Rules for Being a Mistress Page 33

  But Cosy had foregone all the gowns Lady Serena had given her and was making do with the ugly green dress she had worn ages ago to Serena’s card party. She sat down with her mother and refused to dance with anyone. She had to be there, but nothing could induce her to enjoy herself. And she was in no mood for a new gown.

  Allie had her dance with Lord Westlands. She would have preferred to waltz with him outside in the fragrant air, beneath the moon and the stars, like a proper heroine, but Lady Agatha was too cold to venture out, and it was a spectacle her mother would wish with all her heart to see. To Allie it was a dream come true. When he returned her to her mother, she wanted to cry.

  Westlands could not help but notice that Cosima was despondent. He thought it was because she was in love with him. “It will not be long now,” he whispered to her.

  Cosima was watching the dancers. Radiant in a gown of lilac satin, embellished with glittering arabesques of jet, Lady Serena floated by in the arms of her cousin. They danced beautifully together, like a pair of angels. “No,” she agreed. She fully expected Serena to marry Lord Ludham. Everyone did now. He was so attentive.

  Westlands gave her shoulder a comforting squeeze.

  “Aren’t you going to dance with Cosy?” Allie demanded.

  “If I do not dance with my fiancée at once,” he told her with a quick smile, “I fear she will become jealous and marry someone else.”

  Toward the end of dinner, Cosima was asked to play. She took her place obediently at the pianoforte and played the light-hearted Mozart concerto that was on the stand in front of her.

  The mint sorbet had just been removed when Fletcher, Lady Matlock’s butler, descended to the dining room and announced Lord Oranmore in his stentorian voice.

  Cosima’s fingers froze on the keys. Had she heard that right, or was it a hallucination? Slowly, she turned her head to look.

  “Who?” cried Lady Dalrymple, dropping her spoon and fumbling for her quizzing glass.

  “Must be the new one,” Lady Matlock remarked to Mr. Carteret. “How very good of him to come to Bath to pay his respects to me!”

  “There’s nothing new about him,” Mr. Carteret remarked, looking at the new arrival with a critical eye. “Fifty, if he’s a day.”

  Lady Serena suddenly stood up and fainted. Lord Ludham was almost too surprised to catch her.

  “Ben!” shrieked Miss Allegra, getting to him in the quickest way, which meant scooting under the dining table and out the other side.

  Cosima remained motionless on the piano bench. Benedict looked gaunt in his black clothes. He was sunburnt. His lustrous black hair had been cut down to an inch, and what remained was no longer black, but heavily dappled with silver. He was one of those unfortunate blue-muzzled men who must be shaved twice a day to keep them human. He needed a shave now very badly. His eyes were icy and gray as he looked around the room.

  To her, he looked utterly beautiful.

  “You look so old!” cried Allie.

  “Good God,” murmured Lord Westlands, coming forward to shake his hand. “Good God! It is you. We thought you were dead, sir—er—my lord. What a pleasure it is to see you.”

  “Congratulations, my lord,” Benedict replied, “on your engagement.”

  Westlands flushed with embarrassment. “Everyone has been so upset about you—your—” he broke off in embarrassment. “We thought a little ball might cheer everyone up.”

  Benedict’s face gave away nothing of what he might be feeling. Cosima tried to emulate his implacable self-possession as he finally approached her. She was shaking from head to foot.

  She began to stammer like an idiot.

  He bowed to her. “Please, don’t allow my presence to disturb you any more than my absence, Miss Vaughn,” he said dryly. “Please, finish your Mozart.”

  Somehow she did not faint. Somehow she resisted the urge to throw her arms around him and cover his hard, angry face with kisses. Somehow she did not burst into tears. Somehow she kept her countenance. “I won’t,” she said faintly.

  “You missed a key change in the middle of the adagio,” he said.

  “You came back from the dead to tell me that?” Her voice shook.

  “Play!” he urged as she sat staring at him. “You obviously need the practice.”

  After a moment, she obeyed.

  By this time, Lord Ludham had gotten Serena into an upright position and had persuaded her to take a little wine. Now he approached Lord Oranmore like an ambassador. “Serena has been devastated, my lord, as I am sure you can imagine.”

