How to Impress a Marquess

by Susanna Ives

  But as George faltered, his secretary eagerly assumed more responsibility. He competently handled all the business correspondence and interactions with the housekeeper and butler. Rather than wander idly about without direction, George’s staff worked harder when their master loosened his rein on them. Why had he not trusted them sooner? Why had he tried to control everyone?

  During the day, he urged Penelope to stay at home and wait for any letter or communication from Lilith while he wandered off, in disheveled clothes and a hat worn low, to the haunts of artists in the underbelly of London. If he found no refuge in proper society, he was offered plenty by the artist community. Humbled by his desperation to find Lilith, he had to temper his usual contempt and request help. He learned Lilith possessed a great number of interesting friends, albeit poor. Everyone had a story to share about her wild spirits but also her kindness and charity. It only broke his heart even more.

  None of the artists knew her whereabouts, sending him on to someone else, but only after offering him tea and a look at their work, explaining their artistic vision. What he once scoffed at now intrigued him, and even inspired him. He understood in a deep, wordless way why capturing the pure moment when the white light slanted across the empty glass was far more important than shoring up the crumbling walls of the fortress wing. In fact, Tyburn Hall could fall to the ground as he stayed up late in his study, trying to capture the way that same white light had bled through the breakfast-room window and danced on Lilith’s face. The first few nights he struggled with his fears as he put his paintbrush to the canvas. It had been so long since he painted last, secreted away in a closet at Eton. But soon, he was lost in his work again.

  Penelope, also unable to sleep, would join him late at night and ask what all those blobs were that he had painted and if he needed glasses, because everything was blurry on his canvas. He would launch into a lengthy discussion about the reality and subjectivity of experience. By God, he was losing his mind, but it felt so much better than droning on about stamp duty and other such nonsense. Even in his sorrow, he’d never felt more alive. At least he felt pain—deep, acute, throbbing pain—and not the dull nothingness that had characterized the last decades of his life.

  After a week with no news about Lilith, George went around to McAllister’s Magazine and bandied about the word “lawsuit,” but it didn’t help. They hadn’t heard from Lilith either, and she had missed her chapter due date. He wanted to tell them that she hadn’t been negligent. A new chapter waited beside his bed, atop his drawing of Lilith the night he made love to her. The pages were worn from reading and rereading.

  He returned to his study and hung his head in his hands. “Please, Lilith, please,” he pleaded. “Have mercy, woman.” He picked up his brush, mixed a little red paint into brown and added a stroke to his canvass. As if this were a prayer to her.

  “She’s here! She’s here!” he heard his sister cry outside his door. He dropped his brush, his heart pounding. He turned, expecting to find her tender, forgiving smile.

  “I love—” he stopped.

  Beatrice and his sister rushed through the door.

  Beatrice stopped in her progress and gazed about the study, taking in the paintings of Lilith and then his ruffled appearance.

  Concern wrinkled her brow. “Are you well, Cousin George?”

  “He has taken up painting again,” Penelope explained. “Aren’t the canvasses beautiful?” She tried to sound unconcerned, but he knew that she was as anxious about him as he was of her.

  “And your face,” said Beatrice.

  “He’s growing a fashionable beard,” Penelope interceded again. She beckoned Beatrice to the sofa. “Come, come, how did you manage to escape? I was terribly worried about you. Did you receive my letters?”

  Beatrice described how the guests had politely scattered from the house party the morning after the ball. Lady Marylewick had raged to Beatrice that she hoped everyone in England saw what underserving children she had and how poorly they treated their mother and dishonored their family’s name.

  “She said that if I left, I was as horrible as you,” Beatrice concluded. “I didn’t mean to say that you are horrible, I’m merely repeating her.” She twisted her hands in her lap. “But…but…Lilith was correct when she said Oxford was allowing women to attend. I can’t stop thinking about it. I know I should care about finding a husband and dresses and other stupid things, but I—I so want to learn about astronomy and physics and what really matters. I can’t help—”

  “Good God, Beatrice, if you desire to go to Oxford, just tell me to whom to write,” George said. “However, my reputation as an insane, cruel sultan might affect their decision.”

