Flirtation & Folly Read online

  Aunt Cartwright’s bedroom was surprisingly airy. A window stood open to admit the lazy, invisible curls of a March breeze, and the curtains were a light gossamer of muslin, fluttering in the air like huge white butterfly wings. Instead of the cramped congestion of innumerable tables, knick-knacks, books, and chairs downstairs, there was only a squat bureau on one side of the room and a shield-back chair pulled alongside the bed. No doubt a quiet, open room for sleeping was one of her prescriptions.

  Aunt Cartwright was abed, which was not surprising for an invalid, but her face was unusually pale, even for her. The lace of her cap drooped as if in sympathy with her distress. She beckoned Marianne to sit on the chair. “How kind of you to come so quickly! I had no idea you would turn up at my door at this hour.”

  Unease and annoyance warred in Marianne’s chest. “You asked me to come as soon as possible, Aunt. Of course I did not spare a minute.”

  “I did not mean to be taken so literally, my dear,” Aunt Cartwright said. “But now that you are here, I must admit I am in the greatest of distress. I hardly know how to tell you what has happened.” Her hands plucked at a lace-rimmed handkerchief as if she was absent-mindedly testing its durability.

  “Please try, Aunt Cartwright.” Marianne leaned forward and pressed her aunt’s hand in what she hoped was an encouraging but respectful way. The unease began to overcome her annoyance.

  “Oh, Marianne, Mr Glass is leaving us!”

  With this revelation, Aunt Cartwright hung her head and stuffed the handkerchief into her face, barely muffling her sobs. The awkwardness of her gesture and the relative unimportance of her disclosure did not mean that Marianne could not identify a very real grief. Her aunt’s sobs increased in volume, but Marianne thought it was likely the release of pent-up emotion now that sympathy was at hand.

  At least, some degree of sympathy. Jeannette was right, Marianne sighed. Not exactly an emergency worthy of racing through London streets. All her high-handed orders to Jeannette had just made her look ridiculous.

  “He says he is offered a country practice, somewhere in Derbyshire. Frank says it is a good offer, and I daresay it is, but Frank forgets how much I depend upon him! Mr Glass is always at my right hand, you know. I consult him about tinctures, and oils, and ever so many things—and he lets me have any ingredients I choose, quite without ceremony—ˮ She paused to throw a violent sob into her handkerchief. “No other apothecary is likely to treat a lady concocter with respect. He lets me be myself.”

  Here, at least, Marianne could sympathise deeply. Her aunt had an eccentric but remarkable talent and longed to continue to make use of it. Was that not just like Marianne and her desire to be original and shine in society? “Poor Aunt!” she said. “Of course you would feel dejected. Mr Glass made himself very useful and was very kind.”

  “He was, indeed.” Aunt Cartwright sniffled. Her throes of agony were beginning to settle into a satisfied malaise now that she had her niece’s comfort. “How shall I ever find another such person? And we invited him here to dine, you know, nearly every time we had company. It did not matter to us that he was a mere apothecary. We treated him just like one of our family. Where could he hope to find that again?”

  “You were very good to him.”

  “Indeed we were. Oh, Marianne, I do not know how I shall go on.” This last was said in a sighing tone, but it sounded more like a sigh of resignation than despair.

  Marianne could not help but compare her aunt’s disappointment to whatever hardship Mr Hearn was undergoing, and her own sad fate if she failed to marry this Season. It was wrong, perhaps, to rank misfortune, especially as it might detract from the sympathy her aunt deserved, but she could not help feeling her aunt would find it very hard indeed to endure the suffering others faced.

  “It is so inexplicable,” her aunt said. “Everyone was so happy here, with everything just as we could wish. Why on earth should Mr Glass desire to run away?”

  “He is hardly running away, Aunt.”

  “Of course he is! He is like a son to Frank and me, and he is abandoning us. I have never heard such a story—a beloved son just running off like that.”

  “But Mr Glass is not your son, Aunt, and he is over forty years old besides. It is not the same thing.” As her aunt appeared unimpressed with her logic, Marianne tried again. “People must go their own way sometimes. At least he has told you all about it, and you know he will be safe. My brother Harry ran away when he was little, and for over a day my mother had no notion where he was, or even if he had not fallen into the millpond and drowned.”

