The Constant Companion

by M C Beaton

  Instead of having one long formal table for the wedding breakfast, Lady Eleanor had had separate little tables arranged around the marquee, with the result that the occasion had turned into a sort of moveable feast with everyone wandering from table to table. As Constance watched narrow-eyed, drinking her fifth glass of burgundy, Lord Philip bestowed a light flirtatious kiss on Mrs. Banks-Jyce’s wrist and then strolled back towards his wife.

  He had a grin on his face and Constance quickly lowered her eyes. She did not know that Philip had just been thinking how pretty his wife looked, and that the Mrs. Banks-Jyces of this world were all very well but thank goodness he hadn’t married one.

  “How is my bride?” he asked in a light, teasing voice.

  “‘They were as fed horses in the morning; every one neighed after his neighbor’s wife,’” said Constance bitterly.

  “Dear God,” said Philip acidly. “Only you, dear Constance, would think of quoting Jeremiah on your wedding day.”

  “And only you, dear Philip, would think of flirting with another woman on your wedding day,” countered Constance sweetly.

  Philip’s face was a mask of hauteur. “Madam, I find you insolent,” he remarked in chilling accents and strode away, only to have his bad temper fanned by Peter Potter who asked him what he thought he was doing, paying court to that Banks-Jyce woman.

  “I don’t know what’s come over you, Peter,” he said, regarding his friend’s amiable sheep-like face with irritation. “In all the years of our friendship, I’ve never known you to carp and nag as much as you’ve been doing recently.”

  “Never had to,” said Peter, quite unabashed. “You won’t find me standing champion to a lot of Haymarket ware. Those ladybirds were paid for their services, after all. I mean, that’s pretty much all they expected. You’re a fair man with your servants and a good landlord, but up till now you’ve never really had to consider anyone’s feelings but your own.”

  “I should not have to concern myself with them in this case,” said Lord Philip. “She owes me a debt of gratitude. She has no right to twit me on my behavior. Just look at her now!”

  Constance, fortified by a great deal of wine, was attempting to play the flirt with Mr. Evans, of all people, and to Lord Philip’s fury, the secretary seemed to be enjoying the experience very much.

  Lord Philip was about to go and join them when his arm was firmly imprisoned by Squire Benjamin. The squire felt that Lord Philip ought to have the benefit of his advice. After all, he, the squire, was the proud father of four daughters and felt he was qualified to discourse on the gentler sex. Philip could see no way of escape. He allowed Squire Benjamin to draw him aside and then, never once taking his hard, green stare from his wife, he listened to not one word of the good squire’s advice.

  By the time he escaped, the dancing had commenced. The first dance was a country one, affording him no opportunity to tell Constance how much her behavior had shocked him. Her pretty face was flushed and her eyes were like stars. Constance was enjoying the novelty of being headily intoxicated and having a great deal of compliments paid to her by the gentlemen guests. She did notice that Philip was glaring at her, but all it did was want to make her giggle.

  Lord Philip endured the next hour as Constance flirted and the guests gossipped about the shooting, and sighed with relief when it was time to take his wife away.

  He remembered he had told her that they would move immediately to his town house. Now he felt that he really should have taken her somewhere more romantic on their first night together, and the fact that he hadn’t suddenly caused him to feel guilty, and the unaccustomed feeling of guilt made him more bad-tempered than ever.

  She was waltzing with Peter Potter and laughing helplessly at something that gentleman was saying, and Lord Philip was waiting for the end of the dance impatiently so that he could say goodbye to this curst reception, when, all at once, it seemed as if the gods had taken pity on him at last.

  With a great whoosh, a tremendous gust of wind tore the marquee from its moorings and whipped it up and across the garden. Rain swept across the wedding guests, drenching gowns and coats and jewels and feathers, and giving a great proportion of the party the first decent wash they had had in months.

  A battalion of footmen soon appeared with umbrellas and rugs, and the soaking guests were huddled into the house to change. Lord Philip caught Constance as she was about to race across the garden.

