Chapter Twenty-Eight #3
“Please, Mr. Ellsworth, be seated.” Lord Dere gestured toward the sofa before replacing the tray in the cabinet with an apologetic smile and setting his magnifier on top. “Have you come about my letter?”
“…Yes. And I apologize for the hour. I only arrived back in Oxford this evening and walked to Iffley, which made it even later. That’s why I was—er—climbing the trellis. I thought I might see if I was too late, and you were already preparing for bed.”
The baron nodded, as if this were all quite usual. “You must have an answer, then, to give me, in response to my offer.”
“I do. That is, sir, after much deliberation and a fair bit of self-doubt, my answer is—with gratitude—yes.”
Then his lordship beamed at him, clapping his hands in delight and looking at once a decade younger. “Splendid! Absolutely splendid! What a treat. I cannot wait to see everyone’s faces!”
One face he did not have to wait to see appeared the next second, for the library door flew open to admit the mistress of Perryfield.
She was dressed once more (“For battle,” Benjamin added inwardly), her hair now braided and wound in a crown atop her head, and the silk of her gown rustling like the banners of an army.
“Just as I thought,” she pronounced ominously. “It is you, Mr. Ellsworth!”
Lord Dere and Benjamin began to speak; then both paused to yield the floor to the other, before the baron courteously waved for Benjamin to continue.
With an effort, the latter made Mrs. Dere as elegant a bow as someone who had just been caught trespassing, climbing the wall to her bedroom, and plummeting earthward again could manage, and he repeated his apologies and excuses.
Without deigning to reply, she rounded at once on her uncle-in-law. “What letter is this? What offer does he speak of?”
“Now, Alice,” began the baron, “I had an idea. Something to help the young people make a start in their marriage. They hadn’t much time to plan or prepare for it, you know.”
“And if they did not, whose fault is that?” she demanded. “Are you telling me you encouraged Mr. Ellsworth to come here, when you know I advised Maria and indeed all the Barstows, that it would be better to avoid Iffley for some time?”
“I did,” he admitted. “I mean, he might have given me my answer in a letter, but he—they—eventually would have needed to come back to Iffley, of course.”
“At nine in the evening? Unannounced? Was it not bad enough that Maria stole back, and we must hear it from the servants, who heard it from Mrs. Lamb—?”
“Has Maria come back?” asked Benjamin, almost reaching to grasp Mrs. Dere by the arm in his urgency but managing to halt the movement in mid-air. “Is she in Iffley?”
“Are you telling me you don’t know the whereabouts of your own wife? You don’t know she has been at Iffley Cottage these several days?”
“Now, Alice…” interposed Lord Dere, but their guest was not at all abashed. Rather, it was Benjamin’s turn to beam and clap his hands.
“Thank God,” he breathed. “The Weatherills told me she would be here, and so she is. I intended to go to Iffley Cottage directly after I called upon you here, sir.”
Here Mrs. Dere forgot herself so far as to smack a hand down upon the marble table, her rings clacking like coins.
“Before anyone goes anywhere, I again demand an explanation. Uncle, tell me why the two of them should be flitting about as if they had done nothing to warrant concern! What have you proposed to them? And what will everyone say about it?”
“Now, my dear Alice,” began the baron for the third time, “my very dear Alice.” And his very dear Alice knew things must have come to a perilous pass indeed, if she was to be thus addressed.
She reached for the nearest armchair and sank onto it, feeling suddenly close to what, in any other person, might be called self-pity.
Whatever he had done, it must be very, very bad.
Why, oh why, did no one care for his good name as she did?
And why should he continually thwart her efforts to preserve the family fame?
What had those Barstows ever been, all these many years, but drains upon his purse and sources of dismay?
Even her favorite Frances had crossed her, eventually, and as for Maria—well, Alice Dere never had high hopes for that girl, and she had proven the worst trial yet.
At least when the second eldest, Jane, came to them under clouds of disrepute, she had the decency to lie low for two entire years.
Whereas Maria, not two months past her disgraceful marriage, came prancing back to Iffley, parading herself before the gossipy Mrs. Lamb, while her horrible husband literally scaled the walls of Perryfield to get at them?
She felt crushed. Faint.
It was all too, too much.
But Mrs. Dere was too conscious of the honor owed Lord Ranulph Dere, not only as head of the family, but as the chief magnate of Iffley, to flout his law when he laid it down. She might protest—and did—but she never failed, ultimately, to bend the knee.
“Very well, uncle,” she sighed. “Let us have it.”