Sam had jumped to his feet the moment he saw her and, undeterred even by Harry’s arrival, he was at her side before she could make up her mind. “I know this looks daunting.” He took her hand.
“A true understatement,” she whispered.
“Alex, please—”
“You stay out of this,” Sam ordered, scowling at Harry.
“Sam, be nice to him.”
“I love her, so go home,” Sam said to Harry, and turned back to Alex. “Is that nice enough?”
“You do?”
“Very much.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Alexandra!” Her mother beckoned her with a smile, a very smug smile that she bestowed in turn on each and every one at the tea table.
“Why are my parents—”
“I invited them … actually, I invited your father, but your mother came too; we’re getting along very well.”
Alex stared at him as though he’d suddenly sprouted a second head.
His brows flickered in sportive response. “Really, we are. Do you want to meet my parents? I wouldn’t necessarily wish them on anyone, but since they’re here and you’re here”—he shrugged—“maybe we should get it over with.”
“I’d rather hide.”
“You have to meet them eventually.”
“No I don’t.”
“You do if you’re to be my wife.”
“Obviously, this craziness has infected you.”
He shook his head, glanced around at all the gawking faces, said, “If you’ll excuse us a minute.” Then he turned to Harry because Alex wished him to be nice and said politely, “We’ll be right back.” Tightening his grip on Alex’s hand, he pulled her out into the corridor. “I was hoping to make this more romantic, but under the circumstances”—he nodded in the direction of the drawing room—“I’m afraid any romance is out of the question. Will you marry me? I have already asked your parents’ permission.” He grinned. “Please, just say yes and put me out of my misery.”
She smiled. “I came over to apologize to you. To thank you for saving me from—whoever Ben was.”
“I don’t want an apology. I want you to answer my question. I’ve never really asked anyone to marry me before; I haven’t slept all night for thinking of this.”
“Do you actually know what you’re doing? You don’t have to marry me to sleep with me because I missed you dreadfully last night and I decided my pride could be sacrificed to pleasure.”
“You do like pleasure.”
“Your kind of pleasure.”
“Good. Now, I’m going to need some kind of commitment here, because I’m not the kind of man who deals with amour in a casual way.”
She snorted.
“Not anymore anyway.”
“Allow me to be skeptical.”
“I swear, my word on it. Last night was the longest night of my life. You have to marry me.”
“What about those little pink and white misses in your drawing room?”
“They’re interested only in my bank account.”
“They don’t know what they’re missing.”
He grinned. “And you do.”
“Which is my dilemma. I’m not sure I want to give it up.”
“Good.” His mouth twitched into a smile. “I’m waiting.”
With a man like Ranelagh, every rational impulse urged her to say no. “Yes,” she heard herself say.
“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” he breathed. “And I promise to say yes to you anytime you want.”
Such delectable motivation was impossible to ignore. Whatever remaining caution she possessed fell away. “Do you think they might leave soon?”
“I can assure you they will,” Sam said firmly. “Come, darling, let’s make our announcement. And then I’ll tell them we have to make our wedding arrangements and we need privacy.”
“I don’t want a big wedding.” Someone else seemed to be speaking for her, each new statement more astonishing than the last.
“I have the archbishop waiting down the hall. Is that small enough?”
Suddenly her head was clear, and her gaze turned challenging. “You were pretty sure of yourself.”
“Just hopeful. If you didn’t say yes immediately, I was going to seduce you into saying yes.”
“Do you think that would have worked?”
“Well,” he said calmly, repressing his grin, “based on past experience …”
“Don’t be smug.”
“Never. I apologize. Please, can we get these people to leave? We can argue the nuances later. Please …”
He looked so contrite, it was impossible to refuse. Then he kissed her gently and said thank you with such unutterable sweetness that she was lost.
Chapter 31
Once Sam made his marriage plans plain to his parents, they did what was required of them and acquiesced—with politesse if not grace.
Clarissa, Hedy, and Harry each took their congé with varying degrees of civility, or in Hedy’s case with no civility at all. “Don’t you care about Clara Bowdoin and her coming child?” she inquired spitefully. “Poor Clara will be heartbroken if you marry.”
“Miss Alworth is leaving, Owens,” Sam said grimly. “See her out.”
Everyone pretended not to hear Hedy’s continuing vituperation as she was pushed out of the room by Sam’s butler. Clarissa and Harry abruptly took their leave, the two handsome blond youngsters deep in conversation as they left.
“Now then,” Sam said into the awkward silence.
“Sam, perhaps we should wait,” Alex suggested. “How can it matter if—”
“No.”
She shot him a fractious glance. “Pardon me?”
“I meant, please … I’d rather not wait if you don’t mind, darling.” Ignoring their audience, he smiled for her alone. He pulled her aside, and said in the merest breath of sound, “I’m thirty-three, I love you, and I don’t want to wait.”
“What will people say?”
“Since when did you begin to care what people said?”
“Since I found myself in the middle of this scandalous occasion.”
“What’s scandalous? Your parents are here; my parents are”—he grinned—“unfortunately, also here. It’s broad daylight in my drawing room and I’m offering you my heart, my name, my title, my life.”
