Those Endearing Young Charms

by M C Beaton

  She had awakened feeling both ill and hungry. Try as she would, she could not remember anything after the first few glasses of wine in the taproom at Market Warborough. She had imagined all sorts of horrors. But Felice had somewhat reassured her by saying that my lord had carried Emily upstairs, as far as she knew, without waking her.

  The earl had hardly spoken on the journey to Maxton Court.

  A footman scratched at the door to announce supper, and Emily hastily finished her toilet and followed him downstairs and then along cold, shadowy passages.

  The dining room was immense and faced north. A huge fire, big enough to roast an ox, did little to alleviate the pervading chill.

  The earl was in evening dress and already seated at one end of the long table. Emily sat at the other and stared at her husband across a long, narrow stretch of white linen, silver, and glass.

  They ate their way through dish after dish, Emily barely tasting her food.

  The tablecloth was then removed and the fruit, nuts, and wine brought in. The servants retired.

  The earl spoke. “If you will pour yourself a glass of wine, you may send it down to me.”

  Emily looked nervously at the little silver wagon on wheels at her elbow, which contained three decanters: port, sherry, and madeira. She poured herself a glass of madeira, carefully put the crystal decanter back on the wagon, and gave it a push. One of the wheels appeared to have jammed. The earl sighed and rapped one long finger on the table.

  She gave it an enormous push. The old floors of the house were uneven and the dining room was on a definite slope. The wagon set off decorously enough, but it gathered momentum as it sped down the long, polished table. The earl put out his hand a second too late. It flew past him and sailed off the end of the table, continued on its journey, and crashed into the far wall.

  “I am so sorry,” babbled Emily, “but you see …”

  “No matter,” said the earl. He stood up and went to retrieve the wagon. The contents were miraculously undamaged. He carried it back to the table and poured himself a glass of port.

  Emily began to giggle nervously. The earl raised his thin eyebrows. Emily began to laugh, and the more supercilious her husband’s expression became, the harder she laughed. “We look so silly,” she gasped at last.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said.

  “There you are!” shouted Emily. “You can barely hear me, which is not in the slightest amazing, since you are seated about a mile away.”

  The earl picked up the decanter in one hand and his glass in the other and walked down the length of the table, pulled out a chair next to Emily, and sat down.

  Emily’s laughter died abruptly, and she shrank back in her chair.

  “Now,” he said evenly, “we have a great deal to discuss.”

  “Yes, Devenham,” whispered Emily.

  She hung her head, her blond curls tumbling about her face. Her evening gown of gold silk was cut low enough to show the rapid rise and fall of two excellent breasts. He wrenched his eyes away and stared stonily down the table. The tremendous attraction she held for him was, he was sure, the result of overlong celibacy. Any woman who was not precisely an antidote would have held the same attraction.

  “The situation is this,” he said, taking a sip of wine and placing the glass carefully on the table. “We are locked in a marriage that is distasteful to both of us. This was brought about by your childish play-acting and interference.”

  Emily flushed with anger. She felt her action had not been without a certain amount of nobility.

  “But, here we are. I expect you to learn the role of a countess. That is not too much to ask. I expect you to entertain with dignity and decorum such guests as I may choose. You will not see much of me. I have a great deal to do.

  “If you behave yourself in what I may judge a suitable manner, then you may be allowed to go home on a short visit. I do not want your family here. If I decide that you have fulfilled your side of the bargain, then I might take you to London for the coming Season. I will eventually want an heir. But we will leave that side of things until later.”

  “And what is your side of the bargain?” demanded Emily.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. You have discussed my side of the bargain. What do you see as yours?”

  The earl frowned. He thought hard. He could not really see that there was another side of the bargain. He felt he had behaved in an amazingly charitable and dignified manner. But she was looking at him, her wide brown eyes fixed on his face.

  He cleared his throat. “For my part,” he said, “I will behave to you in public as any faithful and devoted husband would. You will be allowed a certain amount of pin money for clothes and trinkets and those rubbishy books you like to addle your brains with.”

  “I am going to be very lonely,” said Emily, thinking of the endless rooms and corridors in this black mansion. “I would like a pet. A dog or a cat.”

  “No,” he said firmly. “Dogs belong in the kennels and cats in the stables or kitchens to keep down the rats. I cannot tolerate animals who do not work.”

  “It’s a great wonder you manage to live with yourself,” muttered Emily.

  “I work very hard, that is when I am not engaged in marrying the wrong person. It is time for you to leave me to my port.”

  “Gladly.”

  He arose and assisted Emily from her chair. “There is one more thing, Devenham,” she said, putting a timid hand on his sleeve. He looked at the hand with such rigid distaste that she quickly withdrew it.

  “Yes?” he demanded, wondering what piece of trivia she was going to request. Her next words brought home to him with force that he was never going to know what to expect next from this wife of his.

  “Are you going to kill me?” she said.

  “Am I …? Don’t be so gothic. How could you think of such a thing!”

  “Easily,” said Emily, calm now that she had got the dreadful words out. “You tied me up in a sack and you kicked me in the head.”

