by M. C. Beaton
He realized that if he wanted her he would have to go about courting her, and the idea made him angry. One should not have to court one’s own wife.
Nonetheless, as the day wore on and she did not return, he changed into his evening clothes, dressing with elaborate care and sent orders to the kitchen to prepare an especially good dinner.
MacGregor, the Highland cook, drove Biggs into a fury by pointing out smugly that his best French dishes would be just the thing to restore tranquility to the household. But Biggs was a devoted servant, so he swallowed his spleen and lined his army of servants up for inspection and gave them their orders. They were to be quiet and unobtrusive. James, the first footman, was to order flowers for the dining room and for my lady’s bedroom. Then Biggs hit on a brainwave. A band of musicians should be hired to play soft romantic music in the hall—there was some Viennese lot who were fashionable at the moment.
His heart quailed however when he took a tray of decanters in to the Green Saloon early in the evening. Her ladyship had not returned, and his lordship was looking about as romantic as a thunderstorm.
As he was gloomily descending to the hall, the street door opened and Mary came in. She looked white and tired, as indeed she was. She was tired of listening to Major Godwin’s troubles and had snapped at him that all Lucy needed was a good shaking. She loathed the very sight of Clarissa and was sure that Hubert was in love with her. That time of passion, which had meant all the world to her, had been, she was sure, merely a divertissement for her sophisticated husband. She had been on the town for long enough to realize that a great proportion of society treated their sex lives in the same way they treated gourmet cooking, something to be savored and enjoyed while someone else did the dirty dishes. One had affairs with anyone other than one’s spouse, and never let messy emotions like love spoil the fun.
She looked up and saw the anxious face of Biggs.
“I shall not be dining this evening,” she said quietly. “I am very tired.”
“Oh, you can’t do that, my lady,” said Biggs anxiously. “His lordship has commanded such excellent dishes and MacGregor would break his heart, my lady, if they were to go to waste.”
“My lord is dining at home!” exclaimed Mary in surprise.
“Yes, my lady,” said Biggs, “and he has already changed for dinner and awaits you in the Green Saloon.”
Mary gave a sigh. “Very well, Biggs. Tell my lord I shall join him shortly.”
Biggs made her such a low bow that his bristling head nearly touched his shoes and then rushed off to tell MacGregor of his splendid diplomacy in getting my lady to take dinner.
Hubert was seated by a small fire in the saloon and looked up briefly as his wife entered the room. She was wearing a lingerie gown of pale green muslin trimmed with little gold oak leaves. Her hair which had grown longer was piled on top of her head in an artless cluster of curls. A chain of gold oak leaves had been threaded through her curls. She looked remarkably pretty and very young.
She dropped a curtsy to her husband, who was once again staring at the fire, and sat down in a high backed chair opposite him.
Had she arrived some two hours earlier, he would have swept her into his arms. But he had grown angry at being kept waiting, forgetting that he had not dined at home for some time. As if remembering his obligations to an unwanted guest, he rose to his feet and poured her a small glass of wine, placed it on a table beside her, and resumed his brooding over the fire, the flames playing on the stern plains of his face and sparking fire from the diamond pin in his stock and the diamond rings on his long fingers.
“Was it not a strange meeting at Horseguards?” asked Mary timidly at last.
“Very,” he said coldly. “I am sure you have already mulled over the matter with Major Freddie Godwin.”
“As you no doubt have with Clarissa.”
“We will leave Clarissa’s name out of this, if you please.”
“Of course,” sneered Mary nastily.
“I merely do not wish to bicker this evening.”
“Dinner is served,” announced Biggs.
Lord Hubert offered his arm to his wife. Mary put the tips of her fingers on his sleeve as if she were afraid of contracting some contagious disease. Biggs’s boot-button eyes darted from one angry face to the other and with a little sigh he made a smart rightabout turn and led the way downstairs.
As soon as his master and mistress were seated at the table, Biggs realized it was going to be a bad evening. Both my lord and my lady were usually in the habit of noticing and appreciating any special effort on the part of the servants. But the splendor of the dining table, with its beautifully polished silver and crystal, its elaborate flower decorations, its tempting dishes, went unnoticed by the glacial pair.
