The Chaotic Miss Crispino

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“Is that right? And ’tis that what you call it now, me fine Marchioness? We lived higher than O’Hara’s hog on that ‘stage-playing,’ if memory serves,” Maximilien retorted, his round face turning a violent red, although Allegra, watching him, was very sure he was not really angry, but was only indulging in a little more stage-acting of his own. They were an unusual group, she acknowledged silently, but there was a lot of love in this villa, and she felt a momentary pang at the remembered loss of her own family.

“High as O’Hara’s hog, is it? And twice as much time was spent lower than O’Malley’s well, Uncail. I remember that as well,” Lady Coniston shot back, not without humor. “Now, do we waste time splitting hairs, or do we help Valerian and Signorina Crispino with their little problem? Uncle Max, your Conte di Casals may get the passport, but I don’t wish to hear how. I’m a mother now—and, like my husband, ‘past such things.’”

“It’s turning into an Irish shrew ye are, darlin’,” Max groused before downing a glass of wine.

“Valerian,” she went on, unheeding, still holding Allegra’s hand as she turned to her other guest, “all we heard when Tony and I last saw you in Rome was that you were off to find Lord Dugdale’s long-lost granddaughter and transport her to Brighton. I see the granddaughter before me, and I congratulate you on your success, but I sense that more is involved in this story. Please, if I promise to have the servants lay out some refreshments in the sala da pranzo, you must tell us everything, from the very beginning!”

Allegra’s ears pricked up at the mention of food, her recent seasickness forgotten, and she squeezed Lady Coniston’s hands appreciatively. “I will tell you everything, dear Marchesa, I promise, all about my singing, my life, and even the terrible Timoteos—directly after we have eaten!”

A FULL TWO WEEKS passed in relative bliss for Allegra, for in the Marchioness of Coniston she had found her first true female friend since childhood. Lady Coniston, or Candie, as she had begged Allegra to address her, was more than gracious, more than interested—she was a true sister of the heart.

For Candie had not always led a life of comfort; she had known poverty, she had known fear, and she had learned to make her own way, by whatever means she could. But, like Allegra, she had never sacrificed her honor in order to fill her belly.

Candie had been rewarded for her purity with the love of Tony Betancourt, a man Allegra found to be immensely wonderful, and with the birth of their son, Murphy, an adorable blond cherub of two years who held his uncle Max’s heart in his chubby little hands.

Could there be such a similarly rosy future in Brighton for someone like Allegra? Somehow, she doubted it, no matter how enthusiastic Candie was about her prospects.

To that end, and over Allegra’s protests, Candie had set out to provide her young guest with a complete new wardrobe the very morning after Valerian and Allegra’s arrival in Naples. Although Italian styles were still woefully behind those of Paris, there existed enough modistes sufficiently schooled in the art of copying for Allegra to acquire a fairly extensive wardrobe that would be considered not only acceptable but wonderfully stylish by the ladies of Brighton.

But the Marchioness was not content to merely dress her young guest in fine feathers. Oh, no. She spent long hours schooling Allegra in proper deportment (including at least one stern lecture concerning Allegra’s tendency to gesture with her hands as she spoke, an entirely too Italian habit), and had helped her to weed most Italian words and phrasing from her vocabulary, permitting her to use only those considered suitably Continental and sure to impress her English relatives.

“I was the Conte di Casals’s niece Gina more than once in the past, you understand,” the Marchioness had informed her as the two sat alone late one night over Allegra’s lessons, “so I have a fairly good notion as to how you should go on. Have I told you about the time—I was just a young girl, I believe—that Uncle Max wrangled us an audience with the Pope?”

“His Holiness!” Allegra had exclaimed, much impressed. “I once sang a solo for the Bishop of Bologna, but it is not the same, is it?”

