Her voice was very soft and seductive as she said the last words and, as her blue eyes looked up into his, the Marquis had believed that he had found the pearl beyond price, which he had always sought in the woman he would marry.
Then yesterday evening everything he had planned, his whole future, had fallen in pieces about his ears.
Chapter 2
The Marquis awoke when he heard the anchor being raised and a few minutes later the yacht began to heel over as the sails were set and caught the wind.
He was aware that his head ached and his mouth felt dry and he knew that last night, contrary to his usual habit, he had drunk too much.
First the brandy had been surprisingly good at the inn on the quay and secondly, when he had returned to the yacht, he felt so depressed and incensed with life in general that he had sent the Steward for a decanter of his best claret, which he had drunk until the early hours of the morning.
Then, when he thought of last night, he remembered that he had brought a woman aboard with him and he asked himself if he had gone insane.
How, after all that had happened, after an experience that should have been the lesson of a lifetime, could he have been mad enough to involve himself with yet another woman and one who, if he was not careful, would undoubtedly be an encumbrance?
Then, because it was impossible for his thoughts to linger on anything for long, except the perfidy of Sarah, he recalled the reason why he was in Dover, why he had drunk too much and why in the cold and unpleasantness of March he should be contemplating a voyage at sea.
Thinking back, he could remember all too clearly the moment he had met Sarah.
He had been so occupied in London that he had not been down to Elvin last winter as much as usual.
He had been involved in many discussions and committees concerning the projected Reform Bill and in speaking frequently on other matters in the Chamber of the House of Lords.
He had also found that the new King, William IV, required his presence constantly at Buckingham Palace.
While it was flattering to be in such demand, it meant that he seldom seemed to have any free time for his own amusement.
It had therefore been almost with a feeling of playing truant that he had slipped away from London to Elvin to enjoy a few days hunting before the season ended.
He was well in the front of the field and enjoying one of the best runs he had experienced for a long time when crossing some rough ground his horse picked up a stone.
As he was riding one of his very best hunters, the Marquis dismounted and, letting the hunt go on without him, he realised that he must either try to dislodge the stone himself or find someone to do it for him.
He had, as it happened, nothing he could use as a probe except for his fingers and when he lifted his horse’s hoof he saw that the stone was embedded half under the shoe and if it was not extracted carefully the shoe would come away with it.
He looked around and saw that he was on his own estate, which was a very extensive one, and that only a short distance from where he was standing now was The Manor.
He remembered his agent telling him a year ago that it had been let to Sir Robert Chesney.
Ordinarily the Marquis would have called on a new tenant, but he had, in fact, forgotten Sir Robert’s arrival and, when he had come to Elvin, it had been with large parties and he had no time to pay courtesy calls on local people.
‘I shall have to make my apologies now,’ he told himself as, leading his horse by the bridle, he walked towards The Manor.
He went immediately to the stables, knowing where they were, and found an elderly groom to whom he explained his predicament.
The groom recognised him and touching his forelock said,
“Now don’t you worry, my Lord. I’ll soon get the stone away, then you can rejoin the ’unt. I can ’ear ’em now, drawin’ through Chandle’s Wood but I doubts they’ll find anythin’ there!”
“I imagine that is where the fox has gone to earth,” the Marquis replied.
“If ’e ’as, then they’ll ’ave to dig deep!” the groom smiled.
He took the horse as he spoke and led it towards an empty stall.
“While you are busy,” the Marquis said, “I will pay my respects to Sir Robert. He is at home?”
The groom’s voice altered as he answered,
“Sir Robert died last week, my Lord!”
“I had no idea!” the Marquis exclaimed.
He thought as he spoke that it was extremely remiss of his agent not to have informed him of the fact.
It would have been polite to send Sir Robert’s widow a letter of condolence or at least a wreath to the funeral.
“I be sure ’er Ladyship’d wish to make you’re acquaintance, my Lord,” the groom said.
The Marquis walked towards the front door, feeling uncomfortably that he owed Lady Chesney an apology.
An elderly manservant led him across the small hall into what the Marquis remembered was a charming drawing room at the back of the house overlooking the rose garden.
If he thought the room was charming, then so was its occupant.
She was certainly astonished to see him when he was announced, but he liked the way her voice, when she greeted him, was calm and composed and he certainly liked her appearance.
In a black gown that accentuated her clear skin, the gold of her hair and the blue of her eyes, Lady Chesney was certainly very alluring.
She insisted on sending for some refreshment and, as the Marquis seated himself opposite her, he began,
“I have only just learned from your groom of your husband’s death. I can only say how sorry I am not to have sent you my condolences and my sympathy, but now they are both yours.”
“That is very kind of you, my Lord,” Lady Chesney answered. “My husband had been ill for some years and the reason why we came here was that the physicians thought that the fresh air and the quiet of the country might do him good.”
