Julie Tetel Andresen

by The Temporary Bride

  Once she arrived in Billingshurst, Fate again chose to smile on her. She found a pawnshop next to the inn from which a coach bound for Wolverhampton was scheduled to depart soon, and that coach, she discovered, connected to Calvert Green. She made up her mind to take that final, necessary step, and within the hour she was safely on her way.

  The efforts of one particularly cheerful passenger to become acquainted with his fellow travellers were frustrated for the first several miles by the bouncing of the stagecoach over the ruts and potholes of a notorious stretch of highway. While the vehicle swung perilously from side to side, the passengers were primarily occupied with holding on to their seats and expressing their remarkably unanimous opinions as to the competence of the man handling the ribbons and on the shocking state of disrepair of the Realm’s roadways. From there it was a small step to the downfall and decay of modern manners and of Society, not to mention the dissolution of the youth of the nation, all of which were discussed with relish during the intervals when the coach was more or less in an upright position. Presently the road became smoother, and with it several passengers expressed more sanguine opinions as to the prospects for the ultimate positive outcome of their journey.

  The cheerful passenger took up where he had left off, and as the self-appointed master of ceremonies, he introduced himself as Mr. Cricksfield and chattily referred to the round, equally cheerful-looking woman at his side as his rib. Beside her sat a small, spare man in a catskin waistcoat and jean-pantaloons. He had a sharp, lively face set off by a pair of twinkling eyes and had the aspect of one better known to the Bow Street Runners than to someone from Miss Denville’s walk of life. He grinned and said in accents that located his birthplace within a block or two of Tottenham Fields Market that his name was “Foote—Jimmy Foote, and if m’mother had had triplets, we would ha’ made a yard. Dang me if it isn’t more agreeable-like to know the coves yer travelling amongst!”

  This remark caused Helen to stir momentarily from her misery and to state her name and provenance.

  Mr. Foote regarded her with interest, having difficulty placing a nice-looking female in an attractive dress on the common stage. “Governess?” he ventured.

  “Yes,” she said with a rueful smile.

  “Your first position, miss?” Mrs. Cricksfield asked sympathetically.

  After a slight hesitation, Helen replied that it was her first position and received hearty encouragement from Mr. Cricksfield, whose eye moved right along to a rather desiccated female squeezed into the far corner of the coach. “And who might you be, ma’am?” he asked cheerfully.

  The lady proved to be as nasty as she looked. “Featherstone,” she answered sullenly, “not that it’s any of your business.”

  “Ha, ha!” Mr. Foote laughed. “Miss Featherstone?” he had the temerity to enquire.

  “Yes.” The hollow monosyllable seemed to proclaim Miss Featherstone’s complete satisfaction at this state of affairs.

  Mr. Cricksfield’s next victim was a handsome young man of perhaps seventeen, who bore signs of incipient dandyism. His locks of guinea gold were brushed carefully into a wild mass of curls with one tumbling across his brow. His shirt points were high enough to restrict the movement of his head. The shoulders of his coat seemed to have achieved their sharp edges with the aid of a quantity of buckram padding.

  “Well, young man,” Mr. Cricksfield said, “and what might you have to say for yourself?”

  “This,” said the middle-aged lady next to the young man, “is my son Charles. I am Mrs. Goodwin, Mrs. Alexander Goodwin of Bath. Mr. Goodwin is an attorney-at-law.”

  Her tones were measured, her diction precise, and her manner was meant to convey that some unforeseen circumstance had entered their lives to make travelling by the common stage an unfortunate necessity.

  Helen was surprised to learn that the young Adonis and the very correct woman at his side were even acquainted, much less mother and son, which in fact was the impression Charles had been at some pains to create.

  “Well, now,” Mr. Cricksfield said, “you have a fine- looking son, Mrs. Goodwin.”

  “The fresh face of innocence,” Mrs. Cricksfield sighed in a spirit of motherly camaraderie.

  The object of this tribute was not at all gratified. Since he had modelled his dress and manner after Byron, who was best known for his dark, brooding countenance, Charles redoubled his efforts to project an air of one brooding magnificently on the blackness of his soul. He fell rather short of his goal, however, for he resembled a little boy who had given in to a fit of the sulks.

  “Charles will be well enough,” Mrs. Goodwin said in the most irritating way imaginable, “when he has put aside some of the odd quirks that young men of his age often fancy. Mr. Goodwin assures me that it is just a phase.”

  A flush flew up her son’s face. “Dash it, Mama!” Charles said angrily under his breath.

  Mrs. Goodwin favoured her offspring with a smile of studied indulgence. “Charles,” she pronounced, “is liverish.”

  “Ah!” Mrs. Cricksfield said with the sort of helpless sympathy characteristic of those who have never been sick a day in their lives.

  Miss Featherstone muttered from her corner that no one could tell her anything about being liverish. “Comes from drinking too much coffee.”

