Never Laugh at Love Page 7

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  When they drove down St. James’s Street the following day she saw crowds outside Humphrey’s Print Shop and guessed that a new cartoon by either Rowlandson or Cruikshank had been issued.

  She questioned the Marquis the same evening about the cartoonists.

  “Those fellows make a fortune!” he said. “But they make people laugh and that does nobody any harm.”

  “Is James Gillray still alive?” Anthea asked.

  “No, he died of drink in 1811,” the Marquis replied. “I have always understood that it was the terrific demand for his work that drove him to the bottle.”

  “Really? That is tragic – I was looking at some of his drawings today.”

  “In the Earl’s collection? Seldom misses a new one, but there are now not as many published as there used to be. Rowlandson is past his prime and is getting lazy. There is only Cruikshank who is very young, in fact in his early twenties!”

  “As young as that?” Anthea asked. “And yet people buy his cartoons?”

  “People will buy anything for a good laugh,” the Marquis replied.

  Anthea was rather pensive for the rest of the evening.

  When Emma had left her in her nightgown ready to go to bed, she took from the drawer a sketchbook she had bought since coming to London, in which she had done a number of drawings to show her sisters.

  They all portrayed the Social figures she had seen at Almack’s and at the other parties.

  She realised as she looked at them that she had caricatured everyone in a manner that was in fact not unlike Gillray’s work.

  The coloured wash she had added made her finished pictures resemble Rowlandson’s and Cruikshank’s.

  She examined some of her sketches critically, then with a determined expression on her face she climbed into bed. The next morning she rose early before her Godmother was called, and taking Emma with her, she hired a hackney carriage and drove to 27 St. James’s Street.

  She left Emma outside and went in and asked for the proprietor.

  She was surprised to find ‘he’ was a ‘she’, and to meet Mrs. Humphrey, an elderly bespectacled lady with a square face and a small tight mouth, wearing a white bonnet.

  “What can I do for you, madam?” she enquired.

  Anthea felt rather shy as she produced her sketchbook.

  “I am – wondering,” she began, “whether it would be – possible for me – to sell one of these?”

  She knew, as Mrs. Humphrey took the book from her, that she was calculating how she could refuse politely and without giving offence to buy anything.

  Then, as she turned over the pages, her expression altered.

  “Have you done these yourself?” she enquired, an incredulous note in her voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you offered them to anyone else?”

  “No,” Anthea replied. “I drew them to amuse my sisters who live in the country. Yesterday I was looking at some of Mr. Gillray’s cartoons and I saw the name of your shop on the back.”

  “Mr. Gillray is a very great loss indeed.”

  “I am sure he must be,” Anthea answered, “but I see you publish the work of Mr. George Cruikshank.”

  “A clever young man,” Mrs. Humphrey said, “but not the artist that James Gillray was or indeed his successor, Thomas Rowlandson.”

  She turned some more pages of Anthea’s sketchbook and then she enquired,

  “You say you wish to sell these?”

  “Are they worth anything?” Anthea asked.

  “If you will excuse me a moment. I would just like to speak to my associates.”

  She disappeared into the back of the shop and Anthea stood looking around her.

  There were not only caricatures on the long tables but also some rather delightful watercolours, which made Anthea realise that she certainly could not compete in that field.

  Mrs. Humphrey returned.

  “You have not told me your name, madam.”

  Anthea thought quickly.

  She was quite certain it would be a mistake, if she did publish any of her caricatures, to allow anyone to know the name of the artist.

  “My name is Dale,” she said. “Miss Ann Dale.”

  “Very well, Miss Dale,” Mrs. Humphrey answered. “I would like to tell you that my associates and I think very highly of the sketches you have just brought me.”

  “You do!” Anthea exclaimed.

  “We would be willing to publish them all.”

  “All?” Anthea questioned faintly.

  She thought she could not be hearing correctly.

  “You can accept payment by subscription or receive a sum of money outright for copyright.”

  “I am afraid I don’t understand – ”

  “There are two ways for an artist to sell cartoons and caricatures,” Mrs. Humphrey explained. “Sometimes the artist will sell his work outright to the printer.

  “The other way is for him to receive a small sum down and to take fifty per cent of every copy which is bought. These, as you will see if you look around the shop, are usually sold at one shilling and sixpence to two shillings each. Yet a Thomas Rowlandson occasionally fetches as much as three pounds.”

  Anthea thought for a moment and then she asked,

  “If you bought my drawings outright, what would you give me for them?”

  Mrs. Humphrey looked down at the sketchbook and seemed to be calculating.

  Then she suggested,

  “Seeing that we are short of cartoonists at the moment and these sketches illustrate a social angle that has not been portrayed before, I am prepared, Miss Dale, to offer you ten pounds each for them!”

  For a moment Anthea thought she must be joking.

  Then in a voice that hardly seemed to be her own, she answered,

  “I would like to accept your offer, Mrs. Humphrey.”

  From that moment it seemed to her as if she was in a dream from which she was afraid she would awaken! Even now as she told her sisters what had happened she could hardly believe it had really been true.

