But she would have to endure it. Because she’d given her word now, that she was going to marry Ben, and if she backed out...
She shuddered. It didn’t bear thinking about. Seeing Father wounding Mother with his criticism of the way she’d brought up her daughter had been too awful. She couldn’t do anything that might set him off again and cause Mother to...possibly even cry. Not when Mother had been the only one to take her part, even if it had been in a rather timid way.
So she lifted her chin when Father arrived to escort her down to the chapel. Accepted his lukewarm compliments on her appearance stoically. And kept her shoulders well back all the way along the corridors, to the entrance that led into the chapel from the house.
She was a bit surprised to see Joshua and Julius waiting for her, one on either side of the chapel door.
‘We wanted to be the ones to present you with your wedding bouquet,’ said Joshua, holding out a beautiful arrangement of white roses and sweetly scented pinks.
Having thrust it into her hands, they darted into the chapel and clattered up the stairs to the seats in the gallery reserved for the family.
‘That was good of them,’ Father observed, with a smile. ‘Good lads, the pair of them.’
‘Yes,’ said Marguerite, feeling rather...touched by their gesture. Perhaps they weren’t such monsters after all. Perhaps they did have some decent qualities.
As she entered the chapel on the arm of her father, the guests, all friends of her brothers, turned to look at her, mostly looking rather the worse for wear. She lowered her head, reluctant to meet with the grins and elbow-nudging she was sure they would indulge in. And saw a snail emerge from her bouquet and begin crawling across her gloved hand.
She shook it off, only to disturb a couple of slugs, which had been curled up between the flowers.
She sucked in a short, sharp breath. The little beasts! Oh, not the slugs, they couldn’t help it. She meant Julius and Joshua. She should have known they couldn’t show her even the tiniest bit of respect, not even on her wedding day! She gripped the bouquet tightly, fighting back the urge to fling it as far from her as she could. It would only make everyone laugh at her. She’d have to do what she always did when any of her pestilential brothers played one of their horrid pranks on her. Pretend she hadn’t noticed. Or that she didn’t care. And so, grim-faced and quivering with fury, she stalked slowly to the front of the chapel, dripping slugs and snails all the way.
And there stood Ben. The very epitome of a reluctant groom with those bruises standing out in vivid contrast to the paleness of his face. He did not smile when she reached his side but kept facing forward, his back rigid, his expression miserable.
She turned from him to thrust her bouquet into Mother’s outstretched hands, to the sound of muffled giggling from her two younger brothers. And from then on kept her gaze fixed on their chaplain, making her responses through gritted teeth whenever it was her turn.
And then Ben was sliding off her snail-slime-streaked glove to place a ring on her finger, and the chaplain was pronouncing them man and wife, and all she could think about was getting her hands on her horrid little brothers and making them pay for ruining what might have been...well, no, it probably wouldn’t have been the kind of wedding most girls dreamed of but at least she might have gone through it all with some dignity. Instead of which, Mother was handing her back her bouquet with a perplexed expression on her dear face, and then Marguerite was laying her hand on Ben’s arm and walking the length of the chapel to the outside door, where the servants, who hadn’t been able to fit inside, were all lining the path to the waiting carriage, with smiling faces, to see her come out.
They all clapped and cheered as she walked, still with one hand clamped to Ben’s arm, to the carriage, and, because none of this was their fault and she was going to miss them, she tried to smile back.
Vale, the footman, who was standing by the steps of the carriage Father had lent the pair for their bridal trip, since Ben didn’t possess one, was beaming at her, too. But it was the unsmiling Ben who handed her in and, once Marcie had scramble in after her, shut the door. Ben, and his manservant, Sergeant Wilmot, she noted as they mounted up, were going to ride their own horses.
The inside of the carriage was decked out with yet more flowers, which filled the interior with a lovely scent. Marguerite glowered at them. Had her younger brothers been busy in here, too?