  “Charles does not drink coffee,” Mrs. Goodwin informed Miss Featherstone. “It is simply part of his constitution, for he has suffered intermittent attacks of bile since he was an infant.”

  Charles was justifiably disgusted by the turn in conversation and left his mother and Miss Featherstone to thrash out the relative merits of Blue Pills and mercury for the curing of the many disorders that might afflict the system.

  “What the lad needs,” Mr. Foote said bluntly, “is to sling his lips around a heavy-wet. That’ll perk up his spirits, make no mistake!”

  This suggestion was immediately seconded by Mr. Cricksfield, who loved above all things to bend his elbow with his fellow man at the village taproom. He proceeded to treat the occupants of the coach to two of his favourite drinking stories.

  The ice was effectively broken by his unrefined jokes, and thereafter discussion was lively.

  The coach to Wolverhampton was labelled an express and was not scheduled to make a stop before Lowick. They had been on the road for perhaps two hours, when, on a long stretch of highway in the middle of nowhere, the sound of approaching horses’ hooves suddenly penetrated the interior of the coach. There came then an exchange of male voices outside, and the cumbersome vehicle came to an abrupt halt with a lurch.

  “Footpads!” Miss Featherstone shrieked in alarm, no doubt fearing for her valuables and her virtue.

  Mr. Foote uttered several ejaculations that seemed to indicate that nothing would please him more than to wrangle with one or more footpads. Mr. Cricksfield cheerfully mentioned that the first and second coachmen were both equipped with blunderbusses. This reminder did not exercise an immediately soothing effect on Miss Featherstone.

  A second later, the door next to where this nervous lady was seated was wrenched open, and the occupants of the coach looked with blank astonishment upon a very imposing gentleman who did not bear the least resemblance to a footpad.

  “Descend, Nell!” the gentleman commanded.

  All eyes shifted with intense interest towards Helen. She had lost all trace of colour from her face upon laying eyes on her Richard, but she retained enough spirit to resent being accosted in such an embarrassing fashion. “I shall do no such thing,” she said in a small but defiant voice, which hardly wavered at all.

  Public sentiment was firmly on Helen’s side, and no one made the least move to facilitate the gentleman’s entrance into the coach, had he been of a mind to remove Miss Denville bodily.

  Wraxall quickly sized up the situation and prepared to counter it. He scanned the passengers for a possible ally and soon his eyes alighted on Mr. Foote, where they rested for several moments.

  The Duke of Cla
re had not mistaken his man. Mr. Foote’s eyes twinkled responsively. “She run away from yer, guv’nor?” he asked.

  “More or less,” Wraxall replied.

  “Well, dang me,” Mr. Foote said, “if it don’t take a body four eyes and four arms to keep a hold on his girl these days.”

  Miss Featherstone managed to slip in a few words of encouragement to Miss Denville in which figured phrases such as “freedom from the shackles of tyranny” and “saving oneself from being slain at the altar of ogres” before Wraxall could correct Mr. Foote’s, and indeed everyone’s, misapprehension.

  “She is not my girl,” he said calmly. “She is my wife.”

  Mrs. Goodwin gasped audibly at this disclosure and wavered in her support for the disobedient wife. Mrs. Goodwin had also almost instantly identified the handsome gentleman as no less than a marquis, and there was something about the way he was standing there so masterfully that won her support. Her son, on the other hand, looked in awe at the sight of the most elegant gentleman he had ever clapped eyes on and darkly suspected a Romance. His instincts were with the heroine.

  “I am not!” Helen responded with some heat.

  “Are you not?” her self-proclaimed husband said with no change of expression. “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure,” Helen replied with dignity.

  It seemed that a “Bravo, Miss Denville!” might rise to Miss Featherstone’s lips, but Wraxall had anticipated some sort of outburst from that corner and silenced the thin lady with a ruthless stare.

  “Well, if you are not my wife,” Wraxall continued with a dangerous look, “I should like to know what you were doing travelling alone in my company and using my name for no less than four days.”

  Helen turned scarlet, choked, and was rendered speechless.

  Mr. and Mrs. Cricksfield seemed to feel that the gentleman’s question called for an answer. Helen looked helplessly about, encountered nothing but glances of surprised disapproval, and cried, “It was not like that! There was a mistake!”

  Her fellow travellers seemed to agree on that score and were awaiting an explanation.

  “So,” Wraxall went on inexorably. “You say that we are not married?”

  “Not!”

  “Then what of the wedding ring I gave you?”

  All eyes fell on Helen’s naked finger.

  “I had to pawn it in Billingshurst to pay for my travel and lodging,” Helen admitted in an unwise burst of candour.

  Only Jimmy Foote found that an acceptable method of obtaining cash. Helen’s support was crumbling all around her. Even Charles thought it a rather shabby trick to play on a man.

  “But you don’t understand!” Helen told the arbiters of this domestic quarrel. “It turns out that he is a duke!”

