Tilly Read online

  “Well, I am rather,” said Lord Charles gloomily. “I’ve already had to sell off the property in Scotland, and then the hunting box in Yorkshire had to go. Trouble is, I invested in all the wrong things and the worse things got, the worse I invested. The king’s visit was the last straw.”

  “You could have refused,” said the marquess lazily. “Told old Tum-Tum you’d turned Methodist or Christian Scientist or something. Freddie Barminster was threatened with the royal presence, so he sent a pile of tracts entitled ‘The End of the World Is at Hand’ and stuff like that to Buck House and informed His Majesty that he, Freddie, had found this splendid new religion and was just waiting for a chance to convert the monarch. Visit was canceled like a shot.”

  “When the king of England honors me with a personal visit, I would think it unpatriotic and caddish to refuse,” said Lord Charles stiffly.

  “I’m not turning Bolshevist, you know,” said the marquess mildly. “But with my father’s death, I inherited the title and the responsibilities. I’ve got a duty to my servants and tenants and I assure you, if His Majesty showed any signs whatsoever of honoring me with his presence, I would plead leprosy or anything else I could think of.”

  “I envy you,” sighed Lord Charles. “But with old buffers like me, the monarch must always come first.” He looked up as the door opened. “Come in, my boy,” he said warmly. “Here’s Lord Philip kindly dropped in to see us.”

  Lord Philip turned and tried not to stare. It was the boy from the lodge… no, it must be Charles’s son… no, by God, it was that weird daughter of his. What was her name?… Tilly… that was it.

  He rose to his feet and made Tilly a graceful bow. He took her small hand to kiss it and found to his surprise that his own was being wrung in a knuckle-cracking handshake. A pair of large, beautiful eyes looked up into his own and then Tilly’s unfortunate mannerism of crinkling up her eyes took over. The marquess led Tilly over to a sofa and set himself to charm. He prided himself on his social manners and, after all, he was fond of old Charles. He therefore smiled dazzlingly into what he could see of Tilly’s eyes and asked her in his light, lazy voice whether she was looking forward to her Season.

  “Oh, I shan’t be out this year,” said Tilly, slumping into the chesterfield as if she wished its down-stuffed depths would hide her. “But I suppose I shall have to go through with all that rot next year.”

  “Come, now,” teased the marquess. “Surely you will enjoy all the balls and parties and all the young men paying court to you.”

  Tilly gave a loud, embarrassed laugh. “I’d really rather hunt than do anything,” she said, and then her face brightened. “I hear you are a capital huntsman. You must tell me some of your experiences.”

  “Perhaps, later,” said the marquess gently. He privately thought women were a nuisance on the hunting field, always getting their long skirts tangled in the branches. Not that this specimen of English womanhood seemed to bother with skirts—and more shame to her! Eccentricity was all very well in the middle-aged. In girls, it was painful. He averted his eyes slightly and wished he had not come. And yet… there was a strange, restless magnetism about this impossible girl. It was a pity… But that was as far as his thoughts about Tilly went, for Lord Charles gently claimed his attention.

  Tilly made her escape. She had decided to change the slightly bored look on Lord Philip’s face. She would put on her best shirtwaister for luncheon—for surely the marquess would stay for lunch.

  With the help of one of the housemaids, she managed to get into her corset, her skirt and her blouse with its uncomfortable high-boned collar. With great daring, she heated up the curling tongs and frizzled the front of her hair. Then she was liberally doused in something the housemaid referred to as Oh-Dick-Alone, and smelling exotically of cologne and burnt hair and walking gingerly on the unaccustomed height of a pair of French heels, Tilly made her entrance into the dining room. But of the elegant marquess there was no sign. Her father sat at the head of the long mahogany table, the dappled sunlight from the garden outside playing across his face. His face!

  It seemed to have slipped oddly to one side. Tilly stopped and stood very still, her heart beating fast. The room was very quiet. Suddenly a thrush bounced up and down on the branch of a rosebush outside the open window and poured his vital, throbbing spring song into the silence.

  “Papa,” whispered Tilly. Then louder, “Papa!”

  But Lord Charles was dead.

