Felicity and the Damaged Reputation: A witty, sweet Regency Romance Read online

  Felicity and the Damaged Reputation

  by

  Alicia Cameron

  For Stéphanie, Michael, Sacha and Dann. I borrowed Lord Sumner’s dialogue from Dann Mercier. Merci, Dann!

  © Alicia Cameron 2018. The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 1

  Felicity goes to London

  There was no doubt about it, Felicity Oldfield’s grand London adventure had commenced. First, she had been abducted by a peer of the realm on the journey, released, then in less than a few hours she had arrived in London for the post of governess, been cast off without a sou, walked the streets of London alone, been pursued by a young gentleman, met a man of bad character who might have led her onto a path of ruination, saved by a rich and fashionable couple in their velvet-lined coach and was even now being taken to her mad Aunt Ellingham where she expected to be treated appallingly - maybe even sent to the kitchen to live a life of servitude. Like every heroine she had ever read about, Felicity had suffered. How wonderfully exciting! Not all of it was wonderful, of course, but then one expects some discomfort when one had chosen to live rather than take the path of safety.

  In the county where she had erstwhile resided, Felicity was considered the most pitiful of all the Oldfield sisters. Upon the death of her papa, the large draughty mansion that had been her home was no more so, but the twins, Amity and Charity, being three years her senior, had been sent to their mad Aunt Ellingham the season before, and Amity had had the great good fortune to become engaged. Well, strictly speaking Amity’s engagement to the Reverend Mr Cedric Barnabas, was not considered great good fortune until the unexpected death of Papa, whose perennial cough turned out to be something more serious than any of the family had thought. This had allowed Mr Lawson, a nephew whom her papa could never mention without revulsion, to inherit all, save twenty pounds a year each. The Reverend Mr Barnabas, as serious as he was round and red-faced, agreed that the twins should not be parted, and agreed to his Dearest’s desire that Charity come to live with them. Their other sister Felicity, a head taller than the twins and still only eighteen, he could not consent to have, since his resources were meagre, he said, and she had the look of one who would eat more than her share of the victuals.

  After Lady Crosswell, of the premier family in the area, had shamed Mr Lawson, Papa’s heir, into writing to offer Felicity a home with him, Felicity realised that she could not stay. She was determined that she should hire herself out as a governess to make her own way in the world. There was a period of grace, while the Lawsons came back from abroad which allowed the sisters to live at Oldfield Castle still, not very amicably. Felicity, even though feeling her father’s absence more than the twins, was adjudged to be too cheerful, and it suited them all if she banished herself to rooms where they were not, excepting, of course, meal times. Then they took the opportunity to remind her of her many failings and to wonder how Mr Lawson would put up with her. When that gentleman arrived, eight months later, along with his miserable little wife, it became clear. One look at that cowed lady gave Felicity her cousin’s character all at once, and she knew she must leave. The twins then turned their remarks to the governess plan: they were very sure that no family might be found to accept such an unaccomplished girl.

  With Mr Lawson’s arrival, Amity’s wedding was quietly achieved, and Felicity stayed for the happy occasion.

  Seeing her sisters settled after the wedding breakfast in the modest two bedroomed cottage, with the wrap around garden that they must learn to tend or starve, Felicity was not inclined to rue her fate. The twins, tiny and neat and identically fitted with brown hair and eyes in self-satisfied little faces, sat on either side of the Vicar, making up between them his number of years and seemed to care for him equally.

  ‘Oh, my dear Reverend Barnabas, let me pour your tea.’ Charity.

  ‘My love, should you care for some bread and butter?’ Amity.

  They twittered almost as one, whilst the round red face between them remained serious and entitled, like a foreign potentate whose slaves did his every command. At least poor Papa used to preface his requests with a charming, if vague, smile which he reprieved when his will was done. Reverend Barnabas deemed such attentions unnecessary.