  “I fear that my imagination is not as strong as your lordship’s.”

  “Sir!” Ludham protested. “Serena has suffered a great deal. A little kindness from you would not go amiss. She has believed you to be dead for weeks.”

  Serena smiled at him weakly. She was trying to look on the bright side. He was now the Marquess of Oranmore, and, it was rumored, he had been left a vast fortune. “My lord,” she said. “I can not tell you how h-happy I am to see you.”

  “Clearly,” he replied. “I have arranged for us to be married next week.”

  Serena quivered. “So soon, my lord?”

  “My recent experiences have taught me that life is short and precious,” he explained. “This time next week, we shall be in Oranmore, my dear.”

  “Oranmore!” she cried. “You don’t mean—! You do not intend to live in Ireland?”

  “Of course,” he replied. “I am Lord Oranmore. I must live amongst my people, such as they are. We’ll have to stay in one of the tenant’s cottages while the house is rebuilt, of course. I’m afraid the rebels burnt the original structure to the ground in Ninety-eight.”

  “Rebels!” Serena squeaked, turning white. “But, surely, my lord, with your vast fortune, we need not actually live in Ireland!”

  He cupped his ear as if he had difficulty hearing. “Vast fortune?”

  “Are you not rich?” she cried.

  “I suppose I am,” he replied, “by Irish standards. You will not be obliged to eat cabbage more than twice a week, I should think.”

  “What about the fortune you inherited from your aunt?” she demanded.

  He glanced at Miss Vaughn who was murdering Mozart while listening feverishly to the conversation. “I seem to have misplaced it,” he said dryly.

  “Never mind all that,” cried Miss Allegra Vaughn. “Where have you been all this time? What have you been doing? And why are you not dead?”

  “And so, to make a long story short,” said Benedict, now seated at the dining table to the right of Lady Matlock, “he fired his pistol at me, point blank.”

  Seated on the arm of his chair, Allie gasped in horror.

  Benedict paused to take a sip of his claret. By this time, Cosima had abandoned the piano and was sitting on the arm of her mother’s chair. She caught her breath as she imagined the bullet of hot iron piercing his flesh.

  “Where were you shot, Cousin Ben?” Allie demanded. “Have you got a scar?”

  “He aimed for my heart, Miss Allegra, but it was a misfire.”

  “’Twas a miracle, then!” Allie breathed.

  “It was not a miracle, Miss Allegra,” he said impatiently. “A good assassin is conscientious. Thady wasn’t. He didn’t keep his powder dry, that’s all. When his weapon misfired, I stood up and kicked him in the face. The pistol flew into the carriage and landed on the seat next to me.”

  “Good on you,” said Allie, favorably impressed.

  “Don’t interrupt,” Benedict said sternly. “Master Thady became very civil after that. He confessed all. At first, I could not believe that my grandmother could be involved in such a dastardly scheme.”

  “Lady Oranmore!” For a moment, Lady Dalrymple looked as if she meant to dash right out and find the nearest newspaper office, but then she seemed to think better of it. Who, and what, were not enough for newspapermen, as she knew from bitter experience. The loathsome creatures always wanted the when, where, and why,
too, before they paid up.

  Benedict continued. “Thady swore that, if he returned to Dublin empty-handed, my grandmother would—quote—‘do him in.’ I am not a vindictive man, I hope. I took pity on him. I gave him my watch and my ring to take back to Dublin in the hopes that my grandmother would be convinced he had done the job. I wanted to see what the greedy old harridan would do next.”

  Cosima chewed at her bottom lip savagely.

  “Thady went back to Dublin to tell Lady Oranmore of my unfortunate demise. The old girl was so upset that she instantly set about marrying off my first cousin Nuala to my second cousin, Mr. Power, who, in addition to being my second cousin, is also my heir. Poor boy. He wept when I sent him and his mother packing.”

  “I hope you got back to Dublin in time to stop the wedding!” said Cosima. “That girl is not sixteen!”

  “Yes, of course,” he said impatiently. “Nuala is my ward, and she can not marry without my permission.”

  Cosima looked down at her hands. “So you never saw Castle Argent? You went back to Dublin, and that was the end of it?”

