by M. C. Beaton
“There will be one in today,” said Lord Ranger, “announcing our forthcoming marriages. To state that we were married already, and at Gretna, would have caused a great deal of unnecessary scandal.”
“So what of your parents?” asked Lady Harrington. “Have they forgiven you?”
“We wrote to them to say we were coming here to stay,” said Jilly, “and that if they wished to see us properly married in church, they were welcome to come. I hope we have not presumed too much, my lady. But we did so want to surprise you.”
“We will give you a wedding to remember,” said Lady Harrington. “But wedding gowns! You do not want provincial wedding gowns.”
“We have splendid wedding gowns in our baggage,” said Mandy. “Lord Paul’s mother, the Duchess of Barshire, insisted on ordering them for us. We shall be so grand. Oh, it is so good to be home.”
“Yes, it is home to us,” said Jilly.
“And where will you live?” asked Sir John.
“We shall settle somewhere near here,” said Lord Ranger. “Jilly wants somewhere exactly like Greenbanks.”
“You will find it easy to find a place,” remarked Sir John. “So many families are ruined at the gambling tables of St. James’s and have to put their estates on the market.”
“Come, girls,” said Lady Harrington, getting to her feet. “You shall have your old rooms.”
Sir John gave a little cough. “Not their old rooms exactly, my dear. Married ladies now.”
“Goodness, my wits are wandering. Jilly’s old room is quite suitable for herself and her husband, and Mandy’s old room can be used by both of them as a dressing room, and Mandy and Lord Paul can have the Blue Room, which James uses when he is here.”
Laughing and chattering, they went up the old staircase, Jilly saying over and over that they had never expected to see Greenbanks again.
The cheerful maids bustled about, unpacking their clothes. Jimmy was sent off to the village to carry the glad news, and soon a little procession, headed by the squire, Sir William Black, and his family, could be seen heading up the drive.
Will I ever be as competent as Lady Harrington? thought Jilly as that lady calmly coped with this unexpected houseful of guests and visitors.
Mr. and Mrs. Davenport were returning from a visit to neighbors. There was no Abigail with them. They had pensioned her off, persuading each other that the reason was that their girls had left so there was no further need for her services, where the real reason was that the very sight of her filled them with guilt. They were convinced Jilly and Mandy were living in sin with a couple of aristocratic rakes who had seduced them. They had given up scanning the newspapers, hoping for some kind of announcement.
Mrs. Davenport had written many angry letters to the Harringtons, accusing them of having corrupted their daughters, but somehow had not the heart to post any of them.
Pride had forced them to tell their friends and neighbors that their daughters were still in the South on an extended visit. They were so used to being smugly righteous that they hardly knew how to cope with all these new feelings of nagging guilt. Their attendance at church had slowly fallen off. Once they had gone every day of the week. Now they only went reluctantly on Sundays. There was a new vicar, not like the old hellfire one, who preached love and charity, and sometimes the miserable Davenports felt he had guessed their secret and was speaking directly to them.
The postboy sounded his horn outside, but Mrs. Davenport remained where she was. For the past few months, she had run out to meet him, hoping for news until hope had died.
The footman came in and bent low before Mrs. Davenport with a silver tray on which several letters lay. In practically every other household, the post was given to the master, but Mrs. Davenport had made it clear long ago that she expected to read all letters first.
She took the letters and opened the first one, which was sealed with a heavy blob of wax embossed with a crest.
She stared down at the first lines and then looked at the signature at the bottom of the page. “It is from Jilly,” she said weakly. “I cannot read it.”
Her husband twitched it out of her hands, scrabbled in the folds of his cravat for his quizzing glass, and then studied it.
“Jilly is married,” he said in a wondering voice, “to Lord Ranger, and Mandy to Lord Paul. They were married at Gretna, but both want to be remarried in church. They have gone to Lady Harrington’s to be married there and say that if we join them, we are more than welcome!”
