The Speckled Monster (8 page)

“No one, my lord,” she stammered. “I would prefer to live singly.”

“If you are founding your hopes on my death,” he said, “you will find yourself mistaken. You will get nothing but a pittance. Enough to keep you out of the poorhouse if you live in a cottage and conserve candle wax.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Her very meekness infuriated him. “Do I not have the right to dispose of you as I see fit?” he shouted, swiping her letter from the desk and whirling around to face her once more.

Between them, the letter eddied and tossed, spiraling toward the floor.

“Yes, my lord,” she said again. “But am I to have no say whatsoever in my own destiny?”

For a moment, it looked as if he might backhand her, but he turned away to stare out the window at the yellowing leaves; somewhere, they were already burning them. He clasped his hands so tightly behind his back that his knuckles blanched. “I am no Calvinist,” he said at last, grinding out the words. “Make your own choice: marry Massereene's heir, or live out your life as country-cloistered spinster.”

“May I consult the family?”

“Ask the family,” he spat. “Ask your friends. Ask the man in the bloody moon. But consider your answer carefully: I will call for it this winter in London.” He seated himself and drew out another a set of papers: obviously the draft of her marriage contract. “Meanwhile, you may spend Christmas here alone, to see how you like it. Now get out.”

 

Clinging to the notion that any chance to escape Skeffington was a victory, Lady Mary laid her choices before the rest of the family in the drawing room the next day, as a steely rain needled the windowpanes.

“You are such a little romantic, Mary!” cried Lady Kingston from the tea table, whose control she had greedily assumed as the ranking lady of the family. She had also taken the familial liberty of dropping Mary's “Lady.” Lady Mary, however, could not bring herself to address her brother's insipid limpet of a wife as Rachel. She did her best not to address her at all.

She looked hopefully at Frances instead, but Frances shook her head. “I am sorry you will ruin yourself,” she said primly. “But if you will persist in being so unreasonable, I cannot blame Father, whatever he may inflict on you.”

“What is so wrong with Skeffington?” asked Lady Kingston. “He will make you a viscountess.”

“I do not love him,” frowned Lady Mary.

“But there is no necessity of loving,” exclaimed Lady Kingston, setting her cup down with a definitive click. “Consider the best marriages from one end of town to the other: You will find very few women in love with their husbands, I assure you. Yet many are happy.”

Kingston rose. “There, madam, I must agree with you. Thankfully, your equation works equally well the other way round.” He bowed and strode from the room.

“You see?” cried Lady Kingston. “Civility is all that is required.”

 

The rain disappeared, and in the last scattershot spears of light, Will found his sister on the rise where she had once taught him to chase the setting sun, just as she had long before down in Wiltshire. Without a word, he took her hand. They both gazed in silence at the fiery globe sinking in the west, but neither made any move to sweep it from the sky.

When it had disappeared, leaving behind the silvery green scent of rain and a sky washed pink and orange, Will cleared his throat. “If it would be of service to you, I will tell Father the hardship he is putting on you. You have only to say the word.”

She looked up at him, startled as always that he had somehow escaped little boyhood. When had he grown taller than she? When had he learned such courtliness? But he was nineteen: not yet of age, but a man nonetheless, already married, with a child on the way.

“It will do me no good—nor you either,” she said. “He'll just disinherit you.”

“He can't,” said Will with a wry smile. “Caught fast in his own favorite trap of entail.”

She smiled back, in spite of herself. “Perhaps not disinherit. But he can make your life hell.”

“He has already delivered me there,” he said, looking steadily off into the distance. “Mary,” he began, scanning her face, “might there be . . . is there any other man—of smaller fortune, perhaps—who might make you happy?”

“It is impossible, Will,” she whispered, squeezing against the lump in her throat. “He is impossible.”

He took both her shoulders in his hands. “However much Father is against it,” he said with fierce gallantry, “I will assist you in making you happy after your own way. You have only to ask.”

 

The rest of the family left to spend the Christmas holidays in London, leaving Mary and Frances behind at Thoresby, confined to the few small rooms that were all that their father would heat. She took refuge in her correspondence with Philippa.

 

Dorchester let his daughters stew till the middle of February, sending the coach to fetch them back to London just in time to help with preparations for another wedding: Aunt Cheyne had arranged for their sister Evelyn to marry John Leveson-Gower, Baron Gower, on March 13.

She had thought herself resigned to Hell; then she glimpsed Paradise at the wedding. A few days later, when Dorchester summoned Lady Mary to give her final answer, her certainty surprised them both. “I prefer a single life, my lord, if you would be pleased to allow it.”

“Pleasing me,” he retorted, “is only to be done by obedience.”

That afternoon, he sent a footman to her room. “Your father sends his regards, my lady, and the consequences of your answer,” he said, depositing a small valise in her hands with an ostentatious bow. “His Lordship suggests that you pack.”

Standing alone in the middle of her chamber, she opened the valise. In the bottom was a note in the hand of her father's secretary.
You will shortly be confined where you may repent at leisure,
said its neat lettering.
Consider this case sufficient to hold all you need for your new life
.

