The Wedding

by Edith Layton

  “No,” she said stubbornly, “not yet. Maybe when we get .o London. But we’ve been traveling all day, and I’m dusty and travel-weary. And I look it. Even if Annie gets a flatiron for my gown when we get to the inn, my hair is all disarranged from…you,” she said with a little giggle, “and from falling asleep with my head on your shoulder. It’s all lopsided,” she wailed. “I’d have to wash it again to get it looking right, and it’s such a chilly night that even if I sit in front of the fire it won’t be dry until dawn.”

  “I, too, am weary and travel-stained,” he said. “I’d thought to go tomorrow.”

  “Ah, Crispin, please,” Dulcie said, “I’m not ready. Meet with your Sir Francis tonight or tomorrow, but leave me at the inn, please. I promise you that when I do meet him in London, I’ll try to dazzle him. Don’t be angry with me or disappointed in me. I’d disappoint you more if he saw me looking and feeling this way. Oh, Crispin, I will meet him if I must, but please, not now.”

  It was odd to hear brave Dulcie so defeated, and by such a small thing. But it was as painful to him as it was odd.

  “I’m not disappointed,” he said, hugging her. “How could I be, for such a little thing? At any rate, it will be better for me if you stay at the inn,” he said and then added, when he felt her tense in his arms, “because if he saw you looking this way he might try to keep you with him forever.”

  She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him, and he tasted tears.

  “Such a fuss for nothing,” he said on a smile. “Very well. You stay at the inn. I’ll go to see him and return as soon as I can,” he promised, his lips to hers. And then proceeded to completely dishevel her hair.

  “Oh, excellent,” Sir Francis said. “Not that the lady is indisposed, of course—we regret that and hope she recovers quickly—but that you had the foresight to come alone this time. Otherwise we’d have to have invited you back again, alone. This business, as you must understand, my dear sir, is for gentlemen alone.”

  “Such business usually is,” Crispin commented. “I’ve known talented and clever ladies, but even they don’t usually care to involve themselves in these affairs.”

  “Precisely,” Sir Francis said with glee. “Well said! That is exactly why we asked you here. Wrede spoke highly of you. You’re a man of mystery, you know. One never sees you anywhere a fellow ought to be, at clubs or coffeehouses,” he chided playfully. “You’re elusive, wealthy and wise, and newly wed in such secrecy. How you intrigue us! A fellow who dares much, we hear. Oh, you are in the right place, sir. We believe you’ll find satisfaction in our little venture, we really do!” Sir Francis Dashwood rubbed his plump hands together as he spoke.

  His overeagerness made Crispin wonder if he actually wanted to do business with this odd man after all. One might be excused for being excited about a good financial prospect—Crispin himself was—and he realized it wasn’t fair to judge the man for not being able to conceal his excitement. In every other way he was a gentleman. Sir Francis was a short thickset man who wore subdued clothing and whose heavy face was framed by his own dark ringlets. He had a large nose and a double chin, but it wasn’t his features that made him unattractive to Crispin. It was the way he wore them. His thick lips were wet, and his eyes held too much excitement and dark laughter.

  “Ah, here is Montagu!” Sir Francis cried as a tall gentleman joined them. “Montagu, we are pleased to make you known to our new guest: Crispin Knightly, Viscount West. Crispin, if we may call you that, sir? We give you John Montagu, earl of Sandwich, one of the members of our little cabal.”

  Crispin bowed. He didn’t like the look of the earl any more than he liked his reputation. Sandwich was gangling and sly looking, his thin lips always quirked with private amusement, his pale eyes seeming to glint with pleasure at secret thoughts. He was known to be brilliant, and whispered to be other things not generally spoken aloud. And he was known for his many mistresses as well as for his intelligence. His work at the Admiralty was still spoken of with as much astonishment as his visits to the lowest brothels in London. The earl’s appetite for work, and for women, was notorious. Men could be admired for either, but there was something extraordinary and feverish about Sandwich’s pursuit of both.

