The Daring Debutantes Bundle

by M C Beaton

  “I’ll fetch my mantle,” she whispered back. “Where shall I meet you?”

  “In the conservatory. In half an hour.”

  Sally nodded, and then he left her side to go and chat with some other guests.

  Sally hurried up the stairs, anxious to get her mantle and escape before Miss Fleming should find out what she was up to. For that lady showed an alarming tendency to behave like the chaperon she was pretending to be, and Sally felt sure she would try to stop her going by pointing out all those distressing things, such as it being better to make a clean break.

  She slipped quietly down the stairs, grateful that she, as Aunt Mabel, had acquired such good knowledge of the geography of the vast house, that she did not have to look for a servant and ask for directions to the conservatory.

  She pushed open the door quietly and stood just inside, her eyes searching the darkness.

  The conservatory had been built onto the back of the great house some time in the last century and was, in daylight, Sally remembered, rather like a miniature crystal palace.

  But in the hot, humid darkness it seemed mysterious and vast with huge palm trees soaring up to the glass roof.

  “Are you there?” she whispered into the blackness—and then let out a squeak of alarm as a pair of strong arms folded about her from behind.

  “Darling,” the marquess murmured in a low voice, turning her around to face him.

  Sally could feel her bones beginning to melt as she felt her body pressed closely against him. Her mantle, which she had been carrying over one arm, fell unheeded to the floor.

  And then his lips came down on hers, burning this time, and exploring, causing dizzying skyrockets to burst in her brain. His mouth left hers and began to wander over her face, kissing her closed eyelids, the tip of her nose, her ears, and her neck.

  In a tiny corner of Sally’s brain alarm bells were beginning to ring. Thoughts jumbled one over the other. She was alone with him without a chaperon. He was kissing her only because she had appeared easy game. His hand left her waist and slid down the low front of her dress, cupping her bosom in a warm clasp.

  “No!” cried Sally, wrenching herself free. “You mustn’t… you frighten me!”

  There was a short silence, and Sally could almost sense his anger. Then he said lightly, “We are supposed to be walking in the snow. This tropical atmosphere is having a bad effect on me. Where is your mantle?”

  “On the floor,” replied Sally in a shaky little voice.

  He struck a match and held it up, his face looking like that of a stranger as it was illuminated by the small flame. “Ah, there it is!” He stooped and retrieved her mantle and blew out the match. He put the mantle about her shoulders and, taking her hand in a firm clasp, led her through the darkness of the conservatory to a small glass door that led out to the garden and lawns, glimmering under their carpet of snow.

  He opened the door, and Sally stepped out after him. Romance fled before the impact of the ice-cold air and the realization that she had forgotten to change out of her satin dancing slippers, for the snow was already seeping through the thin material.

  Letters from many, many distressed girls ran through Sally’s troubled brain: “I don’t know what happened… I didn’t mean to do it… didn’t mean to be bad.” And Sally remembered her own sympathetic, yet rather detached, replies. For she had always wondered how any woman could simply surrender her virginity so easily. With a new maturity, she realized how close she had probably come to it herself. He had released her hand and was walking a little way ahead of her, through the snow.

  Light, glittering flakes were falling and circling out of a black, black sky. The gas was turned up in one of the rooms above, throwing a sudden yellow rectangle of light across the lawn.

  “You aren’t wearing a coat,” Sally called after the marquess, but he walked on, his head bent, his hands behind his back, like some royal personage walking forward to lay another boring foundation stone.

  My pride would not normally let me run after any man like this, thought Sally, rather angrily, but it’s our last short time together, and he’s spoiling it all by stalking off in a temper like that.

  She hurried after him, up to her ankles in snow, holding up her pearl-embroidered skirts. She almost collided with him as he came to an abrupt halt. He tucked her hand in his arm and said, “Let’s walk to the rotunda.”

