Imprudent Lady

Chapter 4

The following week was a calm one for Miss Mallow, allowing her to catch her breath after her spate of public life. She sat home working most days and went with Uncle Clarence and her mama to one very dull dinner party and with an aged female friend of her uncle to a concert of antique music. Lord Dammler was feted at Carlton House by the Prince Regent, found that an unknown young female had smuggled herself into his apartment during his absence one evening and was waiting for him in his bedroom, was requested to write a comedy for presentation at Drury Lane, won a thousand pounds at faro, enjoyed a flirtation with Lady Margaret Halston, and was presented with a paternity suit for a child conceived while he was still in America, by a girl who knew his reputation but not his itinerary. It was a calm week for him, too.

On Friday evening he stopped at Lady Melvine’s to take her to a rout he would prefer to have missed. He found her dressed and ready, a hideous purple turban on her head and an excess of diamonds sparkling about her person.

“Setting up as a shop window, Het?” he quizzed her.

“Don’t I look horrid? But I haven’t a stitch to wear, and the diamonds detract attention from this old gown, don’t you think?”

“They certainly detract from your elegance. Nothing is so vulgar as too many diamonds. You don’t need both the necklace and that awful cluster of brooches, do you?”

“No matter, when I walk in with you I will be the envy of them all.”

“You forget I have a reputation to maintain, Auntie.”

“The reason I am so ill prepared is that I have spent the whole afternoon reading another book by that Miss Mallow you recommended.”

“Oh, has she written more than one?”

‘Three-all delightful. The Cat in the Garden is the one I have just put down.”

“Sounds monstrously exciting,” he drawled, then yawned behind long fingers. “Is it about animals then?”

“No, it is a two-legged cat referred to in the title. An old tabby like me who lurks about her garden seeing things she shouldn’t, and telling.”

“Which she also shouldn’t. I’m surprised at such dissipation coming from Miss Mallow’s pen.”

“You cannot know her well!” Hettie laughed.

“Hardly at all. Don’t tell me you have her acquaintance."

"I've met her. Fanny Burney brought her to call on me last week, and sat with her lips pursed the whole visit at her protegée’s impertinence.”

“I think we must be speaking of two different ladies. My Miss Mallow could not by the broadest interpretation be called impertinent.”

“Not to your face maybe. She does a fine job of ripping you up behind your back.”

“Indeed!” He looked stunned. “May I ask what she said? We are virtual strangers. It is odd she should speak to my discredit.”

“It is rather your works she dislikes than yourself.”

“I seem to recall she complimented me on the cantos.”

“Ask her sometime for her true opinion.”

“I am asking you, Hettie. What did she say?”

“My, how your head has become swollen! A fellow writer may not find a single fault in your work without your mounting your high horse. Well, it was nothing so very bad after all. She only took exception to your being chased by Indians and rescuing three women and emerging unscathed to attend a ball and dally with the governor’s wife the same night. I must say, it seemed a point well taken.”

He shrugged. “I am not a novelist who counts up the hours in a day, but a poet. Was there anything else?”

“She was not happy at your hogging the whole world for your setting. She is to launch her next heroine off into the cosmos and out-do you in wonders.”

“She is welcome to try her hand at it. I make no claim to having visited the stars. Is that the sort of thing she writes?”

A peal of laughter escaped Lady Melvine. “Good God, no! She was funning. Very down to earth indeed. She couldn’t be more so. Well, I have her three books here. See for yourself.”

“I don’t read novels.”

“Suit yourself. You’re missing a good bet.”

He picked up The Composition and glanced at it. “Very well, I’ll try it. It will lull me to sleep one night, I expect.”

“Indian giver!” Hettie charged. “Oh, by the way, if you chance to be speaking to her again, she knows you gave me the book-and the very day you received it, too, so don’t put your foot in it.”

With a tapered finger, he reached up and adjusted his black patch. “Now I wonder if that is what got her hackles up? I've already told her how much I enjoyed it.”

