by Sara Seale
“Thank you,” Lou said, moving quickly away, feeling suddenly ashamed. Cousin Blanche, if she could not afford it, did not have to put on such a reckless display of extravagance, nor did her daughter have to acquiesce so complacently, and where, indeed, was Melissa on a rainy afternoon when she should have been fitting her wedding dress? The final rehearsal was to be a full dress affair at home, so that trains and unfamiliar trappings could be manoeuvred without disaster on the day and the picture as a whole scrutinized and made perfect. Very soon the bridegroom would arrive; neither he nor Melissa or her mother apparently attached any importance to the old superstition that it was unlucky for the groom to see the wedding dress before the ceremony.
Cousin Blanche was beginning to panic, and even the waiting bridesmaids started whispering and giggling among themselves. The head fitter was complaining with rising indignation that there would not be enough time to dress the bride and be ready for the rehearsal and her apprentices could not spend all the afternoon in idleness when there might be last-minute alterations to be made.
“Be quiet!” snapped Blanche, and a maid came into the room at that moment and handed her a letter.
“Come by hand,” she vouchsafed laconically. “There’s no answer.”
There was nothing in the trivial interruption to cause alarm, but Lou watched while her cousin slit the envelope and felt suddenly afraid. Even the chattering bridesmaids fell silent as if disquiet had touched them, too, and Blanche herself froze into rigidity as she read the contents of the note.
“Madame ...” the head fitter murmured, sensing disaster, but when Blanche spoke her voice was like ice, and her face looked suddenly old.
“Will you all go, please? You won’t be required here any longer,” she said.
“But the wedding gown?”
“The wedding dress will have to wait. My daughter’s been—delayed.”
“Cousin Blanche...” Lou said as the door closed softly behind the fitter and her assistants, then Blanche suddenly went to pieces.
“She’s gone!” she screamed on a rising note of hysteria. “Melissa has done this to me ... run off with that good-for-nothing young charmer I’d thought safely forgotten, just because of a tiff with Piers ... love is all that counts, she says. Love! As if such nonsense mattered with the world at your feet and a fortune already spent in advance. Don’t stand there like a lot of gaping dummies—there’ll be no wedding, so you might as well all go home.”
“Cousin Blanche!” Lou’s young voice was sharp with distress and she made an instinctive movement towards the older woman, then drew back, embarrassed and dismayed. It was terrible to witness such a cracking of that hitherto hard, cold facade; it was hurtful to interpret the avid expressions on the pretty faces of the girls enjoying her humiliation.
Jane—or perhaps it was Caroline—said in an audible whisper:
“History repeating itself with a vengeance! Who’s going to tell the high and mighty bridegroom he’s been left at the altar?”
Who, indeed? thought Lou distractedly, and as if on cue, Piers walked unannounced into the room.
CHAPTER TWO
He stood there for a moment surveying them all with a quizzical expression. The bridesmaids had instinctively ranged themselves in a line against the wall and his eyes travelled slowly over them each in turn.
“Very charming,” he observed. “And where’s the bride—or am I late?”
No one answered him, and his attention turned to Blanche. She had control of herself now, shocked into immobility by his sudden appearance, but her face was drawn beneath the careful mask of make-up; and she caught her breath on the last remaining note of hysteria.
“Is anything amiss?” Piers enquired politely, and Lou had the uncomfortable impression that not only was he instantly warned of disaster but was in some measure enjoying himself.
“Well, is nobody going to explain why you all look at me as if I were the spectre at the feast?” He continued as nobody spoke. “You, Cinderella—you’re usually the one given the unpleasant jobs. Won’t you break it to me gently? Have I been left at the altar like my father before me?”
His eyes coming to rest on Lou’s distressed face were hard and suddenly without amusement and, there was an imperceptible tightening at the corners of his mouth. He was not enjoying himself, after all, thought Lou, wondering why she should have imagined he was, and because someone had to tell him and Cousin Blanche was coming to no one’s rescue she said with a baldness that inexperience could not soften:
“Yes, you have, I’m afraid. Melissa’s run away with someone else.”