  If Helen thought to win any allies with this piece of information, she was sadly mistaken.

  “Then I suggest you show him the respect that is His Grace’s due,” Mrs. Goodwin said frigidly, more or less summing up the general sentiment, for even Miss Featherstone was susceptible to rank. “Especially since he is your husband and you owe him something on that score as well.”

  “He is not my husband!” Helen protested, sticking to her guns. She looked up into her would-be husband’s eyes defiantly and read so much laughter and determination in them that her heart turned over, but she did not suspect the outrageous lengths to which he was prepared to go.

  “Well, my dearest Nell,” Wraxall said, playing his trump card very smoothly, “if we are not now married, certain circumstances will soon become known that will make it imperative that you become my wife.”

  Helen was bewildered. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, on her guard.

  Jimmy Foote did. “I’ll go bail he’s tipped her the rise,” he said wisely, “and somebody has found out.”

  Wraxall smiled, but no one else in the coach was enlightened by this observation.

  “She’ll soon be crying fives loaves a penny,” Mr. Foote explained helpfully. The faces remained blank. “She’s up the spout, lads!” he expostulated, thinking to make the matter sufficiently plain.

  His Grace, to whom these vulgar expressions were not unknown, said, “Exactly so! And everyone in Igglesthorpe Upon Inkleford knows of her delicate condition!”

  The meaning of Mr. Foote’s remarks slowly penetrated the minds of those assembled, with varying degrees of astonishment, relish and outrage.

  Aghast, Helen turned on Wraxall in mingled fury and indignation. “Richard, you are unscrupulous!”

  “I am aware of it,” her love replied with complete satisfaction.

  Miss Featherstone was about to fall into hysterics. To Mrs. Cricksfield fell the office of soothing this thin lady’s exacerbated nerves. Mrs. Goodwin pulled herself together sufficiently to say to Helen that His Grace seemed, on the contrary, to have a good many scruples if he wanted to save her from ending her adventurous career in the nearest Magdalen.

  Helen was equipped to play any number of roles, but being cast as a Fallen Woman was too much for her to carry off with any aplomb. Since Wraxall’s success was obvious to all concerned, no one moved to stop him when he reached in, pulled his wayward bride to her feet and out of the coach.

  Wraxall’s hands lingered on Helen’s shoulders, and she felt compelled to look up at him. “How did you know where to find me, Richard?”

  “From the note you left my sister.”

  “But I did not say where I was going!”

  “I had a notion you were on your way to Calvert Green,” he replied patiently.

  “Yes, but—” she began, and then her mind fastened on a more important matter. She flushed but did not skirt the issue. “How could you have implied what you did, odious man, about all of Igglesthorpe knowing of my delicate condition? Where did you come by such an idea?”

  “Mrs. Coats,” he replied promptly.

  “Have you no shame?” she cried. “How dare you blame an innocent woman for such—such—”

  “An indelicacy? Easily! She seemed to think that it had something to do with your dressing-gown. By the way, Mr. Vest sends his congratulations and best wishes to you, too.”

  “Wretch!” she replied, but was unable to keep the loving note out of her voice. She was trying hard to maintain her gravity, but her sense of the ridiculous was fast overtaking her modesty. “I suppose,” she said as sternly as she was able, “that you did not exert yourself to dispel her misbegotten notion?”

  “No, because I was hoping the possibility might not be so remote,” he said to no less than a half dozen pairs of interested ears.

  Fortunately, at that juncture, since Helen could not trust her voice to speak, His Grace became aware that the coach had not travelled on, and he recommended to the driver that, since he was being paid a fair wage to conduct several persons to points north, he might return to his principal occupation. Unabashed, the driver took the hint, and the coach lumbered slowly forward. Those passengers who were so inclined to hang out of the windows—which included all save Miss Featherstone, who had, to everyone’s relief, fainted—were afforded a shocking example of the decay of modern manners. They clearly saw Miss Denville—or however she called herself—locked in the embrace of a man with a title but very dubious morals.

  “Well, I never thought I’d live to see the day!” Mr. Cricksfield said, craning his neck to obtain the last possible glimpse of the disgusting spectacle. “Such a public display! Shameless, I call it!” This sentiment found ready agreement in the coach, and the ensuing babble lasted all the way to Wolverhampton.

  ****

  “Now, NELL,” Wraxall said when the coach had at last tooled out of sight. “Will you marry me?”

  “I do not seem to have much choice, ruined as I am,” she acknowledged.

  “And we shall, of course, honeymoon in Italy,” he continued, kissing her again.

  “To prove to me that there truly are blond Italians?” she asked irrepressibly when he had interrupted his obliging attention
s.

  “No, my love,” he replied. “Because their pastries are the best in the world!”

  At this, Helen abandoned any idea she had vaguely entertained of dissuading her love from his present folly, for if he wanted a fat wife, it was entirely his own affair.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty