Rules for Being a Mistress Read online

  Lady Dalrymple said frostily, “Miss Vaughn? I do not know a Miss Vaughn.”

  Mr. King was startled. “But—but I had thought your ladyship and Lady Agatha Vaughn were the dearest of friends!”

  “Oh, those Vaughns,” her ladyship sniffed. “We were obliged to stay with them in Ireland last summer, when I turned my ankle and could not move for a month. Unfortunately, the poor, desperate creatures followed us here, Mr. King. I am sorry to hear that Miss Vaughn has been so unprincipled as to drop my name. She means to advance herself in society, I collect.”

  Mr. King was distressed. “That is most unfortunate, my lady. Lord Ludham has begged me to present him to Miss Vaughn as a desirable partner.”

  Lady Dalrymple became shrill. “Miss Vaughn is not a fit partner for Lord Ludham or anyone else! Miss Vaughn is a penniless Irish upstart. I would not do his lordship the disservice of presenting him to such a person. Millicent has twenty thousand pounds, and she is quite as handsome as Miss Vaughn.”

  Benedict suddenly smelled a strong odor of tobacco and perfume. In the next moment, the Honorable Mr. Roger Fitzwilliam was bearing down on them. Lady Dalrymple suddenly remembered that she needed to change a book in Meyler’s Library. Snapping her fingers for her footman, she departed, dragging Millicent with her.

  “Mr. Fitzwilliam is a younger son,” she explained to her child when they were safely away. “We are not quite desperate just yet, I think. We have a little money left.”

  “There goes Miss Carteret and her twenty thousand pounds,” Mr. Fitzwilliam said wistfully. “She’s a bit long in the tooth to be turning her nose up at you, Sir Benedict.”

  “Excuse me,” Benedict said coldly, and walked away.

  Fitzwilliam fell into step with him. “You’re welcome to Miss Carteret,” he said generously, “for I have found something better. Lady Serena Calverstock is no longer young, but she’s a damned fine female all the same. I don’t mind mutton, if there’s no lamb to be had. King has promised to present me at the cotillion tomorrow. You do not dance the cotillion, I collect?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” said Benedict, bristling. “I am not an invalid.”

  Fitzwilliam frowned. “You wouldn’t poach, would you? I saw Lady Serena first. She’s ripe for the plucking, too! Now that her sister, Lady Redfylde, is dead, Serena can no longer live with her brother-in-law, you know. She has been cast out into the cold, cruel world.”

  Benedict snorted. “Lady Serena is perfectly able to keep her own house. And it would hardly be proper for her to live with Lord Redfylde now that he is a widower.”

  “You know her ladyship?” Fitzwilliam said jealously.

  “She was my sister’s matron of honor. I have known her for years. And she is possessed of a pretty independence. If she marries, it will not be in desperation, Mr. Fitzwilliam.”

  “Setting up house is a most tedious undertaking for a single lady,” Fitzwilliam argued. “Even a wealthy woman will resent having to spend her own money on necessities when she never had to before. The more she spends on food and rent, the less there is for clothes and jewels and carriages. I doubt Lady Serena has ever had to pay a butcher’s bill in all her life. And tradesmen always do cheat a woman, if they can. Depend on it: right now Lady Serena is feeling all the disadvantages of spinsterhood.”

  Benedict looked at Fitzwilliam thoughtfully.

  “It would be remiss of me not to pay my respects,” he said.

  Although she was a near-total invalid, Lady Agatha Vaughn still took interest in society when she felt up to it. Today she felt up to it, and, as she was eating a meager breakfast of biscuits and beef tea, her eldest daughter dutifully read the society columns to her. Cosy was continually amazed by how many people her mother still knew, even though she had been out of society for decades.

  “Did you say Sir Benedict Wayborn, my dear?”

  Cosy blanched. Her mother had been a Wayborn before her marriage. Now, as it turns out, the devil who had propositioned her in the kitchen was a Wayborn, too. “He’s not one of your brothers, is he, ma’am?” she asked anxiously. How nasty it would be if he turned out to be my uncle, she thought.

