“Oh, yes, my lord! If your lordship will remember, the girl Meg is one of those to whom you spoke today. Meg did not go with her ladyship to Brighton.”
“Then you had better engage a second personal maid. The lady who will arrive soon is my mistress.”
There was a perceptible pause, though the footman remained expressionless.
“Very good, my lord.”
It was not that Alfred was in the least scandalized. As he afterwards said to the second footman, “Hurrah for the governor!” He was used to such situations, but not to such candor.
“One more question. Where am I likely to find my wife? In the drawing room?”
“I could not say, my lord. But I believe: in her bedroom.”
“Where is her bedroom?”
“If your lordship will be good enough to turn left at the top of the stairs, you will see her ladyship’s door directly opposite.”
“Ah … A still better place to surprise her. Thank you.”
Darwent sauntered up the stairs, while the footman, after waiting until his head had gone out of sight, bolted belowstairs to tell the others.
It was remarkable, Darwent thought, how the prospect of meeting Buckstone in a duel restored his spirits and his zest for life. It roused more than that: it roused his old, old sense of devilment. Without troubling to knock at the bedroom door, he turned the knob and opened it.
He found himself in a large bedroom, richly furnished but in the severely classical French style. Even the bed was a gilt-scrolled austere white, without posts or tester or curtains.
Caroline was not there. Amid a vast clutter of half-unpacked portmanteaus and boxes, a dark-haired lady’s maid, her eyes wide with amazement, stood clutching an armful of billowing gowns.
“My lord,” she whispered, though she must have expected him.
Darwent, assuming the role of the dandy, drew himself up in a manner which must have been admired by the acting manager at Drury Lane.
“I take it you’re Meg, m’love?” he inquired.
“Yes, my lord,” whispered Meg, and curtsied among the gowns. “But …”
Here Darwent noticed another door. It was in the right-hand wall. Though the door was closed, a fraction of its edge showed that it was not fastened.
“My lord, you mustn’t go in there!” whispered Meg in agitation, as though she were speaking of Bluebeard’s den. “That’s the bathroom. Her ladyship is having her bath.”
A look of strong satisfaction crossed Darwent’s face.
“You’re a good, modest girl, m’love,” he declared, as Buckstone himself might have said it. “But after all, you know, the damned woman is my wife.”
He opened the door of the bathroom, closed it behind him, and bolted the door on the inside.
Chapter IX
Tells of a Lady in Her Bath—
THE ENSUING TABLEAU, AS Darwent turned round, might have interested an unprejudiced witness.
Darwent was in a room long but very narrow, since it had been partitioned off from the bedroom. A thin window at the narrow far end admitted light, showing no furniture or fitting except a mantelpiece, two chairs, and the portable but very heavy bath, which had been pushed longways against the same wall as the door.
And thus, as he turned sideways from bolting the door, he found himself at the foot of the bath, looking straight into Caroline’s eyes at the other end.
“Good evening, madam,” he said pleasantly. He did not believe, after his experience with Buckstone, that she would recognize him.
The bath, made of dark carved wood and lined with copper, was not large but rather high. According to the prevailing mode, it contained six gallons of near-boiling water and two gallons of cold milk. Though all this had to be carried up in buckets from the cellar, Caroline’s modesty was considerably aided by the milk and by the height of the water, which was only an inch or two lower than the ordinary evening gown.
But it did not (apparently, that is) aid her feelings of shock and outrage.
Caroline sat bolt upright amid steam from water-and-milk. Her brown hair was severely drawn up on her head, and tied there in a white ribbon with a bowknot. Her eyes, with the long shiny upper lids, were almost wide open. Her face and shoulders were pink-tinted with steam. Her right hand, half-raised and motionless, held a dripping bath sponge.
Thus, while you might have counted twenty, they looked at each other without moving. Caroline’s gaze was fixed on his face. She opened her mouth to speak.
“‘How dare you!’” interrupted Darwent, raising his hand. “Forgive me, madam, if I correctly anticipate the remark you were about to make. Do you know who I am?”