“Oh, when did you see her again?” Lady Melvine naturally had no hope of making a romantic conquest of her nephew, but she took a proprietary interest in his affairs.

“Last week. I found her a dead bore-not a word to say for herself, but she has an uncle whose acquaintance I could come to cherish.”

Hettie teased him to say more, knowing by his smile there was some joke in the matter, but he refused to satisfy her vulgar curiosity. The rout was a squeeze, at least until Lord Dammler took his leave, when several others left as well. He went to a club and lost half the money he had won the week before. As he was about to step out of his carriage before his apartment, his hand brushed Miss Mallow’s book, and with a shrug he carried the three slim volumes into the building. It was not yet late. Taking a glass of ale, he opened Volume One, skimming a line here and there. He smiled at a telling phrase or a description, and before long was reading in earnest. Unlike his aunt, he was a fast reader. Before he went to bed, rather late, he had finished the second volume, and before he had his breakfast in the morning, he finished the third and was converted to Miss Mallow’s growing list of supporters.

Had he been informed beforehand that the novel was about a youngish spinster and her boring aunt, living alone in a quiet neighbourhood with only a country person for romantic interest, he wouldn’t have opened the cover. But though nothing much happened, he kept turning the pages, eager to peer into the minds and hearts of these normal people. It had an air of reality about it- that, he fancied, was the trick. No preposterous doings of the sort he wrote about-no, to face the dreadful truth, here was literature, and what he wrote was claptrap. He sat musing for some time on the matter, and the more he compared the prim little lady’s work with his own tales, the more dissatisfied he became. He went out and bought copies of the other two novels, and spent an afternoon reading The Cat in the Garden. Having already met her uncle, he recognized him as the musical lady in The Composition. He marvelled at her nerve in serving up such a parody-she, who looked as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. She knew, of course, that the old boy didn’t read. But who was she writing about in this other one? He was convinced it was a real person, and one he was curious to meet. Tired with reading, he went out to a dinner party that evening and found himself seated beside “Silence” Jersey, the most renowned chatterbox in London. He smiled to think what Miss Mallow would make of her. The fact that she was never silent removed nine-tenths of the burden of conversation from him, and he thought again of Miss Mallow. On an impulse he decided he would call on her again-take her out for a drive to get her away from the babbling uncle, and see what she had to say for herself. He figured he could draw out a shy young lady without too much trouble. How the ton would goggle to see him driving in the park with an unknown little spinster! This too amused him.

Next day he stuck to his resolution, and prepared himself in the morning to pay her a visit. He was amazed to find himself a little nervous. Not in a missish quake, of course. He had supped with princes and dined with princesses, flirted with duchesses and countesses without a qualm, but he did feel a qualm at calling on this little lady no one had ever heard of. The thought had taken hold that she would be judging him, as she so obviously had judged her uncle, and found him wanting. What would she write of himself if she decided to slip him into one of her books? “A gentleman who brought Society to its knees with the aid of an eye patch and a piece of doggerel…" No, she would cut closer to the bone than that.

But when he was later confronted with the live novelist, the qualm seemed to have transferred itself from his bones to hers. She looked quite thunderstruck to see him in her saloon, but not so surprised that she failed to warn the butler there was no need to disturb Mr. Elmtree. No more than he did she want that tongue ruining their visit. Her mother, a sensible but not remarkable woman, sat with them for ten minutes, at the end of which time Dammler repeated the mention of a drive. “I will take good care of your daughter, ma’am,” he assured Mrs. Mallow.

“Prudence is pretty well able to take care of herself,” she replied.

“She is well named,” he smiled.

Prudence looked at him closely. At that instant she realized he was mere flesh and blood. The most pleasing combination of flesh and blood ever seen, perhaps, but a mere mortal after all. Her awe of him fled like a small cloud before a howling wind.

“I wonder how many times you have had to listen to that platitude,” he said as they went out the door.