Yes, there were many lessons, but there were just as many stories, and just as many shared reminiscences between the new friends, quite a few of them having to do with the at-times-almost-bizarre courtship of Candice Murphy by Mark Antony Betancourt, Seventh Marquess of Coniston. The Marquess, it seemed, had until his marriage been known all over London as Mister Overnite: a carefree, heartbreakingly handsome man who supposedly had held the modern-day British record for dallying the whole night long in more society matrons’ beds than half the husbands in the Upper Ten Thousand.

It hadn’t been easy for Tony to understand that his bachelor days were effectively over from the first moment he’d clapped eyes on the mischievous Miss Murphy, but—as Candie, blushing, told Allegra—he had lived to give proof to the adage that reformed rakes make the very best of husbands.

As for Allegra’s singing career, it had been left to Valerian to explain to her that this, alas, was over, finally and completely. It was not to be mentioned in company, it was not to be considered as a viable part of her future—it simply was not to be thought of, ever again!

Only the quick-witted Tony had been able to save Valerian from Allegra’s employment of a particularly vile Italian curse, which he did by quickly pointing out that there was nothing wrong with Allegra considering herself a talented amateur.

“Why, as a matter of fact,” he had interjected cleverly, winking at his appreciative wife, “Prinny himself is quite a devotee of Italian opera. You’re bound to be the sensation of the age, Allegra, once you sing for him, for many of his guests perform at the Marine Pavilion after one of his Highness’s hours-long dinner parties.”

“Yes, the dinner parties,” Valerian had added, knowing by now where to aim his darts where Allegra was concerned. “I heard it said that there are often two dozen main dishes served in one evening,” he slid in, watching as Allegra’s sapphire eyes opened wide. “That’s not to mention the many side dishes, cakes, puddings, pastries, and the rest. Although I have not yet had the pleasure, Duggy is one of Old Swellfoot’s cronies, signorina, so you are sure to be invited, if you can just learn to behave yourself.”

All in all, Allegra had become not only resigned to leaving Italy but anxious to reach England and her mother’s birthplace, although it was with tears in her eyes that she waved good-bye to the Betancourts as the ship pulled away from the pier, her newly obtained passport safely in Valerian’s possession.

Then, suddenly, all her new finery to one side and her more refined English forgotten, she pointed to the dock, hopping on one slippered foot as she exclaimed, “Impossible! It is that terrible Bernardo—here, in Napoli! How has he found me? Again he shows up unwanted, come un cane nella chiesa— like a dog in a church!”

As Bernardo ran to the very edge of the pier, tears streaming down his handsome face and looking for all the world as if he was about to throw himself into the water in order to swim out to the ship, Allegra struck her right arm straight out in front of her, tucked her middle two fingers beneath her thumb, and shouted dramatically, “Si rompe il corno!”

Immediately Bernardo stepped back as if stunned, clutching his chest.

“You’re going to break his horns?” Valerian asked from beside her, watching bemusedly as her small but voluptuous figure was shown to advantage by her antics. “Why don’t I believe that is some sort of quaint Italian farewell?”

Allegra threw back her head, her long black hair blowing in the wind, since she had shunned Candie’s suggestion that she wear one of the new bonnets Valerian’s money had bought her. “I wished evil on him, signore. Great evil such as only another Italian can imagine!”

“Oh, you did, did you? And now you will kindly take it off again,” Valerian commanded, shaking his head. “Otherwise the lovesick fool will be on my conscience forevermore. You’re leaving Italy, signorina, so you can afford to be magnanimous. Bernardo Timoteo and his cohorts can no longer harm you.”

Allegra turned to Valerian, her face alight with glee. “Magnifico, signore! You are right! I, Allegra Crispino, will be magnanimous!” She leaned over the railing, waving a white handkerchief at the openly sobbing Bernardo. “Addio, caro Bernardo addio!” she called brightly, until the handsome young man on the pier heard her and began waving in return.

