The Scandal of the Season (20 page)

“These are very pretty, Bell,” he said, and she looked up with a smile.

Lord Petre's shirt hung untucked from his breeches, the loose sleeves covering his hands. He tossed the shoe back onto the floor, and Arabella stopped herself from leaning forward to straighten it. Instead she took one of his hands, sliding her fingers up under the awning of the cuff.

“What does a baron do all day?” she asked. He sat lazily on the sofa, pulling her across toward him.

“That is an excellent question, Bell, and easily answered,” he replied. “A baron does nothing.” He put his hands behind his head and leaned back. Arabella knew that although he liked to deprecate himself in this way, he also liked to be contradicted.

She laughed. “But what about when you are at Ingatestone?” she asked. “Surely then there is much to attend to.”

“Oh! In the country—that is a different matter entirely. I had assumed you were speaking of the town. In the country I am constantly occupied. In the summer I fish, in the autumn I shoot, and in the winter I hunt. I frequently dine at greater length and even more heartily than I do here, and it is not at all unusual to travel an hour to a neighbor's for dinner. Now that I describe it, I wonder that there is any time at all left for gambling and drinking.”

Arabella frowned at his flippancy, certain that he did not believe his own words. “I do not believe you to be so very idle,” she said.

“You are quite right, Arabella. On Monday I dined with James Douglass and on Tuesday with Robert Harley. Last week I went to see a hanging at Tyburn. 'Tis a wonder that I am not entirely exhausted.”

“You have been to a hanging?” she echoed.

“Of course,” he replied, leaning back on his sofa, trying to look careless. “It is widely considered the most diverting spectacle in London. But I did not enjoy it so much as I had been promised,” he added with a laugh that rang hollow. “The man who was being hanged did not die immediately—his wife and children had to pull at his legs to spare him the agonies of a slow death. I did not think it was so wholly entertaining as to justify the attendance of almost an entire metropolis.”

Why should he have mentioned the hanging if he had disliked it? Arabella thought. She guessed that he did not want to be thought a coward, and yet he told his story in such a way that he could not be accused of being a brute. She said nothing, puzzled by these contradictions in his character.

“Ah, Bell, do not be cast down,” Lord Petre said, misinterpreting her silence. “Wretches hang; jurymen dine: 'tis the way of the world.”

Arabella looked up at him directly. “Oh, I know
that,
” she replied. She paused, and then burst out, “But why are you being so strange and secretive about what you do all day?”

He sat up from his reclining position on the sofa and returned her look without smiling. “Ah—now you are being serious.” He walked over to the fire again and gave it a prod with the poker. But then he stepped abruptly to the side of her sofa, knelt down, and looked up at her. His face was earnest, ardent. Arabella's heart began to pound.

“I am at present engaged in business that I cannot speak of,” he said obliquely. “When I dine with Mr. Douglass it is not what you think.”

It took Arabella a moment to register that he was not after all proposing marriage to her, and when she did, she looked at him incredulously. What on earth could he be talking about? This was not what she had expected.

“I am engaged in—have been for many months engaged in—an affair that is for…for the public good of our country,” he finished. Arabella said nothing. He was speaking sincerely, but she did not understand him at all.

“It is a plan that involves our Queen,” he said. “If we are successful, we will make England the strongest nation on earth. And I shall make a name for myself. Not because I am the seventh Baron of Ingatestone, but because I am Robert Petre, an Englishman.” His tone was thrilling. “But it is a most confidential matter of state. I can say no more, and should not have said so much. Will you keep my secret?”

She still did not grasp what he was saying, but she listened with more interest than she had expected to feel. It was not the substance of his remarks that caught her attention, it was the sight of him inflamed with the fire of passionate ideals. Behind his charming manner, Lord Petre longed to be a rebel, a hero. This, then, was the basis of his friendship with Douglass. They were fire-brands. He took her by the hands, gripping them very tightly.

At last Arabella felt that she had the measure of him. She leaned toward him equally ardently, admiring his courage, his idealism.

The thrill that she perceived in him became real in her, too. His passion was contagious—and it filled her with daring. Leaning forward farther still, so that the breath of her whispered words was on his cheek, she said, “Will you take me to bed, Robert?”

Lord Petre felt a rush of exhilaration. His confession had not made her afraid, then! He saw that she was flushed with excitement.

Her breath was still on his skin, and his heart thundered in his chest. He longed to give way, but he hesitated. Protect her and keep her safe. Until today he had thought what he felt for Arabella was violent physical desire, but it was more than that. He was beginning to love her.

Arabella felt him pause, and she pulled back. “I have not the slightest doubt that you have fucked all the married women you have been abed with,” she said.

He felt a thrill as she spoke the word. Protect her! She was fearless. Laughing, he replied, “Married women are a different matter. There is scarcely a man in London whose father is the person to whom his mother was married. Nobody expects married women to be chaste.”

But Arabella did not answer. Standing up, she stepped around him, and walked toward his chamber.

At any other moment, had he not been so fired up with thoughts of rebellion and adventure, he might have been able to stop himself, though it would have required an immense effort. But the circumstances proved too much for him.

Afterward he was happier than he could ever remember being. It was so easy, and he wondered why he had had such scruples—such fears—about taking her as his mistress. This was not like his relationship with Charlotte, where they were natural with one another because they felt no disarming passion, nor like his involvement with Molly, where their desire had been entirely physical. With Arabella it was a complete absorption. Although he had just been with her, he still desired her; he felt a lingering anticipation that made him want to be with her always.