The little pause that followed seemed to her like a moment suspended in time. The bridesmaids became frozen into a waiting silence, Blanche made a small, nervous gesture and then was still, and Lou herself searched out a corner of the room where she could merge into obscurity.
Piers’ lean, dark face showed little change. He surveyed them all with an expression which suggested that someone might have committed an impertinence.
“Has she, indeed? Well now, Blanche, what do you propose to do about that?” He was extremely cool, extremely unsurprised, but Lou realized, if the others did not, that he was also dangerously angry.
“What do you expect me to do, my dear Piers?” Blanche, whose only course lay in brazening things out, was momentarily deceived by his manner. “The girl, of course, must be slightly unhinged, but as I don’t know where she is at the moment, I can’t do much about getting her back. You’d better read her note.” She handed over the letter and he stood reading it in silence, then folded it carefully and handed it back.
“Love is all that counts,” he quoted reflectively. “Dear me, I wouldn’t have thought that sort of cliché would have come from Melissa. Well now, Blanche, I repeat—what are we going to do?”
“And I’ve told you there’s nothing I can do. We will have to postpone the marriage, of course. I’ll think up something for the press.”
“Postpone it?”
“Well, there’s hardly time between now and tomorrow to learn her whereabouts and get her brought back.”
“And if I don’t choose to postpone it?”
“You scarcely have much choice.”
“But you, my dear Blanche, have less. We made a bargain, you and I, with your daughter a very willing hostage. Are you able to return my money?” he said very gently, and at last Blanche began to look afraid.
“You know very well that’s impossible, but I, no more than you, expected to be let down at the last moment.”
“Didn’t, you? But your charming daughter is only following your example, after all.”
“That was very different. You’re a rich man, Piers, you can afford to be generous.”
His eyes suddenly narrowed. “Yes, I’m a rich man, and for that reason I don’t choose to be made a laughing stock of. I can make you bankrupt, my dear, and the scandal won’t be pleasant. I was to foot the bills for the wedding and trousseau too, wasn’t I—or did you imagine I didn’t know I was being milked?”
The bridesmaids had drawn together in a little group to whisper among themselves. Blanche glanced at their worldly-wise faces, well aware that the scandal would be all over London by nightfall, and anxious creditors probably on the doorstep by morning.
“You girls had better go and change,” she said sharply. “And please don’t leave until I’ve had a word with you all.”
“Let them stay,” Piers said. “You won’t muzzle their gossiping little tongues once they get home, and your financial excesses are pretty well known anyway.”
“Do you want to humiliate me by making me beg for generosity in front of them?” Blanche asked, and unwonted tears filled her eyes.
He was silent for a moment, remembering her as she had seemed to him as a small boy, beautiful, elegant and sweet-smelling, his ideal of the mother he could not remember. She still had beauty and elegance, and that trick of bringing a mist to her eyes when defeated, and perhaps one never quite forgo
t one’s first, voluntary act of worship.
“Oh, dear me, no, that would be most embarrassing for everyone,” he answered, and now the voice which had beguiled the impressionable Lou before ever they met was light and casual. “There is no real problem for you. Blanche. The marriage will proceed.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, faint with relief.
“I knew you’d be reasonable, Piers,” she said. “It won’t mean a long postponement. I’ll hire detectives, I’ll have her brought back, eating humble pie. Melissa’s very sensible, really—she’ll soon find out her mistake.”
“But that will be a little late, won’t it? I don’t think I would care for a bride who had anticipated her wedding night with someone else.” There was a chill in his voice, which should have warned her.
“But there’s no other way out.”
“Oh, I think there is. You must find me a substitute, that’s all.”
She stared at him incredulously.
