Sweet and Twenty (12 page)

“Good!”
he said heartily. “We’ll quarrel as much as you like after this election is over, but for the present getting Tony elected is a big-enough problem for me. I don’t want to have to worry about having hurt your feelings, too. Have I? You seem awfully quiet and have been noticeably bad-tempered of late.”

“No
,
no. My feelings are not so sensitive as that.”

“I think they are, but I didn’t mean to rip up at you. Perhaps I’m more sensitive myself than this cowhide veneer I wear would suggest. Miss Ratchett does not misunderstand the matter, you know. I am not making up to her in any way that could possibly suggest to her a serious attachment. It is hardly even a flirtation.”

Lillian could accept that this was true, at least practically speaking, for Miss Ratchett had already said that Mr. Hudson had no intention of remaining in town. But why Hudson should be telling her was not at all clear. “I didn’t accuse you of leading her on,”
she said, hardly knowing what reply to make him, but clearly he was waiting for some exculpation,

“Then we are still friends?”

“Yes, certainly.”
She was becoming more lost by the moment.

“Good. How about a ray of sunlight before I go, then? A smile—just a little one?”
he asked, smiling himself. She laughed in confusion. “That’s better. You have a lovely smile, you know. Notice that I don’t suggest you use it to buy us votes. And especially don’t feel required to use it on Alistair!”

After this enchanting piece of flirtation, he turned and walked straight over to Miss Ratchett, to spend a near-fifteen minutes with her in apparent delight that gave a strong hint of romance, whatever he might say to the contrary. And he had not spent five minutes with herself. Then he would go home and change his clothing . . . to dine with the Ratchetts!

He received no more of Lillian’s sunlight that afternoon, and after he had left his speech and behavior were subjected to a scrutiny that would have astonished him had he been aware of it. Lillian vehemently deemed him an utterly treacherous man. He would say or do anything to gain his ends, and if he thought he would receive no more quarrels from her, he was badly mistaken.

The harvest ball, ostensibly arranged by Basingstoke and his friends, was much discussed and looked forward to in Crockett. It was to be something different from any party ever thrown before. Some genteel families assumed that the price of a guinea a couple would keep out the riff-raff, but it was not the organizers’
wish that anyone with a vote be excluded, so they gave away more tickets than they sold. The dinner preceding the ball, however, was limited by the size of the hall to one hundred persons, and it promised to be a more decorous do than the dancing afterward.

On the arranged evening, Fellows and Hudson called for the ladies of New Moon and the six proceeded to the Assembly Hall, where the one hundred of Crockett society were gathering, the gentlemen in their black jackets and pantaloons, the costume chosen by the whipper-in who did not wish to put the local worthies to the expense of satin breeches they would not be likely to require again in their lives.

The ladies, however, had no limits placed on how grand an ensemble they might devise. There were satins, silks and laces enough to equal the greatest ton party in London. Nine-tenths of the jewels might be paste and the pearls coated with fish scales, but in the candlelight they sparkled and glowed as well as genuine jewels, and gave the wearers as much pleasure.

Fellows had Sara on one arm and her mother on the other, while Hudson escorted Lillian and her Aunt Martha. Alistair and his whipper-in were present, for no overt political overtones were to be acknowledged. In fact Hudson had given him two tickets, for it seemed ungentlemanly to force them to contribute a guinea to the Whig cause. These matters were understood to a nicety between them.

Alistair accosted Fellows’s party as soon as they entered and made himself pleasant to them all. It was only Sara who showed any joy at this circumstance. She detached herself from Fellows with such unexpected alacrity that no one had time to pull her back into the fold.

“Has anyone else been throwing potatoes at you, Mr. Alistair?”
she asked eagerly. Having the keenest interest in the campaign, about the only fact she had discovered for a week was that people threw potatoes at Mr. Alistair, and she thought it very mean of them.

“No, no, I am not so unpopular as that,”
he assured her.

“Indeed you are not! I’m sure you must be the most popular gentleman in the parish.”

“I hope I am the most popular in the constituency, in any case.”

“There too. I am sure no one else looks half so well in evening clothes.”

