by French Leave
It was not until much later, just before sleep claimed her, that she remembered he had never denied it.
Chapter 5
The woman’s a whore,
and there’s an end on’t.
SAMUEL JOHNSON,
from James Boswell, Life of Johnson
Upon the morrow, Lord Waverly went in search of his betrothed and found her upstairs in the nursery, sitting on the rug and stacking wooden blocks with the brothers Brundy.
“Bonjour, milord,” she said cheerfully upon seeing him enter. “I am watching les enfants while Nurse prepares for them le petit déjeuner.”
Master William seized the opportunity afforded by the distraction to knock the blocks down, a violation of the rules of fair play so flagrant as to make Master Charles howl in protest.
“ ‘e’s crying,” Willie self-righteously informed the newcomer, pointing at his wailing brother.
“Willie, you naughty boy!” scolded Lisette, scrambling to collect the scattered wooden cubes. “Now you have made Charlie cry. Pick him up, milord, s‘il vous plaît.”
Lord Waverly eyed the miniature Sir Ethan with distaste, but dutifully grasped the sobbing child by the armpits and lifted him, all the while holding him at arm’s length. “Good heavens, what a repellent child! What do I do with it?”
“Mais non!” cried Lisette, laughing as she clambered to her feet to relieve the earl of his burden. “He is not a sack of meal!”
Waverly surrendered the child with no small sense of relief, and Master Charles was soon settled in Lisette’s arms.
“Ah, milord, are they not the dearest things?” said Lisette, laying her cheek against Charles’s soft black curls.
“Undoubtedly,” agreed the earl, suppressing a shudder.
“Moi, I wish I had a—” she broke off, blushing, and when Nurse entered the room to announce that breakfast was ready, Lisette, in her embarrassment, all but fell on the good woman’s neck. “Ah, c’est prêt! I have promised the children that I will eat with them. Will you join us, milord?”
“I fear I must decline. I should like to have a word with you in private, Lisette.”
Recognizing her cue, Nurse set the tray on the table and bustled away, muttering something about having forgotten the butter for the twins’ bread. Waverly waited until the door closed behind her, then turned to address his betrothed.
“First of all,” he said, choosing his words with care, “it appears my offer of marriage was rather ambiguous. I should have made it plain that the sort of marriage I propose is one in name only—what the French call a mariage blanc.”
“But—but what if I do not wish to have a mariage blanc?"
“My dear child, you must trust me to know what is best for you,” said Waverly with some asperity. “You are far too young to be tied to a man twice your age—particularly a man who has led the sort of life I have lived.”
“But you will want an heir, non?" Lisette persisted, absently running her fingers through Charles’s curls.
“I have a younger brother in the army and another attached to the British embassy in Russia. Surely between the pair of them, they can contrive to save the family from extinction.”
“Voyons!” cried Lisette, all sparkling eyes and flushed cheeks. “You wish to marry me, but still I will live like a nun. For this I might have stayed at Sainte-Marie!”
“Nonsense! You will have the title of Countess and all the privileges that your rank and my name can offer. You shall wear fine clothes and attend parties every night, if that is what you wish.”
Lisette shrugged her slender shoulders. “Très bien, I shall be a very gay and well-dressed nun.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Lord Waverly, who had never been overly burdened by scruples where such matters were concerned, found it unaccountably embarrassing to discuss them with the young lady who was soon to be his wife. “We will speak more of these things when you are rather older. But consider for a moment that by the time you are twenty, I will be almost forty, and you will no doubt prefer a man nearer your own age. For now, suffice it to say that, when the time comes, you will not find me unreasonable, so long as you are discreet. And I, for my part, will conduct my own amours so as to spare you any embarrassment.”
Lisette might have argued the point, but seeing that Lord Waverly’s mind was made up, lapsed into somewhat sulky silence.
“Now that that is settled,” the earl said briskly, “I came up to tell you I must make a brief journey to London.”
