Tilly Read online

  “Don’t worry,” said the marquess soothingly as he noticed the startled expression on Tilly’s face. “He’s dotty. Been like that for years. Old lady can’t fire him; wouldn’t dream of it.”

  Mrs. Plumb woke up with a start. She was a very frail old lady, dressed in gray lace, lying on a chaise longue like some insubstantial ghost in the bright sunshine.

  “Welcome, Philip,” she said, offering a withered cheek to be kissed. “And this is…?”

  The marquess introduced Tilly, who seized Mrs. Plumb’s gloved hand and operated it like a pump handle. “So you are to be Philip’s bride,” said the old lady, shrinking slightly back into the cushions of the chaise longue, as if to retreat from the boisterous Tilly.

  “I’ll leave you two ladies to chat,” said the marquess unfeelingly, not noticing the dismay on the two faces turned toward him. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Tilly. It will be a very quiet wedding, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Tilly hurriedly.

  “Yes, please,” said Mrs. Plumb faintly. “You may have the conservatory for the reception. So little there to damage.”

  She held out her hand to be kissed by the marquess and then lay back against the cushions and closed her eyes.

  Left alone, Tilly eyed her nervously. “Jolly ripping of you to have me,” she ventured.

  “You must excuse me. I must sleep,” said Mrs. Plumb, opening her faded blue eyes. “Tell Jumbles—the butler, you know—to show you to your rooms. You must be exhausted.”

  Tilly reluctantly complied, although she would have liked to stay in the fresh air of the garden with its bright flowers and cool grass.

  The butler was nowhere to be seen and she suddenly did not have the courage to poke around strange servants’ quarters looking for him. She finally came across a startled betweenstairs maid who conducted her to a pleasant suite of rooms on the second floor. The furniture belonged to the eighties of the last century, being of the hot, overstuffed variety. But a great elm tree grew right outside the windows of both sitting room and bedroom, shielding them from the brassy glare outside.

  Tilly kicked off her shoes and lay down on the bed, clasping her hands behind her neck and staring up at the ceiling.

  Bit by bit her excitement began to fade, to be replaced by cold doubt. Already she missed Francine’s reassuring presence. And what would she, Tilly, wear as a wedding gown? There would surely be no time to get one made and even Tilly knew one simply did not wear ready-made clothes, particularly to one’s wedding.

  Then she remembered she had her mother’s wedding dress in an old trunk with the rest of her belongings, which were being sent for. It would just have to do.

  The marquess returned briefly that evening to tell her the wedding was set for a week ahead. He was pleasant, smiling, and businesslike. Mrs. Plumb appeared to have detached herself from the whole proceedings and Tilly was left to handle much of the arrangements for the wedding herself.

  She was sorely in need of another woman to talk to, to advise her, to allay her fears. The marquess’s formidable aunts and their disappointed daughters were to attend, but they were of no help.

  One evening during the following week, Tilly carried her mother’s wedding dress downstairs to ask Mrs. Plumb for her advice. But Mrs. Plumb had merely glanced at it through half-closed eyes and murmured, “Very pretty.”

  Tilly longed for the courage to consult a dressmaker, but the bills were already heading in the marquess’s direction for food and flowers and wine and extra servants, since the servants in Mrs. Plumb’s mansion were mostly too old to cope with the added work and fuss.

  Then there was the cost of the marquee to be erected in the garden and the fashionable orchestra to be paid.

  The weather blazed on remorselessly and the letters to The Times prophecied drought.

  It was a very hot and tired Tilly who finally stood at the altar for the wedding rehearsal. The marquess arrived with Toby, who was to perform the part of best man. Both seemed in high spirits—in more ways than one, to judge from the strong smell of brandy emanating from them.

  Tilly’s maid of honor was a timid, quiet girl, an acquaintance from Tilly’s Jeebles days, called Bessie Cartwright-Smythe. Tilly went through her part of the ceremony, anxious that she should not do anything wrong.

  The marquess and Toby left immediately afterward to attend a bachelor party in the marquess’s honor, the silent Bessie went off to stay with an aunt, and Tilly was once more on her own. An old friend of her father’s, Colonel Percy Braithwaite, was to give her away and was spending the evening at his club.

  The eve of her wedding!

  She lay on the chaise longue in the garden, staring up at the faintly moving leaves of the oak tree, feeling increasingly nervous. She had not yet even tried on her mother’s wedding dress.

  She thought of her husband-to-be with a sort of half-formed adolescent longing. If only he would smile at her tenderly—even hold her hand. He surely could not be indifferent to her, thought poor Tilly, unaware that that was the very reason that had prompted the marquess to propose.

  I shall probably sleep with him, thought Tilly, feeling very warm at the thought. But what on earth am I supposed to do? The duchess always says that only the lower classes feel passion—witness the Fallen Women—but all my romances are about lords and ladies. Perhaps he is distant with me because he feels it would be ill-bred to betray his feelings. And babies! He will want an heir. But how is it achieved? Surely not like the farm animals. Oh, these are dreadful thoughts….

  And so Tilly’s mind raced on and on as a cool sliver of moon rose above the baking city.

  After awhile she felt her eyelids begin to droop and she reluctantly took herself off to her hot bedroom. As she was dropping off to sleep an anguished thought struck her. She had forgotten to hire the services of a major-domo to announce the guests and she shuddered to think of the muddle old Jumbles would make with their names. And then she fell into a deep nightmare in which the marquess, aided by Aileen and the duchess, was pushing her into a home for Disreputable Women because she had betrayed too strong a passion for her husband.

  The day of Tilly’s wedding dawned brassy and hotter than ever. She was awakened at dawn by the energetic hammering of the men erecting the marquee in the garden.

  She dressed and went downstairs to find the house abustle with strange servants carrying chairs, potted plants, and silver. Mrs. Plumb appeared early as well, roused at last to a sense of her duties to her young guest. Tilly was bustled back upstairs with Mrs. Plumb’s antique lady’s maid to begin the long and painful preparations for the wedding ceremony.

  It was all too soon discovered that Tilly’s wedding dress had been designed to fit her mother’s slim figure. A servant was sent scuttling off to find a seamstress, and Tilly stood miserably while the dress was sewn onto her around two-inch inserts of white satin. The gown had also been designed to cover an 1880s bustle, and there was an agonizing search of the attics before the right undergarment was found.

  Despite Tilly’s protests, white enamel makeup, complete with two circles of rouge, one on either cheek, was considered de rigueur for a bride.

  Tilly was poked and pushed and turned and pinned and painted and frizzed and finally drowned in Parma Violets, a perfume that always made her sneeze.

  The seamstress, the lady’s maid, and a bevy of other female servants who had been dragged in to help finally ceased their efforts and stood in a circle, staring at Tilly in satisfaction.

  They had turned Tilly into a fashion plate—but a fashion plate of the 1880s, not the present early 1900s. Not a hair was out of place. The creamy folds of old lace were swept into a large bustle at the back. A little coronet of artificial white flowers held a short veil of fine and priceless Valenciennes lace. A huge bouquet in a silver filigree holder was put into her white-gloved hands and she was propelled toward the door. Between the old-fashioned dress and the enameled mask of her makeup, Tilly looked like a pretty but
lifeless waxwork from Madame Tussauds.

  But to Mrs. Plumb and the colonel and all the servants lined up at the foot of the stairs, Tilly looked perfect. Compliments were showered on her, all of which Tilly accepted with gruff gratitude.

  But as Tilly walked up the aisle, the marquess’s relatives let out gasps of delighted shock and dismay. What a fright the awful girl looked! How clumsily she walked with those great mannish strides! The marquess gave his bride a warm smile. He had wanted to shock his relatives and dear Tilly was doing just that, splendidly.

  All Tilly’s doubts and fears were swept away the minute the marquess bent to kiss her. His lips were cool and firm, her own, warm and naively passionate.

  She walked down the aisle on his arm, oblivious of the hard stares, deaf to the spiteful comments. The “Wedding March” boomed triumphantly from the organ loft and the bells in the Norman tower crashed and clanged their joyous message to the world.

  The Honorable Matilda Burningham had made it.

  She had captured the best-looking man in London.

  She was a marchioness.

