Lady in Rags

Chapter Four: Bad Fortune

It did not normally take so long for gossip of the strength of the night Verity spent at Mr Armiger's to die out, but Me Armiger was new to the neighbourhood, and rich and handsome beside, so all the inhabitants of both town and village were eager to talk about him still, and Verity had always had an air of superiority about her that the villagers of Little Hough had disliked, so they in particular were keen to air her dirty laundry as often as possible. So even as autumn became winter, and the first gentle snows began to fall upon the country, Verity was still in disgrace, and Mr Armiger was still thought to be a devilish rake, which did little to detract from his charms in the eyes of eligible young ladies and their mothers. A husband was supposed to sow his wild oats before he settled down, after all.

This made Mr Armiger rather miserable. He had no intention of remarrying. Quite the opposite: he was determined to live the remainder of his life a bachelor. His first marriage had been made while he was very young, and still very naive, to a very beautiful Florentine girl of a poor but well-bred family. Somehow the stars had aligned and it had not been the disaster that young love often turned out to be, but rather six sweet, halcyon years, terminated brutally by a sudden sweeping fever, a fever that, in the end, had spared Mr Armiger his life, but taken that of his wife and child, and bleached his crow-black hair to an abnormal shade of grey. Still grieving, he was convinced that he could find no woman who could ever match the love he had found in Giulia Landolfi, and that it would be an insult to her memory to try.

Neil Armiger preferred to attempt a life of restrained bachelorhood, of books, and solitude, and long, lonely walks in the valley wilderness. It was an attempt only, as in Houglen perfect strangers seemed to believe themselves entitled to his company. They had so many rational excuses for public events, with so many coquettish virgins begging his attention at each of them.

It wasn't that he felt he was distracted from his grief by the flirtatious young debutantes around him, but he did find them tiresome. They seemed to find his statement of intended bachelorhood more of a challenge than a deterrent, and though he found many of them to be pretty, he found none of them to be charming.

Occasionally he found himself wondering how Verity Baker might act, if she were invited to a ball, wherein the implicit challenge of the night was to seduce the stand-offish Mr Armiger, but even in the ordinary way of things, she was rather below the social circle he mingled with, and at a time like this, with gossip still circulating, she was very much a pariah.

He had not seen her since the night she spent under his roof, and heard little of her, as the gossip that surrounded her involved him too intimately for any but the most gauche of debutantes to mention it in his hearing. She remained only in his memory as a beautiful paradox: high-born, but poorly bred; intelligent, but uneducated; bold, but prudish. It was a paradox that made him curious, and a curiosity that social strictures prevented being satisfied, which in turn only made him more curious still, especially when the faintest whisper of her name in his presence was immediately followed by a hush of silence, and then a chorus of raised eyebrows and clicking tongues.

One day, in mid December, he found an opportunity to partially sate his curiosity. He was at a tea party in Mrs Stanley's house. Mrs Stanley's two eldest nieces were also in attendance, and in their best mood to flirt. It was to avoid them that he had hurried to make the acquaintance of the vicar's daughter, Clare Abernathy. She was the youngest of the women there, little more than a child, and far too young to flirt. After trying to piggy-back his conversation with her for several minutes, the enterprising Miss Stanleys had transferred their attentions to the more likely Mr Bigham, who had recently come into a large enough fortune that any lady might be persuaded to overlook his paucity of chin and jaw.