  Sally nodded, deliriously happy again. The rotunda gleamed against the whiter snow. Sally raised her skirts higher as the snow, away from the shelter of the house, grew deeper. Besotted as she was, she was conscious of a faint feeling of irritation, since he showed no concern for the fact that she was laboring through the winter landscape in a thin pair of evening slippers. He had gone quiet again, preoccupied.

  The marquess was in fact wrestling with a problem. His intelligence and all his emotions were telling him that he had fallen in love with Lady Cecily. There was, therefore, no reason on earth why he should not ask for her hand in marriage. But it was all just too easy. Lady Cecily was of good family, his mother and father would be delighted, and nothing could be more correct. He looked at her sideways out of the corner of his eye. Snowflakes were shining on the white roses in her hair, and her piquant little face was delicately flushed.

  He had been in severe danger of going much too far too soon back in the conservatory. But never had a female so assaulted his senses. Never had he wanted to possess a girl as much as he wanted to possess Lady Cecily Trevelyn. He had hardly drunk anything at the ball, so it could not be that. He knew instinctively that she was a virgin, and he was not in the habit of becoming hot and bothered over virgins, let alone respectable, marriageable ones.

  They had finally reached the rotunda, and he drew her down onto a marble bench, seeming not to notice that it was covered with two inches of snow.

  “Cecily,” he began, and then repeated “Cecily” again, for Sally had momentarily forgotten her assumed name.

  She turned toward him, her eyes large and questioning in the faint illumination from the expanse of white snow. “I am sorry if I frightened you back there,” he said, taking her hands in his. “You have quite a devastating effect on my senses. You have—Oh, dash it all… come here and let me kiss you again!”

  And without waiting for her reply, he swept her into his arms, kissing her lingeringly, molding her body against his, his searching hands taking the pins from her hair so that it cascaded about her shoulders and the white silk roses tumbled down and lay on the harlequin tiles of the floor of the rotunda.

  Gradually as he kissed her and kissed her, Sally could sense suddenly a new tenderness in him… and all her defenses crumbled.

  She buried her fingers in the crisp black curls at his neck and returned his kisses with all her heart and soul, feeling his hands sliding over her breasts, feeling her body burning like a flame.

  At last he drew back and took her small face gently between his long fingers. The sky was paling in the east, and somewhere a cold and sleepy bird let out a mournful chirp.

  “I love you with all my heart, Cecily,” he said. “When can we be married? How soon?”

  Love and passion and dreams and romance fled from her wide gray eyes, to be replaced with such a look of bewilderment and loss that he frowned suddenly. That frown brought the memory of how he could not stand liars or confidence tricksters or people who pretended to be other than they were rushing into Sally’s brain. The night had gone, her one, precious night. Reality came flooding back. The snow on the bench had melted and was seeping through her coat and gown. Her feet were two blocks of solid ice. Her mantle had been pulled down, exposing her naked shoulders, and the chill wind of dawn brushed its cold fingers over her bared breasts and bruised lips.

  “I’m cold, so very cold,” whispered Sally, arranging her gown and pulling her mantle with its sealskin collar high around her throat.

  He gave her an impatient shake. “I’m asking you to marry me,” he said.

  Sally ro
se slowly to her feet. “No,” she said, oh, so gently, oh, so sadly. “I can’t.”

  The snow had stopped falling. Sally walked from the rotunda and across the glittering snow toward the palace.

  “Cecily!” he called after her. “Cecily!”

  But I’m not Cecily, thought Sally, feeling a terrible lump rising in her throat. I’m Sally. And I’m a liar.

  The marquess stared after her diminishing figure in disbelief.

  He could not believe she was rejecting him. He could not believe she had turned down his offer of marriage. A small flame of anger was growing in him and burning away his heartache. Well, let her see if he cared! Be damned to her!

  But there was something so forlorn in the droop of her shoulders and the way her fur-edged mantle dragged slowly across the snow behind her.

  One more try. “Cecily!”

  Sally stumbled and nearly fell, amazed at the tearing pain of loss and hurt somewhere below the region of her heart. For one split second she made a small movement, as if her whole soul were about to drag her unwilling body and brain back across the snow to him.

