Finessing Clarissa (6 page)

‘Now drive on,’ said his master, ‘and stop at the nearest inn and find out where the Earl of Greystone has his residence.’

‘She’s here!’ trilled Effy. Amy jumped to her feet and she and her sister went down to the hall. A very tall girl was standing, blinking owlishly in the lamplight. Beside her stood a fat lady’s maid.

Effy tripped forward, both hands held out in welcome. ‘Greetings, Miss Vevian. I am Miss Effy Tribble and I hope you will be very happy with us.’

Clarissa looked down at the dainty white-haired Effy and felt large and awkward. All her newfound independence deserted her. ‘Glad to meet you,’ she mumbled. She seized Effy’s hand and shook it. Effy let out a yelp of pain. ‘There is no need to crush my hand, Miss Vevian,’ she said.

‘Sorry,’ mumbled Clarissa, shuffling her feet.

A tall woman approached her. ‘And I am Miss Amy,’ she said. Clarissa looked relieved. Amy was almost as tall as she was herself. She was reassuringly harsh and plain. ‘Good evening,’ said Clarissa and dropped into a low curtsy. It was a very low curtsy indeed. Clarissa found she could not rise and sat down suddenly on the floor. The sisters helped her up. ‘You are very tired from your journey, no doubt,’ said Amy, feeling quite maternal. There was something about this tall girl that reminded Amy of herself. ‘Give your bonnet and cloak to your maid. This,’ said Amy, turning to introduce a gaunt, harsh-featured woman who was standing in the shadows of the hall, a little way away, ‘is our maid, Baxter, who will show your maid to her quarters.’

Clarissa followed the sisters up the stairs and into the drawing room.

‘Wine?’ offered Effy.

Clarissa shuddered. ‘No, I thank you.’

‘Tea?’

‘Oh yes, please.’

‘Tell us,’ asked Amy, ‘what happened to your carriage and what has it to do with the Earl of Greystone?’

In a low clear voice, Clarissa recounted her adventures. When she got to the bit about bathing Tom’s forehead with water from the sewer and then setting the carriage alight, Amy could control herself no longer. Her stifled snorts of laughter turned to outright guffaws. Clarissa reddened and Effy said quickly, ‘Pay no heed to my sister. She is not herself.’

But Clarissa started to grin. Amy’s laughter was infectious and soon the whole sorry tale began to strike her as being funnier and funnier. By the time she got to the bit about knocking Mr Epsom down the stairs, Amy was crying with laughter and Effy was rigid with shock.

‘I see we’ll deal famously,’ said Amy at last, wiping her streaming eyes.

‘Yes, quite,’ said Effy repressively. ‘When you have finished your tea, Miss Vevian, I will show you to your room. The hour is late. Have you dined?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

When Clarissa had been seen to her room, Effy returned to the drawing room and looked severely at her sister. ‘There is nothing to laugh at,’ she said.

‘Oh yes, there is,’ hooted Amy. ‘What a card!’

Effy sat down. ‘Listen to me, Amy. I know now why she has been sent to us. She is gauche and clumsy and dangerously so. You must not encourage her by laughing at her. Her schooling must begin tomorrow. Smoking cheroots, indeed! I was never more shocked.’

‘She’s a great girl. Don’t turn her into a simpering miss, Effy. You know what? I
like
her, and what’s more, I bet this earl, Greystone, likes her too. He said he’d come here to settle accounts. Don’t need to do that in person, you know. Could send a draft.’

‘Do you think . . .’ began Effy slowly.

‘Bags of hope there,’ said Amy cheerfully. ‘Besides, we don’t know that she usually goes on like she did on the journey. Parents should have been with her. Stands to reason, she’d be nervous and upset at having to go on such a long journey with only the maid for company.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Effy. ‘But
red hair
. So unfortunate. And she is so very tall.’

‘Better to make the most of her height,’ said Amy shrewdly. ‘She stoops a bit. Get the backboard on her and make her sit up straight. She could look regal.’

‘But did you notice those freckles?’ fretted Effy. ‘Lemon and white of egg might do the trick.’

‘I like freckles,’ said Amy stubbornly.

