by Joan Wolf
I did not have a chance to speak to Lord Winterdale about what had happened at the Richwood ball, as he was closeted in the library with his steward all morning and then, in the afternoon, he went out and did not return until after I had gone to bed.
The following morning, George Stanhope arrived in Grosvenor Square and asked to speak to me in private. I took him into the downstairs drawing room and we stood under the chandelier and faced each other across the pink and blue Persian rug.
His usual cool demeanor was definitely ruffled. “Georgiana,” he said, “I have heard the most extraordinary story from my sister . . .” He broke off, looking worried and clearly not certain how he should proceed.
I had already decided that the best way to handle this situation was to be completely truthful. In consequence, I told him all about how Lord Marsh had kidnapped Anna. I told him how Lord Winterdale and I had chased them into Hampshire, only to find that it hadn’t been necessary after all. I told him that we had stayed at Marsh Hall overnight—in separate rooms—and left for London at four o’clock in the morning in the hope of getting home before anyone knew that we had been gone.
“You can imagine how terrified I was that something dreadful was going to happen to Anna,” I said in conclusion. “It is nothing short of a miracle that Catherine was able to save her.”
I had expected him to agree with me, to express a reciprocal horror about Anna’s kidnapping as well as relief at her rescue. But that is not what happened.
“Whatever possessed you to go with Winderdale, Georgiana?” he demanded in a voice that was certainly not sympathetic. “He was perfectly capable of dealing with the situation without your presence. And I blame him even more for taking you. He must have known that there was no chance of your getting back to London before night fell!”
I stared into his angry green eyes. “But I wanted to go,” I said reasonably. “If we had indeed found Anna, she would have needed me.”
“Winterdale could have taken her nurse with him,” he snapped. “He most certainly should not have taken you!”
I was furious that he was blaming Lord Winterdale for a decision that had been mine.
“I forced him to take me,” I said. I lifted my chin. “I told him that I would follow him on horseback if he didn’t.”
George’s answer was prompt. “Then he should have locked you in your room. Really, Georgiana, he has exposed you to all the worst sort of gossip and speculation. . . .”
Locked me in my room! I could feel my eyes flash with outrage. I took a step closer to him, skewered him with my gaze, and said in a steely voice, “Tell me this, George, do you believe me guilty of illicit conduct with Lord Winterdale?”
A flush suffused his pale skin. “Really, Georgiana . . .”
I moved yet a little closer. “Well, do you?”
He said unwillingly, “I certainly do not think that you would enter into such a relationship of your own volition.”
A faint red haze began to appear before my eyes. “I see,” I said. “So he is supposed to have raped me?”
“Really, Georgiana! Such language does not become you.”
At this point, I was beside myself. “Well, let me tell you this, George, such thoughts do not become you.” We were standing very close, and I had to tip my head back to see beyond his nose. “Nothing happened between me and Lord Winterdale! I did not go to bed with him, either willingly or unwillingly. We went to Hampshire in pursuit of my sister and Lord Marsh, and we returned as soon as we learned that Anna was safe. And that is the entire story.”
The flush had subsided from his cheeks, and he was looking even more pale than usual. Close as we were, he made no attempt to reach for me. “Perhaps what you say is true, Georgiana, but that is not what people around town are saying.”
I stepped back from him, lowered my chin and tried to speak in a milder voice. “Believe me, George, I have no intention of holding you to our engagement.” My temper sparked again. “God forbid that you should attach yourself to one as tainted as I.”
He looked at me unhappily. “You make it sound as if I have no feelings for you. That is not true. It is just that I must consider the good name of my family.”
“George,” I said in the pleasantest voice I could manage to produce, “I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth. I wouldn’t trust a coward like you with the welfare of my dog, let alone my innocent little sister. Now will you please go away and leave me alone?”
He hesitated, opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something more, thought better of it, turned, and departed as if the hound of hell was at his heels.
I was still standing there under the chandelier, shaking with anger, when the door opened once more and Lord Winterdale came quietly into the drawing room.
“I passed Mr. Stanhope on his way out,” he said. “He did not look happy.”
I said stiffly, “We have agreed to sever our connection.”
His reckless eyebrows lifted. “Damn,” he said. “I was afraid that something like that might happen. Evidently that old busybody Tunby saw us driving down Park Lane the other morning.”
I clasped my hands in front of me and nodded. “It is all over town,” I said in a stifled voice.
He said, “Come along with me to the library. We had better have a talk.”
I followed him out the door of the drawing room and down the hall to his private sanctum. Once we were inside, he went over to his desk, took his usual chair, and waved me to mine. Once we were seated, he regarded me across the neatly piled papers, his face completely shuttered.
He said, “I am afraid there is nothing else for it, Miss Newbury. You are going to have to marry me.”
I stared at him in utter astonishment. “W-what did you say?” I stuttered, certain that I could not have heard him correctly.
“I said that you were going to have to marry me.”
I stared in silence at the face I had come to know so well: at the black hair, the recklessly slanted eyebrows, the brilliant blue eyes, the hard mouth that at moments could look so heartbreakingly sweet. He looked back at me, his face expressionless, but I had a feeling that he was not as controlled as he appeared to be.
