“But couldn’t he be going to Cambridge?” Carolina really didn’t know why she should feel disappointed.
“No, if he was going to Cambridge, he’d have gone straight north through Bishop’s Stortford, instead of going out of his way to Chelmsford, I would think.”
“I wonder what he’s doing here?”
“Perhaps you should have stayed locked in and found out what his intentions were—getting you drunk and seducing you, most likely!” laughed Reba. “’Tis fairly obvious what he had in mind since you said he saw through your disguise so easily.”
“Yes, he did that,” agreed Carolina, pondering. “But somehow, I don’t quite think he meant to get me drunk and seduce me.”
“Whyever not?” asked her friend carelessly.
How could she explain it? Reba would laugh her to scorn if she said there had been something chivalrous about the man in gray, something reassuringly protective, despite the effrontery of that massive sweep upstairs that had carried her irresistibly out of harm’s way. “I just don’t think so,” she said sulkily.
Reba quirked an amused eyebrow at her and Carolina returned her friend a haughty look. “I think he intended to take me home, just as he said.”
“Which would have gotten you expelled, of course.”
“Yes, but he didn’t know that!”
Why was she defending the fellow? she asked herself wildly. She tossed her head and told herself it didn’t matter. Suddenly what Reba had said came back to her. Reba’s lover had been tall and dark and given to wearing gray.
The gentleman she had just seen on the road had been tall and dark and he was dressed—just as he had been at the Star and Garter—entirely in gray. A terrible suspicion crossed her mind, but she put it immediately aside. Half the gentlemen in England must be wearing solid gray! But she knew that was not the case. Men’s fashions were quite colorful. She was distracted from her thoughts when Reba suddenly remarked, “You should count yourself lucky, Carol, that you are far from home and your lover cannot be snatched from you so quickly.”
So Reba’s lover had been snatched away. Carolina put aside her suspicions about the man in gray as she suggested softly, “Why don’t you tell me about it?” Reba began obliquely. “My mother sometimes despaired of making good matches for my sisters, despite Papa’s money.”
“Why?”
Reba gave her a jaded look. “Both my sisters resemble my father. And my father has a face that, all agree”—she shrugged and her furs rippled slightly— “resembles his horse.”
Carolina blinked at this harsh pronouncement. She waited while Reba plucked delicately at her velvet cloak, brushing away the flakes of snow that had blown in through the open flap. “Because I’m the best looking of the three”—Reba’s white teeth flashed in a fleeting smile—“my mother, who has force but no imagination, has overlooked the fact that I have inherited my father’s wit.”
That wit which had made him one of the leading merchants of England, was doubtless Reba’s point. Plainly Reba was trying to tell her something. Carolina waited.
“My mother,” said Reba, with a frown, “would have been overjoyed to marry her eldest daughter to a widowed knight of ninety merely for the sake of hearing her called Lady Jane, but none turned up so she had to accept the next best thing, an untitled old widower with money, a friend of Papa’s who cares nothing for Jane—he wed her for the trading advantage it would give him with my father.” She twiddled her bar muff. “Nell is not so homely as Jane, and Mamma entertained wild ideas of marrying her to the younger son of a baronet—I heard her talking to Papa about it—but none appeared.”
“Perhaps she was too impatient,” murmured Carolina. It seemed to her that there were always younger sons eager to wed fortunes no matter what the bride looked like.
“Perhaps,” Reba shrugged. “I’ll grant you she was in a hurry. She yearns to dance with earls.”
So Reba’s mother wanted to climb the social ladder via her daughters’ marriages. Certainly it was not unheard of!
“When none came instantly to hand, she fobbed Nell off on what Papa called ‘a good catch’—the nephew of a wealthy shipowner in Plymouth. Nell’s dowry bought him a ship! And when his uncle dies, with what Nell will inherit, they could well have the largest merchant fleet in all the south of England, according to Papa.”
