Lady Lucy's Lover (14 page)

Lucy felt a lump rising in her throat, the imperfection of her life striking her in the face of all this simplicity and perfection.

Her eyes filled with tears and the water swam and shimmered in front of her blurred gaze.

“Ah, no, sweeting,” he said softly. “I did not bring you here to make you cry.”

The endearment, unexpected as it was, was too much for poor Lucy and she began to cry in earnest.

He wrapped his arms around her and buried his lips in her hair. “Don't,” he whispered, his voice muffled. “Please don't.”

And then she knew that she loved him. He turned her face up to his and looked long and searchingly down into her drowned blue eyes, and then he kissed her very tenderly, very slowly, and for a long time, his tongue exploring the salt taste of her wet cheeks, his lips kissing her eyes, her nose, and her mouth again.

His hands pressed her sun-warmed dress and body closely down the length of his own, feeling her breasts pressing through the thin fabric of his shirt under his open coat.

At last he drew back with a little sigh. “Alas, we cannot,” he said with a rueful smile. “Who would believe that I, with my rakish reputation, would be so very, very good. But I am no marriage breaker, Lucy.”

“You cannot break what was broken already,” said Lucy sadly.

“You can make it irreparable,” he said. “We must return to our former friendship, Lucy. I do not think you should stay very much longer. I do not think I can keep a bridle on my feelings forever,”

“What are your feelings?” begged Lucy. If only he said he loved her then she would have that to remember.

But he shrugged and turned away. “Some things must never be said. Come along. Lucy. These woods are enchanted. Did you know that? We will be pixie-led if we do not hurry.”

Lucy hurried to join him, making a heroic effort to match his light mood and finally succeeding as they approached the great stone edifice that was Mullford Hall.

“Why didn't I notice that swing before?” said Lucy. “Do the servants' children use it?”

“I do not know. Mama used to use it once. She used to dress—just like Marie Antoinette, if you can believe it—in shepherdess gown with panniers and carrying a crook embellished with a blue bow. She would sit on the swing and allow her court of admirers to take turns at pushing her on the swing. My father and I would watch from the library window.”

“A lonely picture,” said Lucy. “A small boy and his father watching a callous woman.”

“You have claws, Lucy. Do not sink them into my dear mother. Some gamble, some drink, and some—like my mother—crave attention. Sit down and I will push you and see if you can catch one of the leaves up there.”

The swing was hung on two ropes from the branch of an oak tree. Lucy sat on the swing and gave a gasp as she seemed to fly up in the branches, her hat falling to the ground and her golden hair tumbling about her shoulders. “Not so hard, Simon.” She laughed. “Please stop. I would rather deal with any admirers sitting on a secure and unmoving sofa!”

He let the swing go and watched as Lucy swung lower and lower, the thin muslin of her dress molded against her body, her rioting tumbling hair, falling about her face, shining in the sunlight.

All of a sudden he caught the ropes of the swing and she tossed back her hair and turned a laughing face up to his.

“Oh, God help me,” he said with such force that her face paled. “You enchant me.”

He bent and kissed her passionately as if his whole mind and body and soul were behind that one kiss, and her mounting passion rose to her lips and answered his. And so they stayed, held by passion, fused by passion. Two still figures on a sunny landscape.

And that is how Guy, Marquess of Standish, found them.

The Marquess of Standish had ridden out from London feeling like a new man and with all his good and shining resolutions to keep him company. But as the miles fell behind, the murder of Wilkins seemed like a bad dream. And, after all, he, the Marquess, had not actually committed it.

Li and Harriet Comfort and Mr. Barrington seemed unreal on this lovely sunny day. He had meant to reach Mullford Hall by nightfall, but all of a sudden a charming ale house with a pretty garden seemed to beckon. The tavern wench was as attractive as the inn. It was not as if he had to hurry, he told himself. Barrington's sneer about losing his wife was ridiculous. Lucy had been upset, of course, and had no right to run to Habard at that shocking time of the day. But Habard had done the correct thing by taking her to his mother. Poor old Lucy, thought the Marquess with a return of some of his old malice.

