“When I’ve seen my bankers. I’ll do that in the morning, and I only hope the fellows don’t take it into their heads I’m flying the country. We can catch the night packet from Dover, but don’t bring a mountain of baggage, Léonie, if you want to travel fast.”
The Duchess took him at his word, and when his coach arrived in Curzon Street next morning she had only one bandbox to be put into it. “You can’t travel like that!” he protested. “And ain’t you taking your abigail along too?”
She rejected the suggestion with scorn, and pointed an accusing finger at the baggage already piled on the roof of the coach. After a lively dispute, in which Lady Fanny and her son joined, two of Lord Rupert’s trunks were left behind in his sister’s charge. An errand-boy, two loiterers, and a cook-girl were interested spectators of the start, and Mr. Marling delivered a lecture, which no one paid any attention to, on the amount of baggage he himself considered necessary for a gentleman to take to Paris.
When the coach at last moved forward Lady Fanny announced that she had the migraine, and went off upstairs, leaving Mr. Marling to order the disposal of the two trunks left on the pavement.
She expected to see his grace of Avon within three days. She saw him within two, greatly to her dismay. When his name was announced she was reclining on a couch in her withdrawing-room, her hands encased in chicken-skin gloves (for an east wind had slightly chapped their soft whiteness), yawning over the pages of The Inflexible Captive. She gave a perceptible start, but recovered herself in an instant, and greeted his grace with apparent delight.
“La, Justin, is it you indeed? I’m vastly glad to see you. Only look at this book that John has given me! It is writ by that Bluestocking, Mrs. More. I find it amazingly dull, do not you?”
His grace came over to the fire, and stood looking enigmatically down at her. “Amazingly, my dear Fanny. Do I see you in your customary good health?”
Lady Fanny promptly launched into a recital of the many ailments that afflicted her. It was a fruitful topic, and his grace evinced enough polite interest to encourage her to enlarge on it. She enlarged for twenty minutes and discoursed on Dr. Cocchi’s book, The Pythagorean Diet, or Vegetables only conducive to the Preservation of Health and the Cure of Diseases. His grace was urbanity itself. Lady Fanny quaked inwardly, and began to falter in her account of her indisposition. A short pause ensued. His grace took snuff, and as he shut his elegant gold box said languidly: “I understand, my dear Fanny, that there is to be a marriage in our family.”
Lady Fanny started upright on the couch. “A — a marriage?” she stammered. “Why — why — what do you mean, Justin?”
His grace’s brows rose a little; she thought there was a gleam of malice in his eyes. “Doubtless I have been misinformed. I was under the impression that my niece is about to espouse a gentleman of the name of Comyn.”