“Of c-c …” She checked herself. “That is to say, no. How should I?”
If Darwent had been in a mood to observe more closely, he would have seen that Caroline, though frightened; was not very much shocked or outraged. She was angry because he had caught her at a disadvantage, looking like this, with her hair tied up in a white bowknot.
As for Darwent, his first thought had been of how beautiful a woman she was when you saw her like that. The steam mist tinged her to warm color. The white bowknot on the updrawn hair, though tolerably ridiculous, was the very thing which made her seem human and hence damnably desirable.
He crushed out this thought, crushed it as he might have crushed a spider under his boot heel in the floor boards. It was too easy to remember, as so often he had remembered, her lofty voice at Newgate Prison:
“You appear to think, Mr. Cotton, that I am doing some ill service to a wretch who (forgive me) is better dead.”
And, thin-echoing through nightmares:
“You also appear to think that I should consider his welfare. Why should I? I don’t know him.”
Now his smile disappeared, and he looked at her again.
“Don’t you glare at me,” said Caroline, almost tremulously. She threw the sponge into the bathwater. “Don’t you dare!”
“I am your husband, madam.”
“How interesting!” observed Caroline, who had known it ever since she heard his voice in the other room.
Darwent, regaining his smile, glanced toward the mantelpiece and empty grate on the wall opposite the long side of the bathtub. A heavy gilt armchair, its padded upholstery a dull purple, stood with its back to the empty grate.
“I observe with pleasure,” he said, “that there is no dressing gown or towel in the room. Therefore we can speak together comfortably.”
He sat down in the chair, so close to the side of the bath that his boot tops touched it. Caroline looked at him over her shoulder, more flushed and even lovelier.
“Will you be good enough to leave me, sir?”
“No, madam.”
“I am helpless,” Caroline said tragically. “Have you none of the instincts of a gentleman? I am quite helpless!”
Darwent inclined his head.
“Yes, madam. I was aware of that happy circumstance. Though not perhaps as helpless as I was at Newgate.”
“Have you no consideration for me?”
“You appear to think that I should consider your welfare. Why should I? I don’t know you.”
Caroline heard no echo, or seemed to hear none. What she showed was uneasiness growing toward fright.
“You’re my husband!” she cried.
“So I am. Your loving care in the past has just reminded me.” The snarl in his voice was audible now. “Also, you remind me of one of the matters I wish to discuss. The annulment of our marriage.”
Caroline sat very still, her arms extended along the ledges of the bath, looking straight ahead so that he saw her face in profile.
“I don’t wish the marriage to be annulled,” she stated.
“No doubt you don’t. I understand your inheritance depends on the purely superfluous detail of a husband. At the same time …”
“Oh. The inheritance.” Caroline spoke almost absentmindedly, and kicked out underwater. She turned her face completely away
from him. “Can you think of no other reason,” she asked in a muffled voice, “why I might not wish the marriage to be annulled?”
“Yes, madam. I can.”
“Oh?” Though her arms and shoulders trembled, she did not look round.
“I ask myself,” Darwent continued in a musing tone, “the same question my friend Mulberry asked me today. Why did you return with such haste from Brighton, where (as I now guess) gossip must have told you I should be tried and acquitted today?”
“Then you do begin to understand?”
“Most certainly, madam. It is quite plain.”
“Oh, do stop calling me ‘madam’! Can’t you—say a pleasant word?”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Shall I call you ‘my love’ or ‘my pet’? Thank you, no. And a pleasant word on your lips would be as strange as an honest kiss. As I was saying: to obtain an annulment, I must state why you wished to be married. I have witnesses who can corroborate it. No; you don’t want that. It would be simpler to have me killed.”
Dead silence. The thin window, on Darwin’s right, had its lower half raised and propped up with the window stick. Even the back of Caroline’s neck seemed eloquent with shock, as though she had expected him to say something else.
