Edwardian Candlelight Omnibus (64 page)

“Well, then,” rejoined Tilly brightly, “you did warn me it was more of a business contract than a marriage. You will go your way and I will go mine. And I
am
looking forward to going mine. So many
delicious
young men around!”

He stopped and pulled her to him. “But I don’t want you to go in any other direction than this,” he whispered.

She opened her mouth to reply with some witty and cynical remark but no sound would come out as she watched his mouth descending, oh so slowly, toward her own in the moonlight. He had removed his gloves and his bare hand was already caressing the nape of her neck. Tilly clutched the lapels of his jacket for support and closed her eyes.

“Your shawl, my lady.”

The couple jerked apart. Tilly swung around, flushed and embarrassed. The marquess was furious. Francine stood there demurely in the moonlight with a large white cashmere shawl over her arm.

“The night air, my lady,” she went on, ignoring the marquess’s glare, “so bad for the lungs.”

The marquess dismissed Francine with a curt nod and turned again to his wife. But the treacherous English climate was against him as well. A chilly breeze had sprung up that was strengthening into a full-fledged wind by the second. There were cries of dismay from the ladies, who began scurrying toward the house.

For Tilly, the spell was broken. She was appalled to think that she had been on the point of giving in too easily. Men, the wordlywise Francine had said, never appreciated anything easy. They walked in silence, side by side, toward the house.

“Where did you get that maid?” asked the marquess.

“From Lady Aileen,” said Tilly. “Well, I didn’t
get
her, I lured her away, so to speak.”

“Funny,” he said, looking at her with his fair head cocked to one side, “I could never imagine you concerning yourself with matters of dress.”

“Oh, we all have to grow up sometime,” Tilly replied lightly.

The guests were organizing themselves for the usual late-evening session of cards. Tilly detested playing cards but hustled her husband into a foursome with the duchess, Lady Aileen, and Toby.

The duchess was a poor cardplayer in that she loudly and obviously suspected everyone of cheating and then kept employing childish ruses like pretending to drop her fan in order to see the marquess’s hand. The hair on her face had begun to sprout again, and he found it most unnerving to look down and see her large face coyly peeping over the edge of his arm.

Toby’s hands were shaking so badly that his cards fluttered like dry leaves before a desert wind. He eyed the marquess’s glass of whisky and soda with burning eyes, as if by some telekinetic means he could suck its contents across the table and into his mouth.

At last the long evening came to an end as the rising wind began to howl around the mansion and the servants moved quietly about with baskets of kindling and scuttles of coal.

The rest of the weary servants heard the bell ringing, a signal that they could put their respective charges to bed and try to catch some much-needed sleep.

Masters rose wearily to his feet and tugged down his striped waistcoat. “I say again,” he remarked severely to Francine, “that it is not our place to interfere in the… er… married lives of our betters.”

“I
know
the men,
moi
,” said Francine with such intensity that her listening audience wondered just what her experience had been. “If he gets what he wants on the first night, then
pouf!
—all will be lost. A few days of the honeymoon and then my lord will be off to his amours.”

“What on earth can
we
do?” demanded the cook, tucking a strand of gray hair under her cap.

“I’ll think of something,” was all Francine would say. “Now, I must put my lady to bed…
alone
.”

She whisked herself off and Mrs. Judd watched her go with a worried frown. “It’s all right for the likes of a Frenchie to talk about them things,” she vouchsafed at last. “But I’m a very sensitive person, I am. My sensibilities are
shocked
.”

“She’s got a good heart has Francine,” said Masters after some deliberation. “Best do as she says.”

Upstairs, the marquess tightened the sash of his dressing gown and squared his shoulders. It had seemed a good idea to put his wife’s suite of rooms at one end of the West Wing and his own at the other. Now it was simply a damned nuisance. It would be the first time he had crept along the corridor of a country house in the small hours of the morning on legitimate business, so to speak. He stepped out into the dimness of the corridor.

Empty.

Or so he thought. From the shadows at the far end, Toby Bassett watched him go and felt immeasurably sick and depressed. But then, why should not a man spend the night with his own wife?

