by M C Beaton
He looked handsome and stern and remote. It was hard to believe that this haughty aristocrat had knelt at her feet only a short time before.
“What are you doing here, Miss Lamberton?” he demanded in chilly accents.
Constance made several pitiful efforts to speak and ended by bursting into tears. She felt alone and miserable. How could she have fallen in love with this lord who only considered marrying her a sort of duty? And she suddenly felt sure his pride had been so hurt by her refusal that he would be only too happy to have the chance of refusing her.
He made no move to comfort her other than handing her a handkerchief. He stood by the fireplace, his arm leaning against the mantel, and stared coldly down at her, waiting for her to recover.
At last she gave a great gulp and fell silent.
“Go on, Miss Lamberton,” he said.
“I want to marry you, after all,” said Constance.
“Indeed!” he said. He walked across the window and stood with his back to her. It was a very elegant, very unresponsive back.
Constance decided that only the truth would serve… the truth except for that one main fact that she had fallen in love with him.
In a halting voice, she began to tell him of the Barringtons’ visit and of Bergen’s threats.
“And so,” he said icily, without turning round, “having failed to obtain a post as a governess or a housekeeper in your relatives’ home, you consider marriage to me to be the only way out of your predicament.”
“You need not marry me, you know,” said Constance in a small voice. “I could be a maid in your household or…”
He turned round and stared at her haughtily. “Fustian, Miss Lamberton,” he said. “I would not consider employing a girl of your family and quality as a maid.”
“Then—as a mistress?” whispered Constance.
“Neither as a mistress.”
“What am I to do?” wailed Constance. Lord Philip stood silent for several minutes staring at her. Her face was slightly blotched with crying, but nonetheless she still managed to look very pretty, fresh and vulnerable. Furthermore, he was tired of his celibate life and fastidiously shrank from the sordid bargaining setting up another ladybird would involve. Children would be splendid to have around. He smiled slowly as he pictured a nursery full of haughty, little high-nosed Cautrys.
“Well, well,” he said briskly, walking towards her. “Perhaps it would serve after all. I am sure we should rub along together tolerably well. Yes, I will marry you, Miss Lamberton,” said Lord Philip, feeling very magnanimous.
“Oh, thank you,” whispered Constance with true beggar-maid humility, although a nasty, mocking little voice in the back of her brain was evilly pointing out that her beloved Philip was a stuck-up prig.
“Very well,” he said briskly. “I do not think you should return to Manchester Square. My sister will not, of course, approve of you. She considered your father a trifle wild. I have, however, an elderly aunt living in Brook Street. She does not go out much, but she will take care of you for, let us say, a month until we are married.”
Constance whispered another “thank you” and he gave her an indulgent smile. His blossoming love for Constance, of which he had as yet been unaware, was being nipped in the bud by the frost of his own splendid magnanimity.
He pressed his cold lips to her forehead and then rang the bell and ordered his carriage to be brought round.
Chapter Eight
Once again, Manchester Square was rent by the infuriated screams of Lady Amelia when the Gazette announced the betrothal of Miss Constance Lamberton to Lord Philip Cautry. Once again, Mrs. Besant was summoned.
That good lady arrived breathless and exhilarated to view the tantrums and rage of her beautiful friend with indulgent calm.
“You must have been blind, dear Amelia,” said Mrs. Besant, carefully laying another log on the bonfire. “I saw he was enamored of her long ago.”
“Why didn’t you warn me?” raged Amelia, tearing her handkerchief to rags. “I thought that day she left that she had gone with those relatives of hers, after all. Why didn’t Bergen tell me anything? Why didn’t you warn me… or was it because you wanted to hurt me?”
Mrs. Besant conjured up a suitably shocked expression on her horse-like face. “You wrong me, Amelia. You know I am your only friend.” This, at least, was true.
“I could kill her,” grated Amelia. “I could choke the life out of the little…”
“Now, now,” soothed Mrs. Besant, feeling quite warm toward Amelia, now that the humiliation had been finally achieved. “Just you leave things to Mary. I’ll think of something.…”
The Comte Duval turned to his companion, his eyes narrowed into slits. “Whose fan did you say?”
