Honoria Or The Safety 0f The Frying Pan Page 9

“Oh, we will both help you with that later,” Honoria said. “Of course you can come too, Helen.”

  “How am I to vex you if Helen comes?” Frank asked.

  “By directing your sarcasm at me, I should imagine. Why do you wish to make me angry?”

  “I rather like the way your eyes flash – and, as you pointed out yourself, it is a far greater challenge than sending Helen into a pet.”

  “Why then, if you are seeking a challenge, do you not strive to keep her sweet?”

  “Keep her sweet? She has never been sweet in her life!”

  “Then pray try to render her so.”

  “You are both perfectly horrid!” Helen exclaimed. “You are colluding with each other to upset me!”

  “Frank is excessively silly and I do not think you should listen to a word he says; certainly you should not respond,” Honoria said, taking an apple from the bowl and slicing it down the middle.

  Lady Charles took a large draught of her wine and rose from the table. “Please come with me to my room, Helen.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wish it,” her mother replied austerely.

  Helen cast a glance of pure dislike at Frank and followed her mother from the room.

  “There! Mama has succeeded in removing her although I daresay she will be back only too soon,” he observed, reaching across and taking the apple from Honoria’s hands. “Would you like me to peel it for you?”

  “No, thank you. I could perfectly well do it for myself but, since I like the peel better than the flesh, I shall not do it at all.”

  “Ah ha!” he exclaimed. “I have lit, quite by chance, on the best way to vex you: remove your independence! I never met a girl so reluctant to allow anyone to help her.”

  “It is probably on account of being an orphan,” Honoria murmured, deftly removing the core from her apple.

  “Nonsense! You have lived with us ever since you were a few months old; I do not see how you can feel like an orphan.”

  “Nevertheless I do – more and more as I approach my majority and must decide what to do.”

  “Why cannot you go on in the same way as you do now?”

  “Because I shall no longer have a guardian and – while I am immensely grateful for everything Uncle Charles has done – I do not believe that it would be reasonable to expect him to continue to support me.”

  “Support you? You mean because you will suddenly be a woman of substance? But that does not mean you must leave us, does it? Is that what you intend?”

  “I am not certain but I own that I am tempted to set up my own establishment.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Yes; why not?”

  “Because that would be a very odd thing to do. Should you not like to be married?”

  “Not particularly; in any event, no one has made me an offer.”

  “I have – at least I think I did. Will you marry me, dear cousin?”

  “Pray do not be absurd: what in the world would you say if I accepted? Would you feel compelled to go ahead with it?”

  “I would be the happiest man on earth,” he said smoothly.

  “Well, I will not marry you, Frank.”

  “Why not? I am generally considered quite handsome and have not – yet – done anything of which I am particularly ashamed. We deal excessively well together; why not agree to marry me?”

  “Agree to marry you? You mean, I take it, agree to doing so at some unspecified time in the future – without in fact intending to carry it through? That would be quite improper for when either one of us backs out – as inevitably we would – we would never live it down.”

  “I could not back down without covering myself in ignominy – but you could, perfectly well. But I did not in fact mean that; I should be very happy to be married to you, Honoria.”

  “That is kind of you, Frank, and I do appreciate it. But you are not in love with me, nor I with you. When you do fall in love, I fear you would grow to hate me for being in the way of your marrying a woman for whom you truly cared.”

  “I do not think it would be in the least difficult to fall in love with you, Cousin: you are exceedingly pretty and have a great deal of spirit.”

  “And not a little money,” she added cynically.

  “Do you think me a fortune-hunter?” he asked with a show of anger.

  “I did not until you came home yesterday, but now I do, yes. And I have been forced to the conclusion that it is your mama who is pushing you in this direction and I cannot tell you, Frank, how much that distresses me.”

  “I cannot see why it should; you know how fond Mama is of you.”

  “Clearly she is more attached to my fortune.”