‘Do you know,’ she said to Marcie, the moment the carriage lurched into motion, ‘what my dear little brothers gave me as I went into the chapel?’ She held up her bouquet.
Marcie began to smile. The smile froze when yet another slug fell out and plopped onto the floor. She drew her feet back swiftly. ‘Oh, my lady,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘The little...’
‘Beasts, yes,’ she said, lowering the window and, pausing only to make sure nobody was in her firing line, throwing it as hard and as far as she could. When she sat back, she eyed the flowers festooning every available surface of the interior of the coach. ‘I won’t feel safe until we’ve checked every last petal,’ she said, ‘for creepy crawlies.’
Marcie shuddered.
‘In fact,’ said Marguerite, coming to a decision based partly on how good it had felt to fling her bouquet away and see it go splashing into a pond, thus returning the slugs to their natural abode, ‘it would probably be best if we just chuck the whole lot out of the window to make sure we won’t have who knows what falling into our hair all the way to Shropshire.’ Which was where, she now knew, Ben’s estates lay.
Marcie set to with a will, untying the bunches of flowers from the window straps, the lamp holders and the luggage nets for Marguerite to fling out of the window, until the carriage was blessedly free of floral insults. They didn’t encounter any more slugs, but they did get showered with earwigs once or twice, and there was also one rather fat toad nestling in the luggage net beneath a posy of the brightly white marguerites, after which she was named.
By the time they’d cleared the carriage, Marguerite was trembling. She wasn’t sure if it was with anger or some other kind of nervous reaction to the final farewell her brothers had seen fit to give her. All she knew was that she felt like crying. Or screaming. Or kicking something. None of which was at all ladylike.
She had to content herself with drawing a clean handkerchief from her reticule and blowing her nose. It didn’t help all that much. She was going to have to think of something...positive about today, and the situation in which she found herself, or she might end up giving way to a fit of the vapours. Or giving way to the almost overwhelming temptation to abandon all her years of schooling in how to behave like a perfect lady.
But she wasn’t just Lord Darwen’s only daughter now, was she? She was Ben’s wife. Which meant now he would expect a certain standard of behaviour from her, too. Oh, how she wished she had something left she could throw out of the window to relieve her feelings. But she didn’t. So she was just going to have to follow her own advice and try to find the silver lining. It didn’t take her all that long to come up with the comforting notion that at least it would be the last time Joshua and Julius would be able to play any pranks on her. Not until such time as Ben invited her family for a visit.
That was one aspect of getting married she hadn’t considered before. But it stood to reason that Ben was not going to indulge in any such behaviour, didn’t it? A man wasn’t likely to put slugs in his wife’s...bed, for example, not if he wanted to enjoy the activity Mother had warned her he’d expect there, and on a frequent basis, too.
She blew her nose one last time and smiled at Marcie, who’d so staunchly helped her rid the carriage of every last vestige of her brothers’ handiwork without a single protest. Apart from the one yelp when a shower of earwigs had caught her by surprise. ‘Thank you for coming with me, Marcie, and at such short notice, too. When you only agreed to come to the countryside with me from
London to see how it would suit you.’
Marcie gave a huff. ‘Well, I liked what I seen of your father’s estate, right enough. But it was a bit too...’ she screwed up her face ‘...rigid below stairs, if you know what I mean. Not that anyone tried to put me in my place, like, not with me being your personal maid.’ She giggled.
‘Me, a lady’s maid! You could have knocked me down with a feather when you asked me to help do your hair that time your brothers...’ Had been up to their usual mischief, resulting in the total destruction of a style that had taken Briggs, the top-lofty dresser hired at great expense for the Season, to create. And since neither Marguerite nor her mother had been willing to face her displeasure, they’d seized on Marcie and begged her to repair the damage if she could.