“More times than I care to remember.”

“And it isn’t true either,” he said, giving her a hand into the carriage. It was far and away the grandest carriage Miss Mallow had ever been in. Papa had kept a little gig, and Uncle Clarence had a lumbering old coach that had been in the family twenty years. Dammler's was a spanking new one, shiny with a crest on the side. Silver mountings gleamed everywhere, and in the interior the seats and squabs were covered in real tiger skin.

“Oh, how savage!” she laughed.

The carriage seemed suddenly to be in very poor taste. “I am not prudent either, to have put my pelts to such a base use. I’m sorry I didn’t keep them for rugs.”

“Surely walking on them is no more noble than sitting on them?” she remarked.

It was a mere nothing-a thoughtless comment to fill time until they should be moving, but again it made him feel foolish.

“Why did you call me imprudent?” she asked, trying not to show in too obvious a manner her interest in this magnificent carriage. There were little doors and silver pulls mounted on the side, which raised her curiosity. “To have treated your uncle Elmtree so was a shabby trick, Miss Mallow.”

She looked at him in amazement. Could it be he considered meeting himself such a treat he felt her uncle to have been deprived because she told the servant not to call him? Certainly Clarence would think so, but for Dammler to suggest it himself was a piece of pride she could scarcely swallow without chewing it a bit.

“What have I said to make you hate me already, ma'am?" he asked. “I intended to be on my best behaviour. You must own you gave him a fine raking in The Composition.”

“Oh, you mean you read it?” she asked.

"Indeed I did, as soon as I could tear it out of Hettie’s hands. I lent it to her,” he added, not considering it a real lie, as he had no notion of returning the gift.

“Oh, but he never guessed, nor would he if he ever got round to reading it. How did you figure it out? My changing him to a woman fooled everyone else. Not even Mama suspected.”

“I saw what you were up to at once. Bach’s fugues are the Mona Lisa, and the baroque counterpoint is her foreshortening. I don’t think you worked in an analogy to the eyelashes, did you?”

It was horrid to laugh at Uncle Clarence, but so very nice to have someone who understood and did not disapprove, that she could not suppress a smile. “No, nor the symbols either-they are a recent innovation.”

“Lawrence will snap it up in no time,” he warned her with a quirk of his black wing of eyebrow, and a conspiratorial smile.

“And claim it for his own-that is another of his tricks to be watched out for. He took to putting on a bit of impasto to highlight the nose as soon as ever Uncle Clarence invented it.”

“Plagiarist! He’ll be posing them in three-quarters profile with their hands folded if we don’t keep a sharp eye on him. I adored your books. You are a real artist with words.”

She flushed with pleasure, but demurred, “It is yourself who is the acknowledged artist.”

“Humbug-don’t try to gammon me. They’re claptrap, Miss Mallow, and you know it.”

“Oh, indeed they are not! They are stunning tales. I like them excessively.”

"That is not what I hear,” he wagged a finger at her. “Now that you are famous you must watch your tongue. And it will take some watching, too, I’ll wager. I have it on good authority Miss Burney was chagrined at your impudence, and Lord Dammler is certainly offended at your criticism of him. Especially as it was so very much to the point.”

“Oh, but I didn’t…”

“Didn’t claim you must send your heroine off to the moon, since I had grabbed the world for my playground? Of course you did. Hettie’s tongue runs like a river, but she doesn’t lie.”

“I-I was only funning, you know.”

“I know, now that I have met you. Come to know you a little I mean.” He was anxious to know her better. She was different from anyone he had met since returning to England. “I wish you will tell me all about The Cat in the Garden. Who is she?”

“She, as you might guess now that you are on to my trick, is a man-a horrid old nosey Parker who lived near us in Kent. He was a bachelor of a certain age-funny how they haven’t the reputation for malice and spite we spinsters have, but they are just as bad. He was always peeking over the hedge when I had company.”

“So you are Emily. I didn’t suspect that.”