Effy remembered Mr Haddon kissing Amy’s hand. ‘You like everything about Clarissa,’ she said maliciously ‘because she reminds you of yourself. But I do have to point out that you are still unwed, sister dear.’

‘And all thanks to you,’ said Amy furiously. ‘Who forced me into turning down two whole proposals of marriage?’

‘Not I. It was you who thought Squire Wraxall meant marriage when he was talking about another lady.’

‘You’re such a washed-out little thing,’ said Amy waspishly. ‘You don’t understand women with bottom.’

‘Bottom’ in the Regency meant courage and gallantry. Effy deliberately misunderstood. ‘You can’t talk about women with bottoms,’ she said. ‘You’re as flat as a board, front
and
back.’

‘At least I don’t have to wear a chin-strap every night. You’ve got a neck on you like a vulture.’

Effy began to cry.

‘Oh, dear,’ said Amy, instantly repentant. ‘I say, don’t cry. ‘Member you said there was a necklace you wanted to buy? We could go tomorrow and get it if you like.’

Effy stopped crying and peeped over her handkerchief.

‘Promise?’

‘I promise,’ said Amy cheerfully. Mr Haddon had kissed her hand and looked at her
so
– so Effy could say what she liked from now on!

The Earl of Greystone was feeling quite happy as he drove his half-sister and stepmother home after a visit to a neighbour. Amazingly, Clarissa’s strategy had worked. He had announced that Peregrine would never go to school. To send the boy to Eton would be a waste of time and money, and furthermore, he was too spoilt to be fit company for other boys. Peregrine had tried to hold his breath and was slowly turning purple in the face when his heartless half-brother had walked from the room. By that evening, Angela had been weeping and begging the earl on her knees to let dear Peregrine go to Eton. The poor boy had set his heart on it, and on and on she went, until the earl had finally appeared reluctantly to give his ungracious permission. He privately resolved to raise heaven and earth to get the boy admitted as soon as possible, even if it had to be in the middle of term. Then he had broached the subject of the Grand Tour, quite casually, saying someone or other had suggested it for Tom, but of course Tom was such a stay-at-home it was probably out of the question. Tom defiantly and shrilly had demanded to be allowed to go.

The earl smiled and was wondering how Miss Vevian was faring in London. He looked forward to seeing her again and telling her how her plan had worked.

In a month’s time, with any luck, he would be shot of both boys. It would mean a great deal of travel, first to Eton with Peregrine, and then to Oxford to hire a tutor to travel with Tom. Then he would be free to take Bella to London.

Bella and Angela elected to retire for the night as soon as they got in the door. The earl decided to go to the saloon and sit quietly by the fire and read.

He had just settled himself comfortably with a book in his hand and a glass of wine at his elbow when the house was rent with shriek after shriek. Throwing down his book, he ran out of the room and up the stairs in the direction of the screams.

Bella and Angela were standing together in the passage outside Bella’s room, clutching each other and staring in the open door. Bella opened her mouth to scream again. ‘Stop that!’ commanded the earl and pushed past them.

Bella’s room was a wreck. Drawers hung at a drunken angle, with clothes hanging out of them. The mattress and the pillows on her bed had been sliced open. Her jewel box had been upended, bracelets and necklaces and brooches spilling out onto the floor. Even the upholstered chairs had been sliced open.

‘My room is the same,’ whimpered Angela.

The constable was called and the magistrate. The grounds and the outside of the house were examined, showing that the thief had climbed up the ivy into Bella’s room and had then made his way to Angela’s room through a connecting drawing room. Angela’s room was only half-violated, as if the thief had been alarmed and had made his escape.

The servants were closely questioned but claimed to have neither seen nor heard anything. A footman did say he had been on his way to the bedchambers with baskets of logs when the butler stopped him and told him that the logs had already been taken up. The sound of his approach must have been what had alarmed the burglar.

The earl tried to calm Angela’s hysterics, hitting on the solution at last by telling her she could choose new chairs and refurnish both rooms if she liked. Angela went off happily with Bella to draw plans for the redecoration.

