Sally Read online

  He piloted her expertly through the swirling dancers. “No, of course you didn’t make him up,” he said. “I can see Mr. Grumpit now. He has a gray mustache and a monocle…”

  “And a red face.” said Sally, laughing.

  “And he loves you very much.”

  Sally pretended to be shocked. “Mr. Grumpit loves his wife,” she protested.

  “Nonsense. He is burning with a secret passion, and having kissed you once, wants to kiss you again.”

  “Are we talking about Mr. Grumpit?” asked Sally, suddenly breathless.

  He smiled down into her flushed face and held her closer. “Of course,” he murmured. “And you must never kiss anyone but Mr. Grumpit, for he is very jealous.”

  Sally swayed in his arms, deaf and blind to everything else. All at once a small hope began to grow in her mind. Perhaps she could tell him the truth after all. While they were at supper.

  Now, supper should have been a romantic occasion, seated at one of the many little tables in the candlelight, snow falling outside the long windows, firelight joining the candlelight on the painted walls, but it wasn’t. Perhaps it was because the marquess seemed distracted; perhaps it was because Sally was tense, summoning up courage to tell him the truth; or perhaps simply because the palace food was up to its usual standard. Sally wondered desperately where the delicious smell of French cooking had been coming from. The staff dinner?

  Everything on her plate seemed to be a hundred years old, from the stale lobster patties to the tough and athletic quail.

  At last the marquess turned his blue gaze on her. “I’m afraid we will have no meet tomorrow, Lady Cecily,” he said. “It’s snowing much too hard.”

  Sally looked up at him from under her long eyelashes. “Would you be very shocked if I told you I did not know how to ride?” she asked abruptly.

  “Well, it’s a hypothetical question, since I have had ample evidence that you can ride beautifully. But, yes, of course I would be very much shocked. For it would mean you had lied to me. I cannot bear to be lied to. There is nothing worse, in my opinion, than someone who pretends to be other than they are. It’s getting away from the subject of riding a bit, but there was this chap once came to stay here. Father had met him at his club. Said his name was James Harrison, the famous African explorer. Well, he stayed and stayed and stayed. He was always waiting for ‘his man to arrive with funds,’ and Mother ordered Worthing—the secretary, you know—to let him have ready cash when he needed it. He never seemed to want to talk of his adventures.

  “’Oh, you don’t want to hear me boring on about Africa,’ he would say. He was very charming and witty, and everyone adored him. The ladies did, anyway, and, as for Mother, she was simply enchanted. But then various little objects began to disappear: a piece of china here and a miniature there. Mother suddenly became suspicious and hired a private detective. It turned out that this chap was actually called Harry Snyder, a well-known confidence trickster. I was all for having him arrested, but Father and Mother—well, typical—they didn’t want anyone to know how they had been tricked, and so he got away with it.

  “But I tell you this.” He leaned across the table, gazing into Sally’s wide and startled eyes. “If I ever come across another one, another fake, male or female, I’ll simply call the police, no matter who it is…. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Like what?” asked Sally, hurriedly lowering her eyes.

  “I don’t know, almost as if you were about to say good-bye to me.” He gave a light laugh. “You make me feel as if I am standing on a liner, watching you on the shore.”

  “If you will forgive me for saying so,” said Sally, “I think your cook is a confidence trickster.”

  “Pretty awful, isn’t it?” he said, and Sally was glad that her statement about the cook had stopped the marquess from looking at her so intently.

  He began to tell her a series of amusing anecdotes about the palace cook, and Sally hardly heard a word.

  She could never tell him her real identity now. All she had was this one evening. She would not even come back as Aunt Mabel. Better to make a clean break.

  “You’re not listening to a word I’m saying.”

  Sally looked at him in dismay. “I’m—sorry,” she stammered. “I—I w-was th-thinking of something else.”

  “You know,” he said, looking at her curiously, “I keep feeling there’s some dark mystery about you. Never mind. Your turn to do the talking. Tell me about Africa.”