  But, fortunately, Lady Agatha had no brother by that name.

  Cosy sighed with relief.

  “I wonder! Could he be one of the Surrey Wayborns?” Lady Agatha mused. “How long does he mean to stay in Bath? Is he ill? Is he a knight or a baronet? Is he married?”

  “It doesn’t say, Mother. Probably he’s no relation to us at all.”

  Lady Agatha finished her tea. “I think I will be well enough to get up tomorrow.”

  When Lady Agatha felt well enough to get up, she would put on her auburn wig and paint her face with white lead. She had been badly scarred by smallpox as a child, and she never allowed anyone but her family and her maid, Nora, to see her without her face on, as she put it. She had no idea that the deadly poison was slowly killing her.

  “Perhaps Lady Dalrymple will visit us again.”

  Cosy silently cursed Lady Dalrymple. It had been Lady Dalrymple who had first put the idea of coming to Bath into Lady Agatha’s head. Then the old witch had dropped her mother like a hot potato when she found out the Vaughns had lost all their money. The woman, and her son, and her daughter, had spent three months with the Vaughns in Ireland, eating them out of house and home, but now, apparently, they couldn’t be bothered to maintain the “friendship.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, turning over to the personal advertisements. She had placed an advertisement in the paper a week ago herself, in the hopes of earning a little money by giving piano lessons, but there had been no response. Yesterday, she had finally sold the beautiful Erard pianoforte she had dragged, at great expense, all the way from Ireland, in order to pay the chemist for her mother’s medications. She had hoped the sale would fetch enough for her to buy her mother a Bath-chair, but that had not been the case. Today was the last day that the fruitless, yet not inexpensive, advertisement would run. It would be the height of irony if today’s paper contained a response, and she dearly needed a laugh.

  There was no response today either, but, halfway down the page, an interesting item caught her eye. “Sizeable reward,” she read aloud. “For the return of a gentleman’s property. No questions asked.” A watch and a ring were described in detail. The ring she was certain of instantly, but she had to go down to the kitchen and take the watch out of the man’s valise to be sure. Opening it, she saw the inscription: “To my son, B. R. W. Tempus Fugit.”

  She had no idea what “Tempus Fugit” meant, if anything, but that would not prevent her from claiming the sizeable reward. How sizeable? she wondered greedily. Twenty pounds would be enough to buy a Bath-chair secondhand. A hundred pounds, and she could put her sister back in that snooty English school. A hundred pounds was a sum that took her breath away.

  Ajax Jackson walked in just as she was pocketing the watch and the ring.

  “There’s a reward offered!” She showed him the newspaper, forgetting in her excitement that he could not read. “Sizeable, it says. I think I’ll go over and collect it. There’s his direction. Number Six, Camden Place. Right across the street. I’ll be back in a flash with the cash.”

  Giddy with excitement, she put on her bonnet and ran out of the house. Pausing in the park between Upper and Lower Camden, she pulled the layers of her veil over her face. She would have to disguise her voice, too, she decided. Her Irish accent might give her away to the servants. Fortunately, her mother was English; she could do a fair imitation of a hoity-toity English lady. She went confidently up the steps, and rang the bell.

  The door opened, and a portly man of middle years stood before her. He was elegantly dressed in knee breeches and buckled shoes. His head looked like an egg with a face drawn on it. She guessed he was the butler. Pickering would have been insulted. He was not a butler. He was a gentleman’s gentleman.

  “Mrs. Price?” he whispered, looking both ways down the street. Distracted by his furtive manne
r, Cosy looked up and down the street, too, but saw no one. Apparently satisfied, the servant pulled her inside and closed the door. “In here, Mrs. Price, if you please.”

  Of course, she ought to have corrected the man’s mistake at once, but his manner was so strange that curiosity got the better of her. Who was Mrs. Price? And why would a married lady be visiting Sir Benedict’s butler in the middle of the day? Or maybe she was visiting Sir Benedict himself. A married woman!