“Miss Constance Lamberton,” replied the other man proudly.
“You are sure?”
“Course I’m sure. It took a lot of searching and work and… er… money to find out.”
“You will be repaid,” said the comte. “Where is Miss Lamberton at the moment?”
“She’s staying with some old fogey of an aunt of Cautry’s in Brook Street. Never goes out. She’s going out this evening, however. Cautry’s got to take her to dinner at his sister’s, Lady Eleanor.”
The comte took out a goose quill and began to ferret among the holes in his teeth while he thought hard. “For our safety, Miss Lamberton must be removed, although she has said nothing. I must study her again. I feel sure you can engineer an invitation for me for this evening. And also for Miss Braintree. I must use her once more. But that one will not talk. I could ruin Fanny Braintree’s reputation for life, and she knows it. She will continue to do what I ask.”
“Pinching papers from her old father’s office!”
“That… and other things,” smiled the comte.
“Which of us will kill Miss Lamberton?” asked the other uneasily.
“Why me, dear boy,” smiled the comte. “I and my little wits—I will kill Constance Lamberton.”
Lady Eleanor looked down the long gleaming table to where her brother sat with his fiancée, and her massive bosom heaved.
“It’s disgraceful,” she whispered to her husband for the umpteenth time. “There’s bad blood in the Lambertons. They’re an old family, I’ll admit, but never a title among the lot of them. Disgraceful! This wedding must be stopped.”
“How?” queried her husband with a rare burst of irritation. “How will you stop it? By killing the girl?”
“I might,” said his wife grimly. “I just might!” And for one uneasy moment her husband wondered whether she were joking.
Despite all her ill-wishers Constance appeared to survive. She sat, on the evening before her wedding, in Lady Agatha Beance’s drawing room and tried to fight down an acute bout of premarital nerves. Philip’s aunt, Lady Agatha, had been extremely kind. She was a slightly deaf, elderly lady who appeared to have enjoyed Constance’s company immensely, having at last found someone willing to read novels to her by the hour. In the past month they had got through the four volumes of The Rival Mothers and three of The Supposed Daughter.
“If life were like a novel,” thought Constance, “Philip would have fallen in love with me by now.”
But she had hardly seen her fiancé except for a few carriage drives, and one terrible dinner at the Riders where Lady Eleanor had hissed and fumed at her like an aristocratic volcano all evening.
“He will never fall in love with me now,” thought Constance with a rare burst of insight. “He’s so pleased with himself for taking care of my future that I swear he looks on me in the light of a charity case.”
Lady Agatha lived among the fading glory of the chinoiserie phase of the last century. Constance stared vaguely at the little Chinese men walking over bridges and under willow trees up and down the wallpaper, and wondering with the front of her mind why Chinese artists were so bad when it came to perspective while the rest of her brain scuttled and fretted round the ever present worry
. “Will he ever love me? You cannot love someone you pity. It is better to give than receive, except, of course, life is rather hard if one has been placed in a position always to be the receiver. Is he having second thoughts?”
Lord Philip was. No amount of blue blood flowing in his veins, no amount of titles or family crests or family pomp could protect him from that universal illness—premarital nerves.
Constance had been, well, not overwhelmed enough, he decided irritably. On the few occasions he had seen her since his proposal, she had been very quiet and timid and seemed distressingly unaware of his great condescension.
His bachelor life had assumed a rosy and enchanting glow it never had before.
He was roused from his thoughts by the arrival of Peter Potter who ambled in, in his usual way, unannounced.
He was impeccably dressed as ever but had crowned it all by his usual lapse of memory by having a red Kilmarnock cap pulled down over one ear. He looked for all the world like a extremely gentlemanly pirate.
“You are wearing your nightcap,” said Lord Philip grumpily, and then burst out with what was really worrying him. “I can’t help wishing I didn’t have to go through with this wedding tomorrow. Constance does not seen aware of the sacrifice. I could, after all, have looked higher.”
