by M C Beaton
Emma nodded, barely hearing her. She felt very nervous. She could hardly remember what the comte looked like. She had thought about him, transposing his face in her imagination onto the features of every fictional hero in Mrs. Simpson’s novels.
He strode into the room and looked around him. “I see the newly plastered walls but no redecoration,” he said. “How can you bear to live in a gloomy place like this?”
“If you recall,” said Emma tartly, “I am but returned to town.”
“So you are,” he said with a sudden heart-wrenching smile. “It seems like years. I waited and waited to hear from you.”
“Sit down, my lord,” said Emma formally. “We must discuss plans for our wedding.”
“I feel like punishing you by telling you I have changed my mind,” said the comte, “but then, that would only punish me. So what do you want, my love? A grand wedding, a quiet wedding, an elopement?”
“I would like to be married from my village. I thought I would see you first and then travel there to tell the happy news to my parents and begin the arrangements.”
“How very efficient. And when is the happy event to take place?”
“I thought… I thought next spring.”
“Think again, light of my life. I have a special license in my pocket and I would like to get married in a few weeks’ time.”
“But that would mean marrying in London! And so soon!” said Emma wretchedly. Now that he was here before her, he was no longer the hero of her dreams, some androgynous Greek god, but a very attractive and masculine man who exuded an aura of sensuality.
He learned forward and said earnestly. “It is commendable you want to go home. But think of those unnatural parents of yours.”
“You have never met them,” said Emma defensively.
“No, but think on it. You have featured largely in the columns of the newspapers. I would have expected an anxious mama to be at your side, not Jolly’s horrible mother.”
Emma gave a startled gurgle of laughter. “Oh, she is so tiresome. She has a constant need to be read to.” A shadow crossed her face. “But my parents have many concerns to keep them in the country. Perhaps they feel guilty, for it was they who insisted I marry Sir Benjamin.”
The comte leaned back in his chair and studied her thoughtfully for a few moments. Then he said, “Go home by all means. Write to me from there and I will come and visit you. You have had a terrible time and must long for the reassurance of your parents’ company. But I still insist that their behavior toward you lacks a great deal of warmth.”
“What shall I do with Mrs. Simpson?”
“Give her her marching orders.”
“It will be difficult. She is so very lonely.”
“Then it is time Jolly took over. He admires his mother immensely. He can take her to Brighton.”
The comte rose to his feet and walked over to where Emma was sitting. He bent down and took her hands in his. She looked up into his blue eyes, half shy, half frightened.
“Don’t be away from me too long,” he said huskily.
He bent lower.
“Still here?” demanded Mrs. Simpson’s voice from the doorway.
The comte stifled an oath and straightened up. Emma told Mrs. Simpson of her engagement, and that lady looked startled and displeased. The comte waited for Emma to send Mrs. Simpson from the room and was very cross indeed when she showed no signs of doing so.
He eventually took his leave without having had the opportunity to snatch even one kiss.
Emma then braced herself to tell Mrs. Simpson of the proposed visit to Upper Tipton, but, before she could suggest that Mrs. Simpson make preparations to join her son, that lady said, “Thank you, my dear,” and kissed her warmly. “I was so lonely and bored before I met you. There is nothing I like more than jauntering about the countryside. I will go and set that lazy maid of yours to packing right away!”
Only a few hours after Emma’s arrival in Upper Tipton, it became all too clear to her that her parents thought she had failed them by proposing to marry a Frenchman. They felt, too, that “poor” Sir Benjamin had been a victim of unscrupulous French people. Everyone knew that nationality was devious and tricky. They were immersed in the small minutiae of village life. Emma’s adventures were somehow considered all part of the foreignness of the big city and a threat to their ordered and provincial existence.
But it took Emma’s mother a full week to voice her real fears. “Do you remember Jane’s Mr. Worthing?”
“Oh, yes,” said Emma coldly. “He cannot have cared for her very much to cry off.”
“But we have been trying to tell you. Of course you do not know, for Jane is visiting the Plumleys in Lower Hardworth. She is engaged again! Mr. Worthing is such a fine man. But you see, my love, I do not know how he will take the news of your marriage to a Frenchman.”
“This is ridiculous!” said Emma. “Mother, the Comte Saint-Juste is a loyal subject of King George. Without his help, I might have found myself accused of my husband’s murder.”