  As all three regarded Felicity rather pityingly, pleased at their place in the world, and rather despising of hers, she knew she should seem admiring, but she found she could not. The idea of being married to — but no, this was something to be congratulated on, and she did so. Amity smiled, smugly. And Charity, too, looked placidly complacent. As Felicity left, with her carpet bag and one bandbox (tied with grosgrain ribbon) to catch the mail coach to London, they hugged her lightly, pleased to offer her their affectionate sympathy. Felicity accepted theses mild caresses, then looked over Amity’s shoulder as she did so, at her smug husband, and shuddered.

  No, as she sat on the stagecoach, clutching her bag to her (the bandbox attached behind), Felicity knew that she was headed to a new life. London might have been denied her as a debutante, but she was going there to work. Who knew what exciting and romantic adventures a governess might meet? Did they not, in novels, marry their widower master? (Though it was a Mrs Hennessey that had written to her about the position) Or perhaps be tempted by some man into unspoken amour and be ruined forever? Felicity was not quite sure what ruination in the world signified, but it involved meeting a charming older man and later, one’s friends casting one out. She was already cast out from friends by nature of her leaving home, so ruination seemed preferable to life with the Reverend Barnabas or indeed, Mr Lawson, new owner of Papa’s estate.

  The fingers grown white on the handle of her bag, and the paleness of her complexion might suggest rather more fear than she was like to admit, even to herself. If you wanted to clear a fence, you had to throw your heart over it — however afraid you were. So Felicity raised her head a little higher.

  The beginning of her adventure lacked glamour, it was true. She was crushed between a man who smelled of the stables, and a round dame in an enormous straw bonnet who constantly refreshed herself from the contents of a large wicker basket on her knee, and partly on Felicity’s. There were two especially thin children opposite, who looked at every move the fat lady made with hungry eyes. When the woman affected not to notice, Felicity found an apple she’d been keeping for breakfast at the bottom of her carpet bag and bade them share. This caused more commotion than she’d intended, for the younger was disinclined to surrender his treasure to the elder and violence erupted, with the two striplings falling into the foot well and rolling around in a brawl, squashing Felicity’s feet in the process. This was halted, first by Felicity’s expedient of releasing the apple from the little one’s grasp. In the second of shock that this produced, Felicity hardly had the time to react before a thin man accompanying them had caught both heads with one resounding slap. He relieved Felicity of the apple with insouciance and sat eating it with loud noises, making the little boys cry.

  Felicity smiled at them sadly. No doubt their father was teaching them the wages of greed. She looked at the fat woman hopefully, for the children’s sake, but that dame i
gnored the activity and continued to eat — a little cheese which she had wrapped in muslin — with great relish.

  The young girl, whose long limbs were not suited to the crush of the stage coach, stared out of the window as they travelled, her yellow brown eyes watching the world go by. She was wearing her very best clothes, but after seeing the finery that the twins had required for their London Season, she knew that her warm wool pelisse worn over a grey dress was not fashionable. Her bonnet too, was a simple straw, boasting only a blue ribbon and one bunch of artificial cherries. That it framed a charming face she did not know, for no one had ever said so. Her papa, in noting her height, called her the maypole, when he noticed her at all. But indeed, she was merely the height of Lady Crosswell and her daughters, she just seemed tall in her own short family. It was fortunate, she thought now, that her clothes were respectable rather than fashionable — for after all, she was about to lower her station in life. Fashionable clothes would have been unacceptable for a governess.

  Felicity, as her name suggested, could find the sunny side to most circumstances. In a rare moment of attention her papa had remarked that she was well-named, unlike her sisters. Indeed, Amity had a fractious spirit and if Charity had any compassion beyond the normal, Felicity had never encountered it.

  She tuned out the smells and the noises and continued in her London dream. She would seek her adventures there, and surely something more must happen than in the cottage at the edge of a tiny hamlet where her sisters now lived. Or even in Oldfield Manor, with its new, frightful owner. Felicity felt no particular grief in the parting. She had never been close to her sisters. The twins were an entity all to themselves, who had had, at one time, (she’d been told by the kindly cook at her home) their own language, which they had ceased to use after they were perhaps four, since the arrival of Felicity had demanded that they get their attention from the greater world too.