“I don’t know,” she equivocated. “Everything’s so sudden. We met only a short while ago.”
“You mean, we finally met. And need I remind you, I’ve never offered a woman what I just offered you, so consider not only the signal honor I’ve afforded you, but my consequence,” he said with a grin. “Furthermore, if you’re concerned about scandal, think how it will look if I pick you up, carry you down the hall to the archbishop, and force you to marry me.”
“I’m well aware of your consequence, my lord, in any number of areas,” she added with a half smile. “And you wouldn’t dare force me.”
“Knowing you”—his lashes drifted downward in suggestion—“I’m not so sure I’d have to, but if I did, I rather think your mother might help me.”
Alex took momentary pause. “That in itself is terrifying, over and above any concern with scandal.”
“This won’t be scandalous in the least, darling. Our sudden marriage will be considered the most captivating of love matches.” He winked. “I’ve been very hard to land, you know.”
She made a moue. “How can I even be thinking of this when I said I’d never marry again?”
“Because you love me and can’t live without me.”
The simplicity of his reply couldn’t be faulted, no more than its veracity. “I do love you,” she replied softly, “and last night was the longest night of my life too.”
Sam smiled faintly. “Then let’s make your mother happy.”
“And give yours an apoplexy.”
He shrugged. “You can’t please everyone.”
A mischievous l
ight brightened her eyes. “I suppose as long as I am …”
“And I …”
He bowed gracefully, offered her his arm, and turned to the remaining guests. “If you’d care to join us in our wedding …”
But Sam was no more tolerant of delay in his wedding ceremony than he was in any other particular of his life. As the archbishop droned on, Sam said, “Just move along to the end, if you please.”
The clergyman’s astonishment lasted only a second —the viscount’s expression was clearly one of impatience. He quickly pronounced the couple before him man and wife.
Ignoring the archbishop’s stern look, Sam thanked him warmly, lifted Alex into his arms, and turned to their parents. “If you’ll excuse us now, we’ll have you all to dinner once we return from our honeymoon.”
“Honeymoon?” Alex blurted out. “I have appointments all week that—”
“Can be canceled.” He was walking toward the door.
“Not all of them.”
“Then, I’ll let you out of bed occasionally to attend them,” he said, exiting into the quiet of the hall.
“Don’t think you can just—”
“Make love to you day and night?”
“No … I mean”—she took a small breath—“did you say day and night?”
He smiled. “And anytime in between …”
Her answering smile was instant. “With such cogent argument, how can I refuse?”
“How indeed, considering I’m so much larger than you—which you like, as I recall. Also, I’m intent on having my way with you—which you also like, and aside from all this talk of sex, I’m thinking at my age we really should seriously contemplate having a child right away. So you see, making love becomes not only a pleasure but a duty. Are you interested in being a dutiful wife?” he inquired, a wicked gleam in his dark gaze, his deep voice lush with suggestion.
“If you agree to be a dutiful husband.”
“You have my word on it, Lady Ranelagh.” He smiled. “I’ll be diligent in my duty, zealous even.”
“How nice.”
“Almost as nice as my finding you,” he replied, gracefully descending the main staircase as though she were weightless in his arms. “I bought Leighton’s painting, by the way.”
“Knowing him, it cost you dearly once he knew you wanted it.”
“It was worth every shilling. I prefer my wife not be naked on the walls of Grosvenor House. And Cassels turned out to be cooperative too.”
Her gaze took on a new directness. “I hope you’re not implying censure of any kind.”
“Not in the least, darling. Pose nude all you wish.” He nodded at the footman opening the front door. “I’m not averse to having a very large personal collection of your modeling.”
“Would you buy them all?”
“I already have.” His shoes crunched on the gravel of the drive as he moved toward his waiting carriage.
Her eyes widened. “You’re going to be very hard to handle.”
Leaning through the open carriage door, he deposited her on the seat. “So will you.”
She grinned. “It should be interesting.”
“It’ll be more than that, darling.” His smile was tantalizingly close as he sat down beside her, his voice heated, low. “It will be pure, undiluted pleasure….”
Epilogue
The viscount’s family enlarged apace, with a baby born in each of the first three years of their marriage. The two boys and a girl brought enormous joy to Sam, who had given up the hope of ever having children. While Alex found that happiness wasn’t so much in independence as in the heart of the whirlwind that made up her life as wife and mother. Her golf improved as Sam designed more courses; their children turned into youthful prodigies on the Lennox fairways. And the parents who had questioned the suitability of the match came to be the most partial advocates of the union—not to mention the most adoring of grandparents.
As a great admirer of his wife’s artistic talents, Sam encouraged Alex to open a gallery of her own, and in the bargain he had his own private gallery of all her portraits he’d purchased. And now when Alex chose to sit as subject, in deference to the man she loved she posed in a modicum of clothing.
They would remark from time to time, with loving glances, how lucky they were to have run into each other that day at Leighton’s. In the interests of harmony, Sam always refrained from mentioning he would have found her wherever she was. In those days, he’d been single-minded in pursuit.
