by M C Beaton
Miss Fadden returned slowly to the box, thinking hard. This uncle became more mysterious by the minute.
The Duke soon found the address of Mr. Funk in Russell Square by questioning a butler who was out taking the night air. As soon as he was in range of the house, he made himself invisible and drifted quietly through the outer wall, finding himself in an over-furnished sitting room where a middle-aged portly gentleman was sitting in front of the fire, entertaining a stout middle-aged lady.
He thought himself in the presence of the fiancé’s parents and was about to melt away to go in further search of Mr. Funk when the lady spoke. And what she said stopped him short in his ghostly tracks.
“And when is the wedding to be, Mr. Funk?”
“I don’t know,” replied that gentleman heavily. “I don’t know if I shall get married, Mrs. Jeebles. Ah, me!” He sighed and mopped his forehead.
“Not get married, Mr. Funk?” exclaimed that lady. “And here’s me, your oldest friend, telling everyone you was going to marry a real Countess! Has she changed her mind?”
“Not she,” said Mr. Funk gloomily. “I have recently been put in the way of certain information that makes it seem as if I might be making a mistake.”
“But you can never cry off,” said Mrs. Jeebles.
“It will be done for me. No…” Here Mr. Funk raised a fat hand to quell the lady’s next question. “Forgive me, Mrs. Jeebles. I can say no more. I am to take the Countess driving on Friday and after that it will all be over.”
After a short silence, the couple began to talk of mutual friends, and although the ghost listened long and hard, Mr. Funk did not refer to Alice again.
Seriously worried, he took himself off to Manchester Square. In the first place, he thought, Alice must have run mad to even consider leg-shackling herself to such an old barrel of wind. And secondly, what was it that Funk had found out about Alice? The truth? God forbid!
To Alice’s surprise, when the Duke was ushered into the drawing room, Miss Fadden made her excuses, saying she must retire for the night. Miss Fadden had grown very fond of Alice and felt the girl might have a chance to unburden herself if she were left alone. “And if she does not,” thought Miss Fadden grimly, “Then I will do the unburdening for her.”
No sooner had she left than the Duke moved into the attack. The contrast of the young and beautiful Alice, glowing in an opera gown of jonquil satin trimmed lavishly with Mechlin lace, to the vision of the portly merchant he had just left, made his voice harsher than he had intended it to be.
“What on earth possessed you to tie yourself to that aged bag, Funk?” he demanded.
“I like him,” said Alice, staring miserably at her white kid Kemble slippers. “He is kind… and… and fatherly.”
“It sounds incestuous. Is he fatherly in thine bed, heh?”
“There is nothing like that, nor will there be.”
“Fiddle! There will be nothing like that for the simple reason that the old turd does not wish to marry you.”
“You lie!” said Alice passionately. “He must.”
The Duke’s eyes narrowed. “Why must he? Are things gone as far as that? Are you with child?”
“No! No!” Alice raised her hands to her flaming face. “Why must you always think the worst?”
“Then what other reason is there?”
“I must get married and find a home,” said Alice, not looking at him. “I am lonely.”
“Then marry for love, damme!”
“Love?” said Alice dryly, raising her eyes to his. “What is love? It is frustrated lust, nothing more. What is marriage? Legalized lust.”
“Do not be so cynical. It does not become you.”
“I was quoting you,” said Alice. “Do you not remember?”
There was a long silence. The Duke sat down and stared into space. He sat so still that his many jewels seemed to burn in the candlelight without a flicker.
“Perhaps I was wrong,” he said at last.
“No,” said Alice, suddenly desperate to see if she could hurt him as much as he had hurt her by his long absence. “Love does not exist. That much I have learned. I would settle instead for a comfortable home.”
“And children,” he said harshly. “Children fathered by Funk.”
“Perhaps. If I am lucky,” said Alice, staring at him, hard-eyed.
“Well for your information, lady, I called, invisible, on Funk to find him entertaining an elderly lady-friend, Mrs. Jeebles, and confiding that he had discovered something about you that makes a marriage with you impossible.”
“No!”
“Oh, yes. And he is to take you driving on Friday and somehow during that drive the engagement will be terminated.”
“It can’t be true,” said Alice desperately, while he watched her curiously.
“Why so shaken?” he demanded. “Do not tell me you have formed a tendre for that old parcel of stocks and shares?”
“Yes,” said Alice wearily. “Yes.”
The Duke rose to his feet wondering if he looked as murderous as he felt.
He did, and Alice cringed back in her chair. But she would endure anything rather than confess that she had squandered all the money he had so generously given her.
The Duke marched over and jerked her to her feet. “I am going to teach you a lesson, my minx,” he said. “Look on it as part of your education.”
He pulled her roughly into his arms and began to kiss her savagely. Alice fought as hard as she could against the wave of passion she knew would shortly engulf her. She beat at his shoulders with her fists until he roughly seized her hands and pinned them behind her back, holding her pressed against his chest and gazing down into those large, violet eyes.
