Cressida Read online

  CRESSIDA

  by

  Clare Darcy

  WALKER AND COMPANY New York

  Fic.

  Darcy,Clare

  Copyright © 1977 by Walker and Company

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electric or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  All the characters and events portrayed in this story are fictitious.

  First published in the United States of America in 1977 by the Walker Publishing Company, Inc.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Limited, Toronto.

  ISBN: 0-8027-0575-8

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-73662 Printed in the United States of America 10 987654321

  CRESSIDA

  Also by Clare Darcy:

  Eugenia

  Elyza

  Regina

  Lady Pamela

  Georgina

  Cecily

  Lydia

  Victoire

  Allegra

  CHAPTER 1

  The two occupants of the charming breakfast-parlour of the house in Mount Street had each her head bent over her correspondence on this fine morning in early May, Miss Calverton dealing rapidly with the little heap of cream-laid cards of invitation, letters, and household bills that Harbage, the butler, had placed beside her plate, and Lady Constance Havener brooding over a single missive, very prettily written in a round, firm hand, that appeared to have taken her attention to the exclusion of the rest of her correspondence.

  Miss Calverton, who was approaching her six-and-twentieth birthday, looked, as she always did in the morning before Moodle, her dresser, had had her innings and transformed her into an elegant creature with a deserved reputation in the ton for the highest degree of dashing a la modality, rather like a schoolgirl, with her tawny curls tied up with a ribbon and her lower lip caught between her even white teeth in the concentration of her task. Lady Constance, who was four-and-fifty , looked what she was—a handsome, slightly eccentric lady of fashion whose ambitions to appear younger than she was expressed themselves in an exuberantly modish negligee and a head of jet-black hair that was cropped behind and crimped wildly into curls in front, and whose statuesque form and uncompromising prominence of nose she attributed with pride to Plantagenet ancestry.

  Her ancestry had not protected her, however, from what she was wont to term, in a voice of a dramatic colouring that might well have fitted it for the theatre, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and, having been left, some half-dozen years before, a widow with a quite inadequate jointure by the late Mr. Jeremy Havener, who had had little to recommend himself as a husband beyond being the handsomest man in London of his time, she had been very glad to lend the somewhat erratic dignity of her presence to the orphaned Miss Calverton’s household.

  “I do think,” she said now, still frowning over her letter as she broke the silence at last, “that people who wish one to do things for them ought not make one feel very wormlike for not doing them. Without saying a single word of reproach, that is. Or rather, I mean, without writing it, for after all this is a letter. ”

  Miss Calverton, who was used to Lady Constance, glanced across the table at her briefly, quite unmoved by the darkly impressive manner in which this speech had been uttered, and, smiling in a way that enhanced the schoolgirl image, enquired who was making her feel like a worm.

  “It is a girl I scarcely know,” Lady Constance said. “Kitty Chenevix—my cousin Emily Mortmain’s daughter. Emily married a Chenevix, you know, and they were horridly poor because he died almost at once and poor Emily was obliged to go and live in Devonshire. And now Kitty is nineteen and it is high time that someone brought her out, only her aunt Mills, who was to have done so, has been taken ill, and so she wonders if I might do it instead. All in the most unencroaching way, you see, she continued, glancing once more at the letter with a look of dissatisfaction upon her face, “merely hinting at the possibility in the most heart-rendingly timid manner, so that I shall feel the greatest beast in nature to refuse her—

  “Then why refuse her?” Miss Calverton asked practically, still with the greater part of her attention fastened upon her own letters.

  “But, my dear Cressy—!’

  Lady Constance became voluble. She hoped she knew better, she declared, than to invite any of her relations to stay in a house that was not her own, and, what was even worse, to foist a totally unknown young girl upon Cressida for an entire Season. There would be the nuisance of chaperoning her about to the Subscription Balls at Almack’s, which were apt to be sadly flat for anyone who was not a debutante, a fond mama bent upon firing her daughter off into Society, or a gentleman interested in looking over the latest wares upon the Marriage Mart. And if the girl, by rare good fortune, turned out to be a belle instead of a Homely Joan for whom it would be quite impossible to find a husband, there would be young men plying the knocker at all hours of the day, and cluttering up the drawing room just when one most wished for peace and quiet.

