by M C Beaton
There was no help from the aunts and cousins who took their cue from the Duchess and shrieked and tittered and exclaimed in a quite horribly sycophantic manner.
It came as almost no surprise when the gentlemen agreed to take their port in the drawing room with the ladies. There was nothing they could now say, thought Lucy, which had not already been said. She had often wondered what gentlemen talked about when the ladies had retired, and now she knew.
The Duchess was very tipsy. Her wig—red this time—was askew and one of her false breasts had slipped around under her left armpit.
“We’ll have no caterwauling tonight,” she said maliciously as Bella headed for the pianoforte. “We’ll have a romp. We’ll eat Lady Standish!”
To Lucy’s horror, her grace removed her false china teeth and held them out in her hand, making snapping noises in the back of her throat.
Lucy sprang behind the sofa as the party shrieked with glee and began to gnash their teeth in mock rage.
It was like a nightmare. The flickering candles seemed to make the glistening faces dance and shimmer. Shadows flew up the walls to the painted ceiling as Lucy darted hither and thither, crying breathlessly, “Stop. Oh, do stop!”
Harry Brainchild made a dart in Lucy’s direction and went flying over a footstool and nearly ended up in the fire.
“Good evening.”
The chill accents of the Duke of Habard acted like a douche of cold water on the room. The Duchess quickly put her teeth back in and sank down onto the sofa in her usual pose.
The cousins and aunts, who had been so many withered and menacing demons a bare moment before, were immediately transformed into faded and shame-faced elderly ladies. The men stood at attention as if at a military lineup.
“We were just having a romp,” said Bella Bly breathlessly while her arms waved like a windmill.
“Indeed!” said the Duke icily. “Mama, in future you will consult me in the matter of which guests you choose to invite to my home. I see Lady Standish is looking fatigued. I will escort her to her apartments and then I shall retire myself.
“I have had a fatiguing day. I am sorry I shall not have time to talk to you gentlemen since you will have left early in the morning before I am about. I shall give the servants orders to pack your trunks. Do feel free to visit me again should I ever extend such an invitation. And you, my dear relations, I am sure your families must be missing you sorely since you have been away from them so long. I urge you to think of them and return as soon as possible. Lady Standish… if you please.”
Lucy followed him silently from the room.
“If you will fetch your cloak, Lady Standish,” he said with chilly formality, “we will take the air. The atmosphere this evening is suffocating.”
“Have I offended you?” asked Lucy timidly.
“Never,” he said with a quick smile.
“You called me Lady Standish.”
“Ah, I was trying to make up for my family’s lack of formality by showing a little of it myself. Collect your cloak and bonnet, Lucy.”
He waited punctiliously outside her rooms until she emerged wrapped in a long blue cloak with a hood.
The night was clear and bright with moonlight, and full of the sounds of rushing wind. Ragged wisps of cloud flew across the sky and a small whirpool of rose petals danced at the bottom of the wide, shallow stone steps that led down into the shelter of the walled gardens.
The air was quite warm out of the rush of the wind.
Lucy’s long skirts made a soft swishing sound on the grass and her fair hair gleamed silver in the moonlight.
“I do not normally discuss my mother,” he said with a sigh. “But she has become eccentric to the point of madness. My father was a gentle, retiring, scholarly man. I am more like my grandfather. No one knows my mother’s background. My father claimed she was Scotch, and certainly he returned with her on his arm after a visit to that country. But I learned as I grew older that my mother was not even sure whereabouts Scotland was in the geography of the British Isles.
“It was rumored she came from a very low background and my father had done all in his power to eradicate any traces of it. She was exceptionally beautiful. When I was a child, she seemed like a fairy princess to me—on the few occasions that I saw her. But the vulgar behavior which was forgiven because of her delicate beauty began to seem more horrible as her looks faded. Father died when I was still in shortcoats, and then Mama began to entertain day and night. I swear she would still take lovers if she could. Only the quick deterioration of her looks put a stop to her immorality. But I have allowed her too much license. She has been warned that she is shortly expected to remove to the Dower House where she may entertain whom she will. She will extend an invitation to anyone who will toady to her and I am heartily sick of toadies. Poor Lucy. This is not the calm refuge I would have wished to offer you.”