  “I would have gotten your harp for you, Cosy,” said Westlands. “Come hell or high water. Oh! Begging your pardon, ladies. I did not mean to use such strong language.”

  “I did go back to Dublin,” said Benedict, “but not right away. The assassination attempt had merely hardened my resolve to complete my errand, Miss Vaughn. I was very eager to get my hands on your…harp. I had no intention of going back to Dublin with nothing.”

  He took a sip of wine.

  “I walked on to the charming little village of Lucan. There I found a friendly tavern where none but the landlord spoke English—or so I was told. Perhaps they simply did not wish to speak to me. I don’t know. But I spent the night there, and woke up next to a man with a fish; neither had been in the bed when I laid down, but I daresay that was my fault. Fortunately, the salmon was well-wrapped in what appeared to be a lady’s shawl, but I don’t criticize.

  “I explained to the landlord that I was trying to get to Ballyvaugn on the Grand Canal. The landlord winked at me in a friendly manner and said that I had the look of a man on important government business. Naturally, I was flattered. Not supposing that my true errand, that of fetching a young lady’s harp, would be of any interest to this earthy tradesman, I allowed him to think what he liked. He said he would have me there in a ‘shake,’ which, in Ireland, is usually, but not always, less than a fortnight. He gave me some very good directions to another charming little village from whence I found the canal. I got on the passenger boat without any difficulty, but rather surprisingly, my traveling companions were all Roman Catholic priests.”

  “What! All of them?” said Cosima, startled.

  “Yes; all. Two dozen holy men in long black dresses and me.”

  “It’s called a cassock, you know!”

  “They were so kind. They even shared their lunches with me. I suppose I must have looked hungry to them. After lunch, we continued on our way in prayerful silence, down the length of the beautiful, leafy, green canal, until finally, my endeavors were rewarded. I saw a splendid stone building rising in the distance to my right. Charmed by this vision, I asked the young seminarian sitting next to me if we had reached Castle Argent. He looked at me as if I were mad and said, ‘’Tis Patrick’s College.’”

  Cosima gasped. “You went the wrong way entirely! You’re in Maynooth!”

  “Indeed! I had gone north to the Royal Canal, when I ought to have gone south to the Grand Canal. But I daresay the landlord made an honest mistake. Father Moynihan kindly suggested that I go back to Lucan, and walk to Adamstown from there.”

  “Right,” said Miss Vaughn.

  “I explained that I was rather in a hurry, had important business, et cetera, and Father Traynor, who knew the area better, suggested that I take the shortcut to Straffan. He said it might save me as much as an hour.”

  “Is there a road from Maynooth to Straffan?” Cosima said, puzzled.

  Benedict summoned the waiter for more wine. “No,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

  “You walked through the bog?” Cosima asked, wide-eyed. “In your gorgeous clothes?”

  Benedict waited while the waiter poured his wine, then calmly held it to the light to examine its color. “The phenomenon,” he said slowly, “known as a moving bog is not as rare as one might think. It is caused, or so I am told, by significant amounts of water accumulating between the lighter, porous material of the bog and the hard clay that is usually to be found underneath. Water, as I’m sure you know, Miss Allegra, seeks its own level. As it does so, it carries the bog along with it, and, in this case, it carried me as well. So Father Traynor’s shortcut really did save me an hour.”

  Miss Vaughn laughed. “I think Lord Oranmore is telling us a bit of a Munchausen story.”

  Benedict ignored this impertinent remark. “So there I was, covered in flotsam, and, for all I know, jetsam, too, in what I supposed to be Straffan.”

  “Was it not Straffan?” Cosima asked.

  “Why not?” he replied. “If a miserable string of sod huts wants to call itself Straffan who am I to object? I explained to the lovely turf-cutters plying their trade in Straffan that Father Traynor of St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, had sent me to them, and that I had important business at Castle Argent. They could not have been nicer to me. One of them took me for a very educational tour of the nearby waterways in his flat-bottomed boat. At the end of the tour, he struck me on the back of the head with his—one wants to use the correct word here—loy. The Irish do not call a spade a spade,” he explained. “They call it a loy, but, believe me, it does the work of a spade.”

