At that particular moment, Reverend Shackleford may have even been tempted to sell his soul to the devil if old Nick had offered to turn the clock back by a mere thirty seconds. Agnes’s face turned an interesting shade of puce as she opened and closed her mouth several times. As Charity declared later, her stepmother reminded her of the coy carp resident in the Duke’s newly installed fishpond at Blackstone. She was a similar colour too.
As the Reverend stared wordlessly at his wife, he could see out of the corner of his eye the faces of his four youngest offspring who were regarding him as though he was entirely dicked in the nob. One by one, they tiptoed out of the room, hurriedly followed by Freddy.Traitor, the Reverend thought without taking his eyes off Agnes.
‘I mean to say…’ he stuttered when the silence became entirely unbearable. Agnes held out her hand, stopping him in his tracks. ‘I do not wish tospeakto youeveragain Augustus Shackleford,’ she declared dramatically. ‘You willimmediatelyremove your things from my bedchamber and from this day forward, you can sleep in the attic … or thestable… I care not.’ The wordstablewas several octaves higher than the rest of the sentence and she ended it with a sob worthy of the most wretched Greek tragedy.
With that, she turned and tottered towards the open door as if barely able to move, such was her heartache. The slam of the door behind her however, gave evidence to the fact that while her heart might indeed be broken, there was nothing wrong with her right arm.
‘Now you’ve gone and done it,’ declared Patience matter-of-factly. ‘You’ll simply have to help me out of this hobble now father if you ever wish to sleep in your bed again.’
∞∞∞
Unfortunately, by the time Grace’s friend Miss Felicity Beaumont arrived at the vicarage not three days later to begin Patience’s lessons on Society etiquette, neither conspirator had managed to come up with even a remotely feasible scheme. Things were becoming desperate indeed, not least because the Reverend had been reduced to sharing a bed with Percy…
While Miss Beaumont may not have been expecting the most effervescent of welcomes being fully cognisant of the fact that her charge was not even remotely happy about the turn of events, she had hoped for at least a modicum of hospitality. However, as she relayed to the Duchess of Blackmore during dinner on the first evening, the atmosphere was such that one could be mistaken in thinking somebody had died.
Her pupil was in the main, sullen and disobliging and it did not help that Patience’s idea of etiquette was to avoid swearing in polite company. The phrase,blast and bugger your eyes,she was informed coolly by Miss Beaumont on the first day, was unacceptable even in the most stringent of circumstances.
Naturally, Grace did not wish to put her old friend through such a tedious daily ordeal and was beyond frustrated with her sister. Indeed, she went as far as declaring her intention to favour Patience with a piece of her mind, but as Miss Beaumont gently reminded her - had she so quickly forgotten her own conduct during the first few months of her marriage to the Duke of Blackmore? Grudgingly, Grace conceded that mayhap she was being a trifle hard on her younger sister and agreed to give the lessons a month before intervening.
However, the fact that she’d only recently been blessed with a daughter of her own gave Grace more than a few sleepless nights, most especially as when confiding to her husband of her sincere hope that Jennifer would not develop the Shackleford wilfulness, Nicholas’s only response had been a derisive snort.
∞∞∞
‘Tare an’ hounds, Percy Noon, your arse is bony enough to crack deuced nuts on,’ Reverend Shackleford complained. ‘Shift over to your side of the bed,’.
‘What side? I don’t have a side,’ the small man snapped, ‘because you’re taking up three quarters of the bed … Sir.’ Such an uncharacteristic flash of boldness would, under normal circumstances, have been out of the question. However, Percy was the first to admit that these were hardly normal circumstances as evidenced by his brief display of pluck to his backbone.
He glanced over at his bed companion who was lying on his back, staring into the darkness. For a few heart stopping seconds, the curate thought the Reverend had gone to his heavenly reward. It gave a whole new light to the large man’s earlier acerbic comment that at least he wouldn’t have to share a deuced po in Heaven.
Just as Percy was wondering whether to give him a sharp poke, Reverend Shackleford gave a loud sigh and shook his head in the dark.
‘The truth is, Percy lad,’ he sighed, ‘as preposterous as it may sound, on this occasion, I have only myself to blame.’
Percy entirely agreed, though naturally he didn’t voice that opinion. Usually, the curate had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Reverend’s problems, which to be fair were nearly always the result of his superior’s inability to keep his nose out of … well … anything. However, on this particular occasion, if he was ever to have his bed back to himself, Percy was painfully aware he had no choice but to voluntarily offer his assistance.
Both men stared silently into the dark, each endeavouring to come up with a solution to the problem.
‘I don’t suppose you’d be up for marrying the chit, would you Percy?’
∞∞∞
Two weeks into her lessons, Patience was becoming frantic. The whole situation was made even more untenable because Felicity Beaumont was one of the few people Patience actually felt comfortable with. The lady was quick-witted and funny and more than once had her charge laughing before she remembered what she was there for.
Clearly, Miss Beaumont had managed to avoid matrimony, and Patience longed to know why and how. Ordinarily, she would have simply come out and asked her, but given that the importance of good manners seemed to be central to everything her mentor was teaching, Patience felt inexplicably unable to broach the subject, which wasn’t like her at all.
Usually, when Patience wanted something, even if it was simply information, she was relentless in her pursuit of it, often to the exclusion of everything else.
At all other times, she much preferred her own company, roaming the lanes and fields of Blackmore where airs and graces were not important and manners had no meaning. Mayhap if she’d been lovely to look at with hair that curled wantonly around her face as did Tempy’s, then she’d feel differently. But she wasn’t and it didn’t. In truth, her hair was the colour of mud and without so much as a kink.
The few times she’d given her face more than a cursory glance, she supposed she had quite nice eyes, pleasingly full lips and indeed, her skin was clear with the required porcelain hue. But somehow, when put all together, the result was instantly forgettable.
And forming an attachment? To Patience, relationships brought far too much torment for her liking. To be always at the mercy of another’s opinion, and to be at their beck and call for the rest of her life sounded like torture. And then there was the horror of the dreaded tête-à-tête. Patience was not simply forthright; any comments she made were at best direct, and at worst unequivocally offensive. Indeed, most conversations she chose to take part in ended up with her family expressing their deepest apologies.
Patience could only assume her sisters had chosen to forget about her foibles, preferring instead to believe that simply marrying her off would finally put an end to her eccentricities.
Sighing, Patience climbed out of bed. Today, she, her father and Miss Beaumont were scheduled to attend a formal luncheon at Blackmore. Evidently, Grace had considered it prudent to provide her sister with a little more practice of eating in polite company, especially as Patience had only another two weeks of instruction before they repaired to the town of Bath.
More deuced small talk, Patience grumbled to herself, hurriedly pulling on her best day dress in preparation.