“Is that why you have never married?” asked Lucy shyly.
His eyes glinted down at her in the moonlight. “No,” he said. “Mama did not turn me against your sex. I simply have not been in love.”
“Oh,” said Lucy sadly.
“You need not feel sorry for me. I have felt passion for many women in my time, but alas, it does not last very long.”
“Oh,” said Lucy again. She tried to fight against the wave of depression that was engulfing her. So she was just another passionate episode in his life. A fleeting emotion.
“Did you write to your husband?” he asked, turning his head away from her.
“Yes. Today.”
“And do you think he will come?”
“I don’t know,” said Lucy wretchedly, wishing disloyally and all at once that she weren’t married. If the strange Guy of the past weeks still existed, then he would not come. If the old fashion-hungry Guy was back again, then he would. But she could not bring herself to say this.
All she said bleakly was, “He does not love me.”
“Love comes in many forms,” he said harshly. “It is not all like poems and novels. I think you will find your husband loves you… in his fashion.”
“Perhaps.”
“Then let us retire. I will be better situated to entertain you tomorrow. And most of the unwelcome guests should be gone. Bella is the only one who lives with us permanently and she is kind in her way.”
“Yes.”
The Duke came closer to her, his bulk a blacker blackness in the dark garden. The air was suddenly charged with tension. Lucy’s whole body seemed to lean towards him.
But he gently drew her arm through his and led her back to the house, back to her apartments, where he bade her a courteous goodnight.
The passionate man who had burned in her arms the night before seemed to have gone forever.
The human body was a treacherous beast, reflected Lucy bitterly as her maid prepared her for bed. Did Guy throb and burn for Harriet Comfort? If he did, then he was to be much pitied. Or was there some other woman, some other demimondaine or Fashionable Impure who had made him forget his marriage vows so soon?
The Marquess of Standish stirred uneasily in his sleep and then finally awoke. A shaft of sunlight was struggling through the grimy panes of a curtainless window somewhere above his head.
And then he remembered.
Li!
Vague memories of his night of ecstacy twisted lazily in his fogged brain. He propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at the girl sleeping next to him.
Her black hair was tumbled over the greasy pillow and the faint lemon of her skin showed through the patches of white paint on her face. Her naked body was thin to the point of emaciation.
The room smelled abominably of stale opium fumes, brandy, and the stench from the kennel outside. Her glittering garments were folded carefully over a chair. The sunlight revealed the jewels to be made of paste and the brocade to be far from clean.
This could not be his enchantress of the night? This half-starved child.
“Li!” he sai
d urgently.
She opened one almond eye and looked at him.
“Wot is it, guv?” she demanded crossly. “Can’t a girl get a bit o’ sleep?”
“You are not Chinese!” he exclaimed, hearing the Cockney accents of Bow.
“Oh, Lor’.” Li came fully awake. “I waren’t s’posed to speak. ‘I’ll ’ave your guts fer garters an you do,’ says old Barrington. I’m Chinese all right, but I was born ’ere, see. ‘Them flash culls,’ says Mr. Barrington, ‘likes for to think they’re mountin’ a bit o’ the magic Orient. So keep your chatterbox closed or I’ll make over your phiz,’ ’e says, says ’e, rotten old ’oremaster that ’e is. You won’t tell ’im, there’s a luv?”
The Marquess dumbly shook his head. He staggered to his feet and started slowly and painfully putting on his clothes while all the while his bloodshot blue eyes raked around the sordid room.
Oh, the wonders of candlelight and opium! What had seemed a mystic temple the night before was now revealed as a dingy basement room with peeling plaster walls.
