Minerva Read online

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Which is a pity, for Prinny might award me the Order of the Garter if he but heard. Do eat something, Miss Armitage. You are a growing girl.’

  His mocking eyes rested fleetingly on her bosom, and then returned to her face.

  ‘You must have come as rather a surprise to Lady Godolphin,’ he went on. ‘She is rather a scandalous old lady. Godolphin was her third, or hadn’t you heard?’

  ‘Her third what?’

  ‘Husband. She has buried three and is said to be on the look-out for number four.’

  Minerva put down her fork. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ she said roundly. ‘Lady Godolphin must be sixty at least. She’s very, very old.’

  ‘Age does not damp these embarrassing fires that burn within us …’

  ‘I have not the faintest idea to what you are referring.’

  ‘To passion, Miss Armitage. Love. Lust, if you will.’

  ‘I know nothing about it. Nor do I wish to!’

  ‘So what do you plan to bring to a marriage?’

  ‘You should not be speaking to me like this. No gentleman …’

  ‘Should speak so? Look on me as a sort of older brother, Miss Armitage. Unless you become wise to the ways of the world, life with an old rip like Lady Godolphin is going to be full of shocks. I assume you hope to wed this Season?’

  ‘I must.’

  ‘Indeed! Why?’

  Minerva hesitated. He should not ask so many very personal questions. But he had suggested he adopt the role of brother and that was reassuring and strangely disappointing at the same time. He had no thoughts of marrying her. Nor would he ever have. Minerva certainly never dreamed of marrying the catch of the Season. Perhaps Lord Sylvester would marry eventually, but it would be to some woman of equal rank, fortune and birth.

  ‘My father is in need of money to educate the boys and to … to … supply us all with the necessities of life. Oh! It all seems so mercenary.’

  ‘No more so than most of the people in this room,’ he said gently. ‘But if you plunge into marriage with a man solely because of his fortune, you are dooming yourself to a life of misery.’

  ‘But children,’ protested Minerva. ‘I would have children.’

  ‘And what about begetting them?’

  But he saw from a glance at Minerva’s open gaze that she had very little idea of how babies came to be conceived.

  ‘Please let us talk of something else,’ said Minerva firmly.

  ‘Before we do … a word of warning, Miss Armitage. It is a sad life for any woman to be tied to a man that she does not hold in affection at least.’

  ‘And how would you know, my lord?’

  ‘Intelligent observation,’ he said. ‘I see Lady Godolphin has found a beau.’

  Minerva turned her head slightly to follow his gaze.

  Lady Godolphin was on the other side of the room in animated conversation with a grey-haired military-looking man.

  ‘She has merely found some kind gentleman to keep her company,’ said Minerva repressively. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Colonel Arthur Brian. An old war horse. Married, I’m afraid. No hope of a match there.’

  ‘You are funning of course. A lady of Lady Godolphin’s age cannot be thinking of anything other than company.’

  ‘You must not judge people by yourself,’ smiled Lord Sylvester. ‘The Dudleys hold a rout tomorrow. Will you be there?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Minerva, relieved that this blush-making conversation had taken a normal turn. ‘I do not know yet.’

  ‘How many brothers and sisters do you have?’ asked Lord Sylvester. ‘Your good father misunderstood my question when I asked, and promptly supplied me with all the names and pedigrees of his hounds.’

  Minerva gave a reluctant smile. ‘That is very like papa. I have five sisters and two brothers.’

  ‘What will happen to them if you do not succeed in your objective?’

  ‘I had not thought …’

  ‘Do not worry, Miss Armitage. Your face, your figure, and your undoubted beauty are weapons enough … provided you do not prose too much.’

  Minerva took a deep breath. ‘I appreciate your concern, Lord Sylvester, and I feel sure your remarks are well meant, but they do border on the insolent.’

  ‘You are right,’ he said amiably. ‘What you do or say is no concern of mine.’

  Minerva should have been relieved. He promptly began to talk lightly of this and that, telling her amusing stories about the entertainments she could expect to enjoy during the Season. But she felt strangely abandoned.