  “Home,” he said grimly.

  “I can’t go home now,” yelled Constance above the clamor of the storm and the shrieks of the guests. “I am soaking wet.”

  “You can dry yourself at home just as well as you can here,” said Lord Philip. He snapped his fingers and told one of the footmen to have his carriage brought round.

  It was a horrendous journey back. Twice it seemed as if the chariot would be hurtled into the ditch, and once the coachman was blown from his box, and although unhurt, was nearly in tears over the damage done to his finery.

  Constance had never believed until now that hate could be akin to love. But in that minute she hated Lord Philip who could dismiss the poor coachman’s grief as “tiresome rubbish.”

  Constance hardly noticed her new quarters as she allowed herself to be dried and changed by her lady’s maid. The lady’s maid was French, a grim, silent woman with her hair screwed painfully up on top of her head and snapping black eyes which reminded Constance of the comte. She felt even more furious with her husband, feeling that she should have had some say in hiring her own lady’s maid.

  Wearing a white muslin dress, its deep flounces decorated with little garlands of artificial flowers—a present from Lady Agatha—Constance surveyed herself critically in the pier glass before going downstairs to join her husband.

  She grudgingly admitted to herself that her maid, Bouchard, knew her job well. Her hair had been changed from its usual severe coronet to a rioting mass of curls on top with one heavy soft ringlet falling onto her shoulders.

  Lord Philip was waiting for her in his dark and rather sparsely furnished drawing room. The heavy dark curtains cut off whatever light there was from the stormy day outside. The walls were covered with hunting pictures and various studies of horses. There was no fire burning on the hearth and the floor was bare of rugs. It smelled faintly of dry rot and disuse.

  Her lord looked at her enigmatically as she entered and poured her a glass of brandy.

  “The coachman, my lord,” said Constance firmly. “I would like to send a note to the stables assuring him of a new livery.”

  Lord Philip looked at her in haughty surprise. “The one he has will do quite well when it is cleaned.”

  “But don’t you see,” cried Constance, made courageous by the effects of brandy descending on top of an already wine-filled stomach. “It means so much to him. It will never look so grand when it is cleaned. Coachmen are very conscious of their appearance, you know. It would quite spoil things for him at the next grand occasion were he not as fine as his fellow coachmen.”

  “I am not about to concern myself with the vanities of my coachman…” began Lord Philip but was interrupted by a quiet, “Please,” from Constance.

  He surveyed her from under his heavy lids and at last said coldly, “Very well. You may have your wish.”

  He scribbled a note, standing at a desk in the corner. He sanded it and gave it to a footman who ran round to the mews at the back of the house with it. The coachman could not read, so the second footman, a garrulous man considered to be greatly educated, read the contents to him. In the mysterious way of servants, they immediately knew the unexpected kindness was all Constance’s doing and the lady’s maid, Bouchard, who tried that evening to relate in scornful accents the paucity of my lady’s wardrobe was firmly put in her place by no less a personage than Mr. Masters, my lord’s butler.

  Supper was served to the newly-married couple in the dining room. A stormy night had fallen outside. The couple ate silently, facing each other down the long e
xpanse of mahogany. The room was heavily silent, broken only by the wailing of the wind outside and the occasional jingle of harness as some brave members of the ton braved the filthy evening. The candles streamed and flickered, sending little white rivers of wax dripping onto the crystals of the chandelier.

  “It was an unusual wedding, my lord,” said Constance at last in a thin voice.

  “Quite,” replied her spouse, studying the contents of his plate as if he had just found the mutton guilty of a social gaffe.

  “I was very frightened,” added Constance, determined to make some sort of conversation.

  “Of course,” replied her lord infuriatingly. “I have been wondering who attempted to kill you. You didn’t leave any broken hearts down in that godforsaken part of the peasantry you hail from? No lovelorn ploughmen sighing in anguish?”