Remove after remove was carried back to the kitchens untouched, as the couple sipped their wine and brooded on each other’s iniquities.
How long this state of affairs would have lasted is hard to say. But the cook, MacGregor, finally could not stand the insults to his art any longer. He erupted into the dining room, an angry barbaric figure in his military kilt, his red beard glistening with rage.
“It iss mair that the flesh and bluid can stand,” he roared, advancing on Lord Hubert. “Sassenachs wass always the same. Ice water in your veins. My verra soul went into those dishes, my lady, my lord. Do you care? Och, it takes the heart out of a body.”
With that he tore off his chef’s cap and flung it on the floor and then collapsed into a chair, hugging his large body and rocking backwards and forwards, wailing, “Ochone, ochone!” in a high keening voice.
Mary sat in shocked silence. Biggs was wringing his hands. Lord Hubert raised his quizzing glass and studied his cook in startled amazement.
“If you will stop that demned Gaelic wailing, MacGregor,” he said icily, “and try to explain slowly and carefully in English the reason for this disgraceful behavior.”
“It iss yourselves,” moaned the cook, too distressed to guard his tongue or remember his place. “We are sad to see my lord and my lady at odds so we work and slave to bring ye together again. I am inspired. Neffer haff I cooked as I haff cooked this night. Och, what’s the use!”
He resumed his keening, while his master slowly lowered his quizzing glass.
Out in the hallway, the small six-piece orchestra hired for the occasion burst into the opening chords of ‘Oh, Nights of Passion.’
“Stop that damned caterwauling, MacGregor,” snapped Lord Hubert, “and bring all the dishes back and you, Biggs, bring all the servants here! Bustle about man!”
MacGregor stopped his wailing and fled from the room. Biggs marched after him, while the orchestra played on.
“Oh, Hubert,” said Mary, the tears standing out in her large eyes. “I feel we are behaving very badly.”
One by one the servants marched in the room and stood against the wall. MacGregor and the kitchen staff followed, bearing the rejected dishes.
Lord Hubert stood up while they all hung their heads and waited for the outburst. “Now,” he said, “I and my lady are indeed touched by your efforts to please us. We have indeed been remiss in not noticing your attentions.” He smiled down the long length of the table at Mary, and her heart gave a painful lurch. “You must not be so depressed by our marital rows, must they, my love?”
Mary smiled back at him weakly.
“So, my lady wife,” said Hubert, stretching out his hand, “if you will come and sit by me, I think we shall celebrate our loyal servants’ devotion. All of you, pull your chairs to the table, and we shall sample the MacGregor’s art!”
The Duchess of Pellicombe’s carriage swung over the cobbles of St. James’s Square in front of the Challenge mansion. The dining room curtains were drawn back, affording the Duchess an excellent view of Lord and Lady Challenge entertaining their servants to dinner.
“Good gracious!” she cried, her eyes almost popping out of her head. “Do but look. The Challenges dining with the
ir servants!”
The Duke leaned across her and stared from the carriage window at the brightly lit tableau.
“Challenge must have turned radical,” he grunted, settling back in his seat. “That sort of thing breeds anarchy. I shall speak to that young man very sternly.”
Mary watched her husband’s animated face as he refought old battles with his servants. The wine was flowing freely, his face was flushed and alive. He had never looked so handsome. He had never before looked so much a stranger.
“Right you are, Captain—I mean my lord,” cried Biggs, excited by the tales of battle. The butler turned his twinkling gaze on Mary. “Saved my life, many’s the time, ’is lordship did. ’Member when Frenchie was levelling a pistol at me and I was saying me prayers. His lordship creeps up behind Frenchie and slices ’is ’ead clean off. How we laughed! That poor Frenchie’s ’ead was a-rollin’ on the ground with sech a look of surprise on ’is face as you never did see, my lady.”