  Sally blushed red, thinking of the confidence trickster. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “I had a bad time there.”

  The strains of the music filtered into the supper room. “My next partner will be waiting for me,” said Sally, getting to her feet. She was all at once glad to escape. She looked glad to escape, and by now the marquess’s interest was definitely caught. Women were not in the habit of fleeing from him.

  He found himself becoming more and more intrigued by the minute with Lady Cecily.

  Sally wondered whether she should run away before the last dance, but the thought of being held in the marquess’s arms one more time was too much for her. And so at last she was being held by him as they moved to the sugar-sweet strains of The Merry Widow waltz. Sally forced the days ahead out of her mind. Only this moment existed. Nothing was real for her but the tall man who held her closely against him. Faces were a blur, gowns and jewels a swirling colored background to her happiness. She had never felt so elated in her life before. At last the magic dance was over. Faces swam back into focus: Mrs. Stuart with her eyes glittering strangely as she looked at her husband; the duchess, fatigued; Miss Wyndham and Peter Firkin standing shoulder to shoulder and looking radiant; and the duke, morose. And there was Miss Fleming waiting to tell Cinderella that the ball was over and it was time to turn into Aunt Mabel again.

  Sally stood next to the marquess as the orchestra played the National Anthem. As the last chord was struck he whispered to her, “Let’s go for a walk in the snow,” and with shining eyes, Sally nodded her head.

  “I’ll fetch my mantle,” she whispered back. “Where shall I meet you?”

  “In the conservatory. In half an hour.”

  Sally nodded, and then he left her side to go and chat with some other guests.

  Sally hurried up the stairs, anxious to get her mantle and escape before Miss Fleming should find out what she was up to. For that lady showed an alarming tendency to behave like the chaperon she was pretending to be, and Sally felt sure she would try to stop her going by pointing out all those distressing things, such as it being better to make a clean break.

  She slipped quietly down the stairs, grateful that she, as Aunt Mabel, had acquired such good knowledge of the geography of the vast house, that she did not have to look for a servant and ask for directions to the conservatory.

  She pushed open the door quietly and stood just inside, her eyes searching the darkness.

  The conservatory had been built onto the back of the great house some time in the last century and was, in daylight, Sally remembered, rather like a miniature crystal palace.

  But in the hot, humid darkness it seemed mysterious and vast with huge palm trees soaring up to the glass roof.

  “Are you there?” she whispered into the blackness—and then let out a squeak of alarm as a pair of strong arms folded about her from behind.

  “Darling,” the marquess murmured in a low voice, turning her around to face him.

  Sally could feel her bones beginning to melt as she felt her body pressed closely against him. Her mantle, which she had been carrying over one arm, fell unheeded to the floor.

  And then his lips came down on hers, burning this time, and exploring, causing dizzying skyrockets to burst in her brain. His mouth left hers and began to wander over her face, kissing her closed eyelids, the tip of her nose, her ears, and her neck.

  In a tiny corner of Sally’s brain alarm bells were beginning to ring. Thoughts jumbled one ov
er the other. She was alone with him without a chaperon. He was kissing her only because she had appeared easy game. His hand left her waist and slid down the low front of her dress, cupping her bosom in a warm clasp.

  “No!” cried Sally, wrenching herself free. “You mustn’t… you frighten me!”

  There was a short silence, and Sally could almost sense his anger. Then he said lightly, “We are supposed to be walking in the snow. This tropical atmosphere is having a bad effect on me. Where is your mantle?”

  “On the floor,” replied Sally in a shaky little voice.

  He struck a match and held it up, his face looking like that of a stranger as it was illuminated by the small flame. “Ah, there it is!” He stooped and retrieved her mantle and blew out the match. He put the mantle about her shoulders and, taking her hand in a firm clasp, led her through the darkness of the conservatory to a small glass door that led out to the garden and lawns, glimmering under their carpet of snow.

