Chapter 4

CHAPTER FOUR

L ord Worthe left her with Lady Leighton who was sitting among the other tired, half-inebriated matrons in one corner of the ballroom. Lady Leighton was deep in conversation with some other lady, and Scarlett did not disturb them, glad to sit silently devastated on the hard chair beside her. The look in his eyes when she had laid her hand upon his arm was not one she would soon forget.

What does it matter? You will never see him again regardless.

Bess said nothing about Lord Worthe when she found her friend sitting by her mother. “Oliver is ready to leave,” she informed them.

Scarlett was quick to her feet and began at once to move to the front of the assembly room. Bess gave her more than one puzzled look but said nothing until they were safely on the road back to Stanbridge. “Why the long face?” she asked in a low voice .

“Do I have a long face?” Scarlett asked equally quietly. Lady Leighton and Bess’s brother had fallen into slumber almost immediately when the horses began to move. “I had a wonderful time tonight.”

“I should think you did. To receive such pointed attention from such a man!” Bess turned a little to look at her friend’s face, though the carriage was dark and one could hardly see anything. “If your father would allow you to go to London, I bet Lord Worthe would propose within a fortnight.”

“Pray do not be too sure of that.” Scarlett frowned down at her hands, then said, “I displeased him.”

“Displeased him? I am sure nothing I saw looked like displeasure. He was absolutely enchanted by you!”

“For these London men, it is undoubtedly a new lady and a new enchantment every night.”

Bess considered that. “Perhaps for some, but Lord Worthe is not one of them. I asked Ollie and he said Worthe’s name has never been seriously linked with a lady. His brother is another matter altogether! But not Lord Worthe. I think he really liked you.”

Those words caused a pang in Scarlett’s heart such as Bess could surely never imagine. “It does not signify,” she mumbled. “No matter what might have been, there is surely nothing to it now.”

“But why?”

“He asked me whether he might call. I…I discouraged him.”

“To call on you in Stanbridge ?” Shock made Bess squawk the word Stanbridge quite loudly. Across from them, Leighton stirred and muttered something that sounded angry.

“Shh, we must not wake them.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” Bess hissed, “that the Earl of Worthe wished to travel all the way to Stanbridge to call on you—and you said no ? Where was your head?”

“My head,” Scarlett whispered, “was imagining the horror of introducing him to the reverend.”

Bess sat back with a quiet thud. “Ah, yes.”

How Scarlett wished that Bess would tell her she was silly, that the reverend was just like any other father and would welcome a suitor for his daughter’s hand. But both ladies knew it was not true.

Though Reverend Margrave was a member of the Anglican Church, it could not be denied that his teachings and readings were heavily influenced by Methodism. Anything of natural enjoyment, anything of even the slightest luxury or pleasure, he deemed sinful. Life was best lived modestly, frugally, and cheerlessly, in his opinion. Her situation had not been so extreme when her mother was alive; even though her mother owned the same, or at least similar, ideologies, she had also possessed a naturally gentle spirit that somehow eased the situation.

Reverend Margrave was not cruel. He would never think of denying her something that she truly needed; it was only that he believed she ought not to need much. Even her friendship with Bess—dear Bess who was coddled and loved and indulged by a doting mother and father—was always at risk. The reverend termed Bess a flibbertigibbet, which was his highest condemnation for a young lady, and only Bess’s mother’s patronage in the church made the friendship tolerable to him.

Bess’s voice sounded quite feeble when she offered, “Surely the reverend will expect you to marry some day? And to make such a match as?—”

“I think he would view the arrival on his doorstep of a gentleman from London akin to Satan appearing in the vestry,” Scarlett replied tiredly. “Any man he would deem suitable for me would likely be some pale, humble creature, a curate maybe, who would move into the parsonage with us. Not a worldly sort from London.”

She paused then added, “But I am not sure he intends to let me marry at all.”

To this, Bess could only offer a deep sigh and a lengthy silence. At last she said, “It was certainly some tale Lord Worthe told you. The one about the girl who looks like you?”

Lord Worthe had expanded upon the tale of the lady in London who appeared to be Scarlett’s twin during the intermission. The lady he knew—the one who was engaged to a Lord Kemerton—was discovered by a man called Viscount Oakley who turned out to be the lady’s own cousin. Viscount Oakley was at a house party where Miss Booker was a maid, and when he saw her eyes—an unusual violet shade much like Scarlett’s own—he knew they must be related .

“Imagine such a discovery—that you were not whom you had always believed yourself to be,” Bess said dreamily.

“A fine thing for a housemaid but not as splendid for a young lady in your position,” Scarlett remarked drily.

Bess put her hand over her mouth to keep her giggle silent. “Goose! I was thinking of you—you know you do not look like either of your parents.”