‘Your skill made it made it easier for me to insist on getting rid of that awful Briggs,’ said Marguerite with feeling, ‘when she tried to get some poor footman turned from his own post when he couldn’t find my cloak.’ Briggs may have always made sure that Marguerite was the best-dressed debutante in any ballroom. But she had also intimidated Mother and been unkind. And been furious when Marguerite had returned from the masquerade ball at the Lambournes’ without her cloak, when the footman in charge of fetching it hadn’t been able to locate it.
Everyone had been relieved when she’d left their employ, even Mother, who’d then been able to start making her own decisions about what to buy Marguerite, and what she should wear on any given occasion without running the risk of having her opinion sneered at.
‘Any road,’ said Marcie, ‘I never thought I’d ever travel outside London. And now not only have I seen Wiltshire but I’m also going to see Shropshire. And all this lovely countryside in between,’ she sighed, leaning to look out of the window. The countryside was pretty, Marguerite conceded, after following Marcie’s example. And it wasn’t as if she’d seen all that much more of England than Marcie. She’d been brought up at Wattlesham Priory, spent a month or so in London, and was now travelling to Ben’s estate.
They stopped at several coaching inns to change the horses that were pulling Father’s carriage, where Ben and his man spent their time seeing to their own mounts. And they stopped for the night well before it started growing dark. Because, Ben explained, he didn’t want to push their riding horses to the point of exhaustion.
Ben came to the coach door as Vale let down the steps. As he had done at every other stop en route, to ask after her welfare and to tell her where they were and how long he planned to stop, before striding off to rejoin his man and help look after his own horses. They clearly meant a lot to him. He wouldn’t let ostlers touch them and fed them from supplies he’d brought himself.
‘Your father has arranged rooms for us here, overnight,’ he said, offering her his arm. And then something flickered across his face as they set off in the direction of the inn door. ‘I hope...’ He shook his head. ‘I should like to set out early in the morning, if...’ He frowned. ‘We have several days’ travel ahead of us. Your father has arranged the overnight stops on the way, but we will still need to keep up a reasonable pace...’
She glanced up at him in some surprise. He sounded so uncertain. Ben never sounded uncertain. Morose, yes. Sarcastic, yes. Pedantic, even, sometimes. But never uncertain. He was an officer in the army, for heaven’s sake. Used to bawling orders at men and having them obeyed without question.
Well, that was clearly what getting married did for a man who’d fought his way halfway across Europe. No wonder he spent so much time with the horses at each stop they’d made. It must give him a valid reason to appear to be too busy to speak to his new bride.
She didn’t know if it was just that she was tired after the journey or still on edge from the morning’s assault by slugs and earwigs, or because she’d just had that startling idea that Ben had been trying to avoid her all day, but, anyway, she found it very hard to speak to him when at last they sat down to dinner.
They were eating that dinner in a private parlour that was part of the suite of rooms they had, attended by inn servants. And every time she looked at his poor battered face, she couldn’t help thinking about what he’d expect from her later tonight. He’d want to kiss her with that rather sulky, lopsided mouth. And he’d probably remove most of his clothes, as well as her own. Mother had said so. And once she thought about removing clothes, her mind went straight back to the way he’d looked, naked, in the moonlight.
Every time he lifted his fork to his mouth, she recalled the way the muscles in his upper arms had bunched and flexed as he’d rowed her across the lake. And every so often, when a hank of his thick dark hair flopped across his forehead, she got a strange yearning to tidy it up. As an excuse, she rather thought, to run her fingers through it so she could find out if it was as soft as it looked.
When she finally gave up the pretence of eating anything and rose from the table to go to the bedchamber in which her travelling luggage had been placed, he got to his feet, too. Which made her glance down at his thighs, which she’d also seen tantalising peeks of through the knots in the shawl.
He cleared his throat.
She made herself look at his face.
‘I, er, ought to warn you,’ he said, ‘that is... I hope you aren’t expecting too much. We haven’t had much opportunity to...er...discuss things, and you ought to know...’ He faltered to a halt, looking as uncomfortable as she felt. Which made her feel even more uncomfortable. She’d assumed he would just come to her room and...and do it. Not stand about talking about it!