“I must go,” he said dully.
Li wound a ditty wrapper around her thin body and trotted over to help him with his coat.
“You won’t tell old Barrington?” she repeated anxiously.
He shook his head.
“Well, that’s all right,” said Li cheerfully. “So if you’re off, you’re off, as the beadle said to the nursery maid. I’m goin’ back to bed.”
The Marquess raised his hand wearily in farewell and stumbled out of the door and up the steps.
Hammers were thudding in his brain. A fresh wind was blowing and above the jumbled tenements and shop signs and gin shops and chimneys was a clear blue sky.
He had such a revulsion of the soul that he thought he would be sick.
His self-respect was in ruins. He searched in his tail pocket for his watch and found it had gone. He searched in his other pockets for his money and found that had gone also.
With a muttered exclamation, he was about to turn and go back. As she had helped him into his coat Li’s busy little hands had also relieved him of his possessions.
But the thought of facing that sordid scene again made him shudder.
He wandered on and on through the mean narrow streets, unable to call a hack since he had no money.
By the time he reached home, he was tired beyond belief.
His butler seemed to be trying to tell him something but he brushed the man aside and went into his study at the back of the house. The morning papers were lying on his desk and by force of habit he found himself picking them up to scan the day’s news.
The Prime Minister, Benjamin Wilkins, had been assassinated.
The room seemed to swim about him and he forced himself to concentrate on the print.
Mr. Wilkins had been at Vauxhall the night before with a party of friends. They had gone to watch the fireworks display and it was only when the display was over and the crowd thinned out that the Prime Minister had collapsed to the ground, a bullet wound in his back.
It was assumed that the shot had been fired during the display and that the sound of the fireworks had covered up the sound of the murderous shot.
For the first time since his marriage, the Marquess had an intense desire to be held in his wife’s arms. He rang the bell and asked if there had been any news from her ladyship. The butler turned over a pile of correspondence and selected a letter with a heavy seal.
“You may leave,” said the Marquess sharply when it appeared that the butler was going to wait to see him open it.
The letter was brief and chilly. Lucy begged to inform her husband that she was a guest of the Dowager Duchess of Habard and that he was welcome to join her if he pleased.
A faint perfume arose from the letter, bringing all Lucy’s youth and freshness and innocence vividly to mind.
All at once, the Marquess decided to turn over a new leaf. He would be the best husband London had ever seen. He would set out for Essex and, with luck, should arrive on the morrow. First, he had something to attend to. He opened a secret compartment in his desk and drew out a thick brown notebook in which he had lodged in code the names and addresses of various members of London’s Fashionable Impure.
Turning to a clean page, he began to jot down in rapid code—a code he had devised for his own amusement—the names of the conspirators and all the facts of how Barrington had coerced them all into being a party to the murder.
It took him two hours of concentrated thought, and, after that, he carefully hid the book away again, mounted the stairs to his bedchamber, and fell into an exhausted sleep.
Since that evening in the garden, the Duke of Habard had been a punctilious host. His mother had retired to her rooms in a huff and Bella Bly had gone on a visit with one of the departing aunts, so it seemed as if there was nothing to mar the beauty of the house or the surrounding countryside.
Lucy and the Duke went out riding in the mornings, and, in the afternoons, he took her on a lazy walking tour of the grounds. In the evening, they dined together, talking comfortably of books and music. The Duke was warm and friendly, but not by the slightest gesture or look did he betray that his feelings for Lucy had even been anything warmer.
And Lucy, always conscious of her conscience and her married state, was able to accept him as a friend and enjoy a relatively peaceful night’s sleep, untrammeled by any of the screaming frustration she had felt before. She was even able to admit to herself wryly that she might have been on the point of falling in love with the handsome Duke.
They discussed the assassination of the Prime Minister at length and finally came to the conclusion that it must have been the work of some madman. It was supposed that Mr. Erskine would be the next choice to head the coalition, and the Duke said he was too weak and shiftless a man for the job.
