The Spanish Marriage (16 page)

Lady Towles picked coquettishly at her husband’s sleeve.
“Charles, dear love, I am perishing of thirst. Won’t you fetch me
some lemonade?” It was not a request. Sir Charles regarded his wife with
a bleary, somewhat knowing eye, shrugged, and began to shoulder through toward
the refreshment room.

“Puppy,” Lady Towles said with a shudder. It was
obvious she wished Matlin to witness her distaste for her husband. Then she
turned and smiled brilliantly at Matlin. “Douglas, I have a bone to pick
with you: you have not even left your card since you returned to Town. Now, my
dear, is that kind? I really had thought....”

Matlin cut through her persuasive voice. “Adele, I
really do not see that you and I have anything more to say to each other. As I
recall we said it all before I left.”

“You went away. How was I to tell you how sorry I was?”
She hinted at a pout. When Matlin did not answer her she glanced across the
room. “Are you worrying about Taffy? For heaven’s sake, Douglas,
one must marry someone, and we all thought you were dead. I’m sure I
cried for weeks. Then Taffy asked for me, and what was I to say but yes? Don’t
hold him against me, Douglas. He’s very sweet, in a stupid sort of way,
but....” She smiled up at him and touched his sleeve lightly. Her message
was very clear: Douglas Matlin could have Adele Towles at any time.

“I am married as well,” he heard himself saying.
Was he really invoking Thea against Adele Towles? Somehow the image of Thea,
who would barely come up to Lady Towles’s chin, was vastly refreshing to
him. “I don’t hold Sir Charles against you, Adele.”

“Oh, but really, that
baby?”
Adele
dismissed Thea as utterly negligible. “It’s said you married the
girl to bring her out of Spain with her name intact. A chivalrous gesture, I agree,
but hardly something to base a marriage on.” She ran her fingers up his a
few inches, delicately. He was surprised at how blatant a gesture it was.

“I seem to have missed what is common knowledge to
everyone else, my lady. Dorothea is my wife, and I have not the slightest wish
or intention of causing her the least moment of discomfort. I care very much
for her.”

“Words of passion,” Lady Towles mocked. “If
you could but hear yourself. I’m not proposing that you make your little
schoolgirl uncomfortable.” As she pressed closer to him he was aware of
her scent, jasmine, somehow hot and overpowering in the crowd. “Are you
determined to be a bore? Don’t let Taffy bother you; the poor dear is so
addle-pated he would not know what happened two feet in front of his....”

Matlin shook off her arm and stepped away to look at her. “I
cannot believe we are having this conversation, still less that you have
virtually offered me
carte blanche.
I am flattered by the offer, Adele,
but my answer remains no. I’m not certain which of us has changed the
more in two years; probably it is me. Good evening.”

He left her standing there and pushed his way forcibly
through the crowd and into the library, where William Lamb was dispensing
punch. Accepting a cup, he drank it down, then took another.

“Hold fast, man, what the deuce d’ye think you’re
doing?” Lamb muttered.

“Trying to wash a taste from my mouth. You wouldn’t
believe me if I told you, Lamb.”

“Well, you know best, but I’ll thank you not to
get yourself foxed at my mother’s card party. Not to be inhospitable, you
understand.”

“Oh yes, I understand.” Matlin held his punch
cup out for more punch.

Because it seemed there was nothing else to be done, Thea
went to parties, bought dresses, and played grateful and affectionate companion
to Lady Ocott and friend to Bess Chase, who was soon as much at home at Ocott
House as in her own more modest home in Upper Wimpole Street. If Thea was
sometimes preoccupied enough to worry Lady Ocott, the older woman did not pry
into the source of her discontent.

“I don’t doubt that this all feels frivolous to
you now, my lamb, particularly after all the hardship you met with in Spain,
but you really should allow yourself the holiday! Once Douglas has a position
with the government—a formal one, I mean—you will have your hands
full meeting all the obligations of a political wife. I assure you, I’ve
never found it dull. When the lease on your house is up and that tiresome
doctor goes back to Lincolnshire where he belongs, you will have to keep
household both in town and in the country. You can be such a help to Douglas.”

