“I didn’t know that dukes married—married artists.” Young Ledyard eyed his host with suspicion; he had fallen victim more than once to the soaring flights of that gentleman’s imagination.
“They don’t; that was exactly what furnished all the ripe excitement. He not only married her, but he was most frightfully set up about it—fairly swollen with pride. Nothing damped them, as far as I can learn; Society and the Court and the whole blooming family went off their heads with excitement and cut her and insulted her and disowned her—and she laughed in their faces and danced on their toes. She thought that the whole thing was the most stupendous joke; Bunny says that there never were five minutes after she came to Gray Courts that you couldn’t hear her laughing or singing somewhere about the place—and sometimes doing both at once.”
“Who’s Bunny?”
“Bunny was her maid—afterward she was my own private slave until the magnificent Noll showed her the gates of the ancestral home after she’d locked me up in her room one night when he was out hunting for me with the boot-strap! She went off into the most stunning hysterics right outside the door and called him a bloody roaring monster what ought to have his heart cut out for laying a finger on an innocent lamb. And when they fished the innocent lamb out from under the bed and informed him between larrups that his Bunny had been hurled into outer darkness by two footmen and an under-gardener, he let out the last howls of his life. He’d reached the mature age of six and a half, but he hasn’t lost or found anything since worth a single solitary howl!”
“Why didn’t your mother and father stop them?” demanded Ledyard, looking stern and sick and still faintly incredulous.
“Because the only active interference they were capable of at the time would have been with a Ouija board,” explained the Honourable Tony affably. “Exit Biddy, Duchess of Bolingham, laughing, on the day that young Anthony Christopher Stoningham Calvert makes his first bow to a ravished family. I’ll wager that before she slipped off she realized that it was a good one on all of us, too!”
“Well, but what happened to your father?”
“Oh, the Black Duke, as he was impolitely referred to, hadn’t extracted any amusement from life before he discovered his Biddy, and once she was gone, he evidently considered it a dingy affair. He slunk around the empty corridors for a bit hunting for the echo of her laughter, but he got tired of that game, too, and died of pneumonia and boredom without making any particular fuss—though Bunny swears that after everyone in the room thought he was gone for good and they all were filing out of the room on the tips of reverent toes, he flung back his head and gave one great roar of laughter—the kind of a roar that he used to give when he’d come on little Biddy in a dark hall, dancing out an imitation of the Bolingham vestals at their weekly task of patronizing the parish poor. Bunny said that it fair scared the breath out of their bodies, but when they went back he was lying there as dead as last year’s wild boar.”
“Calvert, are you making this up?”
The Honourable Tony turned his head sharply toward his interlocutor, his dark eyes narrowed to slits. After a moment’s cold scrutiny of the troubled countenance, he shrugged his shoulders with a not highly diverted laugh.