Moving soundlessly with Hunter beside her, Mimosa walked along the passage and down the staircase into the empty hall.
She knew that once they had retired to bed the footmen also went to their own rooms in the basement.
“We do not have night-footmen,” Lady Barclay had explained to Mimosa soon after her arrival in Park Street. “I feel it is quite unnecessary for them to stay up once we are home and I hate seeing those young men with pasty faces and lines under their eyes because they have been kept up all night.”
“I am sure that they appreciate your kindness,” Mimosa had commented.
“I have always felt sorry for the night-footman at home, who had to sleep at night in a padded chair rather than a bed. In any case we had no callers either by day or by night when Grandpapa was so ill.”
Lady Barclay smiled.
“I am sure it is an old custom that should be maintained, but between ourselves, my dear, my husband does not like my introducing new ideas into the household. He feels it is bad for discipline!”
They both laughed, but Mimosa knew now that there would be no footman in the hall to watch her as she tiptoed across it and down the passage that led to a door that opened into the garden.
It was easy to pull back the bolts and turn the key and then Hunter shot out ahead of her and across the green lawn to where the Marquis was waiting, having moved back into the shadow of the tree.
It took Mimosa only a few seconds to hurry over the short grass to where he was standing with Hunter jumping up excitingly on him.
Then, as she saw him resplendent with his decorations glinting in the moonlight, she suddenly felt shy and could only stare at him, her eyes filling her whole face as she realised that she was wearing only a nightgown and negligée.
Her fair hair, released from its elegant coiffure that had taken so long to create for the party at Carlton House, was now flowing over her shoulders.
“Mimosa!”
The Marquis’s voice was low and deep.
“W-why are you – here? H-how – did you – g-get in?”
The Marquis smiled.
“It is not as difficult as it sounds. Charles has an aunt who lives in one of the other houses and he borrowed her key to the garden gate.”
Mimosa was listening, at the same time all she could think of was that he was there, he was talking to her!
Although she could not be sure, she thought that there was a different expression in his eyes from the anger she had seen when they were at Carlton House.
Then, because she was worried, she could not help saying,
“Why were you – angry with me? What had I – done? What could I – have said that made you – cross?”
“That is what I have come to explain,” the Marquis replied. “When I saw your eyes looking at me with that same worried expression they had had when we were together at Heron Hall, I knew I could not sleep until I had told you why I was angry when I found you at Carlton House.”
“I-I thought – you would be there,” Mimosa stammered, “and I was – looking forward to – seeing you again.”
“Why?”
The question seemed abrupt and he spoke more loudly than he had before.
It flashed through Mimosa’s mind that she wanted to tell him the truth and then she knew if she did so that he would despise her more than he did already.
For a moment her voice seemed to have died in her throat and the Marquis took a step nearer to her.
“I asked you a question, Mimosa. Why were you hoping to meet me at Carlton House?”
There was a little pause before Mimosa managed to reply,
“I thought that as you – were a friend of His Royal Highness – you were bound to be there.”
“And you were looking forward to seeing me?”
“Yes.”
“I have been thinking of you as being at home in the country. I never dreamt, never imagined for a moment that I would see you tonight.”
“And – when you did – you were angry? Why? Why were you – angry with me?”
She felt the Marquis draw in his breath before he said,
“I was angry with myself because I have been such a fool!”
Mimosa looked up at him in bewilderment.
“I don’t understand – ”
“I have been a fool,” the Marquis said quietly, “because I tried to forget the girl I left behind in the country.”
“I-I hoped that sometimes you would – think of me,” Mimosa said humbly.
“Of course I thought of you!” the Marquis said harshly. “How was it possible for me to think of anything else? And yet I told myself I had to be sensible.”
“I-I don’t – understand.”
“That is not surprising! I don’t understand myself or my own stupidity!”
Because what he was saying seemed utterly incomprehensible, Mimosa could only go on looking at him, at the same time aware that her whole body was pulsating with the joy and excitement that he was there and talking to her.
She felt as if she had suddenly come alive, when ever since she had left him only a small part of herself had been living, moving, breathing, speaking, almost like an automaton.
For her heart, her soul and every part of her that mattered had been left with the Marquis and without them she was incomplete.
And yet now everything seemed to be more vivid, more intense – the moonlight, the scent of the flowers, the beauty of the garden, the Marquis himself.
It all combined to sweep over her so that she felt herself thrill and thrill again, simply because he was standing there and she could look at him.
“How can you be so incredibly lovely?” the Marquis asked. “How could I have thought for a moment that I could forget you?”
“But – you did not want to – see me again?”
“Of course I wanted to see you!” he replied. “I wanted to see you, I wanted to be with you, I wanted to talk to you, Mimosa, and to laugh as we did at Heron Hall!”
