by M C Beaton
“And the intermediate dessert of cheese, butter, and raw celery is served with an ale so old and strong that if you throw it on the fire, it sets the place ablaze.”
“I am sure we English would find some German customs very odd,” countered Fanny. “You will not find spitting boxes in England.”
“Of course not,” said the German, with mock solemnity. “An Englishman’s spitting box is his stomach. No wonder they die young! And this fashion of ‘taking wine.’ You ask someone at the table to ‘take wine with you.’ Then you raise your glass, look fixedly at the one with whom you are drinking, bow your head, and then drink with the greatest gravity. Many of the customs of the South Sea Islanders are less ludicrous—”
“Miss Page,” interrupted Lord Bohun, with an edge to his voice, “we are going out to the maze. Pray take my arm.”
“And pray take my other,” said the German.
“I am sure I am keeping you from the other ladies,” said Fanny, with regret. But she felt the moment had come when she should tell Lord Bohun that the engagement was over.
Lord Bohun had bribed the servant, who was usually placed on a stepladder above the maze to guide people out, to disappear as soon as he saw himself and Fanny moving toward the center.
They conversed amiably enough as they walked between the tall hedges toward the center, where there was a rustic bench. “I have something to say to you,” said Fanny, “and I had better say it very quickly, before anyone else joins us.”
“I do not think there is any fear of that.” Lord Bohun looked up. Servant and stepladder had disappeared and there were cries of exasperation as the guests tried to find their own way out.
“Do not be angry with me,” pleaded Fanny. “I cannot marry you. I am so very sorry. I am afraid we would not suit.”
He smiled at her. “I have no intention of marrying you.”
“Oh!” Tears of relief started to fill Fanny’s eyes. “You are so good, so generous. I was afraid you would take it badly.”
“I think you misunderstood me, Lady Deveney. I do not need to marry you to get what I want.”
Fanny stared at him in disbelief.
“Yes, Lady Deveney. Your mistake was to tell me about that portrait of me. In my search for it, I was lucky enough to meet the vicar who married you. I gather the pair of you are still poor. Why you ever got married in the first place is beyond me, but the obvious plan seems to be that you each find rich partners. So unless you want me to ruin Deveney, you will do what I ask.”
“Where is that wretched guide?” came a man’s voice from the other side of the hedge. “I declare I will get the fellow horsewhipped when I find him.” And a female’s voice answering, “Oh, let us try this way.”
The voices faded. Fanny turned a white face to Lord Bohun.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked in a thin voice.
“Tomorrow you will meet me at the corner of the square, Hanover Square, and you will come away with me.”
“But I cannot leave with my baggage. I will be noticed.”
He laughed. “You won’t need baggage, my chuck. Besides, I shall take you up at nine in the morning. No self-respecting member of society will be awake by then.”
“And if I do not?”
“Then I will tell everyone that the Deveneys are married and don’t have a feather to fly with. Deveney’s reputation will stink to high heaven. I shall make sure that word of his deception gets back to his regiment. Of course, I shall tell the Woodwards before anyone else.”
“Charles was right about you,” said Fanny, her voice breaking. “You are a monster.”
“You may call me any names you please. You have no alternative.” He reached for her as she shrank back on the seat. And then, with a little gasp of relief, she looked up and saw that the servant was back on his ladder.
She jumped to her feet and called out, “Direct me out of here immediately, if you please.”
Sir Charles and a small group of people were waiting outside the maze. He saw Fanny’s white face and strained eyes and took her aside.
“What has that bastard been up to?” he demanded fiercely.
“Nothing,” lied Fanny. “We couldn’t get out of the maze and I thought I was going to be trapped in there forever. Walk with me, Charles. Where is Miss Woodward?”
“Back at the barge.”
They walked silently to where the barge was moored. Sir Charles was immediately claimed by Miss Woodward. Lord Bohun came running up and joined Fanny.
“Pity Sir Charles had you first,” he murmured, and Fanny threw him a look of loathing, but no one saw that look.