  It was a fair, mild day, just drawing into evening. Crispin had left Dulcie at the inn and had been driven to this meeting. The carriage had let him off by a gate to one side of a country road. He’d been invited not to Sir Francis’s manor house but to his retreat nearby. He was told it was his lordship’s folly, where he met with gentlemen friends from London—many men secluded their families from their friends and business acquaintances. That way they spared them the smoke of their pipes, and spared themselves the trouble of entertaining them. Every gentleman had his own study or library for such meetings. Crispin supposed a rich and eccentric man could move his retreat as far from his house as he liked.

  “Come, come,” Sir Francis said merrily. “Older gentlemen arrive by boat on the Thames. But ’tis only a short walk, no trouble at all for such a fit-looking young buck as yourself. He’s a fine specimen, is he not, Montagu? Speaking of specimens, we hear you’re a horticulturalist. We’re sure you’ll love the specimens you will find here. Come along, we’ve a fine ruin to show you, too,” he said as he led Crispin down a path of crushed white shells. “An abbey—ruined but newly refurbished for comfort. Gothic is fine, but comfort is our byword. No need for a ruin to be ruined, is there?” he tittered at his own weak jest.

  “This evening is just a trial for both of us,” Sir Francis quickly cautioned Crispin, “although in no way will it be a trial, we do sincerely hope. Quite the contrary. But we must have twelve members in our little group in addition to myself. One has left, and now there’s room for another, which is why we asked you here. We are a close and secret order: gentlemen of note who need more than the workaday world can offer us. Daring men who are not afraid of risk in pursuit of our goals. Men who know the joys of life, who are used to them, and who seek more. Indeed, we believe men of such inclination and education can appreciate more than others can and deserve more! You’re said to be such a man. Being newly wedded, you most especially need what we can offer.” He laughed, then added, more seriously, “but you will see, and we shall see. If you don’t care for us, or we for you, this will be merely an enjoyable evening. But if we suit, it will be a wonderful thing for us all.”

  Money was always a wonderful thing to Crispin, who had spent his adult life building up his fortune. He nodded, hoping they would suit. The men Sir Francis and the earl associated with were rich and powerful. Such men had opportunities that others lacked. Opportunity given to a clever man meant money, and although Sir Francis had enough money for any man now, he could always use more.

  The grounds over which they walked were covered with neatly shorn grass. Young trees lined a silver brook that coursed beside the meandering path. As they walked down a hill and up to the crest of another, Sir Francis stopped and waited for Crispin to comment on the scene that lay below.

  An ardent gardener, Crispin noticed the trees and shrubs first. He wondered what Sir Francis expected him to comment on. The man was clearly waiting for him to say something about the vista before him, but Crispin was disappointed. The lawns were edged by common hedges of privet and boxwood. The trees he quickly identified as willow, larch, oak, and alder. It was a pleasant vista, but there was nothing to account for the sudden silence and obvious anticipation of the men with him.

  And then Crispin saw what they were looking at. It was the paths, not the greenery, that he was supposed to be impressed with. From this higher vantage point he saw that the path he had walked diverged to become two paths. Cut deep into the turf and covered with crushed shell, they shone brilliantly white in the ruddy light. Now he saw that each was shaped oddly, in long and sinuous lines. Each was, in fact, contoured to look exactly like a shapely female leg. The limblike paths bent wide apart before they finally met up again. At their apex was a dense bushy gree
n hedge with a tunnel cut into it. The whole scene was crafted so that a man watching another walking the path from either side would see him seem to enter a woman’s sex at its end.

  It was childish and vulgar. Obscene, certainly. But it was funny. Crispin laughed.

  Then he noticed what he had missed before when he was trying to identify the many shrubs. This time he looked at their shape and saw what they’d been clipped and grown to represent. The organs he was familiar with; they merely amused him. Others astonished him, because even with all his experience, he’d never known people could do what some of those bushes were shaped into doing to each other.

  “Extraordinary,” he said.

  “Just so!” Sir Francis giggled, delighted. “And that is just the beginning, we promise you, sir. Oh, what a night awaits you!”

