The Love Knot

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘I can not and will not come home with you, Harry Montgomery, for a very good reason and that is––’

  But quite suddenly Dorinda was distracted. She sprang up before she had finished speaking and going to the drawing room door she opened it just as suddenly, in time to find Blanquette with her ear to it. Whereupon, in impeccable French and in words that she knew that Blanquette would understand all too easily, she ordered the young maid below to the kitchens, where she was to stay until such time as Mrs Montgomery rang for her.

  ‘Where was I? Ah yes.’ Dorinda reseated herself on the sofa and began again, her summary dismissal of the maid having left Harry wordless. ‘You were just saying that you thought I ought to return home with you, Harry. Well now, that is a very interesting proposition, particularly in view of the fact that I am, now, home. This is my home now, Harry, and since you have never once provided me with anything even amounting to a hovel in which to hang up my hat, I can only tell you with the utmost sincerity that while I would very much like it if you had provided me with a home to which I could return, Gervaise Lowther has provided me with not only a home, as you can see, but furniture and a carriage and horses, and clothes, as you can also doubtless observe, and a beautiful box at the Opera which I can use whenever I like, not to mention accounts with all the best shops – opened in my own name – all in return for the other thing that you have never given me, Harry Montgomery – and that is love.’

  ‘I hardly think that a fair accusation, Dorey. I married you, after all. I did marry you. Who were you before I married you, may I ask? I will tell you. You were the impoverished daughter of a widow, and she herself was running a seaside lodging house. You were hardly a catch, Dorey, my dear, hardly a catch by any means. You were lucky to catch me, in fact. Everyone said so at the time. Everyone on the island said you were lucky.’

  Dorinda sprang to her feet and stamped one of them good and hard, clenching her hands in a fury.

  ‘How dare you! How dare you – you, you – oaf! What sort of person do you think you are, coming into my house and insulting myself and my mother in that way? You who have never cared an oat if I came or went, if I was in rags or starving, just so long as you did not have to do a hand’s turn, or work for so much as an hour a day. You who only wanted to spend your days chasing butterflies and your nights drinking wine and falling asleep over the card table. You are an inebriated imbecile at best, and a cold hearted fish at worst, Harry Montgomery. Gervaise Lowther on the other hand is funny and kind, and I find I can love him. Whereas you – you I have never loved, and now I hate!’

  It was a truly extraordinary sight (but very satisfying) to see Harry white in the face, his lips trembling, fetching his walking stick and hat from the floor where he had laid them. He who had once been so pompous – and on really bad days, when he was suffering from too much wine the night before, quite bad tempered and waspish – was now standing looking at her as if he would like to take the walking stick and use it across her back, but could not because he was in her house and she was under the protection of another man, and there was not a jot that he could do, not a tittle or a jot, Dorinda realized with relish.

  He walked to the door using his walking stick as a gentleman should – to walk, rather than to beat his wife – but he turned when he reached the door and announced in his cold, dry voice, ‘This is not the last of it, Dorey, I do assure you.’

  ‘Oh, but it is, Harry, I assure you.’

  ‘He will never marry you, Dorey. You will be thrown aside as all women such as yourself are, and end up in the back streets, gin-ridden and unable to make your way even to the poorhouse.’

  ‘I really do not think it is anyone else’s business except my own where I end up, as you call it, Harry. Really I do not. Certainly it is no longer your business.’

  ‘I shall divorce you, of course.’

  ‘No you will not, Harry. You have not enough money to divorce me, but I now have plenty of my own to divorce you, and I do assure you I can, on the grounds of total cruelty and neglect. Anyone, any judge, will hardly have heard me make my case before the whole court will be sobbing in sympathy for me, and not for you, Harry. Not for you who neglected and disdained me, even putting collecting the Morning Post before my well-being and protection! If you ever want to blame your wife’s leaving you on any one thing, the straw that broke this particular camel’s back, Harry, was just that. You actually cared more for your wretched newspaper than you did for me. No wonder I took up with Gervaise who is kind and considerate and has given me everything I have ever dreamed of.’

