Margarita and the Earl

by Joan Wolf

  When the tour was over she smiled, graciously thanked Mrs. Gage, and told that lady to carry on exactly as she had been doing. “I will be making no changes,” she said firmly, ignoring the housekeeper’s startled face. And she kept her promise.

  *

  As the weeks went by, she established a routine that comforted her with a sense of familiarity. She took over the small sitting room that adjoined her bedroom and made a shelter and refuge. She had her books there, books she had gotten in London in the weeks she stayed with her grandfather. She had her needlework. She had given instructions that the fire was always to be kept going, and she would sit close to it during the long winter afternoons, her thin southern blood warmed by its glow.

  She rode once a day, at eleven o’clock. It was warmer then, and she ran little chance of encountering Nicholas, who was usually in the saddle much earlier. In fact, she arranged things so that she rarely saw him until dinner time when, formally attired, she would meet him in the small paneled saloon and go in with him to the family dining room. Nicholas was usually out on the estate all day, and he radiated the vitality, the joy, the satisfaction, of someone who is doing what he most enjoys. She would listen with every appearance of interest to his enthusiastic talk of seed drills and drainage and crop rotation, and when he asked her in return what she had been doing, she always answered serenely that she had been busy with her needlework. Occasionally she had a visitor, and she would sit politely in the drawing room exchanging small talk about the weather.

  It surprised her that neighboring women should call upon her. At home, women never made such calls, and she hesitantly asked Nicholas if she was expected to return them. When he replied in the affirmative, she punctiliously made the rounds of her neighbors, sitting for half an hour over a cup of tea and leaving to go home with relief to her sitting room. It was less lonely when she was alone.

  *

  The weeks went by. Nicholas was endlessly occupied by the estate during the day and was barely conscious of Margarita. Her delicate beauty drew him at night, but she never gave him any response, lying passive and quiet in his arms. She puzzled him. He sensed a reserve in her as deep as his own, and he did not know how to pierce it. His relationships with women had always been purely physical, and as such, they had been notoriously successful. He was not successful with his wife, and he did not understand why.

  *

  He was in the estate office one cold January afternoon when the door opened and Lord James Tyrrell came in. Lord James was a cousin of Sir Henry Hopkins and had been for years one of Nicholas’s closest friends. They had been at school together. When he saw who it was, Nicholas rose immediately to his feet, his hand held out.

  “James! What are you doing in Worcester this time of year?”

  “I had to rusticate for a while—got badly dipped at Watier’s last week. So I thought I’d pay a visit to old Henry and look in on you at the same time.”

  Nicholas’s eyes surveyed his friend with cool amusement. “Cards again, eh?”

  “Yes, damn it. I have no luck—unlike you, my friend. Congratulations on getting the old man’s collection. It must be worth a fortune.”

  “I certainly hope so. Sheridan is winding up the legal details, and then I’ll be free to put some of those blasted pictures on the market. They should fetch a tidy sum.”

  “All of which you will put into this moldering great house of yours.”

  “It isn’t the house I’m anxious to improve, James, but the land.” Nicholas spoke with a burning intensity. “Winslow could be one of the gardens of England if given the proper attention. There have been enormous advances in agriculture during the last twenty years or so. But my uncle would never put anything into the estate. The farms are run-down and unproductive, equipment is ancient and broken, and the stock is disgracefully depleted.” Nicholas had acted as agent for Winslow ever since he had been sent down from school five years ago. He was painfully aware of the truth of his own words. “Winslow needs money,” he concluded fiercely, “and, by God, it is finally going to get it.”

  Lord James looked curiously at the man seated behind the huge old desk. In many ways Nicholas was an enigma to him. If he wanted, Nicholas could be one of the major figures of London society. He was indecently good-looking, had been heir to one of the most ancient of England’s titles, and had a streak of wildness in him that made him devastatingly attractive to women. But he spent only a small part of his time in London. The rest of the year he passed here at Winslow, passionately fighting a losing battle against decay. Lord James, who spent as little time as possible on his own family acres, did not understand him.