“I am sure that cannot be the case,” said Mrs. Anstey, looking like a stubborn rabbit. “Then the village people—well, we must set them a good example. They cannot, naturally, abide the French. Why, only last week at the fair there was this French acrobat and they tarred and feathered him.”
“Oh, the poor man!” cried Emma.
“Nonsense. He was French!”
“Mother, what you are trying to say is that you would rather I were married elsewhere?”
“It really would be best for all of us. Besides, you are not of us anymore, dear. You have become so Londonized. You would be better there with your grand friends. We do not understand London people. Take that Mrs. Simpson. She is upsetting the household with her constant demands to be read to when you are not present.”
“Mrs. Simpson and her servants saved my life.”
“Yes, to be sure, and it was monstrous brave of her, but it is upsetting to have to house a lady who goes about cracking people on the head with a poker.”
“I will leave today, Mother. I shall be married in London, and none of you need to attend my wedding if you don’t want to.”
Mrs. Anstey began to cry. “We are thinking only of you,” she said between sobs. “I mean, you would not like to thrust this wedding to a foreigner on our village.”
Emma felt shaken and disgusted. There was really only one thing to do—return to London and let the comte arrange the marriage.
But on the road back, something inside her rebelled. She would not be rushed into a hole-and-corner wedding. She would have a grand society affair and—yes—her dear friends, Annabelle and Matilda, would be her maids of honor.
“I tell you, you ain’t going and that’s that,” said Mr. Carruthers sulkily.
“But why?” wailed Annabelle. “It’s not as if it will cost you any money. Emma is to supply my gown.”
“You are my wife and you will obey me,” roared Mr. Carruthers.
“I wish to God I weren’t your wife,” said Annabelle. “I am sure there is something havey-cavey about all this. I think you took money from Fletcher in return for your help in arranging Emma’s abduction. Yes, you should be in the Tower along with the rest of them!”
Mr. Carruthers jumped to his feet and struck his wife a cruel blow across the face. “There!” he panted. “Never speak to me like that again, or it will be the worse for you! You are not going and that is that!”
Over in Grosvenor square, Matilda, Duchess of Hadshire, was fairing little better.
“It is not convenient,” said the duke icily. “I detest Saint-Juste.”
“What did he ever do to you?” demanded Matilda, outraged. “You barely know the man.”
The duke raised his quizzing glass and studied his wife with disfavor. “Saint-Juste had the temerity to tell me once that my coat, that is, mark you, my claret-colored coat with the silver buttons, was badly cut. So you are not going to that mountebank’s wedding, or it will b
e the worse for you!”
The comte, in answer to Emma’s desperately worded note, found her sitting in her drawing room with her friends’ rejection of her wedding invitations lying on her lap.
“What will I do?” said Emma miserably.
“You will leave everything to me,” he said. “We will be married tomorrow by special license, by the special license I have been carrying around this age. That fright, Mrs. Simpson, can see you off, and since Jolly is back from Brighton, he can be my bride-man. It is I you are marrying, not some parcel of relatives, not some fair-weather friends. And we are not spending our wedding night in this house. I shall book us the best rooms at a good inn at Richmond on the river. And there is something I must say to you to allay your fears. You may have your own room.”
Emma looked at him, tears of gratitude filling her eyes.
“You think I did not know?” he said softly. “Of course that monster of a husband of yours has left you with many fears. So we will take things slowly and get to know each other first.”
Emma threw herself into his arms, crying and calling him the best of men.
“There’ll be time enough for all that afterward,” said Mrs. Simpson, walking in on them. “I hope you’re just leaving, Saint-Juste, for this monstrous exciting novel has just been delivered.”
Emma looked at the books she held in her hands. Six volumes. As she walked with the comte to the door, she whispered, “I am not marrying you just to get away from Jolly’s mother,” and he whispered back mockingly, “I will try to believe you.”
And so Emma was married in a small, dark church off the Strand. There had been no time to have a proper wedding gown made, and so she was married in a white ballgown and wearing her finest jewels. The comte almost outshone her in white satin embroidered with gold thread.
She left the church on the arm of her husband, feeling dazed. It had all seemed so quick. The rehearsal in the morning had seemed much longer.
The comte had said, as the service was to be in the afternoon, they would head straight for Richmond and forget about the added ceremony of a wedding breakfast.
Emma turned before she climbed in the carriage and hugged Mrs. Simpson. “I shall miss you,” she lied, and tears gushed to Mrs. Simpson’s eyes.
