Devil's Bargain

by Marlene Suson

  “Aye, nineteen. And right busy them gels kept me, too.”

  “No doubt,” Tia murmured sympathetically. “Did madame have any boys?”

  Doris looked profoundly shocked. “It weren’t that kind of house,” she said reproachfully.

  Utterly bewildered by this reply, Tia said nothing.

  “No nip-farthin’ was madame when it come to deckin’ out her girls,” Doris confided as she tugged at Tia’s hair. “Most particular she was that they be turned out so as none of them went unnoticed.

  “And when Oi done for them, they didn’t. Many’s the fine lord that came a-calm’. Can’t rightly say, though, whether us ever had the honour of a dook a-visitin’.”

  At last, Tia was permitted to view her new maid’s handiwork. As she turned toward the silver-framed mirror on her dressing table, Doris said, “Now, then, see how fine Oi’s made you look. Everyone will be starin’ at you tonight, and that’s the truth.”

  Indeed it was, Tia thought in stunned dismay as she examined the alien image in the mirror.

  Her hair had been piled into an unsteady edifice atop her head. Into this messy concoction, Doris had stuck three long plumes, one on each side of Tia’s head and the other straight up from the crown. She looked like a plucked peacock.

  Even worse was her face, coated with a layer of ghastly white makeup. Her eyes had been outlined with some badly smudged black substance, and her lips painted a brilliant red, Tia was put forcibly in mind of a harlequin’s face.

  She was so horrified she emitted a strangled yelp that brought her husband running into the room.

  He stared, a dazed look upon his face, in speechless astonishment at Doris’s remarkable handiwork.

  Tia, in a quavering voice, informed Doris that she was no longer employed.

  The girl looked so stricken that Tia could scarcely bear the sight of her crumpled face. “But ma’am, what’s Oi done?” she protested in genuine puzzlement.

  “Only look at me!” Tia exclaimed, but she could not help but feel sorry for the poor creature who clearly did not understand what she had done wrong.

  Marc hastily ordered the maid to leave them.

  Doris obeyed, but not before she knocked over a candle stand as she departed. Fortunately, she managed to snatch up the still-burning taper in it before it scorched a hole in the carpet.

  After the door had closed behind her, Marc said with icy hauteur, “You have no power to dismiss servants that I have hired.”

  Tia was outraged. “Is this the elegant look you wish your duchess to have?”

  “No, of course not,” he said uncomfortably. “I was assured that she had experience as a lady’s maid, but I cannot conceive who could have trained her.”

  “I doubt the poor woman had much time to train her. She had nineteen daughters.”

  Marc’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What was the woman’s name?”

  “Madame Theroux.”

  Marc’s jaw dropped. “Good God!”

  “Do you know her?”

  “Not personally.” He had no intention of explaining to his innocent wife that madame was the proprietress of one of London’s most notorious bawdy houses. It took all of his superb self-control to maintain his air of cool detachment when he was even angrier and more appalled than Tia. “Madame is not... er, in the first stare of fashion. I have been told that she has some rather odd notions about how her... er, daughters should look. I fear poor Doris must have been adhering to her instructions tonight.”

  “I cannot possibly go out looking like this,” Tia said mournfully.

  “No, you cannot,” Marc agreed.

  “I am very sorry for her, but she will not suit as my maid.”

  “I will handle the matter,” he promised.

  Chapter 16

  True to his word, Marc did handle the maid problem in his own way, and it was not at all to his wife’s liking.

  He had a long private talk with Doris that further irritated his wife. After all, Doris was her maid, and she should have been allowed to participate, too. Then, instead of discharging the incompetent as Tia had thought he would do, he retained Doris and hired, in addition, an experienced dresser of his own choosing for Tia.