Mary repressed a shudder and gave a weak laugh. Then she felt the pressure of her husband’s hand on her knee under the table.
How could she possibly go to bed this night with this blood-thirsty stranger? She moved her knee away from his hand and he snapped his head round and stared down at her, as if finding some subaltern guilty of dereliction of duty.
Then a faint, wicked gleam began to burn at the back of his eyes. “Come, my love,” he said, throwing down his napkin. “It is time we retired.”
Mary blushed painfully, and all the servants got to their feet and stood waiting.
“Three cheers for the Captain!” shouted Biggs. There was nothing else to do but to take her husband’s arm and leave the room as the resounding huzzas split the quiet air of St. James’s.
Her bedroom looked dark and mysterious and sinister to Mary’s frightened eyes. It was lit by only one small candle placed beside the bed and the dark, saturnine face of her husband seemed to glow above the darkness of his body.
“No, I can’t,” said Mary helplessly. “Not tonight, Hubert. I am not feeling at all the thing. Hubert! Why are you taking off your clothes. You are not attending to me. Leave me alone. I am perfectly capable of undressing myself! Oh, my gown! You monster! You have ripped my gown! Oh, no! Oh, Hubert. Oh, darling…”
The watch announced to the interested that it was two o’clock and a fine night.
In the upstairs bedchamber of the Challenge mansion, Lord Hubert initiated his bride further into the mysteries of the marriage bed. At one point, Mary surfaced from a sea of passion to protest faintly, “The position is awkward and monstrous undignified, my lord.” But her husband, his face strangely drawn and tense in the light of the guttering candle, merely looked down at her and said, “I love you, Mary,” and she closed her eyes, grasped tightly onto the muscles of his shoulders, and forgot everything else.
The watchman announced the three o’clock in a hoarse stentorian voice, as if peeved at his lack of audience.
Mary turned sleepily in bed and looked at her husband. He was wide awake, staring up at the bed canopy.
“Clarissa,” he said. “Clarissa, by all that’s holy.”
He hurtled from the bed and began to put on his clothes with the same rapidity with which he had taken them off.
Mary struggled out of the mists of sleep and fatigue and sat up in bed clutching the crumpled sheets to her naked breasts.
Her husband was emanating a quivering air of excitement, like a war horse scenting battle.
“If you go to Clarissa at this hour,” said Mary in a low, even voice, “our marriage is finished.”
Lord Hubert swung around, staring at her as if not quite hearing or seeing her. “Fustian,” he said vaguely. “I shall return shortly.”
Mary sank back against the pillows, as wave after wave of misery and shock engulfed her. After such a night of love, he had left her to go to Clarissa. He was a degenerate, an unfeeling monster. And she loved him.
She turned her face into the pillows and cried until a pale dawn began to streak the sky.
Chapter 8
A thin drizzle was falling as a hired hack drew up outside Major Freddie Godwin’s house. The Godwins lived in that network of small streets at the back of Park Lane. The houses were the same as those of the grand squares and of Park Lane itself, except that they were much smaller and had the appearance of being squeezed together to make room for as many desirable gentlemen’s residences possible. Even the tiny shops considered it the height of vulgarity to display all their wares in their windows, so that you had to guess that it was, say, the grocers by one basket of plovers eggs in the window, or the bakers by two varnished wooden loaves.
Into this stagnant pool of gentility stepped Lady Mary Challenge at six o’clock in the morning.
She paid off the hack after the driver had deposited her trunks on the pavement, and brushed the straw from the skirt of her carriage dress before mounting the worn steps of the Godwins’ residence. Assuming—quite rightly—that the bell probably did not work, she rapped loudly with the tarnished brass knocker and waited.
There was a long silence and then the slow, shuffling sound of footsteps.
A sleepy, cross butler opened the door a crack and stared disapprovingly at the heavily veiled figure of Lady Mary.
His eye swiveled round the crack, looking for an attendant maid and, finding none, began to close the door again.
Mary put her small half boot in the crack and, made courageous by misery, said in a loud voice, “I am come to see your master. Rouse him immediately or it will be the worse for you.”