She paused before she said with a little sob,
“Unfortunately they were – mistaken.”
That was the beginning of an acquaintance that progressed rapidly into friendship and from friendship into love.
The Marquis, riding away from The Manor, found it impossible to forget two blue eyes that had looked at him pathetically, curiously, then undoubtedly admiringly.
He had returned the next day, feeling that, as he had not sent a wreath to the funeral, at least he could provide the widow with exotic fruit and flowers from his greenhouses.
She had been suitably grateful and, of course, said how interested she would be to see Elvin, as she had always heard so much about it.
The Marquis was only too willing to be her guide and her delight at the treasures that had been accumulated by his ancestors and the innovations he himself had made in the house was very gratifying.
It was six months before the Marquis became what he had wished to be within a week or so after making her acquaintance, Sarah Chesney’s lover.
But he had found to accomplish this required all his powers of persuasion and ingenuity.
This was not because she did not love him.
She had told him that she had loved him at first sight and he had captured her heart to the point where it was no longer hers but his.
However, she was anxious that there should be no breath of scandal, which she said might so easily spoil the love they had for each other.
She explained it in a way that the Marquis thought was good common sense.
“You are so fascinating and so handsome, my Lord,” she said, “that naturally every woman you meet falls in love with you. The world being a censorious place, no one would believe that any one female could resist your magical charm.”
“You flatter me,” the Marquis had said with a smile, but he had enjoyed it all the same.
“‘You will understand,” Sarah had gone on in a soft caressing voice, “that I could not be disloyal to my dear Robert’s memory by getting m
yself talked about in a scandalous manner so soon after his death. While you can go back to London and forget me, I have to live in this small world where people talk because they have nothing better to do.”
“Do you really think I could forget you?” the Marquis asked.
“I hope you will not do so,” Sarah replied, “but you are so important and of such consequence in the Social world, while I am just a little nobody who worships you because you have brought me such unbelievable happiness.”
“You know that happiness is what I want to bring you,” the Marquis said, “and I want to show you how much I love you. But as you say, it is impossible here in The Manor where your servants might be suspicious of what we were doing.”
“They are so kind to me, my Lord. They look after me and cosset me. But they would be deeply shocked if they thought you were anything more than a kind friend who wished to comfort me in my loneliness.”
The situation had seemed hopeless until Sarah was asked to stay with some friends on the other side of the County with whom the Marquis had a slight acquaintance.
It had not been easy, but because he was determined he had somehow managed to get himself invited at the same time.
They pretended that they had never met before.
Fortunately there were quite a number of other people staying in the house and their bedrooms were not far apart.
The Marquis, making love to a woman he had pursued for six months, found it a delight that made him feel as if he had won a victory after what had been a strenuous battle.
He truly believed that he was in love with Sarah in a way he had never been in love before.
The only difficulty was how they could contrive to continue their lovemaking, which the Marquis was certain had been as unforgettable an experience for her as it had been for him.
There had been another month of frustration during which, despite his pleadings, Sarah had refused to agree to what he asked of her and made him feel that he was a brute to suggest anything that might damage her reputation.
“If I cannot come to your house and you will not come to mine,” he asked her, “what are we to do?”
Her eyes filled with tears as they looked into his and she said in a broken little voice,
“Oh, Boydon, I love you so desperately! But – ”
There was always that ‘but’ the Marquis later thought irritably.
Then it suddenly struck him that the answer to their problem was quite obvious. He would marry Sarah!
He had always known that sooner or later he must marry and produce an heir, but it had not seemed a pressing necessity until he was over thirty, which would not be for another year.
What was more, he enjoyed being a bachelor and had seen far too many of his friends unhappily married to women who had seemed desirable enough until they actually bore their husband’s name and sat at the top of their table.
“Marriage is hell, Elvington!” Lord Wickham had said to him after being married for only three months.
“But Charlotte is so beautiful,” the Marquis replied.
“That is what I thought, until I saw her in the mornings when she is petulant and in the evenings when she is tired. And I will tell you another thing,” Lord Wickham had gone on to complain, “it’s not the looks of a wife that counts, it’s her intelligence.”
His lips had tightened for a moment before he had continued,
“Can you imagine what it is like to know exactly what a woman is going to say before she says it, for twenty-four hours of the day?”
The Marquis had not replied and his friend had added bitterly,
“You are the only one of our crowd who has had the good sense to remain a bachelor. George’s wife takes laudanum and Charles has married a harridan!”
“I have certainly no wish to be leg-shackled!” the Marquis said firmly not only to his friends but also to himself in private.
And yet, he thought, Sarah was different, so different that he was certain she was the woman who was so ideal in every way, so exactly what a man wanted in his wife, that he dared not risk losing her.
He knew even then that he hesitated before committing himself.