“You are going away? But you will take me with you, oui?" asked Lisette, her dark eyes wide with alarm.
Waverly shook his head. “Not this time.”
“Is it because you are angry with me, milord? If so—”
“Angry with you, Lisette?” he echoed, smiling slightly. “I do not think I could be—at least, not for long.”
“Is it because you have compromised me? But I can be once again your Cousin Luc, and no one will ever know!”
The earl shook his head. “I am sorry, child, but Cousin Luc has died an unlamented death. You may join me in London within a fortnight. In the meantime, I will procure a special license, and we may be wed immediately upon your arrival.”
“You would leave me here all alone?”
Waverly had to smile at this description. “Not at all. There are the children to play with, you know, and I believe Lady Helen intends to take you to her dressmaker. I daresay you will enjoy yourself hugely.”
Lisette, fighting tears, could only shake her bowed head.
“Come, ma petite,” he added, taking her chin in his hand and tilting her head back. “It will not be for long, I promise. You will join me very soon, and if you wish, I will take you to Astley’s Amphitheatre to see the equestrian performer. Now, if you will excuse me, I must see to the packing of my bags.”
“Equestrian performers,” Lisette repeated to her young playmate after the earl had gone. “Bah! He thinks I am no older than—than you or Willie. But I will show him! I will give him an heir, oui, and a little girl, too. And when you are quite grown up, you shall marry her.”
Master Charles Brundy, displeased with this vision of his future, began to howl anew.
* * * *
Lord Waverly and Sir Ethan departed for London the next day, and within a fortnight had managed to rectify the worst of the earl’s embarrassments. A successful evening at a Jermyn Street gaming house had won for Waverly the wherewithal to make his town house habitable for himself and his bride, and it remained only for him to procure a special license. With this end in view, he betook himself to Doctors’ Commons and the London office of the Archbishop of Canterbury, where he paid the requisite fee of £5 to the aging cleric who assisted the archbishop in this capacity.
“Names?” requested this worthy, dipping his quill into the inkstand.
“Nigel Haversham, sixth earl of Waverly.”
“Ah, Lord Waverly! I was at Oxford with your father many years ago, although he was still Viscount Melling at the time. And the lady’s name?”
“Lisette Colling, spinster, of Amiens.”
The clergyman looked up, revealing pale blue eyes behind small round spectacles. “French?”
Waverly nodded.
“And the lady is of legal age?”
Waverly hesitated over the question, which he had failed to anticipate. None but a fool could look at Lisette and believe her to be twenty-one years of age. There was nothing for it but to tell the truth.
“No, she is not quite eighteen.”
“And you have some proof of parental consent?”
“Alas, her parents, one of whom was English, are dead,” the earl confessed.
“But she must have had a guardian in France,” persisted the cleric.
Mentally cursing himself for failing to anticipate the legal complications inherent in marrying a young lady half one’s age, Waverly assumed a soulful expression. “As to that, it is a most romantic story,” he said with a melancholy sigh. “I res
cued her from a Parisian convent with the intention of bringing her to her English grandfather, only to discover that the gentleman had died a scant ten days earlier. Of course, by that time we had formed so violent a fondness for each other that we could not bear to be torn apart.”
“And her French guardian?” prompted the cleric, unmoved by Waverly’s burst of eloquence.
“Perhaps you did not understand: her French guardians placed her in a nunnery against her will,” said Waverly, certain that this circumstance must touch the bishop’s Protestant soul.
“It is a great pity,” clucked the older man, shaking his head sympathetically. “Nevertheless, she cannot wed without their consent. Unless—”
“Yes?” prompted the earl.
“If she is indeed half English, you might apply to the Lord Chancellor for an English guardian to be named.”
“Impossible! We cannot wait that long!”
The clergyman blinked at him, and Waverly, startled by his own vehemence, resumed his soulful tone once more. “Surely some allowance must be made for the natural impatience of a man in love.”