Carolina thought, perplexed, of the wild times her father and mother had had. There had been jealousy, rage, revenge even—but none of it with commercial intent. Still she had to admit that even her own mother had demanded “good” marriages for her daughters and they—having more spunk than Jane and Nell or perhaps just more prospects—had resorted to the Marriage Trees.
“Now I am to be Mamma’s last throw of the dice,” said Reba, “and she has kept me hidden away like the crown jewels. And I know she will try to marry me off to some younger son as well, just to hear me called Lady Reba. But I am better than that, better than my sisters who have no looks, better than my mother who has no brains—I have a sense of style and my father’s wits and I will do better than any of them!”
Carolina’s breath was expelled on a long slow sigh. “So whatever your mother decides, you intend to choose for yourself?”
Reba gave her friend a sidelong secret smile. “I have already chosen,” she murmured.
“The man you went away with in the spring—when everybody thought you were in Hampshire?”
Reba nodded.
“And nobody knows about him?” It all sounded very romantic to Carolina.
“Well, George knows for he saw us together by chance, going into our lodgings—but I warned him that if he told anyone, I would swear he had helped me and he blanched. George is afraid of me,” she added lightly.
And perhaps with reason! “You will run away with your lover?” said Carolina raptly. The Marriage Trees had come irresistibly into her mind.
“He is not here to run away with,” frowned Reba. “And Mamma will be in a hurry to see me wed ‘before the bloom of my youth fades away’ as she is so fond of saying.”
At seventeen it seemed unlikely that Reba’s youthful bloom would soon take flight, but Carolina was moved to remark, “If that is how she feels, I am surprised that she has not betrothed you long before this.”
“She has an orderly mind, has my mother. She intended—and it is working out that way—that her daughters shall be married in the same order as they arrived in this world—first Jane, then Nell, and now me.
“But will he not be back soon?” Carolina asked, returning to the fascinating subject of Reba’s absent lover.
“That is the problem,” sighed Reba. “We must wait until his wife dies.”
Carolina opened her mouth and closed it again. The coach took a lurch that gave her an excuse for starting as if she’d been stuck with a pin. Stunned, she stared at Reba.
“He is the Marquess of Saltenham and he has been married for four abominable years to a wife who languishes at the point of death and never quite goes on to her reward!” Reba burst out. “On her doctors’ advice he has taken her to Italy for her health and there they remain. Oh, it is very vexing!”
The snowy countryside fled by as Carolina found her voice. “Does he write to you?”
“No.” Reba sighed. “He told me he would not—it is too dangerous. He says we cannot afford a scandal, for while he has the title, the money is all hers.”
“Does your mother know about him?”
“No, of course not. Had she known she would have married me off at once to the first halfway acceptable suitor to cross our threshold. Oh, I know what she would say—she would say my marquess is a married man and that he is toying with me!” She sounded aggrieved.
Carolina had the feeling that perhaps Reba’s mother was right.
“But surely she must see that it would be a great match,” she said slowly, trying to be on the side of her friend. “If you told her in just the right way?”
“Indeed she would not, for she is pig-hea
ded and listens to no one!” Alarm filled Reba’s features. “And you must not tell her—or anyone else! I have entrusted you with my very deepest secret and you must swear you will not reveal it! Oh, do close that flap, Carol—the snow is coming in.”
“Of course I won’t tell her,” said Carolina, hastily closing the flap. She had wanted to see the countryside but now she was glad to be back in semidarkness for she was certain she must be showing the shock of Reba’s startling revelation. Certainly Reba had given no inkling of a clandestine liaison of such proportions when they were in school! “But”—she could not help bringing up the main point—“suppose it doesn’t work out?
Suppose a sojourn in Italy cures the marchioness? What then?”
“Oh, of course it will work out,” said Reba pettishly. “She can’t hang on forever—all I need is a little time!”
But how could Reba be certain that absence would not make the marquess's heart grow fonder-—perhaps of some doe-eyed Italian contessa?
“Did he ask you to marry him when—when he is free?” Carolina asked reluctantly.