  The dresser, Beryl, was a woman in her fifties—and everything that Tia dreaded in a personal servant: rigid, disapproving, and more snobbish even than the top-lofty Coles. Beryl was quick to inform her new mistress that her previous employers had included a princess, intimating that a mere duchess should be thankful indeed that such an illustrious dresser had condescended to work for her. She was precisely the sort of woman that Tia had hoped to escape when she had begged her aunt to hire a girl like Marie for her.

  With Beryl performing the principal tasks expected of a lady’s maid, Doris was left with very little to do except to follow Marc’s instructions that she was to accompany her mistress everywhere. This she did with tenacious diligence. Tia could not even walk Puck in Green Park without having Doris and the new footman, Sebastian, accompany her.

  Desperate to be rid of both Doris and Beryl, Tia protested to her husband that it was a shocking waste of money to engage both a personal maid and a dresser for her.

  He retorted coldly that he was not yet under the hatches, and he would employ however many servants he wished.

  “Do you go to the Castlereaghs’ ball tonight?” Lady Mobry asked Tia as they took tea in the drawing room of Castleton House.

  “Yes,” she replied without enthusiasm as she listlessly stirred the pale liquid in her cup.

  “You look so moped, and you have lost weight, too,” her aunt observed. “What is wrong?”

  What was wrong could be summed up easily—her husband. It had been two weeks since Tia had so foolishly betrayed her love to him at the Stratfords’ ball, two weeks since he had suddenly changed from a delightful companion to a brusque stranger, two weeks since he had seen fit to pay her bedchamber a nocturnal visit.

  His behaviour toward her in the presence of others, even their servants, was particularly urtfu1. He was coldly polite, as though she were some unwelcome pensioner who had been foisted off on him.

  When she tried to question him about the abrupt change in his manner toward her, he brushed her queries aside with a curt reminder that he had warned her precisely what their marriage would be like when he had made his offer. She had agreed to it and, therefore, had no cause for complaint now.

  Tia confided all this to her aunt, but she received no sympathy from Lady Mobry who promptly sided with Marc.

  “He’s right. He is acting as he told you he would,” her aunt said briskly. “You agreed to his terms, and now you must keep your bargain.”

  But how much easier abiding by it had seemed back then, before her heart had become engaged. Now it was agony for her. Tia wanted to ask her aunt whether her fear that her husband’s earlier attentions to her had merely been a game to prove he could make her love him was justified. But she was so hurt by her aunt’s lack of compassion for her unhappy situation that her tongue failed her.

  “Do not look so Friday-faced,” Lady Mobry said. “Once you told me you preferred to see nothing of your husband.”

  “And once you told me that you thought a clever woman could win his heart,” Tia said sadly. Obviously she had not been nearly clever enough.

  “Clearly, he has won yours,” her aunt said impatiently, her lips tightening into a thin, disapproving line. “Your face tells me that you are wildly in love with him. If only it did not reveal your every emotion. How very tiresome your husband must find such transparency.”

  Tia, much shocked, wondered whether Marc, who seemed to confide a good deal in her aunt, had complained to her that he did. “What are you telling me? Pray, don’t wrap it in clean linen.”

  “Men prefer a little mystery in their women. I am persuaded that if you set your mind to it, you could school yourself to better disguise your emotions.”

  Recalling bitterly how her face had so disastrously revealed her l
ove to Marc, Tia resolved to try.

  That night as she and her husband rode to the Castlereaghs’ ball, Marc said, “I approve of your new dresser. You are looking more elegant than I have ever seen you.”

  Tia could not argue with him. Her own mirror had told her the same thing. Much as Tia disliked her, Beryl had a way of turning out her mistress so that she looked prettier than she ever had before. Nevertheless, Tia longed to have Marie back.

  At the ball, card tables had been set up in several smaller rooms for the dedicated gamblers. Marc escorted Tia to the ballroom with its intricately decorated vaulted ceiling. The orchestra was playing a minuet, but instead of asking her to dance, he left her immediately, saying he wished to gamble. That surprised Tia for he rarely did so. She suspected it was merely an excuse to escape her company.