  Only a moment before, it had seemed as if the whole magnetism of his personality had been concentrated upon her. But now he had retreated behind a polite façade. No longer was he vibrant, disturbing, upsetting and attractive. He seemed even less than the ‘brother’ he had claimed to be. Minerva finished her meal in the company of a polite stranger.

  She kept casting hopeful little glances in the direction of Lady Godolphin. Surely an elderly lady such as she must be wishing for her bed! But Lady Godolphin seemed even fresher than she had been when the evening had begun. Colonel Brian’s grey head was bent close to her own and he was whispering something which was making Lady Godolphin’s sharp little eyes sparkle.

  Ahead lay the terrors of propping up the wall in the ballroom.

  Lord Sylvester escorted her back to the ballroom, bowed over her hand and left.

  But where Lord Sylvester led, most of fashionable London followed, and Minerva found herself besieged by partners. She could not dance for she had claimed to have wrenched her ankle and so a small court of gentlemen pulled up chairs and surrounded her.

  Try as she would, she could not flirt. For too long had she laid down the moral law in Hopeworth. The calm mask of superiority which Minerva used to cover her feelings of inadequacy was quickly put on again. The sight of Lord Sylvester dancing and flirting with a diminutive brunette made her worse. She had been on the point of listening to him, of taking his advice! He was nothing more than a tailor’s dummy and he cared for nothing but his clothes.

  By the end of the evening, Minerva had become the talk of the ball. The ladies accounted her downright plain. The men called her a moralizing prig. Lady Godolphin heard the gossip and was cross at having to forego a very promising dalliance with the Colonel in order to take her infuriating charge home.

  ‘No, Minerva,’ she cautioned, while they walked to the carriage. ‘Not a word until we get home.’

  Minerva primmed her lips. She was not the one who had done wrong! She was not the one who had been flirting outrageously!

  But when they were ensconced in Lady Godolphin’s drawing room and Lady Godolphin started to acidly outline the damage that Minerva had already done to her chances, Minerva began to feel very small indeed.

  ‘I’ve never heard such a load of follicles in my life,’ raged her ladyship. ‘Prosing and moralizing like a Methodist! Well, let me tell you my girl, you’ve got your Pa and the family to think of. And you’ve got me to reckon with. I ain’t sporting the blunt a week longer if you’re going to make people feel uncomfortable. Half the eligible young men in London have already taken you in dislike.’

  ‘Lord Sylvester did not,’ flashed Minerva.

  ‘Oh, him! He’s always doted on eccentrics. Gets his servants off the streets. You’ve never seen such a rough crew. More like a private army. He’s all the crack, I’ll grant you that. But even his patronage won’t help you for long. If he was serious about you, t’would be a different matter. But folks know that Sylvester has never been serious about any female in his life.’

  ‘I really did not say anything very wrong,’ protested Minerva feebly. ‘I was only trying to be honest.’

  ‘Honest! Some would call it by another name. That silly little flibbertigibbet, Miss Harrison, would ask you if you did not think her gown bang up to the mark, and what did you reply? Says you, you think it’s very well but the neckline is immodestly low. Now, we
all know it was low enough to see her nuptials, but that’s neither here nor there, for she went to her friends in tears, and tho’ they had been saying just the same thing a bare moment before, they hadn’t been saying it to her. Now do you see the difference?’

  ‘I felt concerned for her,’ said Minerva in a low voice. ‘I only spoke the truth.’

  ‘Well, lie,’ howled her ladyship. ‘One more week, Minerva Armitage. One more week, that’s all. And if Society has still a disgust of you, back to the country you go!’

  CHAPTER SIX

  Minerva was determined to try to please Lady Godolphin at the Dudleys’ rout. Mr and Mrs James Dudley were a fashionable young couple who were determined to remain so, and knew that the road to success was rooms packed to suffocation point.

  It took an hour to fight one’s way up the narrow staircase of their house in St James’s in order to gasp for air in rooms packed with jostling shoulders and resonant with loud, arrogant voices as the dandy set exercised their wit and presented their bon mots. Lady Godolphin spent half an hour talking to Colonel Brian, seemed to remember her charge had yet to be introduced to the host and hostess, performed the ceremony, and then told the bewildered Minerva it was time to go home.