  “Not,” Lady Constance, suddenly self-convicted of a lack of tact, hastened to add, “that you are not thoroughly accustomed to that upon your own account, my dearest Cressy, for I am sure the house is besieged by your admirers whenever you are in town—”

  Cressida, who had been attending with only half an ear to her companion’s protestations, at this point smiled mischievously and said in her crisp, warm voice, with its oddly offhand intonations, “Nonsense! Are you offering me Spanish coin, Lady Con? You know I am at my last prayers!”

  Lady Constance bridled. “Well, I am sure there is no need for you to be saying such a thing!” she observed tartly. “No one would take you for more than one-and-twenty if you did not make a point of telling them, and as for being at your last prayers—poh! I know you refused an offer no longer than two months ago from poor Gerard de Levalle—and why you must continue doing so, ” she added tragically, “I mean refusing offers from perfectly eligible men year after year, I cannot think. I am sure it never entered my head, when your great-aunt Estella died and I brought you to London for your first Season, that you would still be Miss Calverton half a dozen years later. She brightened suddenly. “But perhaps it will turn out to be all for the best in the end, with Langmere grown so very attentive since you have broken off with poor Gerard, for I cannot but think that it would be far more satisfactory to marry an English marquis than a French comte—so confusing with that monster Bonaparte going about creating all those extraordinary new titles, though of course now it is all quite as it was before the Revolution, with a Bourbon back at last upon the throne. But you really behaved quite shockingly to Gerard, you know, ” she continued, returning to her original grievance, “for I am sure you gave him every reason to expect that his suit would be successful—though not quite so badly as you did to poor Lord Mennin, crying off from your engagement to him after the notice had appeared in the Morning Post—”

  Cressida looked rueful. She was not a Beauty in the accepted sense of the word, for, though she was fashionably tall and slim, she was not dark—the current mode— and her features were far from being cast in the classical mould. But there was something in that intensely alive face, with its hazel-green eyes and what one of her more poetical-minded admirers had called her ripe-red, mocking, bitter-sweet mouth, that made it quite apparent why she had never lacked for suitors since she had come to the notice of the ton six years before.

  “Oh, dear!” she said. “You do make me sound a dreadful flirt, Lady Con! But I don’t mean to be! Heaven knows, I had every intention of marrying Jack Mennin— only when it came to the sticking point�
��”

  “You stuck!” Lady Constance finished it for her severely. “But you really must break yourself of that habit, my dear, before it becomes ingrained and you end up as an ape-leader—which is never an agreeable thing to be, no matter how extravagantly wealthy one is. It appears to me, in fact, that it might have been better for you if your great-aunt had not left you that huge fortune, for then you must have been obliged, like any genteel young female without expectations, to accept the first eligible offer that was made to you.

  Cressida laughed. “Well, there is no use in thinking of that now, because she did leave it me,” she said. “And if you are so bent on matchmaking this Season, Lady Con, I wish you will ask your young cousin to come to us; your energies in that direction will be far better expended on her behalf than on mine!”

  She had finished with her letters now and took up the Morning Post, which lay beside her plate, and which, after a glance at what appeared to be a singularly dull budget of news upon foreign and domestic political matters, she turned to the page devoted to social intelligence. A notice of a ton engagement between the very plain middle-aged daughter of an earl and one of the many foreign fortune-hunters who seemed to have been loosed upon the town by the Peace elicited an amused comment from her, after which silence reigned until Lady Constance, who had gone back to pondering whether she really should accept Cressida’s offer and invite Kitty Chenevix to Mount Street for the Season, was suddenly startled to hear an abrupt exclamation from her companion.

