Chapter 14
Allegra lacked any particular enthusiasm for the project she had not long ago set herself, which was to determine, if she could, the motives of her suitors.
This seemed sadly irrelevant, when she would rather have been reliving the intoxicating time she had spent alone with Mr Severin, and anticipating more.
But he had been quite clear – and she could see for herself – that there was no future in their liaison.
He had no intention of marrying anyone, so he could not be counted as a suitor, and she wasn’t even sure if she wanted him to be.
What lay between them didn’t seem to have anything to do with marriage, or with ordinary life as she knew it. It was outside all of that.
She hadn’t, as she easily might have done, challenged him with what scraps she now possessed of his personal history, and this had only partly been because they had been very decidedly otherwise occupied.
It was cowardly, probably, to say nothing, but he was capable of devastating frankness, as she knew, and she had no desire to be told something that she’d be forced to act upon, if that action meant never seeing him again.
Let him keep his secrets, which were no affair of hers.
But he and her mother – two people who could scarcely have less in common otherwise – had both warned her about Mr Englishby, in startlingly similar terms. She no longer had any wish to seek out his embraces, which must be sadly flat compared to what she had recently experienced with another, and so she was quite happy to avoid him as much as she could, and hope he would take the hint and reciprocate with equal indifference.
It wasn’t as if he could be supposed really to care for her, any more than she did for him; his courtship had always been equivocal at best, his interest superficial.
This left her with two prospects only. Sir Harry, as Severin had rather cruelly said, appeared to be no enigma, held no hidden depths, just an abundance of cheerful shallows; Lord Milton was another matter entirely.
Weeks had passed since they had first met, the Season would be over soon enough and still he had not sought out her father or her mother to ask for her hand.
Despite this he hovered around her with no change in his manner – he was cool, elegant, inscrutable but always there – to Leontina’s intense and growing frustration.
Mrs Constantine was delighted, then, if somewhat surprised, when an invitation arrived one morning to a rout party at Lord Milton’s Mount Street residence.
It was not possible for gentlemen, with some few exceptions such as royalty, to host such parties on their own.
Nor could it be supposed that they would wish to, masculine amusements being generally of a quite different nature.
His Lordship, therefore, must have secured the help of a hostess.
And the Constantines had been invited, which must hold some significance.
‘He has a mother, I believe,’ said Leontina pensively.
She was surrounded by her daughters in her cluttered sitting room, and had set her needlework aside to view her correspondence.
‘She must be in town, and clearly he has instructed her to invite us, since we don’t know her at all.
This is encouraging! Perhaps it is important to him that she approves of you, and he has been waiting for that approval to be granted before he can declare himself. ’
‘Everyone has a mother,’ Cecilia put in. It was plain that, though she had been quiet up till now, she had been listening avidly for some while to matters that were none of her business.
‘She could be dead,’ Beatrice argued, in a tone that suggested that this might be no bad thing. They were both supposed to be at their books, engaged in preparing some Italian composition, but finding their mother’s grown-up conversation far more interesting.
‘I suppose it must be his mother,’ Allegra mused, ignoring them with the ease of long practice. ‘He’s hardly likely to ask anyone else but a close relative to act as hostess. Unless he has a sister and has requested her help? That could be.’
‘In either case,’ Leontina responded, unruffled, ‘we will see inside his home, which we have not previously been able to do, and we will meet at least one of his female relations.’
Cecilia had obviously been reading the wrong sort of novels in her free time, with far greater attention than she paid to her textbooks.
‘He might have a sister or a mother as hostess, but keep his secret, shameful wife locked away in a room. Or maybe she’s dead, but still locked in a room, and he goes to visit her coffin,’ she persisted.
‘At night, naturally, when the house is quiet. Wrapped in a dark robe, hooded, and carrying a shaded lantern.’ She shivered at the deliciously sinister, if rather improbable, picture she had conjured up.
‘I honestly don’t think he’s the type,’ Allegra replied, trying to suppress a smile.
‘You haven’t met him. He’s very… tasteful.
He’s not at all the sort of gentleman who’d have a hidden wife, living or dead.
I’m sure he’d think it terribly bad ton.
’ She could not help but recall what Mr Severin had said about men and their hidden lives.
Despite his perfect facade, Milton could have fifty mistresses for all she knew, and a dozen natural children.
‘If you had said such a ridiculously Gothic thing of Mr Severin, though,’ Leontina added absently, still studying the invitation as though it held more information that it had not yet given up, ‘I might almost have believed you, Cicietta.’
Allegra was obliged to bite her lip in frustration, as her mother’s uncharacteristically careless remark could not fail to intrigue her younger sisters, who immediately clamoured for more details of this apparently fascinating and sinister gentleman.
But she too was undeniably interested to see what Mama would think of to discourage them.
She must undoubtedly wish to, unless she desired to hear his name on their lips twenty times a day, and find them before long devising schemes to insinuate themselves into his company.
A gentleman who might be suspected of keeping coffins in his London house – occupied coffins – was just exactly to their taste, so they would not easily be put off.
Leontina could not, after all, unless she was prepared to lie and risk contradiction from Allegra herself, say that he was ugly, or poor, or ineligible for any other reason than his bad reputation.
And this was hardly likely to scare them away, girls being what they were – rather the reverse.
If she were foolish enough to mention his mysterious and possibly foreign origins, they could all say goodbye to any peace in the house till the Season was over.
But she had underestimated her mother. ‘He is quite an elderly, unpleasantly rude sort of gentleman,’ she said lightly, ‘who for some reason has decided that he enjoys making mock of your sister, though she is barely acquainted with him. Is that not so, Allegra, dear?’
Beatrice might easily have decided to declare that this mockery was perfectly understandable, but with the flightiness of youth she chose to leap to her older sister’s defence for once.
‘How very disagreeable!’ she cried with some heat.
‘Poor Allie, I am sorry for you. Is he one of those old gentlemen who pinches your chin – if not worse – and says how big you are grown, in such an odious, oily voice that you want to kick him? Like Cousin Nigel?’
‘He is nothing like Cousin Nigel,’ Allegra said before she could stop herself. ‘And he isn’t old at all, you must admit, Mama – he can’t even be thirty, I shouldn’t think. If he is old, what then is Lord Milton?’
‘Well, thirty is excessively old,’ Beatrice rejoined. ‘I think Cicietta’s right; you should kick him. Hard. Probably since he’s so ancient that would kill him, which I am sure is no more than he deserves, the nasty old man.’
This was getting rapidly out of hand, Allegra felt. ‘He doesn’t pinch my chin, or anything else.’ This was, so far, true, though there was no guarantee it would continue to be so. ‘I’ve barely exchanged two words with him.’ This was a lie, and she uttered it brazenly.
‘And he’s hardly likely to comment on how big you’ve grown, Allie,’ little Bianca, who had been so quiet that everyone had forgotten she was present, put in rather neatly.
‘Since you haven’t. I shall be taller than you soon, I daresay.
And everyone else already is. You are practically stunted, I am sorry to say.
’ She didn’t sound sorry in the least, and Allegra gasped in mock outrage, while her other sisters clapped and cheered and made a great deal of noise.
This egregious insult clearly could not be allowed to go unchallenged, and Bianca must be advanced upon in a menacing way and ruthlessly tickled till she shrieked with laughter and, at last, apologised and begged for mercy.
Leontina watched all this mayhem with superb indifference.
Allegra could only hope that the chaos, though it was not unusual for the Constantine home, might make her mother forget her own inappropriately heated remark, which could just possibly have revealed, if anyone had been paying close attention, a far greater interest in the mysterious Mr Severin than she had any wish to betray.