“Well, as good as.” Reba tossed her auburn head. “He said if only he wasn't married, and sighed, and then—well, I won’t tell you what he did next!” She laughed and gave Carolina an arch look in the dusky coach. “But he made it quite clear he’d marry me in a minute if only she were gone! Am I shocking you?”
She was, but not for worlds would Carolina, lurching about as the coach skittered over icy ruts, have admitted it.
In truth the marquess had only heaved a great sigh as he ruffled Reba’s thick auburn hair and murmured, burying his face in its musky expensive perfume, “If only I weren’t married ...” before he carried her off to bed, but Reba chose to remember it in such a way as to suit herself. “I told him to come back single and court me! That I’d wait!” she confided blithely. And she had been picking up her chemise from the floor as she spoke and so had not seen the look, almost of consternation, that had passed over his dark face when she said that, or noted how swiftly he had pulled the bell rope and ordered his coach to take Reba back to the school “because we cannot afford a scandal.” Just before she left he had given her a melancholy smile and presented a ruby pin to remember him by. Reba exhibited it, pinned inside her muff.
“How will you explain it?” asked Carolina, troubled. If she were to bring home a ruby pin, explanations would be demanded!
Reba shrugged. “Mamma will never see it. I’ll keep it pinned inside my muff—or my underthings.”
Carolina, studying the pin by opening the flap for a moment—which let in a shower of snow—thought the marquess had held Reba rather cheap, at least if this rather insignificant pin was any indication!
“How did you meet him?” she wondered. For merchants—even successful ones from Bristol—did not usually take tea with marquesses and marchionesses.
Reba seemed glad to tell someone about it. Her russet eyes sparkled in the gathering dusk. “Aunt Bella was bringing me up from Hampshire to install me in Mistress Chesterton’s school. She was going to stop by to see George and give him his marching orders and then scurry back to Hampshire to scoop up Willie and carry him away to Bath to take the waters. Well, it was sunny when we started—then it started to rain. It rained and rained and Aunt Bella refused to stop. She said she couldn’t afford the time, with poor Willie waiting for her back there with the pip! She said I was an ungrateful girl to suggest it! And as it happened, Robin Tyrell—the Marquess of Saltenham—was on his way out of London to visit his estates near Basingstoke. The roads were a sea of mud, Aunt Bella kept sticking her head out, screaming at the coachman to hurry— and every time she opened the flap buckets of water came pouring in. Robin was in a hurry too. Our coaches chanced to meet at a narrow bend of the road and in the confusion as the drivers tried to rein in their horses, our coach overturned. I was thrown clear and so was Aunt Bella—but she landed on her head in the road and was knocked quite silly, to say nothing of her hat being ruined. I wasn’t at all hurt. I had landed on a great clump of soft clean wet grass and I was just sitting up when I saw this tall handsome man in dove gray satin leap out of the other coach and run toward me. His coat had gunmetal velvet cuffs and it was trimmed in yards and yards of silver braid and the skirt of it was stiffened so that it stuck out and he was wearing a burst of silver lace at his throat and cuffs and a huge black periwig and shiny gray leather boots—oh, you should have seen him, Carol, he was magnificent!”
Carolina could see him indeed. A fop of the first order. She put aside all thought that the man in gray who had dragged her upstairs at the inn might be the Marquess of Saltenham—and somehow she found that comforting. She told herself that was because it would be terrible for Reba to be mixed up with such a domineering creature.
“So of course I didn’t want him to know I was all right” said Reba. “For then he’d have turned all his attention to Aunt Bella! So I promptly sank back with a groan and pretended to be in a dead faint and let him carry me to his coach.”
“And your aunt?”
“Oh, Aunt Bella’s wits seemed quite knocked endways and she moaned and gibbered and held her head, and the marquess was very alarmed. He said he would take us to the nearest inn and summon a doctor and he did. The doctor put Aunt Bella to bed and said that was where I should be too, but after he left I pouted and insisted that dinner and some wine would quite restore me and we had that in a private dining room.”
“I am surprised your aunt would let you do it!”
