Snobbery With Violence - M. C. Beaton [7]
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.”
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,