  Constance picked up her wineglass, glad to notice her hand was steady, and stared at him over the rim. “Not I, my lord,” she remarked. “It is more likely to be some relic of your own highly colored past than mine.”

  “Explain yourself!”

  Constance drank the contents of her glass in one gulp. “I have heard,” she said slowly and distinctly, “that the members of the corps de ballet at the opera are notoriously hot-headed.”

  “A lady never refers to or notices her husband’s past affairs with the Fashionable Impure,” retorted his lordship, the glitter in his eyes betraying his annoyance.

  “Oh, really,” said Constance sweetly. “But a gentleman can, of course, insult his wife by referring to mythical affairs with ploughmen.”

  “I married you,” grated Lord Philip, “because I found your modesty becoming. I am afraid I was mistaken in you.”

  “As I was in you,” retorted Constance, her face flushed with anger. “I thought you were human. This should have been the happiest day in my life. But instead, I am nearly killed and you go on as if somehow it were all my fault. The only affection you have shown all day is towards that little trollop, Marjorie Banks-Jyce.”

  Lord Philip dabbed his mouth fastidiously with his napkin. “You’re jealous,” he said.

  Constance’s hand flew to her glass. She picked it up and threw it full at her husband. He dodged, and it went sailing over his head and struck the door.

  As if answering a knock, Masters, the butler, opened the door and entered the room, followed by two footmen, and proceeded to supervise the serving of the pudding as if nothing was amiss.

  My lord’s and my lady’s faces which had a bare moment ago been contorted with anger were now masks of well-bred calm.

  “A dreadful evening, is it not?” remarked Lord Philip, stabbing his whipped syllabub to the heart.

  “Indeed, yes,” said Constance. “Very stormy. Quite appropriate, is it not?”

  Lord Philip eyed the footman who was sweeping up the broken glass. “I agree,” he said in a hard mocking voice. “Love is always stormy, my dear.”

  Masters smiled indulgently and heaved a romantic sigh.

  “I hope Squire Benjamin will not try to travel home on a night like this,” Constance essayed.

  “He will stay in town with my sister. Evans made the arrangements… you violent, spiteful, little cat!”

  The last remark was made immediately after the door closed behind the servants.

  “I was much goaded,” said Constance. She rose to her feet and walked down the length of the table towards the door. “I shall leave you to your port, my lord.”

  He leaned back in his chair and surveyed her as she walked towards him, her face flushed and her bosom heaving. She had never looked more beautiful. He reached out as she passed him and grasped her wrist. He meant to tell her so, but instead found himself saying, “I shall forgo my port, tonight. I think it is time we retired.”

  Constance looked down into the glittering green eyes and her courage began to ebb. It had been a false courage after all, wine-induced. She had never before answered back to anyone the way she had answered back to this husband of hers.

  Her long eyelashes dropped to veil fear and embarrassment in her eyes.

  “Then I shall see you in the morning,” she said in a trembling voice.

  He released her wrist. “You shall see me long before then,” he said. “But you may go up now and I shall join you shortly.”

  Constance trailed miserably from the room. A footman bearing a branch of candles appeared as if by magic, and she followed him upstairs to her room. She dismissed her lady’s maid, Bouchard, who gave a sour curtsy and escaped to join the servants’ celebrations below stairs.

  Constance wandered from her sitting room into the bedroom and stared at the great canopied bed against the wall. She slowly undressed and put on a ridiculously flimsy nightgown. Who had chosen it? Philip?

  She felt very young and alone and frightened. Lady Amelia’s salacious whispers muttered in her ears like so many demented ghosts.

  And then she thought she heard a soft footstep in the corridor outside.

  Lord Philip, clad only in an elaborate gold and blue dressing gown, strode into his wife’s bedroom. He did not look towards the bed, but marched to the fireplace and moodily stared down at the glowing coals. Apart from the red light from the fire, the room was in darkness. He was uneasily prey to a series of conflicting emotions. Up till this point, he had naturally considered that his wife would spend their wedding night in his arms. That was the natural way of things. He was in no doubt that she would not enjoy the experience, although he knew himself to be a practiced lover. No lady ever enjoyed sex, and it was natural and fitting that she should not. Such base pleasures were only felt by gentlemen, and women of the demi-monde and the lower classes.