He took the other letters. There was one from Mandy, one from Lord Ranger, and one from Lord Paul.
“Lord Paul says the notice of the forthcoming marriage has been sent to the newspapers and that both his parents and Lord Paul’s will be in attendance.”
Mrs. Davenport had begun to cry. She felt as if the weight of centuries had been lifted from her.
“Of course, we would not dream of attending,” said Mr. Davenport wrathfully. “To have connived in that highwaymen masquerade, to have shamed our name, to have gone to those Harringtons, who caused all the trouble in the first place…”
But his wife was not listening. She rubbed her eyes and then said in a firm voice, “I have heard Lord Paul’s mother, the Duchess of Barshire, is vastly fashionable. There is no time surely to have something made, but I had my purple gown made in London. Yes, that will do very well. Oh, so much to arrange. Oh, thank God!”
And leaving her amazed husband staring after her, she bustled from the room.
Lady Harrington was walking with Jilly by the pond the day before the wedding. “You must not let the absence of your mother and father upset you, dear,” she said. “They do not deserve your concern.”
“They are, however, our mother and father,” said Jilly in a low voice, “and somehow I would have liked their blessing. They were, you see, both of them brought up very strictly and they continued with us. I can see now that I am removed from them that they were doing what they thought best for us.”
“Well, I hope they don’t come. I have enough on my hands,” snapped Lady Harrington, who was feeling the strain of having two dukes and two duchesses who expected strict formality under her roof.
Both had arrived with retinues of servants who had to be billeted in and around the village, and both had insisted that their footmen be present to serve all meals and that their French chefs take control of the kitchens. Lady Harrington sighed. Having such an abundance of servants should have made life easier, but there were just too many of them, and the footmen had to be watched every moment in case they seduced the Harrington maids.
“I am glad to hear your in-laws are leaving directly after the wedding,” said Lady Harrington. “I feel like one of those poor landowners surviving a visit from Queen Elizabeth.”
Marquees were being erected in the gardens to house the guests. Colonel Tenby had arrived home for the wedding and had insisted on housing as many of the guests as he could.
They walked back together side by side to the house.
Then Jilly looked down the drive and said in an amazed voice, “But that is our carriage.”
“So? What of it? Probably Lord Ranger and Lord Paul coming back from somewhere.”
“No,” said Jilly. “I mean my parents’ carriage. They have come.”
As they reached the house, Mandy came out with Lord Ranger and Lord Paul.
Jilly and Lady Harrington joined them. “Remember,” urged Lady Harrington, “they can do nothing to you now.”
The steps were let down and the Davenports descended.
Mrs. Davenport, dressed more fashionably than either of her daughters had ever seen her, stood looking at them for a moment and then said in a small voice they had never heard her use before, “We are come for your wedding.”
Jilly and Mandy ran to hug her, and Mrs. Davenport began to cry while Mr. Davenport furiously blew his nose.
Lady Harrington drew Lord Ranger and Lord Paul into the house. “Leave them to it,” she said crossly. �
�Though, by God, it’s more than that precious pair deserve.”
The little church was crowded the next day and the streets leading to the village were jammed with carts, gigs, and post chaises, everyone having traveled from far and wide to see this fashionable double wedding.
Margaret Andrews and Belinda Charteris had traveled from London to be bridesmaids. Lady Harrington clutched her husband’s hand hard as Mr. Davenport, with a daughter on each arm, walked up the aisle.
The girls were in white Brussels lace embroidered with rich gold thread and seed pearls. Each had a coronet of pearls and gold wire holding their veils.
Lady Harrington’s eyes filled with tears and she dabbed them furiously with her handkerchief. On her other side Mrs. Davenport began to weep as well.
For both of them the service passed in a tear-soaked blur until the village band broke into a jolly tune and the bells in the steeple crashed out to proclaim the glad tidings to the waiting crowd outside that Jilly and Mandy were married.
