Honoria and the Family Obligation Read online

  Mama frowned her down, not pleased that Serena’s liveliness had led her to speak before the formalities were performed. ‘Be that as it may, might I introduce you now? Mr Allison, Mr Scribster, my younger daughter Serena. Honoria you already know.’

  The gentlemen bowed slightly and the ladies curtsied. As she rose, Honoria met the gaze of the phantom Mr Scribster, animated for once by an expression of surprise. She felt her lip curl slightly and he looked away. The pressure off her a little, she amazed herself by saying, ‘How was your journey, gentlemen? I trust it was not too fatiguing.’

  Mr Allison replied, looking through her, ‘Thank you, no. It was without event.’ His voice was dry and colourless, very unlike his gentle attempts to get her to talk on the other occasions when they had met.

  ‘And how do you like our Yorkshire countryside, sir?’ asked her papa.

  ‘Very well, sir. My cousin, Lord Royston, has a place but ten miles from here. I am well acquainted with it.’

  ‘That accounts for your being at the Harrogate Assembly!’ declared Lady Fenton in a tone that disclosed she had been ruminating on the little incident.

  Mr Allison merely inclined his head.

  After a few more stilted observations, Mama invited the gentlemen to see their bed chambers. Mr Allison expressed his intention to have a rest before he dressed for dinner and the party dispersed.

  ‘Not you, Serena. To the Yellow Salon. Now.’

  Honoria and Serena exchanged glances, following their mama.

  ‘I do apologise for my outburst, Mama,’ said Serena. ‘I just wasn’t expecting to know Honoria’s Mr Allison.’

  Honoria frowned.

  Lady Cynthia gave her famously probing regard.

  ‘When Lady Hayes took me to the Assembly, I suppose I danced too much and the strings on my slipper came undone and it came off. Someone kindly retrieved it and that someone was Honoria’s Mr Allison.’

  ‘He’s not my Mr All-’

  ‘Is that the whole tale, young lady?’ interrupted their mama with the basilisk eye still on her younger offspring. ‘For it does not seem enough to account for Mr Allison’s altered manner. He was all charm before you girls arrived and a trifle - reserved afterwards.’ Her eye brooked no contradiction or her understatement. ‘You did not indulge in some hoydenish behaviour such as to give him a disgust of the connection?’

  ‘Mother,’ declared Serena, ‘I’m shocked.’

  She curtsied and turned out of the room with dignity, Honoria following. Lady Cynthia rolled her eyes.

  Walking up the stairs, Honoria whispered. ‘Do pray tell.’

  ‘Well, it was all as I told Mama. Only, I left the middle bit out.’

  At that moment, Mr Scribster entered his friend’s bedchamber. Allison was thrown down on the bed, boots still on, in an almost theatrical attitude of despair. He sat up drawing his hands through his hair.

  ‘Gus, you’ve got to get me out of here.’

  ‘What on earth?’ Never having seen his friend less than in control, Scribster was at a loss.

  Allison bent forward with his head in his hands and laughed shortly. ‘It is a short and ridiculous story, but right now I just wish to get out of here and I cannot seem to think-’ He ran his hands through his usually immaculate hair.

  His friend was more concerned than he appeared ‘Nothing easier, I’ll go to the stables with a letter addressed to you that Belcher can deliver to the house. He’ll still be with the horses - the butler won’t have seen him. Emergency in London - must depart.’

  ‘Brilliant! I knew I must have kept you around for some reason, it certainly isn’t to lighten my mood.’ The feeble joke was an attempt at a more usual manner.

  Scribster’s lips twitched, ‘We Scots wear our misery without disguise. It is the honest way.’ He saw Allison’s face lighten and was relieved. ‘Will you not tell me your ridiculous story?’

  ‘On the way. First find Belcher. Wait!’ He folded over a piece of paper from the small desk in his chamber and found a wafer to seal it with. He dashed off his name ‘Mr. Rowley Lascaux Allison’.

  Scribster moved quickly to the servants’ stairs at the end of the corridor. He dashed down looking less like a corpse at every step, had anyone been there to see it.

