How to Cross a Marquess

by Jane Ashford

  Sir Richard merely stated his address in Mayfair and helped Bess into the carriage. In a moment, he had followed and shut the door, and the sound of hooves muffled by mist resumed.

  Bess nestled close to her new protector, one small hand slipping over the buttons of his waistcoat. “Aren’t you going to be rid of that mask, then?” she asked, in a lilt that called up visions of Ireland.

  “We will talk when we reach my house,” replied Sir Richard, removing her hand from his chest.

  Bess straightened and eyed him. “Talk?” she echoed. “Aye, if you like. I’ll be pleased to get acquainted before… what comes after talk. I’ve not done such a thing as this before, you see, and ’tis unnerving.”

  Beckwith merely grunted.

  “Do you doubt me then?” flared Bess. “I swear I’ve never in my life…”

  “No one has doubted you,” interrupted Beckwith, and she subsided to watch his silhouette in the dim light filtering through the hack’s window.

  They made the journey in silence, broken only by Sir Richard’s instructions to the cabbie when they reached the quietly elegant street where he dwelt. The driver steered into the mews at the back and deposited them before a narrow slatted gate next to the stables before departing with the promised guinea.

  Bess pulled her cloak closed and gazed about with disfavor. “Why do we come here?” she asked.

  “I should think that would be obvious,” replied Beckwith, taking a key from his pocket and unlocking the gate. “Follow me.”

  The girl glared at his back, but did so.

  He led her along a narrow walk to a cobbled yard, then through the back door into the kitchen. The servants had gone to bed, and the fire was banked for the night. Beckwith turned to face the girl, pulling off his mask and letting the domino fall onto a wooden chair.

  “Ah,” breathed Bess, “a fine handsome man you are, too.”

  “Come here,” said Sir Richard.

  Two

  At the same hour that Sir Richard set out on his surprising quest that evening, a stream of carriages before the Earl of Leamington’s Berkeley Square mansion paused to allow a very handsome family party to alight. The daughter first drew the eye, for she was a remarkably lovely girl of twenty with smooth black hair and large pale green eyes strikingly set off by sooty lashes. She was above medium height and slender, dressed in a white brocade gown that proclaimed its cost even as it avoided all extremes of fashion. Her parents were similarly clad—well but conservatively—and rather older than most progenitors of hopeful debutantes. Their faces were amiable, and they clearly derived much pleasure from their daughter’s beauty and success.

  They left their wraps and walked together up to the landing where the Countess of Leamington and her newly presented daughter waited to greet them. “Sir George and Lady Devere. Miss Julia Devere,” intoned the butler.

  “Julia!” cried the countess surging forward. “Allow me to be the first to wish you happy. I’m sure I shan’t be the last tonight. Such a fine match! When I saw the announcement in this morning’s paper, I said at once to Alice, ‘If only you do so well, my dear.’ Did I not, Alice?”

  “Yes, Mama,” murmured Lady Alice.

  “Sir George, Lady Devere, you must be delighted,” the countess went on. “A positive paragon—wealthy, well born, without a hint of that distressing unsteadiness so common in the young men today. All London wondered where Sir Richard Beckwith would find a wife to match his high principles, I vow. Until Miss Julia appeared, of course. ’Tis like a fairy tale.”

  The older Deveres, embarrassed by this effusion, muttered incomprehensible replies.

  “Such a handsome man, too,” continued the countess. “A fair match for Julia there as well, eh?” She turned twinkling blue eyes on Julia.

  Julia Devere showed no signs of discomfort. Her answering smile was lovely and unself-conscious. “Thank you for your good wishes, Lady Leamington,” she replied. “We mustn’t keep you from your other guests any longer.” And gathering her parents with a glance, she walked on into the ballroom.

  Behind her, the countess shook her head. “That girl deserves her success if anyone ever did; she has the sweetest temper on earth. Take a lesson, Alice.”

  “Yes, Mama,” murmured her daughter again, and they turned to greet the next arrival.

  Lady Devere, on the other hand, was deploring the manners of the aristocracy. “I shall never understand it,” she complained to her daughter. “Sometimes it seems that the higher their rank, the greater their vulgarity. I shouldn’t dream of speaking so to Lady Alice, should she announce her engagement.”

