by M C Beaton
By nightfall, the bells in all the steeples began to ring and the news was out. Napoleon was defeated. Waterloo had been held by the British and allies. Mary’s servants promptly dropped their Bonapartiste sympathies and became tremendously pro-British, offering all kinds of help to the wounded, leaving Mary to fall into an exhausted sleep at last.
Lord Hubert Challenge rode wearily into Brussels on the following morning behind the ragged remains of his regimental band who were playing “Rule Britannia” in double quick time. The Duke of Wellington had forbade the playing of the song for fear it might offend the allied armies, but Hubert hadn’t the heart to check them. He was bone weary, exhausted. He felt they had suffered a crushing defeat rather than a victory. So many, oh so many, dead.
Beside him rode Major Godwin in the tattered remains of his evening dress. But the sun shone bravely and the fickle people of Brussels were all out to cheer the victors and suddenly Hubert realized he was alive. By some miracle he had emerged from that dreadful carnage, unscathed.
He stared wonderingly down at his bloodstained uniform and marvelled that it was not his own blood. “Hey, be of cheer, man,” he called across to Major Godwin. “Don’t want Lucy to see you with a long face!”
Major Godwin brightened and his eyes began to search the crowds. “She’s probably billeted with your wife,” he said hopefully. “I asked Lady Mary to look after her.”
Hubert felt an almost drunken sense of exhilaration, and his head reeled like the bells tumbling and clanging above in the city steeples. He reined in at his house and dismounted. As he turned round after tethering his horse, his first thought was to look up at the window to see if Mary was there. But suddenly a pair of white arms were wound round his neck and he looked, instead, down into the beautiful face of Clarissa. “See the conquering hero comes,” she murmured.
He threw back his head and laughed, laughed because he was alive and there were still pretty women in the world. He bent his head and kissed her.
Upstairs, Mary let the curtain fall and turned and stared blindly across the darkened room, darkened so that the bright sunlight would not hurt the eyes of the wounded.
Her love for Hubert, that first, fragile, tender and delicate adolescent love, withered and died. Mary was a very human girl. She thirsted for revenge. She crossed to the looking glass and stared at her reflection, at the pale face with the wide eyes and the demure wings of brown hair, then down at her fussy, frilly, outmoded gown. Her trousseau had been chosen by her mother.
As she heard her husband’s heavy tread on the stairs, she muttered to herself, “I shall become the most dashing young matron in London. Two can play at that game and a married woman does not have the same restrictions as a young girl. Damn him to hell!”
Peter Bennet sat quietly in a chair in the corner, studying the expressions on her face. He had been looking out from another window and had seen Hubert’s arrival. He felt bitterly sorry for Mary, but good breeding stopped him from interfering in a marriage which was none of his business.
“Mary!”
Lord Hubert stood in the doorway, his arms outstretched.
“I am glad you are safe, my lord,” said Mary in a cold, formal voice. “But be so good as to lower your voice. We have wounded here.”
Hubert looked around, aware of the other men in the room for the first time. Major Godwin walked in after him.
“Lucy?” asked the Major, staring at Mary, his eyes wide with hope.
Mary bit her lip, and Hubert saw her gray eyes were filled with pity for the large major. Then she walked forward and said softly, “Lucy has left for England, Major Godwin. I insisted that she go. You did place her in my care, after all.”
The Major’s face fell, but he tried to be fair. “Thank you, my lady, I am sure that was the best thing to do. But it sort of casts a fellow down, you know, to dream of nothing on the road home but of seeing his wife again, and to find…”
“There were very frightening rumors,” interrupted Mary gently. “At one point it seemed almost certain that we had been defeated. Practically everyone was trying to flee. It was best that she should go.”
“Yes, but you waited,” pointed out the Major miserably.
“Then you must blame me,” said Mary with a cheerfulness she did not feel. “I am afraid I all but forced your wife into the carriage. Now, sit down here by me and tell me about the battle and I shall send one of my servants to your lodgings to fetch you fresh linen.”
Hubert watched her as she listened intently to the Major as if he were the only man in the room. He found himself becoming very angry indeed. She should have been bustling about in a wifely manner, fetching him fresh clothes and seeing to his needs.
At last he could not bear it any longer and interrupted them with, “If you will excuse my wife, Major Godwin, I would like some words with her in private.”
“Of course,” mumbled the Major guiltily. “Forgot.”
Hubert led Mary into the bedroom and slammed the door. “Well, madam,” he grated. “Would you care to explain the coldness of my welcome?”
“What else could it be but cold?” said Mary lightly. “There is no love in our marriage as you have often pointed out.”
“Your duty as a wife…”
“My duty, sirrah,” said Mary tartly, “has been amply fulfilled. You have saved your family home through the marriage settlements. You have my money and that, my lord, is all you are going to get. I shall not interfere with your pleasures.”