“Lots of families do not look anything alike,” Scarlett replied. It was true that Scarlett did not resemble the reverend or Mother in the least. Reverend Margrave’s hair was grey now but had once been darker. He was tall, almost cadaverously thin, and had deep-set, dark eyes that were close together. Her mother had also been quite tall for a woman, with darker eyes and hair. Though she had been thin, her bosom had been impressive, jutting forth like a massive shelf out of her chest.

Scarlett, on the other hand, was, at best, a medium height with flaxen hair. She had often been warned it would turn as she got older, but having arrived at the age of eighteen, she imagined that danger had passed. Her eyes were nearly violet with exceedingly long eyelashes that only accentuated how wide set they were—too wide at times, she thought. Almost frog-like. She kept herself lean—her father’s enforced scarcity at meals and the long walks around the parish helped with that—but that was truly the only similarity.

“I shall have to charge you with the task of finding the lady,” she told Bess. “You can see for yourself if she is really so much like me.”

“See if I do not!” Bess replied. “And what shall you do if she is? If she truly is so much like you?”

Scarlett shrugged. “What is there to do about it? Nothing at all. Exclaim over the oddness of it, and keep it as a diverting tale.”

“There was that letter you found…” Bess mentioned. “The one from the Home for Unfortunate Waifs?”

“Oh, that was nothing.”

“But what if it was not nothing? What if it was about you?”

“Me? Of course it is not about me—if you recall, it was dated from before I was even born. Besides, I was never in any home for unfortunate waifs. I was, and always shall be, in Stanbridge.”

“Or so you have always believed,” Bess replied.

“You have too much imagination, Bess Leighton,” Scarlett said, giving her friend a fond little squeeze on her arm. “In any case, I certainly cannot ask him about it, can I? Not without him knowing how I occasionally?—”

“Pry?”

Both girls giggled. “I was going to say tidy his files for him, but I suppose pry might be the more accurate word.”

“Will you two please silence yourselves,” Leighton grumbled across the carriage .

With guilty grins towards one another, they did as he asked.

The late night—or early morning, depending upon how one looked at it—meant Scarlett was late to the breakfast table the next day. She was still hurriedly scraping her fair hair back into its severe low chignon even as she descended the stairs. “Good morning,” she said breathlessly as she entered the room.

The reverend sat in stony, reproving silence, perfectly upright and still, while she poured his coffee and dished out the exact amount of eggs he would eat every morning. That finished, she sat, laying her napkin across her lap and taking her own, smaller portion of the eggs. They joined hands then while the reverend prayed over the food.

As was his custom, the reverend opened the newspaper to peruse while he ate. He could not abide the laziness of doing only one thing at a time. “Well then, Scarlett,” he asked with one eye on his reading. “Was it worth all the fuss and travel?”

It was a difficult question to answer. If she said it was, she might get a lecture on wastefulness and dissipation. If she said it was not, then she would be a liar and also get a lecture on the wages of sin or something like that.

After thinking for a moment, she said, merely, “I had a very nice time. ”

“And did you dance?”

Her eyes widened and she quickly looked down. Was she not meant to? It was an assembly, after all. Thinking of dancing, however, brought Lord Worthe immediately to mind, the dances and talk and laughing they had shared; equally quickly, she shoved such notions from her mind.

“I did,” she said cautiously. “Several young gentlemen of good character and family asked me to stand up with them.”

“I hope none of these young fellows got a wrong idea?” He looked up from the newspaper and frowned at her. With exaggerated movements, he then placed one finger on the spot where he had likely been reading. It seemed very much like he might be about to launch into a sermon for her, but she diverted him rapidly.

“I was very modest, I assure you, but the strangest thing happened!”

The reverend was mollified, and allowed his eyes to drift back to the newspaper. “There is an account this morning of some fellow in Cambridgeshire who believes he has discovered Roman antiquities at Whittlesford. Broken pottery and human remains as well.”

Scarlett wrinkled her nose at the phrase ‘human remains’. “How interesting,” she said. “In any case, this man, Lord Worthe was his name, believed he knew me.”

The reverend seemed absorbed in the antiquities, his dark eyes fastened on the page in front of him. “A man has many arts that he might use to ingratiate himself to an unknowing sort of female,” he remarked absently. “Pretending a former acquaintance is but one of them.”

“Evidently, he knows of a lady in London who is my very image—same height, same hair, even the same colour eyes as mine. She had a very intriguing story as well—it seems she had been a maid in some grand estate, but then they came to find out she was part of the Richmond family. The Earl of Tipton’s people.”

“The Earl of Tipton, eh?”

“Naturally I told him I could have nothing to do with any Richmonds, but?—”

“I shall not have you take on airs, thinking yourself some lost heiress. That is certainly not the case,” he said sternly, his eyes still moving over the pages in front of him.

Something in the way he said it made Scarlett pause. “Of course not,” she said. “Why should I think that?”

“Most of these unfortunate waifs are abandoned because they are the product of a sinful alliance. Fornicators and adulterers.”

Unfortunate waifs.

Without thinking, she blurted, “Was I an unfortunate waif?”