The butler opened the door two inches. He wanted to send this unescorted young miss to the rightabout but something in her voice gave him pause.
“Master’s asleep,” he said sulkily. “’Tis dawn and respectable people are abed.”
“Fetch Major Godwin immediately,” said Mary grimly.
Reluctantly the butler opened the door wide and led Mary into a small dingy saloon on the ground floor.
After some time, Mary heard him mount the stairs and then the shrill sounds of an altercation. She could not make out the words but she could recognize Lucy’s voice. Then she heard a heavy tread of the stairs and Major Godwin walked in, looking as if he had hurriedly scrambled into his clothes—as indeed he had.
“Oh, Freddie,” said Mary brokenly. “Take me home.”
“Indeed, yes,” said Freddie equably, as if being roused from his bed at dawn by young matrons was an everyday occurence. “Delighted to be of service. I shall have my carriage brought round directly and you shall be home in St. James’s Square in a few minutes.”
“Not there,” wailed Mary. “I mean home. My parents’ home.”
“Is anything wrong with Hubert?” asked Freddie.
“Everything’s wrong with Hubert,” said Mary bursting into tears. “He-he d-doesn’t l-love me. He’s gone to Clarissa. At three o’clock this morning. He l-left our b-bed and w-went to Clarissa.”
“Here. Steady on. There must be some reasonable explanation.”
“What?” demanded Mary through a mist of tears.
Major Godwin thought long and hard, twisting his sideburns in his large fingers. But it was too unusual and painful an exercise for him, so he at last said dismally, “Don’t know.”
And Mary, who had somehow hoped that he would come up with some dazzling explanation, threw herself into his arms and cried in earnest.
“There, there,” said Freddie helplessly, putting back her veil and trying to dry her eyes with his pocket handkerchief. But she only cried harder than ever, so he merely hugged her close, trying to comfort her as he would a hurt child.
“Philanderer!” cried Lucy from the doorway. “What, pray, is the meaning of this?”
“I’m going off with Mary,” said Major Godwin, made stupid by embarrassment.
“What?” screamed Lucy. “Explain yourself, sir, this instant.”
“Oh, I say,” began the Major awkwardly, about to make his us
ual humble apology. But in that moment, he saw the full blaze of jealousy in his wife’s eyes and recognized it for what it was. He was overcome by a mad desire to hurt Lucy as badly as she had hurt him, so he turned his attention to Mary and stroked her back with a large, comforting hand. He then looked coldly at his furious wife over Mary’s head.
“We’re going off together,” he said, savoring every word.
Lucy glared at him, and then her natural vanity reasserted itself and she laughed, “Stop teasing, Freddie. You would never leave me in a hundred years and you know it. I don’t believe a word of it. And just to show you, I am going back to bed and I am going to leave you to your silly schoolboyish games.”
She gave a malicious little titter and flounced out of the room.
“I’ll escort you,” said Freddie heavily. “Come, Mary. Dry your eyes. It will do us good to leave London for a bit. The servant shall bring you some tea while I fetch my trunk.”
A bare half hour later, Lucy Godwin leapt from bed at the sound of her husband’s carriage being brought round to the front of the house. With unbelieving eyes, she watched the servants strapping her husband’s trunk up at the back, along with Lady Mary Challenge’s luggage. She threw up the window and leaned out.
“Freddie!” she screamed. But the broad back of her husband disappeared into the darkness of the carriage and a footman slammed the door behind him. The coachman on the box cracked his whip, and the carriage swayed off down the narrow street.
Lucy’s beautiful mouth folded into a thin line. Lord Hubert Challenge should hear of this.
Mrs. Witherspoon was awakened by a commotion below her bedroom window. Ever curious, she opened the window and leaned out, her great bosoms spilling over the sill.
A small trunk had rolled from the back of a traveling carriage and had broken open. Fine silks and satins were spilling out into the greasy mud of the street. Mrs. Witherspoon settled her elbows on the sill and prepared herself to thoroughly enjoy every bit of someone else’s misfortune.