  “I deny that; yes, I daresay she would like me to manage your fortune in six months’ time rather than hand it over to someone else, who might squander it; I do not see that as unreasonable. Do you not trust me?”

  “Not by so much as an inch, no. I wish to have the management of my inheritance myself and there is no more pressing reason to abstain from marriage than that: I dislike the idea of handing what my parents left for me to another person. I wish to have the choosing of when I shall buy a new dress without being obliged to beg either my aunt or my husband for permission.”

  “Have you had to beg Mama to buy you a new gown?”

  “I have not thought of doing so – and indeed have not had one for a long time until today. It is immensely gratifying to have two new dresses and I own I am looking forward to wearing one of them tonight.”

  “And I to seeing you in it. What colour is it?”

  “Well, one is white and the other red – quite a contrast, do you not think? I believe my aunt wishes me to wear the white tonight, considering the red a little bold for a first appearance. But, now that she has admitted to such a degree of fatigue, I am afraid that we may not be able to go this evening.”

  “Possibly not and, if that is the case, it is entirely my sister’s fault. She is eaten up with jealousy.”

  “I only realised that today. I thought we were close and of one mind on most important matters. Now I discover that she resents me.”

  “If she does, she has not thought about it properly; she should be grateful for your mitigation of Mama’s megrims; between Helen’s jealousy and Mama’s volatility, I would not be surprised if one had not already murdered the other were it not for your intervention. I will do my best to persuade her to take you out this evening – would you like that?”

  “I would certainly like to go out – if only to wear my new dress – but not if it means that my aunt will succumb to a fit of the vapours and take to her bed for a week - and not if it drives Helen into a full-blown rage.”

  “I will speak severely to them both,” Frank promised with the heroic air of one prepared to run through a whole troop of enemies on her behalf.

  “No, pray do not for you will only make Helen more bitter and give your mama cause for hope that you wish to dance with me. I think it unwise to encourage her in that folly.”

  “But is it folly?”

  “Yes. Really, Frank, I am disappointed in you; have you no mind of your own that you must take your mama’s suggestion so strikingly to heart?”

  “It is not the first time I have noticed how excessively pretty you are,” he said defensively.

  “Perhaps not; I am capable of seeing that you are more than usually handsome, but that does not mean that I wish to …” She paused, realising too late that there was no way in which she could complete the sentence without embarrassment.

  “Kiss me?” he said and, before she had grasped his intention, he did so.

  Withdrawing his lips from hers, he looked gravely into her face. “I could grow used to that.”

  “What in the world do you mean?” she asked with an unwise degree of skittishness. “Am I to infer that you found it not as unpleasant as you feared and that you are therefore optimistic that, with practice, it might become less disagreeable?”

  “By n
o means! Disagreeable? My dear girl, it was delightful. I meant that I might find it difficult to stop.” With which he fastened his lips to hers again, this time with a disquieting degree of ardour which made it difficult for her not to kiss him back and even more difficult to continue to maintain that there was nothing between them more stimulating than fraternal affection.

  She had no brother but she did not think that, if she had, she would have felt at all comfortable to be kissed in this manner by him. She had used that excuse to ridicule his mother’s ambitions and undermine his protestations that she was a ‘pretty girl’; she had hoped thereby to keep him at a proper distance but, in his arms and with his lips on hers, she discovered this to be a remarkably poor argument. He was not her brother, he was strikingly handsome and, in view of the way she had kissed him back, she could not claim to have found his action disagreeable.

  Chapter 11

  Whether Frank spoke to his mother – or what he said if he did – remained a mystery but Lady Charles rose from her bed in the late afternoon determined to undertake the promised outing to the assembly rooms as soon as dinner was finished.

  Prosser had been given the dressmaker’s copy of La Belle Assemblée, folded to reveal a number of pictures of young women in the latest fashions; these Beauties sported hairstyles in which an abundance of curls were arranged in an apparently artless manner, which Prosser, once a dab hand at ladies’ hair, recognised as being hugely complicated to achieve.

