by M C Beaton
To Mary’s relief, the carriage slackened its nightmare pace, slowed and finally rolled to a halt outside a tavern.
“This is a common alehouse,” exclaimed Mary in surprise. “You must be mistaken.”
“Unfortunately, I am not,” said Lord Peregrine bitingly. “Clarissa likes this milieu. She says it adds edge to the excitement.”
Mary winced. She could almost hear Clarissa saying it in her laughing, mocking voice. She wished she had not come.
Everything was very quiet and still except for the dry wind rustling through the hedgerows and the creaking and rattling of the inn sign. The inn was low and thatched. There was no sign of any other carriage, but Mary assumed that the guilty lovers had hidden it round at the back, out of sight.
“Come!” said Lord Peregrine, jumping down and holding out his hand. Mary hesitated. In her burning jealousy and rage, Hubert, with Clarissa in his arms in some romantic inn, had seemed a reality when she left London. Now confronted with this silent hedge tavern miles from anywhere, she began to think the whole thing impossible.
“I was silly to come,” she began but Lord Peregrine held up his hand. “Hush!” he said. “I can hear that laugh of Clarissa’s.”
Jealousy is a marvelous thing. Mary listened intently and could swear that she, too, had heard Clarissa’s high mocking laugh.
Grasping her parasol firmly in her hand, she marched into the inn, followed closely by Lord Peregrine.
The tap was deserted except for a thick, heavy-set landlord who looked remarkably like Lord Peregrine.
“We are looking for a certain lord and lady…” began Lord Peregrine. Mary stared at the landlord hopefully. Now that she was actually inside the building, the whole business began to seem unreal. But to her dismay, the landlord jerked his thumb towards the back quarters of the inn. “In there,” he said laconically.
Mary pushed open a low door and found herself in a short narrow corridor. Lord Peregrine was so close behind her that she could feel his hot breath on the back of her neck.
With her heart thudding against her ribs, she walked forward and pushed open the door of the room.
Empty!
Nothing but a low iron bedstead covered with a greasy quilt. She swung around.
Lord Peregrine had his back to her. He was locking the door.
“Why?” said Mary through white lips. “You tricked me. Why?”
“Revenge,” he snarled. “I shall have from you what that husband of yours has been taking from my fiancée so freely.”
Mary began to scream. He studied her thoughtfully and then slapped her across the mouth.
“No one will hear you, I’ve paid the landlord enough,” he said. “But I can’t stand the row.” He began to tug at his cravat. “You can take your clothes off or let me rip them off for you. When I’m finished with you, you’ll have learned every trick I’ve picked up in about five hundred brothels between here and Rome.”
He moved toward her and she backed away, looking wildly around for a means of escape, but the only window was barred. Lord Peregrine put out a large, beefy hand and hooked it into the bodice of her gown. He pulled her into his arms and rammed his hot mouth down over her own.
With a demented strength she wrenched her mouth away and screamed “Hubert!” her voice like a clarion call.
Peregrine pinned her savagely down with his great bulk. Her hat was crushed over one eye and he wrenched it off and threw it into the corner.
“Now,” he said between clenched teeth. “Now.”
But it was like trying to rape an eel, he thought savagely, as Mary twisted and writhed. He held her down by the neck with one hand and drew back his fist to knock some sense into her when the lock of the door shattered in pieces as a pistol shot ripped the country silence.
Lord Hubert Challenge stood on the threshold, a smoking pistol in his hand and black murder in his eyes.
Lord Peregrine’s beefy face which had been flushed a moment before, turned ashen.
“Out!” said Lord Hubert, jerking his head at Mary. “Out and wait for me.”
On trembling legs, which were barely able to support her, Mary tottered past him. She clutched at his sleeve. “He will kill you, Hubert,” she whispered.
“Get out!” said Hubert savagely, “and don’t talk fustian.”
Mary tottered through the taproom. There was no sign of the landlord. Out into the dazzling sunlight she swayed and collapsed onto the grass verge of the lane, covering her ears with her hands. Lord Peregrine was so strong, so brutish, he was probably massacring Hubert right now. She must run for help.
But still she sat there, wincing at each muffled thump and cry from the inn. Then there was a great cry and a long silence.
She heard a sound and looked up.
Lord Peregrine stood swaying in the doorway of the inn. Blood was streaming down his face and one arm hung limply at an awkward angle at his side.
“Hubert!” she cried desperately. “What have you done with Hubert?”
But he said not a word. He pulled himself ’round the low building, hanging onto the wattle with one hand until he reached his carriage. He crawled into it on his hands and knees and painfully took up the reins.
Mary leapt up to her feet and ran into the inn, visions of her husband’s dead body flashing before her eyes.
Hubert walked into the taproom. His blue swallowtail coat moulded his form without a crease, his cravat was spotless. He looked down into her anguished face with a smile in his eyes.
