His One Woman (5 page)

Sophie responded by jumping up and down again and beginning to semaphore in their direction—this time laughing and waving Aunt Percival's tolled-up sunshade to be sure of attracting them to her side immediately.

Both men responded by smiling at them before making their careful way through the crowd of women—few men were present—to Marietta's now three-quarters-empty stall.

‘I warned Alan,' remarked Jack when the formalities were over, ‘that by the time we arrived we should find all the best bargains will have gone—and so they have. But that stern goddess Duty called us. Even if I might have frivolously declined to obey her on the grounds that I had a previous engagement,
Alan, who is made of sterner stuff, would never have allowed such a consideration to move him.'

Duty again—and from Jack this time! Sophie pouted at him, and it was left to Marietta to say to him, ‘I see that you think of duty as a woman, Jack. Do you have any authority for assuming any such thing?'

Jack put on a puzzled face, and it was left to Aunt Percival to inform them, ‘Mr Jack, even if he does not know it, has the best authority for what he said—was it not Wordsworth who called duty, “stern daughter of the voice of God”?'

‘Bravo!' said the three men together, while Sophie stared at Aunt Percival. One might have guessed that
she
would remember such a useless piece of knowledge—and by boring old Wordsworth, too. She had unhappy memories of being asked to learn his Lucy poems by heart.

She was about to say something when Alan leaned forward, looked into her eyes, and half-whispered to her, ‘I'm sure that Miss Sophie likes poetry which has a softer touch. For example…' And he began to quote Byron to her in a voice which was so soulfully melodious that even Jack stared at him.

The admiring look which he sent her on ending gave Sophie the notion—totally unfounded—that,
smitten by her charms, he had been left with no alternative but to celebrate them.

‘Oh, Mr Dilhorne,' she simpered at him. ‘You flatter me.'

‘Oh, no,' he returned. ‘Most apt, wouldn't you agree, Charles?'

‘Yes, indeed,' said that gentleman, trying to keep his face straight.

Jack said nothing, but smiled a lot. Aunt Percival looked bemused. She detected a false note somewhere but, since no one said anything, she thought that she must be mistaken. Unlike Charles Stanton, she was not aware of how ruthless the handsome Mr Dilhorne could be.

‘When we have all finished showing off our learning,' Jack said, ‘I should like to enjoy some bodily, rather than mental, sustenance—it must be hours since I last ate or drank. Miss Percival spoke a moment ago of a tea-room. I wonder if you would like to accompany me there, Marietta?'

‘Oh, no,' wailed Sophie. ‘Why can't I take you? Marietta has only just returned from it.'

‘Splendid,' said Jack. ‘Then she'll be sure to know how to find it, won't she?'

He had decided earlier on that day that he wanted to see more of Marietta Hope without having to share her with either Alan and Charles or with Sophie and Aunt Percival. This seemed an ideal occasion to discover whether she was quite as remarkable as he was beginning to suspect she was.

So far he had no sexual interest in her, or so he told himself. In the past his taste in women had always run in the direction of either pretty young blondes who looked adoringly at him and talked of nothing, or their more experienced sisters with whom he could have a jolly good time with no fear of any unwanted consequences.

His father, the Patriarch, as all his descendants called him, had despaired of Jack ever finding anyone sensible with whom he could settle down for life. ‘Feather-headed and feather-brained, the lot of them,' he had once grumbled to Jack's mother, Hester, about the women Jack fancied. ‘Will he never take up with anyone I might like to have for a daughter-in-law? Someone like Eleanor or Kirsteen?'

‘You're not in a position to complain about him, Tom Dilhorne,' Hester had said. ‘It took you long enough to sow your wild oats and settle down.'

Now what could a man say to that? Other than, resignedly, ‘I might have hoped he'd be more sensible than his old father—although perhaps I ought to remember that if I'd settled down earlier we should never have married!'

On hearing Marietta's immediate offer to stand down in Sophie's favour, Alan, who was well aware of his brother's wish to be alone with the plain Miss Hope rather than the pretty one, answered for him.