On the way back, Fanny sat and listened to the orchestra and drank steadily, glass after glass of champagne. Lord Bohun left her to it. Let her drink and sulk all she wants, he thought. I have her at last!
Sir Charles sat down next to Fanny and said, “Drinking a lot of that stuff, aren’t you?” He gave a little sigh. “Good idea,” and held up his glass to a passing waiter to be refilled.
The sun was sinking in the sky and turning the river to molten gold as the unhappy couple sat side by side and proceeded to get quite drunk.
Fanny’s tipsy brain wrestled this way and that with the problem and found no way out, no way that would not damage Charles. Charles should not have kissed her so beautifully. But what was it he had said? That it was a long time since he had had a woman?
Suddenly her brain seemed to become clear and sharp. Charles should have her first. Bohun thought he already had. Then let Charles have her for all his kindness and forbearance. He could use her “unfaithfulness” with Bohun to get a divorce. He could have his Miss Woodward and live happily ever after. Had she not drunk so much, or had she been at all used to drinking heavily, she would have known better than to act on such an idea. She might even have realized that since that kiss she had fallen deeply and irrevocably in love with her husband. Sir Charles, wrapped up in his own misery, let the music slide in and out of his brain and matched his wife glass for glass.
“What a state you are both in!” exclaimed Miss Grimes as Fanny tried to step into the carriage when they arrived, missed her footing, and fell on her face on the carriage floor. Sir Charles tried to help her and fell on top of her.
“Bed for both of you when you get home,” said Captain Tommy severely. Fanny looked at him wide-eyed. “How did you know?” she asked tipsily, but no one knew what she was talking about.
Miss Grimes remarked tartly that she never thought to see the pair of them “come home glorious,” as the euphemism for dead drunk had it.
On arrival, she sent her maid to prepare Fanny for bed, confident that Fanny would quickly fall into a deep sleep and wake in the morning with the most terrible headache.
But although Fanny’s legs were wobbly, everything in her brain still seemed crystal clear. When the maid had tucked her into bed, she murmured a well-manufactured, sleepy good night.
As soon as the maid had left and closed the door, Fanny got out of bed, fell on the floor, picked herself up, and sat in a chair and stared at the clock. She would give it fifteen minutes and then go to him.
The door opened and Sir Charles walked in. Fanny goggled at him. “I was supposed to come to you. Lock the door, Charles.”
“Why? I only came to see if you were all right. We did drink rather a lot. Going to feel like hell in the morning, Fanny.”
“Lock the door!”
“Oh, very well.”
“Now come here and kiss me!”
“You are drunk.”
“Bohun’s a beast.”
Sir Charles walked over and crouched down in front of her. “So you’ve found out at last.”
She nodded solemnly. “Now you can kiss me.”
“Oh, Fanny, Fanny … I’ll kiss you for that. And then bed, promise?”
“I promise. That’s the idea.”
He stood up, raised her to her feet, and kissed her gently on the mouth, but she wound her arms tightly about his ne
ck and held him close. It was like the fireworks display in Vauxhall, he thought dizzily. Great golden stars were exploding in his head and deep, thick blackness.
They were both in their nightclothes, he could feel her breasts hardening against his chest, her nipples pushing through the thin cloth that separated their bodies. This is my wife, he thought with a sudden burst of gladness, and everything is as it should be.
He carried her to the bed, laid her down on top of the covers, and then lay alongside her and gathered her in his arms again, forcing himself to remember she was still a virgin, forcing himself to slow his pace, caressing her and kissing her until he knew at last she was ready for him. Had Fanny not been so drunk, the loss of her virginity might have been more painful, but passion and tenderness for her made Sir Charles a skillful lover. Naked, they moved gracefully in the dance of love, the one instinctively learning to pleasure the other, bodies writhing and turning and twisting, while the sounds of London life died away outside and the watchman’s hoarse bark punctuated the hours.