  “Ten pounds?” Chloe said in an awe-struck voice.

  “How many did you sell?” Thais asked.

  “There were ten in the book,” Anthea replied. “A hundred pounds!”

  “It cannot be true!”

  “And they will take as many more as I like to send them,” Anthea added.

  The burble of noise that came from Thais and Chloe’s lips made it difficult to say any more until they had travelled for at least a mile.

  Then as they neared home, Anthea said,

  “I was thinking as I drove North that it would be a mistake for us to tell Mama. You know she would be shocked at me trading my drawings and she would also be afraid that someone might discover my identity.”

  “Yes, you are quite right,” Thais agreed in a serious tone. “It would only worry her.”

  “I will just pay more of the money into the bank,” Anthea said. “I persuaded Mrs. Humphrey to give me cash.”

  She remembered that she had to wait for a considerable time while Mrs. Humphrey procured the one hundred pounds and she had been worried that when she got back to the house her Godmother would ask where she had been.

  She swore Emma to secrecy by saying that she had been to buy a special present for the Earl to thank him for having her to stay at Sheldon House.

  This story was easily substantiated by the fact that Mrs. Humphrey had given her George Cruikshank’s latest cartoon as a gift and Anthea had shown it to Emma.

  “I can’t make head nor tail of them drawings,” Emma said. “My young man enjoys them, but I thinks, if you asks me, miss, a man likes a good laugh more than a woman.”

  “What makes you think that, Emma?’ Anthea asked.

  “Well, I’m always wanting to talk about love and how much we matters to each other. But Jim? He just wants to have a good laugh. ʽCome on, ’Em,’ he says, ‘You knows I loves you. We don’t have to look all gloomy about it’.”

 
Anthea, before she left London, had bought her Godmother a pretty paperknife that she had admired in a shop in Bond Street and asked her to convey the Cruikshank cartoon to the Earl.

  “That is a very sweet thought, Anthea,” the Countess had said. “I am so glad you have enjoyed your visit and you know how delighted I have been to welcome you as my guest.”

  The Countess had paused and then added,

  “Perhaps it would be possible for me to invite you another time.”

  “Or perhaps you would have Thais,” Anthea suggested tentatively.

  “I might. Indeed, I might do that next year,” the Countess replied.

  Anthea knew that the invitations would be given if once again her Godmother needed an excuse to stay in London.

  Anthea was sure that Thais, if she had the opportunity, would be far more successful than she had been in finding herself a husband.

  But what did husbands matter when she had found a way to augment their income?

  She would in the future be able to provide plenty of the luxuries they had been unable to afford.

  “I have been so lucky!” she said aloud. “I have brought back clothes and discovered I have a talent that is really saleable.”

  “You are clever, Anthea!” Chloe exclaimed in undisguised admiration.

  Thais was more practical.

  “How can you go on doing caricatures of people if you are not in London?” she asked.

  “It will not be so easy,” Anthea admitted, “except for the fact that I have made friends with the Marquis of Chale.”

  “A Marquis?” Chloe interposed. “Oh, Anthea, is he in love with you?”

  “Not in the slightest!” Anthea laughed. “The Marquis is a very old man, over seventy, but he knows everybody and is the greatest gossip in the Beau Monde. I have asked him to write to me.”

  “Will he do so?” Thais asked.

  It was a question that Anthea had already asked herself.

  But she discovered that the Marquis was an inveterate letter-writer and corresponded with his relatives and friends in the same prolific manner in which he talked.

  “I am sure he will write to me,” Anthea said confidently. “And if we search through magazines and newspapers, now that I know what the people look like, I am sure I can do sketches of them and make whatever they are doing appear funny.”

  “It is the most exciting thing that has ever happened!” Chloe cried. “I wish we could tell Mama and Phebe, but I suppose we will have to keep it to ourselves.”

  “We must indeed,” Anthea answered, “and no one must guess the real identity of Miss Ann Dale or – and listen to this girls – ”

  They turned their faces obediently towards hers as she added,

  “ – or of the tiny little mouse that will appear in the corner of every one of my drawings.”

  “The country mouse! Did you really put it in, Anthea?”

  “It will be my trade mark,” she answered. “I drew it to amuse you. Now I have decided that that will be my signature and, who knows, I may go down to posterity – just like James Gillray!”

  “It is a thrilling idea,” Chloe said, “but rather disappointing that nobody will ever know it is you. I cannot help thinking, Anthea, that by being anonymous you will miss half the fun.”

  “I shall also miss the recriminations,” Anthea laughed, “and the brick-bats from those who think they have been insulted!”

  “Will they really be angry?” Thais enquired.

  Anthea shrugged her shoulders.

  “I don’t expect so,” she replied. “The people in Society live in a world of their own. They think themselves too grand and too important for it to matter what the common people think!”

  As she spoke, she thought of the Duke.

  She was quite sure he would not value anybody’s opinion but his own.

  He was, Anthea told herself, quite insufferably conceited and puffed up with his own importance!

  At the same time she could not help remembering that he was the most handsome man she had seen during her visit to London.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Duke left his phaeton with the groom and walked across the grass towards the Achilles statue.