In the busy weeks that followed, the earl kept in touch with the local magistrate to find out if any clue had been found as to the identity of the thief, but each time the magistrate reported that no one strange had been seen in the neighbourhood. What made it all so odd was that nothing of value had been taken and the magistrate suggested the reason might be spite. Perhaps the beautiful Lady Bella had unwittingly spurned some young gentleman at the Bath assemblies and this was his revenge.

The earl replied that Bella was always spurning someone or other but he doubted if any of the Bath Pump Room beaux would go to such lengths.

It took longer than he had expected to get Peregrine into Eton and to find a tutor for Tom and get that gentleman off on his travels. Angela fussed so and insisted that Tom be kitted out with everything necessary for the journey, from a collapsible candlestick to lice-proof drawers.

At last the earl was able to send some of the servants ahead to open up the town house and planned to leave for London the following morning.

They had just finished an early dinner – or rather, the earl considered Angela’s choice of four in the afternoon too early – and the earl had retired to the saloon when the butler announced that Sir Jason Pym was calling.

The earl looked up, startled. He and Sir Jason had been students at Oxford together and he had not clapped eyes on him since then. He remembered him as a shy young man with a stammer.

As Sir Jason walked in, Lord Greystone found it hard to recognize in this Exquisite the nervous undergraduate he had once known. Sir Jason was tall and slim and dressed very expensively. His cravat was perfection, his coat was of Bath superfine worn open over an ornately embroidered waistcoat. The heels of his boots were high and he wore gold spurs. His thin face was painted and his black eyes were sparkling and restless. He wore his hair long and powdered and tied at the nape of his neck with a black ribbon. It was not a style favoured by anyone under fifty, but the earl shrewdly judged that in this case the powdered hair was due to affectation rather than conservatism.

‘What brings you calling so unexpectedly after all these years, Jason?’ he said. ‘Sit down by the fire and tell me about yourself.’

‘I was in the neighbourhood,’ drawled Sir Jason with no trace of his old stammer. ‘Heard you lived here and thought, on impulse, you know, that I would call.’

‘You are more than welcome,’ said the earl. ‘But we leave for London in the morning. I am taking my half-sister to town for the Season.’

At that moment, Angela and Bella entered. The earl introduced them. Both seemed delighted with Sir Jason, who said he was struck all of a heap with the beauty of the ‘sisters’, and Angela tittered and explained she was Bella’s mother, at which Sir Jason cried, ‘Never! It cannot be so.’

The earl reflected that Jason had turned out to be a tiresome fop.

‘Have you any more divine beauties here?’ cried Sir Jason.

‘No, just us,’ simpered Bella, hiding her face behind her fan.

‘Strange. A friend of mine claimed to have met a lady from your family, Crispin. He seemed vastly taken with her. He did not know her name, and when he asked the landlord at a certain posting-house, where this lady had spent the night, the landlord said that you, Crispin, had ordered the room for her and paid her bill.’

The earl frowned and then his face cleared. ‘Oh, that would be the Honourable Clarissa Vevian. She stopped here on her road to London.’ He flashed a warning look at Bella and Angela. He was sure they were dying to gossip about Clarissa who had set her own carriage on fire.

‘Ah yes, a divine goddess, or so I am led to believe,’ said Sir Jason.

‘Nothing out of the common way,’ said Angela waspishly. ‘Great lummox of a girl with the reddest hair you have ever seen.’

‘She is, let me see, Viscount Clarendon’s daughter, is she not?’ asked Sir Jason. ‘I cannot remember where their house is in London.’

‘Clarendon has a house in Bath,’ said the earl. ‘Miss Vevian is living with the . . . in Holles Street.’

For some reason, he did not want to say she was living with the Tribbles. Angela and Bella would then speculate out loud as to why Clarissa had been sent to the Tribbles. And everyone knew the Tribbles only sponsored girls who were a problem.

The conversation moved to other topics. By the time Sir Jason rose to leave, Angela and Bella were completely enchanted with him and the earl was devoutly hoping never to see him again. There was something slimy and oily about Sir Jason that he could not like.

To his dismay, he heard Sir Jason say he, too, would be at the Season and Angela replying that they would be delighted to have his company any time he cared to call.

The earl consoled himself with the thought that he would be glad if Bella married anyone at all and took herself out of his household and – pray God – took her mother with her.