  “Good heavens!” said Lady Dalrymple.

  “I’m sure it was an accident,” Benedict said mildly. “I woke up in a clump of coarse yellow grass growing, I know not how, on a stretch of otherwise barren heath. My friend had vanished with his loy. No doubt, he had gone to get help, and, had I been thinking clearly, I might have waited for him. But I was not thinking clearly. I got up and walked, using the sun to navigate, in an easterly direction. Needless to say, by this time, I no longer had the look of a man on important government business. In fact, I had been stripped of my coat, my breeches, and my boots, and, of course, my wallet. I can only suppose that the man with the loy must have taken them to convince the skeptical authorities of my existence. I must say, I miss my boots.”

  “What a good thing,” said Miss Vaughn, “that you gave your watch and your ring to Thady for safekeeping.”

  “Quite. My grandmother tells me she sent them to my fiancée. Serena?”

  Serena looked at him blankly. “What? I haven’t seen them,” she stammered.

  Cosima opened her mouth to speak, and then closed it again.

  Benedict mistook this false start for a yawn. “But I can see that I am boring my company,” he said grimly. “Suffice it to say that, once I no longer resembled a man on important government business, the local population couldn’t have been nicer, and their command of the English language was at least as good as that of any Yorkshireman. I walked to the nearest town and was conveyed to Ballyvaughn like a king on a cart piled with peat bricks.”

  “So you made it there all right?” Cosima said anxiously.

  He smiled thinly. “I did. I walked up the lane to the gates of your demesne, Miss Vaughn, a scant twenty-four hours after I left Dublin. Unfortunately, I no longer had your handkerchief to show your wolfhound, having carelessly left it in the pocket of my coat, along with my wallet.”

  “That’s quite all right,” she assured him. “I’ve a lot of handkerchiefs. As for Dolly, she wouldn’t hurt a fly. She’s big as a horse, but gentle as a lamb.”

  “That is just what I told her as she came bounding down the lane to meet me,” Benedict replied. “Coming at me at full speed as she was, she had only to put her paws on my shoulders, and down I went. I must have been very tired because I went to sleep immediately. I woke up som
etime the next day, having been taken up to the house in my sleep by another Thady—”

  “That’d be our Thady,” Allie said knowledgeably. “Thady Jackson.”

  “Let us call him the ‘good Thady,’ Miss Allegra, to distinguish him from the ‘bad Thady’ who tried to kill me.”

  “No wonder your hair turned white,” said Lord Westlands. “Personally, I would have thrashed ‘bad Thady’ within an inch of his life and driven him ahead of me all the way back to Dublin.”

  “But then,” said Rose, “Lord Oranmore would not have gotten Miss Vaughn’s harp.”

  “So you did get Miss Vaughn’s harp, after all,” said her mother. “Well done, you!”

  “Oh, God!” Cosy said guiltily. “I should have told you. My harp isn’t at Castle Argent!”

  “No,” said Benedict. “It isn’t.”

  “You didn’t get the harp?” Lady Matlock pouted. “You mean you went all that way, only to come back empty-handed?”

  Cosima bristled. “None of this would have happened if he’d taken the Grand Canal like I told him to.”

  “You are quite right, Miss Vaughn,” he drawled in reply. “I should have trusted you.”

  “This whole thing is ridiculous!” declared Lord Westlands. “I would have gone back to Ballyvaughn with a troop of soldiers. And if your harp was not there, Cosy, I would have found it, wherever it was. I would not have given up so easily.”

  “Ah, to be young again,” said Benedict.

  After dinner, it pleased Lord Oranmore to dance with his fiancée. Serena listened wide-eyed as he laid out his plans for his future wife. Afterward, he was waylaid by Miss Allegra Vaughn, but he coldly refused to dance with her.

  “You are far too young to be at a ball, Miss Allegra,” Benedict told the child sternly. “Even a private ball. You should be at home in bed.”

  He went off to dance with another young lady. In fact, as far as Cosima could tell, he danced with all the young ladies present, including Rose Fitzwilliam. He even danced the boulangere with Miss Carteret. Only then did he trouble himself to find Miss Vaughn sitting with her mother.