  And so they pushed and shoved their way downstairs again and shivered on the doorstep for an hour waiting for their carriage to be brought around.

  Minerva had had no chance to be either a success or a failure. Lady Godolphin retired to bed early, and Minerva wrote a bright chatty letter home, saying that everything was wonderful, and privately hoping no gossip of the Aubryns’ ball would reach her father’s ears. Buried as he was in the country, the vicar seemed able to pick up a surprising fund of rumour and on dits.

  Annabelle would not have behaved so, thought Minerva. Annabelle would have charmed and flirted. But Annabelle thought a great deal of her looks and already knew to a nicety how to flash killing glances from her blue eyes.

  Lord Sylvester had not been at the rout, but two of Minerva’s partners of the night before, Mr Bryce and Mr Blenkinsop had, and had stared at her very haughtily before turning away.

  Well, the sooner they forgot about her the better, thought Minerva before she fell asleep. In fact, they very probably had.

  In this, she was very much mistaken. Mr Jeremy Bryce and Mr Harry Blenkinsop were at that moment regaling their friends, Lord Chumley and Mr Silas Dubois, with wildly exaggerated tales of Minerva’s moralizing.

  ‘And she’s got that nasty way of looking at you as if you’d crept out from under a stone,’ said Mr Bryce, crossing his long, thin legs.

  The gentlemen had foregathered after the rout in a corner of Hubbold’s Coffee House in St James’s. They were all rather foxed and had been working each other up against the fair Minerva for quite half an hour. Mr Blenkinsop, fat and florid, regaled them with Minerva’s views on hunting, Mr Bryce, his face looking more to one side than ever, told them of Minerva’s strictures on the Season.

  London had been remarkably thin of gossip of late and so the four gentlemen had had no one to date on whom to vent their spleen. Their malice was bred of boredom. They came to London each year a month before the Season began and, by the time it started, had eaten so much and drunk so much that they were fit to get up to any sort of mischief.

  Lord Chumley was fair and foolish with a long lugubrious face and a thatch of tight curly hair. He looked rather like an embittered sheep. Mr Silas Dubois was all nose. He had very small eyes, a small mouth and a small face which seemed to crouch behind the promontory of his enormous nose. His figure was small and slight. The Dandies cruelly described him as a walking lampoon. But the four gentlemen had one bond in common. Each time one of them looked in his glass he saw an Adonis looking back. All four were extremely vain and fancied themselves as devils with the ladies. They praised each other fulsomely, and this mutual admiration society, together with a deal of strong spirits and fortified wine, did much to keep them separated from reality.

  Before this, they had plotted the downfall of some proud society beauty who had snubbed one of them, but all it had ever come to was drinking confusion to the lady. But this evening, the wine was running strong and there seemed to have been something about Minerva which had caught Bryce and Blenkinsop on the raw.

  ‘And she’s nothing but a vicar’s daughter,’ drawled Mr Bryce. ‘How dare she talk down to me in that deuced prosy way. What she needs is a good tumble with a strong man on top of her. That would soon knock some sense into her head.’

  ‘Or into somewhere else,’ giggled Lord Chumley. ‘Such a pity one can’t do it, though. We could have a marvellous bet. I’d give ten thousand to the fellow who could mount her first.’

  Lord Chumley was the only member of the four who was rich. The other three looked at him in a calculating way.

  Mr Bryce let out a soundless whistle, and then shrugged. ‘Too dangerous,’ he said regretfully. ‘They’d hang us.’

  Silas Dubois leaned forward, his small eyes darting in the shadow of his large nose. ‘Not if we all stuck together,’ he said. ‘Look at it this way. Rumour has it that the Reverend Charles Armitage is hoping his daughter will make a good match and repair the family fortunes. Now, if Chumley here were to court her – he’s rich, everyone knows that – and we sort of seized our chance when he’s got her softened up and then we all stuck together and let her scream and said it was all a hum, well, who’s going to believe her? Who’ll want to believe her? And if one of us does succeed in mounting her, we can then stick together and point out to her that it’s in her own interest to keep her mouth shut.’

  The other three stared at him in speechless admiration.

