It was not possible to spend all his time at Whitehall or at Whites’; even the private suppers hosted by his friends ended some time. He must return from time to time to the Ocotts’ house, and while his own smaller house in Charles Street was under lease to a doctor from Lincolnshire, he could not retire there. So he picked among his invitations and chose parties at which Thea was least likely to appear. It was inevitable that in these circles, admittedly not always the best, he should encounter Lady Towles.
He was at a card-party at Marlborough House where he chatted with one of the Lamb cousins and wondered when he could decently retire to the library; there something more substantial than iced cup was being served.
“Douglas, old man! Say hello to a chap, won’t ye?”
At the sound of that voice and the clap of a solid, meaty hand on his shoulder, Matlin turned and found himself looking into the protuberant brown eyes of Sir Charles Towles. Sir Charles wore an outrageously cut coat of green superfine, and the starched points of his collar poked into the puffy rounds of his cheeks. His fair hair, which had earned him the nickname “Taffy” amongst his cronies, had been lavishly pommaded and forced into unconvincing curls about his ears and forehead. There were beads of sweat along his upper lip.
“Hello, Towles.” Matlin made the greeting as cordial as possible. He had never been a part of Sir Charles’s crowd and could not understand the reason for his enthusiastic greeting now. Then, as he caught a glimpse of chestnut hair just beyond Towles’s shoulder, Matlin thought he understood. In a moment his surmise was confirmed: Lady Towles joined her husband.
“Douglas, my dear friend.” She extended her hand to him with a meaningful smile. Matlin took her hand coldly, bowed over it, and let it go.
“Adele. I felicitate you both, of course. I had not heard of your marriage until very lately.”
“Oh, yes, you were out of the country, weren’t you?” Lady Towles’s voice was sweet. She poised her hand delicately on her husband’s sleeve and watched Matlin through her eyelashes.
Oblivious to undercurrents, Sir Charles nodded emphatically. “Quite an adventure, eh, Matlin? Must tell me all about it over a bottle or two some night, eh? And where’s your wife? Understand you married a Spanish Señorita; is that it?”
“My wife’s mother is Spanish. She was raised in Somerset, and is quite as English as you are yourself.” Matlin’s tone was barely civil.
Lady Towles picked coquettishly at her husband’s sleeve. “Charles, dear love, I am perishing of thirst. Won’t you fetch me some lemonade?” It was not a request. Sir Charles regarded his wife with a bleary, somewhat knowing eye, shrugged, and began to shoulder through toward the refreshment room.
“Puppy,” Lady Towles said with a shudder. It was obvious she wished Matlin to witness her distaste for her husband. Then she turned and smiled brilliantly at Matlin. “Douglas, I have a bone to pick with you: you have not even left your card since you returned to Town. Now, my dear, is that kind? I really had thought....”
Matlin cut through her persuasive voice. “Adele, I really do not see that you and I have anything more to say to each other. As I recall we said it all before I left.”
“You went away. How was I to tell you how sorry I was?” She hinted at a pout. When Matlin did not answer her she glanced across the room. “Are you worrying about Taffy? For heaven’s sake, Douglas, one must marry someone, and we all thought you were dead. I’m sure I cried for weeks. Then Taffy asked for me, and what was I to say but yes? Don’t hold him against me, Douglas. He’s very sweet, in a stupid sort of way, but....” She smiled up at him and touched his sleeve lightly. Her message was very clear: Douglas Matlin could have Adele Towles at any time.
“I am married as well,” he heard himself saying. Was he really invoking Thea against Adele Towles? Somehow the image of Thea, who would barely come up to Lady Towles’s chin, was vastly refreshing to him. “I don’t hold Sir Charles against you, Adele.”
“Oh, but really, that baby?” Adele dismissed Thea as utterly negligible. “It’s said you married the girl to bring her out of Spain with her name intact. A chivalrous gesture, I agree, but hardly something to base a marriage on.” She ran her fingers up his a few inches, delicately. He was surprised at how blatant a gesture it was.
“I seem to have missed what is common knowledge to everyone else, my lady. Dorothea is my wife, and I have not the slightest wish or intention of causing her the least moment of discomfort. I care very much for her.”