“Dear heart,” he said gently. “What a mull we have made of our marriage.”
Mary fled into his arms, sobbing and crying. “How did you find me? Why is Perry so bloody and you untouched? Oh, Hubert, I am so sorry. I should never have believed him!”
“Hush,” he said, holding her tightly and putting his lips to her curls. “Lucy Godwin fortunately could not wait to tell me the news. Somehow she overheard Perry telling you lies. She seemed so disappointed to find me respectably driving in the Park, instead of philandering in Chiswick. Perry is all bully and bluster, but an arrant coward in a fight. Now have I answered all your questions?”
“Yes… no…” gabbled Mary quite overset. “Do you love me?”
His brown eyes held the old mocking glint.
“Come home with me and I’ll show you,” he teased.
Mary buried her aching head against his broad chest and sighed. Could he not have said, “Yes?”
“I must rest my cattle,” he said holding her a little away from him. “Let us see if this hedge tavern has a hair of the dog. You look as if you could do with one.”
“The landlord?”
“I… er… persuaded him to leave,” said his lordship, smoothing down the ruffles at his wrists. “Ah, what have we here? French brandy no less. Probably smuggled.” He found two glasses and stared at them thoughtfully and then, producing a large handkerchief, wiped them carefully.
With equal deliberation, he poured two large measures, holding one out to Mary and saying in a peculiarly colorless voice, “Now drink that down like a good girl. I shall ask you questions afterwards.”
Mary looked anxiously at him. “But Perry tricked me, Hubert. You know that. What questions?”
“Drink,” he commanded, holding the glass to her lips.
She drank the strong measure in one gulp, shuddered and blinked, and then smiled at him weakly.
He dusted a chair with his handkerchief and drew it forward for her. Sitting down opposite, he leaned back, his thumbs in his waistcoat, affording Mary an excellent view of his broken knuckles.
“You are hurt,” she exclaimed.
“It’s nothing,” he shrugged. “Tell me, why were you holding hands with Major Godwin last night?”
Mary flushed and looked down. She thought of the large Major and the pain in his eyes.
“It is not my secret,” she said at last, looking down into her empty glass. “I cannot tell you.”
“I don’t like you having secre
ts with another man.”
Her eyes flew up. “You have secrets with Clarissa.”
“No longer,” he said. “I explained all that, if you will remember.”
“Clarissa—she heard Lucy’s story too?”
He nodded.
“Then she will no longer be engaged to Lord Peregrine.”
“Oh, I think she will,” remarked Lord Hubert in a bored voice. “It titillated her no end. That sort of woman finds brutish indiscretions exciting.”
“And that is the sort of woman you have consorted with in the past? That explains…” Mary bit her lip. She had been going to explain that that explains his brand of violent love making on that night in Brussels, but lost her courage.
But he seemed to read her thoughts for he said gently, “I have not yet made love to you, Mary. I do not count that episode as love.”
Mary looked at him in embarrassed anguish. How could he sit there so coolly discussing such things which were surely reserved for the privacy of the marital bedchamber? One did not discuss such things with the hot sun blazing outside.
“Poor Mary,” he murmured. “So much to learn.”
He stood over her and raised her to her feet. She looked up into his eyes and then closed her own as his mouth came relentlessly down on hers.
The world swayed and spun. The floor seemed to disappear from beneath her feet and a heavy, drugged sweetness took possession of her body as his mouth moved against her own, parting her lips and exploring her mouth.
Still keeping his mouth against her own, he swept her up in his arms and carried her down the corridor toward the bedroom.
She pulled her mouth free. “What are you doing?” she cried.
“Taking you to bed,” he smiled.
“To… It’s the middle of the afternoon, sir!” cried Mary appalled. “That bed, no doubt, is full of livestock and you want to… oooh!”
He dropped her abruptly to her feet. “Not yet a woman,” he remarked coldly, his eyes like pieces of agate.
“Me, not yet a woman,” said Mary shrilly, hurt unreasonably. “I may not be one of the strumpets you are used to bedding but I am a lady, sir, and I will not soil my dress on that filthy bed.”
“Oh, really,” he said savagely. “Did you mean to keep it on? How quaint. Very well, madam. We shall return home and draw the shades and extinguish the candles and you may keep all your clothes on and, if it pleases you, I will go to bed in my boots and breeches, but have you I will.”
Mary was shocked. That anyone should dare to be so crude in the presence of a lady!
She folded her lips into a thin line and marched back down the corridor and through the inn. Then she saw with dismay that his horse, Vittoria, was tethered to a tree outside and there was no sign of a carriage.
“I could not bring the carriage to your rescue,” he said behind her. “It would have taken too much time. With one horse I was able to cut across the fields. You must ride with me… on the horse I mean, my love, in case I have offended your delicate sensibilities with my boorish masculinity.”
