Chapter 4
Miss Grantham, sleeping late into the morning, did not leave her room until past eleven o’clock. The servants, in green baize aprons and shirt-sleeves, were still sweeping and dusting the saloons, and Miss Grantham presently found her aunt in her dressing-room, seated before a table on which her toilet accessories were inextricably mixed with bills, letters, pens, ink, and wafers.
Lady Bellingham had been a very pretty woman in her youth, but there was little trace of a former beauty to be detected in her plump countenance today. A once pink-and white complexion had long been raddled by cosmetics; there were pouches under her pale blue eyes; her cheeks had sagged; and it could not have been said that a golden wig became her.
Some traces of hair-powder still clung to this erection, but the monstrous plumes she had worn in it on the previous evening had been removed, and a lace cap set in their place, with lilac ribbons tied under her little chin. A voluminous robe with a quantity of ruffles and ribbons, enveloped her stout form, and she wore, in addition, a trailing Paisley shawl, which was continually slipping off her shoulders, or getting its fringe entangled in the pins and combs which littered the dressing-table.
She looked up, when her niece entered the room, and said in a distracted way: “Oh, my dear, thank heavens you are come! I am in such a taking! I am sure we are ruined...”
Miss Grantham, who was looking very neat in a chintz gown, with her hair dressed plainly, bent over her to kiss her cheek. “Oh no! Don’t say so! I had some deep doings myself last night.”
“Lucius told me you had gone down six hundred pounds,” said Lady Bellingham. “Of course, it can’t be helped, but why would not Mr Ravenscar play faro? People are so tiresome! My love, nothing could be worse than the fix we are in. Just look at this bill from Priddy’s! Twelve dozen of Fine Hock at thirty shillings a dozen, and such nasty stuff as it is! Ditto of Claret, First Growth, at forty-two shillings the dozen—why, it is robbery, no less! Ditto of White Champagne, at seventy shillings—I cannot conceive how the half of it can have been drunk, and here is Mortimer telling me that we shall be needing more.”
Miss Grantham sat down, and picked up the bill from Priddy’s Foreign Warehouse and Vaults. “It does seem shocking,” she agreed. “Do you think we should buy cheaper wine?”
“Impossible!” said Lady Bellingham, with resolution. “You know what everyone says about the inferior stuff that Hobart woman gives her guests to drink! But that is not the worst!
Where is that odious bill for coals? Forty-four shillings the ton we are paying, Deb, and that not the best coal! Then there’s the bill from the coachmakers—here it is! No, that’s not it. Seventy pounds for green peas: it doesn’t seem right does it, my love? I dare say we are being robbed, but what is one to do? What’s this? Candles, fifty pounds, and that’s only for six months! Burning wax ones in the kitchen, if we only knew. Where is that?—oh, I have it in my hand all the time! Now, do listen, Deb! Seven hundred pounds for the bays and a new barouche! Well, I can’t think where the money is to come from. It seems a monstrous price.”
“We might let the bays go, and hire a pair of job horses,” suggested Miss Grantham dubiously.
“I can’t and I won’t live in squalor!” declared her aunt tearfully.
Miss Grantham began to gather up the bills, and to sort them. “I know. It would be horrid, but we should be spared these dreadful bills for repairs. What is K.Q. iron, Aunt Lizzie?”
“I can’t imagine, my love. Do we use that, too?”
“Well, it says here, Best K.Q. iron, faggotted edgeways-oh, it was for an axle-tree!”
“We had to have that,” said Lady Bellingham, comforted. “But when it comes to eighty pounds for liveries which are the most hideous colour imaginable, and not in the least what I wanted, we have reached the outside of enough!”
Miss Grantham looked up with an awed expression in her eyes. “Aunt, do we really pay four hundred pounds for a box at the opera?”
“I daresay. It is all of a piece! I am sure we have not used it above three times the whole season.”
“We must give it up,” said Miss Grantham firmly.
“Now, Deb, do pray be sensible! When poor dear Sir Edward was alive, we always had our box at the opera. Everyone did so!”
“But Sir Edward has been dead these dozen years, aunt,” Miss Grantham pointed out.
Lady Bellingham dabbed at her eyes with a fragile handkerchief. “Alas, I am a defenceless widow, whom everyone delights to impose upon! But I will not give up my box at the opera!”
There did not seem to be anything more to be said about this. Miss Grantham had made another, and still more shocking discovery. “Oh, aunt!” she said, raising distressed eyes from the sheaf of bills. “Ten ells of green Italian taffeta! That was for that dress which I threw, away, because it did not become me!”
“Well, what else is one to do with dresses which don’t become one?” asked her aunt reasonably.
“I might at least have worn it! Instead of that, we bought all that satin—the Rash Tears one, I mean—and had it made up.”
“You never had a dress that became you better, Deb,” said her ladyship reminiscently. “You were wearing that when Mablethorpe first saw you.”
There was a short silence. Miss Grantham looked at her aunt in a troubled way, and shuffled the bills in her hand.
“I suppose,” said Lady Bellingham tentatively, “you could not bring yourself-?”
“No,” said Deborah.
“No,” agreed Lady Bellingham, with a heavy sigh. “Only it would be such a splendid match, and no one would dun me if it were known that you were betrothed to Mablethorpe!”
“He is not yet twenty-one, ma’am.”
“Very true, my dear, but so devoted!”
“I’m his calf-love. He won’t marry a woman out of a gaming-house.”
Lady Bellingham’s mouth drooped pathetically. “I meant it all for the best! Of course, I do see that it puts us in an awkward position, but how in the world was I to manage? And my card-parties were always so well-liked— indeed, I was positively renowned for them!—that it seemed such a sensible thing to do! Only, ever since we bought this house our expenses seem to have mounted so rapidly that I’m sure I don’t know what is to become of us. And here is dearest Kit, too! I forgot to tell you, my love. I have a letter from him somewhere—well, never mind, I must have mislaid it. But the thing is that the dear boy thinks he would be happier in a cavalry regiment, and would like to exchange.”
“Exchange!” exclaimed Kit’s sister, aghast. “Why, I daresay it would cost seven or eight hundred pounds at the least!”
“Very likely,” said Lady Bellingham in a despondent tone. “But there’s no denying he would look very well in Hussar uniform, and I never did like his being in that horrid line regiment. Only where the money is to come from I don’t know!”
“Kit can’t exchange. It would be absurd! You must explain to him that it is impossible.”
“But I promised poor dear Wilfred I would always look after his children!” said Lady Bellingham tragically.
“So you have, dearest Aunt Lizzie,” said Deborah warmly. “We have never been anything but a shocking charge on you!”
“I am sure no one ever had a better nephew and niece. And if you won’t have Mablethorpe, I dare say someone richer will offer for you.”
Miss Grantham looked down at her shapely hands. “Lord Ormskirk is making very precise offers, aunt.”
Lady Bellingham picked up the haresfoot, and began to powder her face in an agitated way. “There you are, then. If only you would have Mablethorpe, there would be an end to Ormskirk’s pretensions! I can’t deny, Deb, that we are very awkwardly situated there. Don’t, for heaven’s sake, quarrel with the man! I daresay he would clap us up in a debtors’ prison in the blink of an eye!”
“How much money do we owe Ormskirk?” asked Deborah, raising her clear gaze to her aunt’s face.
“My love, don’t ask me! I had never the least head for figures! There’s that odious mortgage on the house, for one thing. I have been quite misled! I made sure we should make a great deal of money, if only we could set up in a modish establishment. But what with green peas, and two free suppers every night, not to mention all that