  She imagined them for mornings to come being joined by the Reverend Barnabas, he bending to kiss his wife on the cheek and to bow his head in greeting to her twin. How shocking if one day he bent to kiss Charity and nodded to Amity! Felicity gurgled at the thought. She wondered what would happen to Charity if her twin had children. Where would they put them? And would Charity be well enough without a marriage of her own? Amazingly, Felicity expected so. The unnatural bond of the sisters would be difficult to break save by another Reverend who lived in a duplicate cottage next door. Felicity charitably gave this gentleman more hair and less bulk than Reverend Barnabas, for if not quite feeling affection for Charity, the other twin was at least less unpleasant to her than Amity’s acerbic tongue and strange moods.

  Felicity’s grief for her father and her home was more real. He had been a distant figure, but he had taught her to read and that plus her late mother’s passion for novels, which were still to be found in his library, had led to a rich internal world that she populated with characters more interesting than those around her. It was difficult to think she would never again be tucked behind the curtains of the library, reading a book on the upholstered window seat, with her father in a chair by the fire, perhaps hardly aware of her existence. She had chosen to believe they were linked by a love of books, and that his silence was fellowship of a sort.

  When Felicity had taken the coach to visit her sisters after the wedding, and thus leave Oldfield forever, a small coterie of under-servants, who had no business being there, came to wave at the carriage. The butler, Jenkins, did not have the heart to shoo them away, for he too had a tear in his eye.

  From the time when Felicity, escaping her nanny (who was dealing with her fractious sisters) had toddled into the kitchen, she had been a favourite with them all.

  ‘Ooooh, young miss!’ had said the Betty, the kitchen maid, lifting up the child she had nearly stepped on. Betty was now Mrs Tansy, the cook, the self-same dame who was now dabbing at her eyes, watching as the carriage disappeared, Felicity’s head still straining out the window and her little hand waving.

  ‘Ooooh, Nancy!’ she now said, with a departure from the usual formality, to the housekeeper, Mrs Merryweather. That straight-backed dame had shining eyes, too. ‘Lunnon is so very far! And I’ve heard such terrible ends that young girls can come to there.’

  ‘Nonsense, Betty. Let us go down and take some tea.’ For the housekeeper to offer to take tea in the kitchen, and not in her own room was also a lapse of standards, but Jenkins was not much put out.

  ‘She’s a strong and brave girl, ladies.’ He said now comfortingly. ‘You must not worry on that account.’

  ‘But too beautiful! If she were going for her season as she ought, if the Lord had not seen fit to take her papa, then it would be an asset,’ she sniffed. ‘But out in the world on her own — heaven-knows-what might happen to her.’

  ‘Don’t fuss, now ladies,’ he said, encompassing the two crying maids as well. ‘She has gone to a respectable position.’

  ‘My Miss Felicity, a governess — her who would have made a marriage such as would have made them others jealous.’

  The maids, Mrs Merryweather and the butler all tried to comfort the cook, but they all needed comfort themselves. In the kitchen, there was already gathered the head groom and his young assistant and Jim, the boy who mucked out, hardly higher than the table.

  ‘Is she gone then?’ said Farley, the grizzled old groom.

  The cook’s cries answered.

  Forgetting himself, Jim spoke, ‘She never teased me cos of my lowness to the ground, not onct. Onct, she helped me muck out when I was a bit late, like.’

  Farley cuffed his head. ‘Shouldn’t ha’ done that. Not that ye could stop her. She was a rare one for helping. She nearly ruined Dorian’s coat with the curry comb when she were but a lass. I found her helpin’ in his stable. He were a dangerous horse, but he were gentle with her, somehow.’