“How dare you! You lay in my arms not so many nights ago.”
Mary winced. “You do not love me,” she said flatly.
Hubert shook his head wearily. He felt he should apologize but it was not in the nature of his class to apologize for anything at all—particularly to one’s wife.
“I find this shrewish discussion fatiguing,” he said, beginning to strip off his clothes. “We must be in Paris in twelve days.”
“You,” said Mary evenly, “can go to Paris or go to hell for all I care. I shall be in London.”
He whipped round and struck her across the face. She looked at him coldly and then turned on her heel and slammed the door.
He started after her to beg forgiveness. But what was the use. She was a woman, after all. And women never understood anything anyway. He was sorry he had struck her. The room suddenly seemed to swirl in front of him. God, he was tired! Mary must understand he was suffering from nerves and battle fatigue. He would make things all right with her. Just as soon as he had an hour’s sleep. That was all he needed.
* * *
The clocks of Brussels were chiming eight o’clock in the evening when he finally awoke.
Mary sat on the cabin roof of a public boat and watched with dull eyes as the placid fields and quaint villages slid past. Across the fields, the spires of Ghent rose in the evening air. Behind lay Brussels, with its smells of blood and gangrene. She was going home.
She was going to change. First she would go to her parents’ home and demand money—money to pay for the best dressmakers and hairdressers in the kingdom. “If a Clarissa is what he admires,” she thought savagely, “a Clarissa is what he will get.”
A little nagging voice in her brain tried to tell her she was being too hard on him, that she had not given him a chance, that he had been battle-weary and at the end of his tether, and that was why he had struck her. But the louder voice in her brain crying for revenge, crying over the ruin of wasted love, soon silenced the other.
Down below in the cabin she could hear the clink of glasses and the loud, jolly voices of her compatriots, celebrating their release from Brussels.
“He has won his battle,” she thought grimly. “Now I must win mine. No man shall hurt me again. No man shall touch me again.”
Chapter Three
The Tyres, Mary’s parents, lived a prim well-ordered life in a prim well-ordered mansion. A trim line of pollarded elms marched all the way up to the well-scrubbed steps. The lawns were smooth and shaved
like billiard tables, and the neat, well-ordered patchwork fields seemed to frown under the unruly shadows of the large fleecy clouds romping in an indecorous way across a pale blue summer sky.
Mrs. Tyre was as prim and upright as her home. She had gone into mourning some twenty years ago for a second cousin and had affected deep mourning ever since, enjoying the interest it caused, but always failing to discuss the reason for her mourning weeds, merely sighing mysteriously, into a black edged handkerchief, “Poor Albert.” (Albert having been the name of the second cousin.) Her figure was spare and straight, with never an ounce of womanly flesh to relieve her stern silhouette. She had a neat, prim mouth and well guarded eyes which surveyed the world from behind a barrier of thin, white eyelashes. She wore black mittens, winter and summer, and her pale, lavender-scented skin was cold to the touch.
She kissed the air some two inches from her daughter’s cheek and remarked in her high, drawling voice, “Do not, pray, fatigue me with boring battle stories, Mary. It’s Waterloo this and Waterloo that, and one will be glad when one can return to the more important business of the everyday world. Now, why are you come home and where is your husband?”
Mary walked with her mother through the familiar dark square entrance hall which smelled of beeswax and wood-smoke. Mrs. Tyre kept fires burning in all rooms of the house despite the warmth of the sunny day outside.
“My husband is stationed in Paris with his regiment,” said Mary, removing her bonnet. “I am come to ask for money.”
“Money!” A startled look flashed across the arctic wastes of Mrs. Tyre’s pale eyes. “We were exceeding generous with the marriage settlements.”
“I know,” said Mary, turning to face her mother at the door of the Rose Saloon. “But I am a lady of title now, mother, and it is essential that I dress according to my rank.”
“Come in,” said her mother holding open the door. “We cannot discuss such matters devant les domestiques.”
The Rose Saloon remained the same. Perhaps it had been rosy sometime in the early eighteenth century when the house was built, but now it had plain white walls with the familiar prim landscapes of country roads running straight as rulers into the middle distance; or long lines of poplars running straight into the middle distance; or an avenue of funeral urns marching away into the middle distance. A straight, tall grandfather clock stood as rigidly as any soldier in the corner, its heavy tick-tock seeming to issue orders to the seconds—“Left-right! Left-right!”
Mrs. Tyre sat down on the very edge of an upright chair and placed her mittened hands along its arms, placed her feet neatly together and surveyed her daughter.
“Well, Mary, you may tell me now. What is all this fustian about dressing to suit your station in life. Did I not furnish you with a monstrous elegant trousseau?”
A thirst for revenge had made Mary dishonest. She knew she had only to appeal to her mother’s snobbery and so she decided to lie.
