Belgrave Square - Anne Perry [66]
Emily was dressed in her favorite delicate water green. She was feeling a great deal better and looked as lovely as an early flower with her fair hair and alabaster skin. Certainly she could have done with a trifle more color, but an attempt to lend it artificially had looked so awful they had both laughed heartily, and Emily had scrubbed it off. The Ashworth diamonds at her ears and around her neck would lend all the sparkle her uncertain health might lack, and she was determined to enjoy herself.
Jack sat next to her, looking at her every few minutes in concern. But far more extraordinary than that, Pitt was present, dressed after considerable argument, and a mighty victory for Charlotte, in a borrowed dinner suit which really fitted remarkably well. Charlotte thought privately this was due to some clever and exceedingly tactful planning on Jack’s part. Pitt was sitting a trifle uncomfortably, now and again running his hand around inside his collar, and stretching his arms as if his cuffs were riding up, but he was smiling, and even when no one was looking at him, still appeared remarkably pleased with himself.
That might have been due at least in part to another occupant of the table—not Lord Anstiss, sitting playing with his fork and a mouthful of smoked salmon, his concentration on his plate, his face wreathed in mild anticipation, but Great-Aunt Vespasia, her hair pale silver, wound on her head like a coronet, the light shining through it, her eyes bright with humor, a tiny smile on her lips as she looked at Charlotte, then at Pitt. In fact as she watched Pitt ease his shoulders again in his jacket her smile widened and the affection in it was plain, as most definitely was the amusement.
The waiters came and served the next course, and Lord Anstiss resumed his extraordinary tale of courtly romance about Edward Heneage Dering who in 1859 had fallen in love with Rebecca Dulcibella Orpen.
He had gone to her aunt, Lady Chatterton, a woman quite naturally old enough to be his mother, and somehow so mishandled his request for Rebecca’s hand that the aunt had assumed the offer intended for herself, and accepted it forthwith. He had been too much the gentleman to disabuse her of her illusion.
“In 1865 all three were received into the Catholic church,” he went on with a wry smile. “And two years after that Rebecca Orpen married a friend of Dering’s named Marmion Edward Ferrars, also a Catholic.”
Charlotte was fascinated. Had she known him better she would have challenged the truth of this odd story, as it was she had to content herself with a hasty glance at Aunt Vespasia, who nodded imperceptibly.
Anstiss saw the look, but his face registered only amusement.
“Indeed,” he said with relish, “they all four settled in Ferrars’s home at Baddesley Clinton, a marvelously isolated house in Warwickshire, with a moat.”
Pitt coughed but Anstiss took no exception to it as a comment. In fact their incredulity seemed to be precisely the reaction he desired. He looked to Vespasia for confirmation, which she readily gave.
“Ferrars had no money to speak of.” Anstiss picked delicately at his food. “And Dering had a great deal, so he paid off the mortgage, restored the local church and they all four settled down together to devote their lives to good works—and philosophy and sitting reading Tennyson together in the evenings. Dering wrote bad novels; Ferrars, who believed, quite correctly, that he resembled Charles I, dressed and cut his beard accordingly; Rebecca painted rather good water-color portraits of them all.
“Lady Chatterton—she still called herself that—died in ’seventy-six. Marmion Ferrars died in ’eighty-four, and the year after Dering at last married Rebecca, where they still live—one presumes happily ever after.”
“Absolutely marvelous,” Emily said with delight. “And you swear it is true.”
“In every particular,” he said, meeting her eyes with unfeigned amusement. “There have been a great many people devoted