  “I tied you up to save scandal. I was not aware which part of your anatomy I was kicking. I heard the preliminaries of a sneeze and was doing my best to put a stop to it. Had I known where I was kicking, then I should have kicked you in the nose.”

  “Brute!”

  “Modify your language, ma’am. Besides, I did not kick you; I nudged you with my foot.”

  “You kicked me,” said Emily, looking mulish.

  “I did not! I …” He closed his mouth in a thin line. He had never understood, until now, why married couples went in for endless, pointless arguments about who did what to whom. Now he felt he knew.

  He sat down at the table again and picked up his glass.

  Emily curtsied to the back of his head and stalked out of the room.

  Upstairs, Emily composed herself and sat down to write a lying letter to Mary. For a time Emily was happy as she penned the fiction of how content she was, gradually building up a picture of an ideal marriage.

  When she had finished, she firmly sanded and sealed the letter, and then turned her thoughts to the predicament she was in.

  Well, it was not so bad after all, she told herself. She was a countess, and that must count for something. Then she had this lovely home. At that moment, the wind whistled in the ivy and blew a puff of smoke down the chimney. Emily picked up a shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders. Lovely home, she repeated firmly.

  The furniture in the bedroom was dark, massive, and Jacobean. I don’t believe a new stick has been added to this place since the house was built, thought Emily. It would be fun to redecorate. But probably old fusty-dusty Peregrine likes it just the way it is. Nonetheless, it was an ancestral home. Next, she was not immediately threatened with any of those terrifying intimacies of marriage. And thirdly, she might find some jolly friends among the local county to lighten the tedium of her days. For the first time in her life, she would be socially acceptable.

  Telling herself that things were re
ally not too bad at all, Emily went to bed. But it was a long time before she slept. Despite Devenham’s promise, she could not help waiting and watching the door, expecting him to enter at any moment.

  She lay rigid, as, at last, she heard him mounting the stairs. But he passed her rooms and went to his own, his even step in the passageway outside not slackening its pace for a moment.

  Then Emily slept.

  During the next few weeks, Emily was kept very busy. She had not yet learned the gentle art of saying she was not at home to callers, and so the drawing room at Maxton Court often had as many as ten people at a time.

  As news got about of the pretty little countess’s hospitality, more people began to call, people who had never set foot in Maxton Court before, but Emily was not to know that.

  She carefully kept a log of all her callers, together with their cards, so that she would have something to talk to her husband about in the evenings.

  But the earl was absent. He spent most of the day about the estates. He went to a boxing match in the next county. He went to London for two weeks. On his fleeting appearances at home, he had his supper on a tray in the library.

  The weather was cold and still, the whole countryside frozen under a thick coating of frost, which burned and glittered under a red winter sun.

  Bored and restless, Emily ordered out the carriage and began to make calls herself.

  There was the vicar, Mr. Graham, and his wife Martha, and their brood of children in the shabby vicarage. A dull but pleasant visit.

  Then there were the Misses Parsons, two spinster ladies who lived in genteel poverty in a damp cottage under the shadow of the church. A most enjoyable visit.

  The squire, Sir Basil Leech, and his two fat and jolly daughters came next on the list. After them, Lord and Lady Nightingale, chilly and grand and condescending. They had heard of the new countess’s lowly origins. Emily decided not to call again.

  Mindful of her new duties, she turned her attention to the tenant farmers and farm laborers. It was about this time that Emily began to enjoy herself. She was a good listener and had been starved for company. She like helping people and was amazed at how grateful they could be for the smallest attention. She started to set out with saddlebags full of medicine from the still room, cakes, biscuits, and sweetmeats from the kitchen, and wine from the cellars.

  She gave only to the needy, not wanting to be accused of giving away her husband’s provender to people who did not need it.

  Her fussy, dainty clothes began to irk her, and so she mostly wore riding dress of a mannish cut, with a little hard hat with a veil on her head.

  She sometimes thought uneasily that her husband would not approve of all this socializing with the farm laborers, and cringed when he appeared back from town one day, obviously having come in search of her, to find her on the floor of a laborer’s cottage, playing with the baby.

  But he only said mildly that he had come to escort her home.

  Nonetheless, he looked so grim and forbidding that Emily’s heart plumped right down to her serviceable boots. She would not admit to herself that the memory of that one and only kiss often came to plague her during the long cold nights, and that, at times, the sexlessness of her marriage made her feel less than a woman.

  She decided the earl was angry because he obviously thought her enjoyment in the laborer’s cottage was simply because she herself came from a lowly background.

  The earl had, in fact, received a severe jolt in the solar plexus at the sight of his wife. The very mannishness of her dress made her seem extremely sweet and feminine. Stopping off at the inn before journeying home, he had heard of her great popularity in the village.

  He was amazed and delighted at Emily’s behavior, and, yes, he had to admit, he was proud of her. The charms of Mrs. Cordelia Haddington, which he had savored not so long ago, had done much to drive the humiliations of the Ansteys from his mind. Since Mrs. Haddington was a society widow and definitely not a member of the Fashionable Impure—or he would not have been able to afford her in the days of his captaincy—he knew that she had hoped for marriage and had rather dreaded a scene. But the generous Cordelia had welcomed him back into her life, her bed, and her clever, clever hands without so much as a murmur of complaint. He enjoyed her witty, malicious tongue and her understanding sympathy, and before he knew what he was about, he had told her of the trials and complexities of his marriage.