  He opened the door, and Sally stepped out after him. Romance fled before the impact of the ice-cold air and the realization that she had forgotten to change out of her satin dancing slippers, for the snow was already seeping through the thin material.

  Letters from many, many distressed girls ran through Sally’s troubled brain: “I don’t know what happened… I didn’t mean to do it… didn’t mean to be bad.” And Sally remembered her own sympathetic, yet rather detached, replies. For she had always wondered how any woman could simply surrender her virginity so easily. With a new maturity, she realized how close she had probably come to it herself. He had released her hand and was walking a little way ahead of her, through the snow.

  Light, glittering flakes were falling and circling out of a black, black sky. The gas was turned up in one of the rooms above, throwing a sudden yellow rectangle of light across the lawn.

  “You aren’t wearing a coat,” Sally called after the marquess, but he walked on, his head bent, his hands behind his back, like some royal personage walking forward to lay another boring foundation stone.

  My pride would not normally let me run after any man like this, thought Sally, rather angrily, but it’s our last short time together, and he’s spoiling it all by stalking off in a temper like that.

  She hurried after him, up to her ankles in snow, holding up her pearl-embroidered skirts. She almost collided with him as he came to an abrupt halt. He tucked her hand in his arm and said, “Let’s walk to the rotunda.”

  Sally nodded, deliriously happy again. The rotunda gleamed against the whiter snow. Sally raised her skirts higher as the snow, away from the shelter of the house, grew deeper. Besotted as she was, she was conscious of a faint feeling of irritation, since he showed no concern for the fact that she was laboring through the winter landscape in a thin pair of evening slippers. He had gone quiet again, preoccupied.

  The marquess was in fact wrestling with a problem. His intelligence and all his emotions were telling him that he had fallen in love with Lady Cecily. There was, therefore, no reason on earth why he should not ask for her hand in marriage. But it was all just too easy. Lady Cecily was of good family, his mother and father would be delighted, and nothing could be more correct. He looked at her sideways out of the corner of his eye. Snowflakes were shining on the white roses in her hair, and her piquant little face was delicately flushed.

  He had been in severe danger of going much too far too soon back in the conservatory. But never had a female so assaulted his senses. Never had he wanted to possess a girl as much as he wanted to possess Lady Cecily Trevelyn. He had hardly drunk anything at the ball, so it could not be that. He knew instinctively that she was a virgin, and he was not in the habit of becoming hot and bothered over virgins, let alone respectable, marriageable ones.

  They had finally reached the rotunda, and he drew her down onto a marble bench, seeming not to notice that it was covered with two inches of snow.

  “Cecily,” he began, and then repeated “Cecily” again, for Sally had momentarily forgotten her assumed name.

  She turned toward him, her eyes large and questioning in the faint illumination from the expanse of white snow. “I am sorry if I frightened you back there,” he said, taking her hands in his. “You have quite a devastating effect on my senses. You have—Oh, dash it all… come here and let me kiss you again!”

  And without waiting for her reply, he swept her into his arms, kissing her lingeringly, molding her body against his, his searching hands taking the pins from her hair so that it cascaded about her shoulders and the white silk roses tumbled down and lay on the harlequin tiles of the floor of the rotunda.

  Gradually as he kissed her and kissed her, Sally could sense suddenly a new tenderness in him… and all her defenses crumbled.

  She buried her fingers in the crisp black curls at his neck and returned his kisses with all her heart and soul, feeling his hands sliding over her breasts, feeling her body burning like a flame.

  At last he drew back and took her small face gently between his long fingers. The sky was paling in the east, and somewhere a cold and sleepy bird let out a mournful chirp.

  “I love you with all my heart, Cecily,” he said. “When can we be married? How soon?”