  ‘But she’ll disapprove of us,’ said Mr Bryce sourly.

  ‘Not if we play our parts aright,’ said Silas Dubois. ‘We’ll prose and moralize to beat the band!’

  ‘By George!’ exclaimed Mr Bryce. ‘You’re demned cunning, Silas. Demned cunning.’

  Silas beamed and his small mouth vanished up under the shadow of his nose.

  ‘When do we start?’ asked Mr Blenkinsop. ‘And where do we finish? That is, once Chumley gets her on a string, where do we take her?’

  ‘Got an inn out the Barnet Road,’ announced Mr Dubois. ‘Not mine really. Belongs to m’uncle. But it means the landlord will turn a blind eye. Hint at marriage, Chumley, and then say you’re taking her to meet your parents. Drop her at the inn and we’ll draw straws as to who does the deed.’

  ‘One of us or all of us,’ chortled Harry Blenkinsop.

  ‘Fair deal,’ said Chumley. ‘That way I can keep my money. I mean, if I’m to organize the whole thing …’

  The other three looked at him and then at each other. It would spoil the sport if one of them could not gain the prize at the end of it.

  ‘Don’t remove the bet, Chumley,’ said Jeremy Bryce at last. ‘We’ll see you don’t do all the work. I have it! We’ll give her a chance to go to bed willingly with one of us. And whoever she chooses will get the money. If it’s Chumley, he keeps it.’

  This suggestion was hailed with loud cheers, for each of the four privately considered himself irresistible.

  They called for more wine, and set themselves to plot and plan.

  They were not aware that they already had rivals.

  In White’s Club in St James’s Street, not so very far away, three gentlemen, who considered themselves leaders of the Dandy set, were discussing Minerva Armitage.

  They were Viscount Barding, Sir Peter Yarwood, and Mr Hugh Fresne.

  Unlike the previous four conspirators who were all in their late twenties, the three Dandies were in their middle thirties. Both Viscount Barding and Sir Peter Yarwood were married. Mr Fresne was a bachelor. Lord Barding and Sir Peter kept their respective wives tucked away in the country, preferring to peacock at the Season without the disadvantages of being accompanied by a wife. It also saved money which could be better spent on tailors’ bills.

  Lord Barding was a plump man with thinn
ing hair. He had a yellowish complexion and a liverish disposition. He was tightly corseted and his shoulders were padded with buckram, making him look even larger than he was. He had very thin legs in tight pantaloons and with his square shoulders and square corseted figure, he looked rather like an animated box.

  Sir Peter Yarwood was slim and willowy and drooped. Everything about him seemed to be wilting. Despite assiduous use of the curling tongs, his fair hair drooped in wisps about his ears. His mouth drooped, his eyelids drooped, and his shirt points drooped. He had very long polished nails which seemed to hang at the end of his fingers like icicles from the eaves.

  Mr Hugh Fresne was tall and handsome in what he privately considered a Byronic way and was much given to smouldering eyes and brooding silences. He was always on the point of marriage and for some mysterious reason always backed out at the last moment.

  It had quickly become fashionable to detest Minerva Armitage and since there is nothing cosier than a communal resentment, the three dandies found themselves in harmony with each other. Usually, they were ferocious rivals, falling out over the cut of a jacket or the set of a cravat.

  All three were very rich, despite Yarwood and Barding’s parsimony in leaving their wives at home. They happily spent a great deal of money on themselves and very little on anyone else.

  Brummell had remarked languidly that the three gave dandyism a bad name. But they considered themselves the very Pinks of the Ton and dressed in the extremes of fashion in order to attract attention.

  After a rubber of whist, they had settled down to tear apart society’s latest antidote – the antidote being Minerva Armitage. No one could quite think in the following weeks who suggested it, but suddenly, after the sixth bottle of port, they had called for the betting book and entered the following bet.

  ‘Mr F, Sir Y and Lord B do hereby wager 50,000 pounds to be paid to the one who succeeds in winning the prize of Miss A’s affections.’

  Unlike Mr Bryce and his friends, they were not planning an assault on Minerva’s virginity, but on her dignity. The plan was to get her to fall in love with one of them and then reject her in the most public and humiliating way possible.