by Rebecca Dean
Chapter Sixteen
Though he’d had no opportunity to visit Lily again, Piers was still euphoric at how well things had gone on their afternoon out together. His heart beat faster whenever he remembered how pleased Lily had been to see him, and how she had been so interested in everything he’d said, hanging on to his every word.
His experience with her was so different from the stilted unsatisfactory experience he’d previously had with young women that he knew he couldn’t let her slip out of his life. Until now he’d barely given a thought to marrying. Now he could think of nothing else.
Because of the grand occasions taking place during coronation week he’d had no opportunity to contact his father and speak to him about his intentions with regard to Lily, but as soon as he and Prince Edward returned from the Coronation Fleet Review at Spithead, he was going to do so. Until then, he was deeply grateful that the review was an occasion absorbing all Edward’s attention.
Since Edward was being educated at the world’s most prestigious naval college, this wasn’t, of course, too much of a surprise. Even Piers, an army, not a navy man, was impressed by the sight in front of them as they steamed out of Portsmouth’s great dockyard and into the Solent aboard the royal yacht. There, in breathtaking magnificence, the entire British fleet was arrayed in review lines, full flags flying, their upper decks manned.
“What a sight, May! What a sight!” Piers heard King George say to Queen Mary. For once he had to agree with his King. No country in the world had a navy to rival Britain’s—not even Germany, where the shipyards at Kiel were building battleships as fast as was humanly possible.
“D’you know how many battleships and dreadnoughts are out there, Cullen?” David suddenly said to him. “Thirty-two. And they are backed up by twenty-four armored cruisers, sixty-seven destroyers, twelve torpedo boats, and eight submarines. I wish I was serving as an officer aboard one of them.”
“Yes, sir,” Piers said, knowing that if such a day should come, he would be replaced as Edward’s equerry by a naval officer.
The royal yacht was nearing the lines, and the world suddenly exploded in thunderous, deafening noise as twenty-one guns began firing a royal salute.
Only with great effort did Piers stop himself from wincing. As the smoke finally cleared away and the royal yacht began steaming slowly down the first of the review lines, he wondered how long his position as an equerry was likely to last. He certainly still wanted to be Edward’s equerry when he married Lily. That way Edward would be in attendance at their wedding and, with luck, might be there as his best man.
They had reached the first of the battleships, and three great cheers went up from the men lining her decks. At moments like this he liked to pretend that the cheers were for him. That his position and Edward’s were reversed. Only he wouldn’t have Edward as an equerry, not even in his imagination.
He would have someone far more forceful.
He would have someone like himself.
Unlike Piers Cullen, Hal Green never indulged in daydreams. At thirty-two he was the youngest editor on Fleet Street. It was a position he’d gained via brilliant talent, tireless energy, and family connections, for his uncle, Gerald Fielding, was the press baron, Lord Westcliff.
That nepotism was responsible for his position as editor of the Daily Despatch rode easily on Hal’s shoulders, for he knew that even without Gerald he would have become the editor of a newspaper of similar stature. His own hungry talent would have seen to that. The only difference would have been that the editorship would have taken a little longer to achieve.
He surveyed the morning’s headlines, well pleased with them. The Despatch’s crusade for first-division status for imprisoned suffragettes was causing a furor—which was just what he had set out to achieve. Rose Houghton’s visit had so piqued his interest about how suffragettes were being treated in the third division that he had applied to visit Holloway in order to see conditions for himself.
It had been a request that had been refused.
Hal hadn’t been too concerned. Such a refusal, when publicized as he could publicize it, was all grist to his mill. Also, because he never took no for an answer, he knew he’d eventually get the visit he was after.
“I intend running a weekly page devoted entirely to suffragette issues,” he said in a telephone call to Rose. “It will have the headline ‘A Woman’s Voice’ and feature articles by leaders of all suffrage societies and reports of any forthcoming suffrage activities. I’d like your friend, Lady Daphne, to write an article detailing her experiences in the third division—and I’d like to meet with her. D’you think you could arrange that?”
“I can try,” she said crisply.
He severed the connection, his mouth quirking into a smile. Rose Houghton’s masculine-like forthrightness and her obvious, though unexpressed, low opinion of men amused him vastly.
He tapped a pen against his teeth, wondering what her prose style was like. She wouldn’t have had much education; girls of her class rarely did. She’d probably been educated by private tutors with a few “polishing” months at a finishing school in France—where the only academic subject would have been French. Her eyes, however, were fiercely intelligent—as well as beautiful—and instinct told him that anything she wrote would be commercially compelling as well as incisive.
If he was right in his assumption, there was no reason why the Daily Despatch shouldn’t be the first national newspaper to employ a female journalist. Doing so would tie in very nicely with the present campaign—and even when the campaign was over, there was room for a woman’s slant on national topics. The controversy such an appointment would arouse would increase circulation figures, just as the controversy caused by the present campaign was increasing them.
He pushed his chair away from his desk and rose to his feet. He was due to meet with his uncle at the Savoy in half an hour and was going to add the possibility of Rose being employed by the Daily Despatch to their agenda. Gerald would be aghast, Hal knew, but he would talk him round to the idea.