‘Now, Miss Sophie,' he said. ‘Later on you may have the honour of taking tea with me—but only after you have sold me that pretty brooch whose price seems to have been above most buyers' touch.
I should like to take it home to give to my wife as a memory of a happy afternoon. I should be sure
not
to tell her of the charming young thing whose stall I bought it from.'

Since this came out in Alan's most seductive voice, Sophie tossed her head, saying, ‘Very well,' although she jealously watched Marietta take Jack away, leaving her with a middle-aged married man and Charles Stanton, whose manner to her was cool in the extreme—and Aunt Percival, who didn't count.

‘I should really have let Sophie take over,' Marietta told Jack in a worried voice. ‘I've just had a cup of tea with Charles.'

‘Ah, but did you have anything to eat?' asked Jack, who could be as cunning as his brother. ‘I really can't be expected to partake of a solitary meal. Besides, after the waitress has taken our order, you can enlighten me on the current situation in the States
vis-à-vis
the proper conduct for a young unmarried gentleman who wishes to get to know an unmarried lady better.'

So all this gallant attention to her, Marietta thought glumly, was simply to discover how best to approach Sophie! How could she have expected that Jack might be any different from all the other young men who had fluttered around the beautiful Hope cousins while ignoring the plain one—or using her to get to know the prettier ones better?

‘It's very much as I expect it is in England. You may not be alone with an eligible young woman—
other than in the kind of situation we find ourselves in at the moment—in an acceptable semi-public place. You may go anywhere with her so long as a chaperon accompanies you—although I believe that we allow a freer life for our young gentlewomen than is allowed to yours.'

‘As I thought,' said Jack. ‘In a ballroom at home I am allowed to escort the favoured fair one to a table where refreshments are laid out—which I suppose equates to this. So, I suppose that if I asked you and Sophie to go riding with me—I ought, perhaps, to say us, for Alan and Charles would be sure to wish to accompany me—I might safely invite you?'

So that I can act as chaperon for Sophie, I suppose, and that was another dismal thought.

‘Yes, or, on occasions where riding is not required, then Aunt Percival can act as chaperon.'

‘And having got that out of the way,' said Jack, ‘we can now talk of graver things. We in England think that Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel about slavery,
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, has been a great cause of friction between North and South. It has even been suggested that if there is a war it will have been a major cause of it. What, I wonder, is your opinion?'

One good thing, perhaps, thought Marietta, while giving him a reasoned answer, was that Jack would not have been likely to ask Sophie such a serious question. On the other hand, did she, Marietta, secretly wish him to talk to her in the same flighty way in which all the men who met her talked to Sophie? After all, wasn't he behaving with her in exactly the
same way in which young men conducted themselves with the duennas of pretty young things, hoping to get them to favour their suit over everyone else's. Another dismal thought.

The only surprising thing was that Jack appeared to be genuinely interested in what she was saying to him. They went on to discuss Mr John Brown's failed insurrection at Harper's Ferry in 1859 and all the other incidents which had brought the United States to the verge of war. She couldn't believe he would have wished to discuss any of that with Sophie, either.

In return she asked him about his interests, and learned that he was shortly to visit New York with a letter from Ezra Butler to John Ericsson, who was busily engaged in trying to build an effective iron man-of-war.

Tea and cake over, Marietta pulled out her little fob watch and insisted that it was time that they returned to the stall.

‘I am sure that your brother would wish to take tea with Sophie and Aunt Percival. You could assist me in selling whatever remains there—if anything does.'

‘Surely,' said Jack enthusiastically. ‘I should have informed you that my late father was a great man for selling things as well as buying them and we all seem to have inherited those talents—in varying degrees, of course.'

If Sophie resented losing Jack again by having to do the pretty to Alan and Aunt Percival in the tea
room she did not let it show, but went off with them meekly enough. Charles had found a clerical gentleman with whom to converse about the coming war, so Marietta had Jack to herself again.