  She looked enquiringly across the table. “What is it, my dear? Bad news?” she asked solicitously. “I do hope no one of our acquaintance is dead?”

  “Dead? No! Resurrected, rather, I should say!” remarked Cressida, who appeared, now that Lady Constance observed her, to be suffering rather from a cool sense of distaste than from any grief of even the most minor nature. She flicked the open page of the journal before her. “It is only Dev Rossiter,’ she said. He has returned from abroad and is visiting the Duke of York at Oatlands, with every intention, it seems, of coming up to town very shortly and ‘doing’ the Season. How highly respectable money does make one, to be sure!”

  She folded the journal and put it aside rather sharply, while Lady Constance sat gazing at her with a rather puzzled expression upon her face.

  “Rossiter?” she said after a moment. “I don’t believe I—”

  “Good heavens, Lady Con, of course you do!” Cressida said impatiently, without allowing her to finish her sentence. “He was one of the on-dits of the town last year. It was said, you know, that Rothschild, the financier, was the only man in England who knew the day after Waterloo that Wellington had not been defeated there, since he was actually in Brussels on the day of the battle and sailed across the Channel, as soon as he realised Bonaparte had been romped, to put his knowledge to good use here. He made a million pounds on Change by buying into the Funds at a time when everyone else was selling in a panic on the false intelligence that Bonaparte had already entered Brussels—but he was not the only man in England to accomplish such a coup. Rossiter duplicated the feat: he was in Brussels, too, on the day of Waterloo, and sailed across the Channel in an open boat in foul weather, only a few hours behind Rothschild, to make his own fortune by his dealings on ‘Change. Surely you must have heard that gossip!”

  “Of course I recollect, now that you have reminded me of it,” Lady Constance said with dignity, “but you know I have no head for business, my love. The only thing that came into my mind when you spoke the name was that there was a gentleman named Rossiter whom your cousin Letitia mentioned to me once, who was in the Army and was most particular in his attentions to you while your great-aunt Estella was still alive, only of course an engagement was out of the question, as he was not at all a suitable person—

  “It is the same man,” Cressida said. “And we were engaged—for all of a week. Then we had a blazing quarrel and broke it off—or perhaps I should say he broke it off.”

  He broke it off?” Lady Constance looked scandalised. “But, my dear, no gentleman would—

  “Oh, Rossiter is a very odd sort of gentleman,” Cressida said coolly. “By birth he has all the credentials—the younger son of a cadet branch of the Derbyshire Rossiters, one cousin an earl and another a bishop— but he had already been engaged in every imaginable sort of riot and rumpus even when I knew him, seven years ago. And though I understand he has not been in England since, except to carry out his Waterloo coup, there have been some very warm tales circulating about of his adventures on several continents, both in the Army and out of it. ”

  “None,” said Lady Constance, assuming an air of great propriety, “that I have ever heard, I am sure. It is my opinion, my dearest Cressy, that you encourage gentlemen to speak far too freely to you upon subjects that we females had much better know nothing whatever about. As for Mr. Rossiter, I am sure a Royal Duke may know whom he likes, but I do hope you will not feel obliged to renew your acquaintance with him when he comes to London. Not that I expect you would wish to, if he cried off from an engagement that I cannot help thinking you must have entered into only because you were a very young and inexperienced girl.

  “You are quite right on both heads. I don’t wish to, and I was—very young and inexperienced, that is,” Cressida said, and went back to her Morning Post.

  But when Lady Constance left the breakfast-parlour a few minutes later the Morning Post was laid aside again, and Cressida sat for some time with her chin in her cupped hands, frowning into space as her mind went back, almost in spite of herself, to the Cressy Calverton of seven years before.