They had gone to bed very early. Sir Charles, at last sated with love, fell into a dreamless sleep. But his now sober wife lay awake, knowing what she must do. Now that she loved him, it was more important than ever to protect Charles from ruin.
She dragged herself from the bed and slowly began to dress. She sat down at her writing table and wrote a letter to him—explaining why she had to go away with Lord Bohun and begging him to be happy with Miss Woodward. Then she unlocked the door, went to his room, searched until she had found his pistol, and put it into a capacious reticule. Then she went back and sat beside the bed, looking at her husband’s sleeping face in the flickering flame of the rushlight in its pierced canister beside the bed. She slept fitfully in her chair, awakening with a start every now and then, her eyes flying to the clock.
Dawn filled the room with a gray light. Outside, the sparrows of London began to chatter awake Then came the milkmaids calling, “Milk-o,” and then one after an other, the other cries of London: “pies, mackerel, watercress, and strawberries.”
At five to nine, she rose and pulled a cloak about her shoulders. She leaned over the sleeping Sir Charles and kissed him on the mouth. He murmured and smiled in his sleep.
She placed the letter she had written on the pillow beside him. Then with one last look round, she left the room and went down the stairs. The clatter of dishes and the hum of voices rose from the servants hall in the basement.
She unlocked the front door, grateful that the lock was so well oiled that the turning of the large key hardly made a sound. She closed the door gently behind her and stood on the step.
It was a miserable gray morning and rain was beginning to fall. Over on the far corner of the square was a closed carriage, black with red leather curtains. Standing beside it was Lord Bohun.
With slow steps she walked across the square.
“Good morning, my love,” said Lord Bohun. He held open the door of the carriage. “Get in.”
She hesitated with one foot on the step and cast an anguished look back at the house across the square. “I can’t,” she said suddenly.
He gave her a rough push on the back and sent her flying into the carriage. “Hammersley,” he called to the coachman, before jumping in after Fanny and slamming the carriage door.
“It has been a long night,” said Mr. Featherstone, stifling a yawn. “Are we going to sit here forever?”
His latest love, Mrs. Dolly Marsden, was seated beside him in his phaeton. He had set off to drive her home after a night of pleasure, but just outside the pillared portico of the church, just outside Hanover Square, she had given an exclamation and told him to stop. Dolly watched avidly as Fanny walked slowly across the square, saw Bohun say something, saw Bohun thrust Fanny into his carriage, heard his voice clear across the square calling, “Hammersley,” to his coachman. Had one glimpse of Fanny’s white and anguished face at the carriage window as the coach rolled past.
“Now there’s a thing,” said Dolly, paying no heed to her lover. She was still furious with Bohun over his threats. Hammersley was Bohun’s country home in Gloucestershire. Elopements went to Gretna Green. Seductions, as Dolly knew too well, were often taken out into the country, as she herself had been some years ago, when Bohun had first had her. She was sure he was up to no good.
That spinster, Martha Grimes, lived in Hanover Square—and so did Sir Charles Deveney. Did Sir Charles know of it? She doubted it.
This was surely a way to get even at last with Bohun. She would tell Sir Charles what she knew and swear him to secrecy. He was an honorable man, unlike Bohun.
“Love of my life,” complained Mr. Featherstone, “I am getting deuced wet and so are you, or had you not noticed?”
Dolly jumped down from the carriage. “I shall find my own way home,” she cried up to him.
“But what have I said? What have I done, my heart?”
Unheeding, she scurried off. The rain began to fall heavier than ever and Mr. Featherstone realized, at last, that Weston’s excellent tailoring was not immune to shrinkage and drove off.
Dolly hammered hard at the knocker on Martha Grimes’s door. A correct butler answered it and stared disapprovingly at this wet matron with the highly rouged cheeks.
He was about to close the door in her face-without even asking her business—when Dolly shouted at him, “Get Sir Charles and tell him his cousin has been abducted.”