  Instructed to devise something similar for the two girls, the maid, a sour-faced female who had never been heard to express admiration for either young woman, but who was well acquainted with Lady Charles and her moods, did not demur beyond a tightening of the lips, which Lady Charles, already in high alt, took to be disapproval.

  “If you cannot achieve something similar, my opinion of your ability as a dresser will deteriorate sharply,” she threatened, her colour rising with annoyance.

  “I will do my best, my lady; nobody could do more,” the maid replied haughtily.

  She took the magazine and retreated to her own quarters, emerging half an hour later with a resolute expression, a pair of scissors and a quantity of curl papers.

  She drove the two girls into Helen’s room, informing them cogently that she would attend to the younger first as her hair would need as long as possible in the papers if it were to be expected to hold its curl. With a grim expression, she began to brush the long strands with what Honoria considered excessive vigour before inserting the papers, winding the hair tightly around and fixing them with pins. Helen endured this painful exercise without a word although tears sprang to her eyes as the maid pulled her hair.

  “That’ll do for you, Miss Helen, for the time being,” Prosser said a half hour later. “You sit still now and wait for the papers to work.”

  “I wish the fashion was not for curls,” Honoria complained as the maid’s rough technique was applied to her.

  “Fashion’s a tool to control the weaker sex,” Prosser observed astonishingly.

  “I believe you are right,” Honoria agreed, meeting the maid’s eyes in the mirror with something approaching respect. The sour-faced old harridan clearly harboured, beneath her acidic exterior, an active, if embittered, mind. “I am already beginning to regret my earlier enthusiasm for a new gown.”

  “It is all vanity,” Helen opined from her seat in the window.

  “Indeed it is. What I find so alarming – and depressing – in myself is that I needed only the merest whiff of fashion – the sight of a pretty dress in a shop window – to be tempted into undergoing such torture as you are putting me through, Prosser.”

  “I expect you’ll be glad in the end,” the older woman sniffed with the faintest suggestion of a smile on her thin lips. Honoria was not sure whether the smile was one of sympathy or whether it signified a sly delight in causing pain.

  “I certainly hope the suffering will prove to be worth it.”

  “It does not end when Prosser ceases to tug your hair,” Helen warned, “for she has pulled it so tight that it continues to pain me. I believe every nerve ending in my head has been set on fire.”

  “Such is woman’s lot,” Prosser murmured, returning with obvious satisfaction to voicing platitudes.

  “I am persuaded it does not need to be,” Honoria contradicted. “We are not bound to chase curls when our hair is straight nor bind ourselves into corsets to enhance our figures.”

  “No, but, if we do not, we shall never acquire husbands,” Helen pointed out.

  “I am not at all certain that I wish for one.”

  “You may count yourself fortunate that you do not need one,” Helen snapped.

  When, several hours later, Prosser removed the papers and brushed out their hair, both young women were surprised at the change wrought in their locks.

  “There!” the maid said, standing back when she had done.

  Helen’s hair shone with an almost unearthly light in the candlelight. Beneath the shining curls, the angularity of her features was softened so that they appeared not so much sharp as fine and delicate; the sullen mouth, now trembling into something resembling a smile, acquired a rather touching vulnerability which hinted at a nature more sensitive than anyone had previously recognised.

  “Oh, it is quite ravishing!” Honoria declared. “Did I not always say you were a Beauty, Helen? You will attract a thousand suitors tonight!”

  “I never thought I could look pretty, but I do, do I not - almost? Thank you, Prosser. You are a marvel!”

  Frank, when the ladies appeared in the saloon before dinner, opened his eyes wide at the sight of Honoria in her white dress and even observed that his sister “did not look half bad”.

  Lord Charles removed his gaze from the newspaper, which he had been perusing on and off all day since breakfast, and looked up at his womenfolk.

