Love and Lady Lovelace (The Changing Fortunes Series, Vol. 8) Page 7

  Kensington was the garden center of England and as Amaryllis and Miss Wilkins rode out in their carriage along the Cromwell Road, they met many carts loaded with vegetables, and women carrying flat baskets of strawberries on their heads, proceeding toward the capital.

  The Courtlands’ villa was a stately home in miniature. The breakfast was to be served on tables laid out in the charming gardens. Only about twenty couples had been invited, which meant there was space enough and room enough to sit in the sun and hear the birds twittering in the branches of the arched trees above and listen to the lazy plashing of the many fountains.

  Since there were so few guests, Amaryllis had been sure that there would be no danger of meeting Lord Philip and his new fiancée, but no sooner had she joined the Earl of Harrisfield and had seated herself beside him at one of the tables than the couple she had most dreaded to see arrived arm in arm and looking quite delighted with each other. Not only that, but Mr. Bagshot and his fiancée, Priscilla Armitage, arrived as well.

  Now, Priscilla really meant to keep that fascinating bit of gossip about Lord Philip to herself. But she was a rather shallow girl, insensitive to anyone else’s feelings but her own. She was also a snob and very anxious to impress the haughty Duchess of Courtland.

  Not only that, but no sooner did Lord Philip and Amaryllis realize that each was at the party than they began to sparkle fondly on their respective affianced, and to Priscilla’s jealous eyes looked the picture of happiness.

  Priscilla had been delighted to find that she and Harry were to be honored with seats at the Duchess’s table. The enterprising Miss Armitage promptly set about to try to engage the Duchess’s attention but Her Grace appeared monumentally bored by each conversational sally and kept turning her bony shoulder on the gushing Priscilla.

  Harry Bagshot then discovered that the ribbons of his knee breeches had become untied—silk having quite a remarkable propensity for untying itself—and so he excused himself and disappeared toward the house to repair his appearance.

  Priscilla saw her chance and took it.

  “Your Grace,” she whispered, “is it not exciting to have two prospective bigamists at one’s party?”

  The Duchess’s pale cold eyes turned and fastened on Priscilla’s flushed and eager face with disdain.

  “Fustian!” said the Duchess in her loud, penetrating voice. “I fear the hot sun has deranged your wits.”

  “But it’s true!” whispered Priscilla earnestly. “Mr. Bagshot—my fiancé—told me that at the beginning of the Season he attended a havey-cavey wedding as best man and now that married couple is here—but engaged to someone else—I mean each engaged to someone else.”

  “If you are telling the truth,” said the Duchess awfully, “then you will kindly identify these people immediately or take yourself off.”

  Priscilla was cornered. Everyone seemed to be listening. “Lord Philip and Lady Lovelace,” she muttered. She could see the figure of Mr. Bagshot in the distance and prayed that the Duchess would let the matter drop.

  The Duchess of Courtland got to her feet.

  “I have just received the intelligence that Lord Philip Osborne and Lady Lovelace are, in fact, married. Lord Philip, is this true?”

  Lord Philip took one brief glance at Amaryllis’s white face. He rose to his feet to deny the whole thing. But Harry, on returning, had heard the Duchess’s question and before he could stop himself he had blurted out, “Priscilla! How could you? You gave me your word that you would not say anything. No one need have known. The vicar was so foxed he wouldn’t have remembered a thing.…”

  His voice trailed off as he realized the full extent of the damage he had done.

  There was an awful silence.

  The birds sang, the fountains played, and the air was sweet with the smell of flowers.

  All eyes were fastened on Lord Philip and Lady Lovelace.

  Lord Philip walked to where Amaryllis was sitting. “Madam wife,” he said in a completely expressionless voice, “allow me to escort you home.”

  There was really nothing left to do but to rise and take his arm and walk away. Away from the world of the Exclusives, away from the staring eyes. A babble of shocked exclamations reached their ears as they arrived at the house. Lord Philip called for their carriages and turned to Miss Wilkins, who was walking a few paces behind them.