  “Their ideas are different from ours,” agreed Julia absently. Her thoughts were focused on the party ahead. She would be the center of attention this evening, she knew. Any newly engaged girl was the object of congratulations, and envy, and she had the added luster of having won one of the most eligible bachelors of the haut ton. She looked forward to the furor with some trepidation, but her main emotion was happiness. She had liked Sir Richard Beckwith from their first meeting, and everything she had learned about him since then had strengthened her regard. She knew herself to be very fortunate—to be creditably settled in life with a man she could wholeheartedly admire.

  The Deveres were indeed surrounded by well-wishers as soon as their arrival was noticed. In the flood of congratulations and questions about the wedding, Julia missed the first set, and she was led into the second only after her partner pointedly excused her from a pair of talkative dowagers.

  “That was very rude, Mr. Whitney,” Julia told him as the waltz began.

  “Rude? You accuse me of petty sins when you have broken my heart?” he retorted.

  Julia laughed. “You know I have done no such thing.”

  “I shall never recover,” protested her partner. “Where is the infamous Sir Richard tonight, by the by? I should think he’d be much in evidence, flaunting his triumph in our faces.”

  “He had business to see to. He won’t be here.”

  “The cad. Leaving you alone to face all these congratulations. Don’t you wish to reconsider your acceptance of him under these conditions?”

  “No, Mr. Whitney. But I am beginning to wish I had not accepted your invitation to dance. Do be serious.”

  “Ah, you and Richard, always so serious. I do wish one of you would fly up in the boughs just once. A wild adventure, a tempestuous scene. Don’t you wish for it sometimes?”

  Laughing again, Julia shook her head. Mr. Whitney heaved a dramatic sigh and turned the subject.

  The ball continued much in this vein for Julia. During the supper interval, she was the center of a lively group of young people, and afterward she danced with a variety of partners. If she wished that one of these was Sir Richard, she did not let it show, and when one of her admirers went to fetch lemonade late in the evening, she awaited his return with a serene smile. She didn’t even notice the arrival of two latecomers, one a young man whose handsome face was marred by chronic worry and the other the middle-aged roué who had bid against Beckwith an hour before. The two separated at the door, the latter stopping to scan the crowd, then moving with calculated nonchalance to a position just behind Julia, though partly screened from her by a curtained doorway.

  “I must tell you the most extraordinary thing, Seldon,” he said in a penetrating voice to an acquaintance he had taken in tow as he moved across the ballroom.

  Julia’s head turned slightly, and she started to move away as she recognized one of the most notorious libertines in London.

  “What’s that, Lord Fenton?” answered Seldon.

  “Beckwith came to the Chaos Club tonight,” was the reply. Julia froze.

  “I don’t believe it! Propriety Dick?”

  “I tell you, he was recognized. And not only that, he laid down two thousand guineas to buy himself the loveliest little lightskirt
I’ve seen in fifteen years.”

  “No!”

  “I saw it myself.”

  “But he’s never mounted a mistress. He’s always deploring the morals of the ton.”

  Lord Fenton smiled slightly, his eyes on the rigid shoulders of Julia Devere a little distance away in the ballroom. “Perhaps his decision to become leg-shackled gave him pause,” he said very clearly. “That certainly makes a man think of what he’s missed.”

  Julia moved away, returning to her parents, numb with shock. She had not been able to resist listening once she heard her fiancé’s name, but what she’d heard was so unbelievable that she couldn’t even think just yet. She fled instinctively to the protectors of her youth and sat down beside her mother. Julia’s hands were trembling, and her skin felt icy; a void seemed to have opened inside her.

  “You are very pale, Julia,” said Lady Anne. “Are you feeling ill?”

  “Only very tired,” she managed to reply.

  “All these congratulations are fatiguing. Shall we go home?”

  Julia nodded emphatically, and her mother turned to speak to Sir George. As the three of them rose and looked for their hostess to say good-bye, Lord Fenton watched from across the room. His lined face showed both malicious satisfaction and an almost diabolical glee. He gazed about the ballroom as if wondering what he could do next to sustain the entertainment.

  On the carriage ride home, Julia was silent. Her parents, chatting desultorily about the evening, noticed nothing amiss. When they reached the house they had hired for the Season, Julia stepped down first and went directly to her room, submitting to the ministrations of her maid mechanically and allowing herself to be put to bed without speaking a word. The maid, who was new to her service, fell silent also after her first few remarks were ignored and simply did her work as quickly as possible.

  When she was at last alone, Julia gazed up at the canopy above her bed and allowed an unaccustomed tide of emotion to surge through her. Its strength was such that she had to clench her hands and jaw to keep quiet.