  And then she walked on with a sure, quick step. The conservatory door opened and closed.

  The marquess felt numb—not with cold. He had an awful feeling he would never see Lady Cecily again.

  He did not know that he hadn’t even met her.

  CHAPTER SIX

  By Monday morning the Marquess of Seudenham was reflecting wryly that he could do with a bit of advice from Aunt Mabel. But that lady had been unaccountably detained in London, “due to poor health.”

  His mother had shaken her head and written off to say that she would travel to London at the end of the week to visit Aunt Mabel’s sickbed. The marquess was not to know the consternation with which that letter was met.

  He simply could not get the mysterious Lady Cecily out of his head, and by Tuesday, when he read an item in the social columns saying that Lady Cecily had attended a supper party at Lady Courtland’s after just having returned from South Africa and was throwing a masked ball that very night at the town house of her guardians, he decided to catch the train to London and attend that ball himself, invitation or no.

  The marquess had managed to slowly get over the fury he had felt at Lady Cecily’s refusal of his proposal of marriage. But the resultant feelings of loss and hurt and worry were so painful that at times he longed for his anger to come back again.

  The hunt had met on the Saturday, and despite her lack of sleep, he had fully expected to see Lady Cecily among the riders. But the hunt had set out over the snow, and halfway through the day he found he could not bear it any longer and had ridden hard to the palace—only to find she had left.

  As the train carrying him to London sped through the wintry landscape, the marquess decided stubbornly that there was some strange reason behind Lady Cecily’s rejection. She could not have kissed him like that and been indifferent to him. Perhaps she was engaged to some yob in South Africa? He had never proposed marriage to any woman in his life before, but never for a moment had he been expected to be turned down.

  He had been hunted too long on the Marriage Market not to know that his title and his fortune set him high above the rest. He was not a vain man and was unaware of the fact that he was extremely handsome, most of the time putting any female admiration down to his title. Now he began to fret about his appearance like a schoolboy undergoing the first pangs of calf love. Was his face showing wrinkles? He had found one suspiciously gray-looking hair among the thick thatch of his black curls only that very morning. How old was Lady Cecily? Why hadn’t he checked the peerage? Was he old enough to be her father? Of course not. And on and on his thoughts ran to the thudding of the wheels.

  He had a slim town house, which he hardly ever used, in Half Moon Street in Mayfair, since he preferred the country to the town. He looked around it now with new eyes, anxious eyes. How stale and lifeless it seemed. Not a feminine touch anywhere.

  He startled his servants by demanding that flowers be arranged in all the rooms and that new curtains be put up to replace the dark velvet hangings. “What kind of curtains, my lord?” My lord did not know. My lord simply knew he wanted something… well… bright and pretty. And the place was freezing. Fires in every room.

  Had she been too cold? Good God! He had kept her out half the night in the freezing cold! She must think him a callous monster. In his mind’s eye, Lady Cecily changed from the courageous, the sparkling, and the independent Cecily to a young girl who ought to be sheltered from the cares of the world.

  He tried to pass the afternoon at his club, among the thick pile carpets and leather armchairs and all the subdued hush of that well-run establishment, which he had always found soothing at the worst of times. But now it irked him. The sleeping figures of two of the older members alarmed him. He might end up like them! Snoring his life away with no wife and children waiting for him at home. Then he remembered it was a masked ball and that he hadn’t got a mask, and so he set off to look for one.

  He also remembered that Peter Firkin was engaged now to Miss Wyndham, and sickeningly happy, and so he spent some time on Old Bond Street, choosing an engagement present and settling at last on an enormous box of solid gold knives and forks, and then feeling that it was all too vulgar and ostentatious the minute he had paid for it.

  By evening he felt depressed and exhausted and realized he had hardly had any sleep since the day Lady Cecily had left.

  He summoned his valet and was helped into his evening clothes. He slipped a black velvet mask into his pocket and set out for the Earl and Countess of Hammering’s town house in Kensington.