  Aunt Cartwright caught at the distraction with admirable quickness. “Your brother Harry? Which one is he, dear?”

  “He is the third of us, right behind my brother Edward. He is the one about to take orders, like Edward did. Or, rather, Harry must have already taken orders by now.” For a moment Marianne was disconcerted, realising how out of touch she had grown from the rest of her family. Her mother still wrote letters, but they came fewer and farther between, and instead of steady insistence that Marianne hurry home, they revealed an increasing indifference and very little news. The lack of entreaties reassured Marianne that she could stay in London a while longer, but at times she wondered if her parents did not want her anymore. Marianne pushed herself to refocus on her tale. “When he was little, Harry’s tastes were always rather low. He would always play with the children forbidden by our parents, or follow the grooms walking horses and listen to them talk. One day after a quarrel with Edward, he ran off.”

  “Goodness! But he was brought back again?”

  “He was. I found him gossiping with some idle company at the back of a seedy tavern—no place for a gentleman, let alone a child. I was frightened just being in it, young as we were, but Harry seemed perfectly at home. I did manage to persuade him to come back, though.” Marianne could almost feel the sticky rum-stained tables that she had crept past to find her brother. He had been insistent that he would find an apprenticeship, or go to sea, or do anything besides study Latin and sit in boredom at the rectory.

  She wondered even now if she had done right to persuade him back. Papa said Harry was merely wild with sowing oats in his last few years before ordination, but Marianne could remember many years of her brother visiting squalid huts, rolling dice with workmen, and cheering grimy-faced children with games. If his tastes were due to sowing wild oats, he had been sowing them all his life.

  “I have little hope that anyone will persuade Mr Glass not to run away,” Aunt Cartwright said, her expression downcast.

  “I know you will miss him, Aunt, but he will be happy. That is something.” A glimmer of hope seized on Marianne’s heart. “Perhaps, if you do not find another apothecary who will help you, I could learn enough to assist and stay with you after the Season. If I am not married by then, I mean.” It hurt to speak aloud her doubt that she might not conquer London and stride off with an eligible husband, but she supposed she ought not ignore the possibility.

  Aunt Cartwright shook her head wonderingly. “Dear me, no, Marianne. Of course I am very fond of you, but we really could not take in a niece.”

  “I could make myself useful.” It crushed her pride to beg, but it was only right to try. She could not go back to Wrumpton. She would not.

  “No, that would not suit. You are a very pleasant distraction as a visitor now and then, but too great a distraction for an everyday thing.” Her aunt’s tone was kind, but Marianne only stared down at her own hands. “An invalid needs peace, and space.”

  For a change, Aunt Cartwright reached out her hand to pat Marianne’s, in the same consoling gesture that had been offered to herself. “You will marry and have a fine home, Marianne. You need not worry about your old aunts.”

  “I hope I will wed, Aunt, but after all, I cannot make a man choose me.” Marianne blew out a breath and tried to rally herself. “I will ask Aunt Harriet if I might stay longer, just in case. Though I confess I am a little frightened.”


  Aunt Cartwright’s eyes widened before she took her niece’s hand. “I pray you will not, Marianne! She thinks inviting you for the Season was a very great favour. She will not thank you for asking to stay even longer. And she misses Miss Westcott a great deal, though she will not say it. She does not want a new companion.” Her voice dropped into a dramatic confidentiality. “Between ourselves, my dear, she already talks a great deal of ‘pushing relations.’ Your mother has never been discreet in petitioning favours. If you press Harriet, she will think you are just like your mother. Indeed, she might even send you home early.”

  “I do not think she would do that,” Marianne said, considering, but she had to admit she thought the rest of Aunt Cartwright’s assessment was likely correct. It seemed so unfair. Both her aunts had such large houses. Marianne would not require much—she would need so very little from one who had so much! But she supposed a beggar might say the same thing about her father’s rectory. It was easy to imagine disposing of other people’s property with generosity, and however true it might be that some had more than others, it was not fair to demand that they share it.