  Julia Devere had been reared with loving, but strict propriety by middle-aged parents. Her principles were high, her ideas somewhat rigid, and her life up to this point had offered no upheaval that put these views to the test. With her engagement to Sir Richard Beckwith, it had appeared that this serene state would continue, unruffled.

  Now, her certainty had been swept away with a suddenness that left her breathless. Even more unsettling was her reaction. Instead of calmly reviewing the circumstances and judging them by the measures she’d been taught, Julia was swinging wildly from scandalized condemnation, to hot anger, to hopeful disbelief. She’d never felt such turmoil. It was as if her mind had filled with a chorus of alien voices, and she was shocked to find that she could surprise herself this way.

  Julia had been carefully educated in many subjects, but not in the lore of feelings. These, to her parents at least, were things to be kept under sedate control. A civilized person did not indulge. A proper young lady did not even acknowledge their existence. For the first time since early childhood, Julia failed to rein in her emotions.

  Silently, she struggled with herself.. Stories like Lord Fenton’s malicious gossip circulated constantly among the haut ton, Julia knew. And though as an unmarried girl she was not told any of them directly, only the most unobservant or stupid deb failed to pick up scraps of information, and Julia was neither of these.

  It was the connection of Richard with scandalous behavior that set her pulse pounding with a muddle of emotion—humiliation at the idea that Richard should find a mistress on the eve of their engagement and make her the butt of vulgar jokes, anger that he had deceived her about his character, amazement that she could have been so deceived, and overriding all else, an astonishing, fierce possessiveness that urged Julia to rise and fight for the man she intended to marry, and not to let some doxy steal him away.

  The latter feeling surprised Julia most. If she had been asked earlier in the evening whether she loved Richard Beckwith, she would have replied, with a mildly reproving glance, that she admired and respected him, that she found in him her ideal of manhood, that she enjoyed his company and conversation. The hot emotion she felt now had no connection to any of those phrases. Julia wondered if she’d fallen prey to some kind of madness. There seemed no other logical explanation for the sudden, radical change in her character. Had some lunacy been growing in the hidden parts of her brain, she wondered, only to burst forth full blown now? But even as this fear surfaced, she dismissed it. She was furious, not insane.

  She made a heroic effort to gain control of herself. She did not know that Lord Fenton’s vicious story was true, a prim inner voice pointed out. Fenton was certainly not a trustworthy person. He had been pointed out to Julia at her first ton party as someone she should not know, and she had never even spoken to him in the course of the Season that was now waning. Was she, she asked herself, ready to take such a man’s word about the conduct of Sir Richard Beckwith, whom she knew so well and trusted absolutely?

  Of course not! She’d been distressingly unsteady, Julia realized, to allow this incident to overset her. It could not be true. And from what she had heard of Lord Fenton, it was likely to be a cruel jest. Julia flushed in the darkness of her bed, ashamed of herself for falling victim to such a hoax. Nothing had changed, she told herself; she would wake tomorrow to discover that Richard was the same as ever. And they would marry in six weeks as agreed and settle to a life much like her present one.

  Thus reassured, Julia was finally able to close her eyes and fall asleep.

  For more Jane Ashford check out the exciting

  reissue of her much-loved Regency classic

  The Reluctant Rake

  On sale October 2019

  About the Author

  Jane Ashford discovered Georgette Heyer in junior high school and was captivated by the glittering world and witty language of Regency England. That delight was part of what led her to study English literature and travel widely in Britain and Europe. Her books have been published all over Europe as well as the United States. Jane was nominated for a Career Achievement Award by RT Book Reviews. Born in Ohio, she is now somewhat nomadic. Find her on the web at janeashford.com and on Facebook, where you can sign up for her monthly newsletter.

  Also by Jane Ashford

  The Duke’s Sons

  Heir to the Duke

  What the Duke Doesn’t Know

  Lord Sebastian’s Secret

  Nothing Like a Duke

  The Duke Knows Best

  The Way to a Lord’s Heart

  Brave New Earl

  A Lord Apart

  Once Again a Bride

  Man of Honour

  The Three Graces

  The Marriage Wager

  The Bride Insists

  The Bargain

  The Marchington Scandal

  The Headstrong Ward

  Married to a Perfect Stranger

  Charmed and Dangerous

  A Radical Arrangement

  First Season / Bride to Be

  Rivals of Fortune / The Impetuous Heiress

  Last Gentleman Standing

  Earl to the Rescue

  Thank you for reading!

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