Her Grace's Passion Read online

  Matilda came to a decision. She locked all the doors again and once more arranged the dummy in the bed. She lighted a candle, then opened the door to the secret passage and made her way swiftly to the outside world.

  The day was beautifully warm and fresh. She hastened through the trees, looking nervously over her shoulder to make sure no one was watching her.

  At last she came to the pool. It was small and deep and clear. A little stream, winding through birch trees, fed the pool at one end and then rippled out at the other. Some effort had been made to landscape the surroundings at one time, but now only flat ornamental rocks on one side of it remained, and a little carefully constructed “ruin” of a temple on the other, dating from the last century when ruins were all the rage.

  The water looked cool and inviting. She had meant for decorum’s sake to strip down to her shift. But the woods were so deserted and so silent and she felt so dirty and soiled that she removed every stitch of clothing and plunged in, gasping as the icy water struck her body. She swam leisurely to and fro, remembering that when she was small, she had crept away from her parents’ house on summer evenings to play in the river with the village girls. For the first time, she began to wonder about clothes, about what to wear for the ball. She was letting her husband ruin her appearance. It was time to fight back. She at last reluctantly left the pool, sitting as naked as a nymph in the sun on the flat rocks, letting the warmth of its rays dry her. Then she put on her clothes again and made her way reluctantly back to the house.

  As she cautiously entered the bedchamber, she heard a loud knocking at the door and a footman calling, “Your Grace, His Grace is arrived.”

  She called back that she was dressing and would be downstairs presently. He had arrived a day early.

  After dismantling the dummy, she changed her clothes and brushed her hair till it shone, wondering at the same time why Betty, the maid, had not put in an appearance. And then, telling herself to be courageous, she walked slowly down the main staircase.

  Budgens met her at the foot. “His Grace and company are in the drawing room,” he said.

  Company? Matilda frowned and then her face cleared. Of course, he must have brought guests with him from London. Budgens signaled to a footman who moved quickly to the double doors of the drawing room and threw them open.

  The duke was standing by the fireplace, leaning one arm along the mantle and talking to a lady who was mostly shielded from Matilda by the high back of the chair. Matilda could not remember her husband’s chilly face ever looking so animated before.

  He raised his eyes and stared at her for a long moment and then his small mouth curved in a smile. “Come,” he said imperiously, “and meet our guest, Mrs. Hendry.”

  Matilda moved forward at the same time the lady rose from the chair and turned to face her. She was very beautiful. She was above-average height and had glossy brown hair under quite the most modish bonnet Matilda could remember seeing. Her skin was flawless and her cheeks pink. Her huge brown eyes sparkled and her mouth, as small as the duke’s, was a perfect little rosebud. But it was the expression in Mrs. Hendry’s eyes that startled Matilda. For it was undoubtedly an expression of triumph.

  Matilda curtsied to her and looked inquiringly at her husband. “Mrs. Hendry has deigned to grace our little ball,” said the duke, “and there will be none to match her.” He raised Mrs. Hendry’s hand to his lips.

  Mrs. Hendry snatched her hand away and said with a rippling laugh, “La! You must not. You will have Her Grace disliking me and I could not bear that, for we are to be bestest friends, are we not?”

  She beamed at Matilda who smiled back reluctantly. “Have you had any refreshment?” asked Matilda. “Are you come from London?”

  “Yes, but do not worry about me. Mirabel saw to my every comfort.” Mirabel was the duke’s first name, and Matilda, who never used it, looked at Mrs. Hendry in dawning surprise. It was fast being borne in on her that her husband had brought his mistress home with him. Beautiful she might be, but Mrs. Hendry was not a lady. Matilda sensed that under the perfection of dress, appearance, and manners lurked a very vulgar creature. Her face stiffened with distaste and she said quietly, “You must excuse me, Hadshire, I have various things to attend to.”

  “Leave us by all means,” said the duke with a malicious smile, enjoying every minute of his wife’s discomfiture.

  She went back up to her own little sitting room and found the duke’s valet, Rougemont, waiting for her. She shrank back a little for she was afraid of him. It was Rougemont who was commanded to lock her in her room when the duke was displeased with her, and Matilda knew the brutish valet enjoyed exercising the power the duke gave him.

  “What is it, Rougemont?” demanded Matilda.

  “Her,” said Rougemont. “That Hendry female.” His harsh voice carried only the slightest trace of French accent.

  “Mrs. Hendry is a guest of my husband,” retorted Matilda, “and I am sure he would not wish you to speak of her to me.”

  “No, he would not,” said the valet. “She’s making a fool of him and of you, Your Grace.”

  “Who is she?” asked Matilda, curiosity overcoming the repugnance she felt for this shadow of her husband’s.

  “Mary Hendry was married to a haberdasher who left her five shops. She sold them and taught herself the ways of the Quality. She was angling for Lord Summers when she saw His Grace and set her cap at him. Talk of London, it was. He keeps her with him constantly and they live as husband and wife, if you take my meaning.”

  “Rougemont, I do not wish to threaten you, but I must tell you that if you continue in this strain, I shall be forced to report your conduct to my husband.”

