Lady Margery's Intrigues (7 page)

They had arrived fashionably late and already the heat from the hundreds of candles was suffocating. All the familiar smells of hot wax, sweat, and a hundred assorted perfumes assailed her nostrils. Then the scent of a particularly ripe cesspool floated past her. She gasped and held her handkerchief to her nose. “What on earth is causing that dreadful smell?” she whispered to Lady Amelia.

Lady Amelia looked round and then gave her young companion's arm a comforting squeeze. “Move quickly to windward, my dear,” she whispered. “'Tis only Lord Ellington. Do you know that he asked Forbes-Bennington for a cure for rheumatism t'other day and Forbes-Bennington said, ‘My dear chap, you might try changing your shirt.’ I declare, Ellington gets riper every season.”

Margery found her hand immediately claimed for a country dance by Toby. She plunged nimbly into the dance, seeking an opening for conversation, but it was not until they were prancing gaily round in the
ronde
that she had an opportunity to whisper, “Oh, Mr. Sanderson. A word in private with you, sir, if you please. I am in such distress.”

“'Course,” whispered Toby, his bulging green eyes riveted to her delightful expanse of white bosom. How it had stayed covered during all the hopping and bouncing of the dance seemed like a miracle to him.

After the final chord, he bowed and led her over to a small sofa in the corner. “Now,” said Toby jovially, sitting down very close to her. “How can I be of assistance, my lady?”

Out of the corner of her eye, Margery saw the Marquess of Edgecombe entering the room and looking in her direction. She would have to be quick.

“Oh, Mr. Sanderson,” she breathed. “I am in sore distress. To put it bluntly, I must marry well. My family home, Chelmswood, is about to go under the hammer.” She held a wisp of handkerchief to the corner of one dry eye. “A ... a ... certain friend of yours has already proposed and I feel obliged to accept him ... but ... but I fear he is weak. I need the advice of a
strong
man.”

Toby ground his teeth. So either Perry or Freddie had stolen a march on him, eh? Well, he still had a chance. Before he knew quite what he was about, he had proposed marriage himself. She should travel with him tomorrow to meet his mama. He would arrange a small party in her honor. Local gentry, of course. Let her get a feel of her new home. Damme, if he wasn't the luckiest man in the world. For Margery was smiling mistily up at him and breathing a tremulous “Oh,
thank
you!"

Their conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Freddie, who reminded Lady Margery that she had promised him the Scottish reel.

Toby watched her flitting off on Freddie's arm like..."liked a demned fairy,” he thought with a sudden rush of proprietary pride. Lady Margery had whispered just before she left that they must keep their engagement a secret for the moment. Feminine nonsense! He wouldn't announce it tonight, of course. But he would send a notice to the
Gazette
first thing in the morning.

A Scottish reel is even less conducive to intimate conversation than a country dance, but when everyone else was getting helplessly tangled up in the figure-eight and Freddie and Margery were laughing and waiting for them to rearrange themselves, she managed to explain her predicament. Freddie's chest swelled. “Marry you meself.” She blushed and thanked him and begged him to keep it a secret for the moment. “Of course,” answered Freddie, pressing her hand warmly and privately planning to put an end to the nonsense by sending a notice to the
Gazette
in the morning.

It was not often he was able to triumph over his two friends. And Lady Margery would see that an open and aboveboard policy was best. This fellow who had been pestering her with his unwanted attentions—bound to be Perry or Toby—should be put in his place.

Viscount Swanley had the honor of the waltz, and so it was much easier for Margery to converse, although all the time she was aware of the cynical blue eye of the Marquess of Edgecombe. Perry rose to the bait exactly like the others. Like his friends, he had enjoyed the novelty of being able to squire a young lady. Now he would be able to join those mysterious ranks of married men. He was vaguely puzzled as to why he had proposed so promptly. After all, he was a rich young man and various matchmaking mamas had tried every stratagem in the book. He decided that it was simply because Margery was the first female who didn't scare him to flinders. The more he thought about what a good chap she was, the more determined he became to secure the prize. That other fellow who had proposed must be either Toby or Freddie. It would do no harm to post the engagement in the
Gazette
tomorrow. No harm at all.

The Marquess of Edgecombe watched his three friends and decided that love must be a contagious disease. First there was the stocky figure of Toby Sanderson drifting about the room smelling of April and May. Then there was Freddie, who had propped himself against a pillar after his dance with Margery and was watching her with adoring eyes. And now there was Swanley, of all people, twirling around in the waltz and holding that infuriating minx slightly closer than the proprieties allowed.