  ‘Do you see, Mrs Tansy? The whole world will be gentle with Miss Felicity. It’s her special talent to make us so,’ said Merryweather.

  ‘But she’s too affectionate. How many times did I tell her it was not fitting for a daughter of the house to hug a servant, and cover herself in flour to boot!’

  ‘You couldn’t stop her,’ said Mrs Merryweather, who had busied herself by making the tea, since Lucy the kitchen maid was still in attendance on her cook. She filled the cups ‘She used to find a cloth from somewhere and clean the windows with Sally when she was only five years old.’ She smiled.

  ‘And it took me forever to clean up the horrible marks she made after,’ said Sally fondly, from the other side of Mrs Tansy.

  ‘But you never told her!’ said Mrs Merryweather.

  ‘How could you, when she thought she had done so well?’

  ‘But with him up there paying her no-never-mind and her sisters being such cats to her, she needed to turn to us for some little affection.’

  ‘Now, now, Mrs Tansy,’ said Jenkins a little sternly, ‘we must not chatter about the Family.’

  ‘Well, he’s dead and they’ve all gone so we may say what we like for the present,’ said Mrs Tansy, rousing herself to rebellion, ‘And I say they gave her nothing, poor little mite.’

  Sally said, ‘She always thought her father cared for her. She used to say she had to go and keep him company in the library.’

  ‘When the truth is, if he noticed her at all, it’s more than I can believe.’

  Merryweather, finished distributing the tea, said with a laugh, ‘But she is hardly little these days. A tall girl. And we must trust that we prepared her for her position a little.’

  Cook looked up at the butler. ‘Has she got any funds with her, Mr Jenkins, to tide her on her way? Surely she won’t receive her inheritance until quarter day?’

  ‘That’s not your business,’ said Jenkins, even more severely.

  Cook looked a trifle abashed. Merryweather relented. ‘Indeed, I sewed a sovereign into her coat, so she has some emergency funds.’ The cook breathed.

  Jim said, ‘Cor!’ at the st
ratospheric sum. Farley cuffed him once more. Naturally, Jim was not permitted to sit at the big pine table where the other servants gathered, but Merryweather nudged the plate of tiny rolls towards him and he took one gratefully — and another when her back was turned.

  ‘And where did that coin come from, I wonder?’ said Cook. ‘Not from the nipcheese lawyer, I’ll be bound.’

  ‘It was a sum I happened to have about me,’ said Jenkins, grandly.

  The cook smiled. ‘Like you that was, Mr Jenkins, and I bet she doesn’t know, for she would not have consented to take it.’ She sighed, looking into the fire in an affecting way. ‘I can see her now, sitting on that table, swinging her legs and stealing a little tartlet that I had made for dinner, or maybe just telling me a story from one of the books she was always reading.’

  ‘Or listening to your tales, Mrs Tansy.’

  ‘She did like to hear of life on the farm.’

  ‘She was interested in everything!’

  ‘Ladies, we speak of Miss Felicity as though she were dead, not merely setting off on her new life.’ Mr Jenkins said in a rallying spirit.

  ‘She always rode too fast,’ said Farley. ‘I’m a-worritting she’ll ride too fast.’

  This metaphor was understood by everyone but Jim, but he said nothing.

  ‘God bless her,’ said Merryweather. There were murmurs all around.

  The servants lingered in the kitchen a while more, doleful at the light that had just left the house, before they all rose to continue the preparations for the new Family, the Lawsons.

  ‘I will not!’ Felicity heard the lady’s cry in the inn yard, but it sounded petulant rather than urgent, so she turned her head towards the scene without haste. ‘You there!’ the lady was now saying to someone in the inn doorway, ‘Conduct me to a bed chamber at once!’

  Felicity saw the green velvet pelisse and the high-poked bonnet disappear inside, whilst the gentleman she had been speaking to, a London smart in a well cut riding coat and startlingly shiny topboots, put his crop to his leg in frustration.