Jack Compton's Luck

Lacey nodded. ‘I can understand that. You know, I’m really pleased to have met you. My half-brother has bought an estate near to yours in Sussex. He is transferring most of the treasures from the family home to it and one of my tasks while I am in England is to catalogue and rearrange them for him. Over the years there was a lot of unwanted furniture and bric-a-brac consigned to the attics at Liscombe Manor that he believes might be valuable. The Historical Manuscripts Commission has also written to him, asking if he has any interesting old letters, papers and accounts hidden away. If I tire of the London season I shall take up residence at Ashdown and enjoy myself there.’

Jack looked at her with new respect over his plate of canapés. ‘Do I take it that this sort of thing is a hobby of yours?’ He was also delighted to learn that she might visit Sussex.

‘More than a hobby.’ She was suddenly impelled to tell him the truth which she not yet confided to anyone in England, not even her Chancellor relatives—apart from her half-brother who had been sworn to silence. ‘If you promise not to give me away, I can tell you that I am a trained historian with a PhD.’

Jack looked at her with new respect. He also thought that she must be a little older than she seemed. The careless grace of the flapper which she had displayed on the dance floor certainly concealed from the world that she was a most learned lady.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I was aware that women in the States were freer than ours and were invading all the professions hitherto reserved for men, but I never thought that I should meet one. And if I had, I should have expected her to be something of a gorgon, not a lady who looks like a model or a movie star and can dance like a professional.’

Lacey, who had been about to sip her champagne, began to laugh. ‘That was a compliment…I think. Did you mean it as one?’

Jack decided to be candid. ‘I don’t know what to think or even what I meant. Other than that you have bowled me over. There I was, under the impression that you were as light-minded as Darcey and Rupert, and then you tell me otherwise—that you’re a lady academic, no less. Do they really not know?’

‘Certainly not, and you are not to tell them. They might not wish to dance the Charleston with me again if you do!’

‘Then why don’t you dance the waltz or the foxtrot with me once we have finished supper and you are quite recovered from your previous exertions?’

‘Willingly,’ she said and laughed up at him. ‘To dance either of them with Fighting Jack would make my evening.’

Darcey and Rupert watched them with amazement. Or rather they watched Jack with amazement. Lacey’s frank and cheerful way with Jack was no surprise, but Jack’s behaviour was quite another matter. For years they had accepted him as the dour man he had become since he had returned to England—and now he was behaving as though he were twenty again.

Rupert wanted to go over and twit him, but Darcey put a restraining hand on his arm. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I want to see what happens when the irresistible force meets the immovable object.’

‘The latter being Jack, I suppose. OK, then—it might be fun,’ Rupert said.

They were even more amazed when a little later Jack and Lacey strolled off to the dance floor to take part in the slow foxtrot which the musicians had begun to play in a slightly faster tempo than usual.

As she had expected, Lacey found that the slow fox was a perfect dance for Jack since he was able to perform it gracefully, if decorously, guiding her round the floor, and holding her at a little distance from him. There were no sudden swoops and bends from him when they turned and glided in perfect time with the music.

He did say once, shortly after they had made the first circuit of the floor, ‘I was always intrigued by this dance’s name. Slow fox, indeed! The only foxes I have ever seen were fast ones.’

‘From horseback, I presume. Do you still hunt?’

‘No time,’ he said briefly, which was not the whole truth, but half of it. He was not about to tell her that the Compton fortunes had declined to such an extent that they could not afford to keep hunters any more. Their once-huge estate had shrunk to being a small working farm.

Since his very touch, as well as his nearness, was disturbing her, Lacey tried to dismiss these unwonted feelings by looking up at him and asking, if only to keep her mind off them, ‘I never did get to hear any of the details of the jolly japes which earned you your nickname. What exactly were they?’

Jack looked down at her sparkling eyes, which were beginning to trouble him more and more, and replied in what he hoped was an offhand manner, although he had never felt less offhand for years, since having her almost in his arms was doing terrible things to him.

‘Now that would be telling, and I don’t intend to play the sneak on my young self. Broadly they came under the heading of what a Yankee I met in the war said was called hell-raising in the States.’

On the last word he looked down at her intently and, whether he knew it or not, his expression was such that for a moment she could seen in him the lively, reckless boy he had once been…And then it was gone as quickly as it had come.

‘Now, that,’ she told him severely, ‘is more intriguing than ever, since hell-raising back home covers such a multitude of sins.’

‘Then I suggest that you use your lively imagination—I’m sure that you have one—to work out exactly what mine must have been.’

