“I have decided that,” the Marquis said.
“Who? Who is she?” Lady Burnham enquired.
She thought as she asked the question that she should be jealous, but somehow at the moment even the love she had felt in the last months to be overwhelming seemed subordinate to the need for survival.
“I think that is something I should keep to myself,” the Marquis answered.
He put out his hand as he spoke and took Lady Burnham’s in his.
“Now listen, Leone,” he said, “if I am to save you and of course myself, we have to be very intelligent about it.” “Yes – naturally.”
Her fingers tightened on his and she clung to him as if he was a lifeline to save her from drowning.
“I want you to go back to the house and insist upon seeing your husband,” the Marquis went on. “Tell him you passed a sleepless night, unhappy and disturbed by his accusations.”
“I understand – and I only – hope he will – listen to me.”
“You must make him listen!” the Marquis said firmly. “Tell him the reason why we have been seeing each other is that, since I thought it was time to settle down, I have been asking your advice as to who I should marry.”
“I am – sure George will – never believe – me.”
“Never mind. If he does not, just continue with your story,” the Marquis answered. “Tell him I have been pressed by my family, which is true, to produce an heir, and I have at last decided that is what I shall do and the announcement will be in The London Gazette in three days’ time.”
“In three days?” Lady Burnham exclaimed. “But suppose it is – not?”
“It will be!” the Marquis said firmly. “What you have to do, is persuade your husband to wait for three days. Point out to him that if he starts a divorce case and then my engagement is made public, people will not only question his evidence, but will suspect he is being deliberately spiteful because my horses have beaten his in the last two races in which we both had runners.”
Lady Burnham drew in her breath and clasped her hands together.
“That might – convince George – it might,” she said. “You know he thinks that the sun rises and falls on his horses.”
The Marquis was well aware of this, knowing that the reason why Lord Burnham was so frequently away from home was that he was attending race meetings in various parts of the country.
“Keep on impressing upon him,” he continued, “that he will be considered by his friends exceedingly unsporting if he ruins the happiness of a young girl who has just become engaged to me.”
“I will tell him! Of course I will tell him that!” Lady Burnham said eagerly, “and – Quintus, I think it is very clever of you. It is the one – argument George might listen to.”
“That is what I thought,” the Marquis said with just a faint tone of satisfaction in his voice.
He looked down at Lady Burnham for a long moment and then lifted her hand to his lips.
“Goodbye, Leone,’ he said. “Thank you for the happiness you have given me. I am only sorry that I should have been instrumental in bringing you so much distress.”
“I love you – Quintus!” Leone Burnham replied, “and I know I shall never – love anybody – again as I love you!”
She gave a little sob before she went on bravely,
“But if George was successful and we became married, we would only – grow to hate one – another.”
“We can only hope and pray,” the Marquis said, “that is something which will never happen.”
He kissed her hand again before he added,
“Go now. Do exactly what I say and make no attempt to communicate with me.”
“No, of course not,” she answered, “and thank you, dearest Quintus, for – everything – but most of all for being – you.”
She rose as she spoke pulling the dark cape she was wearing close around her before looking up for one long moment into the Marquis’s eyes.
Then she turned without another word and walked away. A moment later he heard the Chapel door close behind her.
The Marquis sat down again in the pew.
He knew it would be wise to wait for quite some time before he left the Church just in case Leone was being watched and he had anyhow a great deal to think about.
What was more, he was well aware that his thoughts had to be translated into action, which must be made public in three days time!
*
Two hours later the Marquis set out from Stowe House, driving his most spectacular team in a travelling phaeton which had only recently been delivered.
It was one of the fastest vehicles the coach-makers had ever built and he had spent a great deal of time suggesting improvements in its design that had undoubtedly added to its speed and comfort.
Looking exceedingly elegant with his tall hat slightly on the side of his dark head, his Hessian boots gleaming like polished ebony and his cravat tied in the style that was both the envy and despair of the Dandies, he and his entourage drew the eye of everybody either walking or riding in Park Lane.
As the Marquis turned his horses North, he thought with satisfaction that the groom who had gone ahead of him over one-and-a-half hours ago would reach Dawlish Castle within four hours.
This would give the Duke plenty of time to prepare for an unexpected but certainly welcome guest.
It was in the Chapel that a conversation he had had two months ago with the Duke of Dawlish, came to him like a flash of light in the darkness of despair.
They had been talking together after a race meeting, which they had both attended the previous day and the Marquis had said casually,
“Have you added any more horses to your stable this season, Your Grace?”
“Unfortunately no,” the Duke replied. “My trainer tried to tempt me with a couple of yearlings he says have great promise, but the fact is, Stowe, I cannot afford to expend a great deal of money on horses at the moment.”