She said nothing but allowed him to throw her up into the saddle. He mounted behind her and gathered the reins in one hand, holding her lightly with the other. She sat bolt upright, feeling faint at the sensations caused by that light touch.
The air was hot and humid and still, heavy with the scent of the hedgeroses, and the long shining grass still wet from last night’s storm.
She wondered bitterly whether her husband could sense the churning emotions in her body, but he said not a word until Chiswick Mall was reached and he rode into the yard of a posting inn under the curious stares of the ostlers. “We will bespeak a carriage here,” he said curtly. He swung her lightly to the ground and then turned and strode off into the inn, not once looking behind him to see if she were following.
Suddenly she remembered that quadrille on the night of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball. Was she never to be free of Perry and Clarissa and the problems of Lucy and Freddie, not to mention the pushing Witherspoons?
“I am going to the opera tonight. So there!” screamed Lucy Godwin at her large husband. “And if you need feminine company, I suggest you go and hold hands again with Mary Challenge!”
“I thought we might spend an evening together like the old days,” said Freddie Godwin miserably.
Lucy stared angrily at him. He made her feel so guilty. If only he would shake her or beat her or do anything other than sit there like a great lummox.
But goaded on by the pain shown in his eyes, she went from bad to worse. “Don’t talk to me of the old days,” she sneered. “What a pair of little country bumpkins we were then.”
“Don’t call me little, Lucy.”
“Little, little, little. Awful little man!”
The Major took a step toward her and raised his hand.
“That’s right!” screamed Lucy. “Beat me like the brute you are.”
He dropped his arm and then said in a measured voice. “Very well, Lucy. Have your fun. But show one serious tendre for any man and I will shoot him first and strangle you afterwards.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Witherspoon,” announced a servant.
Lucy stared at her husband uncertainly. Then, “Pooh!” she said, shrugging a muslin shoulder, and went off impatiently to see the Witherspoons. Really, they were the outside of enough. She must tell the servants not to admit them.
The Witherspoons had their customary leer pinned on their large faces, but for once it did not reach up to their eyes. They had received snub after snub since their return from Brussels. Money they had in plenty. But what they desired was social acceptance and they were prepared to get it any way they could.
After the tea tray had been brought in and social chit-chat exchanged, Mr. Witherspoon fixed Lucy with a steely gaze and said, “I fear Lady Challenge has forgotten the great service we did her in getting you out of Brussels. Begging and crying and pleading you were. ‘What about your husband?’ asks one lady. ‘Oh, I don’t care,’ you says. ‘Freddie can take care of himself.’ Tut-tut. Society don’t like that kind of behavior, Mrs. Godwin.”
Lucy sat very still. Society had indeed begun to circulate stories of those who had fled from Brussels, leaving their men to die on the battlefield. If the Witherspoons circulated such a story, she would be socially damned, and some of her best and brightest flirts were among the military.
“But you have not told anyone since we are friends,” she said at last with a lightness she did not feel.
“Not yet.” The two words fell, carefully measured, into the hot, still room.
“I am grateful to you for all you have done. Do you want money?” asked Lucy hopefully.
Mr. Witherspoon shook his head while his wife munched cake after cake, her eyes never leaving Lucy’s face.
“It is not your gratitude we want,” said Mr. Witherspoon. “We want Lady Challenge’s gratitude. She is all the crack now, and it would be deemed a mark of distinction if we could be seen abroad with her. You must remind her of her social obligation.”
“Oh, very well,” said Lucy pettishly.
“See that you do,” said Mr. Witherspoon. “Just see that you do.”
“You are looking particularly dowdy tonight, my love,” remarked Lord Hubert Challenge to his wife as they faced each other down the length of the dining table.
Mary looked down guiltily at her dress. It was of gray silk in an old-fashioned mode, with a high-neck and long tight sleeves. She had suddenly been terrified of the night to come and had chosen the most repelling gown she could find.
“Do you wish me to change my clothes?” she asked.
“No,” remarked Lord Hubert lazily. “Just take them off. What’s the matter Biggs? Got a cold?”
“No, my lord. Must have burnt me hand on this ’ere chafing dish.”
“Then we are quite well able to serve ourselves. You may go to the kitchens and have it attended to and… er… Biggs.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Don’t come back, there’s a good fellow.”
“Monstrous!” cried Mary after Biggs had gone. “To make such remarks, and in front of a servant too!”
“You drive me to it, Mary,” he said, his eyes mocking her. “Miss Prunes and Prisms. You are so easily shocked.”
Mary gulped at her wine and picking up the decanter, poured herself another glass.
Lord Hubert’s black brows rose in surprise. “Does your mother drink? Or your father?”