  “I pray you, Miss Wilkins, return home and await my… wife. I have a few words to say to her.”

  Miss Wilkins hesitated. Amaryllis gave a stunned little nod. It all seemed so unreal. Over and over in her brain ran the one thought that Lord Philip did not yet know about Beaton Malden and should not, if she could possibly manage it.

  He helped her into his high-perched phaeton and then sprang up and gathered the reins.

  Mr. Bagshot came stumbling across the lawns toward them, crying, “Phil, I say, Phil!”

  But Lord Philip and Amaryllis both stared straight ahead at the horses’ ears as the phaeton gathered speed and bowled off down the short drive before Mr. Bagshot could reach them.

  After some time, Lord Philip stopped in the leafy lane that was the Brompton Road. “Down, Jimmy,” he called to his tiger, who was perched on the backstrap. There was a mumbling and grumbling from behind and then the carriage swayed as Jimmy nimbly hopped down into the road and began to walk rapidly in the direction of that famous tavern, The Grapes.

  The sun filtering through the green leaves of the lime trees which bordered the narrow road cast shifting patterns across Amaryllis’s white face.

  “Well,” said Lord Philip after a long silence. “This is a sad coil.”

  “You might at least apologize for your gabbling friend,” replied Amaryllis.

  “Harry? Yes. I still don’t know what prompted him to tell that hen-witted creature, Priscilla Armitage. Harry is the soul of honor—as a rule.”

  Amaryllis took a deep breath and said in an even tone, “You still have not apologized. I curse the day I met you, sirrah. My reputation is ruined. I have no money and no prospect of getting any now. What else is there for a woman to do? Marriage is the only respectable profession open to us.”

  “One can always work. You could become a companion or governess.”

  “No, I thank you. A governess has a horrible life. Neither servant nor master. Neither fish nor fowl. In danger of being molested by the sons of the house or driven out of her wits by nasty, spoiled children. A companion earns a pittance and I am too young to molder out my days in a state of decayed gentility.”

  He studied her averted face for a long moment, his hands idly playing with the reins.

  “This is silly,” he said at last. “We are married and may as well make the best of it. I, at least, have my pension and, when I sell my horses, it should give us a little to set us up comfortably. We could purchase a little place with a few acres.”

  For one wild, mad, elated moment, Amaryllis thought that he was trying to say he loved her. She looked up into his face, His eyes met hers, cold and slightly bored. She began to tremble with hurt.

  “Love in a cottage,” she sneered. “No. I am not interested in a life of genteel poverty—if that is all you have to offer.” And all the while, her heart was begging him to say one word of love.

  “I should have known you were entirely mercenary, although”—here his green eyes raked insolently over her body—“you act the part of passionate lover so well that you could deceive most men for quite a long time. That is it! I have hit on the very thing. You could become Harriet Wilson’s rival.”

  Harriet Wilson was London’s most famous courtesan.

  Amaryllis gasped and struck him on the cheek. He jerked her into his arms and kissed her savagely. For one moment, both surrendered mind and body to that embrace with an intense longing, an intense passion for the other to declare one word of love to prove the marriage was not a sham. But Lord Philip’s pride was every bit as great as that of Amaryllis.

  He tore his mouth free and whistled for h
is tiger, Jimmy, who was sitting on a bench outside The Grapes surveying the antics of his master with an amazed expression.

  He drove her to her home in Green Street in icy silence. He let her scramble down as best as she could and picked up the reins.

  For one moment he hesitated. She looked so small and vulnerable and lost, standing alone on the pavement in the golden sunlight.

  But he hardened his heart and fought down the niggling voice of conscience which was trying to tell him that he was damning her for all his own faults.

  He cracked the whip and bowled out of Green Street and, much as she hated and loathed him, Amaryllis stood and watched him go until he was out of sight.

  Five

  The end of an Indian summer found Lady Lovelace in residence at Beaton Malden. She had fled London after the fateful breakfast in Kensington and had spent some months in seclusion in a quiet watering place on the south coast, unfrequented by the aristocracy. She had shut the world out.