  Love and passion and dreams and romance fled from her wide gray eyes, to be replaced with such a look of bewilderment and loss that he frowned suddenly. That frown brought the memory of how he could not stand liars or confidence tricksters or people who pretended to be other than they were rushing into Sally’s brain. The night had gone, her one, precious night. Reality came flooding back. The snow on the bench had melted and was seeping through her coat and gown. Her feet were two blocks of solid ice. Her mantle had been pulled down, exposing her naked shoulders, and the chill wind of dawn brushed its cold fingers over her bared breasts and bruised lips.

  “I’m cold, so very cold,” whispered Sally, arranging her gown and pulling her mantle with its sealskin collar high around her throat.

  He gave her an impatient shake. “I’m asking you to marry me,” he said.

  Sally rose slowly to her feet. “No,” she said, oh, so gently, oh, so sadly. “I can’t.”

  The snow had stopped falling. Sally walked from the rotunda and across the glittering snow toward the palace.

  “Cecily!” he called after her. “Cecily!”

  But I’m not Cecily, thought Sally, feeling a terrible lump rising in her throat. I’m Sally. And I’m a liar.

  The marquess stared after her diminishing figure in disbelief.

  He could not believe she was rejecting him. He could not believe she had turned down his offer of marriage. A small flame of anger was growing in him and burning away his heartache. Well, let her see if he cared! Be damned to her!

  But there was something so forlorn in the droop of her shoulders and the way her fur-edged mantle dragged slowly across the snow behind her.

  One more try. “Cecily!”

  Sally stumbled and nearly fell, amazed at the tearing pain of loss and hurt somewhere below the region of her heart. For one split second she made a small movement, as if her whole soul were about to drag her unwilling body and brain back across the snow to him.

  And then she walked on with a sure, quick step. The conservatory door opened and closed.

  The marquess felt numb—not with cold. He had an awful feeling he would never see Lady Cecily again.

  He did not know that he hadn’t even met her.

  CHAPTER SIX

  By Monday morning the Marquess of Seudenham was reflecting wryly that he could do with a bit of advice from Aunt Mabel. But that lady had been unaccountably detained in London, “due to poor health.”

  His mother had shaken her head and written off to say that she would travel to London at the end of the week to visit Aunt Mabel’s sickbed. The marquess was not to know the consternation with which that letter was met.

  He simply could not get the mysterious Lady Cecily out of his head, and by Tuesday, when he read an item in the social colum
ns saying that Lady Cecily had attended a supper party at Lady Courtland’s after just having returned from South Africa and was throwing a masked ball that very night at the town house of her guardians, he decided to catch the train to London and attend that ball himself, invitation or no.

  The marquess had managed to slowly get over the fury he had felt at Lady Cecily’s refusal of his proposal of marriage. But the resultant feelings of loss and hurt and worry were so painful that at times he longed for his anger to come back again.

  The hunt had met on the Saturday, and despite her lack of sleep, he had fully expected to see Lady Cecily among the riders. But the hunt had set out over the snow, and halfway through the day he found he could not bear it any longer and had ridden hard to the palace—only to find she had left.

  As the train carrying him to London sped through the wintry landscape, the marquess decided stubbornly that there was some strange reason behind Lady Cecily’s rejection. She could not have kissed him like that and been indifferent to him. Perhaps she was engaged to some yob in South Africa? He had never proposed marriage to any woman in his life before, but never for a moment had he been expected to be turned down.

  He had been hunted too long on the Marriage Market not to know that his title and his fortune set him high above the rest. He was not a vain man and was unaware of the fact that he was extremely handsome, most of the time putting any female admiration down to his title. Now he began to fret about his appearance like a schoolboy undergoing the first pangs of calf love. Was his face showing wrinkles? He had found one suspiciously gray-looking hair among the thick thatch of his black curls only that very morning. How old was Lady Cecily? Why hadn’t he checked the peerage? Was he old enough to be her father? Of course not. And on and on his thoughts ran to the thudding of the wheels.

  He had a slim town house, which he hardly ever used, in Half Moon Street in Mayfair, since he preferred the country to the town. He looked around it now with new eyes, anxious eyes. How stale and lifeless it seemed. Not a feminine touch anywhere.