She was coming to know him so well: to know that a certain quirk of his mouth and a sparkle in his bright blue eyes always preceded some comic aside; that he possessed a good and shrewd mind, and that he had great respect for his parents and his elder brother. She had to be honest, though, and admit that merely to be with him was enough to set her all pulses throbbing.

His tall and muscular body and his face which, unlike his brother's, was not orthodoxly handsome, but a little irregular, though full of character, attracted her as no other man's physical attributes had ever done before. More than that, when with him she was full of a strange excitement even while they were discussing the most banal topics.

Did he feel the same about her? Marietta very much doubted it. He was plainly a man who attracted women and could have his pick of them, so why should he be drawn to her? Except that this afternoon he could easily have arranged matters so that he spent it with Sophie, but instead he had whisked her away and left Sophie behind.

That might simply mean, however, that for some reason he felt a need to discuss serious matters for once and so he had monopolised her. When it came to a ballroom or a rendezvous, it would most likely
be Sophie whom he would choose for a companion—and perhaps for a wife.

Marietta shook herself. What in the world was she doing to be thinking of Jack marrying, and after a fashion that meant that she was thinking of him as a husband? She returned for a moment to being sensible Miss Hope again and, with Jack's help, sold most of the few remaining trinkets on the stall, after watching him charm and cajole passers-by into buying them. He had a nice line in patter and so she told him.

‘You are wasted as an engineer, Jack. You should have been a barker at a fair. You would have made a fortune.'

He was not offended, but instead rolled his eyes and said solemnly, ‘You flatter me, Marietta. My father was a master of the art, and Alan also. I am not of their calibre, believe me.'

He offered her a conspiratorial wink before hailing a passing matron with the words, ‘Madam, I have to tell you that you are missing some of the greatest bargains in Washington today if you do not stay a moment at our stall.'

Marietta laughed up at him after he had successfully wheedled one of society's most miserly women into buying a vase which she didn't want.

‘You are a rogue, Jack Dilhorne, a very rogue.'

He leaned forward to whisper conspiratorially to her, ‘You should do that more often, Marietta, it becomes you.'

She was so unused to such compliments that she said abruptly, ‘What…what did I do?'

‘Laugh,' he told her, solemn now. ‘You should laugh more often. I must think up some jokes.'

‘Oh, Jack,' she riposted, ‘you are a living joke.'

‘In that case,' he shot back, ‘you should be favouring me with a laugh all the time instead of rationing me so severely.'

Marietta did something which she had seen Sophie do quite often, but had never done herself. She slapped him gently on the wrist in playful reproof. ‘Come, Jack, you must not tease me.' Which was another favourite phrase of Sophie's when she was flirting with an admirer.

Goodness, that's what I'm doing, flirting! How did he make me flirt? I ought to stop, I'm too old, too solemn, too plain, too serious… The litany unrolled itself in Marietta's head, but it didn't stop her from laughing again, or Jack from admiring her and trying to provoke her a little more.

He put out a gentle hand and loosened a strand of her glossy chestnut hair which had escaped its imprisoning bandeau. ‘That's better,' he said. ‘It goes with the laugh.'

Well, Jack Dilhorne knew how to flirt and no mistake! Which was perhaps why she was suddenly doing all those flighty things which she had never done as a young girl. It was all his fault, of course. How does it happen that he's making me think, behave and talk like a green girl of fourteen with her first beau?

Marietta tucked the errant lock of hair back. He promptly loosened it again.

‘No,' she murmured at him. ‘No, you will make a spectacle of me if you carry on like this. What will people think?'

‘Nothing,' he told her. ‘They're too busy with their own affairs to trouble about yours. Besides, why should you not be entertained by your gentleman companion? They think nothing when Sophie is.'

‘Is that what you are, Mr Jack Dilhorne? My gentleman companion? How much of a gentleman are you?' But she was smiling when she teased him, and there was no sting in her words.