“Thank you,” said the earl gruffly. “Do you mind leaving now?”
Harry rose and left the room and walked quickly down the staircase. The happiness he had felt in the success of his detective work had evaporated. He was haunted by the set, cold, bereft look in Lady Rose’s eyes.
♦
Rose entered the ballroom at the Duke of Freemount’s town house the following evening, hearing the chatter of clipped voices threading through the jaunty strains of a waltz. She had artificial flowers in her hair and a white satin gown embellished with white lace and worn over silk petticoats that rustled as she walked.
She felt cold and dead. She allowed Sir Geoffrey to write his name in her dance card. He did not seem to notice any difference in her manner.
Although the ballroom was suffocatingly hot, Rose shivered in Geoffrey’s arms as he swept her into the waltz. Footmen began to open the long windows which looked out over the Green Park and a pleasant breeze blew in. Geoffrey manoeuvred her toward those windows and then danced her out onto the terrace.
“I want to ask you something, my love,” he whispered.
A little hope surged in Rose’s heart that it had all just been a joke, that ‘favours’ had meant her hand in marriage.
“Yes, Sir Geoffrey?”
“Tarrant’s giving a house party in a fortnight’s time,” he whispered urgently. Through the open windows, he could see Rose’s mother searching the ballroom for her daughter. “Got you an invitation. We can be together.”
Rose disengaged herself from his arms and stood back a pace and faced him.
“Together? What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re always chaperoned…”
“I would not be allowed to accept such an invitation without a chaperone.”
“That’s just it. I’ve got a friend who will pose as my aunt.”
“Miss Maisie Lewis, for example?”
He turned dark red and then mumbled, “Never heard of her.”
Rose turned on her heel and marched straight back into the ballroom and up to the leader of the orchestra and whispered something. He looked startled but silenced the orchestra.
Dancers stopped in mid-turn, faces turned in Rose’s direction. The recently installed electric light winked on monocles and lorgnettes.
“I have a special announcement to make,” she shouted. “Sir Geoffrey Blandon is a cad. He has been laying bets that he can seduce me before the end of the season. Here is the proof.” She took out the page from the betting book and handed it down from the rostrum to the man nearest her. “Pass it round,” she said.
Eyes stared at her in shock, so many eyes.
Then she walked down the shallow steps from the rostrum and straight up to her white-faced mother. “I have the headache,” she said clearly. “I wish to go home.”
As they stood on the steps waiting for the carriage to be brought round, the earl said dismally, “Well, that’s it, my girl. I thought we’d agreed to go on as if nothing had happened. Why d’ye think I restrained myself from confronting Blandon? You’re ruined.”
“I? Surely it is Sir Geoffrey who is disgraced!”
“It’s all right for a fellow. The chaps will think he’s a bit of a rogue. When he propositioned you, you should have come straight to me. I’d have told him to lay off. But to get up there and behave like a fishwife was shocking.”
Rose fought back the tears.
“Still, Captain Cathcart did the job. You’d best rusticate for a couple of seasons and then we’ll try again.”
∨ Snobbery with Violence ∧
Two
The Srotab middle or lower classes are not, as a rule, given to joking, except with their dry, sententious humour, and they rarely understand what is commonly called ‘chaff’ It is better to hear this in mind, as it may account for many an apparently surly manner or gruff reply.
– MURRAY’S HANDBOOK FOR SCOTLAND (1898)
Rose was only nineteen years old and, apart from her brief foray to support the suffragettes in their demonstration, had been protected from the world by loving, indulgent parents and by the sheer separation from ordinary life enjoyed by girls of her elevated class.
So she was hurt and bewildered that she should be the one disgraced and not the perfidious Sir Geoffrey. As servants packed up the belongings in the town house, preparatory to the move to the country, she hid herself in the normally little-used library and tried to find solace in books. Before her love for Geoffrey, she had damned the season as being little more than a type of auction.
But she was young, and somehow the thought that out there, beyond the stuccoed walls of the house, a whole world of enjoyment and pleasure was going on without her was galling.
She had not made friends with any of the debutantes, despising their empty chatter, and now she regretted her own arrogance.
Rose threw down her book. She would go and try to see Miss Tremp, her old governess, who now worked for the Barrington-Bruce family, whose town house was in Kensington.
She did not summon her maid but went upstairs and changed into a plain tailored walking dress and a hat with a veil.
Rose then slipped out of the house and hailed a hack. She directed the driver to the address but then realized that with her disgrace being generally known, the governess might not be allowed to see her, so instead, she lifted the trap on the roof and called to the driver to take her to Kensington Gardens instead.
It was a fine day and she knew the nannies and governesses with older charges often walked there.
She paid off the hack and began to walk slowly up towards the Round Pond, looking to left and right. Ladies in stiff silks moved along the walks as stately as galleons. Regimented flower-beds blazed with colour and a light breeze blew the jaunty sounds of a brass band to Rose’s ears. The sky above was blue with little wisps of cloud. A boy bowling an iron hoop raced past her, bringing memories of childhood when one could run freely, unencumbered by corsets and bustles. Rose began to think it had been silly of her to expect just to see Miss Tremp when she spotted her quarry sitting on a bench by the pond.
Rose hurried forward and sat down next to her. “Miss Tremp!”
“My gracious. If it isnae Lady Rose!” exclaimed the governess, surprise thickening her normally well-elocuted Scottish vowels.
“I need your help,” said Rose. “Where are the children?”
“Two of them, boys. They are sailing their boats in the pond, my lady, and that’ll keep them busy for some time. I heard about your sad disgrace. It was in the newspapers.”
Rose bent her head. The newspapers had been kept from her but she should have known she would be written up in the social columns.
“It’s so unfair!” said Rose. “Sir Geoffrey should be the one in disgrace.”
“Gentlemen never get the blame in such circumstances. You should know that.”
“Miss Tremp, you educated me well, and for that I will be always grateful, but I could have done with a few lessons in the ways of the world.”
“Listen to me, my lady, I told you I approved of the vote for women. I did not tell you to demean yourself by appearing at a demonstration. And it was up to your mother, Lady Polly, to school you in the arts of society.”
Rose could feel herself becoming angry.
“It is an unfair world for women,” said Miss Tremp. “But you are privileged. It is your duty to your parents to marry well and then to your husband to have his children.”
“But you said women had a right to have independence and not to be a household chattel for some man!”
Miss Tremp flushed pink to the end of her long Scottish nose.
“I am sure I never said such a thing.”
Rose shook her head in bewilderment. “What am I to do?”