Valerian, well pleased with himself, smiled and waved to Bernardo as well, hardly believing he was actually on his way to Brighton at last, to achieve the long-awaited removal of the mercurial Allegra Crispino from his guardianship.

An odd, unrecognizable sensation in his stomach at the thought of depositing Allegra with Lord Dugdale and then walking away prompted him to turn his head and look down at the strange young girl.

“Allegra!” he was startled into saying, for she was gripping the rail with both hands, huge, crystalline tears running down her wind-reddened cheeks. “Why are you crying? Surely you’re not going to miss having the Timoteo dogs barking at your heels?”

“I shall never see my beloved Italia again, Valerian,” she answered in a small voice, her gaze still intent on the rapidly disappearing shoreline as she gave out with a shuddering sigh. “My madre, my papà they live in that earth. They are lost to me forever; all of what is home to me is now gone, while I sail away to an uncertain future with a grandfather I don’t know. I didn’t know how much it would hurt, Valerian, or how very much frightened I would feel.”

Before he could think, before he could weigh the right or the wrong of it, Valerian gathered Allegra’s small frame close against his chest, where she remained, her arms wrapped tightly around his waist, as, together, they watched the only homeland she had ever known fade from sight.

CHAPTER THREE

AGNES KITTREDGE sat in the outdated drawing room she would most happily have given her best Kashmir shawl to redecorate, awaiting the arrival of her children, seventeen-year-old Isobel and her older brother, Gideon, who had reached the age of three and twenty, Agnes was sure, thanks only to his fond mama’s most assiduous nursing of his delicate constitution.

Mrs. Kittredge’s brother, Baron Dennis Dugdale, was upstairs in his rooms, his gouty right foot swathed in bandages Agnes would much rather see bound tightly about his clearly disordered head.

She was furious, Agnes Kittredge was, pushed nearly to the brink of distraction by the disquieting thought that her beloved brother, Dennis, could have the nerve to recover his health after he had most solemnly promised that his demise was imminent. Was there no one, who could be trusted to keep his word anymore, not even a brother?

Not only had her aging sibling once more become the possessor of depressingly good health, but his general demeanor had reverted to one of such high good humor that Agnes, who had never been a tremendous advocate of levity, was lately finding herself hard-pressed to keep a civil tongue in her head whenever the jolly Baron was about.

Lord Dugdale’s near-constant, jocular remarks alluding to a “change in the wind,” and his oblique hints at a coming “surprise to knock your nose more sideways than it already is, Aggie,” were not only most depressingly annoying, they were beginning to worry her very much.

Everything had always been so settled, so regulated, in the life they all lived at Number 23 in the Royal Crescent Terrace. Agnes ruled, Isobel preened, Gideon gambled, and dearest Denny paid the bills. It was all so simple, so orderly. Now Lord Dugdale was making noises as if this arrangement no longer could be regarded as the ordinary, and that soon there would come a major readjustment in all their lives.

Agnes had agreed with this notion in part at first, when the Baron had spoken so earnestly of his imminent demise. There most assuredly would be changes at Number 23 when that unhappy day finally dawned.

Agnes would still rule, Isobel would still preen, Gideon would still gamble. But forever gone from the scene would be Lord Dugdale and his annoying habit of closely questioning the amount of the bills his family presented to him with every expectation that they be paid at once, and without his first issuing a sermon about the evils of incautious spending.

Once her brother, rest his soul, was safely underground, Agnes would be free to run the household exactly as she wished, without the wearying necessity to beg for every groat. This sort of “change” Agnes had looked forward to with great expectation, nearly unmixed with sorrow for the soon-to-be-departed brother, who, after all, had led a good long life and deserved his rest.

It was all that new doctor’s fault, Agnes had decided when her brother, far from sliding conveniently into his grave, began to make a near-miraculous recovery from a violent uproar of the bowels. Who ever heard of such a thing? No bleeding. No leeches. No thin gruel. Just plenty of fresh air, exercise, and good, hearty food. The treatment should have killed the Baron, but it hadn’t.