“Do not worry, Ma,” said her son, enveloping her in a bear hug and watching the stately progress of the comte’s carriage down the street. “I have an idea.”
The comte seemed content to sit beside Emma and talk lightly about the houses and mansions they passed on their way out of London and tell amusing stories of their inhabitants.
Emma felt she should feel carefree and secure. He had said she would have a separate room at the inn. But she could not help feeling he might have shown himself more of the lover.
She cast sidelong glances at his handsome face, wondering uneasily if he planned to find intimacy outside marriage as so many members of London society did.
They were alone in a closed carriage, side by side, and now legally wed, but the comte did not appear to want to take the slightest advantage of the situation.
The sun was sinking behind the trees, and there was a nip of frost in the air. It will be all the same after all, thought Emma, bewildered. Our servants, including my dear Austin, are in the carriage behind. We will go to our separate chambers and meet at mealtimes.
The comte’s carriage turned into the courtyard of an inn on the river. A footman opened the door and helped Emma and the comte to alight.
The comte was about to lead Emma into the inn when he saw a sight that stopped him in his tracks. The windows of the coffee room on the ground floor were brightly lit, and there in the bay were the unmistakable figures of Jolly and his mother.
He seized Emma by the arm and swung her around. He picked her up and threw her up onto the box of his carriage—the box that his coachman had just vacated. He called down to the startled servants, who were staring up at them.
“Do not worry. We wish to be private. Tell Mr. Simpson to meet all expenses until our return.” And then he urged the team of horses forward until the coach was bowling quickly down the road away from the inn.
“What do you mean, Mr. Simpson will pay expenses?” asked Emma.
“Did you not see them?” said the comte savagely. “Jolly and his mother awaiting us. They must have sprung their horses and passed us on the road.”
“But why?” wailed Emma.
“Perhaps, my sweeting, because you gave the old trout the idea you could not live without her.”
“Where are we going?”
“Anywhere where Mrs. Simpson is not!”
The moon was shining brightly and the night was by now very cold when he finally drove into the courtyard of a small inn on a by-road.
He called to a boy in the yard to hold the horses’ reins and then leapt down and went around the carriage and lifted Emma down from the box.
“It is all my fault,” said Emma miserably. “I was feeling sorry for Mrs. Simpson and said I would miss her.”
“And so she decided she would join us on our wedding night. No matter. Come, my love, and let us see what this landlord can offer.”
The inn was poor and the landlord could offer them only a small bedchamber dominated by a large fourposter. But the linen and blankets were clean and a brisk fire crackled on the hearth.
A man carried in their trunks and bowed his nose almost to the ground when the comte handed him a crown.
“We will change for supper,” said the comte when they were alone. “We will attract too much attention in all our finery if this miserable place has any other guests.”
He began to strip off his wedding clothes. Emma sat primly on the edge of the bed and stared at the floor.
He had undressed down to his smallclothes when he realized she was still sitting there silently, not making a move.
He came and knelt before her, and Emma averted her eyes from his naked chest.
“My little love,” he said, taking her hands in his. “I am changing for dinner, not preparing for a rape.”
“Please kiss me,” whispered Emma in a small voice.
He sat beside her on the bed and gathered her into his arms. He removed her bonnet and tossed it on the bed behind them and then began to kiss her gently until the passion in the lips below his own made him murmur something throatily and gather her closer.
At last he freed his mouth and looked down into her dazed face. “Tell me when to stop,” he murmured.
Emma nodded dumbly, and he fell to kissing her again while his busy hands slid her out of her pelisse and began to loosen the tapes of her gown. At last she lay under him, panting, naked except for the diamonds around her neck.
She put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him a little away. “I must ask you something…”
“Oh, not now, my heart,” groaned the comte.
“I do not know your name,” whispered Emma.
“Is that all? Jules.”
“Oh, Jules, please… please…”
“Please what?”
“Say you love me.”
“Emma mine, with all my heart and soul and body I love you and will be yours forever. And now let me show you how much…”
“Jules,” said Emma after a little while. “Oh, Jules, please…”
“Please what?”
“Please do that again!”
Jolly’s eyes strayed from the printed page. He had, he realized, never read to his mother before. He hoped the comte was enjoying himself, for he, Jolly, was most certainly not.
“Pay attention,” snapped Mrs. Simpson, “and go back and read that bit about where the wicked count ravishes the heroine.”
“Yes, Mother,” said Jolly wearily, and fell to reading again.
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