  But a nasty little nagging voice in his brain was telling him that at least he should have tried to woo her. Nonetheless, he must go through with it. It was unthinkable that a man should not bed his own wife. Any other course of action and the planets would reel in their courses, and furthermore, the population of England would decline.

  He removed his dressing gown, squared his shoulders and marched up to the bed.

  Empty!

  He could not believe his eyes. Lord Philip lit a candle beside the bed and held it up. The covers of the bed were turned back but of Constance there was no sign.

  He was about to put on his dressing gown and go in search of her when a small stifled sound coming from somewhere quite near made him pause. He held up the candle again, his eyes raking round the silent room. Again, that little noise.

  He slowly put the candle back on the table and knelt down on the floor and looked under the bed.

  In the red light from the fire, he saw Constance. She was lying under the bed, pressed against the far wall, with a handkerchief pressed against her mouth to stifle her sobs.

  She stared at her naked husband, her eyes dilating with terror. Lord Philip Cautry’s muscular body had made many a feminine heart beat faster but never before with fear.

  “Come out of there,” he said gently. “Come!”

  He stretched out his hand imperiously and Constance allowed herself to be pulled out. Lord Philip retrieved his dressing gown and shrugged himself into it. He indicated a chair at the fireplace.

  “Sit down!” he commanded, seating himself opposite as the trembling girl obeyed him. “Now, my girl, I expect a certain amount of nervousness from a virginal girl, but this is ridiculous. Explain yourself.”

  Constance dried her eyes and looked at him bleakly.

  “I cannot, my lord,” she said in a low voice, “bring myself to perform even one of the exhausting and humiliating acts expected of me.”

  “Fustian,” said her lord, his thin brows snapping together. “You will soon get used to, what is, after all… What exhausting and humiliating acts are you talking about?”

  And so Constance told him in a faltering voice all she had learned from Lady Amelia, the words sounding doubly obscene coming as they did from such innocent lips.

  Lord Philip felt a faint twinge o
f regret. Perhaps he should have bedded Amelia, after all. It appeared as if she would have been a highly inventive mistress. But then that was pushed from his brain by a sudden wave of compassion and tenderness for the young wife opposite. He leaned forward and drew her onto his knees, holding her very gently.

  “I am truly sorry,” he said in a low voice. “I had not realized—did not guess—what filth that monster of a woman would have told you. It is not like that at all. It is a matter of love between man and wife.”

  “Love!” cried Constance harshly, trying to pull away from him.

  “Yes, love—even in this marriage of arrangement,” he said gently, beginning to stroke the long shining tresses of black hair. Suddenly tired and exhausted with emotion, she leaned against him, only wanting her fear to cease.

  He turned her face gently up to his and then bent his head and kissed her very softly and for a long time, until the trembling lips beneath his own began to cling and burn.

  When at last he carried her to bed, Constance wound her arms round his neck and buried her head in his chest. She would now have gone with him anywhere, done anything, just so long as he did not stop.…

  Sometime in the small hours of the morning, Lord Philip awoke in the tousled battlefield of his marriage bed. It was cold, and the blankets and sheets appeared to have tied themselves into a Gordian knot at the foot of the bed. He finally wrenched them apart and drew them tenderly over his wife’s naked body. She awoke and stared up at him with wide questioning eyes.

  And that was when Lord Philip Cautry fell irrevocably in love with his wife. He felt awed and happy and strangely embarrassed as he buried his face in her breast and said in a low voice, “Je t’aime.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Constance.

  “Don’t you know French?” he teased. “It means ‘I love you.’”

  Constance held him very close. She was so happy, she thought she might cry.

  “I know a little French,” she said. “L’Empereur’… ‘trahison’… ‘espion,’” she murmured lazily.