Agnes hadn’t allowed the doctor back in the house since the first day Lord Dugdale had sat up and loudly called for his pipe and a full bottle of his favorite cherry ripe.

“Not that it did me a penny worth of good,” she groused, arranging her shawl more firmly about her bony shoulders as she thought of her brother’s refusal to suffer an immediate relapse. “The man’s body has been restored at the cost of his wits. It had been nearly three months, and still we must hear daily about this surprise of his. It is time and more I consider placing the poor, sainted man in an institution where there are those trained in dealing with delusional lunatics such as Denny.”

“Talking to yourself, Mama? I must admit I do know of some who do so from time to time, but then I believe those people are usually rather deep in their cups. Have you been nipping while my back was turned, Mama? It isn’t like you; but then this entire household has been rather irregular for weeks on end now, hasn’t it?”

Agnes Kittredge looked up at the sound of her beloved Gideon’s voice. “Darling!” she exclaimed, patting the space beside her on the settee. “Come sit down and tell me how you feel this morning. You were abroad quite late last night, I believe. The damp night air isn’t good for you, you know. Have you breakfasted? I expressly ordered the eggs be poached this morning, as they are much more suited to your delicate constitution in that form than the hard-cooked variety you persist in eating whenever my back is turned.”

He sat down dutifully, spreading his coattails neatly as he did so. “I shunned eggs entirely this morning, Mama, in favor of dry toast dipped in watered wine, for I woke with the most shocking headache. Do you think it’s coming on to rain? It couldn’t have been the canary I partook of last night, for you know I never drink to excess.”

“Indeed no, Gideon. You would never do that, not with your fragile system.” Agnes turned to look adoringly upon her son. Gideon Kittredge was as handsome as his mother and sister were plain—although how this quirk of nature came about no one save Lord Dugdale, who once mentioned the idea of his sister having played her husband false at least the once, had ever been able to understand the phenomenon.

Gideon had been born scarcely five months after his parents’ marriage, a sickly babe whose small size and poor chances for survival lent at least partial credence to the outrageous fib that he had been born much too soon due to an unfortunate fright his mother had taken at the sight of a tumbling dwarf in the small traveling circus she and her husband had chanced upon the same day Agnes was delivered of her firstborn child.

When Gideon didn’t expire as expected, Agnes, through guilt over her lie or natural motherly devotion only she knew, threw her entire energies into coddling and protecting the child well past the point of necessity or even common sense.

Gideon’s sniffles were a sure sign of a lung inflammation, his cough no less than threatening consumption, his sighs a dire portent of some crippling, disabling condition that must be averted at all costs. Isobel was conceived and born almost without Agnes’s notice and shuffled off to a separate nursery so that she could not contaminate her brother’s air.

When Mister Kittredge had the misfortune to break his neck in a hunting accident, Agnes had little time for grieving, for she was too busy thanking her lucky stars that the man hadn’t instead decided to succumb to some lingering illness that might either be passed on to Gideon or take her away overlong from her main project in life, that of taking care of her son.

That Gideon had grown from a whining, totally unlovable child into a self-indulgent adult concerned only with his own wants and desires could not be surprising. Even less of a revelation was that he thoroughly disliked his mother, the woman having earned his disgust because of his easy ability to manipulate her.

Moving closer to her now, Gideon laid his dark head on Agnes’s shoulder and gazed up into her watery blue eyes. “You appear distressed, dearest Mama. Is there anything I can do to help? I promise I shall not let this crushing headache stay me from performing whatever deed you should ask of me. After all, I owe my life to you, as well I know.”

Agnes blinked twice, masterfully holding back loving tears. “I shouldn’t think to bother your aching head, my darling,” she declared passionately, daring to touch a hand to his smooth cheek. “It’s just your uncle Denny again. I fear he is becoming worse with each passing day.”