“Unfortunately, my lord—or perhaps fortunately—our laws were not written by men in love,” the cleric pointed out. “Without the consent of her guardian, there can be no marriage, at least not until Miss Colling turns twenty-one.”
“You expect us to wait four years’!”
“It is not so very long,” said the clergyman soothingly. “The Good Book tells us Jacob waited fourteen years for Rachel.”
Lord Waverly might have retorted that Jacob had not been obliged to play nursemaid to Rachel in the interim, but he swallowed this fruitless rejoinder and cast about in his mind for a solution. He had nothing with which to bribe the man, even if he could have been sure the cleric was open to that particular form of persuasion. And then, quite unexpectedly, inspiration struck.
“I daresay you are right,” Waverly admitted with a sigh of resignation. “Little though I like it, I must thank you for your wise counsel, Mr.—?”
“Fairchild. Robert Fairchild, happy to be of service, my lord.”
Waverly’s eyes opened wide. “Ah, Robert Fairchild, is it? But of course! My father mentioned you on occasion. As I recall, he once observed that nothing in your early career would have indicated a promising future as a respected churchman.” He gave the clergyman a knowing smile. “Indeed, there were one or two incidents which might have suggested quite the opposite, were there not?”
Mr. Fairchild turned alarmingly pale, and Lord Waverly knew that he had drawn a bow at a venture and somehow managed to find a mark.
“How my father would laugh, could he see what a paragon of virtue you have become,” continued the earl, pressing his advantage. “It is almost too good a story to keep to oneself, is it not? I wonder what the Archbishop would make of it!”
On this faintly sinister note, he once again thanked Mr. Fairchild for his trouble, bade him good day, and started toward the door, still chuckling to himself. He had just laid his hand on the knob when Mr. Fairchild called out.
“Wait!”
Waverly turned back, his eyebrows arched in mild surprise. “Yes, Mr. Fairchild?”
The clergyman swallowed convulsively. “It just occurred to me—if Miss Colling has been under your protection—” He broke off, flushing, at the unfortunate implication of his words. “—That is, if you have been responsible for Miss Ceiling’s well-being since her departure from France—what I am trying to say is, one might conceivably argue that you are her guardian, might they not?”
“I have certainly considered myself so.”
“That being the case, my lord, it would be ludicrous to think that you would withhold your consent to her marriage to yourself—”
“Utterly ludicrous,” agreed the earl.
“Yes, well, given the unusual circumstances, perhaps—”
Lord Waverly left Doctors’ Commons within the quarter-hour, bearing a special license in his pocket.
* * * *
While Lord Waverly practiced blackmail upon the clergy, Sir Ethan was left to his own devices. For this circumstance he could only be thankful, as he had certain affairs of his own to attend to, the delicate nature of which made it desirable that they be settled before his wife’s arrival in Town.
To this end, he set out from his town residence in Grosvenor Square, and hailed a hackney. He was set down a short time later in front of a neat but unpretentious dwelling in Green Street. He had never been here before, but he had heard a great deal about the house and its principal occupant. He looked up at the first-floor windows, their curtains pulled tightly closed, and ran a finger underneath a cravat that suddenly felt too tight. Then, taking a deep breath, he mounted the stairs, raised the brass knocker mounted in the center of the paneled door, and allowed it to fall.
A moment later the door opened to reveal a shutter-faced butler in dignified black. “Yes?” intoned this well-trained individual in disinterested accents.
“I—I’d like to see Mrs. ‘utchins, if you please.”
“And whom may I say is calling?”
Sir Ethan reached for his card case, then decided it was probably wisest not to leave evidence of his visit. “Ethan Brundy—Sir Ethan Brundy,” he added a bit more confidently. He was not entirely comfortable with that “Sir Ethan” nonsense, but it had not taken him long to discover that a title had its uses.