  “Please do not anger Harriet. She is a terror when she’s roused.” Aunt Cartwright shivered with a theatricality that ought to have looked false, but Marianne knew it simply to be her way. “How glad she will be that Mr Glass is gone! I know she hated seeing him at our dinners. How she glared at him!”

  “Is that why you wrote to me instead?”

  “Oh, yes. I knew you would understand.” Aunt Cartwright’s eyes crinkled with appreciation. “Harriet is monstrous about propriety, at least in some ways. She thought I was almost—well, losing caste, so to speak—just by having him at my table.” Her gaze shifted. “Why, Marianne! You have not even had a moment to take your bonnet off. Here you have been sitting here all this time, ministering to me, and I am a terrible hostess.”

  Aunt Cartwright’s pale fingers tugged at the bow under Marianne’s chin and drew off her hat. A sensation of pulling drifted over Marianne’s scalp, ghostlike, as if an uncanny breath of air stirred over her head. When Aunt Cartwright turned the bonnet over in her hands, several strands of mouse-brown hair could be seen in the tucks of satin.

  “Oh, dear,” Aunt Cartwright breathed, staring at the glinting hairs. “Marianne, has your hair been falling out?” She prodded the loops of hair with her fingertips. “It has, hasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by falling out. A lot more of it seems to come out when it’s being brushed and such.” Still, the ease with which the hairs had been separated from her head disconcerted Marianne. “Why?”

  “Let me look at you.” Aunt Cartwright lifted Marianne’s chin, searching her niece’s face—for what, Marianne did not know. “Have you been more thirsty lately? Do your nails grow the same?” She continued with a battery of questions that at first amused Marianne as the imagination of an invalid seeking a fellow sufferer. But some of the questions hit home in an uncomfortable way, and when Aunt Cartwright settled on a probable cause, Marianne found herself unexpectedly defensive.

  “You have been putting on some lotions or hair oils or something, haven’t you? Carmine, perhaps? Creams? What are you using?”

  “Only something from the shops.”

  “Only something from the devil, you mean,” Aunt Cartwright said, with the same sharpness her sister Harriet would use. It was astonishing to see how similar they were in Aunt Cartwright’s rare moments of indignation. “They put a lot of other nasty things into them, Marianne.”

  “But I did not put anything on my hair, Aunt. Only my skin.”

  “Poisons on the skin come out through the hair. You must not use them anymore. I will make you some milk of almonds, or rose water, instead.”

  “I do not think that will be strong enough,” Marianne said, fishing the mousy hairs out of her bonnet and trying not to sound sullen. “The creams and waters promise to give any lady a lovely complexion, and mine is so brown, even in the winter.”

  “Just because you are not as fair-skinned as Miss Stokes does not mean anything is the matter with you. You had better leave off those creams from the store and let me give you something. You will never have a throat white as a swan, but you will keep your hair, and I daresay you will like that better.” The emphatic, decisive tone still matched that of her sister, and Marianne again had the curious sensation that Aunt Cartwright had been momentarily possessed by a stronger, ruder, and more capable spirit. She wondered if Aunt Harriet ever was seized by a wispy, overly dramatic ghost in turn.

  It was difficult to believe that the unctuous, attentive young man in the shop could peddle wares that made ladies’ hair fall out, but in the end Marianne had to agree that her aunt seemed to know what she was talking about. At her bidding, Marianne fetched a table and the medicine chest, as well as a hamper of dried herbs, and Aunt Cartwright combined and shook little vials with expertise, despite lounging in bed. One by one, slender bottles of darkened glass and earthenware bowls with covers assembled into a line, and Aunt Cartwright dictated labels and instructions for Marianne to scrawl out.

  Not being accustomed to working with so little table room herself, Marianne wrote the commands with considerable lumps of ink choking each line, as if each snaking line of script had hatched from a black egg of ink and done its best to sidle away as hastily as possible. And as grateful as she was for her aunt’s help, she could not help but find her eyes drifting again and again to the medicine chest cramped with pills and lozenges and wondering how many of them her aunt actually used on herself. There was even a tiny blue bottle with a label so frayed at one edge it was beginning to look more like a tassel. Laudanum. The drug that might soothe hurts, but could also be used to chase the quiet of boredom into a deeper, addictive peace—or to end it entirely, if that was desired.