  ‘You have the mind of a housemaid.’

  ‘I had rather have the mind of a housemaid than a heart of stone, Harry Montgomery. And with that, sir, adieu!’

  Dorinda herself shut the door behind him, and she did not bother to watch him walking off down the street, past her carriage and her matching dark bays, perhaps even past the hansom cab that would be bringing Gervaise to luncheon and other delights with her.

  Blanquette’s face appeared at the top of the stairs leading from the basement.

  ‘Madame called?’

  ‘You know very well that I did not call, Blanquette.’

  Dorinda stared down at her maid, realizing with gratitude that she was really rather ugly, and therefore unlikely to attract Gervaise.

  ‘Bring me a glass of red wine,’ she commanded. ‘I find I am feeling very anaemic.’

  ‘Ah! Le bon vin rouge!Tout de suite, madame, tout de suite!’

  After Blanquette had left her and she had drunk the wine, Dorinda stared at herself in the mirror above the fireplace in her delightful new drawing room.

  ‘The cheek of him coming here, and after all this time!’ she told the Dresden figures on the chimneypiece. ‘The utter, utter cheek of him. I shall tell the servants in future to deny him entrance to my house. Good gracious! Carrying on for all the world as if he had been married to me!’

  After she had laughed out loud at this Dorinda dabbed her wine-stained lips with her lace-bordered handkerchief in front of her drawing room mirror and shook her head. Really! What were husbands coming to? Calling without leaving a card? Barging into one’s house and demanding to see one? Anyone would think that they owned their wives, like an African chief or some such. It was both shocking and appalling. Besides, anyone who had taken ten whole days to find his wife certainly did not deserve for her to want to go back to him.

  Quite frankly, she hoped she never saw him again. Certainly seeing him just for those few minutes this morning had brought back the most unpleasant memories, memories that served only to remind her how very, very fortunate she was to be where she was now.

  Oh, but the time! Any minute now Gervaise would be arriving back at the house, and she not changed into the very newest of her dresses, the most delightful dress, a dress which she had just had delivered from Madame Chloe in Dover Street.

  Dorinda skipped up the stairs to her newly decorated boudoir, calling to Blanquette to follow her and singing at the top of her voice the French National Anthem, which somehow served to satisfy both Blanquette and herself, being of a rousing nature and at the same time easy to sing while your dress was being pulled over your head and your stays tied.

  ‘The first thing we have to do, my dear, is teach you to ride. That is the first thing.’

  Gervaise had dined so well he was disinclined to go anywhere after dinner. Really, there was little doubt but that Dorinda, his new and beloved mistress, was a pearl among the many pearls of her kind that inhabited the many discreetly fashionable houses in St John’s Wood. Not only was she wondrous in the boudoir, imaginative and sweet to a point that was well beyond any normal Englishman’s dreams, but she was also brilliant at supervising the kitchen, claiming that the art of the cuisine and the art of the boudoir were as closely entwined as ivy on a tree.

  ‘My grandfather told my mother that if a man tasted a woman’s food and disliked it, or was bored by it, or found it dull, there was no point in his
taking her to bed!’

  Gervaise found himself agreeing with Dorinda’s grandfather wholeheartedly. Had he tasted Dorinda’s food – or at least the food that she had directed the cook to prepare – he would have had no hesitation in inviting her upstairs within seconds of finishing dinner.

  Nevertheless the menu that night had been really quite light – consommé with rice followed by fillets of sole, tomatoes stuffed with veal, tiny roulades of lamb cooked with rosemary and served with a juice of red currants, and wild duck roasted with tiny parsley potatoes and a green salad.

  And to finish, a confection of meringue with a crème anglaise, and a compote of fruit, and – on the cook’s insistence – something called laitance de hareng à la diable. (‘Urgh, what is this?’ Dorinda had demanded to know, at which the cook had assured her that all meals in England ended in this way, especially in the houses of the aristocracy. Dorinda had again muttered her personal sound of disgust, but allowed it.)