She probably hoped to take Habard as a lover to make me jealous, but she picked someone too high in the instep. Poor Lucy! he thought again. The Duke would never form a
tendre
for such a schoolgirl as she. Silly little thing.

And with these comfortable thoughts, the Marquess settled down to dally at the inn and dally with the tavern maid, and so the sun was high in the sky next day when he swung himself up onto his horse and set out once more.

Now he regretted having only brought a single change of clothes, since, at the outset, he had meant to borrow the Duke's traveling carriage and take Lucy straight home. That way he could enjoy the ride out without encumbering himself with excessive baggage and servants.

But as he approached the magnificence of Mullford Hall, he began to wish he had arrived in style. To cover up for this, he ordered the Duke's servants about very haughtily, commanding that his dusty saddlebags be unstrapped and put in his wife's rooms.

Being informed that the Duke and Lady Standish were “somewhere about the grounds,” he fortified himself with two brimmers of canary and decided to find his wife before he changed. It would look more loverlike to appear before her in all his travel stains—and besides, he had only the one change of clothes and should reserve those for dinner.

He heard Lucy's voice coming from the west, borne on the breeze. She was laughing and shouting something.

He turned a corner of the west wing… and stopped, frozen, rooted to the spot.

As still as china figurines, the Duke and Guy's wife were locked in an embrace so passionate, so still, that not a fold of Lucy's gown moved.

All hell broke loose in the Marquess's head. This was
his
wife, his possession, as much as his lands and houses and horses. Rather than surrender an inch of his lands, he had conspired to kill the Prime Minister. To him, Lucy was in line with his other possessions.

Without pausing for thought, he strode forward. The couple broke apart; Lucy startled and white, the Duke grim.

The Marquess pulled off one of his gloves and struck the Duke across the face.

“I am returning to London with
my wife
,” he spat out. “
Your
seconds may find me in town where I will furnish them with the name of my seconds. Come, Lucy.”

“This is madness,” said Lucy.

“Madness! To be cuckolded, madam?” He seized Lucy by the wrist and dragged her from the swing.

“I won't go,” she said wildly. “Simon! Help me!”

“You must go,” said the Duke gravely. “You are his wife and it is a matter of honor.”

Lucy tore herself away from Guy and ran towards the house, tears streaming down her face. He did not love her. He did not want her. What was this thing about honor? She did not
understand
.

But Guy did, and he smiled slowly at the Duke before he turned away. He knew, by all the laws of society, that the Duke was in the wrong. He knew himself to be one of the best shots in England. His anger had evaporated as quickly as it had blown up and he felt elated and cocky. It would do his social prestige no harm at all to drop a hint here and there that he was dueling with the great Duke of Habard.

The old Guy was back.

The Duke stayed for a long time. The swing moved gently to and fro until he put out an impatient hand to still it.

Men may philander, women may not. They did, of course, and no one minded—that is, until they were found out.

By the laws of society, he was in the wrong and the profligate Marquess was in the right. He thought ruefully of the Marquess's renowned expertise with firearms.

Standish was insufferable. But he had been married to Lucy in church and before the eyes of God and the top ten thousand; she was his wife to do with as he pleased.

On the road back to London, Guy, seated comfortably in a corner of the Duke's well-sprung traveling carriage, berated his wife on her disgraceful behavior. It had been easy to extract the truth from Lucy that there had been no serious affair.

Feeling righteous was a new and heady experience for the Marquess and he was making the most of it.

They passed the night at an inn on the road, the Marquess, to Lucy's relief, reserving separate bedchambers.

The next day his tirade continued. When they reached the house in Clarence Square by noon, Lucy's nerves were in shreds.

Heedless of the listening servants, she rounded on him in the hall.

“I am leaving you, my lord,” she said coldly. “I have endured enough of your pompous behavior.”

“Oh, no you don't,” he sneered. He grabbed her arm and twisted it painfully behind her back. “You will stay locked in your room,” he said, forcing her up the stairs. “And mere you will wait until tonight to pleasure me like a good wife should.”