The Marquis had looked surprised, but, before he could say anything, the Duke went on,
“I have a daughter coming out this season. That means a ball in London with an astronomical number of bills from dressmakers, milliners and God knows what other shopkeepers.”
The Duke had sighed before he continued,
“It is a case of gowns or horses and you can guess which, as a married man, I have to choose!”
The Marquis had laughed and the Duke, who had a sense of humour, also laughed before he went on,
“If you take my advice, Stowe, you will remain a bachelor for as long as you can! They will catch you in the end, but you might as well give them a good run for their money!”
The Marquis had laughed again.
“I will, Your Grace. You can be sure of that!”
The Marquis knew that the Duke would welcome him without question as a son-in-law!
The Duchess, who had already married off two of her daughters, would accept him as her third without querying any conditions he might impose as to the immediacy of the announcement.
It would be, the Marquis thought, quite an advantageous marriage if he had to make one, from his point of view. God knows he had no wish to be married.
He had expected to enjoy his bachelorhood for at least another five to ten years before there was any real need for him to settle down and produce an heir.
But if he had to be ‘leg-shackled’ as the servants called it, then it might as well be to a girl whose interests would almost certainly include an appreciation of horseflesh.
The Duke of Dawlish was an acknowledged sportsman and almost as popular with the racing crowd as he was himself.
As the Marquis drove his horses through the traffic with an expertise that proclaimed him a Corinthian, he was trying to remember if he had ever heard the name of the Duke’s third daughter or set eyes on her.
He supposed she must have been at some of the race meetings at which her father was always present.
He could remember the Duchess
looking dowdy but aristocratic and their older daughter Mary, who had married the Viscount Cannington, a chinless young man, heir to an Earldom, but he did not recall the rest of the family.
She would, the Marquis told himself, because she was her father’s daughter, make him the type of wife that he was expected to have and she would know how to play hostess at his family seat in Buckinghamshire and at Stowe House in London.
Up to now when the Marquis gave a house party, he always enlisted the assistance of his mother whose beauty and wit had been proverbial until she had to retire from Social life owing to being almost crippled with rheumatism.
At other times her chaperonage had not been requested and, as he drove on, the Marquis thought of the very amusing bachelor parties he had given that would now unfortunately come to an end.
At these parties, because most of the male guests were bachelors, the females were the most alluring ‘bits o’ muslin’, who were the toast of St. James’s or actresses for whom the Bucks and Beaux waited at the stage door night after night at Drury Lane or the Italian Opera House.
‘They were great fun!’ the Marquis thought nostalgically.
He decided that marriage or no marriage, his house in Chelsea would still contain an occupant about whom his wife would remain in complete ignorance.
Once they reached the open road and there was little traffic, the Marquis drove his team hard.
He reckoned that even allowing an hour for luncheon at a Posting inn, which the groom on his way to Dawlish Castle would have notified of his intended arrival, he should reach his destination at the comfortable hour of four o’clock.
That would give him time to make the acquaintance of his future bride and inform the Duke of his intentions.
He would send a groom back to London first thing in the morning so that his secretary could insert the notice in The London Gazette in time to greet the eye of Lord Burnham when he opened his newspaper on Wednesday morning.
He could not imagine that there would be any hitch in his plan, unless of course, Leone could not persuade her husband to wait the three days he had requested.
The Marquis, who liked being prepared for every contingency, was thinking that he still had a day in hand in case, although it was unlikely, the Duke’s third daughter might already be engaged.
This was such an outside chance that it really did not warrant much consideration. Yet the Marquis was used to taking no chances where his plans were concerned.
He also faced the truth that if the worst came to the worst and Burnham went ahead, he had no wish whatsoever to be married to Leone.
He thought she was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen and he had not been surprised when she had surrendered herself to him, because he had never had the experience, when he desired and pursued a woman, of being rebuffed.
Although he admitted that their love affair had been at times ecstatic, the Marquis, if he was honest, now knew that while it had been enjoyable, it was something he had no wish to continue for the rest of his life.
In fact the idea of such a thing happening appalled him.
He drove on and now he asked himself why his love affairs always ended so quickly and invariably in his becoming satiated and bored with the woman in question, however lovely she might be.
It would be impossible, he thought, to find anybody more beautiful than Leone. She was also sweet and gentle and had given him, as usually happened, unreservedly her whole heart.
The Marquis always wondered a little cynically what was wrong with other men that their wives invariably seemed unawakened to the rhapsody and fire of love.
He could never remember making a woman his without her telling him that never in her life before had she been so aroused that the love he gave her, or rather she gave him, was very different from what she had enjoyed with her husband.
‘It must be that I am a very good lover,’ he thought complacently. He knew it was another accomplishment he could be proud of.