  Now, with Emily beside him in his carriage, he felt he had been disloyal, and paradoxically blamed Emily for that uncomfortable feeling.

  Emily became increasingly gloomy because she smelled another woman. It was not that her husband reeked of scent. It was a certain relaxed air about his body and a used look about the skin of his lips, and, oh, nothing she could really explain.

  But his next words surprised her. “I am very pleased with your behavior, Emily. Your calls on our tenants are much appreciated, and it will save me a great deal of work if you will write me a list of those in need of care and if anyone has been complaining about the lack of repairs to his property. I can then attend to things myself when you are gone.”

  “Gone? Gone, where?”

  “Home. I thought you would enjoy a visit to your sister.”

  The earl looked surprised when a shadow crossed Emily’s face. He did not know Emily was dreading returning home, where she would have to act the part of that silly Emily she had played at the wedding.

  “And what will you do?” she asked.

  “Do? I have plenty to do. The land must be clayed and marled, and I want to introduce the method of four-crop rotation. This way, I will be able to grow wheat where only rye has grown before. We must have improved animals and modern farm implements. Starving workers make bad workers, as starving soldiers make bad soldiers. The welfare of our tenant farmers and their laborers must be studied. Education for the children must be organized. Stupid farmers are also bad farmers.”

  “And what about her?” asked Emily in a thin little voice. “Will she be arriving as soon as my trunks are packed?”

  He flashed her a look and continued as if he had not heard. “Salmon, the Duke of Bedford’s surveyor, has invented many farm machines that I would like to see used here….”

  “You did not answer my question.”

  “I never answer questions in bad taste.”

  He stretched his long legs in their riding boots.

  Emily burned with jealousy, although she did not yet recognize the emotion that was making her so angry.

  This was her property, this husband. He was so formidable and austere it seemed unbearable to think that any other woman had had the magic to make those firm lips cover her own, to make that long hard body …

  Tears flowed into Emily’s eyes and she turned her head away.

  “Yes, I will go home,” she said.

  The Elms was unchanged in that all the furniture and wallpaper had been changed. Emily’s old, narrow bed had been thrown out and a large four-poster put in its place, no doubt to accommodate the extra body when she brought her husband home.

  Emily allowed herself to be paraded before the local county, to the delight of her parents. She delighted them further by adopting the worst of her husband’s manner. Mary privately thought Emily was behaving very badly indeed, but Mr. and Mrs. Anstey assured each other gleefully that their little Emily was every inch a countess now and had learned to sneer in a way that put everyone else in the shade.

  Mary looked forward to getting Emily to herself so that she could find out what was really going on, but, to her horror, Emily carried her new countess manner into the house and up the stairs. It was like having some awful stranger in the house.

  The fact that Christmas was to fall during Emily’s visit home seemed to be the only thing that Mary could see that cracked the icy facade her sister wore. Mary was sure Emily felt she, Emily, should be at Maxton Court for Christmas.

  The earl had been generous with his pin money, so Emily was able to buy expens
ive presents, although that was not such a novelty since she had always been very well provided for. Emily was plagued by visions of Christmas celebrations at Maxton Court, with that unknown lady taking her place at table and welcoming the local county.

  The marriage had not been consummated. That much Emily knew, although she still did not know what consummation entailed. Devenham could call his lawyers and have the marriage annulled.

  Then you would be free, her ever-active conscience pointed out.

  Not without a fight, replied her illogical emotions.

  You’re like a dog with a bone, snapped her conscience. You don’t want him but you don’t want anyone else to have him.

  What’s wrong with that? sneered her emotions.

  And so the battle went on in Emily’s head as Christmas with its attendant celebrations came and went. Devenham had said he would send the carriage for her, but December moved into January and the carriage did not come. Emily grew weary of acting the part of a haughty countess. She grew thinner and paler.

  “There is something badly wrong with her,” Mary confided to Mr. Cummings. “It is like living with an actress.”

  “Our marriage will not have any shadow over it,” said Mr. Cummings, and kissed her so passionately that Mary forgot about her sister’s troubles, for a time at least.

  When Mary returned home and was passing Emily’s room, she heard to her dismay the sound of noisy weeping.

  She quietly pushed open the door and went in. The room was in darkness. She lit the candles and turned to the sobbing figure on the bed.

  “Emily, it is I, Mary. What is the matter?”

  “He remembered my Christmas present,” came a harsh, muffled voice from the bed.

  “Devenham? The roads have been bad, Emily. It is possible …”

  “Look!” Emily raised a tear-stained face from the pillow.

  A jewel box lay open on the bed. A gold and garnet necklace winked in the candlelight.

  “It is exceedingly pretty,” said Mary.

  “Read the letter.”

  Mary picked up a crumpled piece of parchment and smoothed it out.