Lady Margery only stayed for several more dances. It had been a successful and triumphant night. By the force of a formerly hidden very strong personality and a piece of Machiavellian manipulation, she, Lady Margery Quennell, the former drab, had brought three of the season's richest marriage prizes to their knees. She mentally resolved to raise her lady's maid's wages as soon as she was married. But whom should she marry?

She would get to know each of them better against the background of their homes and then decide which would be the least tedious.

She fervently hoped that they would all honor her plea for secrecy. But of course they would. They were gentlemen, after all!

After Lady Margery had left the ball, the three friends found that the dance had become uncommon flat. They elected to stroll to Brooks's for a four A.M. supper of boiled mackerel and then make their respective ways home.

They made a silent breakfast party, each one radiating a strong atmosphere of “if only you
knew
.”

Conversation flagged and they decided to end their night. They lingered outside a cobbler's stall on the corner of Jermyn Street and gave him a polite “Good night.” “Good
morning
, gentlemen,” said the cobbler, taking down his shutters and wondering what it must be like to be able to stay up till all hours and then sleep until the muffin man's bell in the afternoon.

Toby walked off on his own, his mind busy with plans for the impromptu house party. He espied the tall figure of the Marquess of Edgecombe walking some distance in front of him and hurried to catch up. After all, Edgecombe was patently uninterested in the bewitching Lady Margery.

“I say, Edgecombe,” hailed Toby. “Wish me happy!”

“Won a wager?” asked the marquess lazily.

“Won a bride. Lady Margery.”

The marquess stood very still. So she had succeeded after all.

“Fact is,” went on Toby, “I'm taking her down to meet mother and I'm having a few of the neighbors along for a dinner party. Very sudden, I know, but some feller's been pestering the life out of Margery and I want to get the knot tied as soon as possible. But the locals ain't very tonnish. Care to come, Charles? Add a bit of tone to the party.”

“Delighted,” said the marquess smoothly.

“Good of you,” said Toby simply. “You're a real friend, Charles. I know these country romps don't appeal to you as a rule."

“Anything to help a friend,” said the marquess. “I shall arrive around teatime tomorrow.”

Toby clapped him affectionately on the back and strode off whistling “Brighton Beach,” serenading the morning as merrily as the early birds.

The marquess walked slowly homewards, trying to analyze the conflicting emotions in his brain. He was furious with Lady Margery, but he could not help admiring her for having pulled it off. Her schoolboyish chummy manner had certainly melted Toby Sanderson, who had long claimed that he wasn't in the petticoat line.

Then he wondered if Toby had kissed her. This thought annoyed him so much that he ceased to be analytical and decided to accept Toby's invitation and see if he could not upset her marriage plans in some way or the other.

Lady Margery traveled to the Sanderson home, which was called Tuttering, in her own carriage. With her went her two aides, in the form of Lady Amelia and Chuffley. Battersby, the lady's maid, brought up the rear guard with a huge trunk packed with lotions and unguents and various sizes of curling tongs.

“Tuttering is an odd name,” said Lady Margery as they turned into the driveway. “It sounds like an exclamation.”

“It looks like an oath,” said Lady Amelia gloomily as the great early Gothic pile hove into view above the trees. “I declare, it looks like something straight out of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels. Have you read
The Mysteries of Udolpho
?”

“Why, I know it by heart,” laughed Margery. “Do you remember the marvelous piece where Dorothée glances within the dusky chamber and utters a sudden shriek and retreats? I trust there will be nothing to afright me like that!"

But when they were ushered into a large gloomy hall, although Margery did not utter a sudden shriek, she let out a little gasp of dismay. It was huge, baronial, and antique.

“Oh, horror!” she whispered to Lady Amelia as the dank chill crept into the marrow of their bones. “They've
washed the walls
. I didn't think anyone did that anymore. They must be terribly old-fashioned.”

It had been the eighteenth-century practice to wash the walls before a house party, leaving them dripping wet, but the comfort-loving fashionables of the Regency had put an end to the practice, swearing it caused everything from the ague to consumption.

Toby erupted into the gloom of the hallway. Up till this point, Margery had been wondering how such a member of the
ton
as Toby could possibly fit into this medieval background. But, as he stood there dressed in buckskins and top boots and a drab coat, with something suspiciously approaching a leer on his beefy face, she realized for the first time that he exuded a sort of country-squire brutality quite in keeping with an earlier image of flogging servants and raping the maidens of the surrounding countryside.

“Come and meet mother and father,” Toby was saying. “And after you do the pretty, you'll have time to have a rest before dinner.”

They followed him silently across the great hall and through a door into a succession of rooms where pretty gilt furniture lay huddled in groups like French aristocrats awaiting the tumbril. The walls behind the whispering tapestries gleamed with iridescent damp, and the trees, pressing against the windows from outside, gave the place the gloomy air of some vast subterranean world.