  Miss Wilkins had at last suggested that Amaryllis should write to Lord Philip through her lawyers with a view to obtaining a divorce, but Amaryllis could not bear to think of him or hear his name mentioned. At last, she returned to Beaton Malden at the end of October. For the first time a glimmer of hope began to shine on her financial position. The last of the money from her jewels had been used to pay the servants, but Mr. Worthy reported a bumper harvest and that the staff, inside and outside the house, were prepared to wait for their wages, provided they were housed and fed.

  If Amaryllis were prepared to live very quietly and not entertain in any way, then he was sure they would come about.

  Mr. Worthy was living up to his name. Amaryllis was moved to tears when she learned that he had not drawn his wages since his return to her employ. He was a serious young man, devoted to the science of agriculture, and he had pointed out mildly that his reward was in being allowed to run things by himself and introduce as many new methods as he pleased.

  Amaryllis, guilty at having neglected her duties, spent long hours in the saddle during the day, calling on the tenants, checking roofs and walls, and making a meticulous report of all necessary repairs. She was glad of the exercise and the excuse to be absent from the house, for there seemed to be a constant stream of callers, and not all of them ladies or gentlemen either, desirous of having a tour of the house.

  “We really must stop this flow of visitors,” Amaryllis had said to Foster and Mrs. Jarrett. “You must be exhausted. I am sure you have enough to do without having to parade a party of gawking people all over the place who should know better how to employ their time.”

  But Foster had merely smiled and said he and Mrs. Jarrett found it no trouble at all. He further pointed out that he would not allow any of these guests to enter a room where my lady was seated. That is all very well, thought Amaryllis, but I cannot seem to move from one room to the other without running into a party of staring, goggling people. It was never thus when my lord was alive. What can be the sudden attraction?

  One late afternoon, two weeks after she had arrived home, Amaryllis had been riding over her estates with a saddlebag full of medicines from the stillroom at Beaton Malden to give to the sick. She finished her last call, which was on the very outskirts of her property, and turned her horse’s head toward home.

  Far away in the distance she heard the call of a hunting horn and, faintly on the wind, came the shrill cries of the whipper-in. The Malden and Daxtead Hunt had found its fox. Amaryllis was glad that her sex excluded her from riding with the hunt. Only very coarse women did that. She was enough of a countrywoman to have no sympathy at all for the fox and diplomatic enough to refrain from voicing her real feeling about the matter, which was, “Why don’t they just shoot the beast?”

  It seemed a vastly expensive exercise to kill one animal when dogs and guns could have completed the job so much more quickly and cheaply. But she had learned early in life that hunting was not a sport, it was a religion.

  In any case, she disapproved of the Malden and Daxtead Hunt for she was sure they often used bag foxes—that is where the fox has already been caught and is released from a bag to supply the gentlemen of the hunt with a day’s sport.

  Amaryllis reined in her mount. She found she was atop a small ridge which afforded an excellent view across the flat country of Oxfordshire. Against a bank of black clouds, Beaton Malden stood out in the distance, the white columns of its Italianate front standing out clearly against the sinister backdrop of the rising storm.

  And then, all of a sudden, she was struck by a tearing feeling of pain and loss, and Lord Philip’s green eyes seemed to mock her. The pain was so bad that she let out a little gasp and clutched her middle.

  Amaryllis had firmly kept her emotions at bay all that long summer. She had refused to think of her strange marriage, of Lord Philip’s deception, or of the mind-shattering passion of her one and only night with him.

  But emotions will not be kept down, and the harder you try, the bigger the backlash. And so Amaryllis’s feelings roused up with all the back-kicking energy of an ungelded carriage horse in the springtime.

  Tears rolled unchecked down her cheeks. Oh, if only he was suffering as she suffered.

  A wild wind swept up over the bare stubble of the fields, sending whirlpools of leaves dancing up to the darkening sky. An icy blast of sleet stung her cheek and she realized she would have to ride hard to save herself from a soaking.