  His face darkened. “You need help,” he said, moving toward her. “What good would it do? He would dismiss me and put another such as I in my place.”

  “Rougemont,” said Matilda firmly, “leave me. Share your dislike of Mrs. Hendry with the other servants if you must. I do not wish to know anything about it.”

  “Then I shall deal with it myself,” he said, throwing her a contemptuous look.

  After he had gone, Matilda stood for a long time, her hands clenched into fists. Her husband’s behavior was surely intolerable. Or was it? With this light o’ love to keep him occupied, he would have less time to persecute his wife. She swung round and looked at herself in a long glass. Her face was still healthily pink from her morning’s swim and her hair shone from the washing and brushing. She would not let him cause her to go into a decline. She would look her very best at that ball. She would wear her finest jewels and her finest gown. For a moment, she almost seemed to see the Earl of Torridon’s handsome face in front of her. But she was not going to sparkle to please a man she had only met briefly and who was married, or so she told herself.

  Dinner was an agony of embarrassment. The duke seemed quite besotted with his Mary and flirted with her openly. The servants’ faces were stiff with disapproval. They were more snobbish than their betters. It was every nobleman’s right to persecute his wife if that should be his whim. Flaunting his mistress in his own home was another matter. Matilda bore it all with as much calm as she could. She tried to escape after dinner, but the duke commanded her to entertain Mary by playing the piano. Wearily Matilda took out her music and sat down and began to play. After half an hour, she swung round to say that she had the headache and could play no more, but the words died on her lips.

  Her husband was bent over Mary Hendry’s chair and he was kissing the widow full on the mouth while one of his long slender white hands was thrust down the front of that lady’s gown.

  Her face flaming, Matilda marched from the room. As she closed the door, she could hear her husband’s mocking laughter.

  Later that evening, she heard carriages arriving as the guests from London who had been invited to the ball came to stay. Betty brushed her mistress’s hair tenderly that evening. Matilda found she could not like this new and sympathetic maid any better than the
old model. In fact all the servants, when they saw her, looked at her with sympathy in their eyes.

  And then Matilda noticed a little nosegay of flowers on the toilet table. She waited until Betty had retired and then lifted the flowers out of their little vase. A screw of paper fell to the floor. She replaced the flowers and picked it up and smoothed it open.

  “It be a shame” was written in clumsy letters.

  Yes, it was a shame, thought Matilda, but what could she do about it?

  The Earl of Torridon sat in a corner of his traveling carriage. His wife sat in the other. They were late. She had manufactured one scene after another, saying she would not go and then changing her mind. When her much-goaded husband had shown every sign of leaving without her, she had quickly changed and joined him in the carriage.

  The earl turned to face her. “You have gone too far this evening, madam,” he said quietly. “From now on we shall live apart.”

  In the bobbing light of the carriage lamp, her face turned quite white with anger. “You cannot do this! You are my husband.”

  “I am a husband who is weary of your scenes. I have had enough. I shall travel north tomorrow. You may go on to London by yourself. My lawyers will make you a generous settlement on the understanding that you do not come near me again.”

  His countess was about to burst into tears but she remembered the ball just in time. She was extremely vain and had no intention of ruining her looks by appearing with red eyes.

  “I know what it is!” she said. “You have a mistress.”

  “There is no woman in my life,” he retorted, “and after my experience with you, I doubt if there ever shall be.”

  She gave a pettish shrug. He was out of sorts, that was all, she thought, with one of her lightning changes of mood. Gentlemen were prone to disorders of the spleen. She could not believe he really meant to leave her.

  The earl’s thoughts turned to the Duchess of Hadshire. He remembered her as a small, rather dainty lady, very subdued, but with a pleasing air of honesty. He was looking forward to meeting her again.

  As he mounted the staircase with his wife, he noted grimly that the duke and duchess had stopped receiving guests and were no doubt now in the ballroom. He saw his wife pout. She liked to make an entrance, to be announced, and yet was always notoriously late.

  She saw some acquaintances and left his side to go and speak to them. He nodded to one or two people he knew, his eyes ranging over the ballroom, looking for the duchess. At first he thought the lady he had shared a jug of claret with had been lying, for the duke’s partner was a very beautiful woman with brown hair. Surely the duke would hardly behave in such a doting manner with any female other than his wife.

  And then a little knot of people broke apart at the far end of the ballroom and he saw her, the Duchess of Hadshire. He caught his breath. She was exquisitely fair. She was wearing a ballgown of silver gauze. A heavy collar of fine sapphires set in silver was around her neck, matching the intense blue of her eyes. She was as fine and dainty as a piece of Dresden china, from the top of her shining head to her small feet. And then she saw him. For a long moment their eyes held, and then she walked across the ballroom toward him.

  “How pleased I am that you are here,” said Matilda, and indeed, she did look so very happy to see him that he smiled down into her eyes and held her hands in his. Somehow, he was aware that his wife had noticed him with the duchess and was staring at them, and yet he wanted to go on holding the duchess’s little hands in his and looking deep into her blue eyes.