Like some ghost that had gone deaf with the years and had failed to hear the cock crow, Lady Sanderson sat on a sort of throne on a dais at the very end of a long chain of saloons. She was very hairy. She had gray hair sprouting all over her face, tufts of gray hair peeked out of her ears, and there were even little clumps of hair between her fingers. She was dressed in an old-fashioned sac gown which was hitched up to show a bulging pair of ankles tightly laced in a frivolous pair of
glacée
kid boots. The dress was made of some strange type of gray wool, and Margery had a mad idea that she had woven it from her whiskers.

“So you're Toby's gel,” was Lady Sanderson's opening speech. “You ain't much to look at. Not like me in my heyday. I was a great beauty. ‘Course, I still am,” she remarked with innocent pride. “Well, no doubt you'll produce heirs. What d'ye think Simon?”

There was a long silence.

“Simon,” yelled Lady Sanderson, in a voice which could be heard across two spinnies and forty acres.

A panel opened in the wall behind the dais and an older version of Toby's face appeared.

“What, my dear?” asked Lord Sanderson.

“The gel. There! Toby's. What d'ye think?”

“Charming. Quite charming!” remarked the old round beefy face. The panel was slid shut.

“Does that lead to another room?” asked Lady Margery wildly.

“No,” replied Toby. “Why?”

“Do you mean,” asked Margery faintly, “that Lord Sanderson sits between the walls!”

“Always has,” remarked Toby indifferently. “'Course, he must have come out at some time or else I wouldn't be here, eh, what!”

Both mother and son burst into bellows of laughter at this witticism and Margery and Lady Amelia winced.

“I feel,” said Lady Amelia coldly, “that this conversation is not suitable for either the tender ears of my niece or for any saloon."

“Hoity-toity!” said Lady Sanderson, her whiskers bristling with annoyance. “Toby told me you wasn't one of these flibbertigibbets—those die-away simpering debutantes.”

Margery opened her mouth to make a cutting rejoinder and then caught Toby's eye. He looked like a guilty schoolboy and threw her a pleading glance. She said instead, “If you will excuse us, Lady Sanderson, we will retire to our rooms. We are fatigued after our journey.”

“Take a little stroll in the gardens with me first, eh, Margery?” pleaded Toby. Margery steeled herself. She must be strong. She must tell him that their engagement was at an end. She could not possibly live with such in-laws.

“I shall join you presently,” she said to an anxious Lady Amelia, and, laying her hand on Toby's arm, she allowed him to lead her out into the gardens by way of the French windows. They walked sedately along a weedy terrace and then walked down to the thick uncut grass of the lawn.

The sky was heavy and gray and the wind moaned and sighed in the trees. Margery wondered if Lord Sanderson stayed permanently immured between the walls, listening to the sound of the country outside.

Really mad eccentrics were quite common in society. Mad Jack Mytton, the Squire of Halston, had spent half a million pounds in drink over a fifteen-year period, rode a bear around his drawing room, dressed his sixty cats in livery, and shot wildfowl in the depths of winter wearing nothing but his shirt. But, Margery reflected, she had never envisaged becoming part of a family which harbored one of these exotic specimens. Her own father was trial enough, goodness knows!

Toby placed a pudgy hand on hers and squeezed it affectionately. Margery sighed. Now was the time to put a finish to this engagement.

She turned to face him and said gently, “Toby, my dear..."

The big beefy face looking down at hers seemed suddenly young and vulnerable, all bluster and swagger gone. The slightly protruding green eyes held a shy, wary look as if he knew what she was about to say.

“Go on, Margery,” he said quietly.

Just then Margery noticed a very smart curricle rolling to a stop in front of the house. The Marquess of Edgecombe jumped down and stood with his hands on his hips, looking across at the pair.

“I just wanted to say that I feel very tired and if you don't mind I would like to retire to my rooms,” said Margery hurriedly.

A faint shadow of something—relief?—flicked through the green of Toby's eyes and was gone.

“Come and meet my distinguished guest,” said Toby heartily. “But then, you know Charles, don't you?”

Margery nodded, faintly aware of the marquess's mocking blue eyes.

“Hey, Charles,” said Toby. “Lady Margery is just about to retire. Good idea! Heard the dressing gong just now. But we'll all meet at dinner.”

The marquess bowed low over Margery's hand. “My felicitations on your engagement,” he murmured. “Toby is indeed a—er—lucky man.”

Confused and at a loss for words, she kept her eyes lowered and scurried off into the house.

The great hall yawned on either side of her. She climbed up a hideously carved wooden staircase, which branched off in two directions leading to the first foor. Which way to go?

