridges, the esteemed vicar of Clifton village, remembered from two years ago, who had stood quietly in the corners of assemblies and always seemed to have paint streaks on her hands and clothes. His last view of her, cringing at her betrothal ball, was quite lost in this dashing lady. He gaped, and could scarcely contain his eagerness to rush out and spread the news among his parishioners.

Peter’s lips thinned.

“Mr. Bridges!” Elizabeth cried gaily, holding her ungloved hand, her new sapphire ring sparkling on her ring finger, out to him. “How very long it has been, yet here you are, the same as ever.”

“Lady Elizabeth,” he answered slowly. “I must say you are not the . . . same as ever.”

“Am I not?” Elizabeth laughed merrily, trying to imitate Georgina at her most flirtatious. “It is this gown. I am far too old to don white in the evenings now.” She wagged her finger playfully at the silent Peter. “Why, brother dear, are you not going to offer your sister something to drink? I vow I am still quite parched after that long journey!”

Peter bowed shortly. “There is ratafia, if you like, Elizabeth. Or I could ring for tea.”

“Oh, pooh, no! Is that not brandy I see in your glass?”

“I hardly think ...”

“I will have brandy. Thank you.”

Her voice was also new, steely with determination under a smile. Even Peter took heed of the warning. He bowed again, and went to fetch her a brandy.

Elizabeth settled herself on a chaise by the fire, and smiled up at the vicar. “Now, Mr. Bridges, do sit beside me and tell me all the local news. I am quite perishing to hear if Miss Gray ever married her London viscount, and if Lady Haversham’s daughters are all settled.”

She whipped open her gold lace fan, and peered at the elderly vicar over its edge.

Lady Elizabeth Everdean had, quite momentously and dramatically, come home.

Chapter Seventeen

E
lizabeth watched in the mirror as Daisy looped a long strand of pearls through her elaborate coiffure. She had remembered Derbyshire as quite lacking in social amenities, but in the weeks she had been back they had attended several assemblies, dinners, musicales, and card parties. Many of the local families were in residence before departing for the London Season, and it was considered quite a social coup to have the odd and faintly scandalous Lady Elizabeth at their gatherings.

And Elizabeth had the distinct sense that Peter was trying, with a grim determination, to cheer her up by dragging her hither and yon, from tea party to dance without a pause in between.

In her more dreamy schoolgirl days, when she had imagined an exciting Continental life, she would never have thought the fantastical, golden Venice would seem a solid reality and England a bizarre dream. Yet it had happened.

Clifton Manor, a beautiful house filled with fine furnishings, seemed an uncomfortable place, inhabited by the kind of people who should have been familiar but instead seemed to have strange ideas of what proper behavior should be. They were kind to her and always polite, to be sure, but she seemed not to be what they expected of their Lady Elizabeth, and they watched her closely to see what odd thing she would do next. She felt she was always on exhibit, like a tiger in a menagerie.

At night she would sometimes dream of floating free in a gondola, dappled in buttery sunlight while her handsome gondolier flirted with her in fluid Italian. She dreamed of rich wine on her tongue, almond cakes at Florian’s, the scent of incense in the dim splendor of San Marco.

She would wake from these dreams sobbing with homesickness. The old stone church in the village, while lovely, couldn’t rival the almost-pagan splendor of a Byzantine cathedral. The servants looked quite scandalized when she drank more than a thimbleful of sherry before dinner, or wore one of her Italian gowns to a party.

Not that her life at Clifton Manor was bad in any way. The servants, despite their curiosity, were most happy to have a lady in residence again, even if she did nothing that was expected. Daisy adored the stories of the odd Venetian maid Bianca, and the narrow gray-pink house she had tended to so poorly. Daisy even posed for her own portrait, after an initial hesitation, and made over all Elizabeth’s old pastel frocks by lowering the necklines and removing the excess furbelows. She even delighted in bringing in Georgina’s letters on the morning trays of chocolate and toast.

Two footmen had cleaned out her old studio on the third floor, and Georgina had sent on all her works in progress. Elizabeth dutifully set up her easel, and even ground some pigments, but somehow she could not paint. The brushes would just hang from her fingers, and the colors and images that used to flood her mind and make her forget all else refused to come to her. Her mind was a blank. Aside from the portrait of Daisy, she had not finished one work.

Even her appetite was gone. Mrs. Brown, the cook, tried to make her “Italian” meals, to no avail.

Elizabeth could not do anything but think of Nicholas, and the life she had left behind.

Every day, rain or sun, she would go walking through the fields and woods, striding along aimlessly. She hoped that if she could walk far enough, fast enough, she could leave
him,
the taste of him, the sound of his voice, far behind. She felt almost a physical pain in the pit of her stomach whenever she remembered his pale face revealing his betrayal.

She had loved him truly; indeed, she loved him still. Despite his lies, and the lie they had lived together for so many weeks. He lived in her heart, and he would not easily be dislodged. Even distance did not dim the memories.

One moment she would curse him, and vow that if she ever saw him again she would spit in his face for leaving her to this, for lying to her and then never even writing to her. In the next instant, she would cry at the thought of never seeing his face again. It was like a never-ending “delicate time of the month.”

One night, unable to sleep, Elizabeth built up a fire in her bedroom grate and tried to feed all her sketches of him to the flames. She could not bring herself to do it. Instead, she brought out her hidden bottle of brandy, drank it, and cried until dawn.

