Sometimes this thought frightened her. She had already met Lady Yardley and Lady Sophia, and they both seemed to be good and kind—they had always treated her considerately—unlike some other great ladies. But what would they think, and how would they behave when a nobody of a modiste entered their lives claiming to be their cousin? How would society and the ton treat her then?
Her reappearance would, of course, create the most intense excitement. Some would not believe that she was Louise Cleeve, even though not only the documents which she possessed, but also her appearance, would give the lie to such doubts. Was it perhaps even possible that Marcus’s reputation might be harmed if he married her?
Fortunately at this point her sense of humour, and her common-sense, took over. One thing was sure, Marcus would not give a damn about what others thought of him, or his reputation—so no need to trouble herself about that.
Her other worry about ceasing to be Madame Félice was soon put to rest. There was no reason why she should not continue to be the business’s patron. She could put in her chief sempstress, a middle-aged woman of great competence and taste, as its manager. If Lord Yardley could run his India business from England then surely, she, when Lady Angmering, could run a business in London from an infinitely shorter distance. She would always be there to offer help and advice—if any were needed.
Thus the last obstacle to her agreeing to accept Marcus’s proposal of marriage being out of the way, she would tell him on Saturday that she would accept it—something which she had once thought that she would never do.
But then, she had not realised how deeply she would fall in love with him: she could not visualise a world in which she and Marcus would not live together. The ugly ghost of Sywell, her late husband, was banished into a limbo from which it would never return, and she could only thank God that he had never made her his true wife.
Saturday morning saw her dressed in her most elegant walking-out gown. It was a pale green, to enhance her porcelain complexion and her hair. Cut on classic lines, it cleared the ground so that a pair of dainty black shoes with tiny silver buckles could be seen—as well as a pair of trim ankles. Her bonnet was so small that her hair and face were not hidden by it, and the ribbon which tied it was of the same colour as the dress.
That and her reticule lay beside her on the sofa when the housekeeper—the little maid was out on an errand—came in to inform her: ‘A man who calls himself Lord Angmering is at the door and asking to call on you, but, madame, I think that I ought to inform you that he is the man who has been here several times before. He was then calling himself Mr Marks.’ She stopped, but was obviously bursting to go on, so Louise said gently, ‘Yes, what is it? Something is troubling you.’
‘Oh, madame,’ said the woman anxiously, ‘I know that you run a business and seem to know what’s what, but you are still only a young woman. Do not think me impertinent, and do not know my place, if I tell you that the gentry and nobility often use such tricks in order to deceive and betray women whom they are pursuing. Pray be cautious, I beg of you. He seemed a nice enough young fellow when he called himself Mr Marks, but Lord Angmering—why, he may be quite a different kettle of fish—if you will pardon me for saying so.’
Louise rose and took her by the hand. ‘Do not worry, my dear,’ she said. ‘It is kind of you to warn me, but I have known since I first met him that his true name is Lord Angmering. He called himself Mr Marks so as not to embarrass me, and his visit to me today is an honourable one. Now please go and admit him immediately. He has been kept waiting for so long that he may be thinking that something is wrong.’
‘You are not annoyed by my frankness…’ the housekeeper began.
‘Indeed, not. Now do as I bid.’
If Louise thought that she had dressed herself rather magnificently for Marcus’s visit, she found when he entered that he completely out-shone her. He was, for once, dressed like a very tulip of fashion. His valet had outdone himself in his delight that M’lord should wish to look like a proper gentleman for once, and so he had told Marcus who had laughed, saying, ‘Oh, do I usually look like an improper one, then?’
To have his man answer severely, ‘You know perfectly well what I mean, m’lord. I wish that you always took such care. You really do repay for dressing, if I may say so.’
‘Oh, indeed you may say so,’ replied Marcus. ‘But do not think that you are going to get me up like the veriest painted maypole every day. By no means. I prefer to be comfortable. I am sure that I shall not be able to sit down in these breeches.’
