Chapter 18
AND HAVE YOU seen this Miss Prunella Gentleman, of whom so much is said?
” said Lady Throgmorton, as she sat supping a cup of black bohea with her friend Alethea Gray.
Their intimacy was of but two months’ duration, but that it was a true friendship was evidenced by the enthusiasm with which each spoke of the other:
“A most fascinating woman!” said Mrs. Gray of her friend. “Truly beautiful! Truly gracious!”
“A very good creature indeed,” said Lady Throgmorton of hers.
“Miss Gentleman? Oh, I have not met her above half a dozen times,” said Mrs. Gray airily.
Mrs. Gray would not have dreamt of omitting to meet Miss Gentleman a day before everyone else had discovered in themselves a desperate desire to see her.
Mr. Gray had made his considerable wealth in trade, and Mrs. Gray’s parents had been no one in particular.
She was well aware that her intimacy with the leaders of high society rested upon her talent for being in the right place at the right time—for always guessing the piece of news everyone longed to know, and having the acquaintance of every person worth knowing.
“A delightful girl,” she said. “So original! Her manners so wild and unaffected, and yet so pleasing!”
“She is pretty, of course?”
“Oh, she is well enough. I do not admire dark women half so much as fair,” said Mrs. Gray.
Lady Throgmorton and her three daughters were all as golden-locked as china shepherdesses.
“But she certainly shows to advantage among the Season’s debutantes.
It seems impossible these days to find any truly pretty girls; it makes even a dark little thing like Miss Gentleman seem a phoenix.
Your girls are an exception, of course. How I long for their coming out! What an occasion that will be!”
“My daughters certainly never needed magic to improve their complexions or curl their hair,” said Lady Throgmorton with asperity.
“What we see in our ballrooms is not so much a falling off in the general level of beauty, Alethea, but an undeceiving—a disenchantment, I might say—of a public that has grown accustomed to the illusions of vain chits.”
Mrs. Gray had more intriguing news to impart of Miss Gentleman, and she was reluctant to be diverted from the subject by the deceptions practised by young ladies.
“I doubt Miss Gentleman is party to any such sophistications. It seems she was raised in some out-of-the-way little village—never came to town, and was kept ignorant of who she was. She is being brought out by Lady Wythe as a favour to her father.”
Mrs. Gray spoke these last words with such an air of mystery that Lady Throgmorton’s eyebrows rose.
“Her father?” said Lady Throgmorton.
“You will already have guessed his identity, of course,” said Mrs. Gray in a conspiratorial whisper.
“It is a great secret, but it is obvious to anyone who has spoken with the girl. No similarity in appearance, mind you. It is clear she is the likeness of her mother. But she has such a way of holding her head, and using her hands, and saying droll things, that—in short, one only wonders how the family contrived to conceal the connection for so long! Blood will out, after all.”
“It does, indeed,” said Lady Throgmorton.
She had not the least idea who Mrs. Gray was referring to, but Mrs. Gray nodded and winked so, it would be too embarrassing to admit ignorance in the face of such knowingness.
She would get the truth of the matter from her lady’s maid, Lady Throgmorton resolved.
“She is his natural child, of course,” said Mrs. Gray.
“They are being very close about who the mother was. Of course, what she was anyone can see from the girl’s complexion—but he is not the first gentleman to contract an undesirable connection with a native!
The indiscretion is years old now, and he has no wish for such an ancient scandal to be dug up again. ”
“Quite,” said Lady Throgmorton, her mind racing through the list of noble gentlemen who could possibly be meant by Mrs. Gray’s mysterious allusions.
“Poor child! I can find it in my heart to pity her!” sighed Mrs. Gray. “To know nothing of her own mother! And in the circumstances, she could not wish to know more. Her father has not been ungenerous, however. I am told he has settled upon her—”
She named to Lady Throgmorton such a sum as made that estimable woman nearly spill her tea.
“That is generosity indeed! I suppose he has no other children?”
“Oh, it would be a mere trifle to such a one as he!” said Mrs. Gray.
In truth she could not have said if Miss Gentleman’s father had one child or five: she knew no better than Lady Throgmorton who he was.