  But no one could be better company when he was in the mood than Nicholas. Lord James bethought himself of some of the times they had had together and suddenly grinned. “Eleanor Rushton is not happy with your nuptials, Nick. She expressed herself quite forcibly to me on the subject.”

  Nicholas did not look at all perturbed. “Did she?” he said coolly.

  “And she is not the only fair lady to be disappointed, although the others have not so far confided their grief to my sympathetic ear.”

  Nicholas grinned. “Were you very consoling, James?”

  “Very.” Lord James shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind cutting you out with Lady Eleanor, Nick. She is a very luscious morsel. But, alas, she allowed me to hold her hand and no more.”

  “Keep trying,” Nicholas said cynically. “She’ll come around.”

  “Then you wouldn’t mind giving her up?”

  Nicholas looked amused. “Let us say, rather, that I don’t mind sharing.”

  “Very decent of you.” There was a pause, then Lord James said cautiously, “It was a bit of a shock, you know, finding out you’d been riveted.”

  “Yes, it came as a bit of a shock to me as well,” Nicholas replied dryly. “You see, I only got the collection if I took Margarita as well.”

  “Good God!”

  “Quite. However, it might have been worse. I might not have gotten the collection at all.”

  “True,” said Lord James. He eyed his friend for a minute uncertainly and Nicholas laughed.

  “Would you like to come up to the house with me, James, and be introduced?”

  Lord James rose with alacrity. “I thought you’d never ask.” Together and in perfect amity, the two young men moved toward the office door.

  Chapter Six

  “Everyone says that husbands love their wives,

  Guard them and guide them, give them happiness.”

  —Robert Browning

  Nicholas settled Lord James in the drawing room with a glass of Madeira and said, “I’ll go get Margarita.” His butler had told him she was in her sitting room, and he had said he would go up to her himself. He wanted to explain to her first who Lord James was.

  He tapped briskly on the door of the sitting room, and at her response he entered. She was seated close to the fire, a piece of needlework in her hands. He had the impression, however, that she had not been sewing but sitting idle, staring into the flames. Her eyes widened a little when she saw who it was. “My lord! Were you looking for me?”

  He came into the room, and it seemed to her as if the outdoors had invaded her snug retreat. He radiated life and energy and health. “A friend of mine, Lord James Tyrrell, has come to call and I’d like you to meet him. He is a cousin of Sir Henry Hopkins, and we’ve known each other since we were at Eton together.”

  Margarita rose instantly, anxious to remove him from her sanctuary. His very presence threatened its secure remoteness. “I shall be very pleased to meet Lord James.” She put her needlework down and smoothed the soft black silk of her skirt.

  He was looking curiously around the room. Books were piled on a table by the window, and a heavy black shawl lay across the back of one of the chairs. The fire was roaring. “Isn’t it too warm for you, sitting so close to the fire,” he asked.

  “It is never too warm for me, my lord,” she replied a little rueful
ly.

  “I hadn’t realized. I suppose you are accustomed to a hotter climate.”

  “Much hotter,” said Margarita firmly. She came across the room, and he stood aside to let her precede him out the door. As he followed her downstairs, his gaze rested thoughtfully on her small, proud head and martially erect back.

  She made a very deep impression on Lord James. He took one look at her grave young face and fell instantly in love. He exerted himself to the utmost to please her and entertain her and was rewarded at last with a low, rippling laugh and a totally enchanting smile. When Margarita smiled, the sun came out and Nicholas, staring in astonishment at his wife, realized for the first time that she had dimples.

  Lord James finally tore himself away, and when Nicholas came back to the drawing room after seeing him to the door, the room was empty. Margarita had vanished once again upstairs.