He realized he had been weaving unreal fantasies about Tilly, forgetting she was married, and to his best friend too.

Then somewhere in the quivering, jellylike hurt of his mind, a little imp seemed to whisper, “
Philip
always
has a decanter in his room. And if
you
were in Tilly’s arms, would
you
hurry back?
”

He took a deep breath. The duchess had made sure that his room was innocent of even a flask. He moved quickly down the corridor, feeling as if his life had taken on new hope. He pushed open the door of the marquess’s sitting room. There, winking, glistening, and beckoning in the firelight was a full decanter of whisky and standing beside it, like a knight in shining armor, was a glass and a silver siphon of soda. He floated toward it with a rapt expression on his face. His feet hardly seemed to touch the ground.

Also still awake and also in the West Wing, the Duchess of Glenstraith was sitting on her daughter’s bed, holding her hand. “So that’s it, Mumsie,” finished Aileen plaintively. “She’s got Philip and now she’s taking Toby away from me as well.”

“Someone should speak to her husband,” said the duchess, hitching the massive folds of her Jaeger dressing gown closer around her flannel nightdress.

“You
must
speak to him,” said Aileen, sitting up straight. Her hair was in curlpapers and her face was covered in an oatmeal pack. She looked like a singularly beautiful case of leprosy.

“I shall go to him now, before he retires,” said the duchess firmly, “and do my duty.”

Aileen blushed under the crust of oatmeal that was hardening rapidly on her pretty face. “Won’t he be in… well… Tilly’s room?” she said in as thin a voice as possible so as not to crack the mask.

“No, poppet.” The duchess heaved herself to her feet. “Even such a common type as Tilly Burningham wouldn’t forgive her husband so soon for his philanderings with that French trollop. Leave it to me.”

The marquess paused on the threshold of his wife’s room. She was sitting at her dressing table and her maid was brushing her long red hair in smooth, even strokes so that it crackled in the light. The marquess jerked his head to dismiss Francine, but to his amazement the maid showed no signs of leaving and continued to brush her mistress’s hair.

He walked forward into the room. “Please leave,” he said sharply to Francine, taking the brush from her hand.

“She can’t,” said Tilly hurriedly. “She has ever such a lot to do here.”

The marquess gently eased his wife to her feet and propelled her toward the door. “Then we shall leave her to it,” he said. “I wish to be private with you, and my rooms will be the very place.”

Tilly opened her mouth to protest. She was wearing a charming nightgown and negligee of creamy slipper satin, no longer protected by her layers of underwear and stays. The sudden awareness that her husband only seemed to be wearing a dressing gown and nothing else stopped her from uttering a word. She was unresistingly led away, only glancing back over her shoulder to catch the worried look on Francine’s face.

Halfway along the corridor in the direction of the marquess’s rooms, Tilly stopped and turned, trembling slightly. “I have changed my mind,” she said firmly. “I wish to go to bed.”

“And so you shall,” teased the marquess, taking her by the shoulders. He bent and kissed her, holding her closer and closer with an exultant feeling of power as he felt her shudder against him.

Behind his back a door gently opened and Aileen, still wearing her mask, stared in horror at the entwined couple. Tilly must not find her mother waiting in the marquess’s rooms! They were so absorbed that she would surely have time to nip quickly along and warn Mumsie.

The duchess was sitting with her large slippered feet on the hearth of the marquess’s sitting room when her daughter erupted in, hissing, “They’re
both
coming, Mumsie. Tilly mustn’t find you here. What excuse could you make?”

Like most of the human race, her grace was a trifle vain of her own appearance. She was sure her presence in the marquess’s rooms would mean only one thing to Tilly—that she was having an affair with her husband. The commonsense fact that she was accompanied by a daughter still in curlpapers and an oatmeal mask and could therefore hardly have any designs on the marquess, did not occur to her.

She heard the sound of voices in the corridor and whispered savagely, “Hide! Quick!”