  Benedict Fenton could find no good excuse for Rufus’ fall - not one he could explain to Genevieve Horton. Well, Lady Sumner, now. He had seen her ride across the hill in the old way, her ancient brown habit and boots, her mouse-coloured hair escaping from the perfectly simple flat hat and letting the wind tie it in knots. His heart had lifted and he rode towards his old playmate, pushing Rufus when his sure feet tried to turn a little to avoid the rabbit hole. He’d ridden over to see her when the servant’s gossip had let him know she was here. It had given his morning ride a direction, and a pleasant one. Genevieve was the closest of the Hortons to his family. She had spent more time in their easy going home than at Ottershaw. He’d seen her briefly in London, but it wasn’t the same as on familiar ground.

  But now, because of his fall, she was berating him as of old. It was the work of an ‘absolute cluncher’, as Genevieve told him. She sent Ned, her groom, back to fetch some help and he soon found himself on the sofa in the nursery, where she and her sisters had once swapped secrets with Honoria and Serena and allowed him to stay and be mocked or made use of as the young ladies desired.

  They were alone now, apart from the old nurse Curtis, who had tended the three sisters, (Veronica, Genevieve and Rosalind) since birth until they had all left the Manor, each to marry after a single season.

  His own mama had been surprised at this success, for the Horton girls were not handsome, as everyone held that his sisters were. But they had birth and good portions, and Genevieve’s sister Veronica was heir to Ottershaw, since there were no male heirs. Genevieve was almost two years his senior, with a ‘distinguished’ nose, as Rosalind, her youngest and sweetest sister, called it, but that her father referred to as a beak. She looked down it at him now. ‘Let’s see if there is anything broken at that shoulder,’ she said.

  He was holding the right arm with his left when suddenly her probing arms made him squeal. Before he had time to protest she had pulled and rotated the arm, and he found only a dull ache instead of burning pain. ‘Jenny!’ he protested.

  She grinned, but something made it go wrong. ‘Lady Sumner to you, you miscreant.’ She put her hand up to straighten her thatch of hair and put it beneath the pins that were supposed to hold it in place and he thought – is she nervous? Jenny, the fearless rider to hounds, the scourge of all male pretenders to courage in the saddle. Nervous of what? Of him? She had cuffed him more than once in their youth, usually for shying at a fence (he was ten, she was twelve and taller) or for playing pranks on his sisters. He wanted her to cuff him now, not look as strange as she did. The nervous fingers moved from her hair to the jabot and ruff at the top of her habit, and she pulled at it as if it was unbearably tight.

  He saw discolouration of her skin there and was amused. ‘You, Lady Sumner, have been injured yourself. What was it,’ he teased, ‘another rabbit hole? Or did you finally meet a fence too big for you?’

  Genevieve’s hands clutched at her throat in a gesture he had only seen in a booth theatre production at Harrogate Fair. She looked aghast for a moment, then her hands dropped to her sides. ‘No fence you could clear that I could not – even though you’ve grown less spindly since I saw you last.’ It was said with an assumption of her old manner. ‘Bind the ankle tight, Curtis. Mr Benedict has a nasty sprain.’ She strode from the room, no doubt to make for the stables, as his sister Serena did whenever she was put out of temper.

  Curtis came with some linen torn into strips and began to bind Benedict’s ankle in a business-like, but unusually silent manner. She had bound other such wounds in his childhood, he knew her well, and saw that her silence tried to hide some trouble. Despite himself, Benedict asked, ‘What is it, Curtis? What’s wrong?’

  She looked up
from her labours and looked into his serious, honest eyes. ‘It’s bad, Mr Benedict. As bad as can be.’

  He left in the cob as soon as he could, denying himself the dinner that the Squire punctiliously, but unenthusiastically, offered him. Curtis had sworn him to secrecy (about the secret he did not know) by putting her finger across her plump lips. He felt burdened with the weight of it, as he seldom had been in his rather comfortable, hedonistic young life.

  The groom was evidently ignorant as to cause when Benedict asked him casually about the length of Lady Sumner’s visit.

  ‘I think it be a while, Mr Fenton, sir. For the master do say we should get the horses ready for the next public day which is a month off. “Make it a good job, Ned” he says to me, “or Lady Sumner will have at you.” Mayhap Lord Sumner will join her soon.’