Emily was a lively young lady with much of Prudence in her. “No, I made her up,” she said, remembering she had been something of a beauty. “I just used the circumstance of a nosey person making mischief and fabricated from there.”

“I don’t think I could do that.”

“Surely you made up at least half of the adventures you wrote about. They could not all have happened to you."

"They all happened to somebody. Some of them I had second hand, but I didn’t make any of them up out of whole cloth. That is the leap of imagination that defies me.”

Prudence looked skeptical. “I didn’t think, from reading your works you would stick at anything.”

“I have been taken for Marvelman because of the name I chose. He was not meant to be me. The cantos were just scribblings to wile away time when I was bored of an evening. It can be boring far away from company, or in the thick of it, for that matter.”

As they entered the park, a sensation was caused by the appearance of Dammler’s carriage. It was recognized and every second vehicle they passed wanted to stop for the occupant to have a word with him. There was no guessing from his smiling face and joking conversation that he was bored. Certainly Prudence was not. She hadn’t had such a day before in her whole life. Dammler introduced her to a few notables, but usually he just said a few words and drove on.

“How do you find life in a fish bowl?” he asked with a disparaging smile during a brief interlude when he was let alone.

“Very exciting, but I don’t know how you stand the pace if it’s always like this.”

“It is frequently worse,” he said tersely. “This was a poor idea coming here. We can’t talk. I should have known how it would be. We’ll head for the outskirts.”

The excitement died down as they entered the Chelsea Road, and conversation was again possible. They drove and talked for a long time-about their work, his travels, but very little about Prudence herself. As he left her at the door he said, “Next time we’ll talk about you, Miss Mallow. I have been running off at the mouth about myself, which is a poor way of getting to know you. Tomorrow?”

She nodded and entered the house in a dreamlike state to be rallied by her uncle about her new beau. “Knew all along he was sweet on you. I could tell by his eyes-eye. I’ll have to remember to paint that patch out. He is a good-looking fellow but for that one little blemish. What had he to say for himself?”

“He spoke highly of your work, Uncle.”

“Did he indeed? Odd as he has never seen it, but I daresay they are whispering about me at Court. Sir Alfred, you know, would slip them the word about my symbols. He is often at Court. So he is anxious to see my work, is he? Well, I shan’t mind to show him about my studio as he is practically one of the family. When does he come again?”

“Soon I expect,” Prudence answered prudently.

“If he happens to drop by while I am in the studio, don’t hesitate to send for me. I am only doing the twins. I shan’t mind stopping for a minute. Or bring him. Let him see how to pose.” This about a gentleman whose likeness had been taken by the greatest artists across the whole of Europe, and who knew the Mona Lisa’s pose as well as she knew it herself. Prudence bit her lip. Her uncle’s nonsense, which had long since become nearly unbearable, was funny again, for in her mind she shared it with Dammler.

“We must not make too much of it, Clarence,” Mrs. Mallow warned. “It is just courtesy on his part because they are both writers.”

“Pooh, he is in love with her. I have already told Mrs. Hering. She was green with envy. She would like you to take him to call one day, Prue, when you and Dammler have nothing better to do.”

“Uncle, you mustn’t say such things. What if he should hear? I’d be mortified.”

“You are too shy, my dear. Such a fellow as Dammler wants a little encouragement. He is bound to be backward, being handicapped as he is.”

“What do you mean? How is he handicapped?”

“Why, his eye, to be sure. But don’t let it put you off. I’ll take care of that, and posterity will never know the difference. What symbol would he like?”

"It is not settled you are to paint him, Uncle.”

“I have agreed to it. There is no problem. The only question is a symbol. Mention it to him the next time he comes ‘sparking’ you.”

“He is not ‘sparking’ me.”

“What a girl. She won’t say a thing 'til she has his ring on her finger.”

The matter was settled in his mind, and any objections were only coyness. He had already told Mrs. Hering, and would tell everyone else he met in the next two days.