by M C Beaton
“That will not be possible, my lord. Mary has left.”
“Address?” barked Lord Bewley.
“I do not know, my lord.”
“I’ll find it myself.” He pushed past the waiter and strode off in search of Lady Fortescue.
He ran her to earth in the coffee room in the middle of what appeared to be a champagne party, the central figure being a glowing, if wet, Frederica.
Lord Bewley scowled down at Lady Fortescue. “A word with you,” he said.
***
Mr. Harry Jones stared in bewilderment at the rather truculent lord who was facing him across the greasy cluttered table of his tenement home. The children had been sent out to play in the street. Mary, Lord Bewley had been told, had been sent to the bakery for stale bread.
Mr. Jones found his voice. “You want what?”
“To marry Mary.”
“Why?”
“I love her.”
“Oh,” said Mr. Jones, looking wildly around for his wife and then remembering she had gone out to her scrubbing job in the West End.
“She ain’t got a dowry,” ventured Mr. Jones.
“Didn’t expect one,” said Lord Bewley.
“Oh.” Mr. Jones scratched his armpits and looked at the dirty walls for help.
“So what do you say?”
“Here’s our Mary,” said Mr. Jones with relief. “Ask ’er. Ain’t got nuffink to do wi’ me.”
Mary thought she had suffered enough humiliation to last a lifetime until she walked in and saw Lord Bewley with her father.
But she had spirit enough to say, “You should not have come here, my lord. I never pretended to be anyone else.”
“I want to marry you,” said Lord Bewley bluntly. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Mary stared at him. “You’d best come back to my place in the country,” Lord Bewley went on. “Got a fright of an aged aunt in residence. She’ll do as a chaperone.” He looked about him. “As for this horrible family of yours, I can’t have in-laws in conditions like this. They’d best start packing and I’ll find a place for them on the estate.” He glared at Mr. Jones. “Have your stuff packed up by next week and I’ll send a carriage to convey you and a fourgon for your traps. I think that handles everything.”
“She ain’t said she’d marry you,” said Mr. Jones, rallying, and exhibiting a trace of his daughter’s spirit.
Suddenly all truculence left Lord Bewley and he looked at Mary. “Please say yes,” he said. “We’ll have lots of larks.”
Mary’s face glowed in the dark, dingy room.
She dropped a curtsy.
“Yes, my lord,” she said demurely.
***
That evening Sir Philip looked up hopefully as his bedroom door opened. But it was not Miss Tonks, but the poor relations’ personal servants, Betty and John, who came in bearing his evening meal.
“Where’s the Tonks creature?” demanded Sir Philip pettishly.
“Don’t know,” said Betty, putting a tray on the bed while John built up the fire. “All sorts of commotions going on today.”
“Such as?”
“Don’t know, sir,” said Betty. “Not my place to ask.”
Sir Philip was so used to being at the centre of things in the hotel that he thought he would die with curiosity. After the servants had left he picked at his food and then found he could not bear it any longer. He rose and doused himself in scent, changed and dressed and made his way next door to the hotel and up to the sitting-room.
Lady Fortescue and the colonel were sitting talking when Sir Philip walked in. They both looked up in surprise.
“Why, Sir Philip!” exclaimed Lady Fortescue acidly. “Not at death’s door, I see.”
“Stow it,” he said rudely. “Where’s the Tonks?”
“Gone jauntering about the Town with Mr. Davy,” replied the colonel with a rare gleam of malice in his blue eyes.
“That’s just fine, that is. She’s supposed to be at my sick-bed.”
“I don’t think you’re sick at all,” said Lady Fortescue. “Touched in your upper works, but not sick.”
“Ho! If that’s your attitude, I’m going.”
Lady Fortescue smiled at him sweetly. “Without hearing the gossip?”
Sir Philip, who had half-risen from his seat, sat down again. “What gossip?”
So he heard all about Frederica’s engagement and then the startling news that Lord Bewley had proposed marriage to the chambermaid, Mary Jones. Lady Fortescue relished telling Sir Philip about the colonel’s part in getting the captain and Frederica together and how Frederica had so prettily forgiven them all for using her to collect money.
Sir Philip scowled. He felt he was losing his grip on affairs. If it went on like this, they might even decide they could do without him.
***
Miss Tonks at first felt she had really come down in the world. It was such a very ordinary chop-house full of such undistinguished people. But what, she lectured herself, had hanging on to gentility brought her in the past? Despair and hunger, until Lady Fortescue and Colonel Sandhurst had come on the scene. She began to relax.