The lady was so beautiful and so admiring that Alistair was much of a mind to remain at her side, leaving Reising alone to politick for the party. All through the two glasses of sherry preceding the meal, she inveighed against people who threw potatoes, till finally Mr. Hudson went after her himself and tucked her arm in his, to lead her to the table.

Mr. Fellows was too well occupied gossiping with Allingham and Basingstoke to notice her defection, or to think he was wasting his own time preaching to the converted. Indeed he was not preaching at all, but hearing with dismay from Mr. Basingstoke that he had been thrown over by his flirt, Lady Marie Sinclair, with whom he had long been waging a campaign.

“She has given me my
congé,
Mr. Fellows,”
Basingstoke said. “I lay the fault at your door. It was you and Hudson barging in at Ashley Hall that aroused Sir John’s suspicions. I don’t believe he had tumbled to it at all till you went there.”

“I wonder Hudson did it, for he is generally pretty surefooted in these matters,”
Fellows said.

“Well, he ain’t infallible, I suppose.”

With
no notion what the word meant, and no dictionary to aid him, Fellows replied only obliquely. “The devil you say, Mr. Basingstoke. Well, unlucky in love, lucky in war, what?”

Mr. Basingstoke did not immediately grasp the import of words, but Fellows explained, “The election, I mean. Lucky in the election.”

“Oh, aye, the election—there was the
casus belli
between us.”

Fellows hung on his every unintelligible word, hoping subsequent talk would reveal their obscurity to him. “Aye, the cause of the war between us was politics,”
Basingstoke went on. “Sir John, her good man, is a Tory, and I am
persona non grata
at Ashley Hall.”

Persona non grata
was a phrase well-known to Fellows, from being so often one himself, but he did not quite grasp the other foreign phrase and was eager to do so. “So you and Lady Marie are at
casus belli,
are you?”
he ventured.

“Politics—there’s your
casus belli,
but I daresay after the campaign is over she’ll let me back in.
Amor omnia vincit,
you know.”

“Just what I say myself, old chap.”
What a clever devil he was, to be sure. Always a new twist to him. “So it’s au revoir to Lady Marie till after the
casus belli,
I take it?”
Fellows asked, feeling that he had at last translated the phrase accurately.

“Au revoir and adieu, auf Wiedersehen and adios.”

“By Jove!”
Fellows gasped, marveling at this long-headed wizard with the power of so many tongues.

Lillian and Martha were presented to this font of wisdom and were as struck by his words as Fellows, but in the opposite way. They were aghast to see that the “long-headed Basingstoke”
was none other than a foolish, dumpy squire, cast in much the same mold as Fellows himself and respected only because he had got to university and peppered his speech with foreign phrases.

At dinner, Alistair sat across the table from Sara, and they spent so much time looking and smiling at each other that neither overheard a word of Mr. Fellows’s multilingual table-talk, in which
casus belli’s
and
sine qua non’s
jostled with
caveat emptor’s
in terrible confusion.

Mr. Hudson supposed there might possibly have been an hour in his career that equaled this one for sheer horror, but he could not put a finger on it. Between Sara cozying up to the Tory—and she was so lovely that she was much regarded despite her stupidity—and Mr. Fellows making an ass of himself, he was on tenterhooks from soup till sweet. Fellows inveighed against every morsel of food he ate, and he consumed a good many tasty morsels. He spoke in a loud voice down the table to Mr. Basingstoke, letting the locals know he had tasted better fish and fowl elsewhere, in London to be precise. And every bite of it made and donated by his voters’
wives! A silent glare from Hudson reminded him of his duty and he added punctiliously, “Of course, it’s very fine for such bad food.”

Some minor irritation was added to Mr. Hudson’s vexation by the fact that Miss Watters was on her high ropes for some reason, and after he had been at such pains to talk her down from them, too. He might have had some small pleasure from Tony’s million faux pas if she had shared a smile with him, but she was cool to the point of freezing.

Sara sat on his right and received the greater part of his attention to distract her from Mr. Alistair, and on those few occasions when he dared to direct a look or a word to Lillian, she looked at him as though he were a cup or a saucer, or better a dirty dish.