Somehow drawn together now, Lady Harrington and Mrs. Davenport stood together as Jilly and Mandy were helped into the flower-bedecked wedding carriage and were then followed by their husbands. Flower petals were thrown from all around. The crowd sent up a great cheer and the carriage moved off through the crowded narrow village street.
Everyone vowed the wedding was the best ever once the marquees were full to bursting point with everyone eating and drinking, for Lady Harrington had invited the whole village.
Then there was dancing and then suddenly Lord Ranger and Lord Paul escorted their brides from the marquee and went towards the house.
“Thank goodness it all went so well,” said Lady Harrington to Mrs. Davenport. “Tomorrow when they have all gone, you and I will put our feet up and have a comfortable coze.”
“It is a wonder they don’t hate me,” mumbled Mrs. Davenport.
“What you need,” said Lady Harrington firmly, “is a glass of champagne.”
“I never drink!”
“It is your daughters’ wedding. Have one glass and we will toast them.”
Soon Mrs. Davenport was sipping champagne. Her husband looked about to protest, but then he changed his mind. In his mind’s eye he still walked down that aisle with two of the most beautiful girls in the world.
Lord Ranger slowly undid the tapes at the back of his wife’s wedding dress and let it fall to the floor.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked softly, turning her around to face him.
“I was thinking about Christmas,” said Jilly. “I was thinking that miracles do happen.”
He picked her up in his arms and carried her to the bed and removed the rest of her clothes and then his own. No one, he thought with a burst of gladness as he gathered that well-loved body into his arms, had ever told his unsophisticated bride that ladies should not indulge in passion.
And then as he covered her naked body with his own and began to kiss her, he forgot about everything else.
Part VII
The Perfect Gentleman
Chapter 1
The marriage proposal of Lord Andrew Childe, younger son of the Duke and Duchess of Parkworth, was everything it should have been.
For Lord Andrew did everything well. He was handsome and faultlessly dressed. He was a famous whip, he boxed with Gentleman Jackson, he read ancient Greek easily, and he wrote witty poems in Latin.
He saw no reason to trouble himself by pursuing some debutante at the London Season. Some time before it had begun, before the leaves were yet on the trees, he had singled out Miss Ann Worthy as his future bride.
Lord Andrew was thirty-two and considered young misses insipid. Miss Worthy was twenty-eight and hailed from the untitled aristocracy. From her long, aristocratic nose to her long, narrow feet, she was every inch a lady. She never betrayed any vulgar excess of emotion or committed any common faux pas.
Only an admirer of Lord Byron or some such woolly headed creature would have criticized Lord Andrew’s proposal, might have pointed out that the very passionless chilliness of it showed a sad flaw in the character of the Perfect Gentleman—Lord Andrew’s nickname.
He had broached the matter to her parents first and had been accepted by them.
He was left alone with Miss Worthy for a short space of time in the blue saloon of the Worthys’ town house in Curzon Street.
Miss Worthy was sitting in front of a tambour frame, neatly putting stitches into a design of bluebells. She affected not to know what was in the air.
He stood in the doorway for a moment, watching her.
She was attired in an expensive morning gown of tucked and ruched white muslin. A cap of pleated muslin almost hid the thick tresses of her red hair. Her nose was long and straight, and her mouth small enough to please the highest stickler. Her pale green eyes veiled by red and gold lashes might have been thought to be a trifle too close-set. Her hands were very long and white.
Although she knew very well Lord Andrew was standing there, and why he had come, she continued to stitch for that short minute before turning her head and affecting a start of surprise.
“Lord Andrew!” she exclaimed. She rose with a graceful movement and went to sit on a backless sofa in front of the cold fireplace—for the Worthys did not light fires after the first of March, no matter what the weather.
“Good afternoon, Miss Worthy,” said Lord Andrew. “I trust I find you well?”
“Very well, my lord. Pray be seated.”