The Duke bent his head again and this time he kissed her very delicately and gently, his lips moving softly against her own. Alice closed her eyes and knew for the first time what the poets meant when they talked about not being able to call your soul your own. Head, heart and body surrendered under his exploring mouth. And when, still holding her tightly and kissing her, he floated up with her through the ceiling, up to her bedroom and onto her bed, she surrendered to him completely; she was aware of no sense of shame, only a burning, aching need to give herself to him.
She held tightly onto his naked shoulders as the room seemed to turn and dissolve, until the only thing that existed in the reeling world was the warm, passionate body of the man, moving above her.
At last, all passion spent, he cradled her in his arms. “Odd’s Fish,” he muttered. “Oh, Alice. My only love, what have I done to thee? I must go, dearest, child. Can’st not mate with a ghost. I will ruin thy life, sweeting. Thou need’st a real man, a man for the days as well as the nights.”
“I love you,” said Alice. “I cannot love anyone else.”
“It will not do, sweeting,” he said, putting her gently to one side. “I must leave thee.”
He began to dress hurriedly while Alice watched him in blank misery.
As he turned from the looking glass after arranging his cravat, Alice stretched out her arms to him in mute appeal. Her black hair was tumbling about the ivory of her shoulders and her eyes were wide and dark in the moonlit room.
The ghost looked at her gravely and then a wicked smile lit up his handsome face.
“Stap me vitals!” he said cheerfully. “Why so serious? Damme, we will be mad together until the dawn takes me!”
He wrenched off his cravat and divested himself of the rest of his clothes at great speed. “Thou art the loveliest thing I have ever held in my arms, Alice. Come to me again. Come here my sweeting and we will further thine education. We still have the night and a few more hours of my life. Come to me, Alice!”
Chapter 9
Miss Fadden was alarmed to say the least. She was a light sleeper and there had been sounds issuing from Alice’s bedroom during the night hours which had disturbed her greatly. And now, here was Alice, all ready to go driving with her fiancé, face flus
hed, shadows under her dreamy eyes.
“What right have I to say anything?” thought Miss Fadden bleakly. “I think they might be imposters of some sort. I do not believe he is her uncle. But I am an imposter myself!”
For, truth to tell, Miss Fadden was not a curate’s daughter, nor had she been mourning the death of her father when the Duke had come across her in the churchyard. She was in fact an elderly housemaid who had found she was to be dismissed without a penny after years of service to a merchant and his wife and large family.
She had stolen money and her mistress’s clothes—hence the overlarge-sized gray wardrobe—and had taken a modest room in London. But she had only stolen a very little money and it had soon run out, leaving her in arrears with the rent; in order to escape detection, she had changed her accent from its coarse low London tones to a genteel simpering whisper which she felt matched her clothes.
She had come to care for her young mistress very much, at first simply out of pure gratitude and then because of Alice herself. “Had I been a real lady,” thought Miss Cassandra Fadden dismally, “then I would be shocked. I would accuse her of being abed with her uncle. I would tell her of my suspicions; I would tell her I am sure that this Gervase is not her uncle and that he is not French. I am sure she is not French either. But, dearie me, she might dismiss me and then what would become of me?”
Miss Fadden’s thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of Mr. Funk. And the appearance of that gentleman gave Miss Fadden something else to worry about. She had not damned Mr. Funk on account of his merchant class. He seemed a very grand gentleman to her. She had simply disapproved of him on the grounds that he was old enough to be Alice’s grandfather.
But now she noticed there was something sneaking and furtive about the man. And, yes, she could swear he was afraid.
“Well, well, well, ladies,” began Mr. Funk, rubbing his hands together and exuding an air of false jollity, alarming to behold. “Fine weather for a little drive, heh?”
“Yes,” said Alice dreamily, while Miss Fadden peered out of the window and up at the darkening sky.
“Er…” went on Mr. Funk, clearing his throat, “since we are going to visit an old cousin of mine and a vastly respectable woman, I think we can dispense with Miss Fadden’s services for the afternoon, my dear.”
“Yes,” said Alice in that same vague way. She found that nothing during this day was real. The only thing that seemed real to her was the memory of a warm pair of lips and the thought of the night to come.
But, “No!” said Miss Fadden at the same time and with unexpected force in one usually so meek. “It is not proper. I have told you before, sir, that until you are wed it is not fitting that my lady should be alone in a closed carriage with you.”
“Oh, I say,” said Mr. Funk nervously, looking at his fiancée for assistance. But Alice had a little smile playing about her mouth and her eyes were full of dreams.
Mr. Funk swung back to Miss Fadden and encountered a look of such stabbing venom that his fat heart quailed. Let Webb and his friends cope with the woman. He most certainly was not going to.