“But you – tried not to – see me!”
“I wanted to, God knows I wanted to!” the Marquis said. “It took every ounce of determination and a self-control I did not know I possessed to prevent myself from posting back to the country to tell you that I missed you.”
“You – missed me!”
There was a note in her words that seemed like the cry of a bird greeting the dawn.
“You – really missed me?”
“I missed you unbearably!” the Marquis said. “But I told myself that you had amused and bewildered me simply because you were different from anyone I had met before and that actually I had nothing in common with a girl who had lived all her life in the countryside. I thought that you could never adjust to my way of life and my friends.”
“I can understand – that,” Mimosa said in a low voice, “because I knew you thought me – just a country bumpkin, as I am!”
The Marquis gave a little laugh.
“Not at Carlton House when you looked as you did tonight! Mimosa, how could you deceive me? How could you make me believe that you were really, as you said, a country bumpkin and not a beauty who could turn the head of every man who looked at you?”
There was a note in the Marquis’s voice that seemed to seep through Mimosa like the moonlight and yet what she was hoping, what he seemed to be saying, made her afraid in case she was mistaken.
'”What are you – saying?”
“I am saying,” the Marquis answered in a deep voice, “that I love you! I have loved you since the very first moment I saw you when you came to me for help and I found it impossible not to do as you asked of me.”
“You – love – me?”
The words were only a whisper as if she dared not let them pass her lips.
“I love you!” the Marquis repeated firmly.
Now his arms were around her and he went on,
“Your worried eyes have haunted me until I was unable to sleep, but only to think and long, as I have never l
onged for anything in my whole life, Mimosa, to hold you like this, as I did when I carried you back from that damnable horsebox where you were meant to die!”
He pulled her closer to him as he spoke and continued,
“I knew then, of course I knew, that I loved you, and that I wanted to look after you and protect you for the rest of your life. But I was afraid, desperately afraid, that I was making an irrevocable mistake in marrying somebody who, I told myself, was not of my world and never could be.”
Mimosa felt as if the whole of the garden was whirling around her and the light of the moon had become too dazzling to be borne.
And yet she was still unsure, still afraid that she was misunderstanding him even though her heart seemed to be about to spring from her body and her whole being was pulsating because the Marquis’s arms were holding her against him.
“I love you!” he said. “And now, thank God, I am able to tell you so!”
His lips came down on hers as he spoke and, as they did so, Mimosa felt that she must have died and stepped into Heaven because it could not be true.
Then, as she felt the closeness of his arms and the insistent pressure of his lips on hers, she knew that her prayers had been answered at last.
The moon was within reach, although she would never have believed it possible.
The Marquis at first kissed her gently as if he was afraid of frightening her.
Then, as the softness and innocence of her lips excited him, his kiss became more insistent and more demanding.
But he was aware that it was very different from any kiss he had ever given in his life before.
As Mimosa came to him across the lawn and he saw her moving like an ethereal rather than a human being towards him with her fair hair falling over her shoulders, he had known that she was everything he had ever wanted in a woman but had nearly lost.
He had told himself at Heron Hall that she was so childlike and, at the same time, so dowdy and countrified that it was unthinkable in his position and with his commitments at Court, in London and in the County for him to have a wife he would be ashamed of!
A wife whom he would have to protect against the criticisms and the sneers of those who would not understand why she was different from the rest of his friends.
It was not his own conceit that made him feel like that, but rather his sense of duty towards his position as Head of the Family and his obligation to the future generations who would bear his name.
‘She is lovely, unusual and she intrigues me,’ he had told himself when he thought about Mimosa.
He had known when she cried against him after Norton Field had tried to ravish her, and had not understood exactly what he was doing, that he was already deeply in love but was afraid to admit it.
Mimosa excited him as a woman, but it was more than that, there was something so simple and yet so spiritual about her that he could not at first fully appreciate the effect it had on him or that she awoke in him all the chivalry and all the idealistic dreams he had had as a young man.
He had laughed at them when he grew older and told himself that it was all sheer nonsense.
But when woman after woman failed to give him what he really sought, a love that was different from the fiery passion they aroused in him, he grew more and more convinced that what he sought was a mirage and could only be found in story books or in his dreams.
And yet when Mimosa drove away in his carriage from Heron Hall, he had felt, although he would not acknowledge it, that he was losing something very precious, something that he did not fully appreciate and might never find again in his lifetime.
When he was back in London, every woman he met seemed to irritate him in a way that women had never done before.
He had told the truth when he said that Mimosa’s eyes haunted him and he had seen them everywhere he looked.
He saw that worried frightened expression that made her incredibly beautiful and yet at the same time he could describe her as an untidy ill-dressed child, who was ignorant of all the attributes that he thought were essential in his wife.