‘Now you are funning, m’lord,’ said his valet. ‘I told the tailor that you didn’t want them skintight and he nearly had a fit of the vapours at the notion that they might be loose, but I hounded him until he did my bidding. Not that that pleased me any more than it did him.’
‘I wish to God you had to wear the damned breeches,’ muttered Marcus, but he had to admit when he saw himself in the long glass that, as his man said again before he left, he looked ready to rival all the beaux who decorated London society—and what a pathetic ambition that was!
He got his reward, however, when Louise said to him, ‘No wonder that my housekeeper was overset when she saw you. She has spent the last five minutes warning me against such fine gentlemen as you. She agrees wholeheartedly with the old song, “One foot on land, one foot on sea, Men were deceivers ever.”’
‘So that was why I was kept waiting on the doorstep,’ exclaimed Marcus. ‘I began to fear that you had changed your mind about receiving me.’
‘No, I gave you my word, and I always keep it.’ She looked expectantly at him. ‘I assured her that your intentions were honourable. I do hope that you have not been deceiving me.’
‘Not at all,’ Marcus said, bowing low. ‘But, for some reason, I do not wish to propose to you here. I have come in a curricle as well as in modish splendour, and I would like to drive you to somewhere romantical—I believe that is the word which ladies use—to make my proposal in the hope that it might soften your hard heart a little.’
He said this because everything about Louise’s expression, added to her beautifully elegant toilette, seemed to tell him that he was about to receive a favourable answer. He hoped to God that he was going to be proved right—if only because wearing these damned clothes would not have proved a waste of time.
Or so he told himself, if only to prevent himself from being over-confident of the answer which he expected from her.
‘I have never,’ Louise told him, her eyes shining, ‘been driven in a curricle before.’
‘I guessed that, my darling girl, so I thought that between providing you with a splendid treat, as well as allowing you to admire the River Thames from on high, I might, by doing so, be able to bend you to my wicked will—as your housekeeper might put it—except that, as you already know, my intentions are completely honourable.’
He offered her his hand, smiling and bowing, for he was sure of one thing—that if she were not prepared to accept him, Louise would not have accepted his offer of a drive in his curricle, either.
Outside the house a tiger, clad in gold and black stripes so that he resembled a large wasp, was holding the reins of two chestnuts who, he told Marcus, were rapidly growing impatient.
‘Thought you was never coming out,’ he grumbled, adding ‘m’lord’ as an afterthought.
The curricle itself was a gorgeous thing: like the tiger it was also picked out in black and gold.
‘Yours?’ queried Louise, entranced, when she was finally seated beside him, with the tiger up behind them—she had not associated Marcus with such a frippery thing.
‘Alas, no,’ he sighed. ‘It belongs to a friend of mine, namely my sister’s future husband, Sharnbrook, who has lent it to me with the promise that he will call me out for pistols at dawn if I do not return it to him in the same condition it was in when he handed it over. So I must ask you to behave yourself with due decorum at all times. No larking about which might disturb the horses
, please, and cause an upset—not even larking of what I believe is called the genteel kind.’
Louise was growing to like it when Marcus teased her. She had never been teased—or flirted with—before. The normal life of most pretty young women had passed her by.
‘I promise to behave myself,’ she said demurely, ‘just so long as you propose to behave yourself.’
‘Now as to that,’ said Marcus, preparing to negotiate a difficult corner in order to enter King’s Road which, as was usual on a Saturday morning was full of traffic. ‘The reason I came in the curricle was in order to propose to you in public, because were I to do so in your drawing-room, and were you to accept me, I fear that were we in private I should have a great deal of difficulty in controlling myself once you had done so! You, my darling girl, are temptation personified.’
‘Really?’ asked Louise. ‘Really, Marcus?’
‘Yes, really, and if you look at me like that again, we shall have the tiger telling me to behave myself. Tigers are the most dreadful tyrants, are they not, Jarvis?’ he called over his shoulder.
‘If you say so, m’lord.’
‘I do say so.’