  “Really?” Beatrice rushed to his arms, embracing him. “I love you, Cousin George. They can’t turn away the Marquess of Marylewick’s recommendation, even if you are insane.”

  He chuckled to himself. Yes, perhaps he was insane. Did an insane man know he was mad?

  There was a gentle tap at the door and the butler slipped inside. “A telegram has arrived, my lord.”

  George and Penelope exchanged glances.

  The butler handed him the slip of paper and bowed. “I shall be happy to send a return should you require it.” Then he left.

  George read the sparse words. They weren’t what he wanted to see. He closed his eyes, swallowing down the pain.

  “What does it say?” Penelope demanded. He couldn’t bring himself to form the words. Penelope gently took the page and read aloud: “I am well. Don’t worry. Love to you, P, and B. Don’t forget to draw with joy.” She turned the page over. “There is no return address or originating office. No way to find her.”

  A glum pall permeated the room.

  “She has always been like this,” Beatrice said quietly. “She never wanted anything to do with us. Yet she told me about Oxford, and we made that silly sisterhood vow. I wanted to believe that she really desired to be my sister. True sister. How could she leave after she wrote those silly stories and performed the mating dance with Cousin George? How could she be so cruel to everyone?”

  “What?” George cried. “She told you about the, um, mating dance?”

  “It’s hard to love Lilith.” Penelope embraced Beatrice. “When she’s near, she shows you this sparkling, wonderful world in which you so want to belong. She says yes when everyone tells you no. She fills your heart with hope, but now that I’m holed up in this house, reading the dreadful articles in the papers and watching poor George suffer, I realize she offered a false hope. I feel very misled.” She released her cousin and slumped onto the sofa. “Maybe I shouldn’t divorce Fenmore. I’m only causing more pain. Mother is angry. I’ve embarrassed George. The things those hideous papers say…”

  “No!” George said quietly. “Lilith didn’t deceive you.” He paced to his painting, letting his gaze follow along its lines. “She felt horrible about Colette and the Sultan and begged my forgiveness. We fought that night. She left because she thought I didn’t love her. She didn’t want to burden me with a loveless marriage of responsibility and duty. She wanted me to love someone as much as she…” He faltered. “As much as she loved me. She so much wanted us”—he gestured to Beatrice and Penelope—“to be the loving family that she had never known. Everything she wrote, she wrote out of pain, not vengeance. She showed me that sparkling, wonderful world of which you speak and I slammed the door in her face.”

  “But you do love Lilith, don’t you?” said Beatrice. “After all, you did the mating dance with her and painted these pictures of her.”

  He raked his hands through his disheveled hair. “I didn’t tell her. I kept it from her. Because I was afraid of…of…”

  “What?” asked Penelope.

  “Myself,” he confessed. “My real self. The one she loved.”

  Penelope stared at him, tears glistening in her eyes. “Oh, George,” she cr
ied, and then her sweet voice hardened with anger. “You lost Lilith, you idiot! You lost our sister. Her heart must be broken. That poor lady. Come, Beatrice.” Penelope linked her arm through Beatrice’s and began leading her to the door. “You and I must do something to find her. We made a sacred vow, after all.”

  “Wait,” George said. “I can find her.”

  “You haven’t succeeded so far,” was the nasty and unhelpful response he received from Penelope.

  “There is one course left,” he admitted. One desperate and humiliating course.