‘Wine, women and song?’ she merrily proposed. ‘The rake’s classic path to hell?’

‘Something of the sort—but I visited hell later on in quite a different place from Oxford or London.’

Lacey refused to ask him to elaborate on where he had found hell, for she thought that she knew the answer. To restore the conversation to its previous, lighter, level, she said provokingly, ‘I don’t want to use my lively imagination about your past, whose sinfulness has undoubtedly been exaggerated by the time that has passed since then. Instead, to punish you for your lack of frankness, I shall insist that on the next occasion when the Charleston is played you will join me on to the floor again so that I may teach you how to dance it!’

Jack stopped dead—nearly causing a collision behind him by doing so and gathering a lot of amused, angry and surprised stares into the bargain.

‘You wouldn’t! Oh, yes, I do believe that you would. What a spectacle I shall present if I allowed you to do any such thing,’ he exclaimed, resuming the dance again.

‘Exactly—a splendid one, I’m sure. I shan’t take no for an answer. You are not to refuse me when I come to collect you for it. If you do, I must tell you that I have a nice line in throwing comic conniption fits—scenes to you—which I stage to punish boy friends who let me down.’

Jack said, ‘But I am not your boy friend.’

Lacey raised her fine black brows at him in derision. ‘If you’re not, then tell me why you have been flirting with me ever since we were introduced, and why, before we met, you looked at me as though you could eat me.’

‘None of it was intentional.’ Jack tried to make his voice as stiff as possible.

‘That makes it worse, not better. Come on, Fighting Jack, live up to your nickname and dance the Charleston with me.’

Her face, nay, her whole body, was so alight with mischief that suddenly Jack could refuse her nothing. ‘Very well, on your own head be it. Take the consequences, Miss Lacey Chancellor, and live with them.’

‘Great!’ she sparked back at him. ‘That’s the ticket.’

‘Happy to hear it,’ he murmured, wondering what on earth he had let himself in for—and what this was doing to his reputation.

Each of them was so engrossed in the other that neither of them noticed that the music had stopped and the dance had ended until they saw that people were leaving the floor and staring at them as they still revolved.

Lacey murmured wickedly, ‘No need to wonder about making a spectacle of yourself, you are already one.’

‘Too true—and I put it down to my unfamiliarity with this life. I do hope that we shan’t be blackballed and not allowed into a society hop again. I don’t worry for my sake, I’m only in London for a short time, but I shouldn’t like to put an end to your fun.’

Where was all this coming from? Jack asked himself. It was years since he had engaged in social badinage and now it was as though time had rolled back again, or as if he had never been away from town, the season and its functions.

Lacey seemed to be enjoying herself, too. ‘Oh, I don’t think that you need to worry about that. I am that curiosity of nature, a rich American who is not quite a barbarian and is not quite one for whom anything goes. Now, you may take me back to my aunt who, for some reason, is looking most disapproving, but you’re not to forget the Charleston lesson which I am determined to give you even if I have to drag you on to the floor.’

Jack could not stop himself. ‘Are all American women as downright as you are, Lacey? Or is it the Chancellor in you? I seem to remember, years ago, someone saying that all the women of the junior branch of the family were strong-minded beauties.’

There, he had said it, his first compliment to a woman in years.

‘Both,’ she told him. ‘American women are not like yours. On top of that, I believe that a distant ancestress of mine was noted for her looks and her strong mind at a time when women were supposed to boast of the former and not of the latter.’

By this time they had reached Aunt Sue, who greeted them with a frozen face even after Jack had been introduced to her. This was so unlike her that Lacey wondered what was wrong. Had she and Jack perhaps overdone things on the dance floor? Surely not.

She was, of course, perfectly polite, even if cold. Jack did not appear to notice that anything was amiss when Miss Susan Hoyt, Lacey’s mother’s cousin, was introduced to him as Lacey’s companion.

‘Not my duenna,’ Lacey said laughing. ‘Rather a friend to see that I am not lonely and, since Aunt Sue has spent a lot of time in England, to show me the ropes, as it were, and to make sure I don’t say, or do, the wrong thing.’

‘Oh, I’m sure that you’d never do that,’ smiled Jack in a comic tone that suggested that she probably might, ‘so Miss Hoyt’s task must be an easy one.’

Not even that provoked a smile from Aunt Sue and once he’d wandered off, after promising again to be taught the Charleston, she asked her aunt, ‘What’s wrong? Is it something I’ve done?’