Thea smiled sadly. She wondered how long she would remain
with the Ocotts or their nephew once Matlin realized that she was not carrying
his child. In the fortnight since she had blurted out that outrageous lie, Thea
had seen Matlin exactly three times: once by coincidence at a ball and twice at
Ocott House, where they encountered each other in the hallway. Matlin had fixed
her with a conscious look, muttered something unintelligible, and vanished in
the direction of his dressing room while Thea, miserable, watched him go. He
has to be told sooner or later, she told herself. Then he would doubtless ask
for his freedom, demand it, rather, since that was what he had wanted all
along. She had to tell him before he deduced it himself; that would be a
disaster.

But how to tell him? She never found a satisfactory answer.
In the midst of conversation or a concert or a ride in the Park, she would find
herself thinking again, wondering what to say and what the consequences would
be.

Tony Chase and his sister contrived to distract her
sometimes from her fretting. Where Bess had adopted Thea as her friend and
confidante, Anthony had made her his idol. His was a good-humored sort of
adoration: he was always ready to fetch Thea’s shawl or a cup of
lemonade, to amuse her with easy flirtation, or to talk sensibly to her of
current events. He never went beyond what was permitted to a young man dancing
attendance on a married woman; it was Thea’s first real friendship with a
man. Sometimes, chatting with Tony Chase, she would think sadly of the
afternoons of idle chatter she had shared with Matlin in the convent gate
house, but that had been different: she had been in love with him from the
start.

Chase’s admiration opened Thea’s eyes to the
fact that he was not her only admirer, only the most persistent and most evident.
At assemblies and parties, at breakfasts or when riding in Hyde Park, there
were always a few men who crowded round the young Lady Matlin. Once she
realized what was happening it was amusing, vaguely absurd, and wonderfully
heartening to Thea. Her self-esteem had suffered, and this overt admiration was
a balm to her. She practiced flirting, smiled, danced, and all the while
thought longingly of Matlin closeted away at Whitehall.

One man, a little older than the others who rallied around
her, a slight, swarthy man with a strongly marked brow over dark, fierce eyes
and a thin commanding mouth, was persistently at the back of the crowd. In
fact, although she had seen his face half a dozen times, Thea had no idea who
he was, and only a vague, disturbing sense of foreignness. “Mr. Chase,
who
is
that?”

“I’ll find out for you,” he promised, and
Bess, Thea’s shadow as usual, looked in the stranger’s direction
with definite admiration.

“He does look terribly romantic, doesn’t he?”

Thea supposed that he probably did; her own tastes were rather
different. Matlin was not at Almacks’ this evening.

“Lady Matlin?” Chase had not only learned the
stranger’s name; he had returned with the man in tow. “This gentleman....”

“I have been an admirer from the distance, madam,”
the man broke in fluidly. He had a strong accent. Spanish, Thea realized with a
shock. “My name is Joaquín, Lady Matlin. I am happy to have gained this
introduction at last.” He bent over her hand with a flourish.

“How do you do, Señor?” Thea murmured.

“Please, Lady Matlin.” He still held her hand. “We
are in England, I should simply be a ‘mister;’ is that not so?”
He smiled as he relinquished Thea’s hand. She felt uncomfortable as the
object of that smile and was relieved when, after a few minutes of silence, Joaquín
moved away from her toward the musicians.

Bess sighed behind Thea. “What a heavenly man.”

“Don’t be such a nodcock, Bess,” Thea
scolded. As an afterthought she asked: “Do you really think him so splendid?”

“Don’t
you?”

“I hardly know the man. I don’t particularly
want to know him, either. He scares me a little; he reminds me of—someone.
Of a great many someones. Spanish husbands. Horrors.” She gave her
shoulders a little shake. “Won’t the music ever start up again?”

As the stranger disappeared in the crowd Thea dismissed him
from her mind and would have forgotten him entirely had Bess not enthused for
the whole of their ride home over his dark, romantic eyes.

She found Matlin and Lord Ocott in the library when she reached
Hill Street. Lord Ocott looked up from the fire with a smile of real welcome in
his eyes. “Come in my dear. Done up from your partying, or will you take
a glass of wine with us before you go to bed?”

Behind him Matlin stood. For once he did not wear that tight,
withdrawn look. His smile was tentative but real. “Come sit down, Thea,
and tell us which party you’ve graced with your presence. Was my aunt not
with you?”