She then saw the green-and-silver livery of a footman emerging from one of the rooms and, under his direction, she mounted a further flight of stairs and was ushered into a vast bedroom.

When the footman had lit the candles and left, she was at liberty to sort out her confused emotions.

She had thought that life without Chelmswood would be unbearable.

If a rich marriage was the only means of saving her home, then a rich marriage she would have. It had all seemed so simple.

Before the blow had fallen, she had not thought of marriage, simply enduring her seasons until she could get back to the “real” life of Chelmswood. Lady Amelia's placid and uncritical friendship had been all that Margery desired.

Now, what had happened? She was frightened of marriage. If she should marry, then let it be to some congenial companion who would share her interests. Someone like ... A picture of the marquess flashed before her eyes and she blinked to erase it. The marquess, indeed. The man was nothing more than a mocking
dandy
.

But Margery bitterly realized that there were fates worse than losing Chelmswood or even being a companion to Desdemona. If she suffered Desdemona's patronage, even for a little, then perhaps she might meet some gentleman who would be much more suitable than the amiable but witless three she had just laid siege to. If she could charm them, why not someone else? Someone, perhaps, with little money, but who would not spend his time at cockfights or running amok on mad wagers. Lady Amelia could then return and live with her as before.

Margery tried in vain to imagine a “suitable gentleman,” but again the marquess loomed up before her.

What must the marquess think of her anyway—letting him kiss her as if she were the veriest lightskirt? She felt her cheeks grow red with shame and dreaded seeing him at the dinner table.

And how should she tell Toby that she had decided to terminate the engagement? Her head began to ache, but she resolutely rang the bell for Battersby and submitted to her maid's expert ministrations.

Attired in a dark green velvet gown, fashionably low-bosomed and high-waisted and with her hair dressed à
la Sappho
, she timidly descended the stairs and once again walked through the long chain of saloons until she came across the rest of the party.

The party consisted of two of the local county girls who were barely out of the schoolroom—Ann Burleigh and Cornelia Smythe—and three men of Toby's age who obviously shared his sporting habits. They were dressed with obvious discomfort in knee breeches and well-starched cravats and talked in very loud voices about how much they despised the life of London. Lady Amelia was sitting placidly listening to one of them—a Mr. Henderson—rhapsodizing over the joys of otter-hunting. Her motherly face wore its usual look of polite interest, and only Margery knew that she was bored to distraction.

The marquess was undoubtedly the most elegant gentleman there, the magnificence of his bottle-green evening coat and emerald jewelry highlighting the tawdry magnificence of their surroundings. He gave Margery a peculiarly sweet smile, but she resolutely looked away, her heart beating fast.

Ann Burleigh engaged her in conversation. What was London like? She, Ann, would have her season next year. Were the gentlemen very bold? A certain gentleman had helped Ann alight from her carriage only last Sunday, right outside the church, and he had pressed her hand
violently
. Now, didn't Lady Margery think that that was a very
rakish
thing to do?

And Lady Margery wondered what this innocent would think of a passionate kiss from the Marquess of Edgecombe!

At dinner, Margery found to her horror that she was expected to make a speech on her engagement. She blushed and claimed to be overtired from her journey and earned a contemptuous “Pooh! Fiddlesticks!” from Lady Sanderson. No one asked or seemed to care about Lord Sanderson. It was almost as if he were dead, decided Margery.

There was no respite after dinner. Toby suggested that the gentlemen should join the ladies immediately instead of lingering over their wine.

He would entertain them with a song he had just learned by heart. Margery was pressed into service at the pianoforte while Toby stood beside her, leaning uncomfortably close.

She nearly jumped from her seat as Toby began to roar out his song with all the finesse of an anguished bull:

"I'm come a lusty wooer,

My dildin’ my doldin',

I'm come a lusty wooer,

Lilly bright and shinee..."

The song seemed interminable, and, as is the way at these home
musicales
, the guests merely endured the first stanza before turning round and talking to each other. Margery alone was left to endure the brunt of the dildin-doldins, and Toby breathed passionate brandy fumes over her at the end of each line.

At last it was finally over and the voice had stopped. Margery looked up at Toby in a bewildered way, as if she could not quite believe that her ordeal was over. When she realized that it was indeed finished, she gave Toby a dazzling smile of relief and gratitude, which the closely watching marquess interpreted as love.

“Well, that's that,” thought the Marquess of Edgecombe, giving a vicious kick to the logs in the fire. “She does love him after all, therefore I have no reason to stop her from wedding Toby.” And then he wondered why that cheering thought should make him feel so savagely gloomy.

Toby was now pressing Margery to entertain the company. She selected a very long composition by Scarlatti and resolutely began to play. If she played, she would not have to talk or think.