  The marquess had declined lunch and had left Lord Charles alone with his debts and his worries. Lord Charles had fretted over the new idea that had he not endured the royal visit, then he would not be in this horrendous financial mess.

  He would have to sell Jeebles.

  He had looked around the graceful room, at the silk panels on the walls, cleaned and restored in honor of His Majesty’s visit, at the graceful Hepplewhite chairs, and then through the long windows to the calm English vista of lawns and old trees and all the bursting life of spring. The realization of what it would mean to him to lose his family home had struck him like a blow over the heart. He had a massive stroke and died almost instantly, the tired look of pain and loss and bewilderment fading from his eyes.

  Tilly stretched out a trembling hand to ring the bell for the butler. After all, one always rang for a servant to sort out one’s troubles. But this was one trouble that no retinue of servants could cure.

  The Honorable Matilda was now alone in the world.

  And penniless.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “‘Stand back, I tell you, or I may trounce some of you, even as I have him whose carcass, without his head, lies in yonder glade! There, dogs! Take it and glut your eyes with the trunkless head of him who had a stouter heart than any hound among ye!” So saying, he threw the gashed head of Sir Guy into the Baron’s arms, who as instantly threw it among his men with a roar of terror, as if it had been a ball of red-hot iron; none of them were more eager than their lord to retain possession of it, and it fell to the ground to be kicked from one to the other.

  The sound of carriage wheels outside made Tilly start and she dropped her penny dreadful on the carpet. Lady Aileen was back from her calls! Tilly hurriedly picked up Robin Hood and Little John; or The Merry Men of Sherwood and stuffed it under the sofa cushions. She then picked up a copy Manners for Women by Mrs. Humphry, and pretended to read.

  With a sigh of relief, Tilly realized that Aileen had gone directly upstairs to her rooms, probably to lie down.

  Her hand stole under the cushions to retrieve the penny dreadful, and then stopped. No, it was not the time for escape. It was time to carefully go over this horrible change in her life and try to see how she could make the best of it.

  It was a year since her father had died, a long, weary year of watching every bit of her home finally going under the hammer until Jeebles itself, with all its lands, had been sold to a foreign count. Every penny of the sale had gone to pay off Lord Charles’s staggering debts, leaving Tilly with a small annuity from the residue of fifty pounds a year; a genteel amount that would suffice if she were prepared to waste her life away in some small boardinghouse full of equally indigent gentlewomen.

  And then, like an angel from heaven, Lady Aileen had arrived with her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Glenstraith. Lady Aileen had prettily explained their concern for poor Tilly. She, Aileen, was about to embark on her first Season and had come to offer dear Tilly a post as paid companion. “Of course, we will really be friends, Tilly,” Aileen had explained, and her fond parents had beamed at this superb example of their daughter’s magnanimity.

  The duke and duchess hardly ever visited their estates in Scotland, preferring their town house in Grosvenor Square, London.

  Tilly had been suitably grateful, and in no time at all it seemed her life had changed, but in a singularly unpleasant way, for Aileen’s motives had been far from pure. She seemed to enjoy the ridiculous social spectacle presented by her gauche companion and gained herself
a small reputation as a wit by describing some of the “Beast’s” more gauche remarks. She cleverly built up a new character for the naive and unsophisticated Tilly—that of a bumbling Victorian dragon. “Oh, I couldn’t go there,” she would explain prettily to her court of young men. “Tilly wouldn’t let me.”

  And poor, unsophisticated Tilly played right into her hands. The glittering youth of social London embarrassed her dreadfully and she was apt to reply to any conversational sally with a grunt. She was unused to wearing skirts and would therefore stride mannishly into a room and flop down on a chair with her legs spread apart.

  Tilly’s education had been scant, having only had the benefit of a governess for a mere two years of her young life. Her mind was still very immature. She lived in the pages of penny dreadfuls, filling her lonely hours with glorious tales with titles such as The Jew Detective, The Blue Dwarf, and the aforementioned Robin Hood. She read American imports such as Unravelling the Twisted Skein; or Deadwood Dick in Gotham, and The Ghouls of Galveston, and she followed the adventures of Frank Reade’s The Steam Man, a metal steam-driven coal-burning robot, wearing a topper out of which poured smoke as the robot waded into the Comanches.