But, as soon as he saw her at Carlton House, he had been aware of his own stupidity, almost as if it was written in letters of fire above her head.
He had been stunned by her beauty, which he knew outshone that of every other woman in the room. And he knew that the indescribable chic with which she was dressed was entirely different from that of any young girl he had ever seen or imagined.
It was then that he was suddenly furious that he, who prided himself on being perceptive and on seeing beneath the surface what any man or woman was actually like rather than what they pretended to be, had been so obtuse.
Because he was angry, he told himself that he could not talk to Mimosa or go near her while she was at Carlton House and must see her alone, although he could not think how.
It was only when he was driving home alone that he suddenly realised that he could not go through the night without explaining himself and telling her that he loved her.
He had turned his carriage round and gone back to Carlton House.
He found Charles, who had not yet said goodnight, although the Prince Regent was fussing more irritably than before and had even told the band to stop playing, and Charles had understood.
“I have to see her tonight,” the Marquis said to him desperately.
“You can hardly call at the house when they have all gone to bed!” Charles pointed out.
“Then what can I do?”
Charles smiled.
“For once I have an answer to your problem, Drogo!”
They had gone together to his aunt’s house and he had handed the Marquis the key to the garden gate.
Now, as the Marquis held Mimosa closer in his arms, he asked himself how he could have been so incredibly stupid as not to have known that, having fallen in love with two worried eyes, he could never escape the magic of them.
As he felt her body quiver against his and her lips very shyly respond to his kisses, he realised that she was giving him sensations he had never known in his life before and which he had not even realised existed.
She was so perfect, so different from what he expected and yet he could only kiss Mimosa and go on kissing her until he felt as if they were disembodied and no longer human.
They were floating above the earth, enveloped in a Divine light that came not only from above them but from within themselves.
The Marquis raised his head.
“I love you, my darling, I adore you!”
“I think I must have – died and now I am in – Heaven!” Mimosa whispered.
“You are alive, very much alive,” the Marquis said, “and I will never do anything so stupid as to lose you again!”
He paused before he continued,
“You don’t realise how much you have haunted me day and night since you came to Heron Hall and then I finally recognised that I had fallen deeply in love with you.”
“You do – really love me?”
“I love you until there are no words to tell you how much!”
“Tell me – please – tell me – I have been so unhappy, so unutterably miserable because I thought you would – never think of me again – and there are so many beautiful – women in your life.”
“I have never been able to think of anybody but you ever since I first saw you,” the Marquis replied. “It now seems utterly ridiculous that I did not understand and thought – ”
He stopped.
“ – that I was not the – right person for – you?” Mimosa finished.
“That is what I thought, but how wrong I was! You are the only one for me, the one who belongs to me and is part of me. You were meant for me since the beginning of time, as I was meant for you.”
Mimosa gave a little cry.
“How can you say such wonderful things? But suppose – when you know me better you are – disappointed?”
“I could never be disappointed in you!” the Marquis asserted. “My darlin
g, I will look after you and protect you and never allow you to be frightened or worried again.”
He felt her draw a little closer to him before he said very quietly,
“You are mine, my precious! Tell me how soon you will marry me.”
“Are you – really asking me – that?”
“Not really,” the Marquis answered, “since I have no intention of allowing you to refuse me. You are mine, Mimosa, mine, because I have fought for you and saved you and already you belong to me.”
“That is – just what I feel,” Mimosa sighed, “but I never thought you would feel it too. And I knew – because I love you that it would be – impossible for me to marry anybody else.”
The Marquis’s arms tightened around her.
“How could you even consider such a thing? You are mine! Mine! I will kill any man who tries to take you from me!”
He thought as he spoke of how nearly Norton Field had done just that, but he did not wish Mimosa to think of it.
So he kissed her incessantly, demandingly, until he knew that it would be impossible for her to think of anyone else except him.
Then, as his kisses grew gentler and tenderer, he thought that the most exciting thing he could ever do in his life would be not only to look after Mimosa but also to teach her about love and to make sure that she was not shocked or frightened by anything he did.
“I – love – you.”
The words came from the very depths of Mimosa’s heart and the Marquis saw that she was looking up at him.
Her face was so radiant that her beauty seemed to be blinding as her eyes held a happiness that was indescribable.
“You have not answered my question,” he said. “When will you marry me?”
“At once – please very – very quickly,” Mimosa stuttered, “and then – we can go back to – the country.”
As she spoke, she thought that she had made a mistake and added quickly,
But only if – you want to. It would be wonderful – to be with you wherever it was – but I have a feeling that I might – lose you in London.
“You will never lose me in London or anywhere else,” the Marquis declared, “but I agree with you, Mimosa, we will be happier in the country where we can be alone and talk to each other and I can teach you, my precious, about love!”
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