  That man is a menace, she thought.

  Pickering put her in the study.

  A generous fire crackled in the handsome fireplace of carved marble, drawing her to it. She warmed her hands and looked around. The beveled glass doors of the bookshelves gleamed as if teams of slaves had been polishing them all night. The walls were paneled in green damask. A huge desk of carved walnut, for heavy thinkers only, dominated one end of the room. Grouped at the fireside were a sofa, two chairs, and an ottoman, all upholstered in a green and gold striped brocade. The closed curtains on the two tall windows matched the upholstery. It was a man’s room, and she felt like an interloper.

  Then again, interloping was a good way to get to know someone.

  She strolled to the desk, but there were no incriminating letters to Mrs. Price left out on the blotter, just a bill from the wine merchant. The man had paid sixty pounds for his port, and a hundred pounds for a case of brandy! The rest of the desk was taken up by a display of classical marbles and bronzes, a veritable Pantheon of gods and goddesses. And a big box of chased silver. Sea nymphs writhed on the lid, and the key was in the lock, just tempting her to open it.

  Twenty pounds, she realized, would be nothing to the man who lived here. Not if he was in the habit of paying out a thousand pounds to this girl and that. A thousand pounds! Now, that would be sizeable. With a thousand pounds, she wouldn’t have to worry about money for years.

  “Don’t touch that!” Pickering cried angrily.

  Bustling over to her, he slapped her hand away. She yelped in rage.

  “Where is Sir Benedict?” she demanded. “I have private business with him.”

  Taking out his handkerchief, he began to polish the ornaments on the desk.

  “My master,” he said coolly, “has entrusted me with the task of making the appointment. I can tell you precisely what sort of woman he desires you to send.”

  Behind her veil, Cosy’s eyebrows touched her hairline. “Your master, Sir Benedict Wayborn, wants me, Mrs. Price, to send him a woman?” she repeated carefully.

  “Yes, of course, a woman,” Pickering snapped. “What are you implying?”

  “Nothing,” she said quickly. “Please go on! You were saying?”

  “My master desires you to send an Irish girl; tall, slender, with perfect skin, red hair, and green eyes. He wants her to sing to him in Italian, but, between you and me, my master doesn’t speak Italian, so, really, she could just improvise. He won’t know the difference.” He stopped, peered at her through the layers of her veil. “Aren’t you going to write any of this down?”

  “I have an excellent memory,” she assured him in a clipped English falsetto. “Are you quite sure he wants red hair? It’s been my experience that gentlemen prefer blondes.”

  Pickering drew himself up to his full height. “If my master has a lech for an Irish girl with red hair, who are you to question his taste? You forget yourself, Mrs. Price.”

  “Sorry,” she said quickly. “I didn’t mean to forget myself.”

  “You almost made me forget about the breasts,” he whined. “Sir Benedict prefers a small, high bosom.”

  “Oh, he does, does he?” she said tartly. “Anything else?”

  “I should warn you not to send a squeamish young woman. My master’s right arm was amputated some years ago. He doesn’t like people to feel sorry for him, of course, but an expression of shock and horror would scarcely bolster his confidence. Other than that, he is a perfectly healthy specimen, I assure you. A little shy, perhaps.”

  “Shy!”

  Pickering sighed. “I’ll be frank with you, Mrs. Price. Sir Benedict’s loins are in a dreadful state. If my master doesn’t bed a woman soon, I fear he might explode. Of course, it’s my fault completely. For years, I have drawn his baths, darned his stockings, boiled his shirts, pressed his suits, and starched his collars, but I never once thought to get him a woman.”

  “You were busy,” she said charitably. “Stockings don’t darn themselves, you know.”

  “How soon can you get the girl?” he asked eagerly.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” said the imposter. “In the meantime, I understand that ice baths can be most efficacious in cooling an overheated body. Or you could try putting saltpeter in his food. They use it in the Army when the men get a little too randy for their own good.”