They were now running along the road towards Pimlico and Belgravia which ran parallel with the river, and where Louise was a little worried that they might be seen and recognised.
She told Marcus so.
‘No need,’ he said. ‘We shall shortly stop and turn off on to the Embankment—you remember the Embankment?—where Jarvis will dismount and look after the horses and carriage for us. I have brought us a long way round because I wanted you to have the pleasure of the drive before I popped the question, as I believe it is called in lesser circles than ours.’
He gave a little laugh. ‘What could be more romantical than proposing to you on the banks of the Thames in the middle of an Indian summer, as the Yankees call this warm autumn weather.’
Marcus is in such high spirits that he must be sure that I am going to accept him, thought Louise. I am, but how can he know that? Of course, what a nodcock I am! He knows me, and that I would not be dressed in the pink of fashion if I were going to refuse him—and here is the Embankment again, and I must think what I am going to say to him.
‘This is the bench we sat on before,’ said Marcus, after he had handed the curricle over to Jarvis and told him to take a short spin in it. ‘You remember the occasion, I am sure. I was Mr Marks but you were still Madame Félice of unknown origin, and now I am Lord Angmering, and you are Louise Cleeve. Do you feel any different, my darling heart?’
‘Oh, a little strange,’ she said. ‘But not much has changed yet. I am not Louise Cleeve, nor will be until the lawyers have settled matters. I went to one the other day, a man called Herriott. I had heard Lady Leominster talking of him. I showed him my documents and told him that Messrs Jackson and Burneck would testify that I was the child named in them who was rescued by John Hanslope all those years ago. I suppose that Mr Burneck will testify,’ she added a trifle anxiously. ‘So I am afraid that we shall have to wait a little before you can introduce me to your family as Rupert Cleeve’s long-lost daughter.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Marcus with a knowing grin. ‘We can sic Jackson on to Burneck again if he tries to refuse. As for Herriott, he is a proper bulldog of a fellow I am told. You chose well.’
‘Yes, but it seems that since Sywell is dead I may not have my marriage annulled because I cannot bring a lawsuit against a dead man. What I can do, he said, is renounce the title and call myself Louise Cleeve when that is settled. For the moment you are sitting beside Louise Hanslope. Apart from my business I shall not call myself Madame Félice again.’
‘I don’t give a damn what name you use when I sit by you,’ said Marcus determinedly, ‘since I am now about to ask you to marry me, and if you accept me, which I beg that you will, since I am so lost in love for you that I am beginning to fade away, you shall be Louise Cleeve, Lady Angmering. I can’t go on my knees here—you will have to imagine that. Good God! I am beginning to wish that I had not been so virtuous. This would all be a deal easier if we had stayed at your home, and I could have kissed and cuddled you to my heart’s content when you did say yes.’
‘As I am about to do exactly that,’ said Louise putting on an expression of mock severity, ‘it is probably just as well that you brought me here, since I don’t think that we should have stopped at mere kissing and cuddling—and I have no wish to go to my marriage forsworn, if you take my meaning. As for fading away, I have seldom seen you look more robust!’
‘I’m marrying a Puritan, and a truthful one at that,’ moaned Marcus extravagantly, ‘and even if we are in public I am going to give you a surreptitious kiss.’ And he proceeded to do so just as Jarvis brought the curricle back.
‘Well done, m’lord,’ said Jarvis when Marcus helped Louise back to the curricle. ‘I see that you and your lady have not been wasting your time, if I may say so.’
‘No, you may not,’ said Marcus, but his voice was amused. ‘Does Sharnbrook allow you all this familiarity?’
Jarvis sniggered. ‘Oh, he’s a rare one is His Grace. He likes to know what’s what, and we go a long way back, but enough said about that.’ And he put his finger by his nose. ‘Home again, is it?’
‘Back to my lady’s,’ said Marcus. ‘We are about to celebrate our recent betrothal by drinking a decorous dish of tea. Then you may return the curricle to your master and I will call a Hackney cab to take me home again.’
‘I thought that you dared not be alone with me,’ Louise twitted him when Jarvis had disappeared down the road.