  *

  Nicholas began to wonder what it was his wife did during the day. He had been afraid that she would push herself in where she wasn’t wanted, that she would want to take over Winslow and himself, that she would be a perpetual nuisance. None of those things had happened. As far as Winslow was concerned, Margarita might not have existed. She appeared regularly for dinner every evening, and she was there if he wanted someone in his bed at night. It should have been an ideal marriage, or so he told himself in puzzled uneasiness whenever he bothered to think about it.

  He was seated in the library one rainy afternoon, absorbed in writing a letter when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the door open and his wife appear on the threshold. She stopped dead when she saw him and, quietly, began to withdraw from the room. He looked up. “You aren’t disturbing me. Please come in.”

  “I did not think you were here,” she said a trifle breathlessly. She hesitated a moment and then came in. “I was merely going to return this and get another.” She held up the book in her hand and walked swiftly to the shelves on the left-hand wall.

  “What were you reading?” he asked, standing now behind his desk.

  “Candide. You have an English translation, and my English is better than my French.”

  “Candide? I did not know young ladies read Voltaire.”

  She was trying to put the book back on a high shelf. “In South America, my lord, we read Voltaire. Also Rousseau and Montesquieu. We made a revolution because of those writers.”

  Unnoticed, he had crossed the worn carpet to stand behind her. “Let me put it back for you.” He took the book from her hand and raised his arm to replace it on the shelf. Startled by his sudden appearance, Margarita flinched. He saw it and turned quickly to look at her. For a brief moment he saw into her unguarded eyes, and then the familiar shutters came down.

  “You startled me,” she said a little defensively, her head tipped back to look at him. He was too big. His physical presence intimidated her.

  Nicholas didn’t know what to say. She had flinched away from him as if she thought he were going to strike her. And for one brief moment, her eyes had been those of a child in fear. He looked into her now-expressionless face, and the thought struck him that that kind of disciplined immobility was disturbingly familiar. “You are welcome to come in here any time,” he said helplessly.

  She nodded with dignity. “Thank you, my lord. I will leave you now to your work.” She walked with measured, unhurried steps to the door. There was no suggestion of a retreat about her, but Nicholas was suddenly quite certain that she was fleeing, and fleeing from him. She had not waited to get another book. He sat down slowly behind the desk, his eyes on the door. “Dear God,” he said very softly to the unresponsive air. “What have I done?”

  Something very unusual had happened to Nicholas during that brief encounter with his wife in the library. He had seen her as a person. Nicholas’s distrust of women was very deep. Over the years he had grown a hard protective skin over the scar of his mother’s desertion, but the wound was still there. He was not a man who could do without women, but he saw them from a purely physical point of view. His love he saved for Winslow.

  But he had looked into his wife’s eyes and seen there the dark, lost look of a frightened child. It was a look he recognized. He sat thinking about her, and without his quite realizing it, he was thinking about her for the first time not as “the girl” or “my wife,” but simply as “Margarita.”

  *

  Nicholas came back to the house in the early afternoon next day and, going upstairs, knocked at Margarita’s door. “I am going to visit one of the farms this afternoon,” he said. “Do you care to ride with me?” As she hesitated he added, “I think you ought to meet our tenants.”

  “Then of course I will come. If you do not mind waiting while I put on my riding habit?”

  “I don’t at all mind waiting.” She looked at him expectantly, but he made no move to leave. He clearly planned to wait in her sitting room, and much as she hated to have him there, she really could not ask him to go.

  “I won’t be long,” she said briefly, went through the door to her bedroom, and closed it behind her.

  Left alone, Nicholas looked soberly around the room. There was needlework lying on the fireside chair, and this time he picked it up to look at it. The fabric, stretched over a frame, showed him the picture of a beautiful, Spanish-style house surrounded by a blaze of flowers. The needlework was exquisite, the colors brilliant.