Thea took the wing chair which Lord Ocott offered her and
replied that Lady Ocott had been engaged for a small loo party. “So I
went to Almacks’ with Miss Chase and her brother. Can you picture me in
the character of a chaperon? We had a pleasant evening.” She gazed
thoughtfully down at her feet. “I danced a great deal; I think I shall
have to buy a new pair of slippers.”

“Surely a worthy expense.” Lord Ocott smiled.

Matlin brought a glass of wine to her and stepped back to
lean at one end of the mantelpiece, Lord Ocott leaned on the other side;
framing the small fire they watched as she sipped at her wine. They spoke idly,
encouraging Thea to recount the people she had spoken to, danced with that
evening.

“By God, Susan’s right: you’ve become a
veritable Belle. I knew you’d brought a right’un into the family,
Douglas.”

Thea looked up to see how Matlin took that. He was smiling a
little. “I’m afraid running errands at Grahamley and the convent
didn’t train me up for Almacks’, but everyone has been very kind to
me.”

Still smiling at his wife, Matlin thought: Kind? It seemed that
everyone was kind to Thea except he. Well, perhaps it was time to stop all
that, make the best of this bargain for the girl’s sake and his own. The
memory of Adele Towles was still fresh in his mind; he weighed that image with
the picture Thea presented as she sat sipping his uncle’s claret; the difference
struck him forcibly.

“I’m afraid I have not had much time for parties
and society since we reached London,” he began.

“Yes, well, time you remedied that, boy,” Lord
Ocott agreed.

“I don’t want to be a charge on you,” Thea
assured him anxiously.

“No charge. I shall try hereafter to be a better
escort to you, chi—no, I forget, you don’t like that, do you? Thea.”
He smiled.

After half an hour’s chatting with the men, Thea
excused herself and went to her room. When she slept that night it was with the
easiest heart she had had in many nights. Only in the morning did she remember
again: Matlin still did not know that there was no child. Until he did there
was no truth between them and no chance of a future.

o0o

Matlin was as good as his word and began to squire Thea to
parties and the theatre. Once he had begun to do so he was surprised and a
little chagrined at how unnecessary his presence was. When they were announced
at a party or took their seats at the Opera, Thea was immediately surrounded by
acquaintances, many of them male. Tony Chase was particularly in evidence, with
his sister as his excuse, but if Thea must have hangers-on, young Chase was
unexceptionable. Chase was not a problem; Matlin only wished he liked others of
his wife’s cicisbeos as well. John Walsingham, a young buck well known to
be without a farthing to bless himself with and with a reputation for dallying
with other men’s wives, was one of them. There were others less savory,
and while Brummel and Granville Leveson-Gower and Alvanley paid their respects
to Lady Matlin regularly, Matlin generally wished the whole lot of Thea’s
admirers at the Devil. There was one, a dark, Italianate-looking man who
hovered at the edge of Thea’s circle but rarely spoke to her; his manner
was very particular, Matlin thought sourly, and he had none of Chase’s
boyishness or Walsingham’s patent opportunism to season it.

A little more thinking and Matlin came to the startling
conclusion that he was jealous. Once he was past the shock of
that
he
wondered if he had ever really meant to give Thea her freedom and watch her
marry some other man, a Tony Chase or some other eligible boy. If only she were
not so damned young, he thought. If only he had not made such a wretched
beginning of it. He began to sicken of “if only” and to wonder
where the punch room was. They were married, he was to become a father; the
beginning had been marred, but perhaps, if Thea could forgive him, there was
hope for them both.

Who the Devil was the foreign-looking man?

Thea was as puzzled by the attentions of the man called
Joaquín as her husband was. She seemed to meet him everywhere: riding, walking,
at parties, at the theatre. He rarely spoke except to pay his respects to her,
but she always had a sense that he was about to say something more, that he
watched her, and waited. “He hovers,” she said once to Bess Chase.

“I wish he’d hover around me,” Bess
replied curtly. She had worked her wiles upon Joaquín without satisfaction.
“I suppose he’s as mad for you as Tony is.”

That was what troubled Thea. Since leaving the convent she
had learned to distinguish between a man who paid court to her from politeness
and one who did so in earnest, and she knew for certain that Joaquín, no matter
his protestations to the contrary, was no more interested in her than he was in
Lady Ocott or Tony Chase.