‘My mother told me all about it,’ she said hastily.
‘She did?’ He raised his brows. ‘Well, then, so you know—’
‘Yes, yes, all that I need to, in the circumstances,’ she said. And then found herself completely unable to meet his gaze. Because she suddenly was not only very aware of how very masculine he was but also that she was female. And that her particularly female parts felt as if they were pulsing and swelling. And that before very much longer he might be looking at them. Well, he had the right now she was his wife. Especially as she’d already seen every last inch of him. Her face flaming, she dashed from the room and shut the door firmly behind her. And then tottered to the nearest chair.
Why on earth had he wanted to talk about it? Had he no consideration for her feelings? Or faith in her character? Surely he hadn’t been worried she might...shriek with alarm when he came to her room or put up some sort of opposition?
Although...perhaps some women did that. Which would explain why Mother had been so insistent that she should permit her husband to do exactly as he wished, however strange it may seem, because even though it might seem intrusive, she would enjoy it. Once she got over the initial discomfort.
She tossed her head then beckoned to Marcie to help her prepare for bed. She may not have arrived at her wedding night by a conventional route, but she was a bride now, and would not shirk one iota of her duty to her husband. To that end, she instructed Marcie to help her into the nightgown that Mother had suggested would be perfect for this occasion. It was a scandalously revealing confection of pale blue silk, trimmed with lace. Mother had said she couldn’t resist buying it.
‘I wanted you to be prepared,’ she’d said, ‘just in case we had to leave London before you had time to indulge in the purchase of your own trousseau. And just as well I did,’ she’d concluded triumphantly, as her own maid had folded the garment into silver paper and put it in Marguerite’s set of travelling luggage.
‘Leave my hair loose, once you have brushed it,’ Marguerite told Marcie, who usually braided it up neatly at night. Mother had said that a man liked to see his bride’s hair loose, across the pillow, and warned her that if she bound it up he would only undo it.
Marcie giggled as she began to remove the pins from Marguerite’s hair. ‘Oh, it does look lovely, my lady,’ she sighed, when she’d brushed it out so that it flowed over her almost bar
e shoulders. ‘Like silk, it is. Like sunshine,’ she added, sifting a portion through her fingers. ‘His Lordship will think he’s died and gone to heaven when he sees you,’ she predicted, with a wistful sigh.
Marguerite hoped that was true. That he’d find her...attractive enough to do all the things Mother had vaguely hinted at. Because she was beginning to rather look forward to doing them. Ben was...well, he had an amazing body. All muscle and hair. And she’d noted the way his hands had tended to his horses today, with a deft assurance that had provoked a feeling rather like...well, no, it wasn’t jealousy, precisely. More a sort of wistful curiosity about what it would feel like to have those hands tending to her body.
She shifted as a burst of masculine laughter drifted up from one of the rooms downstairs.
Was he down there, fortifying himself with Dutch courage?
No. Ridiculous to let thoughts like that prey on her mind. Nothing made Ben nervous. He was a soldier. Father said he’d become renowned in military circles for his bravery.
So why wasn’t he marching in through that door and...conquering her virgin territory?
She was still wondering that by the time her candle started guttering. By which time she’d started to mull over his cryptic utterance after dinner, about her not expecting too much. Had that been a warning?
But even if that was so, even if he didn’t want to...do what Mother had said husbands wanted to do, couldn’t he at least have come in to bid her goodnight? And perhaps just kiss her cheek? Surely that wasn’t too much to expect, was it? He must know she was nervous...
She glanced at the windows, where Marcie, in her excitement at preparing a bride for her wedding night, had forgotten to draw the curtains. She could see nothing but blackness outside. Some wedding night this was turning out to be! Nobody was stirring now anywhere else in the inn. She wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn she was the only person still awake in the entire place. Sitting up in bed, all decked out for her groom’s delectation, while he was...
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