“Are you mad?” she asked, and he ran an absent hand over his chin as if to satisfy himself that his morning shave had been entirely satisfactory.
“I don’t think so,” he replied. “My chief need was a wife, if you remember, and for old times’ sake, your daughter seemed a suitable choice, but since she’s had other ideas, it makes little difference.”
“Little difference? What on earth do you mean?”
He stood there, quite at ease now, his hands thrust in his trouser pockets, his dark head tilted back a little, surveying them all through half-closed eyes, and Lou, watching him, remembered the gossip and the colorful stories which had seemed to follow in the wake of the name of Merrick. Money and self-assurance, she supposed, could give one this strange right to autocracy.
“I mean quite simply that I don’t intend to be made a fool of,” he said then. “Thanks to you there has been too much publicity about this affair, so why not a bit more? I refuse to be the subject of ridicule by the cancellation of tomorrow’s program, so find me another bride.”
“Really, Piers; you’re carrying this Rajah complex a little far, don’t you think?”
“You must be mistaken in the complex—I have no harem,” he replied. “And with all due modesty I might add that I’m considered quite a catch in the matrimonial market, so where’s your difficulty?”
“You’re insufferable!” Blanche exclaimed with her first genuine burst of feeling, and he gave her a quick, wholly charming smile.
“I am, aren’t I?” he agreed. “Still, I have my pride like anyone else, and tomorrow’s ceremony goes on—so what?”
“So what—as you say?” Blanche echoed, suddenly sitting down on the nearest chair. “I don’t think I feel very well. Does it mean so little to you, Piers, to replace Melissa with a stranger at the eleventh hour?”
He looked down at her, smiling again that quick charming smile which Lou was beginning to think hid a great deal which he did not care to reveal. The whole fantastic interview was so bizarre that she had begun to regard it as a natural culmination to the past unreal weeks.
“Well, now, that’s rather a leading question, don’t you think?” he replied. “You and I both know that this marriage was a matter of expediency rather than a starry-eyed romance. Melissa has, of course, proved me wrong in that respect, but as far as I’m concerned, one bride is as good as another, providing she takes to me kindly. Now here you have a bevy of charming young girls, all hoping for husbands in due course. One of them might oblige, wouldn’t you think?”
The goggling bridesmaids, after the first incredulous gasp, entered into the spirit of the thing with a will, clustering round him, laughing and preening. The absurd suggestion might, of course, be an elaborate hoax, but Piers Merrick was well known for his grandiose gestures and this could very well be the moment for one of them to catch him on the rebound.
“You see,” he said, throwing a glance at Blanche that was at once humorous and disillusioned. He considered them all for a moment with weary attention, then suddenly wheeled round on the youngest bridesmaid, standing apart and clearly not enjoying the situation.
“And what about you, Cinderella?” he asked with mocking deliberation. “You don’t, I notice, seem anxious to fill the shoes of the defaulting bride.”
Lou stood there, licking her dry lips, unsure still if he were jesting or not, and acutely embarrassed at being singled out for his attention.
“I don’t take you seriously, which is just as well,” she replied, and her eyes looked suddenly enormous in her pale, slightly scandalized face.
“Why is it just as well? Would you have me?” he said, and watched the betraying color tinge her skin with a fleeting suggestion of beauty.
“I—I don’t care for these sort of jokes, and—and marriage is a serious business,” she stammered, and for a moment his face wore that strange touch of tenderness which she had glimpsed once or twice before.
“Yes, it is, and I’m quite serious, too,” he said with sudden gentleness. “You would suit very well, I’m beginning to think, Cousin Lou, and we still keep it in the family, which should please your Cousin Blanche. Will you have me?”
They were all looking at her, the bridesmaids in varying degrees of disgust and astonishment, Cousin Blanche with her face already settling into its habitual fashionable mask now that a compromise had been reached, and Piers, the dark, arrogant stranger who believed he had only to whistle up a bride and she would come running; a monstrous suggestion, a monstrous situation!