  At six o’clock in the morning the mists in Hyde Park were still substantial round the trunks of the trees and the grass was wet with dew.

  There was a puzzled expression on the Duke’s face as, moving behind the statue, he saw a veiled figure rise from a seat and utter a little cry.

  “What in the name of God is all this about, Delphine?” he enquired as the Countess threw back her veil and raised an anguished face to his.

  “I had to see you,” she replied, “and it was the only way I could do so without Edward being aware of it.”

  “I thought I must be dreaming when I received your note an hour ago,” the Duke said.

  “Edward returned last night,” the Countess stated with a little quiver in her voice.

  The Duke looked at her enquiringly and she went on,

  “He has a very good reason for doing so. I have brought it with me.”

  She held out to the Duke what looked like a small scroll. He took it automatically before he said,

  “Suppose we sit down? I see no point in being needlessly uncomfortable.”

  “Uncomfortable!” the Countess exclaimed. “Wait until you hear the reason why the Earl has come posting to London!”

  She spoke in such an agitated manner that the Duke, after a quick glance at her face, seated himself on one of the park chairs that stood behind the statue and unrolled the scroll she had given into his hand.

  He saw immediately it was a cartoon and remembered that the Earl of Sheldon had a collection of them.

  As he stared at it in the pale morning light, he saw it depicted a very superior and autocratic looking-lion wearing a coronet seated on a cushion that was emblazoned with his own coat of arms.

  In front of him clawing at him beseechingly, pleadingly, enticingly, were a number of small cats, all with the faces of very young girls.

  But one of the lion’s paws was placed protectively round a ginger cat with slanting but adoring green eyes, whose face undeniably resembled that of the Countess. Beneath the cartoon was written simply,

  “The Love of the Pussycats.”

  “Dammit!” the Duke ejaculated. “This is too much! Who the hell has done this?”

  “I have no idea, but you can imagine what Edward feels about it.”

  “It is not signed by either Rowlandson or Cruikshank.”

  “Does it matter who drew it?” the Countess asked with a querulous note in her voice. “Edward is furious, as you can well imagine! For the first time he suspects that I have taken a lover and I have had the greatest difficulty in convincing him otherwise.”

  “You have convinced him?” the Duke asked in a note of relief.

  The Countess gave a deep sigh.

  “Edward arrived at ten o’clock last night in a towering rage, swearing that he was considering divorcing me and citing you as co-respondent!”

  The Duke stiffened.

  “I thought at first he would strike me, he was so incensed,” the Countess went on. “Then he said that whether he divorced me or not he intended to close Sheldon House for good!

  ‘You will stay in the country where I can keep an eye on you,’ he said. ‘I have put up with your predilection for London and the raffish Society you prefer for too long. In future you will remain at The Castle and to make sure we will re-open the nurseries and add to the numbers of our family’.”

  The Countess gave a little sob.

  “I could hardly believe it was Edward speaking to me in such a manner, but he meant it, Garth. I swear to you, he meant it!”

  The Duke said nothing and after a moment the Countess continued,

  “You know how I loathe the country and I am too old to have any more children. Besides without being in London, without being able to go to parties and meet amusing people, I swear, if I did no
t die from sheer ennui, it would be because I had killed myself first!”

  “But his Lordship changed his mind?” the Duke asked hopefully.

  He realised that as usual the Countess was taking a very long time to come to the point.

  “It took me two hours to persuade him that he was mistaken,” she answered. “Two hours when I felt as if I were a martyr being tortured on the rack!”

  “How did you persuade him?”

  The Countess drew a deep breath.

  “I told him that the cartoon was a sheer malicious lie and that the reason we had been seen together so much these past weeks was that you were engaged to be married to my Godchild, Anthea Forthingdale!”

  “You told him what?”

  The Duke’s voice was as sharp as the report of a pistol.

  “I told Edward you were going to marry Anthea, and, Garth, you will have to do so because otherwise Edward swears he will not be convinced by my explanation.”

  “You must be crazy!” the Duke exclaimed. “I have no intention of marrying a girl to whom I have spoken hardly more than half a dozen words.”

  “You danced with her. You have seen her at the parties I have given and those we have attended together.”

  “I saw her because she was staying in your house. That does not say I have any wish to marry her.”

  “Of course you have no wish to marry her,” the Countess agreed. “You love me and I love you. But if you love me, Garth, you have to save us both from this terrible, ghastly situation.”

  The Duke said nothing. His lips were tight and his chin was very square.

  He stared down at the cartoon again.

  “If you do not substantiate my story,” the Countess said, “I am certain that Edward will go back to his original plan of divorcing me and you can imagine what a scandal there will be.”

  “I just don’t believe he would do such a thing,” the Duke said slowly.

  “He would! You don’t know Edward as I do. His pride is hurt. There is no one more proud than Edward and no one more determined once he makes up his mind about something.”

  The Duke knew this was more or less true, but he said aloud,

  “Perhaps I had better speak to the Earl.”

  “What could you say?” the Countess asked. “Except that the cartoon is a filthy libel. Do you suppose Edward will believe you?”