  Cosy left the interview with a feeling of accomplishment. As she went down the front steps, she saw a veiled woman coming up the street. Her suspicion that this was the real Mrs. Price was borne out almost at once as the other woman walked up to the gate.

  The two veiled ladies looked at each other angrily.

  “Mrs. Price?” Cosy said coldly and imperiously.

  “Who wants to know?”

  Cosy threw back her veil. Her green eyes glittered dangerously. “I am Lady Wayborn,” she said with cool dignity. “If you ever come near my husband again, I will tear out your liver and feed it to my dogs. I will laugh while you die, and I will dance on your grave. Are we clear, Mrs. Price?”

  The other woman gasped, sucking in her veil. “Yes, Lady Wayborn,” she said meekly.

  Lady Matlock no longer lived with her husband. Having provided her lord and master with two healthy sons as well as one superfluous daughter, the countess was now free to enjoy the ill health she had always complained about. Deeply engrossed in the pursuit of Parisian actresses, Lord Matlock had offered no resistance when his lady removed to Bath.

  Lady Rose, their only daughter, had been brought up in the country by a governess, then brought out in Town by an obliging aunt. The return of Rose to her mother’s bosom had forced the invalid to make a remarkable recovery, but it was very tiring to be well again. Society expected so much of one when one was well.

  “Are you or are you not pregnant?” Lady Matlock snarled as she neared the end of a long, uncomfortable interview with Rose. She was no closer to understanding Lord Westlands’s odd behavior toward her daughter than she had been the day before, and her delicate nerves were completely frayed. I am too young, she raged inside, to have a grown-up daughter. “If you are increasing, he will have to marry you. We will make him marry you.”

  Rose was curled up in the window seat, scornful and sullen. Her eyes were red from crying, but she was all cried out now. “I am not increasing,” she howled.

  “Then you will have to marry someone else,” said her parent, exasperated. “You can’t stay here. I’m too ill.” Opening her daughter’s wardrobe, Lady Matlock began pulling out the gowns Rose’s maid had so carefully put away the day before. “And no wonder!” she exclaimed in disgust. “You will never catch a husband dressed so modest. I was practically naked when I met your father. Fardle! Fardle!”

  Rose’s maid, who had been banished to the privy closet for the mother-daughter interview, reentered the room. “Yes, my lady?”

  “Here is a shocking piece of intelligence for you, Fardle,” said her ladyship. “Men like looking at bosoms! Lower the bodices of the ballgowns by three inches, and the day dresses by two inches. That ought to do the trick.” She looked angrily at her daughter. “I expect you to try, Rose. For my sake. You will find little competition here. There is a Miss Vaughn that all the men are in love with, but she’s poor, and half-Irish, so I do not take their love for her seriously. Better to be rich than pretty, I always say, and you, my dear, are both!”

  “I should like to meet her,” Rose said eagerly.

  “Who? Miss Vaughn? What on earth for?”

  “She is Lord Wayborn’s niec
e, Mama. That makes her Westlands’s cousin.”

  “Then, for all we know, she is the reason Westlands jilted you,” snapped Lady Matlock. “Though, I daresay, if she is poor, Lord Wayborn would never approve the match.”

  “Westlands did not jilt me,” Rose protested for the hundredth time. “There was never any understanding between us, Mama. We are friends, that is all.”

  “Men and women cannot be friends. For one thing, their parts don’t match. Aye, me!” Exhausted by her exertions, Lady Matlock sank down into a chair.

  “Couldn’t I stay here with you, Mama?” Rose begged. “I could help look after you. I could bring you your hartshorn as well as any nurse. I need not go to balls. I need not marry.”

  Lady Matlock rallied. “My daughter? A nurse? No, indeed! You are the daughter of an earl. Your duty is to make us all proud, and marry well. Honestly, Rose, with this ungrateful attitude, I am tempted to marry you off to the first gentleman who asks for you!”

  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.