  Benedict Fenton sat silently for the rest of the journey. He had no notion what to do, but his whole instinct told him he must do something. He had met Sumner once at the wedding and once again at a club in London. He strove to remember him and could not, rather like Honoria with her beau. Sumner was medium height, medium colouring, talked too much. He seemed a bore, and that was all. Now Benedict remembered he played deep that night at the Faro table, and he strove to see it as a sinister sign. But many people played deep and he didn’t hold it against the others.

  He’d seen Genevieve in a green ball gown and her hair held tight in an unbecoming style wearing a wreath of flowers that seemed to accentuate the red at the tip of her long nose. She looked stiff and uncomfortable and Benedict had thought, amusedly, that she would much rather be in the stables. He’d meant to ask her to dance, and tease her about her new love of finery, but his friends had taken him to the card room and somehow he’d forgotten his childhood friend and her coronet of dead flowers. He remembered now how quite alone she had been, and how uncomfortable.

  What he was imagining was not what he could ask her. To her he was a silly boy. And if she confirmed the dark suspicions, what then? Nothing at all to be done.

  He and Father were somewhat at outs at the moment. A little matter of London debts. He had gambled away his allowance and failed to pay his tailor and so on. Everyone did it – but his father, usually so good-natured, had cut up strong about it. But he must talk to Papa, he could think of no one else so straightforward and true before whom he could lay this problem.

  ‘The bit I did not wish Mama to bother herself about,’ Serena’s eyes were very merry with mischief as she said this, ‘was that during my dance with Captain Redmond, I agreed to take the air in the gardens for a moment.’

  ‘Serena!’

  ‘I know, but Lady Hayes was in the card room and it seemed harmless. It was very hot inside.’ There was a pause. ‘Captain Redmond wanted rather more than the air, however – and he’s forty if he’s a day, I daresay – so I had to run off to the gardens. I lost my slipper on the way and hid behind a hedge. Mr Allison found my slipper and returned it, and escorted me to the doors. He was kind. Thankfully, the set hadn’t finished and her ladyship had failed to notice my absence. And so I joined her, said I was fatigued, and we went home.’

  That she guessed there was still more to this story, Honoria’s intelligent eyebrow let Serena know, but the younger girl was saved by a summons to the stables, issued by a disapproving Macleod, the butler.

  ‘Why Jenkins needs bother you when he has trouble with the horses is beyond me, Miss. Can’t he do what he’s paid for?’ But Serena had haunted the stable since she was a slip of a thing and the former groom, Woodward, had recognised her passion and encouraged it. When his eyes were failing and Mr Fenton had employed Jenkins to help him, the old man had shunned the help of his replacement and confided all his renowned remedies for poultices and balms to his young Miss Serena. And on no account would Serena divulge them. Papa might not let her at the horses so frequently otherwise.

  ‘Whatever has happened?’

  ‘Mr Benedict drove over to Ottershaw, and his horse stumbled on a rabbit hole.’

  ‘Idiotic,’ said Serena.

  ‘Is Dickie alright?’ asked Honoria.

  ‘I believe so, Miss. The Squire’s groom brought over the horse and a message that he has a sprained ankle and will be sent home in the cob after dinner.’

  ‘Serves him right!’ declared his unsympathetic sister. ‘Fancy falling into a rabbit-hole. Rufus might be injured-’ Serena headed for the door.

  ‘Serena, delay a moment,’ said Honoria, ‘at least change your shoes.’

  It was the work of a moment to cast off the satin, beribboned slippers for her sturdier walking boots in half jean, and while Serena laced them, she affected nonchalance at Honoria’s probing. ‘Did you have much conversation with Mr Allison after he had given back your shoe?’

  Serena affected to think about this, then smiled. ‘After he gave back the shoe? Well, hardly any at all.’

  Honoria knew enough of that smile to suspect it. ‘Serena!’ but her sister had danced away. ‘Your dress!’ said Honoria to the door.

  In the end, Serena delayed too long in the stables to assure herself of Rufus' recovery, and had only just become cognisant of the time. Papa had a heavy appetite and liked to be punctual at his meat. Especially since Mama had decreed that with their fashionable visitors they must delay dinner by at least an hour. Still country hours but more genteel than five of the clock, which was their wont.

  She hurtled in at the side door and pulled up her skirts to take the stairs two at a time.