“Very well, very well,” he said, still with that false air of jollity which made Miss Fadden look at him narrowly. The ladies were both warmly dressed and bonneted and so they allowed Mr. Funk to lead them out to his carriage. Miss Fadden paused slightly, a strange feeling of foreboding at her heart. For this was not Mr. Funk’s usual, old-fashioned but well-turned out coach, but a rather dirty box of a thing with peeling varnish on the panels and a villainous-looking coachman on the box. There were no footmen on the back-strap.
“We are to travel in that!” exclaimed Miss Fadden. “I trust we do not have far to go.”
“My… my own carriage is being repaired,” said Mr. Funk hurriedly. “I… I rented this for the occasion,”—which indeed he had. “We are only going a little way over to Surrey.”
Miss Fadden’s eyes tried to flash warning and dismay to Alice as she sat opposite her mistress in the evil-smelling interior of the coach, but Alice was still lost in rosy thoughts.
It was only after they rumbled over the Thames and were bowling past the mean factories and shanty houses of the Surreyside to take the road out into the country, that Alice at last appeared to come awake.
She suddenly focused her eyes on Mr. Funk and said, “I believe you wish to terminate our engagement.”
“Said nothing of the kind,” spluttered Mr. Funk, desperate to arrive at their destination and get rid of the whole business for once and for all.
“Oh, yes you did,” protested Alice. “You said to Mrs. Jeebles that you had found something out about me that made marriage impossible.”
There was a shocked silence and Mr. Funk turned quite white. Alice turned quite pale herself as she all at once remembered she was not supposed to know anything about Mr. Funk’s conversation with Mrs. Jeebles.
Mr. Funk said desperately, “I said no such thing. Dammit.” He thought, Mrs. Jeebles must have been gossiping over half London. That’s how Alice got to hear of it. But by George, she gave me quite a turn for a moment.
Aloud, he went on, “I said something in a funning way to a Mrs. Jeebles. I can only gather she took me seriously and talked over half London. I am sorry.”
Alice relaxed. “Yes,” she said, “someone told me about it.”
Then Alice realized that she really did want to be released from this engagement.
“Mr. Funk,” she said gently, “before we meet your cousin, I feel I must tell you that I do not think we are suited. I wish to terminate our engagement.”
Mr. Funk’s first feeling was one of overwhelming fury. That this doxy, this scullery maid should sit calmly beside him, rejecting out of hand one of the richest men in the City of London. With a great effort he mastered himself and began to think pleasurably for the first time of the fate that awaited her.
“Very well,” he said stiffly. “I do not wish to talk about it.”
“But…” protested Alice.
“No! No more,” said Mr. Funk, taking out a handkerchief and covering his face as though overcome with grief.
Alice looked sadly out of the carriage window where the snow was beginning to fall. She felt very guilty and miserable. Poor Mr. Funk! How she had led him on. Oh, how she longed to be back in Manchester Square. The light was fading already as the long winter’s night crept across the barren fields. Alice looked down at the watch pinned on her dress. Four o’clock. She hoped the visit would not take long. And when on earth were they going to arrive?
As if in answer to her unspoken question, the coach swung off the road and began to rumble up the bumpy, weedy drive of some wilderness of an estate.
Mr. Funk removed his handkerchief and heaved an audible sigh of relief.
“My cousin’s,” he said cheerfully.
“What is her name?” asked Alice.
“Name. Oh! Emily Jeebles.”
“Another Jeebles?” said Miss Fadden, her pale eyes boring into him.
“Er… yes… the Mrs. Jeebles we were talking about earlier is by way of being a relative. Lots of Jeebles among my relatives,” said Mr. Funk transferring the handkerchief to his brow where a thin film of sweat had broken out.
Miss Fadden felt a cold hand clutch her heart. But the day was so dark, so ominous, that surely that was what was giving rise to her fears.
The carriage swung round and came to a stop in front of a bleak, square brick house with a pedimented entrance.
“Pray go inside and warm yourselves,” said Mr. Funk after he had helped the ladies to alight “I must see that this fellow stables the cattle properly.”
“It is odd that you should care so much about rented horses,” said Miss Fadden, her voice losing its usual meek tones and sounding loud and harsh in the still, cold air.
Driven to thespian heights by sheer fear, Mr. Funk burst into a well-simulated rage. “You get above yourself, madam,” he said sharply. “I did not make my fortune by ignoring the pennie
s. These horses, I would remind you, are rented and should I return them in poor condition then I shall have to pay for them.” He turned impatiently to Alice. “My lady,” he protested, “cannot you get this woman of yours to keep a still tongue in her head?”
But Alice had come out of her dreams and was beginning to share Miss Fadden’s fears. “I do not think I want to meet your cousin,” she said. “I think I would like to return… now.”
Mr. Funk clutched at his head, knocking his wig to one side. “Gad’s ’oonds!” he howled. “We are only staying for ten minutes.”