  “Charming,” he said gruffly. “I suppose you have finally acknowledged that they are grown up,” he added to his wife.

  “Oh, Charles, I am afraid they are; I do not know how I am to support the anxiety. You will come with us tonight, will you not?”

  “I suppose I must,” he agreed reluctantly. “Not to my taste, bobbing up and down all night, but I understand my duty; we can’t have them snatched away from us before we know where we are.”

  “I do not mind standing in for you, Papa,” Frank offered.

  Lord Charles turned his gaze upon his son. “You can come too, Frank, but I’m not sure I’d trust you to keep them under your eye all night. You’ll most likely be diverted by a pretty piece yourself.”

  So it was that after dinner everyone wrapped themselves in warm cloaks, climbed into the carriage, settled themselves beneath rugs with hot bricks to their feet, and set off down the drive in the direction of Tunbridge Wells. His lordship’s presence curbed both his wife’s tendency to tearful fussing and his daughter’s inclination to find fault with everything. They travelled for the most part in silence, broken only by his lordship’s occasional animadversions on the state of the roads.

  “Well, this is very agreeable,” Lady Charles observed upon arrival at the assembly rooms. Her initial reluctance to enter Society seemed, for the moment, to have been superseded by something approaching enthusiasm; she was proud of her children and glad of her lord’s presence which, while scarcely lively, yet provided a sort of bulwark against her usual anxiety; she appeared calmer than usual and, if there was a certain smugness in her demeanour, there was nothing unusual in a middle-aged woman displaying complacency when surrounded by such a handsome family.

  The party had barely sat down before they were approached by one of the hostesses, who recognised Lady Charles from having seen her in church. She was a large lady, dressed in a complicated gown which seemed to have a great many petticoats and overskirts of varying degrees of transparency; the effect was of a many-hued garment whose colours fluctuated as she moved in and out of the beams of light cast by the myriad candles. The bodice – fashionably
small although it was required to contain an inconveniently large amount of flesh - was decorated with vast quantities of lace which fluttered on her embonpoint like leaves.

  “Lord and Lady Charles, what an enormous pleasure it is to see you in our humble rooms tonight! You quite keep yourselves to yourselves, as they say, do you not? And these are your children?” she enthused, her bright gaze moving from one youthful countenance to the next.

  Her expression, Honoria thought, was not dissimilar to Madame Hortense’s; she was no doubt wondering what could be made of the party – not in this case how many dresses could be sold but how many of the other guests could be accommodated in a profitable manner by the two young women and the man. Presumably unaware that one of the females was an heiress, her eye fixed, almost inevitably, upon Frank. “And this is your son, is it?”

  “Yes, indeed. Frank, make your bow to Mrs Hargreave.”

  Frank complied, took the lady’s hand and kissed it.

  “I don’t suppose such a handsome young man will have the least difficulty in finding partners,” Mrs Hargreave told him, beaming, “but I shall nevertheless take it upon myself to introduce you to one or two young ladies.”

  She bore him off at once, promising to return with some young gentlemen ‘for his sisters’.

  “She has not even asked our names,” Helen muttered, affronted by this slight. “I suppose she considers it best to remove him before she brings along a pair of paltry partners for us in case we should compare them unfavourably with Frank.”

  “I would be delighted to be asked to stand up with almost anyone rather than be obliged to sit out all evening,” Honoria replied, beginning to feel self-conscious in the crowded room.

  “I don’t suppose you expected to be left sitting at the side, did you? I daresay you were relying upon Frank to lead you out.”

  “I am afraid you are in the right of it and I already feel positively abandoned. I made sure he was bound to do his duty, not only by me, but by you too. Now that she has taken him away, I daresay we shall be obliged to sit here all evening pretending that we do not mind that no one wishes to stand up with us. Very likely she has any number of partnerless females to dispose of; in any event, she was clearly delighted with Frank; she hardly spared us a glance.”