Acting on Impulse Read online

  “Oh, no, no, no! I am a wicked woman, but I will be better! Oh, Henry, take me away! It is London that gives me these megrims, and the worry—the dreadful worry! The dice—the cards—I cannot help it—forgive me! oh, forgive me!”

  “It is forgiven, Sophia. Don’t speak of it again.”

  “How good you are! I worship you! Oh, you will take me away, before I ruin you with my play! God knows we have come near it!”

  “Hush, dear! Yes, I will take you away.”

  She flicked her hand across her eyes.

  “Yes, oh yes! These joys are killing me—I never go abroad, you have never taken me; you would never! It was unkind, Henry! Unkind!”

  “Yes, Sophia, it was unkind. But I will take you now.”

  She sat up, already smiling.

  “I want to go to Italy! Lady Pamela Palmer went, and my dearest Kitty, last year. Oh, how I longed to go!” She caught his hands. “And you—why, you are half Italian! Farquhar, you’ve a title—an Italian title! And an estate! That is where I will go! Oh, say you will take me!”

  He pulled his hands away.

  “No, not there!” For the first time since he had entered the room his voice lost its even tone. It sounded harsh even to his ears. “Anywhere but there!” He got up and went back to the fire.

  The jealous, peevish light sprang to her eyes again. She sank back on to the cushions with a long wail of discontent.

  “Oh, you do not love me! You refuse me the one thing I ask!”

  He winced.

  “For God’s sake, Sophia, no more hysterics!” he said sharply.

  She quivered and burst into tears.

  “Go away, go away! You don’t care, it’s nothing to you! Oh, I am miserable!”

  “Sophia, anywhere but there! Paris, Vienna—where you will, but leave me that one—” He broke off, pressing his handkerchief to his lips.

  “No, no, no! I want to go to Venice! Oh, is it so much to ask?”

  My lord straightened himself. Once again he was quiet and collected.

  “No, my dear, it is not much. I will take you.”

  She sprang up, her silks crumpled and her hair in disorder.

  “Ah—!” She came to him, and he saw that the tears had made ugly marks on her painted cheeks. “Now I know that you love me!” She swayed towards him, and mechanically he took her in his arms. She heaved a great sigh, full of triumph. “You do care, don’t you, Henry?” she murmured, and stole her hands up to his shoulders. Her face was upturned, expectant.

  He hesitated a moment, fighting his sudden repulsion. Then he bent his head and brushed his lips against hers. She closed her eyes, leaning on him.

  “Ah!” she sighed again. “Now I know! This—is Love!”

  He looked down at her, but for a fleeting instant it seemed to him that it was Mary’s face he saw, grave and steadfast, bravely smiling. He drew a deep breath.

  “Ay,” he said slowly. He still looked down at her, but now he only saw a painted, sharpened face that filled him with something akin to hatred. He raised his head, looking over hers into space. His voice grew softer. “This – is indeed—Love.”

  THE END

  READING “LOVE”

  Angst. That single word could well be this story’s title – and blurb. It’s all Scarlett O’Hara selfish histrionics and Sydney Carton “It is a far, far better thing I do” self-sacrifice and while I very much admire the skill with which Heyer somehow manages to evoke my sympathies for the cheating Lord Farquhar, I am much more interested in how she managed to make both the women in this story utterly unlikeable.

  First, we have Mary. (Ha! Another Mary!) Mary is having an – at least – emotional affair with Lord Farquhar, and is on intimate enough terms with him that she calls him “Henry,” but Lord Farquhar’s troubled, coquettish wife has ensnared Mary’s impressionable brother in her toils and the only way that she can be persuaded to release him is if Henry woos her back to his side and, presumably, bed. So Mary, knowing how much Henry loves her and hates his wife, throws him to the wolves – or, she-wolf, at least – in order to save her brother from a fate that he could very easily avoid if he just didn’t hit on married women. Which you wouldn’t think would be too hard.

  So Lord Farquhar (I really, really want to type Lord Farquaad every time his name comes up), after some grousing and an unsubtle suggestion of elopement and lifelong adultery, goes home and finds brother Mathew in his wife’s bedchamber, which is totally normal and everything’s fine, which we know because we’ve read about cicisbeos in a dozen Heyer novels. But our Henry makes a big deal about it and pretends he cares, tricking his long-neglected wife into thinking maybe he might care for her, and sure, she’s immature and manipulative and clearly unstable, but if you had a husband who was palpably bored and/or disgusted by you and who won’t take you to his childhood home and who also has spent at least several months demonstrably in love with another woman, might not you also be kind of a wreck? Might that not be a good reason for some sympathy?

  Not according to Heyer. According to this story, Lady Farquhar (interestingly, the story mostly refers to her as Sophia, as though disassociating her from even her husband’s name) is greatly at fault for even such declarations as “I am so unhappy! You never made me happy! You never tried! You never understood! You are cruel!” even though we can tell that she’s probably right, he never really did try, for all that he claims to have loved her once, that she was “inconstant,” that he was “never good enough.” There are two sides to every story, of course, but what we see very clearly from Henry is that he has indeed been so “cruel” to his wife as to actively seek out the company of a woman to whom he was attracted, enough that he grew to fall in love with this woman and offer to throw away everything, including his wife and her reputation, all for the illicit thrill of it.

  It’s all very well to be all noble and “I will give you up to save your brother” about it, except you have a wife and it’s the eighteenth century and all these broken hearts are entirely your fault, Farquhar!

  I am feeling very emotional about this story.

  It’s all made worse, of course, because Henry is so very articulate and cutting and clever. He’s another Andover/Avon effort, a specialty of Heyer’s – The Talisman Ring’s Ludovic Lavenham, Cotillion’s Lord Legerwood, Frederica’s Lord Alverstoke, among so many others, have the gift – except not when he’s with Mary, there he’s all ardent schoolboy, as callow as brother Mathew defiantly declaring himself attached to Sophia. But have him contemplate his fate as a husband, newly invested in his marriage at his true love’s behest and confront the youngster who is the reason for his predicament, and he’s all icy looks and cool remarks and of course Sophia went looking for love in all the wrong places, you’re a passive aggressive asshole!

  Wait, I’m supposed to feel sorry for him, right?

  I don’t.

  As far as I’m concerned, he deserves his fate.

  Everyone here does.

  THE SEARCH FOR “ON SUCH A NIGHT”

  Here’s what I knew.

  In 1935, Georgette Heyer sold a short story entitled “On Such a Night” to an Australian magazine.

  And that’s pretty much it.

  That’s all I knew.

  That’s all anyone knew.

  What the story was about, even what era it was set in, no one had any idea. The first I heard of it was a brief mention in my dear Jennifer Kloester’s seminal 2011 work, Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller, and I had been intrigued enough then to have checked out multiple microfilm recordings of some of the bigger women’s magazines of my nation from that time – the Australian Women’s Weekly, the Australian Woman’s Mirror, Australian Woman’s World – spending hours and hours and hours at the State Library of Victoria to see if I might stumble upon this lost gem, like Indiana Jones seeking the Holy Grail, but marginally less dusty.

  My hunt went unrewarded, unsurprisingly, and it was years later that I again got involved in the search