  The baying of hounds and the cries of the huntsmen were carried on the wind. “Silly fools,” muttered Amaryllis. “I hope they break their necks.”

  And on that uncharitable thought toward the gentlemen of the Malden and Daxtead Hunt, she spurred her horse for home.

  Lord Philip had not the slightest idea where he was. He pulled out his hunting horn and blew a blast on it, and listened hard. The only sounds which came to his ears were the lash of the rain on the ground and the soughing and moaning of the branches above his head.

  His horse plummeted and plunged. “Hold hard, you great brute,” he said irritably. “I’ll get off and walk. Will that please you? For if I don’t, you’ll throw me in the ditch.”

  He dismounted and, gathering up the reins, began to stumble his way out of the shelter of the trees and across a soggy clay field.

  Lord Philip had long since sold his horses and carriage, had paid off all his debts, and had removed himself from London to stay with an old army friend in Wiltshire. He had not seen or heard of Harry Bagshot since the day of the breakfast. He had continued to live quietly at his friend’s small country house. Then his friend, a Colonel Freddie Jackson, had announced that they were going to stay for a bit with Sir Peregrine Russell at his place in Oxfordshire, where they were promised some capital hunting.

  Sir Peregrine turned out to be Master of Foxhounds of the Malden and Daxtead Hunt. Neither Lord Philip nor his friend, Freddie Jackson, had had much time to get acquainted with their new quarters or the neighborhood before they found themselves in the saddle and after the fox. For the hunt met on the morning after they arrived.

  It was hardly the Quorn, it was hardly a regular hunt, made up as it was of a motley crowd of gentry and farmers who seemed more interested in the number of stirrup cups they could sink than in the chase. The hounds were a fat, lazy, overfed lot, but at last they gave tongue and the hunt was off across the fields. No one could really call Sir Peregrine a thruster. He dithered, he panicked, he shouted wild instructions and countermanded them in the next breath. A long chase ended nowhere and it was discovered that some of the village boys had drawn red herrings across the fields for the simple pleasure of seeing the hunt heading off in the wrong direction.

  After a lot of baffled circling under a lowering sky, the hounds at last picked up the right scent and decided to humor their master by actually trying to find the fox. It was then that the storm had struck. All at once it was like riding through a thick, black, howling cloud.

  Lord Philip had been lent his present mount by h
is host. It was a great splayfooted beast with a cranky disposition and an alarming tendency to buck.

  Lord Philip, following the faint sounds of the chase, had ridden him hard and spurred him toward the dim outlines of a dry-stone dike. The horse had dug in all four hooves with such force that Lord Philip had catapulted over his head and into a bog on the other side.

  After various trials and tribulations, with both man and horse struggling about in the storm, Lord Philip decided he was hopelessly lost.

  As he stumbled over the field, leading his mount, he searched in the darkness for some sign of a light. He was soaked to the skin, his sodden jacket clung uncomfortably to his body, and cascades of water poured from his hat down the inside of his shirt.

  Suddenly the rain ceased and a small moon appeared high above, tearing through masses of ragged black cloud. In front of him an animal turned in its tracks and stared at him, its eyes glinting in the moonlight, before it scampered off toward the blackness of the wood on the far side of the field.

  It was the fox.

  Lord Philip reflected bitterly that at least the fox had the advantage of him in that it obviously knew where it was going.

  With a savage howl, the wind struck across the field, the moon was blotted out, and the rain came down in torrents again.

  But before the moon disappeared, Lord Philip had caught the glint of metal of two tall gates some distance to his left, on the opposite side from the wood, and so he began to slither and stumble toward them.

  Groping around in the blackness, he found a handle and, sending up a prayer that it would not be locked, turned it and pushed the gate.

  To his infinite relief, it swung open, and he led the horse inside and closed the gate behind him. There was no light to indicate that there was a lodge but he could feel the smooth surface of a drive beneath his boots.