  “I feel like Cinderella,” said the Marchioness of Heppleford shyly.

  No response from her husband.

  Tilly sighed and looked out of the window of the carriage to where the great pile of Chennington lay with its medieval spires and battlements standing up against a purple-black sky. The sun was dying behind the thunder-laden clouds in fiery splendor, gilding the gray stone of Chennington with a strange light.

  In the calm before the storm, the park through which they were driving seemed extra green, the heavy old trees standing motionless in the sultry heat.

  A white swan bent its long neck to study its reflection in an ornamental lake beside the drive, and the weeping willows seemed to twine branches with their mirror counterparts in the flat black water. A marble rotunda gleamed white on its grassy hillock.

  The marquess shifted uneasily in the carriage. What a farce of a wedding! That terrible butler, Jumbles, murdering the names of the guests with gay abandon (and the marquess was sure it was neither age nor eccentricity on the part of the butler but hell-inspired mischief that had prompted him to announce the acid Duchess of Dereham as “the Dutchman of Drearie”), and Tilly, chattering and romping like a schoolgirl.

  He had promised the delicious Cora that he would be back in her arms by tomorrow at the latest. He would catch the Channel steamer from Southampton this evening, he decided. It was his wedding night, but then, this was not a normal wedding and Tilly was such a strange girl, she would probably find nothing amiss.

  The staff of Chennington was lined up in the great hall under the moldering banners of dead and gone Hepplefords to greet the young bride.

  Tilly had been used to a large staff of servants at Jeebles, so the formidable array of faces did not daunt her. The marquess noticed that she said the correct thing to each member of his staff and that nagging feeling of guilt about leaving her so soon returned to plague him.

  But when Tilly arrived in the long drawing room with its gilded walls and painted ceiling, wearing a suit of a mannish cut, in a shocking shade of pink that argued violently with her hair, he fortified himself from the decanter and became more determined than ever to make his escape.

  Tilly chattered happily about a visit from the housekeeper, Mrs. Judd, who had promised to take her on a tour of the mansion on the morrow.

  The marquess put down his glass with a little click.

  “Tilly, my dear,” he said, “I must leave for Paris this very evening.”

  All animation disappeared from Tilly’s face. The thunder rumbled outside and a vivid flash of lightning flared in the darkening room.

  “Business?” asked Tilly, her own voice sounding harsh and strange in her ears.

  “Yes, business.”

  “Then… I cannot keep you.”

  “No.”

  They sat in silence, Tilly’s heartbroken, the Marquess’s embarrassed, while outside the full fury of the storm burst over the mansion.

  “You can’t travel in this weather,” said Tilly at last.

  “I must.”

  Tilly could feel the weak and treacherous tears forming at the back of her eyes. She was to be a wife in name only, after all. The other half of the business contract.

  She rose stiffly, as if her whole body were in pain. The exuberant schoolgirl enthusiasm had gone from her voice. “Then I beg you to excuse me,” she said. “I must lie down.”

  The marquess crossed the long room and held the door open for her. She walked past him to the staircase, where she paused with her hand on the carved bannister and looked back.

  Again the marquess had the odd feeling that Tilly was two women. A beautiful ghost seemed to move wraithlike in the dim and shadowy hall in front of Tilly’s face, in front of Tilly’s wide, pain-filled eyes.

  Then she turned and walked slowly up the staircase, her head held high.

  “We have a bargain, haven’t we?” The marquess suddenly called out. “Haven’t we?”

  But only the sound of tumbling and crashing thunder came in reply.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  On the following day, when the fireworks of the storm had given way to damp drizzle, the county called at Chennington in droves to pay their respects to the new bride, only to be told that “my lady was indisposed.” Where, then, was my lord? “Indisposed also,” said his lordship’s venerable butler, Masters. The servants had taken an immediate liking to Tilly and felt their beloved master was behaving shamefully.

  So the county turned their carriages around and trotted off down the drive under the great dripping trees. But they talked and they speculated.