  Remembering her aunt’s criticism of her transparency, Tia made a determined effort to hide how blue-devilled she was by Marc’s desertion of her and to be gay and entertaining. She must have succeeded for there were not dances enough for all the men asking to stand up with her.

  Two hours passed without her husband appearing in the ballroom, and Tia went in search of him.

  He was in a small antechamber that had been turned into a card room for the evening, deep in a game of piquet with Sir Gregory Lynnock. They were the only two in the little room. Marc’s back was to the door, and neither man noticed her appear there.

  Sir Gregory was saying, “I would think you would prefer the company of your charming wife to playing cards with me.”

  “You find her charming?” Marc asked in disbelieving accents. “Every man to his own taste.”

  Sir Gregory looked at him sharply. “Am I to infer that she is not to yours?”

  “Yes,” Marc said.

  Tia hastily clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle her gasp. She was stunned that Marc could be so cruel and uncaring as to disparage her publicly over a card game. She stepped back from the door so that Sir Gregory could not see her, should he look up.

  Marc’s voice drifted through the open door. “I infinitely prefer my incognita.”

  “And who is she?” his opponent wanted to know. “But if I told you, she would no longer be incognito, would she?” Marc said lazily. “She shall remain my little secret.”

  Sir Gregory might not know the identity of Marc’s convenient, but Tia did: Jennie Martin, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, the woman who was to have anything she wanted, no matter the cost. Naturally, he would prefer such a diamond of the first water to an unexceptional wife with a tiresomely transparent face.

  Lynnock asked slyly, “But if you do not care for your bride, why did you dance such attention on her? I was persuaded she had captured your heart.”

  Marc was silent for a moment, then he said coldly, “I wished to prove that I could make her love me.”

  Thus did Marc himself confirm Tia’s worst fear. She felt as though she had been shot through the heart so great was her pain.

  “Why bother proving that,” Sir Gregory inquired, “if you do not love her?”

  “It has been my observation that a wife who loves her husband is far less troublesome than one who does not,” Marc replied. “Why travel the hard road when you can take the easy?”

  Tia could bear to hear no more. Humiliated and heartbroken, she fled down the hall, looking for a refuge where she might shed unseen the tears that she could not contain.

  At the very end of the long corridor, she tried a door and found herself in a servant’s closet, full of mops and pails. She turned one of the pails upside down, and mindless of the damage to her white gown, sank down upon it. The door swung shut, plunging her into darkness. She buried her head in her arms and succumbed to wracking sobs.

  Long after her tears had spent themselves, she remained upon her hard, uncomfortable seat, thinking about her situation.

  Only a few short weeks ago, Tia had thought she was winning her husband’s affections. What a silly fool she had been. Now she knew that she could never hope to win him away from Jennie, who no doubt was as clever as she was lovely.

  How easily Tia had succumbed to Marc’s charm. Once he had triumphed in the cruel game he had been playing with her, he had no more interest in her. She cursed her “tiresomely transparent” face for revealing her love to him.

  What was she to do now? Tia remembered her husband’s admonition that he did not want a wife who hung on him.

  Well, she would not, she thought, more determined than she had ever been before in her life. She would do now what she had intended to do when first he had made his obnoxious offer to her. She would build her own life independent of his, ignoring his neglect, his lack of love for her, and his beautiful convenient with cool indifference.

  When Tia thought of the cruel way he had talked about her to Sir Gregory her anguish gave way to anger. She would never forgive him for speaking so disparagingly of her to another man. She would treat him as coldly and callously as he had treated her.

  Not once would she give her autocratic husband the satisfaction of thinking she cared in the slightest what he did, Nor would she let her foolish face betray her again.

  Emerging at last from her hiding place, she needed no mirror to tell her that she must look a mess—her eyes swollen, her face red from crying, and her white gown smudged from her sojourn in the closet.