“‘Young Adam Cupid, he that shot so trim/When King Cophetua lov’d the beggar-maid,’” quoted Peter, “except in your case, Adam Cupid seems to have missed. I thought you loved the girl.”
“I am very fond of her,” said Philip stiffly.
“Oh, no you’re not,” said Peter. “You’re in love with the idea of the high and mighty Philip proposing to the penniless Miss Lamberton. She has no high and mighty pride.”
“She’s got nothing to be high and mighty about,” snapped Philip, feeling edgy as he again thought of the ceremony on the morrow.
“You’re nervous, that’s all,” said Peter, pulling off his cap and staring at it for a few seconds in amazement. “Otherwise I should be deuced angry at you for talking such snobbish fustian.”
“I suppose I am,” sighed Philip with a disarming smile. “Getting to sound quite like my sister, eh? Oh well, there’s nothing can be done about it now.”
“Come round to the Cocoa Tree and have a bumper with me,” said Peter. “You’re as blue-devilled as a monkey’s arse.”
Lord Philip grinned. “For a poet, you have a strange way with words, Peter,” he said with a laugh. “Yes, I’ll go with you, but, dear God, I wish this curst, boring wedding were over and finished with!”
There had been the awkward question of who would give the bride away. The ever efficient Evans had been roped in to help and had come up with an old friend of Constance’s father, Squire Benjamin Coates, a bluff and heavyset man who looked ill at ease in his finery, and smelled strongly of the stables.
He was nonetheless a kindly fatherly man who had given away four of his own daughters at the altar, and Constance was grateful for his reassuring presence on the following morning as she was helped into the chariot—or “charrot,” as she had been taught to pronounce it by the ladies of the ton.
It was a splendid “charrot” drawn by satin-skinned chestnuts with silver-plated harness, hung with sumptuous hammer cloths, blazing with armorial bearings. The coachman in the spun-glass wig and pink stockings who sat atop the box was sporting a large nosegay in his buttonhole in honor of the occasion, as did the two huge flunkeys who clung to the back straps.
The sun blazed down with a ferocious, yellow, glittering light which to Constance’s countrybred eyes meant there was a windy storm shortly to follow. She sat awkwardly in the uncomfortable confines of a French corset which seemed designed to push her bosoms up round her ears. Constance felt her wedding dress was overly fussy with its masses of white silk and lace, all flounced and gored and tucked and ruched and vandyked.
But the waiting, watching crowds of servants along Brook Street who had come out on the steps to see her off found nothing amiss. They thought Constance looked exactly how a bride should look, pretty and fresh and virginal.
Lord Philip when he turned from the altar to watch Constance coming up the aisle on Squire Benjamin’s arm was inclined to share their opinion, and felt some new and strange stirrings of pride as he viewed the ethereal vision in white.
The sun slanted in flashes of gold and blue and crimson through the tall, stained-glass windows.
To Constance, Lord Philip seemed like a stranger in the rose silk grandeur of his wedding coat and knee breeches, with jewels flashing on his shoes, his fingers and his cravat.
With a feeling of unreality, she took her place beside him. Peter was best man. There was no maid of honor for Constance, Mr. Evans’s energies having stopped short at the squire.
The Barringtons were present, since social custom decreed that even the most poisonous of one’s relatives must be on the guest list.
Constance made her responses in a low, clear voice, until she was asked whether she would take this man in marriage. She opened and shut her mouth, overcome with a wave of nervous fear, wondering if there was any alternative to marrying a man she loved but who obviously did not love her.
Lord Philip stared down at her in angry embarrassment, and then turned his head away impatiently and stared up at the gallery of the church.
And that is how he noticed the long barrel of a pistol poking over the edge of the gallery, pointing straight at Constance’s heart.