With marriage, his former amusements were no longer of interest. He’d found love and contentment in full measure, and even the most skeptical in society were silenced. The Viscount and Viscountess of Ranelagh, despite the brevity of their courtship, were truly a love match.
It just went to show, the gossips would say—not without a certain incredulity—even the most unbridled libertine could be tamed.
NOTES
1.My heroine, Alex, is a combination of various women from history, but one of them was Angela Burdett-Coutts (1814–1906), the granddaughter of Thomas Coutts (1735–1822), who brought the banking house of Coutts and Co. to prominence and fortune in London. Thomas Coutts was married for almost forty years to Elizabeth Starkey, who bore him three daughters. But when Mrs. Coutts died in 1815, Thomas married the popular actress Harriet Mellon and left her the whole of his immense fortune and the directorship of his bank when he died in 1822. Harriet Mellon married in turn the Ninth Duke of St. Albans in 1827 and died ten years later. Harriet left the duke a modest fortune, but the bulk of her vast wealth and property went to Thomas Coutts’s granddaughter, Angela Burdett, who then assumed the additional name and arms of Coutts.
Angela gave away immense sums of money to charities ranging from the endowment of colonial bishoprics to prizes for costermongers’ donkeys; from the construction of model dwellings in the East End of London to the provision of drinking fountains for dogs. She was particularly concerned with the welfare of women and girls and established and maintained schools for them, as well as providing improved facilities for the training of girls in the national schools. For her wide-ranging philanthropies, she was created a baroness in her own right.
2.Princess Louise, the only one of Queen Victoria’s daughters to be considered anything near a beauty, first met Joseph Edgar Boehm, a Hungarian born in Vienna who had been living in London for six years, when she started classes at the National Art Training School. Fourteen years older than Princess Louise, married with a young family, the blue-eyed, curly-haired, tall, slim, and wiry-like “a battered soldier,” sculptor-in-ordinary to the queen, had achieved fame in English court circles with his statue of Queen Victoria, unveiled at Windsor Castle in 1869.
Princess Louise was already involved with Boehm at this time, and their relationship was of such concern to the queen that she deliberately sought out an appropriate husband for her daughter. Eventually, the Marquess of Lorne, son of the Duke of Argyll, was chosen, because Louise very much wanted to live in Britain, she said, and the fact that Lorne was homosexual may have been an asset. Louise spent very little time with Lorne before they were married on March 21, 1871, at Windsor. Evidence from Louise’s writings suggests that the couple did engage in physical marital relations, although according to some sources the physical relationship ended soon after the honeymoon.
Two years after their marriage, Princess Louise and the Marquess of Lorne moved into an apartment in Kensington Palace, which happened to be close to both Boehm’s studio and his home. Princess Louise continued to practice sculpture, working in Boehm’s studio. In 1878, shortly after her old teacher Mary Thornycroft moved to Melbury Road, Louise had a studio built on the grounds of Kensington Palace. Godwin was her architect, and he explained the task to his architectural students: “I built the studio 17 feet high and put over it a kind of Mansard roof, with windows looking into the garden. The walls are of red brick, there are green slates on the roof to match the old house … and all the light is reflected so as to reduce
the horizontal ceiling as much as possible. This studio seems perfectly satisfactory to the Princess, to Mr. Boehm, the sculptor (for it is a sculptor’s studio) and also to myself.”
The princess’s relationship with Boehm continued throughout the 1880s, and the circumstances of Boehm’s death in his studio in the company of Princess Louise on December 12, 1890, provided the press with much speculation. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s version from his diaries is generally believed:
It was during one of these visits [of the princess to Boehm’s studio] that while he was making love to her Boehm broke a blood-vessel and died actually in the Princess’s arms. There was nobody else in the studio or anywhere about … and the Princess had the courage to take the key of the studio out of the dead man’s pocket, and covered with blood as she was and locking the door behind her, got a cab and drove to Laking’s [the Queen’s physician], whom she found at home and took back with her to the studio. Boehm was dead and they made up a story between them to the effect that it had been while lifting or trying to lift one of the Statues that the accident occurred.
The sculptor Alfred Gilbert, who occupied a studio in the same premises, became an accomplice to their concocted story by taking responsibility for finding the body. Princess Louise championed him for the rest of his life, provided him with accommodations at Kensington Palace in later years, and saw that his ashes were buried at St. Paul’s Cathedral when he died.
3.I’m always interested when I run across another mention of Queen Victoria’s personal servant, John Brown. I mentioned him in the notes for Brazen, and when I was reading about the queen’s daughter, Princess Louise, his name emerged once again because Louise’s lover, Edgar Boehm, was sculpting a bust of John Brown for the queen. (A movie of the relationship between this Scotsman and Queen Victoria, titled Mrs. Brown, starring Judi Dench, was made several years ago.)
According to Queen Victoria’s journal (parts of which were copied by her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, before the original was destroyed—not an unusual circumstance in Victorian times, when appearances counted more than the truth), John Brown in October 1850 was “a good looking, tall lad of twenty-three with fair curly hair, so very good humoured and willing,—always ready to do whatever is asked, and always with a smile on his face.” An indiscreet comment, of course, immediately comes to mind.
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