All that came from that experiment was a raging headache.

She had grown thinner, paler; she could see that now in the mirror. She knew that she could not go on in this stupid manner forever, but she didn’t know how to stop it. She missed Nicholas; she missed Georgina and all their friends. She hated the fact that Peter set footmen to follow her wherever she went, hated sitting across from him at the dinner table, listening to his cool voice talk to her of inconsequential matters like the weather and the last gathering they had attended.

Most of all, she hated the Elizabeth she had become. The merry girl in Italy, so independent and confident in her abilities, would never have cried such a sea of tears. She would not have been so very indecisive over a mere man. Especially such a man, such a rake.

“Old Nick, indeed,” she murmured, not realizing that she spoke aloud.

“I beg your pardon, my lady?” Daisy said.

“Oh, not a thing. I was merely thinking of a painting I am composing in my mind.”

“Well, that is good that you are thinking of painting again! And what do you think of your hair, my lady?”

Elizabeth dutifully turned her head to examine the elaborate whorls and waves. “Exquisite, as always. You are more the artist than I am, Daisy. I am not so very certain about the gown, though.”

“What is wrong with it, Lady Elizabeth?”

“I loathe white.” She fluffed out the skirt of the silk and tulle gown, a creation left over from her days before she left. “It looks rather silly on a woman of nearly one-and-twenty! If only I had not already worn all my Italian gowns.”

“White or not, it looks well on you, my lady. And you have your lovely Indian shawl to wear with it.”

“Hmm, and quite appropriate for supper and cards at the Havershams’.” Elizabeth dug under the dressing table for her discarded silk slippers. “I have half a mind to plead a megrim and stay home with a good book.”

“I wouldn’t want to do that, my lady. Not tonight, anyway.”

“No? Why not?”

“I hear tell the Havershams have a new houseguest.”

Elizabeth sighed. “Oh, lud! Not another pimply faced nephew, dangling for an heiress?”

“Oh, no, my lady.” Daisy’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I heard that this one is a sculptor. Newly arrived from Italy.”

Elizabeth stood in the doorway of the Havershams’ grand drawing room, surveying the company assembled amidst the overstuffed, overdecorated chinoiserie that Lady Haversham was currently infatuated with. There were the Misses Allan, spinster sisters and arbiters of county morals, dressed in rusty black and surveying everyone through their lorgnettes; the vicar, enjoying a very large glass of fine Madeira; Mr. Taylor, local eligible bachelor and heir to the Viscount Drake, dressed in the pink of London fashion and surrounded by giggling misses.

And conversing with their hostess was the person she sought. Sir Stephen Hampton, her old friend and one-time halfhearted suitor, looking just as she had last seen him in Venice.

He saw her as well, and gave a tiny nod in her direction. Elizabeth waved her white lace fan.

Peter took her arm in a firm grasp. “Shall we go in, my dear?”

Elizabeth did not look at him. “I suppose, since we are already here and have no hope of retreat.”

The room hushed just a bit as they made their entrance, as it always did. Local society had grown accustomed to seeing the “odd” Lady Elizabeth, who had vanished from their midst so mysteriously two years ago, in company, but they were still wary of her. It was almost as if they expected her to sing bawdy songs at the pianoforte, or dance barefoot across their ballrooms.

She merely smiled and nodded as Peter escorted her to their hostess, and the hum of conversation slowly resumed.

“Ah, Lord Clifton, Lady Elizabeth,” Lady Haversham cried, the feathers on her puce-and-lavender turban bobbing. “You must meet the newest addition to our little society, Sir Stephen Hampton. He is quite a renowned sculptor, and has only recently returned from Italy.”

Peter raised a golden brow in Elizabeth’s direction. “Italy? Indeed?”

“Yes,” Lady Haversham replied. “I thought Lady Elizabeth would be particularly interested in meeting him. She was always so very
artistic.”

“Indeed I am very happy to meet him,” answered Elizabeth. She held out her gloved hand for Stephen to bow over. “Your fame has quite preceded you, Sir Stephen. Even in the wilds of Cornwall, where I have lately lived.”

“How do you do, Lady Elizabeth?” Stephen gave her hand the merest squeeze.

“Sir Stephen is on his way to begin a commission for the Duke of Ponsonby, for his late duchess’s memorial,” Lady Haversham interjected. “And speaking of marble, Lord Clifton, I do want to ask your opinion of the ruin I am thinking of having constructed in our park....”

Lady Haversham led Peter away, leaving Elizabeth providentially alone with Stephen.

“Would you care for some refreshment, Lady Elizabeth?” he inquired politely.

“Oh, yes, thank you, Sir Stephen.”

They did not speak again until they found a secluded alcove behind the refreshment table.

Elizabeth threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, Stephen, you dear old thing! I have never in my life been so very happy to see anyone.”

His arms tightened briefly. “Are you glad to see me, Elizabeth?”

“Terribly! I have missed you all so much.” She sat down on the velvet bench, and smiled up at him. “Tell me, how is everyone, and what are you doing in Derbyshire?”

“Everyone is well. Georgina sent this on to you.” He reached into his coat and withdrew a thick letter. “She has closed up your house in Venice, and I suspect you will see her here soon enough.”

“Oh, no! I have told her she must not think of coming here and leaving her work.”