Gideon turned his head slightly and stifled a yawn. “Really? In what way?”

“Why, this morning he is insisting on coming downstairs, even though his foot is still wrapped up like some heathen mummy, and his valet has told me your uncle actually intends to see his tailor this afternoon to order an entire new suit of clothes. Now why would he need new clothes? It isn’t as if he doesn’t have a closet full of them.”

“All displaying his love of food, for the dear man seems to find it necessary to wear what he eats,” Gideon supplied helpfully.

“Precisely so, my dear,” Agnes concurred feelingly. “I should think he’d be more concerned with the fact that you have been seen in the same evening dress at least three times this year. If anyone is in dire need of a new wardrobe, dearest, it is you, who shows his tailor to such advantage.”

There was a slight movement at the doorway, followed by a decidedly unladylike snort from Miss Isobel Kittredge, who had just entered the room.

“Toadeating Mama again, Gideon?” the young lady asked, taking up a seat across from the settee. “I’m surprised you haven’t hopped into her lap to ask her to tell you a story. Or would you rather tell her a story, possibly the one about your latest venture into the land of the sharpers?”

Agnes wrinkled her forehead, at least as much as the tightly done-up bun perched atop her head allowed her to do. “Sharpers? What are sharpers, Gideon? I don’t believe I’ve ever heard the term.”

Gideon, sitting up smartly once more, shot his sister a fulminating look. “Pernicious little brat,” he gritted from between his even white teeth as Isobel, obviously well pleased with herself, made a great business out of straightening a lace doily on the table beside her.

“Pernicious, am I?” she countered, lifting hazel eyes as depressingly watery as her mother’s to her brother’s face. “Since you have roused the energy necessary to be insulting, I can only imagine that I am right and you are scorched again.”

“Gideon?” Agnes prompted, fighting the feeling that yet another score of gray hairs were about to sprout overnight on her already nearly white head. “Is your sister correct? Have you been gambling again?”

Sparing a moment to send his sister another fulminating, I’ll-see-to-you-later look, Gideon picked up his mother’s left hand and held it firmly between both of his. “I must admit to a shocking run of bad luck, Mama, but it is nothing to fret about, I promise. The devil was in it last night, that’s all, but I’ll come about as soon as you can get Uncle Denny to advance you a small pittance on the household allowance.”

Agnes’s thin face took on a pinched expression. “How much, Gideon? I cannot fob your uncle off with another story about the price of candles. He has his wits about him again, you know, at least in the area of his finances. Tell me quickly, before I conjure up some horrendous sum.”

“A mere monkey, Mama,” Gideon mumbled into his cravat. “Five hundred pounds. Four hundred, actually, but I also placed a small wager with a certain party about the outcome of a race. Dratted horse stumbled going round the turn.”

“Five hundred pounds! I will never be able to extract so much from your uncle as that!”

“Of course you will, Mama—for me.” He brought his mother’s hand to his mouth, firmly pressing his lips against the papery skin. “And I promise, Mama, I shall eschew racing from this moment on. I don’t know how I got involved in such a harebrained thing, for you know I can’t abide horses. It was all George Watson’s idea—he goaded me into the wager when my spirits were at a low ebb!”

“Of course he did,” Agnes agreed immediately, pressing her cheek against her son’s hands. “I never did like that George—and his grandfather smells entirely too much of the shop to suit me, as I recall. You would be wise to eschew George in the future as well, my darling.”

“George tied him up and forced him to make a wager against his will,” Isobel spat mockingly, shaking her head. “Honestly, Mama, he takes you in like a green goose, over and over again. Gideon is a dedicated gamester. When are you going to get that fact into your head? Why, he probably has a wager with George right now on how long it will take you to come up with the blunt to settle his latest debt.”

“Isobel!” Agnes exclaimed, stung. “You will apologize at once! I vow, your overweening jealousy of your brother makes me wonder if I have nurtured a viper at my bosom.”