  Twenty-three

  Lilith lay on the worn sofa in the morning parlor, the only quiet room in the Brighton Artist Colony, and stared at the cracked ceiling. This particular ceiling had a W-shaped fissure. The one in her cramped bedchamber, which she shared with another writer who enjoyed writing through the night, while smoking and asking Lilith’s opinion about every paragraph she scribed, had an S shape. Lilith had been staring listlessly at ceilings for days and days, hoping in the plaster heavens to find the words to end the cruel Colette story, but all she thought about was George. He would have fixed the ceiling. He took care of the smallest things others might view as trivial. He saw the wonderful details, shapes, and colors that others missed.

  Now the newspapers were ablaze with the stories that her sensitive George had inspired the villainous sultan. Of course, the simple truth was too dull and must be embellished for the audience’s insatiable taste for scandal. Sensational tales circulated that George had punched Lord Charles at the Tyburn ball and then threatened to murder him with an ax. Some papers claimed George had gone mad and his family had hidden him away in an asylum. The lurid accounts didn’t stop at George but extended to Penelope, who, according to the lowest of scandal-mongering rags, had run away with her French lover and demanded a divorce from her husband, and that Lady Marylewick burned down Tyburn Hall in a fit of rage.

  Lilith had set off this storm of inanity. All those years she had huddled in her boarding school bed, plotting her revenge of the Maryle family. Never in her most cruel fantasy had she desired this horror.

  She had always been able to rally herself after a disappointment, raise her sails and catch a fresh wind. For the first time in her life, she felt truly broken. She had hurt the man she loved most in the world. She wasn’t going to recover for years, if not a lifetime. Memories of George throbbed, physically aching the way Lilith imagined the leftover stump of an amputated arm or leg would.

  All she could do was mercifully end Colette and the story. Colette deserved to die for being a blind, self-righteous fool. Lilith had tried to explain this to her muse, but her muse remained silent. Lilith suspected that her muse never made the switch to the Brighton train at the Euston station.

  So that morning, Lilith decided to forge on without the help of her muse or toffee. She began from where she had left off the day Frances and Edgar abandoned her, forgetting about the tantalizing love scenes in the tent, the magnificent palace, and the gentle kisses in the garden.

  Colette fled deeper into the forest, a knife clutched in her hand. The briars and brambles cut her legs. The footfalls of soldiers thundered behind her.

  She ran and ran, until her lungs burned. At last, she came into a clearing amid the trees. From all turns, the sultan’s men, holding swords, materialized from the dark wood.

  “Surrender, Colette,” she heard the sultan say. He strode forward, his blood staining the silk robe where she had stabbed his shoulder. “You have nowhere to go. The lands are filled with other men who want your secret. You cannot win. Come with me and I shall show mercy upon your misguided soul.”

  Her will to fight was gone. Her spirit destroyed. Her fingers trembled as she aimed the knife to her own heart and—

  “There you are!” A young actress barged into the room. “I’m going to read the lines again. I’ve spent the entire morning walking along the beach, trying to feel the anguish of Lady Macbeth. Now listen: ‘Out, damned spot! Out, I say!—One: two: why, then, ’tis time to—’”

  “It is as wonderful as the last dozen times you’ve performed it for me.” Lilith concealed her ire at finally making literary headway, only to be interrupted.

  “But this time was different. A different inflection, a different angst in my heart. Could you not hear it? ”

  “Yes, of course. A little.”

  “A little!” The actress’s face fell. “You don’t understand,” she wailed and fled the room as Benjamin, a soul-ailing poet, stumbled in. He threw himself down on the other sofa and tossed an arm over his eyes. “I’ve been rejected again! I’m in hell. I ought to quit and go back to the farm.” He flung the letter at her.

  She swallowed a sigh and picked the missive from the floor. When did her tolerance for drama so sharply decrease? She could easily see why George limited everyone to fifteen-minute appointments.

  “Ahh, the publisher says you show promise,” she said, skimming the correspondence. “And asks you to submit more poems in the future. This is all very good.”

  “Promise, merely promise? I spent two years working on that. I’m horrible, and no one has the gumption to tell me.”