She began to shiver as if the case had held all the cold that Thoresby's unheated stone walls had gathered in thirty years of winter; it seemed to pour forth through her bones in a glacial flood. Later that evening, she wrote her father again, this time in a wavering hand:
My aversion to the man you propose is too great to be overcome. Married to him, I shall be miserable beyond all imagining. I am, however, in your hands. You may dispose of me as you think fit
.

So pleased was Dorchester with this surrender that he strode to her chamber to embrace her as the prodigal daughter returned, allowing her to kiss his hand good-night. From then on, he proceeded as if she had given eager consent.

 

At the beginning of June, a letter arrived from Lady Jekyll. Inside lay a tightly folded enclosure in a hand Lady Mary had not seen for over a year, and had never expected to see again.
I have been grieved for some time to hear you are to be confined to one you do not like,
mourned Wortley. She agreed to meet him, though only to disabuse him of his error. She could marry or not as she pleased, she assured him.

Almost immediately, the two picked up wrangling where they had left off: about where to meet (Lady Jekyll's, Sir Godfrey Kneller's, or her Italian tutor's), whether she cared enough for him (yes), whether her father could be induced to reopen negotiations with him (no). Wortley was no Paradise, but he was not Hell either. By mid-July, Lady Mary began to glimpse a middling path to escape.

To Wortley, she wrote:
Were I to choose my destiny, I had rather be confined to a desert with you than enjoy the highest of rank and fortune in a court with him I am condemned to
. Still, she did not want to overstate the case.
I am sincere enough to acknowledge,
she added,
there are parts of your humor I could wish otherwise
.

To Philippa, she was more candid.

 

The decision to elope more or less made, the lovers still found plenty to dicker about: where and when it would take place, even whether it was best to abscond in a coach and six, or a coach and pair. Lady Mary did not think it necessary to tell Wortley that she had not yet said good-bye to Paradise. She did inform him, however, that she would not make the smallest move before consulting her brother in Acton. Only when Will promised his support did she go forward.

Come next Sunday under the garden wall, at ten o'clock,
she wrote on Monday, August 11.
It will be dark, and it is necessary it should be so
.

Sensing treachery, her father descended upon Acton. Dorchester knew nothing for certain, but his interrogations of the household convinced him his suspicions were right. After a terrifying interview, he dismissed Lady Mary under guard to her chamber, with a command that she was not to come out again, except to step foot in his coach the next day. She wrote Wortley in a panic, telling him that their plans had been foiled.
I shall be sent back to West Dean,
she wailed,
never to come from thence but to give myself to all that I hate
. Much later, with the rest of the house asleep, she smuggled out another message: She would creep out onto the balcony between six and seven o'clock in the morning. If he could, Wortley should contrive to fetch her then. It would be their last chance.

Shivering as if the birds' morning songs were slivers of ice, she waited the whole promised hour, but Wortley did not come.

Later that morning she was hustled into her father's coach, escorted by her brother and a dour old maid of her father's choosing, who made it impossible for Will and Mary to talk. Thundering west, Will never said a word, but held her hand. She watched him watching the miles streaming by, a small smile playing around his mouth. Its quicksilver curve seemed the only tilt of happiness in the whole of a cold, hateful world.

At the inn that night, she discerned his amusement: tipped off to their route, Wortley had taken a room as another guest. She did not see him that night or all the next day, though she was aware that he was doggedly trailing their party.

The second night, with her suspicious maid snoring away in the next chamber, Lady Mary sat up sleepless with her brother. Near midnight, he excused himself; a minute or two later, the door reopened, but the man it admitted was not her brother. It was Wortley, wrapped in preposterous black.

Her anxiety splintered into giggles. “I used to yearn for a bandit king,” she said, drawing him to a looking glass, “but I never dreamed he would turn out to be you. If any robbery is committed tonight, you will be taken up for it.”

“We have no time for games,” he said, grabbing her hand and drawing her through the dimly lit hall and down the stairs. The courtyard was empty but for one mare placidly munching its bit amid torches that were sputtering out.

“Where is the coach?” she whispered.

He made no answer, but mounted the horse, reaching back for Mary.

She took a step back.

“Come,” he said, motioning impatiently. “There is a parson ready to marry us less than fifteen minutes away. We will be back before anyone suspects we are missing.”

In the flickering dark, she seemed to grow half a foot. “What do you mistake me for, Mr. Wortley?” she hissed. “A dairymaid? I am not going anywhere until you provide decent conveyence.”

He stared at her for an instant, and then dismounted and stalked back toward the inn.

“Where are you going?”

“To ask your brother if I may borrow the only coach in the house,” he said tersely.

She slipped in front of him.
“You cannot be serious.”

“Do you have another proposal?” he asked coldly.

“Involving my brother will force him either to cover his tracks by using me very ill when we return—to the point of beating me black and blue, you understand—or to live in my father's disgrace forever. What sort of return for his kindness would that be?”

“Your father will reconcile himself to us, once the thing is done.”

“The thing?”
Anger soared inside her. “You do not know him as I do. If you take me, you must take me with nothing but the clothes on my back.” She turned on her heel and headed back into the inn. “Adieu. I am entirely yours, if you please.”