  She vaguely dreamed of marriage to some good sort of fellow with a predilection for hunting. She often thought of the handsome marquess, but only as a man she would like to have as a friend. She was not for one minute aware that she had fallen in love with him during the king’s visit. Her comics were no help in educating her mind along the path of passion, for her heroes, if they did get married, seemed to enter into a sort of fourth-form friendship.

  She looked around the room, feeling lost and somehow foreign. The Duke and Duchess of Glenstraith were very “up-to-date” as the latest slang had it.

  They slavishly followed the Art Nouveau movement and had had all their massive Victorian furniture enameled in dazzling white. Sticky-looking chintzes with large cabbage roses were draped over the sofas and chairs and uncompromisingly hard William Morris settles flanked one of the latest gas fires, a terrifying sort of black-lead sarcophagus hung with asbestos stalactites that glowed red when the gas was lit.

  A sort of chandelier embellished with glass flowers hanging on brass stalks hung down from the center of the ceiling, and in the center of each flower was a glass electric light bulb that shed an orange-yellow antiseptic glow, quite unlike the soft light from the old oil lamps back at Jeebles.

  I shall have to talk to Aileen, thought Tilly. I’ll ask her not to make fun of me and then maybe she will advise me how to behave.

  Tilly was to accompany Aileen to a ball that night. She had not been told that she must not dance or that she was expected to sit with the chaperones, but in some strange way it seemed to be expected of her.

  The gong was rung for afternoon tea and Tilly wearily made her way to the drawing room. Tea was too delicate an affair for Tilly’s robust appetite, consisting as it did of tiny cucumber sandwiches, wafer-thin bread, and thin fingers of cake. She longed for one of her old nanny’s nursery teas, with bread slices like doorstops and fat slices of plum cake. But nanny was dead, having waited only a month before following her master to the grave.

  It had been a source of wonder that Tilly had no relatives to take care of her, but such was the case, both Lord and Lady Charles having hailed from singularly sickly and short-lived families.

  The duchess, Aileen’s mother, was already presiding over the teapot. There were no guests.

  The duchess betrayed her Scottish heritage by being built like a Highland cow. She had a great, lowering, massive face, which was very hairy, and wore large hats that always seemed to have embellishments sticking out of them like horns.

  She was dressed in a rose-colored silk blouse with a huge bertha of Irish lace and a long black skirt. For once her hat was a plain biscuit straw, but it was adorned with two huge, bristling steel hatpins that curled up like the horns of the animal she so resembled.

  “Sit down, Tilly,” she barked. “My fairy’s lying down.” The fairy was Aileen.

  “You should have gone with her today,” went on the duchess, pouring tea. “Like to know what she gets up to, and it’s not often she don’t want you along. Thoughtful gel!”

  “Quite,” said Tilly faintly. She always found the duchess rather overwhelming. Like most people who have absolutely no manners at all, the duchess felt that she was the one best suited to train her daughter’s companion in the social arts.

  “Have you read your etiquette book?” she demanded, putting three small cucumber sandwiches into her mouth at once.

  “Y-yes,” stammered Tilly.

  “Where have you got to?”

  “The bit about snubbing. ‘The woman who cannot snub, on occasion, may be pronounced almost incapable of giving good dinners,’” quoted Tilly dutifully.

  “Quite right,” said Her Grace. “The world is full of nasty pushing toads who don’t know their places. Keep up the good work. Pity no one’s come to call, but they must know my fairy’s getting a rest before this ball. I’ve only got you to talk to and it’s a bit boring, but nonetheless I’ll have to put up with it.”

  Tea was enlivened by the arrival of the duke. He was a very tall, very thin man with a vague apologetic air, and he aspired to dandyism in a timid way. He was wearing a single-breasted sack suit with the latest in peg-top trousers, a high wing collar, and a polka-dot tie. He was carrying a novel in one hand.

  “Found this in the library,” he twittered. “Who’s been reading this muck?” He brandished a copy of Elinor Glyn’s Vicissitudes of Evangeline which had just been published and damned in the press as “scandalous.”