“Oh, she was in no condition to protest! The doctor had filled her with laudanum and she was dead to the world. I can’t remember what Robin and I ate, but it was all very romantic.”
Carolina could well imagine. A schoolgirl and a handsome marquess, candlelight and wine. . . .
“He told me all about his wife,” said Reba frankly. “About how the doctors had tried to help her, and none had, and he was taking her to Italy in a few weeks’ time in an effort to restore her to health, but that he really had very little hope. And I was very sympathetic and said how tragic it all was, and when finally I got up to go and he pulled my chair back I pretended to be dizzy and I swayed and he caught me in his arms.” Her wicked chuckle seemed to fill the coach. “And I leaned against him all the way back to the room he’d taken for Aunt Bella and me. He’d taken a room for himself too for he said he felt most responsible for the accident. And there was a terrible spring thunderstorm that night, the most awful thunder and lightning, and I got up out of my bed and ran to his room and pounded on the door in fright—I am sure I sounded frightened at least—and I told him that with my aunt lying there like the dead and all that wild thunder and lightning bolts I was afraid to stay there alone.”
“And of course he took you in?” Carolina could hardly keep the irony out of her voice.
“Of course,” said Reba blithely. “Sometimes, Carol, things must be contrived. He poured us some wine and we sat on the edge of his bed and drank it, and the blue lightning would light up the room in bright flashes like day. And of course my trunks were still back on the road lashed to the coach, so I had dashed down the hall in my chemise, which was very sheer indeed!” She giggled. “And one thing led to another and I ended up spending the night with him.”
“You mean—!” Carolina sat straight up and the rocking of the coach almost pitched her against Reba. “Just like that?”
“Of course,” said Reba airily. “I wanted to make an indelible impression, didn’t I? And going to bed with him certainly accomplished that!”
Chapter 13
Silent and white, the snow outside continued to fall upon the sweeping Essex countryside, the straining horses made clouds with every breath, and the coachman tugged his snow-covered hat down farther over his eyes and cursed beneath his breath as the coach lurched into yet another icy rut unseen beneath the drifting snow.
But inside the cold, dim coach, a bolt upright Carolina was staring at the elegant fox and velvet-clad figure huddled b
eside her beneath a fur robe as if she’d never seen her before.
“Oh, Reba, you’d only just met him and you knew he was married! How could you go to bed with him?”
“Well, he was my first marquess,” said Reba reasonably. “And I may not soon meet another, and I don’t wish to be parceled out to some ‘younger son’ of low rank—or anyone else my mother may have in mind! It seemed a wonderful opportunity—the accident, the storm—and so of course I took it. He was astonished that I was a virgin. He said I seemed so—‘experienced,’ I think was the word he used.”
Carolina’s level of sophistication left her not quite prepared for this. She struggled to understand Reba’s reasoning for she wanted desperately to be on her friend’s side—and gave up. “What now?” she asked. “You do not know where he is or even if he has returned to England!”
“Oh, I hear reports of him occasionally for he is well known, and his wife was a great heiress—which is undoubtedly why he married her. But he spends money very fast, does Robin. I estimate that his wife and her money should be gone at about the same time. He will,” she added contentedly, “need another great heiress, and my mother would be so overcome if a marquess sued for my hand that she would demand my father beggar himself to give me a suitable dowry. She’d make Papa buy him for me! And then”— Carolina could not see the wickedly knowing smile that played over Reba’s face—“I’d end up with everything, wouldn’t I?”
The interior of the coach was suddenly very quiet— and not just because outside they were running over soft snow. Carolina found herself speechless at such foresight, but Reba, now that her secret was out at last, could not talk enough about it. As the darkness of the snowy world outside deepened, she described the marquess’s estates in elaborate detail—for she had insisted he tell her all about them—“to show a proper interest in things, you know, Carol.” She described what she would wear when, as a marchioness, she was presented at Court. “Or perhaps Robin will arrange for me to be presented even before that—during our betrothal period.”
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