  He did not want to waste time over an argument at the door, so he simply presented his visiting card and said he had lost his invitation, and the magic of his title worked as it had done so many times in the past.

  He left his heavy fur-lined cloak and his hat, cane, and gloves downstairs, donned his mask, and mounted the stairs to the ballroom on the first floor.

  Here the marquess met his first setback. The earl and countess gracefully accepted his apology for gate-crashing their ward’s ball, but looked extremely puzzled when he said he had had the pleasure of dancing with Lady Cecily at his mother’s ball.

  “You must be mistaken,” said Lady Harrington. “Little Cecily has not been out anywhere in England until this evening.” The marquess then inquired after their health and said he was sorry to hear they had both been indisposed. That information was met with two blank stares.

  “We shall chat later,” said the countess firmly, since she had obviously decided the marquess was mad or drunk or both. “I must welcome the other guests. You will find little Cecily in the ballroom.”

  Bemused, the marquess left them and made his way into a large room full of masked guests. His eyes raked around the long room. Although she would be masked, he was sure he could tell her easily from any other woman in the room. But nowhere could he see that familiar figure or that light cloud of nut-brown hair.

  “Well, Paul,” said a jovial voice at his elbow. “See old Peter Firkin’s got himself engaged.” He swung around and stared at the masked face next to his own, recognizing one of his old friends, Stuffy Bingles-Farnworth, by the brush of red hair standing on top of his head.

  “Hallo, Stuffy,” said the marquess, his eyes still roving around the room. “Looks as if all us old bachelors are beginning to fall like ninepins. Still looking for an heiress?”

  “Still looking,” said Stuffy gloomily. “Thought I’d try my hand with Lady Cecily, but I’m not that desperate.”

  The marquess swung and faced him, his eyes like two chips of blue ice behind his mask. “I think Lady Cecily is the most charming, most fascinating girl I have ever met,” he said in a repressive voice.

  “Eh, what?” Stuffy stared at the marquess in surprise.

  “Where is she anyway?” demanded the marquess. “I can’t see her.”

  “Why, over there!” said Stuffy. “Dancing
with that long drip of a fellow, Harry Crompton.”

  The marquess followed his gaze. Harry Crompton was performing a lively polka. The girl in his arms had frizzy sandy hair and a virulent pink mask.

  “That’s not Lady Cecily,” said the marquess.

  “None other,” said Stuffy. “And she ought to wear a mask the whole time—and a gag—if you ask me.”

  The marquess waited impatiently until the polka was finished. He approached the girl in the pink mask. “Lady Cecily,” he said hesitantly. “May I have this dance?”

  “Oooh! Yeth!” said Lady Cecily. “Very few people have asked me to danth,” she confided, “and I think its rotten of them, cos it’s my ball!”

  Bewildered, he took her in his arms for the waltz. She concentrated on her steps, counting to three in a loud voice, occasionally crunching down on his foot and then saying “Sowwy,” bursting into peals of shrill laughter.

  He guided her carefully behind a bank of hothouse flowers. “What are we doing heah?” said Lady Cecily, giggling. “Do you want to kith me?”

  “No,” he said, removing his mask. “I just want you to remove your mask a minute.”

  “You do want to kith me. Wicked man!”

  With many titters and giggles, she removed her mask. Well, handsome is as handsome does, and we can’t all be pretty, but there is something rather infuriating when a really plain girl thinks she is a mixture of Venus, Cleopatra, and Lillie Langtry. Little, pale piggy eyes with white lashes ogled up at him, great rabbit teeth sprouted out from between thin lips, and, under the piled-up fuzz of her sandy hair, her ears stuck out like jug handles. “The twouble is,” said Lady Cecily, “I’m iwwesistible!”

  “Quite,” said the marquess hurriedly. “Oh, please put your mask on again, Lady Cecily,” he added with such urgency that she began to pout horribly.

  “My dear Seudenham,” said an acid voice in his ear. “What are you doing with my little Cecily?”

  He turned around. Bosom heaving, the Countess of Hammering stood glaring at him awfully.