Maulever Hall by Jane Aiken Hodge

face was blacker than ever. “Come shall we go into dinner. I am ravenous. The crowds were too great in Exton for anything so mundane as eating: drink was all they cared for, and there’ll be broken heads in plenty before the election is over. I never saw such blatant treating.”
    Watching, with relief, as he fell hungrily upon the lavish meal Cook had sent up, Marianne did her best to turn the conversation to less irritating channels. She had been reading Anne of Geierstein aloud to Mrs. Mauleverer in the evenings, and this seemed an innocuous enough topic: would Lady Heverdon care for it, she asked. He did not know. “ But she is a passionate admirer of Lord Byron’s poems,” he contributed.
    “Oh, admirable,” said his mother, “then she must find you the very image of Manfred and the rest of them, and won ’ t care a bit about ...” Her eyes on his scar, which had suddenly gone livid, she stammered to a halt.
    Marianne’s suspicion that this was forbidden ground was amply confirmed by his mother’s red confusion and his white, if silent, rage. Once again, she turned the conversation. “For myself ” —she managed to keep her voice light—“I confess I much prefer Mr. Wordsworth, even at his most prosy, to Lord Byron’s melodramas, but then I am afraid I am not a very romantic kind of person.”
    He laughed, his short, barking laugh: “That comes admirably from you, Miss Lamb, all wreathed in mystery as you are. Do you, perhaps, prefer Mrs. Radcliffe as a source to Lord Byron, who, after all, is blessed with a sense of humor?”
    “Of a particularly unpleasant kind.” At all costs, even in her anger, she knew that she must keep the conversation general. “So far as humor goes, I would rather have a page of Miss Austen than several volumes of Lord Byron.”
    “Would you really? You surprise me, Miss Lamb. We shall be discovering next that even your first name is not truly yours, but merely borrowed from the swooning young lady in Sense and Sensibility .”
    Suddenly, she was tired of these continued hints that she was merely pretending her loss of memory. “Well,” she said, “I confess that I may, sometimes, have found myself compelled to behave like the heroine of a romantic novel, but who are you, Mr. Mauleverer, to twit me with it? I hope you have never seen me swoon yet, which is, I suppose, the prerogative of romantic heroines, while you carry with you, plain for all to see, the evidence, that you have fought at least one duel, like the veriest Clement Willoughby of them all.” There. She had said the thing she knew most calculated to hurt him and now, appalled, awaited the explosion.
    None came. He was looking at her oddly. “Do I owe you an apology, Miss Lamb? Perhaps I do. At all events, shall we cry quits and drink a glass of wine together?”
    She could only stammer her own apology and gaze at him, dark eyes large with surprise over her wine glass. What an incomprehensible creature he was. But Mrs. Mauleverer, very much more predictable, was shifting uneasily in her chair. “My dear, I think it is high time we withdrew.” And then, as always, gratingly maternal, “you will not stay too long over your wine, Mark?”
    They were hardly safe in the drawing room when she turned on Marianne. “Miss Lamb, how could you? Surely you must have known he got that wound at Waterloo?”
    “No!” Horror-stricken, she could say no more.
    “Yes,” Mrs. Mauleverer went relentlessly on. “It wrecked his life, my poor darling boy. Of course, I was against his volunteering; why should he, at seventeen! But his uncle was all for it, bought him the commission, and, I am sure, hoped that would be the last of him. There were many, you know, who thought the English Army would be mere mincemeat before Bonaparte. But he survived, my poor boy, to spite his uncle, and break his mother’s heart—and his own,” she added in characteristic parenthesis. “Did you not know that he was engaged, before