  *

  Dulcie sat and stared into the fire, hating herself. A lady would have gone with her husband. A lady wouldn’t be sitting by the fireside filled with regret, her hair as dismally damp as her mood. He had asked her to go, but she had feared the unknown more than his disappointment. Now she sat by the fire combing out her hair and counting all the ways that she didn’t deserve Crispin as her husband.

  She scowled into the fire, not noticing that the serving girl had brought her a pot of coffee and a tray of cakes, until the girl cleared her throat after she’d set them down near Dulcie.

  “Ma’am,” the girl said, and then her broad face, already ruddy from the heat of the cooking fires, turned redder as she said, “My lady, your maid’s gone and got herself something to eat, so the missus, she said I was to bring you something, in case you was feeling peckish. There’s strawberries and mulberries, wine jelly, and some pastries and clotted cream, if it please you,” she added, bobbing a quick curtsy.

  Since Dulcie had eaten dinner, she didn’t so much as lift her aching head.

  “Thank you,” she said in a pinched voice. She sat before the fire in a fine silk robe patterned with flowers as blue as her mood. She hung her head down, her hair hanging in front of her eyes so that the fire would dry it faster. She didn’t know she looked like a picture of sorrow.

  The girl nodded her lacy cap, and then hesitated. “Ain’t there nothing I can get you, your ladyship?” she asked. “Food or wine, or nothing?”

  “Nothing that will help,” Dulcie thought, and then realized she’d said it aloud. When she looked up through the screen of her hair, she saw the girl’s round blue eyes register sudden concern. “Nothing, really, thank you,” Dulcie said. “I’ve been traveling long and hard today. I just need to sit in the quiet and rest, thank you.”

  “He’ll be back,” the girl blurted. “They goes, but they comes back every time. And they only meets once this time of year.”

  “They do?” Dulcie asked, with a feeling of dread. The girl was as nervous as she was forward, but she seemed to be trying to give comfort, although she couldn’t possibly know why Dulcie needed it.

  “Lor’, I shouldn’ta said nothing. The missus will skin me. But you was looking so forlorn, Listen, lady,” the girl said, bending near, her eyes darting to the door as she whispered hoarsely. “Most of them, they comes down alone, but seeing as to how your man came with you, he prolly won’t even stay out there overnight. Even them that do is gone by Monday. They have their”—she hesitated—“their rites on Saturday midnight and lay about all day the Sabbath after. Then they’re gone. You’ll see.”

  “No. I won’t,” Dulcie said, sitting up abruptly, swinging her hair back so that it hit the back of her neck with a cold, wet slap. “How can I? I’m not there, so I can’t know. You do. Tell me.”

  It took coaxing and bribery, sweet reasoning, and then outright bullying, to get the girl to agree to talk.

  “Bolt the door. I’ll tell my maid to wait if she comes back before you’re done. But tell me you will,” Dulcie ordered, “if I have to keep you here all night. And then what will the missus say?”

  “The gentlemen have a club, like, at the old abbey. Sir Francis runs it,” the girl said fearfully, sitting in the chair, as Dulcie commanded her to do, and twisting her apron string around her work-worn fingers as she talked. “Medmenham Abbey. It was ruint, till he had it fixed up. It’s far from his house, and that’s where the gentlemen go. They got the place fixed up as fine as fivepence, painted and primed, with furniture fit for a palace. The devil’s palace it is. The paintings and statues they got would make your eyes bug out and stay there.”

  “Go on,” Dulcie said.

  “I’m sure I can’t say any more,” the girl said, with a stab at being demure, “you being a lady and all.”

  “I’m sure you can,” Dulcie said implacably, and folded her arms across her breast.

  “Well, maybe I can. But as for what they do there! I can’t even talk about it ’cause I’m a good girl. It’s a sin and a profanation, turning the abbey of the good brothers into a place of the devil, and that’s sure. Still, nobody’s powerful as the Dashwoods hereabouts, and money talks, so nobody does nothing but shake their heads. Not even the vicar, and there’s a shame.”

  “If nobody goes there except the gentlemen, how does everyone know what the abbey looks like?” Dulcie asked, fascinated.