“Words of passion,” Lady Towles mocked. “If you could but hear yourself. I’m not proposing that you make your little schoolgirl uncomfortable.” As she pressed closer to him he was aware of her scent, jasmine, somehow hot and overpowering in the crowd. “Are you determined to be a bore? Don’t let Taffy bother you; the poor dear is so addle-pated he would not know what happened two feet in front of his....”
Matlin shook off her arm and stepped away to look at her. “I cannot believe we are having this conversation, still less that you have virtually offered me carte blanche. I am flattered by the offer, Adele, but my answer remains no. I’m not certain which of us has changed the more in two years; probably it is me. Good evening.”
He left her standing there and pushed his way forcibly through the crowd and into the library, where William Lamb was dispensing punch. Accepting a cup, he drank it down, then took another.
“Hold fast, man, what the deuce d’ye think you’re doing?” Lamb muttered.
“Trying to wash a taste from my mouth. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, Lamb.”
“Well, you know best, but I’ll thank you not to get yourself foxed at my mother’s card party. Not to be inhospitable, you understand.”
“Oh yes, I understand.” Matlin held his punch cup out for more punch.
Chapter Ten
Because it seemed there was nothing else to be done, Thea went to parties, bought dresses, and played grateful and affectionate companion to Lady Ocott and friend to Bess Chase, who was soon as much at home at Ocott House as in her own more modest home in Upper Wimpole Street. If Thea was sometimes preoccupied enough to worry Lady Ocott, the older woman did not pry into the source of her discontent.
“I don’t doubt that this all feels frivolous to you now, my lamb, particularly after all the hardship you met with in Spain, but you really should allow yourself the holiday! Once Douglas has a position with the government—a formal one, I mean—you will have your hands full meeting all the obligations of a political wife. I assure you, I’ve never found it dull. When the lease on your house is up and that tiresome doctor goes back to Lincolnshire where he belongs, you will have to keep household both in town and in the country. You can be such a help to Douglas.”
Thea smiled sadly. She wondered how long she would remain with the Ocotts or their nephew once Matlin realized that she was not carrying his child. In the fortnight since she had blurted out that outrageous lie, Thea had seen Matlin exactly three times: once by coincidence at a ball and twice at Ocott House, where they encountered each other in the hallway. Matlin had fixed her with a conscious look, muttered something unintelligible, and vanished in the direction of his dressing room while Thea, miserable, watched him go. He has to be told sooner or later, she told herself. Then he would doubtless ask for his freedom, demand it, rather, since that was what he had wanted all along. She had to tell him before he deduced it himself; that would be a disaster.
But how to tell him? She never found a satisfactory answer. In the midst of conversation or a concert or a ride in the Park, she would find herself thinking again, wondering what to say and what the consequences would be.
Tony Chase and his sister contrived to distract her sometimes from her fretting. Where Bess had adopted Thea as her friend and confidante, Anthony had made her his idol. His was a good-humored sort of adoration: he was always ready to fetch Thea’s shawl or a cup of lemonade, to amuse her with easy flirtation, or to talk sensibly to her of current events. He never went beyond
what was permitted to a young man dancing attendance on a married woman; it was Thea’s first real friendship with a man. Sometimes, chatting with Tony Chase, she would think sadly of the afternoons of idle chatter she had shared with Matlin in the convent gate house, but that had been different: she had been in love with him from the start.
Chase’s admiration opened Thea’s eyes to the fact that he was not her only admirer, only the most persistent and most evident. At assemblies and parties, at breakfasts or when riding in Hyde Park, there were always a few men who crowded round the young Lady Matlin. Once she realized what was happening it was amusing, vaguely absurd, and wonderfully heartening to Thea. Her self-esteem had suffered, and this overt admiration was a balm to her. She practiced flirting, smiled, danced, and all the while thought longingly of Matlin closeted away at Whitehall.
One man, a little older than the others who rallied around her, a slight, swarthy man with a strongly marked brow over dark, fierce eyes and a thin commanding mouth, was persistently at the back of the crowd. In fact, although she had seen his face half a dozen times, Thea had no idea who he was, and only a vague, disturbing sense of foreignness. “Mr. Chase, who is that?”