Both women twisted and turned. There were no screens in the room and the curtains were too skimpy to conceal them both. They saw that the inner sitting room door was open to show the bedroom beyond. As one woman, they dived under the great bed—and collided with a chamber pot, a decanter, a siphon of soda… and a body. “Shhhhh!” said Toby Bassett’s voice from the darkness under the bed. He had gone into hiding at the sound of the duchess’s arrival and had subsequently discovered that by dint of twisting his head sideways, he could get his glass to his mouth, and so he had gone to that happy country of the drunk, where even a herd of elephants under his lordship’s bed would have failed to disturb his happy euphoria.

But the two ladies had all their senses about them and could hear with painful clarity what was going on in the next room.

“Darling,” the marquess murmured, in such a voice that Tilly felt her bones melt and clutched at his shoulders for support, “put your arms round my neck. What are you afraid of?”

“I have this silly feeling that there are people listening,” said Tilly.

“Only the birds in the ivy outside,” he said, drawing her closer. He began to kiss her languorously and passionately and Tilly moaned against him, failing to hear her moan echoed by the sweating and embarrassed duchess, crammed under the bed with her daughter and a drunk.

His hard lips parted her mouth and his tongue slid between her teeth. Tilly immediately recoiled, backing away from him and scrubbing her mouth with the back of her hand.

“You should not do that!” she cried, while erotic visions of what the marquess might have done flitted through the fevered brains stacked under the bed. “That’s… that’s… not
natural
. Who taught you
that?
That French tart?”

The marquess cursed himself. He had forgotten her inexperience.

He had always prided himself on his equable temper, but now he found he was fast losing it. He controlled himself with an effort. “Come and sit here on the sofa by me, Tilly, and let me explain. There are a lot of things you have to learn about the art of making love….”

“There you are,” whispered Francine, removing her ear from the door panel. “Too much, too soon. He will frighten her, and she will bore him!”

Mrs. Judd moved away from the door and turned her large and embarrassed face to Masters. “We can’t do anything now. It’s too late. And it’s not
decent
, I tell you, to listen at his lordship’s door.”

“Never too late,” replied Francine. “I have the plan
merveilleux!
” And with that, she flitted silently off down the corridor in the direction of the back stairs.

“So you see,” said the marquess, after a lengthy lecture on the arts of love, of which Tilly understood not a word, “it is all very simple.” He drew Tilly into the circle of his arms and, sliding his arms under her legs, prepared to carry her off to bed.

Tilly looked at him helplessly with a drowned expression in her eyes. She had no longer any power to resist him. Although she had not understood his lecture, the sound of his voice had a hypnotic charm all of its own. The marquess carried her into the bedroom and stood looking down at her lovingly as he prepared to lower her onto the bed.

And then the fire alarm went. It clanged and crashed its brazen warning. And what a tale of terror did its turbulency tell to the listeners under the bed. The duchess and Aileen bolted forth like rocketing pheasants. Fortunately for them, the marquess had dropped Tilly on the bed and had rushed to open the window, not seeing who was fleeing his room. Tilly only saw Aileen’s leprous masked face and, convinced it was some hideous ghost of Chennington, screwed her eyes shut and screamed.

Toby Bassett was the only one unconcerned. He had fallen into a deep and peaceful sleep.

Soon, with the exception of Toby, all the guests and servants were huddled out on the lawn in the chill predawn air, staring up at the great mansion, waiting for a sign of smoke or flames.

Suddenly there was a united gasp as the windows on the front of the house burned red and the shout went up for buckets of water and everyone began to run hither and thither, screaming confusing orders.

It was some time before it was discovered that the sinister red light on the windows was merely that of the rising sun.

It took a little more time to discover there was no fire at all.

Francine tenderly shepherded her mistress off to bed. “Saved by the bell!” she murmured. There would be time enough to lecture Tilly after she, Francine, had had some well-earned sleep.

Tilly sat up in bed late the next morning, sipping her tea and munching Osborne biscuits, while Francine straightened out the rows of jars and scent bottles on the dressing table.

Rain pattered against the windows and a cheerful fire crackling on the hearth combated the chill of this unusually cold summer’s day.