Cressida by Clare Darcy Read Free Book Online Page A

so essential to becoming the prince of fashion that Brummell was.
    Addison was a man in his late thirties, tall and handsome, if one was prepared to overlook a rather large nose and the iciness of the blue eyes under those supercilious brows. Cressida disliked him, but admitted him to her inner circle because he was amusing and extremely difficult to exclude from any gathering—“like a wasp at a picnic,” she had once said of him, which remark, having been repeated for his benefit by a helpful friend, had not endeared her to him, and had resulted in the circulation of several rather disagreeable aphorisms concerning her throughout the ton, which had in turn been repeated to her and to which she had paid no attention at all.
    He had been standing at the other side of the crowded ballroom when she had come in, but, as he always took pains to be seen in conversation with every person of consequence during the course of a social evening, he at once deserted the very minor European Royalty to whom he had been speaking and came across to her.
    “Such unrewarding young bores, these German princelings we have had swarming to England ever since Leopold carried off our young Princess, ” he remarked to her, looking down his nose at his erstwhile companion, after the initial civilities had been exchanged. “Like prize cattle—very fat, very dull, and with smallish, obstinate eyes. And most of them, I daresay, without a penny to bless themselves with, so that if you should be cherishing a secret desire to become a Prinzessin, dearest Cressy, I am sure you have only to throw your handkerchief and there will be a positive scramble to pick it up. Did you know that when Leopold himself first visited London two years ago he could not afford to stop at an hotel and set himself up instead in lodgings over a grocer’s shop in Marylebone High Street? That, of course, was before the Princess Charlotte took him up. The advantages to a young man of having fair hair, hazel eyes, a well-set-up figure, and engaging if somewhat priggish manners, cannot, it seems, be exaggerated in this modern age.”
    Cressida said he and the Princess appeared to be very happy, and that she dared say the Princess did not regret now having broken off her engagement to the Prince of Orange, in spite of the furor it had caused at the time. She then bit her lip, wishing she could take back her last remark, as it obviously presented Addison with a perfect opportunity to speak of another broken engagement, namely, hers to Rossiter.
    But, somewhat to her surprise, the subject was not brought up, and she was obliged to believe, with a slight sense of chagrin, that she had misjudged Rossiter in accusing him of spreading the tale of that old engagement about, for if anyone else in London, beyond the four persons who had been in Sir Octavius’s office that morning, had heard of it, it was certain that Addison would have done so as well. He knew everyone’s secrets, and had no scruples about using them to their owners’ discomfort.
    It was too much, however, to expect that Rossiter’s name would not be brought up at all, which it promptly was, Addison observing in his usual bored way that the lion of the evening, it appeared, had not yet arrived, preferring, like all lions, to do his roaring before the largest possible audience.
    “And how many woolly lambs,” he went on, casting a jaundiced eye over the brilliant room, “in the shape of marriageable young ladies with ambitious mamas, are to be trotted out this evening for his inspection, I leave it for you, my dear Cressy, to determine. A half-dozen fabulous Indian rubies—I daresay you have heard that that was the source of the money he plunged with on Change?—transformed into a solid English fortune, will wash out any number of ‘damned spots’ in a man’s past, it seems, in spite of anything Lady Macbeth may say. To continue in the Shakespearean vein, I