He came to this conclusion over breakfast, looking out at the vista of a perfect early summer’s day, with thin wreaths of mist being burned away by the hot sun. He told Lucy that he had business to attend to, but if she would care, in the afternoon he would take her for a walk in the woods to a certain beauty spot, and he told her to wear some serviceable clothes.
London and Guy and all the troubles of her marriage seemed very far away as Lucy set out with him in the afternoon, wearing a blue muslin gown, half-boots, and a broad-brimmed straw hat on her head.
The Duke was wearing an old game coat, buckskins, and a shabby pair of hunting boots. He wore a belcher scarf loosely knotted around his neck and his thick black hair had not been subjected to the usual rigors of the hairdresser’s art and shone like a raven’s wing in the bright sunlight.
Without his usual armor of formal elegance, he looked infinitely more human and approachable and incredibly handsome. Lucy found to her dismay that her legs had that old trembling sort of feeling as he put his arms around her waist to lift her over a fallen log, and although his touch was cool and impersonal, she could not seem to quiet the tumult of her emotions.
She was painfully aware of the intimacy of their situation, of the curve of his mouth and the caressing laughter in his eyes as he looked down at her.
Then at last he was saying, “Here is our beauty spot.”
They had come upon a small round pond in the middle of the wood. The water was green and cool and sparks of sunlight glittered on its surface. The leaves of the tall trees whispered lazily above their heads in the lightest of summer breezes. A bramble bush trailed its white stars of flowers over the water.
Lucy felt a lump rising in her throat, the imperfection of her life striking her in the face of all this simplicity and perfection.
Her eyes filled with tears and the water swam and shimmered in front of her blurred gaze.
“Ah, no, sweeting,” he said softly. “I did not bring you here to make you cry.”
The endearment, unexpected as it was, was too much for poor Lucy and she began to cry in earnest.
He wrapped his arms around her and buried his lips in her
hair. “Don’t,” he whispered, his voice muffled. “Please don’t.”
And then she knew that she loved him. He turned her face up to his and looked long and searchingly down into her drowned blue eyes, and then he kissed her very tenderly, very slowly, and for a long time, his tongue exploring the salt taste of her wet cheeks, his lips kissing her eyes, her nose, and her mouth again.
His hands pressed her sun-warmed dress and body closely down the length of his own, feeling her breasts pressing through the thin fabric of his shirt under his open coat.
At last he drew back with a little sigh. “Alas, we cannot,” he said with a rueful smile. “Who would believe that I, with my rakish reputation, would be so very, very good. But I am no marriage breaker, Lucy.”
“You cannot break what was broken already,” said Lucy sadly.
“You can make it irreparable,” he said. “We must return to our former friendship, Lucy. I do not think you should stay very much longer. I do not think I can keep a bridle on my feelings forever,”
“What are your feelings?” begged Lucy. If only he said he loved her then she would have that to remember.
But he shrugged and turned away. “Some things must never be said. Come along. Lucy. These woods are enchanted. Did you know that? We will be pixie-led if we do not hurry.”
Lucy hurried to join him, making a heroic effort to match his light mood and finally succeeding as they approached the great stone edifice that was Mullford Hall.
“Why didn’t I notice that swing before?” said Lucy. “Do the servants’ children use it?”
“I do not know. Mama used to use it once. She used to dress—just like Marie Antoinette, if you can believe it—in shepherdess gown with panniers and carrying a crook embellished with a blue bow. She would sit on the swing and allow her court of admirers to take turns at pushing her on the swing. My father and I would watch from the library window.”
“A lonely picture,” said Lucy. “A small boy and his father watching a callous woman.”
“You have claws, Lucy. Do not sink them into my dear mother. Some gamble, some drink, and some—like my mother—crave attention. Sit down and I will push you and see if you can catch one of the leaves up there.”