In fact, he was now considering Sarah from a somewhat different angle. She was not only a very desirable woman, who set his pulses racing and his heart throbbing when she was near but also someone he could trust.
She must, he thought, be able to take his mother’s place, as hostess in the houses he owned and more important still be as acceptable at Buckingham Palace as he was himself.
He knew this involved something very different to what it would have meant under the last Monarch.
George IV, up until his dying day, had liked the men who surrounded him to be raffish and witty and, because he had always been so himself, promiscuous with women.
Equally, the late King had only admitted ladies to the Royal circle that were attractive to the opposite sex – and easily persuaded to relax their morals.
But Buckingham Palace today had a very different atmosphere. The Marquis often thought it was not the same place now that the staid and prudish little Queen Adelaide was on the throne beside the King.
There was no doubt that she and her much older husband were extremely happy together, but while the King had enjoyed a riotous youth and had fathered ten illegitimate children by the actress Mrs. Jordan, he had now become so respectable that as one Statesman had remarked to the Marquis,
“I always feel as I enter the Palace that I am attending a Prayer Meeting!”
The Marquis had laughed but he knew that, if he wished to keep his place at Court, that he freely enjoyed, his life must be circumspect in every way.
If there was to be the slightest breath of scandal about his wife, Queen Adelaide would make sure that she was excluded from the Royal circle.
Watching Sarah critically the Marquis became more convinced every time he saw her that she would make him exactly the wife he required.
Although he had to control his desires, which he found both irritating and frustrating, he still admired her for sticking to her principles and making him understand mentally, if not physically, that they were really necessary.
Only when he finally proposed marriage and she had said in a rapturous manner that her dreams and her ambitions had been fulfilled, did she relent a little and, as he put it to himself, ‘lower the drawbridge’.
“I love you! How can I wait months before you can be mine?” the Marquis asked.
“I want you too,” Sarah had whispered, “and so, my darling, I have an idea!”
“What is it?”
“My lady’s maid, who I always feel watches me like a hawk, has left today to visit her mother who is ill. That means there is only an old couple in the house, both of whom are deaf.”
“You mean – ?” the Marquis asked, his eyes brightening as he realised what she was saying.
“If you come to me tonight, dearest, nobody will know that you are here and I can be in your arms, as I long to be.”
The Marquis had kissed her until they were both breathless and then Sarah had said,
“Come to me across the garden. You can leave your horse tied to a tree in the shrubbery and I will open the French window after the servants have gone to bed.”
“My sweet! My darling!” the Marquis cried.
When later he had said a formal farewell in front of the old butler, their eyes had met and he knew that they were both counting the hours until they could be together again.
They had spent two nights of bliss.
Then Sarah told him that her maid had returned and, because the Marquis could not bear to toss restlessly in his bed at Elvin, when he longed to be with Sarah in hers, he had gone back to London.
There was a great deal for him to do and because he was genuinely interested in politics, the difficulties of the Reform Bill fully occupied his mind during the day.
But at night he found it impossible to sleep and like a boy at school he crossed the day
s off on his calendar until Sarah’s official mourning would be over and they could be married.
She would be free on the 3rd March but they agreed it would be politic to wait another month. To the Marquis the thought was like a light glowing in the darkness.
He had already bought Sarah an engagement ring and several expensive jewels to go with it.
They were locked in a drawer of his desk waiting for the moment when he could give them to her and the world could be told that she was to be his wife.
Then his longing to see her again made him know that he must go back to Elvin. Even if he could not make love to her, as he wanted to do, he could at least hold her in his arms, kiss her and hear her pay him compliments in her soft musical voice.
He was wondering when he should go to her, when he received a letter and, at the mere sight of her handwriting, he felt his heart turn over.
‘I have never been so much in love as I am now!’ he told himself rapturously.
He opened the letter and read,
“Hannah, my maid, has been told today that her mother has died. She is therefore leaving immediately for the funeral and you know, dearest wonderful boy, this means that we can be together as we both long to be.
I know that you will be counting the hours as I am, until we can touch the wings of ecstasy!
Come to me in the usual way across the garden tomorrow, at half after nine o’clock. The servants go to bed early and 1 shall be waiting for you – waiting – waiting until 1 feel your arms around me.
I love you!
Sarah.”
The Marquis read and re-read the letter and told himself that no woman could be so loving, so adorable and so exactly right in every way to be the Marchioness of Elvington.
“I am the most fortunate man in the world!” he cried aloud. “And I shall see her tomorrow.”
Then he read the letter again.
She had said that her maid Hannah was leaving today. In which case why wait until tomorrow and miss being together tonight?
He looked at the clock.
He had risen early and the letter had been waiting on his breakfast table.
He calculated that, if he left London within the next hour, he could be at Elvington by about eight o’clock.
63 Ola and the Sea Wolf Page 3