“That is a very fetching bonnet,” said Mr. Davy, and quite suddenly the chop-house changed in front of Miss Tonks’s eyes and became as exotic a place as Clarence House. Mr. Davy asked her to tell him some of the adventures of the poor relations, and Miss Tonks reflected later that she had never talked so much in her life and to such an interested audience.
“Now what?” she asked gaily when they finally left the chop-house.
“Why, we go shopping,” said Mr. Davy, “for all the things you would like in your mansion.”
“I will never have a mansion, sir.”
“That is not the way to think. What would you like?”
“Not a mansion,” said Miss Tonks slowly, “but a comfortable residence, perhaps in the country but quite near a large town so that one would not feel too out of the world.”
He laughed. “A thatched cottage?”
“Oh, no. Thatch means rats and things. I do not want somewhere old. A nice trim building perhaps, with a portico and two floors. Four bedrooms would be enough, and a drawing-room and dining-room and a kitchen with a modern stove, for I would not like servants who had to suffer. Not many servants. Just a cook-housekeeper, two maids, a boy, and a man to do the outdoor work.”
He stopped in front of the brightly lamp-lit windows of a china shop. “For the dinner service?” he prompted her.
“Oh, Wedgwood, certainly. And perhaps that pretty service for tea, but I would like a silver pot because it keeps the tea much hotter.”
Laughing, they went from window to window, “buying” furniture and materials for hangings and upholstery until they drifted arm in arm back to Bond Street.
“And books for the long winter evenings,” said Miss Tonks, stopping in front of a bookshop. “Not bought by the yard but carefully chosen. All the books I have ever wanted to read.”
Sir Philip, on his way to Limmer’s, stopped on the other side of the road and surveyed them sourly. Miss Tonks was wearing what he damned as a “silly little bonnet.” He could hear her light laughter and reflected it was a long time since he had heard Miss Tonks laugh like that.
Davy would really have to go, thought Sir Philip, and so he went on his way to Limmer’s to plot and plan while Miss Tonks and Mr. Davy, blissfully unaware that they had been seen by him, continued their window-shopping.
***
Five months later, Frederica and her captain were married at the little church in the village near Frederica’s home. It was fashionable for brides to shed tears at their wedding, particularly in the vestry when they signed the parish register, but Frederica reflected that as she had had a very unfashionable life to date and was too happy to pretend to cry, there was no need to start to follow fashion. She was still armoured in the captain’s love, which was just as well as the captain’s mother disapproved of her strongly, and Belinda Devenham, her mot
her, and Belinda’s fiancé, Jack Warren, were at the wedding.
Sir Randolph was furious because Lord Bewley and his unfashionable wife were present. Not only that, but his own wife had befriended Mary, Lady Bewley, and as that friendship had strengthened, so had his wife’s character and she no longer trembled in his shadow. By rights Lady Bewley should have been ostracized from the county and probably would have been had it not been for her father, who had blossomed into a land agent with a talent for making everything prosper. How this had come about no one knew for the man was barely literate, but he had conceived a violent love for the land and that land had repaid him, and so his fame had spread abroad and landowners came to study his methods and brought their wives, who were titillated at the novelty of being entertained by an ex-servant who did not behave like a servant at all.
Lord Bewley, still lost in love, had mellowed enough to begin to enjoy rare popularity.
Jack Warren sat next to Belinda in the church and watched Captain Manners lead his bride down the aisle. They looked radiantly happy. “I am so glad I did not make the dreadful mistake of marrying him,” whispered Belinda, and Jack tried to feel gratified but could not, for somehow she had made him sell out and the news that Peter Manners was returning to his regiment and that his bride was going with him made him depressed. He was beginning to feel almost—well, the thought was disloyal—that he had been tricked into proposing to Belinda.
Lady Fortescue, the colonel, Miss Tonks, Mr. Davy, and Sir Philip were all there. They were in a high state of excitement, not because of the wedding, but because a foreign prince, Prince Hugo Panič, from some principality in the wilds of Middle Europe, had commandeered most of the rooms of the hotel for the following month. News of his largesse had spread before him. He was paying a fortune to have the hotel for himself and his court. They felt their days of crime and plotting were behind them. After the prince’s visit, they could finally sell up and perhaps return to society. The royal coat of arms now gleamed above the door of the hotel. They still had their standards and knew their social standing, apart from Mr. Davy, who had never had any. They also thought that dear Frederica had slightly overstepped the mark by inviting the two hotel chefs as well.