  “We’ve already talked about what a great poet you are.” Ad nauseam. “There, there, I’ll just go get us some toffee. That will make it all better.” In truth, she was down to her last shillings and would have to kill off Colette in the next week or so to have enough money to pay for her keep. But for now, she had to get out of this raucous house with its uncared-for ceilings and insane, needy inhabitants.

  After going down the stairs, Lilith came upon the resident composer playing the piano for some lovesick village ladies.

  “Hello, Lilith, luv.” He winked at her. “Come sing for me and be my inspiration.”

  He hadn’t heard her sing or he wouldn’t utter anything so foolish. “You are beautiful, you speak the poetry of angels, and you are the all-knowing goddess of etiquette, but, dear God, you can’t sing,” George had said that lovely evening in London when they had enjoyed their musical murder.

  “You have enough inspiration.” Lilith nodded to his audience of spoony ladies and continued through the great hall painted with murals, and out the door. Upon the lawn, a semi-nude man stood, draped in a cloth and with laurel leaves in his hair. Artists with canvasses on easels formed a loose circle around him. None were as talented as George. And his beautiful body put to shame the model’s.

  George. Everything reminded her of George. When would come a time when he wasn’t in her every other thought? When suddenly she might realize she hadn’t thought of him or felt the dull throb of her unrequited love for ten full minutes?

  That time seemed far, far away as she walked down the road, remembering making love to George in the garden. The contours of his muscles under her fingertips, the power of his thighs thrusting against hers, the hard set of his jaw as he shuddered in climax. And his eyes afterwards, lit by the brilliant sunlight, glowing with tenderness.

  She had held truth and beauty for a fragile moment. Nothing would be as amazing again.

  Outside the confectionary shop she told herself to buy just two toffees. No more. One for Benjamin and one for her. Of course, once inside, the tiny pieces of heaven behind the glass only made her pine again for the lovely day with Penelope and Beatrice and the vows of sisterhood they had made over toffee. She wondered what her sisters were doing now. If they were angry with her. Could she ever make them understand why she had to leave?

  She took her two meager pieces of toffee and ventured further into the town, desiring not to return quite yet to the asylum for the obnoxious and insane. Against a public house rested a little boy in rags with matted hair and red, raw, bare feet. She tried to walk past the human misery, but her conscience badgered her until she turned back, giving him a toffee and her last half-sovereign.

  Now she had to finish Colette or she might be huddled barefoot on
the street too.

  She continued toward the booksellers, where she could easily hide for several hours, perhaps even find a book that would relieve George from her mind for just a while. Yet she couldn’t reach for the door for the women crowding around a magazine vendor outside.

  “The sultan!” cried a girl who looked about fifteen. “The sultan!” She released a long squeal of ecstasy that shook her bonnet and her red spiral curls. Her acquaintance performed an amazing feat, reading McAllister’s Magazine while jumping up and down and crying, “I love him! I love him! I love him!”

  What was this? McAllister’s didn’t publish today and she hadn’t turned in any pages.

  Another woman used her edition as a fan to cool her perspiring face. “I always loved the sultan. Always. I didn’t care what anyone said. I knew him.” She waved her magazine faster. “Oh, oh, I must get home. Oooh.”

  Lilith edged through the women until she reached the crusty-faced magazine seller.

  “What are you selling?” Lilith shouted over the crowd.

  “A special edition of McAllister’s Magazine and Colette and the Sultan. Aye, but it’s gone now.”

  “What!” Lilith grabbed the man’s filthy brown coat sleeve. “I must have a copy. You can’t be out. You simply can’t.”

  “I ain’t a magician, miss.”

  “But…but…that story is about me! That’s my story.”

  “It’s my story too!” cried the squealing redhead.

  “No, it’s my story!” shouted her jumping friend. “I loved the story from the first installment. I told you about it. Remember? So it’s my story.”

  “No, it really is my story,” said Lilith. “May I see your copy? Please. I beg you.”