At last I choked, “Are you serious?”
“Of course I am serious,” he said irritably. “This is hardly the sort of thing that one makes jokes about.” He leaned back in his chair. “If Stanhope had stood by you, then we might have escaped the net. But as it is . . . not only do you have to marry me, but I have to marry you.” He lifted an eyebrow. “I really do not care to figure in the eyes of society as a despoiler of innocent maidens.”
“Oh,” I said. “I see.”
He gave me a cool smile. “It won’t be so bad,” he said. “I will be kind to Anna, and as you have been saying all along, you must marry someone who can take care of her. Winterdale Park in Surrey is a very pleasant estate, and I am quite certain that she will be happy there.”
As if from a long way away, I heard my voice say, “I am certain that she will be.”
He lined up a pile of papers that were already in perfect order. “Good, that is settled then. I will have a talk with Aunt Agatha and ask her if it will be best to have banns called or if we should get a special license and be married immediately.”
“All right,” I said in a very small voice.
He gave me a pleasant nod. “Why don’t you run along, then, and ask Aunt Agatha to come to see me. Then you can go and break the news to Anna.”
I stood up slowly. It occurred to me that perhaps this was the first time in history that a girl had been proposed to across a desk. I walked to the door, opened it, paused, and looked back. He was leaning back in his chair staring at a green-marble paperweight. There was an ineffable weariness in his pose, and I thought once again that he was the loneliest person I had ever known.
I loved him. I loved him, and now I was going to marry him, and I wanted to weep.
Oh Philip, I thought, daring to call him
by his first name at last. If you continue to lock yourself away from me like this, you will break my heart.
* * *
Lady Winterdale thought that we should get a special license and be married within the week in the drawing room at Mansfield House. “We shall have a small wedding breakfast afterward, and then you and Georgiana can go into the country for a few weeks,” she informed Lord Winterdale. “We must hope that by the time you return to London, the scandal will have blown over.”
“I can’t be away from London for more than two weeks,” Lord Winterdale said smoothly. “I have appointments that I cannot break.”
Not for the first time, I wondered what it was that he did all day long. He might be at his club drinking and gambling during the evening hours, but he was gone from the house for most of the day as well. What appointments did he have? His life was a complete mystery to me, while mine was an open book to him.
This was not a situation that augured well for a successful marriage.
Anna had been surprisingly delighted when I told her that I was going to marry Lord Winterdale.
“Oh good, Georgie,” she had said, clapping her hands. “Lord Winterdale is nice. I like him. He plays ball with me sometimes in the garden.”
I hadn’t known that.
“We will be going to stay at his house in the country. It is called Winterdale Park, and it is supposed to be very pretty. You will like to get away from the city, won’t you, darling?”
“Oh yes!” Anna said with enthusiasm. “May I bring Snowball with me, Georgie?”
“I don’t see why not,” I replied. “I am sure that Lord Winterdale won’t mind if we send for him.”
When Anna broached this subject to Lord Winterdale at dinner that evening, he gave her one of his rare smiles and said that she was welcome to bring any animals she wanted to Winterdale Park, that there was plenty of room.
Anna regarded him across the table, her eyes very big. “May I have a donkey, Lord Winterdale? I have always wanted a donkey, but Papa would never let me.”
“Certainly you may have a donkey,” he returned. “And since we are soon to be brother and sister, I think that you had better begin to call me Philip, Anna.”
She gave him her incredibly beautiful smile and clapped her hands with delight. “I would like that,” she said. She turned her head to me. “Did you hear that, Georgie? I may have a donkey!”
Ever since Anna had seen a picture book that featured a little Spanish boy and his donkey, having a donkey of her own had been one of her chief ambitions.
“What fun that will be,” I said.
Lady Winterdale’s autocratic voice interrupted our talk of donkeys. “I have spoken to Lady Jersey, Philip, and she has graciously agreed to attend the wedding ceremony and the breakfast. Her presence will do a great deal toward lending respectability to your union to Georgiana.”
“Thank you, Aunt Agatha,” Lord Winterdale—or Philip, as I now must call him—said. “I have also spoken to Lord Castlereagh, and he and Lady Castlereagh will attend as well.”
Lady Winterdale stared at her nephew in dumbfounded amazement. “The Castlereaghs?” she said on a note of displeasure. “I did not know that you were acquainted with the Castlereaghs, Philip.”
Lord Castlereagh was the foreign secretary for the government and Lady Castlereagh was a patroness of Almack’s. Together, they were two of the most powerful people in London.
“Oh, I have known Castlereagh for a number of years,” Philip said indifferently.
“You never told me that!” Lady Winterdale’s pointy nose quivered.
He gave her an ironic look. “I did not realize that I was required to inform you of all my friendships, Aunt.”
As usual, she was impervious to insult. “How do you know the Castlereaghs?” she demanded.
He hesitated, then obviously realized that she would not let him rest if he did not answer.
“It is Lord Castlereagh with whom I am acquainted, ma’am. As you know, I spent many years on the Continent during the recent war, and I was often in a position to collect information that Castlereagh found useful. Suffice it to say, he owes me a few favors. He will be at the wedding.”