“I had better explain,” said Mary calmly. “I was at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels…”
“Indeed,” said Mrs. Tyre with a pale smile of satisfaction. “The Duchess of Richmond. Very good.”
“And,” went on Mary, “I overheard the Duchess saying to her husband that the new Lady Challenge would do very well but ’twas a pity her clothes were so provincial.”
“Indeed!” exclaimed Mrs. Tyre in quite a different tone of voice.
She sat for a long moment in complete silence while Mary patiently waited for her mother’s snobbery to do its inevitable work.
“Very well,” said Mrs. Tyre. “I appreciate your good sense, Mary. I am glad to see you have finally come to appreciate your position. Your clothes looked very well to me but… alas, I must admit I am not au fait with the current modes. How much?”
“Two thousand pounds,” said Mary grimly, “just to start my wardrobe.”
Mary had deliberately asked for much more than she needed. She knew instinctively that her mother would be impressed by the outrageous figure.
Mrs. Tyre’s white lashes flickered rapidly, but she was too proud to say she was astonished at the amount. She felt, instead, a dawning admiration for her daughter.
“I shall speak to your father, Mary,” she replied. “Now, why do you not go to your room and change for dinner. We still keep country hours you know.”
Mary rose and went upstairs to her old familiar bedroom on the second floor. She sat down in the old ladder-backed chair by the open window, and felt her courage desert her.
She had written to her husband’s servants at their town house, informing them of her imminent arrival. She had now all but got the money she required to cut a dash in polite society. But, how could she cut a dash when she suddenly felt very young, inexperienced and unsophisticated?
Mary conjured up a vision of her husband as a cold, autocratic boor. The more she concentrated on this image the more it solidified in her mind, until at the end of some half hour’s meditation, she thoroughly hated her husband and was once again hell-bent on revenge.
Her lady’s maid, Marie Juneaux, who had sulkily followed her mistress to this foreign land, answered Mary’s summons and laid out a fussy, frilly dinner dress of pale pink sarcanet on the bed and proceeded to groom her mistress.
Mary entered the cool, square dining room with its square mahogany table and prim regiment of hard, upright chairs an hour later to greet her father.
Her father was fat where his wife was thin, but he contracted his bulk under a formidable pair of Cumberland corsets and, in general, contrived to look as prim as his wife. His shaven head was covered by a plain brown wig and he wore an old-fashioned chintz coat, a striped waistcoat and knee breeches.
He had a soft white face which seemed to be pinned in place by two short narrow lines for the eyes, one short narrow vertical line for the nose and one long, thin horizontal line for the mouth. Mary had never really known her father, and often wondered if she ever would.
He did not ask her how she was after her journey, or waste any time at all on social chit-chat, but went straight to the point. “Your mother says you need two thousand pounds to rig yourself out in style,” he remarked in that high drawling voice which was so like his wife’s. “And so you shall have it. Never let it be said that a Tyre was not of the first stare.”
“Thank you, father,” murmured Mary. “I shall indeed do the family name credit, when I am suitable at-Tyred.”
“Quite so. Now, come kiss me child, before we enjoy our dinner.”
Mary dutifully bent over him as he screwed up his face until all the lines quite disappeared into the flesh. He looked for all the world like a singularly tough baby suffering its mother’s embrace.
He then bent his head and said Grace, and the Tyre family began to eat in their usual silence. For as long as Mary could remember, there had been no conversation at mealtimes.
A soft twilight settled down on the garden outside, and, one by one, the birds went to sleep. Mary remembered the clamor and noise of Brussels and the booming of the guns sounding from the battlefield. For the first time she enjoyed the peace and dull quiet of her home.
But she excused herself directly after dinner and went back to her bedroom only to lie awake for a long time into the night, nourishing her anger against her husband, so that she might draw courage from it. She could not hope to conquer the fashionable world, but at least if she tried very, very hard she could make enough of a ripple in it and bring a look of surprise to her husband’s arrogant face.
With a draft on her parents’ bank securely in her reticule, Mary set out for London a week later. She had never stayed in London in her life before, she and her husband having spent the first days of their marriage with the Tyres, and then at a succession of posting houses in England and the Low Countries on the road to Brussels.
The noise and dirt and bustle of the great city alarmed her and she shrank back against the squabs of the Tyre traveling carriage and wondered how on earth she was going to fa
re alone in this large city.
By the time the carriage rolled to a halt in front of the mansion in St. James’s Square, she was feeling dirty and tired and defeated.
Her groom ran lightly up the steps to ring the bell, only finding, after repeated pulling on something like an organ stop, that it did not work. He applied himself to the knocker and at last the door swung open and the strangest butler Mary had ever seen stood on the threshold. He had a large squashed-looking face and little twinkling eyes like boot buttons. His livery consisted of a much darned, red military coat, worn over a yellowing white waistcoat and a yellow-white neckerchief.