“I’ll find out for you,” he promised, and Bess, Thea’s shadow as usual, looked in the stranger’s direction with definite admiration.
“He does look terribly romantic, doesn’t he?”
Thea supposed that he probably did; her own tastes were rather different. Matlin was not at Almacks’ this evening.
“Lady Matlin?” Chase had not only learned the stranger’s name; he had returned with the man in tow. “This gentleman....”
“I have been an admirer from the distance, madam,” the man broke in fluidly. He had a strong accent. Spanish, Thea realized with a shock. “My name is Joaquín, Lady Matlin. I am happy to have gained this introduction at last.” He bent over her hand with a flourish.
“How do you do, Señor?” Thea murmured.
“Please, Lady Matlin.” He still held her hand. “We are in England, I should simply be a ‘mister;’ is that not so?” He smiled as he relinquished Thea’s hand. She felt uncomfortable as the object of that smile and was relieved when, after a few minutes of silence, Joaquín moved away from her toward the musicians.
Bess sighed behind Thea. “What a heavenly man.”
“Don’t be such a nodcock, Bess,” Thea scolded. As an afterthought she asked: “Do you really think him so splendid?”
“Don’t you?”
“I hardly know the man. I don’t particularly want to know him, either. He scares me a little; he reminds me of—someone. Of a great many someones. Spanish husbands. Horrors.” She gave her shoulders a little shake. “Won’t the music ever start up again?”
As the stranger disappeared in the crowd Thea dismissed him from her mind and would have forgotten him entirely had Bess not enthused for the whole of their ride home over his dark, romantic eyes.
She found Matlin and Lord Ocott in the library when she reached Hill Street. Lord Ocott looked up from the fire with a smile of real welcome in his eyes. “Come in my dear. Done up from your partying, or will you take a glass of wine with us before you go to bed?”
Behind him Matlin stood. For once he did not wear that tight, withdrawn look. His smile was tentative but real. “Come sit down, Thea, and tell us which party you’ve graced with your presence. Was my aunt not with you?”
Thea took the wing chair which Lord Ocott offered her and replied that Lady Ocott had been engaged for a small loo party. “So I went to Almacks’ with Miss Chase and her brother. Can you picture me in the character of a chaperon? We had a pleasant evening.” She gazed thoughtfully down at her feet. “I danced a great deal; I think I shall have to buy a new pair of slippers.”
“Surely a worthy expense.” Lord Ocott smiled.
Matlin brought a glass of wine to her and stepped back to lean at one end of the mantelpiece, Lord Ocott leaned on the other side; framing the small fire they watched as she sipped at her wine. They spoke idly, encouraging Thea to recount the people she had spoken to, danced with that evening.
“By God, Susan’s right: you’ve become a veritable Belle. I knew you’d brought a right’un into the family, Douglas.”
Thea looked up to see how Matlin took that. He was smiling a little. “I’m afraid running errands at Grahamley and the convent didn’t train me up for Almacks’, but everyone has been very kind to me.”
Still smiling at his wife, Matlin thought: Kind? It seemed that everyone was kind to Thea except he. Well, perhaps it was time to stop all that, make the best of this bargain for the girl’s sake and his own. The memory of Adele Towles was still fresh in his mind; he weighed that image with the picture Thea presented as she sat sipping his uncle’s claret; the difference struck him forcibly.
“I’m afraid I have not had much time for parties and society since we reached London,” he began.
“Yes, well, time you remedied that, boy,” Lord Ocott agreed.
“I don’t want to be a charge on you,” Thea assured him anxiously.
“No charge. I shall try hereafter to be a better escort to you, chi—no, I forget, you don’t like that, do you? Thea.” He smiled.