  “Have you a dance for me?” he asked.

  “N-no,” faltered Matilda, and then her face brightened. “Perhaps I have. The next dance is the waltz. My husband is to dance it with me, but… but he is so attentive to his guests, he will forget as usual.” By which Matilda meant that she was sure the duke would enjoy humiliating her by leading Mary Hendry back onto the floor again.

  “Then we will wait and see,” he said. Sure enough, the quadrille ended, the waltz was announced, and before all his guests, the duke led his mistress back onto the floor.

  “I see what you mean,” said the earl quietly.

  Plumed and jeweled heads nodded busily as the gossips got to work. Hadshire was behaving disgracefully. Who was this Mrs. Hendry? “My dear, have you not heard…?” And so it went on as the eyes swiveled from the duke to see how his duchess was taking it, and there was his duchess floating across the floor in the arms of the Earl of Torridon and looking as if she did not have a care in the world.

  Matilda could feel the strength of the earl’s arm at her waist and was aware of every part of his body. Despite the sanction of the waltz by the royal princes, Queen Charlotte’s sons, damned as a bunch of bonhomous thugs, The Times had thundered against it as an “indecent foreign dance called the Waltz.” It was quite enough, raged the newspaper, to see “the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs, and close compressure of the bodies, to see that it is far removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females.”

  But Matilda was learning to feel like a woman. The intensity of her feelings startled her, and she was worried he might sense them. Her fingers tingled in his and her whole body swayed toward him. The faces in the ballroom were a blur. There was only the lilting music in her ears and the feel of this man’s arms about her. When the music ended and he released her, she shivered, as if cold.

  “Will you save the supper dance for me?” he asked.

  Matilda nodded, her eyes shining. She had forgotten about his wife. She was engaged to have the supper dance with her husband, but she felt sure that the besotted duke would take Mary Hendry in to supper instead. Matilda was bewildered not only by the duke’s infatuation, but by his determination to let everyone see it.

  But Rougemont felt he knew the answer, Rougemont with eyes sharpened with jealousy. Once, years before, when he had accompanied his master on the Grand Tour, the duke had come across a statue in the grounds of a villa where he was staying. Rougemont, standing behind a pillar, looked round it at Mary Hendry. Yes, Mary looked like that classical statue with her hair in one of the latest Roman styles and with a small curved smile on her mouth. The duke had begged his host for the statue, had offered a vast amount of money, but his host had remained adamant. He would not part with it. And so the duke had commanded Rougemont to help him steal it. The valet remembered that night, of how they had stretched and strained with six of the duke’s servants to get the marble statue from its plinth and into the closed carriage, of the flight to the border, of the duke’s triumph, and of how the duke had insisted on having the statue carried up to his inn bedchamber and had gloated over it, lovingly obsessed.

  In vain had Rougemont tried to lure his master out for an evening of drinking and wenching; all the duke wanted to do was sit in his bedchamber and caress that statue. The next day, intelligence reached the duke that a local landowner had a fine Michelangelo and might be prepared to part with it. Rougemont, who had manufactured that intelligence, had pleaded a fever and begged to be allowed to stay in bed. The duke had commanded him to guard the statue and had taken off. Rougemont had then gone out and found a sculptor he had approached before. He paid the sculptor a great deal of money for his work.

  The duke returned in the evening, furious at having gone off on a wild goose chase, but mollified by the thought of an evening with his treasure, the statue. As usual, he commanded Rougemont to set branches of candles near it so that he could study every line.

  And then the duke noticed that the mouth appeared to sneer at him. He could hardly believe his eyes. He thought it must be a trick of the light and commanded Rougemont to move the candles closer. But there it was. The corner of one side of that perfect classical mouth, or what he had hitherto considered perfect, was lifted a trifle too high, giving the mouth the appearance of a sneer rather than an enigmatic smile. Rougemont’s sculptor had done his work well.

  In a fury, the duke had seized the poker and sm
ashed it full into the face of the statue and then had commanded Rougemont to get rid of it.

  So, Rougemont decided, he must find a flaw in this Mary Hendry. Her beauty was perfect and her voice, unlike that of the duchess, baby soft and with a slight lisp. Nor was her manner direct or her mind intelligent, two things the duke considered most horrible in a woman. She spoke nonsense as all women were supposed to do. She was graceful, every movement studied perfection, and she danced divinely.

  Rougemont thought hard. There was one little item niggling at the back of his brain… something at dinner. The duke, the duchess, Mary, and their London guests had taken dinner at four in the afternoon, an unfashionable hour, but reasonable enough in view of the fact they were all to have a large supper at the ball. Rougemont had been on duty, standing behind his master’s chair. He frowned in concentration. He had been covertly studying Mary, hoping for some piece of vulgarity in her table manners that might disgust the duke, but she had eaten prettily and sipped at her glass of… water!

  Now the ladies of rougedom, or the demimonde, or of cracked reputation, or of the fashionable impure did not drink water, and Rougemont was convinced, wealthy widow or not, that Mary Hendry was about one step removed from the streets. And what bound that sisterhood together? Strong drink.