‘Oh, that was before, but this is after. I will try to behave myself, but I cannot guarantee that I will. Cry no, if I exceed myself, and I promise to obey you.’
‘Which puts the responsibility back on to me,’ sighed Louise. ‘What a fine marriage we are going to have, if this is how we begin!’
‘Except that we are not yet married,’ Marcus pointed out as they walked into the hall.
‘True, now let me order nuncheon for two and at least try to be good while we eat that.’
‘Am I to understand, then,’ said Marcus, offering her a wicked look, ‘that after nuncheon licence may reign supreme? I will be sure to remember that when afterwards arrives.’
Oh, what a wicked tongue he had! Louise had never enjoyed herself so much before. Her early life had been a hard one, with little fun and laughter in it, but Marcus was rapidly remedying that sad situation. She had never thought that love could be so happy.
Even while they were eating their nuncheon, served by a housekeeper delighted by the news that they were to be married and that her mistress was not to be the prey of an unscrupulous nobleman, Marcus kept up a running fire of light-hearted raillery.
And afterwards? Why, afterwards he made gentle love to her, beginning to teach her its grammar, and nobly, at some pain to himself, refraining from taking her too far along the path towards their passion’s final consummation. His reward was her flushed, joyful face, and after he had awakened her slumbering senses, her cooperation with him in the early games of love rapidly grew and blossomed.
At last, he disengaged himself gently from her and whispered hoarsely, ‘You have not cried no, but I must. I would have a virgin bride, even if I do not deserve one, since my life has been as careless as that of most young men of title. I would not mock the wedding ceremony by anticipating it with you, and I believe you feel the same.’
Louise offered him dazed eyes. ‘I had not understood how easily one might find one’s self breaking the conventions which bind us. I have always wondered how girls could allow themselves to be seduced—but now I know. Had you chosen to go on making love to me, I could not have resisted you, so sweet and powerful are the feelings which are overcoming me. Are they overcoming you?’
‘Of course,’ Marcus said, privately cursing his errant body which was finding consummation rejected a painful experience. ‘Which is why I stopped. Now we must order ourselves a
little and make some plans for the future. I believe that you have agreed that you will declare yourself a Cleeve to my family, as soon as the lawyers have acted. Once that has happened we may tell my father and the others that we are betrothed. My sister, Sophia, as you know, is being married at Christmas. I would have preferred an earlier wedding, but I think that it would give my father and Marissa a great deal of pleasure if we were to be married at the same time. Unless, of course, your memories of Steepwood are too painful for you to agree to that.’
Louise shook her head. ‘Not all my memories are painful. I remember some happy times with Athene, and I would wish for her, and her husband, to be present. It will be a strange experience for me to make my own wedding dress—and not someone else’s!’
‘So that is settled,’ said Marcus, ‘and now I must leave you, lest temptation strike again. When your legitimacy is settled we shall be able to meet more easily, and on equal terms—and I cannot wait for that day.’
‘Nor I,’ said Louise, and after he had gone she sat and dreamed of a time when she and Marcus would not be parted, and when she would have a family of her own, a settled place in the world, and a name which was not an assumed one.
Marcus’s father had intended to stay only a short time in London, but his physician had persuaded him that he should not return to the country, where medical help for his condition would not be adequate.
‘Wait until we are sure that we can do nothing more for you,’ he had said. ‘It is possible that my diagnosis may be wrong, and if so, you may need other treatment—again of a kind you would not easily find in the Midlands.’
‘If I am going to die fairly soon I would prefer to do so at Jaffrey House,’ grumbled the Earl. ‘London is not my favourite place on earth—it’s too smelly and too dirty.’
‘Nevertheless,’ the man persisted. ‘It will not be for long, I promise you.’
Marissa had backed him, and even Marcus when consulted had said of his father’s medical adviser in his own forthright way, ‘Why buy a dog and bark yourself, sir?’
The Missing Marchioness (Mills & Boon Historical) Page 15