From her enquiries, however, she was confident that neither did anyone else.
The risk that her ignorance would be discovered was as low as the rewards of appearing to know the truth were high—and after all, Mrs. Gray reflected, she was bound to discover the truth sooner or later. She always did.
“Little wonder the men are all madly in love with her! She could be black as coal, and still have every gentleman in London at her feet with that fortune,” said Lady Throgmorton, who cultivated a bluntness that her friends described as stimulating, and her detractors as vulgar tactlessness.
“Is she a nice sort of girl, would you say, the mother aside?”
“Quite unspoilt,” Mrs. Gray assured her.
“I do not think she is so very brown—you would hardly know she was not English by candlelight. And her manners cannot be faulted. She showed me every attention, and seemed scarcely to regard the gentlemen, though some of them were very desperate to be noticed.”
“I have no notion of such affectation,” sniffed Lady Throgmorton. “The girl has simply concluded that the best way of holding a gentleman’s attention is to pretend not to value it, you may be certain.”
Despite her skepticism, Lady Throgmorton was not disinclined to take an interest in Miss Gentleman.
She had a nephew who was getting to the age for marriage—a nephew whose conduct might be restrained if he had a wife, and whose numerous creditors would be pacified by the sum Mrs. Gray had named as being the extent of Miss Gentleman’s patrimony.
“Still, if she is a pretty-spoken sort of girl, she might do for Percy,” continued Lady Throgmorton. “You may introduce her to me, Alethea. Catherine longs to see Percy settled. He is not in want of a fortune, of course, but a pretty, modest, dutiful sort of girl would make just the wife for him.”
“I will certainly introduce her to you. What an excellent thing it would be for the girl!” cried Mrs. Gray, though not without an inward observation that Percy’s previous inamoratas had not been remarkable for either modesty or dutifulness. “You will be delighted with her.”
“With all of London in ecstasies, I could hardly be so contrary as to disagree,” said Lady Throgmorton drily.
· · ·
FOR Damerell had acted according to his word, and brought out Prunella with éclat. The great thing about the rumours he had spread abroad, said Damerell, was how easily they might be denied.
“I may have suggested that her noble father had not left Miss Gentleman a prey to want, but I never breathed a word about who he might be, or how much he had given her,” he said to a disapproving Zacharias.
“Every such detail is a vulgar addition, made after the story left my hands. However, as no one has named her parents, it will be difficult for anyone to explode the tale, and even if it is discredited, Miss Gentleman can always disclaim any knowledge of it.”
Zacharias could not like this. “Surely it can only cause her embarrassment once it is discovered there is not a shred of truth in the tale.”
But Prunella thought Damerell’s scheme a capital one.
“All that is needed is for a gentlemanlike creature of independent means to fall violently in love with me,” she declared.
“Then he will not give a fig if I have a duke for a father, or no father at all. And I do not see why I should not persuade at least one gentleman to fall in love with me—indeed, I hope to persuade several!”
She was a protégé after Damerell’s own heart.
Prunella took to the ballrooms of London in the spirit of ruthless calculation of a general entering a battlefield.
Within a week she had marked out the Lady Jerseys and Countess Esterházys of the world, who wielded the most influence among the ton, and she laid herself out to please them.
She took no notice of the numerous gentlemen who promptly lost their hearts to her.
“I shall not soon stop being pretty and saucy,” she explained, “so I need not worry about losing the interest of the gentlemen. But I must have the good opinion of the women, for their word is all the capital I have, and I am lost if they take it into their heads to disapprove of me.”
Zacharias might tut, and Lady Wythe look anxious, but Prunella was in her element.
She was a complete success, and had never enjoyed herself so thoroughly.
As Damerell said complacently, she paid for dressing: the drab serge dresses and absurd pink satin of the past were banished, and Prunella was attired in diaphanous muslin and jewel-hued silks instead.
The simple style of gown in fashion set her off to admiration, and her dark colouring meant she could support the most vivid hues.
There was a crimson velvet pelisse in particular, trimmed with white fur and worn with a white beaver hat crowned with a nodding plume of ostrich feathers, which filled Damerell with solemn pride.