Just as he would talk Rose Houghton round to the idea.
Stepping out of the building and onto Fleet Street, he ignored the chauffeured Daimler that was at his beck and call and began strolling in the direction of the Strand.
Lord Jethney was sunk in so deep a depression he could barely bring himself to be civil to people. With his decision to end his relationship with Marigold, all the joy had gone out of his life. Time after time he told himself he was being ridiculous. He was, after all, a very fortunate man. He came from a family that had been prestigious since the time of the Tudors. He was well respected. He was wealthy. He was healthy. He had two handsome, intelligent sons and he had a wife who loved him. He had, in fact, all that a sane, reasonable man could wish for. But he wasn’t happy, and in his blackest moments, he seriously wondered if he would ever be happy again. All because of a nineteen-year-old girl he had known since her birth—a girl who was young enough to be his daughter.
Sophisticated though he was, nothing in his experience had prepared him for Marigold. It had simply never occurred to him that a girl so young—and brought up as she had been brought up—could be so sexually teasing.
Never in a million years would he have thought that instead of disapproval, his reaction would be to fall headlong, crazily in love with her. He was forty-six. Men of forty-six didn’t lose their heads in such a way. If and when they indulged in love affairs, they were always carefully in control of the affair. It didn’t disrupt their lives, never disrupted their marriages, and they never, ever, became enslaved.
He, fool that he was, had become completely enslaved. It was only because Marigold’s grandfather was one of his oldest, dearest friends that he had found the willpower to put an end to the insanity. Herbert Houghton was a man of integrity and honor and thought he, Jethney, was equally honorable. To have Herbert realize otherwise—to have him know that his hospitality had been taken advantage of and his granddaughter deflo
wered—was a horror so unspeakable he’d found a strength he would otherwise have been utterly unable to summon.
But it was when he had exercised that strength that the unimaginable had happened. Instead of being devastated that he was putting an end to their love affair, Marigold had merely been petulant. Then, as if it wasn’t of the slightest importance, she had told him that he hadn’t been her first lover. Who, then, had been? The thought tormented him. Had it been someone he knew? Had it been one of his many close friends?
He strode toward the chief whip’s office, his jaw clenched so hard his teeth hurt. Had it perhaps been the son of one of his friends? Someone young. Someone single. Someone who might still be in love with her and might ask her to marry him?
Clenching his jaw even harder he came to a halt outside the chief whip’s office, wishing to God that he was still a bachelor. If he were, he wouldn’t be suffering as he was now suffering. He would have put a ring on Marigold’s finger and lashed her to him so tightly she would never have looked at another man again.
As he tried to order his thoughts before entering the office, a wave of shame washed over him. How, in the name of all that was holy, could he be thinking such thoughts? How could he be wishing he had never married Jerusha, who had never said, or done, an unkind thing to him in all the years of their married life?
Desperately trying to focus his thoughts on the subject of the meeting ahead of him—Lansdowne’s proposition that the House of Lords should consist mainly of indirectly elected members—he put his hand on the brass door handle and turned it, knowing that after his behavior of the last few months he needed to be horsewhipped.
The Honorable Toby Mulholland was wrestling with the most difficult decision he had ever faced. Did he do what his family, and Iris and Iris’s family, so clearly expected of him and propose to Iris, or did he make it crystal clear that he was never going to do any such thing?
His platoon was in the middle of a training exercise in Windsor Great Park and as he automatically went through drills that were second nature to him, he passionately wished that he was at Sissbury. Sissbury and Iris were, for him, inextricably linked and, if he had to make a decision about her, it seemed only right that the decision should be made where, ever since they were children, they had spent so much time together.
He felt he should be at Sissbury for other reasons as well. Sissbury lay so close to Snowberry that at one point the two estates marched side by side for nearly half a mile, and this was the reason his father had always encouraged the idea of a romance between Toby and Iris.
“With Lord May’s son dead, and May not being a stickler for tradition, there’s no absolute certainty who will eventually inherit Snowberry,” he had said bluntly to him when he was fifteen years old. “The Sinclair boy is the nearest male relative, but he’d be out of the running if May had a male grandchild and I somehow don’t see the eldest girl being early marriage material.”
Since Rose at that time had only been fifteen, Toby had always been impressed by his father’s very accurate foreknowledge.
Nothing had been said at that time about Marigold, but it hadn’t been very long before it became obvious that Marigold was going to prove even less likely early marriage material—though for quite different reasons—than Rose. Lily, being the youngest daughter, didn’t count at all in his father’s scheme of things.
“Iris is the one,” his father had said. “Marry Iris and there’s no knowing what the future might bring.”
The idea of marrying with an eye to the Snowberry estate one day becoming one with the Sissbury estate had been repellent to him at the time, though now he could see the sense of it, especially when the girl in question was one he got on with so well.
Iris was, quite simply, his best friend. Ever since he was six and she was four, she had always been his best friend. They had learned to ride together—and of all her sisters, she was by far the best horsewoman. Together they had solemnly trained their pet dogs to be gun dogs. They had learned how to fish together and had ridden out with the local hunt together. Their interests were the same. So he had never minded teasing references about being “childhood sweethearts,” or careless remarks about “when Toby and Iris tie the knot.”