Then there was a splashing and slopping of bath water as she whipped round to face him. Her blue eyes were incredulous; her mouth was open.
“Killed?” she exclaimed.
What an actress, thought Darwent, the lithe rattlesnake was! What craft of pretense she could employ when she liked! A moment ago, from a certain note in her voice, you might have thought she felt some tenderness toward him: even what the Minerva novelists now called a “swooning passion.” This amused him.
“Killed?” repeated Caroline, breathing hard against the side of the bath. “Then you do not understand why I returned from Brighton?”
“I know too well. Let me add another circumstance: with your permission, madam?”
“Pray go on.”
“When I entered this house a while ago, I forgot to look at the house next door: number thirty-six. Mulberry told me today that it belonged to Frank Orford.”
“Whom you killed in a duel?”
“Whom I killed in a duel,” lied Darwent, “as all the world seems to know. However! Because you lived next door to Frank, there is no proof you were acquainted with him. But I think you were acquainted with him. You were in some fashion entangled with this mystery of the blue coach and the house near Kinsmere and the dead man in the chair. If a murderer can stab one man with a rapier, he can attempt to kill me too. Surely that would please you?”
“You must be mad,” said Caroline, apparently so bewildered that she forgot to be angry. “But you might at least be accurate.”
“Accurate?”
“The house next door is the property of the Earl and Countess of Kinsmere, Frank’s father and mother.”
“Well! That is reasonable to suppose. But I believe it has been closed since Frank’s death?”
“Do you imagine he ever lived there? Poor, stingy Frank has always had lodgings in Chapel Street. The Kinsmeres’ town house next door has been locked up and shuttered for two years.”
Darwent lowered his head. Two houses, now! Two houses, one here and one in the country, gathering dust and woven with cobwebs since Frank’s parents went to make their home abroad.
“Imprisonment has harmed you,” said Caroline, seeing what appeared to be distress. Her voice softened. “It has not brought you to madness; don’t think so! I own—yes, I acknowledged—that perhaps I may have behaved badly.”
“Thank you,” said Darwent, with concealed sarcasm.
Whereupon he lost his head.
“Let me make a confession too,” he went on. “Every look and gesture of yours, every nerve of my imagination and every glance of your eyes, brings me closer to the lunacy you speak of. If I remained in your damned room much longer, I should lose my senses; seize hold of you without more nonsense; and (shall we say?) exercise my conjugal rights. But I must not do that, must I?”
“Certainly not! —Why not?”
“Because then the marriage could never be annulled. A simpler means than killing, now I think of it. That’s why you behave so very like Aphrodite, I take it?”
Again dead silence.
“You will leave this room, you will leave this house,” her voice was thick, “no matter what scandal it costs. I loathe scandal as much as the Kinsmeres have always loathed it, even Frank. But I won’t have this.” She raised her hand toward a bell rope which hung from the ceiling beside the bath. “I will summon my maid; I will summon all the servants; I will have you put into the street.”
“You forget, madam, that I am the master of the house.”
“Are you? Let us see!” And she gave a violent tug at the bell rope.
“As you please,” Darwent said politely.
Getting up from the chair, he went over to the door, unbolted it, and opened it. Outside stood Meg, the pretty dark-haired maid, her face now pink-to-crimson. Meg was holding one of Caroline’s bonnets, a hat with a fairly high crown like a Hussar’s, shaped by wires inside; heavy, blue in color, with two yellow plumes.
“Meg,” said Caroline, in a cold and steady voice, “you will first fetch me my dressing gown. You will then inform Alfred and Thomas and Leonard that his lordship has taken leave of his senses, and must be persuaded not to favor us with his company.”
Darwent reached out, as though in curiosity, and took Caroline’s blue, yellow-plumed hat from the startled maid.
“Meg m’love,” he said gently, “stay where you are.”
“You heard my order, Meg,” Caroline said curtly.
Darwent smiled down at the maid.