Sure enough, the butler stepped back to allow him entrance, then led him to a morning room adjoining the hall. While he waited for his hostess’s arrival, Sir Ethan studied his surroundings. The room, while not large, was tastefully decorated in airy blue and white. So far there was nothing to suggest that this house had seen even half of the goings-on with which rumor credited it.
“Well, well, so you are Sir Ethan Brundy,” drawled a low-pitched feminine voice.
Sir Ethan turned toward the sound and blinked in surprise. He had not known quite what to expect of one of London’s most expensive courtesans, but the woman standing before him might have been any one of a dozen Society matrons. She was a handsome woman, a bit closer to forty than to thirty. Skillfully applied rouge and kohl did an admirable job of preserving what remained of what must have once been a stunning beauty. Her well-endowed figure was fashionably clad in an elegant morning gown not unlike those currently hanging in his own wife’s clothes-press. The discovery was somehow reassuring. Sir Ethan let out his breath, instantly more at ease.
“Mrs. ‘utchins,” he said, bowing over her hand. “Forgive me for calling without ‘aving been introduced—”
“Not at all,” she assured him, gesturing toward one end of a camel-backed sofa as she sank gracefully down onto the other end. “Do sit down! I have heard all about you, and read of your recent heroics in the Times. No further introduction is needed. Now, what may I do for you?”
The question itself was innocent enough, but Sir Ethan flushed scarlet nonetheless, his newfound confidence utterly deserting him. He sat down beside her and launched into explanation. “You see, Mrs. ‘utchins, I’ve a problem—”
“There is no need for embarrassment, Sir Ethan,” she assured him. “Many of the gentlemen who come to me have problems. I do my best to help them,” she added with a provocative smile.
If it were possible, Sir Ethan’s countenance grew even redder. “It’s not—that sort of problem. I want—information.”
Mrs. Hutchins arched one sculpted eyebrow. It was not the first time a gentleman had come to her for educational purposes, but these seekers after enlightenment were generally quite a bit younger. “‘Information,’ sir?” she prompted.
“Aye. ‘Tis about me wife.”
“I see,” said Mrs. Hutchins, nodding in sympathy. “She doesn’t understand you, I daresay.”
“Oh, she understands me well enough. But we’ve ‘ad four children in as many years—”
“I congratulate you,” purred Mrs. Hutchins, her carmined lips curving as she looked her visitor up and down ad
miringly. “You really don‘t have ‘that sort of problem,’ do you?”
Sir Ethan elected to ignore this interruption. “The last one—six months ago, that was—was long and difficult. The baby was ‘ealthy, but I almost lost me wife.”
“And what does this have to do with me?”
Sir Ethan took a deep breath. “I thought there must be a way—it stands to reason—if there weren’t, you’d ‘ave at least two or three—”
At this point Sir Ethan’s speech became so disjointed as to render it incomprehensible. Mrs. Hutchins, however, was as compassionate as she was astute, and decided to take pity on her stammering guest.
“Come now, Sir Ethan, we are business people, you and I,” she said bracingly. “You want me to tell you if there is a way for you to bed your wife without risking a potentially fatal pregnancy. In fact, you want to eat your cake and have it, too.”
Sir Ethan winced at her blunt speaking, but answered with equal candor. “Aye, that I do.”
“Furthermore, you suspect that there is such a way, and that I must know of it—else, as you so eloquently observed, women in my profession would have a house full of children.”
His expectant silence gave Mrs. Hutchins to understand that her assumptions were correct.
“Your best bet, Sir Ethan, would be to take your pleasure elsewhere. I am free this afternoon, if you would like to come upstairs.” She rose and held out one hand invitingly.
Sir Ethan shook his head. “No, that won’t do.”
“Pray, why not?”
“Because I love me wife,” he said simply. “No offense, madam, but I don’t want any other woman. If there’s no other way, I’ll—”
“Yes?” she prompted. “What will you do?”
Sir Ethan gave a rueful smile. “I’ll take plenty of cold baths.”