  “Well, but who do you think cleans it?” the girl asked, amazed enough to forget her place entirely. She remembered in time to duck her head and add, “They live like pigs, not to mention what they do. Someone’s got to clean up after them. They say it’s not for no one else’s eyes, but I guess they think we ain’t no one. I seen it!” she said in a burst of bravado, “and I ain’t never likely to forget.”

  “If you don’t go on, I’ll wring it out of you!” Dulcie cried, looking every inch an outraged lady. The girl quailed. She hesitated and then looked up, her cheeks red, clearly excited. “They got pictures of people doing it,” she said in awed tones. “Naked and dressed, going at it every which way, doing it to each other and to themselves and to goats and swans, and what all! Swiving, rutting, rogering each other—you know. And doing other things with their privates and such like, too. All being done by such handsome people, too. Real as life, in beautiful colors—even on the ceilings! And they got statues big as life, of men with their things out to here! Struth! Standing up like soldiers, bold as brass, and true to nature. They got hedges clipped to look like your, you know, top and bottom parts and even more shrubs shaped like gents’ particulars. You don’t know what a turn it can give you to turn around and see a man’s particular that’s as big as you are, my lady, and I hope you never do,” she added fervently.

  “Go on,” Dulcie croaked. “What else?” Either the girl was mad, she thought, or she herself was—to think she’d ever understand the workings of the noble mind. If this incredible thing was true, how could Crispin go to such a place? Worse, how could he have asked her to go there with him? Worse yet, she thought again, how could he have gone there without her?

  “They worship the devil!” the girl said.

  Bad as that was, it wasn’t as shocking to Dulcie as the other things.

  “It’s the Hell-fire Club. They don’t care for God’s punishment or nothing. They dress like monks, all in brown, and hold blasphemous services.” As if realizing how weak that sounded after her previous lurid detail, the girl added defensively, “I ain’t seen the rituals, though. Nobody from ’round here is ever allowed in the chapel, so I ain’t seen exactly what they do. But I seen the women they get to come down and pretend to be nuns, dressed up like them and all, only doing things no nun ever heard of—with the gentlemen, after the services, all together, on the floor and on the altar, too! ‘Services,’ they call them—orgies is what they is.

  “I ain’t seen the orgies neither,” the girl admitted, “but I seen the women. Some stayed here after. They was laughing and joking about it, and I heard them saying what they do. Common whores playing at being whoring nuns for the gentlemen of the Society of Saint Francis—that’s what they call themselves. That or the Mad Monks of Medmenham
Abbey! Struth! Their motto’s carved on the abbey in Latin or French or one of them jawbreakers. I can’t read it. But the whores, they said it means ‘Do what you will.’”

  “I see…,” Dulcie said, although she didn’t see, and only wanted to say something to fill up the silence and stop her from thinking about what she’d heard. And then she noticed how the girl was watching her. “I see,” Dulcie said again, coldly this time, drawing herself up, “and I begin to wonder why you told me all this.”

  “I only told you ’cause I din’t want you to worry none if the gentleman comes back late. I—only wanted you to know he would—he will come back,” the girl stammered.

  But Dulcie looked her steadily in the eye and knew the truth. She saw it before the girl averted her face. She too had once been poor and poorly dressed, and she had envied fine ladies. But she would never have hurt them in the guise of helping them, just to get even with them for their fine clothes and their easy life.

  Dulcie gave her such a look of cold contempt that the girl stopped sniveling and drew in a quick breath of fear.

  “Thank you for your concern,” Dulcie said silkily, unknowingly imitating the earl of Wrede, down to his least inflection, “but I should be more concerned about myself if I were you, not just because the missus might find out but also because Sir Francis wouldn’t be pleased to know his doings were common gossip for the visitors to this inn. I should think a man who worshiped the devil could think of some fiendish things to do to someone who gossiped about him, if he did find out. Don’t you? Go,” she said, sickened by what she’d heard, tired of the girl’s face, and afraid of whatever else she might say. “Take your money and go now. And be quiet about this if you know what’s good for you!”