Thinking it over, he supposed he had a pride in himself and in his achievements ever since he had been a small boy. It was his father, who had said to him,
“The world is there for you to walk on and don’t forget it! Be a fighter and a conqueror, a man who achieves what he desires and forget all this damned nonsense about being a miserable sinner they teach you in Church!”
The old Marquis had laughed as he had added,
“If I did not think myself better than most of the people with whom I associate, I would blow a piece of lead through my head!”
His son had laughed too at the time, but he had also thought how magnificent his father looked!
He lived it was true almost like a King on his estate, which was run in such an exemplary fashion that it was the envy of and an example to all their neighbours.
He had thought then that he would like to emulate his father and it was something he had tried to do.
When he had inherited and grown older, he felt as if every day he became prouder of what he possessed and of what he himself had achieved.
“Pride comes before a fall, Stowe! And don’t you forget it!” one of his contemporaries with whom he was having an argument once shouted at him.
The Marquis had not deigned to reply, but he thought now that he had come very close to falling. In fact he was standing on the edge of a precipice and only his intelligence and a bit of luck could save him.
Without thinking he pushed his horses a little faster, as if he was determined to get to Dawlish Castle with all speed and save himself before he should drop into complete disaster.
After quite an edible luncheon at the Posting inn, and having drunk half a bottle of his own claret so that he felt in a slightly mellower mood, the Marquis continued his journey.
There was now less then two hours drive before he reached The Castle, and he was planning what he would say to the Duke on arrival to explain his unexpected visit and also what he would say when he asked the Duke’s daughter to honour him by becoming his wife.
‘I suppose girls are romantic,’ the Marquis thought, ‘and she will expect me to be flattering, and of course, persuasive.’
When he thought about it, he realised he did not even know any young girls and as far as he could remember, he had never talked with one, except to say ‘how do you do’, or ‘goodbye’.
He had certainly never danced with one because he had made it a rule, unless it was completely unavoidable, never to dance at balls.
In fact he invariably ended up at the card tables unless he visited a dance hall with his friends to appraise the pretty Cyprians.
‘I wonder,’ the Marquis said to himself, ‘what young girls talk about? And what are their interests?’
He knew only too well what interested them once they had the ring on their finger and after a year or two had presented their husband with an heir.
In an extraordinary manner they developed the art of flirtation and became amusing and witty, which was certainly not an accomplishment they were taught in the schoolroom.
As the Marquis thought back over conversations he had had with Leone and a number of other lovely women before her, he felt there was, if he was truthful, very little originality in what they said.
They certainly laughed at his jokes, appeared to blush at his compliments, then enticed, allured and invited him with every word that was spoken, with every glance of their eyes, with every movement of their bodies.
He enjoyed it – of course he enjoyed it. He would not be human if he did not like being wooed.
But it was all very obvious and, as he thought back, it had really become somewhat monotonous! That was the reason why, however beautiful the ladies were, his love for them if that was what it was, never lasted very long.
Just in the same way, the occupants of his very comfortable, well-furnished little house in Chelsea changed so often.
‘What am I looking for?’ the Marquis asked himself. The question surprised him, but he did not know the answer.
“There’s an accident, my Lord,” the groom sitting behind him announced unnecessarily.
“I can see that!” the Marquis retorted testily.
He brought his team to a walk and then moved gradually forward.
Accidents on the road were quite usual and this looked no different from those he had encountered before.
It was quite obvious that a stagecoach, an overloaded cumbersome affair, had come into collision with a cart driven by a yokel who had doubtless been asleep, leaving his horse left to plod uncontrolled in the middle of the road.
The accident could only just have happened for the horses were still plunging wildly, while the coach was at a dangerous angle with two wheels in the ditch and both the luggage and the passengers sliding off the open roof.
“Go and see what you can do, Ben,” the Marquis said to his groom.
“Very good, my Lord, but you knows as well as I do I’m not as good at it as your Lordship,” Ben replied.
It was impertinence, but the Marquis accepted it as no less than the truth.
“Very well,” he said, “hold the reins while I sort it out.” Ben obeyed him and the Marquis descended from the phaeton and walked towards the accident.
The noise was almost deafening. The coachman, red in the face, was yelling at the yokel who had been driving the cart and was now yelling back.
Meanwhile the horses belonging to the stagecoach were still plunging with the shafts up round their necks, while a crate of hens had broken open and the birds were clucking about all over the road.
As the shouting of the two drivers and the violence of their language increased, the Marquis reached them.
“Go to the heads of your horses, you fools!” he commanded in a voice which reduced the two men to silence.
Then, as they turned to look at him, they recognised authority when they saw it and hurriedly obeyed.
Some farm labourers had by now, appeared from nowhere and several men had alighted from the coach. On the Marquis’s orders, given crisply and in a manner that made it impossible for him not to be obeyed, they righted the coach.
For All Eternity Page 2