The door swung wide and then the butler, forgetting his dignity for the only time in his life, ran up the stairs shouting, “Help,” at the top of his voice.
Sir Charles was not in his room, so the butler flew to Fanny’s and shook him awake.
For a few moments Sir Charles did not know where he was. All he knew was that he had a banging headache and this butler, Hoskins, was red in the face and yelling something at him.
At last he took in what was being shouted. Some person was downstairs saying Miss Page had been abducted. Sweet memories of the night collided with a wall of black fear. He leapt from bed and was about to rush to his own room to dress when he saw the letter on the other pillow. He snatched it up and read it feverishly.
“My dearest love,” Fanny had written. “I must go with Bohun or he will betray us and you will never marry your Miss Woodward. Be happy with her. Do not think of me again. I will always be your Fanny.”
He crumpled the letter in his hand and then rushed to put on his clothes, after telling Hoskins to have his hunter brought round from the mews.
Miss Grimes appeared in her nightclothes, her nightcap askew. “What’s amiss?” she cried.
“Bohun’s gone off with Fanny.”
“Tommy! I must rouse Captain Tommy!”
“No time,” said Sir Charles. “Pray God I bring her safely home.”
Fanny’s manufactured sleep in Lord Bohun’s carriage soon became reality. He left her alone. He had no wish to start an undignified seduction in a rocking carriage. They would break their journey for the night at a posting inn in Henley-on-Thames. Perhaps, he mused, it might be better to leave her alone there, wait until he had her in his home. Yet why not take her? She could not cry out and alert the inn servants—or her precious husband would face ruin.
As the miles flew past, Fanny slowly came awake. She threw Lord Bohun a look, half scared, half defiant. He smiled at her slowly, and as she saw that smile, Fanny realized she could not go through with it. There was another way that Charles could be made safe—and that way lay in her reticule, in the form of one well-oiled and serviceable pistol.
She closed her eyes to fight down the wave of fear. She would need to kill him and then herself. She felt very young and lost. But slowly she began to experience a cold courage. If she had not been so light-headed and stupid, she would have accepted her marriage, have become a soldier’s wife.
But it was no use worrying about what might have been. The rain was now falling steadily. The coach was moving more slowly now and lurching from one muddy hole in the
road to another. A brief hope that the carriage might overturn and that Lord Bohun might break his neck flared up and quickly died. The time for dreams and fantasies was over. This was cold reality. She was about to commit murder.
By the time they reached the posting house at Henley-on-Thames, a deluge was falling. She stiffly got down from the carriage, ignoring Lord Bohun’s offered hand, walked into the inn, and stood like a small statue while Lord Bohun ordered the best bedchamber for himself and his “wife,” as well as a private parlor.
When they reached the bedroom, there was something about Fanny’s coldness and stillness that made him nervous. He needed to change for dinner—but had no desire to expose himself in all his diminished form at this early stage when he took off his buckram-wadded coat. He told her curtly to get changed while he waited in the parlor.
“I did not bring a change of clothes,” said Fanny in a flat voice. “I will wait for you.”
She walked off into the parlor without staying for his reply and shut the door behind her. Waiters were setting the table. She sat down in a chair by the fire after taking off her wet cloak and handing it to one of the servants, who took it off to the kitchens to be dried and pressed. She was wearing a plain serviceable gown. A wet feather on her hat was sagging down and tickling her nose. She untied the ribbons, took it off, and laid it on the floor beside her. Then she picked up her heavy reticule and held it on her lap.
She had had her moment in the sun, she thought bleakly. Hold on to that thought. Rain drummed against the windows with a monotonous sound. Laughter came from the corridor outside as a coupie made their way out, laughter belonging to a sane world in which she no longer had any part to play. What a mad idea it had all been to pretend they were cousins. How stupid of them! But if Miss Woodward truly loved Charles, then she would marry him—and with his wife out of the way, Charles had no reason to tell her he had been married. She heaved a broken little sigh. All folly had its price, and she was about to pay dearly.