  Was Aunt Cartwright really as ill as she supposed herself? Was it idleness that prompted her to so carefully study her own constitution and doctor it endlessly? Or was it some truly admirable—if idiosyncratic—vein of talent, unfairly embodied in the flesh of a woman—a person no one, aside from the occasional Mr Glass, would accept as any kind of medical expert?

  Even when Marianne fetched a basket in which to pack her new assortment of beauty aids, she could not settle with any precision how much of Aunt Cartwright’s activities were the rightful ebullitions of genius and how much were the wasteful preoccupations of a lady of leisure. Aside from losing her apothecary, her aunt seemed contented with life, but whether that was because she was fulfilling her destiny as a ministering angel or because the stoppering of bottles had deluded her into resignation with a pathetic life, Marianne could not tell. If it had been Marianne confined to a house (even such a well-appointed one, with such a well-mannered husband to inhabit it with her), she did not think she could have found happiness. That little blue bottle of laudanum would have had too graceful an appeal. Marianne wanted that life of bowing courtiers, rustling silks, and flippant laughter that meant London was hers. Without the prospect of novelty and acclaim, she did not see what there was to enjoy.

  Perhaps it was simply the memory of Mr Hearn leaning over the Thames influencing her thoughts, but Marianne found herself gazing at the little blue bottle again and again. What if her dreams of feminine conquest failed? What if she spent all Season straining to queen over the ton—and her efforts came to nothing? It was all too easy to picture herself creeping back to a dusty corner of the rectory, picking up a pile of mending, and scolding her little brothers until her throat was raw and her brothers’ hatred matched her own self-loathing. She would become an old maid, shuttled from one relation’s home to another when her parents finally passed, and would be forever tending other people’s children in other people’s houses. Worse yet, they might not need her even for that, and her whole existence would be acknowledged as useless, a burden to be pushed from one person to the next. Such a life would be intolerable. She did not think she could jump from a bridge and sink into the cold, col
d water and the clammy clasp of river weeds, but sipping a draught from a little blue bottle would be manageable, even for her.

  When she bade goodbye to her aunt, the wicker basket slung over her arm contained only the jars and bottles of creams and waters that her aunt had created for her. But she could picture a little blue bottle with a frayed tag neatly ensconced among them, as if the bottle was carried along in the swing of the creaking wicker as firmly as it was carried along in her mind.

  Jeannette’s price for not telling Aunt Harriet about their early morning escapade to Aunt Cartwright’s was never officially declared, but Marianne intuited it and paid it all the same. Firstly, Jeannette was permitted to pepper her with pungent reminders of her folly without retaliation. Secondly, upon openly admiring one of Marianne’s muslins, she received it as a gift, even though Marianne had only worn it a few times. Marianne did not mind giving her the gown so much—passing along a lady’s cast-offs to a favoured maid was typical for a heroine—but after more than twenty-four hours of ‘I wonder if Mr Glass has arranged his travel plans? It was a surprise that he was leavin’, but then again not much of one, was it?’ and ‘What a dutiful niece you are, Miss Mowbrey—ready to risk everything at a penny’s drop for either of your aunts,’ she was heartily tired of ruing her mistake. Perhaps a day and night of such remarks was not too great a price to pay, all things considered, but it was wearying nevertheless.

  In the morning, when Aunt Harriet was out, Marianne escaped her lady’s maid by ensconcing herself in the drawing room with her sketchbook. If she was merely embroidering, Jeannette would pertly take up work next to her and chatter. That was rather pleasant when Jeannette was in a good mood; her gossip entertained while broadening Marianne’s mind, albeit not in a way particularly maidenlike. But Marianne never talked while she was sketching, and so her bouts of drawing bored Jeannette and drove her into the kitchens to giggle with Hodges or along hallways to linger after George, the footman.