  ‘How shall I learn to ride, Gervaise? I have no riding horses.’

  ‘I have been offered the use of a very nice ladies’ hack, a bright bay gelding, a most comely creature. A sweet and reasonable ride, I have been told by someone who knows a little about ladies’ hacks – and so that is how we must start.’

  ‘Where shall we begin?’

  ‘In Rotten Row, my dear, in the early morning. I shall take you myself, and you will be quite safe with me.’

  Dorinda smiled down the dining table at her lover. He was really so sweet and protective, and handsome too. But a warning voice ran through her head when she thought of someone who loved her teaching her anything at all.

  Alas, the voice she could hear clearly in her head was her mother’s at its most sensible.

  Never allow a man who imagines that he loves you to teach you anything, not a single solitary thing. Not even how to tie the laces on your boots. The moment he loves you, for some reason I have never understood, he feels quite free to treat you like a galley slave while he plays the Roman. You can do nothing right, and the less you can do right the more you find you do wrong, and the more you do wrong, the crosser he becomes, until enfin – you would both like to kill each other, and that is the truth!

  ‘Gervaise.’

  ‘My dear.’

  One of the things that was so utterly delightful about St John’s Wood was that the women allowed the men to smoke their after dinner cigars in the dining room, and did not mind in the least, it seemed, if the curtains smelt in the morning.

  But then, life in St John’s Wood was altogether such a pleasant contrast to being fashionable, and being seen to be fashionable and correct by the haut ton. And there was an end to it. Although of course, ultimately, a man could not do without both sides to his life. His public life with his wife and family was one thing and his private life with his mistress another, the one balancing the other quite exquisitely, as Gervaise now realized – to his own immense delight.

  His wife and family were happy with him as a husband and father, and blissfully ignorant of how he spent those leisure hours when he was not either with them or dancing attendance on the Prince of Wales. He was happy. His mistress was happy. As far as he was concerned his world was altogether a happy place, outlined as it was on the one side by the boundaries of convention, and on the other by his own insistent desires.

  But of course, a major part of the balance in his life could only be kept if he was able to teach Dorinda to ride, and not just to hack, but to jump her mounts so expertly that once winter came he could take her away to his Leicestershire hunting box, where she could be out all day with him, and although of course she could never be invited by any of his friends to their houses in the evening she would be there in the hunting box whenever he wished to visit her after tea. Or before dinner, and after dinner too, if he was lucky.

  ‘Gervaise!’

  Gervaise liked the way that Dorinda said his name. She did not precisely speak with a French accent yet it seemed to him that she did, for she did not pronounce her words in the same way as his completely Anglo-Saxon wife, nor did she move or smile in the same way. Her manner, her expression, everything about her was lighter and quicker. Quickness of speech and lightness of touch seemed to be her hallmark, and her hands always seeming to be darting about, as if she was anticipating his boredom and changing the subject, or her dress, or her manner, before he could tire of whatever it was she was saying or doing.

  ‘Gervaise,’ she said again, returning to the subject in hand while she managed to also look reproachful. ‘You know how much I owe you, you know how much I love you, but I must remind you that I am not first in your life. You have another life which is very, very important and which is not going to be important enough if you take it upon yourself to teach me to ride. No! I must insist you be a good boy, yes? You must be early at the Foreigners Office––’

  ‘Foreign Office––’

  ‘Exactly! This is it! To do your work, and then to go riding with me, but only when I am good at it, yes?’

  It was almost more than Gervaise could take in. Imagine having a mistress who was both passionate and amusing, but also ambitious for him. Who wanted him to do well at the ‘Foreigners Office’, who had, in short, serious intentions for him. Not just his wife (that was after all part of her duties – only to be expected) but now his mistress too wanted him to become Foreign Secretary, it seemed.

  Gervaise half closed his eyes, but then opened them again.

  ‘But who will teach you to ride, my dear, if not myself?’