In a faltering voice, Constance said, “I do,” and then everything seemed to happen at once. Lord Philip gave her an almighty push which sent her flying backwards down the aisle as a deafening report rang out. The ball, meant for Constance, hit the squire who had stumbled forward to her aid, and he collapsed like a stone.
Scream after feminine scream rent the congregation as Philip nimbly sprang up the pulpit and leapt from the top of it so that his fingers grasped the brass rail of the gallery. He heaved himself over and then stared wildly around. Nothing. No one.
Down below, the ceremony was in total chaos. Several rowdy bloods at the back of the church who did not know about the shooting thought the whole thing was some mad jest, and began leaping towards the gallery from the top of the pews, cheered on by wild hunting calls from their less agile friends. Every single female in the congregation, with the exception of Constance, seemed to find it an excellent opportunity to prove the aristocratic delicacy of their nerves to the stronger sex, and it seemed as one woman, fainted dead away.
Philip climbed back down the way he had gone up and dropped beside Constance who was being supported by Peter. He pushed roughly past them and knelt beside the fallen squire, opening his waistcoat and feeling for his heart.
Squire Benjamin slowly opened one blue eye and then cautiously opened the other. His broad hand scrabbled inside his coat, and then he began to laugh as he hauled himself to his feet.
“The ball must have bounced off the steel of my demned corset,” he said cheerfully. “And to think how I cursed when my wife insisted I wear the contraption!”
Constance began to giggle nervously, and Lord Philip’s head snapped round and he stared at her with some impatience.
“I really think, my lord,” came the gentle voice of the bishop, “that we should postpone the rest of the ceremony until another day.”
“Oh, get on with it,” said Philip rudely. He found he was very much shaken. “I don’t want to have to go through this curst ceremony again.” Like the shadow which fell on Constance’s face, a cloud covered the sun outside and the church grew dim.
Somehow, the bishop managed to bring order to his unruly flock, and the ceremony went on, Philip angry and worried and Constance white and miserable.
“He didn’t want to marry me!” said a nagging voice, over and over again in her brain.
The wedding feast was to be held at Lady Eleanor’s Kensington villa. The carriages made their stately way along the Chiswick Road under a now lowering sky. Great gusts of hot wind whirled the dust rou
nd in miniature tornados, and the old trees beside the road sighed like the sea as the wind swept through the thick summer foliage.
Constance sat awkwardly in her wedding finery and stole a look at her husband. He was leaning back, his head against the squabs, with his eyes half closed.
Suddenly he opened them and stared at her. “Who do you think would want to kill you?” he said in a very matter-of-fact voice.
“No one,” said Constance. “Surely it was some maniac, some radical.”
“Taking potshots at the aristocracy? No, I don’t think so,” said Lord Philip and fell silent again.
A sudden squall of rain streamed down the windows of the chariot through which the villas of Kensington danced and wavered as if underwater.
Constance felt the beginnings of anger. Someone had nearly killed her on her wedding day, and yet this brand-new husband of hers had never so much as held her hand or tried in any way to allay her fears.
She bit her lip as she thought of the night ahead. Would he? But of course he would. Memories of Amelia’s salacious conversation thudded in her ears and her face burned.
She knew, of course, that it was considered extremely vulgar of ladies and gentlemen of the ton to betray the slightest sign of emotion, neither anger, grief, or, it seemed, passion.
Constance reflected that she had been very naive. She had expected that the minute they were married, Lord Philip would immediately change from his aloof self and, well… woo her.
The marquees were again erected on the lawn, heaving and straining at their guy ropes like tethered elephants.
Now, Constance had not drunk any wine since her experience with the Riders’ champagne. But she was overcome by the need for some Dutch courage. She had at first been relieved to notice the absence of Lady Amelia, but the green-eyed monster soon reared its ugly head in the shape of a captain’s pretty wife, Marjorie Banks-Jyce. She was a pert little brunette with a perfect figure and a roguish, roving eye. Various wives sat and smouldered as she flirted with their husbands, and Constance sat and smouldered with the best of them, particularly when she noticed that Marjorie had succeeded in making her husband smile for the first time that day.