  A servant, carrying empty platters from the supper room, directed her up the back stairs to a small guest bedroom. He brought her towels and a pitcher of water. She sponged her face and spotted her gown as best she could, but she knew her appearance would not pass muster before the curious eyes of the ton.

  Anxious to avoid as many people as possible, she made her way across the upper story to the front of the house. The staircase was deserted as she ran down it to the entry hall where she reclaimed her evening cloak.

  Pressing a coin into a footman’s hand, she asked him to find her husband and tell him that she would be waiting in their carriage.

  A few minutes later her husband flung himself angrily into the equipage. “Where the devil have you been? I have been looking everywhere—”

  Catching sight of her face in the pale light, he broke off. “What is wrong?” There was no mistaking the concern on his face. “Are you feeling unwell?”

  “Yes,” she said coldly.

  He looked even more worried. “Have you cast up your accounts?”

  She nodded. Letting him think that would relieve her of having to explain why she left the ball. Her control over her emotions was still far too tenuous to tell him that she had overheard his conversation with Sir Gregory. She feared that if she did so she would further humiliate herself by bursting into tears.

  He demanded bluntly, “Are you increasing?” He sounded more alarmed than pleased at the prospect.

  “No,” she said.

  “Poor wife,” he said sympathetically. He put his arm around her and pulled her close to him.

  The warmth of his embrace very nearly undid her. Had she not overheard what he had told Sir Gregory, she would have thought he genuinely cared for her.

  But she had overheard, and her resolve and her body both stiffened against him.

  Chapter 17

  Tia landau turned down Pall Mall. She was on her way to visit the Duchess of Stratford with the ever-present Doris and Sebastian, the footman, in tow. But first, Tia wanted to stop at Harding, Howell & Co. to look for new gloves and a fan to go with a ball gown that had been delivered by her modiste earlier in the day.

  In the weeks since Tia had overheard Marc’s conversation with Sir Gregory Lynnock, she had, with iron determination, schooled her wayward face not to betray her emotions, especially not to a husband who publicly declared that he preferred his mistress to her.

  She shunned Marc as much as possible. When she could not avoid him, she treated him with the same cold indifference that he bestowed upon her. It was easier for her to do than she had thought it would be. She had only to think of what he
had told Sir Gregory and she came very close to hating him. The memory festered like an ulcer on her heart.

  Tia had not informed her husband that she had overheard that conversation. Despite her new self-control, she still did not trust herself to do so without crying, and she would not so humiliate herself in front of him.

  It was clear to her that, although Marc said nothing, he was taken aback by the abrupt change in her behaviour toward him. No doubt he had thought that once she had given him her love, it would be his forever, no matter how cruelly he trampled on it.

  Tia filled her days with shopping, visiting, receiving callers, playing with Puck in the park, and entertaining Freddie.

  Marc’s attentions to her little brother had ended as abruptly as to his wife, and now he mostly ignored the boy. Freddie had been as surprised and hurt as his sister by the change. One day the boy asked him in a tone so pathetic that it nearly brought tears to Tia’s eyes, “Are you vexed with me?”

  Marc denied being so, but he remained cool and distant with the child. In her darkest moments, Tia wondered whether her husband’s initial kindness to Freddie had been part of his calculated strategy to prove he could make her love him.

  She tried to make up to her brother for the change in Marc’s behaviour by playing with him and taking him about London as her husband had used to do.

  Tia packed her nights with parties, assemblies, receptions, balls, operas, and theatrical performances, sometimes crowding a half dozen or more affairs into a night, frequently as part of the Duchess of Oldenburg’s party. Only rarely did Tia attend an affair with Marc, having mendaciously told him that she preferred the Russian duchess’s company.

  By throwing herself into the London social scene, Tia was achieving what she had vowed she would:

  a life for herself in which her husband played little part. But she found small pleasure in her frenetic rounds. Nevertheless, she strove to be as gay and entertaining as possible so that no one would guess the pain that had taken up permanent residence in her heart.