  ‘Well, there must be a man who can teach me, yes? Perhaps some friend of yours? Perhaps Lord Crosstitch? You were mentioning him …’

  Gervaise hooted with laughter.

  ‘Crosswaite. Robert Crosswaite! Capital. I will ask him. He is a bachelor and has less on his mind in the early morning than a married man.’

  Dorinda smiled at her lover, and as she did so the candlelight caught the marvellous dull red of her garnet choker, with its matching ring and bracelet, with which dear Gervaise had presented her, just before he had to call for his opera cloak.

  ‘There was so much that I wanted to tell you, Gervaise, but I am afraid you must hurry, my love, or you will be late for supper and the ball.’

  He kissed her goodbye and later waved up to the window like a little boy being sent off to school. Dorinda watched him climb into a hackney cab, folding his hat and pulling his blue silk-lined cloak around him. She could reflect very happily on the past weeks that had brought such a change in her fortunes. She would like to think that she had brought as much happiness to Gervaise – perhaps more, who knew? – as he had brought to her, but she was too wise to think that he would think of her in terms of any future.

  She had not been married for two years to a feckless, uncaring good-for-nothing without learning that a man’s interest in a woman could last ten minutes, ten hours, ten days or ten years, and whichever it was, Dorinda knew that in her position she was bound for uncertainty. She was a ship in a bottle bobbing about on the waves of life. If she was not to end up, as Harry Montgomery had predicted, in gin alley, she must become more powerful, in her way, than any protector could possibly be. It was just a fact.

  But first, as Gervaise had said, she must learn to ride. But not just learn to ride – she must learn to ride beautifully and to hunt brilliantly. That way she would attract just the right amount of attention from just the right kind of interested and interesting gentlemen, so that if, and when, Gervaise tired of her, or she of him, she would be famous enough for it not to matter.

  One thing on which she was determined was that she would never ever see, or be within walking distance of, gin alley. Much more likely that Harry, with his silly preoccupations and his pride and conceit, would end up destitute and living in the poorhouse.

  Tomorrow she would be on her way, buying riding skirts and any amount of attention-seeking clothes for Rotten Row. Soon she would be trotting out on a bright bay gelding in … she paused, thinkin
g of the colour. Of course – her favourite blue, with matching plumes. She smiled at just the idea. She would stun them. She was determined on it.

  In another more correctly fashionable part of London, in that part which the oldest families travelled to and from during the Season, life was not as easy as it would seem to be in St John’s Wood.

  Mercy stared down the table at her step-uncle, Marcus Stanton. He was such a strange man, part gossip, part friend, partly too correct, partly too incorrect, and yet, with it all, she always felt she could ultimately trust him to say or do the right thing, although why she could she did not exactly know.

  During her childhood he had sometimes seemed to Mercy and her brothers to be a permanent guest at Cordel Court, staying for months at a time, and helping his sister, Lady Violet, tolerate the English winter. He was tall, like his sister, and despite being middle-aged he was still immensely good looking, but unmarried, and likely, Lady Violet always said, ‘sadly to remain so’. An accident in childhood had precluded marriage, but Mercy had never dared to ask her stepmother why, any more than she would have dared to ask her father if he felt sad when his favourite horse was shot.

  ‘My dear, I fear you have the most extraordinary competition in the ballroom this Season,’ her step-uncle was saying when Mercy returned her thoughts to earth. She watched him as he took a large helping of pudding and stared first with satisfaction at his plate, and then down the table with less satisfaction, or so it seemed to Mercy, at his mousy step-niece. ‘There are beauties of every kind, and so many to choose from! Lady Elmont’s daughter, Mathilda, Lady Soutine’s niece, Amaretta – although she might not count as she is slightly foreign with a strange accent. There are considerably fewer heiresses, the Americans having discovered what appalling husbands titled English gentlemen make – or no, I lie, there is one coming over with the Duchess of Marlborough for a short season, I hear. Well, well – at any rate it is doubtless all a tremendous challenge to your maid and your dressmaker, not to mention my sister.’