A Lady of Consequence. Mary Nichols

the Duchess and Duncan returned to the carriage and were carried away, leaving the two actresses staring after them.

      ‘Well,’ Madeleine said, letting out her breath, which she suddenly realised she had been holding. ‘I never thought it would be so easy.’

      ‘And I am not so sure I shouldn’t make your excuses and go alone,’ her friend said. ‘I am afraid you will stir up a hornet’s nest.’

      ‘No, I will not. I will be the embodiment of decorum, you will be proud of me.’

      ‘How can I be proud of you, when I know what a deceiver you are?’

      ‘One tiny fib, that’s all I told, and it harms no one. Besides, I told you I would confess, if I ever find myself talking to the Marquis privately again.’

      ‘Oh, there is no doubt you will, I saw the way he looked at you. And you smiling back at him, like the temptress you are.’

      ‘I am not!’

      ‘Oh, my dear, I sometimes think you do not know when you are on stage and when you are off it.’

      “‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players”,’ Maddy quoted, remembering Lancelot Greatorex’s words the day she had first met him. You don’t need to tread the boards to play a part. We all do it from time to time. Do you tell me you have never had a fantasy, never pretended to be other than you are? Oh, she had certainly done that.

      ‘That may be true,’ Marianne said. ‘But we can only play the role for which we have been cast…’

      ‘You played the lady,’ Madeleine interrupted her. ‘You went to Stanmore House and deceived the whole company, so why can’t I?’

      ‘The reasons for doing it were very different. I was enrolled to help catch a blackguard who meant to harm Lady Lavinia.’

      ‘You never told me that.’ Madeleine was glad to divert the conversation away from her own motives; if Marianne continued to question her about them, she would be hard put to answer truthfully because she did not know what they were herself. Was she still nursing a grievance against the whole nobility? And how could making a fool of the Marquis of Risley assuage that?

      Was it simply that she wanted to see what it was like to be a lady of consequence? Or was she so ashamed of her past that she had to invent one nearer to her liking? But that must mean she was ashamed of her darling mother who, poor as she was and without a title, had been a gentlewoman in the truest sense of the word. Such a thing was inconceivable; she was proud of her mother. But oh, how she wished Mama had told her something of her father. But he was a shadowy figure, a wraith, with no substance.

      Perhaps it was envy that the Marquis of Risley could trace his forebears back generation after generation while she did not know who she was. Her name wasn’t even Charron, it was Cartwright. But could she even be sure of that? Her mother might have fabricated that too, just as she had invented the French émigré. And having brought him into existence, she was stuck with him.

      Marianne smiled. ‘Maddy dear, you have gone into another of your daydreams. If you do not keep your wits about you, one of these days you will be run down by a coach.’

      Her words pitched Madeleine back fifteen years. She was standing outside a haberdashery shop and her mother, who had just come from the shop, was pulling on her gloves and saying something about getting home. She heard again the clatter of horses’ hooves, the sound of carriage wheels, the yells as the driver tried to pull the horses up. She saw his contorted face as the carriage careered out of control and then her mother wasn’t beside her any more. She was lying in the road, white and still, and a small trickle of blood was coming from under her head and growing wider. Maddy could still hear her own screams.

      ‘Maddy! Maddy! Whatever is the matter?’ Marianne’s voice came to her, loud and insistent. ‘You are white as a sheet.’

      Madeleine gave a huge shudder and looked about her. She was back in 1827, in front of the colonnaded arcade of Covent Garden. The traffic flowed past her; there was no one lying in the street and her friend was tugging on her arm.

      ‘I was thinking of my mother.’

      ‘Oh, Madeleine. The Lord smite me for the fool I am. I forgot. I am sorry. Will you forgive me?’

      ‘There is nothing to forgive.’ She smiled at her friend and took her arm. ‘Come, we had better be going.’

      But the memory remained at the back of her mind, as if she needed a reminder of why she was what she was and why she had to break free from the constrictions of the past. And it had been her mother who had invented the name of Charron, so it was her mother who was guiding her now. It made her feel better.

      ‘You did not tell me you were arranging a musical soirée,’ Duncan said, as he and the Duchess continued to their destination.

      ‘Is there any reason why I should have? I have them regularly and you have never shown the slightest interest in them before.’

      ‘Yes, I have. I attended the last one.’

      ‘Only under extreme duress and you only stayed fifteen minutes.’

      ‘Perhaps I had another engagement.’

      ‘Oh, undoubtedly. At White’s or Boodles, I shouldn’t wonder.’

      ‘Mama, you make me sound like a regular gamester, and you know I rarely gamble.’

      Frances smiled, remembering how he had played truant from school and gone to a gaming hell when he was only fifteen. The Duke had rung a peal over him and extracted a promise not to visit such places again. Oh, she knew he went to the gentlemen’s clubs, but he had matured enough not to gamble more than a few guineas, which he could easily afford to lose. ‘So, I collect, you wish to come to my next gathering. Could it, perhaps, have something to do with the delightful Miss Charron?’

      He looked startled. ‘Now, why do you say that?’

      ‘Because I know you very well and I know you cannot resist a pretty face.’ She paused. ‘Was she the one you and Benedict were wrangling over?’

      ‘We were not wrangling. He challenged me to take her out to supper without telling her who I was, that was all. I wish now I had not.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘It seemed an ungentlemanly thing to do.’

      ‘And so it was.’

      ‘She told me her history and I felt so ashamed. She comes from a good family, Mama, her grandfather was a French comte who fled the Terror. Her father was killed in the late war and her mother was run down by a carriage when she was nine years old. She has been forced into acting by a need to earn her own living.’

      ‘If it is true, then it is very sad.’ She paused. ‘But do be careful, Duncan, you do not raise hopes in her that can never be fulfilled.’

      He laughed a little harshly. ‘Oh, Mama, you are as bad as Lavinia. I took her out to supper and escorted her home afterwards. Nothing untoward happened, I promise you. I am not a rake.’

      ‘Oh, my dear boy, I know that.’

      The coach drew up outside the orphanage in Maiden Lane and he was saved any more embarrassing revelations. His stepmother was very astute and he could no more have tried to deceive her than fly to the moon.

      Duncan helped the coachman carry the baskets of clothes into the orphanage, where they were gratefully received by the ladies who looked after the orphans. Duncan, who had accompanied his stepmother on other occasions, had never before paid much attention to the inmates, nor the conditions in which they lived. The house was clean, the children clothed and fed and that was as far as his observation had taken him, but now, thinking of Madeleine Charron’s story, he looked with new eyes.

      While the Duchess talked to Mrs Thomas, the woman who ran the place, he wandered round the house, looking in all the rooms: the dining room with its long