Lady Fortescue at the reception, despite her stiff views, remarked that Mary Jones was now every bit the lady she was supposed to be and not at all common. Did that not show, asked Mr. Davy, that character was worth more than breeding? But he fell silent before the amazement in Lady Fortescue’s black eyes.
When the dancing began, Sir Philip secured a waltz with Miss Tonks. “You’re getting flighty,” he grumbled. “I’m holding you to that promise.” Miss Tonks circled gracefully under his arm.
“What promise?”
“The one you made to me on my deathbed.”
“You were rambling a lot,” said Miss Tonks seriously. “But I do not remember any promise.”
“May God strike you dead, you old harridan,” said Sir Philip, and Miss Tonks gave him a sweet smile, noticed that the dance was over, and went in search of Mr. Davy.
***
The captain and Frederica faced each other across the bed while from downstairs came the jaunty strains of a country dance. Frederica shivered in her night-gown.
“I don’t like this,” she whispered. “I don’t like this at all.”
“Come to me, my sweeting. What is it you don’t like?”
“I don’t like what we are about to do with everyone down there knowing what we are about to do.”
He went to the window and leaned out and closed the shutters and then drew the curtains. He walked back round the bed and felt for her in the darkness. “Now you can’t hear them.” He pulled her into his arms and began to kiss her fiercely and then he laid her down on the bed and stretched out beside her.
She shook and trembled so much that he felt a coldness steal over him. He had not envisaged making love to a frightened bride. “What is the matter?”
“You are naked.”
He hesitated. The gentlemanly thing would be to rise and get dressed and then woo her physically by degrees in the days that followed. And then he almost heard Colonel Sandhurst’s voice in his head saying, “Take action.”
Despite her protests he reached down and eased her night-dress over her head and then pulled her naked body down the length of his and began to slowly caress her and kiss her until gradually the cold body against his began to burn and tremble, and not with fear.
At some time during the night, she said huskily, “Liar.”
“How so?”
“No sabre wound.”
He laughed. “The things I did and said to make you mine!”
***
A month later, Lady Jane Fremney was deposited with her baggage at the Poor Relation Hotel. She walked into the hall and looked about. She signalled to a footman and said, “Be so good as to bring my bags in,” and then hoped the shabby hack in which she had arrived had driven off.
Sir Philip came out of the office and stood looking at her. He saw a tall and beautiful dark-haired woman with large sad eyes.
He went forward and bowed low.
“I am Lady Jane Fremney and I wish accommodation,” said Lady Jane grandly. “My maid will be joining me presently.”
Sir Philip spread his little hands. “I am afraid we have a foreign royal household in residence and they have taken up the whole hotel.”
For a brief moment, she looked lost. Then she said haughtily, “I am tired. Have you nothing at all?”
Sir Philip thought quickly. There were the small rooms which had been used by Captain Manners, all right for a military man but hardly suitable for a lady. But he was acquisitive and so he said, “We have a little apartment but hardly the thing for your ladyship.”
“Show it to me!”
He led the way up the stairs. Lady Jane looked about. A smile curved her lips. “This will do,” she said.
“I will have your bags sent up,” said Sir Philip, rubbing his hands, “and our maids will unpack—”
“No, my own maid will unpack for me.”
When Sir Philip had gone, Lady Jane removed her bonnet and threw it down. Her bags were carried in. She had no maid. Most of her cases were weighted down with stones and her heavy jewel box contained only pebbles.
A week of good food in this best of hotels was what she planned.
And then she would take her own life.
***
“All’s going well,” said Lady Fortescue. “Our royal guest is so pleased with us that he showers us with gold on all occasions. Nothing can go wrong now.”
“Pity about that French hotel over at Leicester Square,” remarked Sir Philip.
“Why, what happened?”
“A Miss Caterham committed suicide there, hanged herself in her room. Trade fell off. Her ghost is said to haunt the place. There’s nothing like a suicide for ruining a good hotel. People are so superstitious.”
“Nothing can spoil our success,” said Lady Fortescue. “Suicide! Our prince is too happy a man. Just imagine. A suicide here? Fiddlesticks. Could never happen!
“More tea, Colonel?”