Arabella was infected with a spirit of playfulness. Her eyes flashed triumphantly and her smile burned brighter than ever. She sat up, saying, “I am fond of your bed, but its aspect is unvarying. I propose a change of scene. What is that door over to the right? No, not Jenkins's chamber—the other one.”

He replied, smilingly, “That is my closet.”

“I hoped that you had one! May we visit it?” she asked.

“I suppose that we may,” he replied, and then added, with pretended severity, “But remember that a gentleman's closet is his sanctuary. You must not move my things about in there, nor urge me to make it look tidier than it is.”

“Of course I shall not!” said Arabella, springing off the bed.

Lord Petre's closet had a window at one end, and two looking glasses with japanned lacquer frames, which gave the room a cheerful brightness in the mornings and snug comfort in the afternoons. There were two high-backed armchairs, an ottoman, and a small writing table. Three sides of the room were lined with oak bookshelves, containing his library, and the fourth wall was covered in paintings, cartoons, and engravings. The window was draped in richly brocaded Oriental silks.

She looked over his bookcases. “I see that you have Milton and Shakespeare well placed, to make visitors believe that you read nothing but fine literature,” she said, as she ran her fingers along the spines of the books, reading their titles. “But I am not fooled. Where do you keep your French pamphlets and your poems by Lord Rochester?”

Lord Petre did not answer, but sat down in one of the chairs, watching her indulgently.

“Ah ha! What is this?” she cried. “
L'Académie des dames
and
L'École des filles.
These are spoken of in reverent tones in every girls' school in Paris, but I have never seen a real copy. I am wild to look inside.” She opened the volume and examined it, leaning her shoulder back against the bookcase. He could see the outline of her figure under the light fabric of her shift.

“Good Lord!” she exclaimed, looking up at him boldly. “The clergyman is fornicating with two women at once.”

He laughed. “Since you have found me out, you might as well know all,” he said. “Lord Rochester's
Poems
are on the shelf to your right.”

“I knew you must have them, for you sent me his lines in your letter. But those were not at all lewd, though Rochester is the most notorious poet in the world. I suppose then you were trying to make me think you a man of delicacy….”

He threw his feet over the arm of the chair and said with a chuckle, “I was hoping that you might one day make a visit to inspect his verses more thoroughly. But I had not imagined that it would be so transporting an event as it is. The sight of you sitting in my silk armchair in your shift with
The Imperfect Enjoyment
open in your lap is worthy of my Lord Rochester's warmest lines. Why do not you read some of them to me now?”

“Very well,” she said, and began to recite the opening of Rochester's poem.

“Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms, / I filled with love, and she all over charms.”

She glanced up at him.

“There's a much better part, a few lines on,” he said, walking over to lean on the back of her chair.

“Where?” she asked. He bent his head over so that it was beside hers and pointed with his finger. “Oh!” she said, and read aloud: “In liquid raptures I dissolve all o'er, / Melt into sperm, and spend at every pore. / A touch from any part of her had done it: / Her hand, her foot, her very look's a cunt.”

From where he stood, he could see down the opening of Arabella's smock. He put his arms around her neck and felt the contours of her breasts and belly.

“You are enflaming me again,” he whispered. He rubbed his hands over the skin of her stomach, excited by her unembarrassed pleasure; the way she shivered when he touched her.

Arabella, too, was amazed by the force of her arousal. When people in town gossiped about scandals among their acquaintance, there was never any mention made of pleasure. And yet she had never enjoyed herself so much before in her life. Being with Lord Petre had transformed her—she was carried away with instinctive, unalloyed delight. It was like liquor; no, it was better: it made the boredom of daily existence bearable. She could while away the long days of polite conversation by thinking of the delicious hours that she had spent, and was going to spend, with him. It was not only physical pleasure, it was the pleasure of companionship, of a character so evenly matched with her own. Even if she had felt that it would be politic to do so, she could not now bring herself to stop.

It had grown dark, and the streetlights were brightly lit when Arabella asked, “Is there anything to eat in your rooms? I am rather hungry.”

“Not a scrap. But I have an idea. I shall take you to a place that you have never visited, and which will give you something new to tell your friends at the tea table. But we must go out through the stables.”

“It is a great nuisance always to come and go from the rear,” she said. “It would be nice occasionally to enter in the proper way.”

“Now, Bell, have we not just spent many enjoyable minutes being told by Lord Rochester that you are mistaken? To enter by the proper route is to make no entrance at all.” She laughed, and walked over to where her clothes lay, putting her arms through the vest of her stays. He came up behind her and kissed the back of her neck.

“We shall have no more complaint from Miss Fermor,” he said, pulling her lacings tight and tying the ribbons. He gave the whole corset an expert tug, settling it on her hips. “We are going out,” he announced, and picked his own breeches up off the floor.

The pair went down the back stairs, Lord Petre warning Arabella to be quiet lest his mother and sister were in the parlor. There were no servants in the kitchen but there was a lantern burning on the table. It illuminated a patch of plaster on the ceiling where a servant had written his name onto the whitewash with candle smoke beside the initials of his beloved.

Lord Petre glanced up at it, too, looking irritated. “The youngest footman,” he said. “He is always entertaining a grand passion, usually here in the kitchen when he thinks that we are out.”

As they walked into the stable yard an altercation could be heard between the butler and the night-soil carter, who had only just arrived to remove the contents of the septic vault.

“Well I 'ad to go first to the market, didn't I?” the night-soil man was saying.

“To the market! Be good enough to tell me why,” replied the butler.