  “I have,” said his lady indifferently, removing a piece of watercress from one of the long hairs on her chin. “Wanted to see what all the fuss was about. There’s nothing in it except that it says that the heroine looks very becoming in bed.”

  “What’s up with that?” asked Tilly, forgetting her usual silent role in her surprise.

  The duchess looked at her with contempt. “No nice woman wants to look becoming in bed, that’s what!”

  “I will not have that word spoken in this house!” declared the duke with surprising vigor.

  “What word?”

  “Bed!”

  “Tcha!” said the wife of his bosom nastily. “What do I say to the upstairs maid if she leaves wrinkles in the sheet, eh what? ‘Mary, you haven’t made the er—er up properly.’ She’ll think I’m talking about the piss-pot.”

  The duke subsided, yet looked ready to cry at this final vulgarity. Tilly took pity on him and tried to change the conversation. “What’s the country like at Glenstraith?” she asked. “Good hunting?”

  “Don’t know,” said the duke. “Cruel sport. Poor little foxes.”

  Tilly felt flushed and crushed. She had never thought of foxes as anything other than vermin. It seemed as if every single one of her ideas was wrong in this strange city.

  “The Marquess of Heppleford hunts,” she finally said.

  “Heppleford?” said the duke, momentarily diverted. “Sound chap. Something funny about his old man’s will, you know. His father died not long before yours and, of course, he inherited the title, but there wasn’t a will. Now the will’s turned up in one of the books in the library and Heppleford’s gone to see his lawyers today. He’ll be at the Quennell’s ball tonight but—I mean—there shouldn’t be any difficulty. He’ll inherit all right. The old marquess didn’t have any other heirs to speak of. He’s a rich young man in his own right, of course.”

  Tilly felt suddenly elated at the thought of seeing the marquess again. Perhaps he might even ask her for a dance….

  Poor Tilly had been dubbed the “Beast” by Lady Aileen and her frivolous friends. The Marquess of Heppleford, on the other hand, had long enjoyed the title of “Beauty.” Because of his startling good looks, he enjoyed high popularity with both sexes, the men accounting him no end of a good fellow and the ladies, down to the last crusty dowager, swo
oning at his approach. He had remained remarkably unspoiled by all this adulation, having a cynical turn of mind combined with a sunny good nature.

  At that moment, however, he looked neither beautiful nor good-natured. His perfect features were marred by an angry scowl as he allowed his valet to assist him into a boiled shirt. His father had been very strange indeed before his death. He had frequently preached to his son on the merits of married bliss, aided and abetted by the marquess’s two aunts, who had marriageable daughters. Now the late marquess’s will had descended on his heir like a bombshell. The marquess naturally inherited the title, but he would not see one penny of his father’s considerable personal fortune were he not married one month after the reading of the will.

  He had planned to marry eventually in his own good time. Now he was forced into a scrambled courtship. Although he was a wealthy young man in his own right, he would need every penny of his father’s fortune to keep the family home, Chennington, and estates in good and profitable order.

  One aunt, Lady Mary Swingleton, had three daughters and the other, Lady Bertha Anderson, had two. All were quite well-favored girls, but the marquess had no intention of marrying one of his second cousins just to oblige. In fact, he was already hellbent on marrying any girl who would drive his scheming aunts into an apoplexy. He thought briefly of the beautiful Lady Aileen. Now, there was a young miss who would take the shine out of any other aspiring marchioness. Well, he would make haste to further his acquaintance with the beautiful Aileen at the ball that very evening.

  Feeling better now that he had decided on at least some vague plan of action, he slowly descended the staircase of his town house in St. James’s Square to find his friend Toby Bassett waiting for him in the library.

  Toby was often compared to the poet Byron, having a dark and brooding sort of beauty. Like his friend the marquess, he was tall. He had a luxuriant mop of black curls and dark liquid eyes that were often half-hidden by heavy lids. The marquess was well aware that his friend’s brooding air of mystery was because Toby was almost always slightly inebriated, being not quite drunk, not quite sober. But the ladies were not so aware, and wove fantastic fantasies to account for Toby’s strange, slumbering gaze.