  Very young and inexperienced—that was an understatement, surely, for the girl who had been reared by a widowed mother, under circumstances of genteel poverty, in a village in the Cotswolds, and who had then, following her mother’s death, lived for three years with an elderly, invalidish, and immensely rich great-aunt in Cheltenham. She had never in all her eighteen years met a man like Captain Deverell Rossiter when her uncle Arthur, descending upon her great-aunt Estella’s secluded villa during race-week, had been moved—she could only suppose, by sympathy for her youth and the stifling atmosphere of lavender-water, hartshorn, and old age surrounding her—to carry her off to enjoy some of the social gaieties provided by Cheltenham in that midsummer season. He had taken her to the races and to the Assemblies, had bought her a new hat and a topaz set (Uncle Arthur, in spite of being perpetually out of funds, with Calverton Place sprouting new mortgages each year like spring flowers, was incurably generous), and, most important of all, had introduced Dev Rossiter to her.

  That she should have fallen head-over-ears in love with Captain Rossiter within four-and-twenty hours of her first setting eyes on him was, she considered, in the light of her present half-dozen years’ experience on the town, entirely predictable. She was young, full of restless energy and romantic fancies, and Rossiter, though certainly not handsome, had a kind of wary, sardonic charm that had already caused more than one impressionable female to overlook the more obvious disadvantages of his rather harsh-featured face and abrupt and quite unconciliating manner.

  Why he had fallen in love with her—if he had fallen in love, instead of having been, as she now suspected, merely relieving what had undoubtedly been to him the tameness of a provincial race-meeting by a flirtation that had unexpectedly got into deeper waters—it was more difficult for her to decide. Certainly, she thought, Cressida Calverton, at eighteen, had had little to recommend her to an experienced and cynical soldier— neither conventional beauty nor manner nor fashion— but upon this point she was overmodest, for, though possessing none of these advantages, there had been a freshness, an eager reaching out for life by an unconventional mind and a vivid personality, that had caused a number of gentlemen to give more than a second glance during that race-week to the tall young girl on Arthur Calverton’s arm, for all her obvious lack of town-bronze and her very dull though very good frock.

  She herself, however, had had eyes
for no one but Rossiter. He had asked her to stand up with him at the Assembly, asked her so negligently that she had been stung into a display of indifference quite foreign to her usual half-shy, half-eager manner. Then in the middle of the dance he had said to her abruptly, “What the deuce is the matter with you? If you didn’t care to dance with me, why say you would?”—and they had been off. She had stiffened, had answered him with a frankness as unconventional as his own, and, quite regardless of the niceties of ballroom etiquette—with which, it had to be said in her defence, she had had little opportunity to become acquainted because of the secluded life she had led—had forthwith walked off the floor.

  He had followed her. Within half an hour they had made up their quarrel and were talking to each other as if they had been acquainted all their lives; within four-and-twenty hours she had known she was in love with him; and within a week they were engaged. His regiment had been ordered to Portugal, but she was willing, even eager, to follow the drum with him. Of course great-aunt Estella had had to be informed; she had said little, but that little penetratingly to the point that they were both making utter fools of themselves, and had allowed matters to take their course.

  Which of course they had, to the rapid denouement of one broken engagement and one (only one, Cressida was obliged to believe) temporarily broken heart. If Rossiter’s own heart had suffered even the slightest crack, he had managed to conceal it very well both from her and from the rest of the world after that horrid evening when, as she had told Lady Constance, they had had a blazing quarrel and the engagement had been broken off.

  Looking back at it afterwards, out of the miasma of bitterness and humiliation in which she had lived for the succeeding months, it had seemed to her that Rossiter had deliberately provoked that quarrel, for it had been he, she was sure, who had first suggested that she think twice before committing her future to the uncertainties of the career of an officer in a Line regiment in wartime. They were both, he had pointed out, without expectations—for at that time no one had had the least notion where Great-aunt Estella intended to leave her fortune— and who was to blame her if she had leapt to the conclusion that his insistence upon this point meant that he himself had had second thoughts about the wisdom of marrying a portionless girl?