Lillian too thought it an abominable meal, with Mr. Hudson showing Sara the distinction of taking her to table and honoring her with nine-tenths of his time. This, coming on top of his
à
suivie
flirtation with Miss Ratchett, in whose direction he was still smiling at intervals during the meal, galled her mightily. To add to her annoyance, she couldn’t get Mr. Alistair to so much as look at her in order to make Hudson jealous. When at last the meal was over and she stood with Sara waiting for a partner, Hudson walked purposefully toward them. Her heart lifted despite his treachery. At least he was going to dance with her first!

“Will you get a hand on Fellows?”
he asked her, and then turned to Sara to ask her to stand up with himself.

She was through with hopping through hoops for him! She wouldn’t have stood up with Fellows if he’d gone down on his knees and begged her. When Mr. Alistair, also coming for Sara but having her whisked off under his nose, asked her to stand up with him, she accepted with the greatest good will and exerted herself to the utmost to keep him well entertained, that Mr. Hudson might see she was not a despicable partner. She noticed with anger that Miss Ratchett, in an expensive, gorgeous, and much too fancy rose silk gown, was the next young lady to have Mr. Hudson’s company. She herself had only the minimal pleasure of standing up with Mr. Basingstoke and hearing his polyglot talk, one half of which she could not understand, and two halves of which was not worth listening to in any case.

The evening wore on, becoming noisier and more crowded as those with free tickets came in. Lillian was sure Martha would whisk them off home and she had not had one dance with Mr. Hudson, nor said more than a word to him. But Martha had secured the company of Lord Allingham and was not about to part with a lord merely because every vulgar hedgebird in town was rubbing elbows with her nieces. A title was a dearly beloved thing to Martha; she was busy substantiating details of Mr. Hudson’s pending title and estates and trying to decide which of her nieces it was he merited.

Lillian’s evening continued steadily downhill. She had to be jerked around the hall by Mr. Fellows for a waltz, and then was made to feel worse by seeing Mr. Hudson sink from Miss Ratchett to a brace of women who had all the earmarks of ladies of pleasure. Their garish, low-cut gowns, their loud laughter and their immodest ogling of every man in the room left little doubt as to their calling. She was pretty sure it was Hudson who had brought them in, along with his flash culls. Who else could be so low? She was rapidly reaching the conclusion she should ask her aunt to take them home.

It was 11:30, nearing intermission, when she glanced up to see Mr. Hudson walking toward her group, with Fellows in tow. She turned resolutely away to ask Martha on the spot if they could go home.

“Go home? My dear, we’ll wait just a little. Here is Mr. Fellows come to dance with you.”
As Hudson was favoring Sara this evening, Fellows was falling to Lillian’s lot.

“Well, Miss Watters, it looks like I am stuck to stand up and jig it with you again,”
Fellows told her. “At least you are light-footed—I’ll say that for you thin girls—you ain’t heavy to steer around the floor.”

“A pity we can’t say the same for you!”
she retaliated, her anger suddenly too great to suppress. And he had to say it in front of Mr. Hudson too!

“By Jove, you’ve a sharp tongue in your head! But you skinny girls are all alike. Sour as vinegar, every one of you.”

“You haven’t danced with me, Mr. Fellows,”
the artless Sara proclaimed, and Mr. Fellows was encouraged to turn his suave charms in her direction.

“He’s in a bad skin because I’ve been giving him a rare raking-down,”
Hudson apologized to Miss Watters. “Was there ever such a night at this? I thought dinner would never be over, between
casus belli
and tainted fowl.”

The words were fine, but Lillian could not quite forget that the appalling dinner had been over for several hours, and this was the first decent conversation she had had with him. “Bad-tempered, skinny girls have added nothing to the night, I daresay,”
she replied tartly.

“Nonsense, you’re a fine figure of a woman,”
he answered rather unthinkingly, only wanting to placate her.

“Thank you very much.”
She was accustomed to hear herself complimented occasionally as a “pretty girl,”
and to have graduated overnight to a “fine figure of a woman”
implied an advanced maturity with which she was not ready, in her greenish years, to come to terms.

“Did I say something gauche? I have been too much with the candidate. I mean it as a compliment.”