He was carrying his hat, cane, and gloves—that traditional sign that a gentleman did not intend to stay very long. He laid them down on a small table, approached the sofa, and fell to one knee in front of her.
“Miss Worthy,” he said, “I have leave from your parents to pay my addresses to you. I wish to marry you. Will you accept me?”
“Yes, my lord.”
He stood up and took her hand and drew her to her feet. He bent his head and kissed her on the mouth. The day was cold. Icy lips met icy lips in a chaste embrace.
Right on cue, Mr. and Mrs. Worthy made their entrance. The happy couple stood hand in hand, gracefully accepting congratulations. Mr. Worthy, thin and ascetic and longing to get back to his beloved books, called for champagne after having been nudged in the ribs by his small, dumpy wife.
Lord Andrew took a glass, toasted his fiancée, toasted his future in-laws, and then took his leave.
All just as it should have been.
With the long, easy stride of a practiced athlete, he walked to his parents’ house in Park Lane—although it, like the neighboring houses, still faced onto Park Street. Not so long ago Park Lane had been Tyburn Lane of dubious repute. There was not much of a view of Hyde Park, for the high wall which had been built to screen the residents from the condemned on their way to the scaffold was still there. One enterprising resident had had part of the wall removed and the entrance to his house made leading from Park Lane itself, but the rest still preferred to keep to Park Street, which was still the front entrance for the rest of the houses.
Up until that moment when he walked into his parents’ house and made his way to the library, Lord Andrew would have considered himself the most fortunate and happiest of men. Unlike most younger sons, he was very rich, having been given one of the minor ducal houses and estates as his own. By studying all the latest innovations in scientific farming, he had made it prosper. The money from his estates had been carefully invested. He could have afforded his own town house and could have lived completely independently from his family if he chose.
But the Duchess of Parkworth had managed to turn the large town house into a home. It had an air of ease and prettiness and elegance. Lord Andrew found it restful.
In his early years, he had not seen very much of his parents from one year’s end to the other. He had an excellent tutor whose job it was to turn him into a gentleman. Lord Andrew had admired this tutor greatly. And so Lord Andrew went to Oxford University, and then on the Grand Tour with his tutor, and the
n into the army to “round him off.”
When his tutor, Mr. Blackwell, died while he was away at the wars, Lord Andrew felt as if he had lost a father. Mr. Blackwell had orchestrated the forming of Lord Andrew’s character, down to choosing his tailor. He had even seen to it that my lord had lost his virginity at a suitably early age at the hands of a lusty and bawdy housemaid. That last experience had caused Lord Andrew to acquire a certain distaste for the female sex. But on the whole, he was happy and carefree and interested in perfecting everything he turned his hand to, always trying to live up to the high standards of his now deceased tutor.
But as he sat down in the library and gazed at the flickering flames of the fire, he felt, for the first time, uncomfortable inside his own skin.
Usually when he had done just as he ought, he could see in his mind’s eye Mr. Blackwell’s smile of approval. But all he could think of was that chilly kiss. What else did he expect? Marriage was one thing, lust another.
He usually looked forward to the Season as a break from the cares of agriculture. He enjoyed racing and fencing and dancing, the opera, plays, and parties. He did not have to attend the House of Lords. That chore fell to the eldest son, the Marquess of Bridgeworth, who enjoyed making long and boring speeches on the game laws.
But for the first time, Lord Andrew began to feel uneasily bored. He remembered when he had been very small, his nurse promising to take him to the servants’ Christmas party. He had lain awake for nights before the great event, trembling with anticipation. But then his nurse had told him that his mother, the duchess, had learned of her plans, and he was not to attend.
He had not cried, for he knew even then that men of five years old did not cry. But life had seemed to lose color for quite a long time afterwards.
That was what he felt like now, as if he had just experienced a disappointment.
He shook himself and decided his spleen must be disordered from lack of exercise. He would go riding in the park.