  He put the fabric down and moved to the table. There were copies of Plutarch’s Lives and Plato’s Republic in English, Don Quixote in Spanish, and two volumes each of Montesquieu and Rousseau in French. There was also a Spanish pamphlet, Manifesto de Cartagena by Simón Bolívar. He was holding this in his hand when Margarita came back into the room, dressed in a severe black riding habit that looked splendid on her lithe young figure.

  “Do you know Bolívar?” he asked slowly, putting down the book.

  “He is my cousin,” she replied.

  He raised his brows a little. “I know very little about what happened in Venezuela,” he said frankly, “but I know he was your leader.”

  “He is our leader,” she returned steadily. “The majority of the Creoles may have been destroyed, but Bolívar still lives. And while he lives, the Venezuelan Revolution is not dead.”

  “That revolution cost you your family,” he said very gently, “yet you still hold to it?”

  “If I let go of it,” she returned, her voice sounding hollow in her own ears, “then I will lose them forever.”

  He was watching her steadily. “I see,” he said quietly. And, oddly enough, he did.

  Chapter Seven

  Pain to thread back and to renew

  Past straits, and currents long steer’d through.

  —Matthew Arnold

  They went down to the stables together, and the groom brought a tall gray gelding for Margarita to ride. Nicholas was mounted on his favorite bay mare, Cora. As they moved out of the stableyard and onto the wooded path that led down from the castle’s hill, he observed his wife closely. She rode beautifully, lightly poised in the saddle, her hands firm on the reins. He noticed the way those small, gloved fingers gripped the reins and felt a pang of guilt. “Have you been riding Meridian all this time?”

  “Yes.” Her eyes were looking forward between the horse’s ears.

  “He has a mouth like iron.”

  A dimple dented her cheek. “I’ve noticed.”

  “You ride very well.” There was a pause as they safely negotiated a low-hanging branch. When he spoke again, his voice was neutral. “When I go up to London, I’ll stop by Tattersall’s and see about getting you a proper mount.”

  At that she turned to look at him. “Are you going to London?”

  “As soon as I hear from Sheridan that the will has been legally cleared. I want to see about selling those damn pictures.”

  They had come out of the woods, and as they did, the sun broke through the gray clouds. “The pictures are very beautiful,” she said to him.

  He turned
in his saddle and looked back at the castle. It shone silver in the winter light, elegantly placed above the slow-moving Severn which reflected back the sun’s glinting rays on this cold February afternoon. “So is that,” he said.

  She turned to look with him, but her eyes soon moved from the castle to the profile of the man beside her. There was an expression around his hard mouth that she had never seen before. “Yes,” she replied slowly. “Yes, it is.”

  They were going to visit Whitethorn, the largest of the farms on the Winslow estate. “George Frost is the tenant,” Nicholas told Margarita as they rode side by side in the winter sunlight. “There have been Frosts at Whitethorn for as long as there have been Beauchamps at Winslow. A Frost rode with a Beauchamp in nearly every war this country has fought, from the wars of King John to the Wars of the Roses and the Civil War. Now they farm.”

  “As you do.”

  “As I do.” There was the flash of unmistakable amusement in his eyes. “Do you find that a sorry comedown from my heroic ancestors?”

  “No. I find it entirely admirable.” She glanced at him sidelong and found that he was watching her steadily. “At home, the people who own the land care very little about its cultivation,” she explained. “Most Venezuelans think it beneath them, a ‘comedown’ as you say, to work as you do. A Spanish-American would judge it impossible to maintain his dignity and honor his ancestors except with pen in hand, sword at belt, or breviary before his eyes.”

  “Yet you think differently?”

  “My father thought differently.”

  “Did he own much land, your father?”

  “He owned two cacao plantations, twelve houses in Caracas and La Guaira, two country estates, a plantation at San Pedro, an indigo ranch, and three cattle ranches. He also owned a copper mine.”

  He pulled up his horse for a minute and her gray followed suit. They stood together in the lane, and he looked at her, his eyes narrowed against the afternoon sun. “And he risked it all?” he asked slowly.