Or he hadn’t until the last twelve months.
Though he hated to admit it, joining the Coldstream Guards had changed everything. For one thing, it had taken him away from Sissbury and plunged him into a life that was very different: far more sophisticated. Imbued with the glamour of being a Guards officer, he’d suddenly found himself knee-deep in girls—and he had liked it. Suddenly, the thought of marriage to a girl he had known nearly from the cradle no longer seemed so attractive. Instead it seemed circumscribing. Put bluntly: he’d begun to have cold feet.
The crunch had come the evening of Lady Harland’s precoronation ball. Marigold had looked absolutely stunning that evening, and like every other red-blooded male in the room he’d wanted to be seen with her, to flirt with her, to find out if her very racy reputation was justified.
Whether it proved to be or not, he’d had no intention of becoming seriously involved with her. Unlike Iris, Marigold was not a girl any sane man would choose to become seriously involved with. She was, though, sexually exciting: merely dancing with her had sent the adrenaline racing through his bloodstream.
He’d realized almost immediately, of course, that she wasn’t going to play ball. The way she had so pointedly brought Iris into the conversation had shown him that. Then he had made the remark that had brought his long-rumbling dilemma into full focus. By saying he and Iris no longer saw much of each other he had indicated quite clearly that a Sissbury-Snowberry wedding was no longer in the cards.
He couldn’t know for sure that Marigold had passed on what he had said to Iris word for word, but he thought her arrival at Sissbury a few days later, in the middle of his party for friends he’d never bothered to introduce her to, was a pretty fair indication she had.
He continued drilling, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead. God, that party! It had been harmless enough in itself. Everyone there moved in a pretty fast set and none of them would have thought it particularly wild. Wild was opium and cocaine. But he had seen the expression on Iris’s face when she had been faced with the sea of champagne bottles and the squealing, giggling behavior of the bathing-suited girls. Iris had thought it wild—and suddenly he had seen it through her eyes.
Taking advantage of his parents’ absence to throw the kind of party he certainly wouldn’t want them to know about had been a shabby thing to do, as had encouraging the drunk and near drunk to cavort in Sissbury’s beautifully ornate eighteenth-century fountain and pool. Sissbury deserved better of him than to be treated so cheaply. So although in front of his friends he had tried to laugh off Iris’s unfortunate intrusion, he had known that she deserved better of him as well.
The worst part, though, had been Iris’s bewilderment and hurt.
Then instead of easing that hurt, he had compounded it at the Coronation Day ball.
He had known she would be there and even when he had stepped into the ballroom he still hadn’t made up his mind as to how he was going to behave toward her. If he apologized, he would be setting their relationship back to what it had always been—and a proposal would still be expected of him.
Not apologizing to her and not behaving normally toward her would send the clearest possible signal that no engagement was to be forthcoming.
And that was what he had done.
The stricken look on her face when, instead of crossing the room toward her, he had turned his attention to the girl standing next to him, was one he knew he would never forget. When, absolutely mortified, he had turned to look again toward her, she hadn’t been there. But before he could decide what to do about it, Marigold had made her outrageous, half-naked entrance. He had seen Rose bundle Marigold swiftly out of the house, and assuming that Iris had already left the ball ahead of them, he had, when the excitement had died
down, sloped off for a lone supper at the Café Royal.
The question now was: Was he going to continue on the course he had set himself, enjoying his bachelorhood and forgetting all about marriage to anyone for at least another ten years, or was he going to make things right between himself and Iris?
It was a hot day and as the drill relentlessly continued he perspired even more freely. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, remembering his family motto “Suivez-raison,” Follow Reason. And he then knew with a flash of blessed certainty what it was he was going to do.
Rory had never suffered any kind of inner turmoil. Like his favorite second cousin, Lily, he possessed a sunny nature that was rarely ruffled. Unlike Lily, he also possessed a great deal of Marigold’s sexual chutzpah. Girls constantly flocked round him, but as soon as they assumed a claim on him they were dropped without trace.
He spent a great deal of time in London, always staying, as did his cousins when in the capital, at his maternal grandmother’s town house on St. James’s Street. It wasn’t his favorite place to be, though. A Scot through and through, his favorite place in all the world was the place where he’d been born: the seventeenth-century Castle Dounreay, overlooking Loch Gruinart, on the Isle of Islay.
Islay’s nickname was “Queen of the Hebrides,” and if Rory could have lived there year-round, he would have. As it was, he was studying for his Foreign Office examinations and he knew that in the near future he could expect to find himself posted to any one of a score of European capital cities.
Until that day came, he was enjoying a vast number of London friendships and spending as much time as possible with his Houghton cousins. Usually such get-togethers were nothing but fun and pleasure, but though he hadn’t let it show, their get-together on Coronation Day had seriously disquieted him; he was now lying wide awake in his bedroom at St. James’s Street, brooding over the Prince of Wales’s visits to Snowberry.