“No doubt, my pet, through no fault of your own, you’ve heard a little of the talk between my wife and myself. I propose to close this door not quite shut, as it was before I arrived. I ask you to sit down there,”—he pointed to the bedroom with Caroline’s hat—“and make certain nothing of a compromising sort is heard now. Do you understand?”
“Y-yes, my lord.”
“Meg!” Caroline screamed.
“And you’ll do this to please me, m’love?”
“Oh, yes, my lord!”
“That’s a good girl,” said Darwent, and closed the door.
For the first time since she had left Miss Sparerib’s Academy as a girl, Caroline had heard an order of hers disobeyed. She was as stunned and incredulous as Buckstone had been when the lash went across his face. Presently tears welled up in her eyes.
“Won’t you g-go of your own accord?” she cried. “You said, if you remained much longer—” abruptly Caroline stopped. “Is it your habit to force yourself into ladies’ bathrooms like this?”
“Not my habit, no. But I have had some experience. And the practice was never bitterly discouraged by Miss Spencer.”
“That’s your playhouse wench, is it not?” She opened her eyes through tears.
“Ah, you remember the name.”
“Certainly not!” Caroline added, with deplorable lack of dignity: “I’d like to scratch her eyes out!”
“Madam,” Darwent said wearily, “stop keeping up this pretense of feeling some kindness towards me.”
“You fool!”
“But again you remind me. I neglected to tell you that Dolly, with some friends of hers, will arrive here soon to spend a few nights under our hospitable roof.”
Water sloshed in the bath. “Here?”
“Only until I can find her a furnished house somewhere off Piccadilly or Grosvenor Square. The girl is ill; she will not trouble you, nor I her. I came to this house merely to give you a taste of your own medicine, and I think you have had it. For the rest, this hat …”
Turning the high-crowned blue hat round in his hands, so that the plumes wagged, he moved to the long side of the bath. Caroline shrank back.
“I have never seen a hat worn while bathing,” he went on. �
��But I urge you to put it on. For some reason you seem very distressed about the white bowknot which ties up your hair like a toy steeple. You reach towards it every twenty seconds. Put on the hat, madam, or for God’s sake take off the ribbon.”
If Caroline had believed the words of fullest insult were past, it was clear that she changed her mind now. It restored her poise, and she remained very quiet. It was as though she searched his mind and heart, seeking where, she could best strike and hurt.
“You imagine, then,” she asked sweetly, “that someone will kill you?”
“Someone will try.”
“Perhaps you are right.” She spoke in her old detached way. “I have friends, sir, who will not be happy to hear of your behavior towards me. Would you dare insult Sir John Buckstone as you have insulted me?”
“I spoke very little to him, it’s true.”
“And that little,” smiled Caroline, “was in Newgate Prison?”
Darwent lifted his shoulders.
“Yes, you may well die,” said Caroline. “But not from a stab in the back, or a pistol shot from behind, or a bludgeon over the head. Let me quieten your child’s fears and your sick fancies. Have courage, sir! Heaven knows you need it. There is enough to trouble you without fretting over assassination. This is London. The possibility of murder is remote. Therefore, dear sir, you are as safe as though …”
Once more Caroline stopped abruptly, and started back in the water with a scream and splash.
The report of a heavy cavalry pistol, fired from outside the open window, whacked in their ears even though it was deadened by open air.
The blue hat, with its two yellow plumes, spun out of Darwent’s hand as though by a twitch of magic. It struck the wall, and tumbled brim-downwards into the bath. As the milk-white surface of the water heaved, it floated slowly round in front of Caroline. Both Caroline and Darwent could see two holes in the crown that were made by the same bullet.
The bullet, round and heavy, had missed Darwent by six inches and smashed a black gouge in the white wall opposite the window.
Chapter X
—And Out of It
THE HIGH-CROWNED HAT, ITS yellow plumes now grotesque, still rocked on agitated water. Caroline, her face pale, reached out and pushed it away as though its touch would defile her.
The Bride of Newgate Page 11