“C-certainly not!” Lou replied in outraged tones and, bursting into tears, fled from the room.
II
After that nothing to Lou had been sane or real. Cousin Blanche’s pleadings had been desperate and undignified, the bridesmaids’ comments unflattering if well-intentioned, and nobody seemed to stop talking, arguing or quarrelling.
“You must be mad to throw away such an opportunity,” Cousin Blanche had said, finally getting rid of the bridesmaids who, were only adding to the confusion. “Here are you, a little nobody, refusing the chance of a lifetime for the sake of some romantic scruple, to say nothing of repaying my own kindness with ingratitude. I wanted him for Melissa, that’s true, but at least I can accept a change of heart with a good grace.”
“Because,” Lou retorted, driven to honesty, “you think he would make you bankrupt, otherwise.”
“I don’t think, I know,” Blanche snapped. “Don’t imagine in your trusting innocence that Piers would not carry out his threat if he fails to get what he wants. He has old scores to pay off, and he’s a proud man.”
“He doesn’t want me. He’s hardly ever noticed me.”
“I’m not so sure. That time you danced ... the way he sometimes teased you ... he was never in love with Melissa, you know. They simply suited for the moment.”
“I don’t suppose he’s ever loved anyone.”
“Very likely not, but you, Lou—you lost your heart to him a little, so marriage shouldn’t be too difficult...”
“No ... no ... no!” repeated Lou with infuriating stubbornness, and her cousin, for the moment, gave up. The child would have to be persuaded somehow, if the creditors were to be staved off, but in the meantime they were both too much on edge to arrive at any profitable understanding.
“You’d better go and change your dress,” she said coldly. “Heaven knows how it’s going to get paid for now anyway.”
Lou rose obediently and started across the hall, already dim and shadowy in the failing light. It must be late afternoon, she supposed, and the house seemed suddenly very quiet after the ceaseless rise and fall of feminine voices. The caterers had gone, but the drawing room doors stood open, and she peeped inside to gaze disconsolately on the lavish preparations for the reception. Tears of regret for the ignominious ending to Cousin Blanche’s bright schemes sprang to her eyes as she looked. The scent of the hothouse flowers which, alone, must have cost a fortune, was already overpowering, and there was such a predominating note of white, ghostly and rath
er funereal, in the shadows that Lou shivered.
“It’s like a wake, not a wedding,” she said aloud.
“Yes, it is rather,” Piers’ voice observed unexpectedly behind her, and two firm hands came to rest lightly on her shoulders.
She turned swiftly round to face him, taken utterly by surprise.
“I thought you’d gone long ago,” she said.
“I’m still waiting for my answer,” he replied, one finger touching with gentle curiosity a tear that still clung to her lashes. “Has Blanche been bullying you?”
“No, not really—and you had my answer.”
“But I’d hoped you weren’t serious.”
“Why? Because no girl has ever turned you down before?”
He smiled with surprised amusement at this unexpected flash of bravado, and gave her a little shake.
“You know nothing about my much publicized love-life,” he said with mock severity.
“Only what I read in the gossip columns.”
“Exactly. And think what a whale of a ball the gossip writers are going to have after tomorrow if you insist on remaining stubborn.”
“I don’t see,” Lou replied wearily, “that it will make much difference. They’d be pop-eyed anyway with a change of bride.”
“Quite true, but that’s an entirely different kettle of fish; no resurrected scandal for poor Cousin Blanche, no hungry creditors on the doorstep, only a last-minute conjuring trick to whet the public’s appetite. It’s a scoop handed out on a plate to any ambitious reporter.”
“What should I care about the public’s appetite? Besides—”
“Like me, my child, damn all! Besides what?”
“You can’t get married to somebody else at a moment’s notice. It wouldn’t be legal.”
“Are you weakening? There’s such a thing as a special licence—all perfectly legal.”