Gideon took that moment to cough delicately into his fist.

“Now look what you’ve done!” Agnes exclaimed, immediately pressing a hand to her son’s forehead to check for fever. “You’ve brought on one of Gideon’s spasms. Such an unnatural child!”

“It wasn’t—a-ahumph, a-ahumph—my dearest sister’s viperish tongue—a-aumph—that upset me, Mama,” Gideon corrected quickly, his strong voice giving the lie to his continuing bout of coughing. “It is the money that worries me. George can be so demanding—and it is, after all, a debt of honor. If only I should be assured that Uncle Denny won’t cut up stiff—”

“No, no, of course he won’t. I shan’t even mention your name,” Agnes assured her son even as she shot her smirking daughter a quelling look. “I shall approach your uncle this afternoon.”

“Without fail?” Gideon asked, somehow managing to produce a slight sheen of feverish perspiration on his smooth upper lip.

“Without fail, my darling,” Agnes vowed, then gave a quick silencing wave of her hand as she heard her brother’s limping gait approaching outside in the hallway.

“La, yes,” she exclaimed quickly in an overly hearty voice that was sure to carry as far as the foyer. “I have just come from prayers in my room, yet again thanking the good Lord on my knees for your uncle’s miraculous recovery. I should think the fine air of Brighton has had much to do with his renewed good health, but the good Lord must be thanked for that good air as well, mustn’t He, children?”

“Spouting gibberish again, Aggie?” Lord Dugdale asked from the doorway, where he stood leaning heavily on the bulbous head of his cane. “If you wish to thank anyone, thank Valerian Fitzhugh—for it’s he who saved me, sure as check. Great faith I have in that boy, and it’s sure to be rewarded any day now with the most wonderful surprise a man could push himself up from the brink of the grave to accept.”

He took two more steps into the room before Isobel rose to take his arm, helping him to the chair she had just vacated. “You mustn’t push yourself, Uncle, not on your first day downstairs. There you go,” she complimented as the Baron lowered himself heavily into the chair. “Now if you’ll just let me place this footstool here for you to rest that leg on—there! Mama, Gideon—doesn’t Uncle Denny look much more the thing?”

Lord Dugdale looked from sister to niece to nephew, his squat, heavy body all but wedged into the chair as he presented himself for their scrutiny. What his relatives saw, other than the truly magnificent cocoon of snowy white bandages stuck to the lower half of his right leg and foot, was a no-longer-young man with a sparse, partial circlet of gray hair banding his head directly above his ears, leaving his shiny bald pate to cast a glare in the afternoon sunlight coming through a nearby window.

His eyes, the same watery blue of his sister’s but with a multitude of cunning if not intelligence lurking in their depths, returned their piercing looks, yet his round-as-a-pie plate face was carefully expressionless. Yes, it was the same old Baron Dugdale they had known forever—complete to the food stains on his loosely tied cravat and too-tight waistcoat.

“Well, this is something new, Uncle Denny,” Isobel piped up at last, perching her thin frame on a corner of the footstool as she looked up at the Baron. “You’ve been hinting about this surprise for weeks, but I’ve never heard Mister Fitzhugh’s name mentioned before this moment. Why, it must be three years or more since he’s been home to Brighton. Ever since Waterloo, I imagine. Is that the surprise? That Valerian—I mean, Mister Fitzhugh—is returning home?”

Gideon rose to stand behind the settee. “Don’t drool, Isobel; it doesn’t become you. Why, you were scarcely out of swaddling clothes when Valerian Fitzhugh took off for the Continent. Don’t tell me you still fancy yourself in love with the man. Lord, that’s pathetic!”

Isobel’s normally sallow complexion visibly paled and a small white line tightened about her thin lips. “Gideon Kittredge—you take that back!” she gritted, pointing a shaking finger in his direction. “Mama! Make him take that back!”