“No!” spat Lucy. “Never again will you touch me!”

“There ain't nothing you can do about it, my lady.” He grinned. He threw her into her room and locked the door and pocketed the key.

Lucy hammered furiously on the door. “You will not touch me,” she screamed through the panels. “I will
shoot
you first. Do you hear me, Guy? I will
shoot
you first.”

The Marquess laughed and sauntered down the stairs. He gave instructions to the wide-eyed servants that my lady was to be kept under lock and key. And then he left to brag around the clubs of his forthcoming duel until a friend pointed out that every one of the eight Bow Street Runners in London must have heard about it and would surely put a stop to it.

Gone, however, were all the Marquess's good resolutions. He drank and gambled and gambled and drank; until he was feeling in a fit mood to take just revenge on his wife. He stood on the steps of Watier's, pulling on his gloves and waiting for his carriage, when he espied the other four conspirators making their way along the street: Jerry Carruthers, Harry Chalmers, the Earl of Oxtead, and Sir Percival Burke.

His eyes gleaming with malice, the Marquess hailed them.

“We meet again, gentlemen,” he crowed. “And if it isn't Mr. Carruthers. Well, well, well. Enter first murderer.”

“Stow your gab,” hissed Harry Chalmers, looking over his shoulder.

“Y'know,” said the Marquess cheerfully. “We were fools to let Barrington get away with it. We could still take him.”

The deed is done, Standish,” said Sir Percival. “Keep silent or it will be the worse for you.”

“Are you threatening me?” demanded the Marquess truculantly. “Well, it's all right for you weasels to run scurrying when Barrington snaps his fingers. But we Standishes are made of different stuff. I will tell if I feel like it or keep quiet. But it will be whichever suits
me
.” He waved to his coachman. “I shall not need the carriage, John. I have decided to walk.”

He grinned again at the conspirators, crammed his bicorne at a drunken angle on his fair curls, and sauntered off whistling. The four watched him go.

Ann Hartford called on Lucy Standish that evening and refused to listen to Wilson the butler's stately announcement that “my lady is not home.”

“Stuff,” said Ann rudely. “I saw her face at the window as I was getting down from the carriage.”

“One of the chambermaids perhaps…?”

“Fiddle. What is going on, Wilson?”

There came a furious banging at a door upstairs and Lucy's voice screamed, “Ann! Help me!”

Ann gave the butler a startled look and ran past him and up the stairs.

“Lucy!” she called, rattling the handle. “This door is
locked
.”

“I know it's locked,” called Lucy. “Guy has taken the key. Oh, you must get me out.”

“Have the servants a duplicate?”

“I don't think so.”

“Well, what about the door to your sitting room?”

“Anne, it's locked as well. Of
course
I tried it.”

“He may have forgotten to take that key as well,” said Ann. Lucy's sitting room adjoined her bedroom.

Ann ran along the corridor and smiled triumphantly as she saw the key in the lock. Lucy almost fell into her arms as she opened the door.

“Now, now,” said Ann Hartford soothingly. “What is all this I hear? Guy is babbling in the clubs about you and the Duke and that he is to fight a duel with Habard. It's too nonsensical!”

“Oh, Ann it's
true
,” wailed Lucy. “And I love him so.”

“Guy is not worth your love.”

“Not
Guy
. Simon!”

“Oh, dear,” said Ann, sitting down suddenly. “This is terrible. You must not, Lucy. Habard is a charming man, but a heartbreaker. He has been philandering, that is all.”

“No,” said Lucy fiercely. “No.”

“He said he loved you, I suppose.”

“Well, n-no he didn't, Ann, but I could
see
.…”

“And he encouraged you to get a divorce?”

“Oh, no, he is much too respectable to do that.”

“Really! So he kisses and hugs you or, for all I know, introduces you to the delights of his bed, and yet he is in
love
with you!”

“Stop! Stop!” said Lucy with her hands over her ears. “You make it sound so grubby.”

“Enough of this. Are you frightened of Guy?”