I stared at my future husband in amazement. He had been a spy!
Catherine said, “If the Jerseys and the Castlereaghs are in attendance, Mama, people will hardly be able to say that there is anything havey-cavey about the marriage.”
Lady Winterdale transferred her look of displeasure to her daughter. “Havey-cavey?” she said. “Really, Catherine, I cannot imagine where you have learned such disreputable language.”
“I beg your pardon, Mama,” said Catherine, who did not look in the least repentant.
Not for the first time I remarked to myself on the change in Catherine, and I thought of those musical afternoons and the Duke of Faircastle’s eldest son. While it was wonderful to see her beginning to stand on her own feet, my fear for my friend was that her love was as one-sided as my own.
CHAPTER
fifteen
PHILIP PROCURED A SPECIAL LICENSE FROM THE OFFICE of the Archbishop of Canterbury, which allowed us to be married at any convenient time or place without prior publishing of banns. We set the date for three days after we got the license, and I spent the intervening time getting Anna and Nanny ready to accompany us to Winterdale Park in Surrey after the marriage. They would be making their home there permanently, while after two weeks I would be returning to town with Philip.
“I have business in London that I cannot neglect, and if we wish to avoid any further gossip, you had better come back with me,” he told me during the fifteen minutes that we spent together discussing our immediate future. “If people think that I have married you in a hurry and then dumped you in the country . . . well, you can imagine what they will say.”
I was intensely curious about this mysterious “business” of his, but I didn’t feel as if I could ask him what it was. He kept his life so secret, was so guarded against trespassers, that I knew if I asked him about it, I would be snubbed.
We were going to be married, and all I knew about him was that something terrible must have happened to him to cause him to become the guarded, wary man that he was. I thought that my only hope was that hint of sweetness that I had caught a glimpse of once or twice. If only I could reach through the layers of distrust he had thrown up around himself, and find that sweetness, then perhaps we could have a marriage.
* * *
It was raining on the day that I was wed. A bad omen, I thought, as I dressed in the white-silk high-waisted evening gown with puffed sleeves and long white gloves that I was wearing for the big occasion. The gown was complemented by a veil of fine white lace, which was attached to a small pearl tiara. The veil hung down my back almost to my waist. I had a bouquet of white roses to carry and a string of pearls to wear around my throat.
I was perfectly calm. In fact, I was amazed by how calm I was. I smiled and joked with Catherine, who was my bridesmaid, and I helped Anna arrange her hair in the way she liked the best.
The earl’s apartment was at the very end of the passageway on the second floor, and there was a small staircase that went downstairs from those rooms to the anteroom on the floor below, so Philip did not have to pass by my room on his way downstairs. Consequently, I was not aware of when he descended to the first floor.
We were all starting to feel slightly restless when Lady Winterdale finally opened the door of my room and announced that the guests had arrived, the minister had arrived, and it was now time for us to make our own appearance.
Catherine came to straighten the folds of my veil. Anna ran on ahead of us, excited by the party atmosphere and eager to show off her new frock. I picked up my bouquet and walked out into the passageway in front of Catherine.
The wedding breakfast was to be served in the upstairs drawing room, and the wedding was to be held in the downstairs drawing room. Down the great circular stairway we went, to the green-marble hall,
where I could hear the sound of voices coming from within the opened doors of the drawing room.
It was then that my heart began to hammer.
We reached the doorway to the drawing room. Catherine and Anna went in, and I followed.
The room seemed surprisingly full, but the only person I had eyes for was the man who was standing by the fireplace. He was dressed, as I was, in evening clothes, and as I came in our gaze met briefly across the width of the room. Something flared in the deep blue of his eyes that made my breath hurry even faster.
Anna ran up to him and said shyly, “Do you like my new dress, Philip?”
He looked at her. “It is very pretty, Anna,” he said. “You look lovely.”
She smiled with radiant pleasure.
Then Lady Winterdale said majestically, “Now that everyone is here, I believe we are ready to start.”
Philip and I took our places in front of the clergyman and the others arranged themselves behind us. The clergyman, whose name was the Reverend Halmark, opened his book and in a pronouncedly nasal voice began to read the centuries-old marriage ceremony from the Prayer Book, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today in the sight of God . . .”
The room was very quiet, and I felt as if all my senses were more acutely tuned than they had ever been before in my life. The scent of the roses from my bouquet filled my nostrils, and I could feel the warmth of Philip’s body beside me right through the fine silk of my dress.
The clergyman looked at Philip and in his nasal voice began the ritual question, “Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife . . .”
My heart thudded in my breast. Thy wedded wife. Could this really be happening?
Through the drumming in my veins I heard Philip answer firmly, “I will.”
Then the Reverend Halmark turned to me and began to speak. When he stopped, I repeated Philip’s “I will” in a voice that was mercifully steady.
From behind me I could hear Anna whisper a question to Catherine.
Philip produced a ring from his pocket and turned to me. “I, Philip Robert Edward, take thee, Georgiana Frances, to my wedded Wife . . .”