After half an hour’s chatting with the men, Thea excused herself and went to her room. When she slept that night it was with the easiest heart she had had in many nights. Only in the morning did she remember again: Matlin still did not know that there was no child. Until he did there was no truth between them and no chance of a future.
o0o
Matlin was as good as his word and began to squire Thea to parties and the theatre. Once he had begun to do so he was surprised and a little chagrined at how unnecessary his presence was. When they were announced at a party or took their seats at the Opera, Thea was immediately surrounded by acquaintances, many of them male. Tony Chase was particularly in evidence, with his sister as his excuse, but if Thea must have hangers-on, young Chase was unexceptionable. Chase was not a problem; Matlin only wished he liked others of his wife’s cicisbeos as well. John Walsingham, a young buck well known to be without a farthing to bless himself with and with a reputation for dallying with other men’s wives, was one of them. There were others less savory, and while Brummel and Granville Leveson-Gower and Alvanley paid their respects to Lady Matlin regularly, Matlin generally wished the whole lot of Thea’s admirers at the Devil. There was one, a dark, Italianate-looking man who hovered at the edge of Thea’s circle but rarely spoke to her; his manner was very particular, Matlin thought sourly, and he had none of Chase’s boyishness or Walsingham’s patent opportunism to season it.
A little more thinking and Matlin came to the startling conclusion that he was jealous. Once he was past the shock of that he wondered if he had ever really meant to give Thea her freedom and watch her marry some other man, a Tony Chase or some other eligible boy. If only she were not so damned young, he thought. If only he had not made such a wretched beginning of it. He began to sicken of “if only” and to wonder where the punch room was. They were married, he was to become a father; the beginning had been marred, but perhaps, if Thea could forgive him, there was hope for them both.
Who the Devil was the foreign-looking man?
Thea was as puzzled by the attentions of the man called Joaquín as her husband was. She seemed to meet him everywhere: riding, walking, at parties, at the theatre. He rarely spoke except to pay his respects to her, but she always had a sense that he was about to say something more, that he watched her, and waited. “He hovers,” she said once to Bess Chase.
“I wish he’d hover around me,” Bess replied curtly. She had worked her wiles upon Joaquín without satisfaction. “I suppose he’s as mad for you as Tony is.”
That was what troubled Thea. Since leaving the convent she had learned to distinguish between a man who paid court to her from politeness and one who did so in earnest, and she knew for certain that Joaquín, no matter his protestations to the contrary, was no more intere
sted in her than he was in Lady Ocott or Tony Chase.
“I wish you’d at least tell him you don’t want his attentions, Lady Matlin. Perhaps then....”
“He never gives me an opportunity to say boo to him. I suppose I should be grateful for that.”
“I suppose I should too.” Bess tossed her soft dark ringlets unhappily. “This is my second Season, Lady Matlin....”
“Thea.”
“Thea, then. I haven’t met a man before that I liked as well as I like your Mr. Joaquín. I wish someone would tell him so.” She looked pointedly at Thea. “Are you scandalized? You’re married, ma’am. Have a little pity on those of us who are threatened by spinsterhood.”
“Don’t be silly, Bess. You’ll never be an old maid. As for Mr. Joaquín, I don’t know what I can do, but I promise, if there is ever a chance and I can help you, I will.”
Bess clasped her hands. “You’re the best of friends. I only wish Tony had met you before Sir Douglas did, and we could have been sisters.”
Thea thought of Matlin and Tony Chase, but did not laugh, no matter how absurd the comparison. When Joaquín appeared again she quite deliberately summoned him over and instructed him to dance with a very gratified Bess. Someone’s romance, at least, should prosper.
The next morning Thea woke early and full of restless energy. When Ellen appeared she instructed to have her horse and a groom ready in half an hour and prepared herself for a brisk ride at the unfashionable hour of eight. Ellen looked sceptical, and the groom who waited for her and held her brown mare and his own horse was yawning. The air was cool and refreshing, and the streets were full of milk-sellers and strawberry girls, crossing-sweeps and dray-carts, the sort of population she rarely encountered in laterday forays into the London streets. She stared around her as she rode to Hyde Park, fascinated. When she reached the familiar precincts of the Park, however, she ceased staring and eased her mare into a canter along the Row, leaving her groom to follow on his slow cob. After half-an-hour of riding a brisk circuit, Thea slowed her horse; she was feeling better, rather pleased with herself.
Spanish Marriage Page 12