  On the third day after the marquess’s departure the blow fell in the servants’ hall. Mr. Masters read the social columns in one of the lower orders of newspapers. In a hushed voice, he read the offending paragraph out to the cook, Mrs. Comfrey. Over a glass of blackberry brandy, the cook subsequently read the news to the housekeeper, Mrs. Judd, and the three gathered in the housekeeper’s cosy parlor that evening for a council of war.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” said Mr. Masters. “I’ve known his lordship since he was a boy and I’d never have dreamed he would do anything like this. His lordship has always been the soul of kindness and consideration.”

  “That trollop! And a foreigner too!” cried Mrs. Judd, clutching the newspaper to her black bombazine bosom.

  “Here, let’s have a proper look at it, then,” said the cook, reaching out a chubby red hand and taking the newspaper. “You only read it to me.”

  Her steel-rimmed spectacles perched on the end of her stubby nose, the cook traced the print with her finger and read aloud:

  “Strange Wedding Night for Peer of the Realm.

  It is rumored that the handsome Marquess of Heppleford left the arms of his bride two hours after the wedding to fly to the experienced arms of one of Paris’s most notorious ladies of easy virtue, a certain Mademoiselle Cora Duval, until lately under the protection of the Compt du Chervenix. Visitors to the marquess’s stately home have been turned away with the intelligence that the new marchioness is indisposed. No wonder! We shudder to think of the affect of such behavior on the lower orders. A solid, virtuous family life is the backbone of our nation. It is up to our Ruling Class to set a good example…

  “Well, I never!” said the cook. “And there’s my poor lady shut up in her room and hardly touching any of the food I’ve sent up to her.”

  “What on earth can she do?” moaned Mrs. Judd. “How can a decent girl like that compete with a—a—Scarlet Woman?”

  “For the moment, she needs to keep herself occupied,” said Mr. Masters, smoothing back the silver wings of his hair. “Young ladies in her situation who don’t keep themselves busy—know what happens to them?”

  “No! What?” chorused his audience.

  “They goes into a decline, that’s what!”

  “Oh, mercy!”

  “So here’s wha
t I suggest we do. Mrs. Judd will go up to my lady’s room in the morning and will tell her that the old marquess’s rooms in the East Wing need to be cleaned out. They do, as a matter of fact. Mrs. Judd will ask her whether she would like to look at the furniture and ornaments and stuff to see if there’s anything she would like for the downstairs’ rooms. My lady was brought up proper, so she’ll have a sense of duty, so mind you tell her it’s expected of her, Mrs. Judd.

  “And burn all the newspapers.”

  “But if we get her roused and about and someone comes calling, maybe she’ll learn that way,” protested the cook.

  Mr. Masters raised his bushy eyebrows in surprise. “Mrs. Comfrey, you forget we are dealing with the aristocracy here. None of them would dream of saying anything so spiteful!”

  Masters had guessed Tilly’s sense of duty correctly. She emerged from her seclusion, pale and heavy-eyed. The old marquess’s rooms were chockablock with papers and bric-a-brac, and Tilly picked up things listlessly and put them down again in a helpless kind of way until the housekeeper’s enthusiasm began to infect her. Mrs. Judd exclaimed in delight over the discovery of a beautiful Ming vase that was lying under a rolltop desk. The late marquess had used the vase as an exotic deposit for everything from rubber bands to paper clips and unanswered correspondence.

  After that find, it turned into a sort of treasure hunt and Tilly became quite flushed and animated to find a clutch of valuable Dresden figurines in the coal scuttle. Like most housekeepers of stately homes, Mrs. Judd had a knowledge of art and china that would have rivaled that of a museum curator.

  “At least someone seems to have tidied up the papers on the desk,” remarked Tilly.

  “That would be the lawyer,” said Mrs. Judd. “Ever such a search there was for the will. We knew there was a will, of course, because me and Mr. Masters were witnesses. Not that we knew what was in it, for it wouldn’t have been fitting, like, for us to read it. Imagine it turning up in the library! But right glad I was that it did. For you’ll never believe it, but that bold Rosy Jenkins down at the Crown—that’s the landlord of the public house’s girl, down in the village—well, she was going about telling folks as how the old marquess came down one night and asked her and her dad to witness his will. ‘Bite your tongue, my girl,’ I says to her, I says. As if his lordship ever visited a public house!