  'No blue slippers,' said a dull voice.

  She perceived Mr Allison on the landing, staring down at her tightly laced boots. Conscious of her harum-scarum appearance, Serena dropped her skirts and said conspiratorially, 'I am shockingly late to change for dinner, sir. I was in the stables checking on a horse that was injured due the most ridiculous accident. Never mind, but please sir, say nothing to my father, I was expressly forbid to be a hoyden.'

  Despite himself, Allison grinned. ‘And are you?'

  Serena considered, 'I'm afraid that I am. I seem to be constantly considering my own opinion before others’. And then I act on it, which is the definition of hoydenish behaviour, my mother says. It leads me into many scrapes.'

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘How ungallant of you. As though I should have known Captain Redmond was so lacking in gentlemanly virtues.’

  ‘But I’m pretty sure your mama would have told you never to leave the ballroom with only a gentleman for company.’

  ‘But it was so hot and I thought no harm ... Captain Redmond was so old.’

  Redmond, Allison knew, was but seven years older than he. He bristled, but adopted a mock-severe tone. ‘And your opinion was unfounded. Experience guided hers - which is why young ladies should listen to their mamas.’

  ‘And not be so hoydenish? Thank you Mr Allison, I shall remember this advice from my elder and depart chastened.' She swept a deep curtsy and darted past him to continue her ascent of the stairs. She turned to say, over her shoulder, 'At least I would if you were not such a fabulist ... I have a good mind to tell my sister why you remembered the blue slipper so well.'

  He had been grinning, but this last comment swept it from his face. 'Can you tell your sister and brother how sorry I am that I will not meet them at dinner? I have been called away on urgent business and am just going to inform your papa.'

  Serena stopped. 'Really?' she said, ‘I hope it is nothing too distressing? '

  'No. But it demands my urgent attention.'

  'I should not have asked. I am too impertinent, Mama says. Only, I do not like to see people in distress and not acknowledge them.' She held out a frank hand. 'Goodbye Mr Allison, I do hope you have a pleasant drive back to town.'

  He looked up at her, then her hand left his and she ran upstairs, in the most cheerful manner possible. He stood, stunned, and then remembered his mission. He went downstairs to find his host.

  The upshot of this was his departure within the half hour.

/>   Scribster sat with Allison for miles of silence whilst the carriage rumbled its way through the countryside. At mile seven he asked, 'Drat it man...?'

  'You remember Lady Carlisle's Ball?'

  'Where you broke the hearts of several young debutantes - stay that - several match-making mamas, by dancing for the first time that season? With lucky Miss Fenton?'

  ‘The same. Did you wonder why I danced?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘I danced with the wrong sister.’

  ‘Hmm. The mystery of the blue slippers is solved.’

  ‘One blue slipper ...’

  ‘The sisters are very much alike, shouldn’t think there was much to split between them. Quite a natural mix-up. You like dark-haired girls with kittenish mouths, it seems. Why are you treating it as such a tragedy?’

  His friend sat up, eyes wide. ‘Weren’t you listening? I’ve all but offered for the wrong sister.’

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be much between them in looks. What’s the difference?’ intoned Scribster with a shrug. ‘One of them can be as likely to make you miserably leg-shackled as the other.’

  Allison threw himself back into the padded squabs with a passion. ‘What on earth are you doing here, you dark-hearted villain? Why do I keep you for my monkey?’

  Scribster stuck his hands deep into his pockets and leaned back, long legs stretched diagonally across the seats. ‘If there is something to pull them apart, you’ll have to explain it to me. I’m at a loss. Tell me the riveting tale of the blue slipper …’

  Escaping from the deadly dull Assembly where he had been cajoled into escorting his maiden aunts, Miss Arabella and Miss Hildegarde, Allison had sought the fresh air of the terrace. A couple emerged from the French doors and he instinctively sought shelter behind a pillar, so as not to disturb their tête-a-tête. He saw the shock of frizzy hair and the military bearing of Fanshaw Redmond, Captain in the 4th Hussars, with whom he shared membership of a number of London clubs. Allison determined to walk in the gardens as soon as the couple were occupied enough not to hear him leave. Which, knowing Redmond’s reputation, would be soon.