Married to a Perfect Stranger (12 page)

“My drawings…I see things in them sometimes. Insights? I was thinking it could be helpful…”

John was transfixed by the way her cheeks had reddened, like living roses. He scarcely heard the words or noticed her tentative tone and diffident gesture. A glossy brown curl had fallen across her forehead as she gazed at him so earnestly. His hand came up of its own accord and pushed the curl back. It lingered. His fingertips brushed her cheek.

Mary stopped talking, lips tantalizingly parted. She met his eyes and held them for what seemed like forever. “What I said yesterday, when we…”

John's hand dropped. “There is no need to discuss…”

“But I didn't mean… I said the wrong thing. I was just so surprised.”

“Surprised?”

“At how amazing, how splendid it was.” She moved, and John found he had a fragrant armful of wife.

Her arms came up and around his neck and tightened. Without a thought he pulled her closer. This kiss was as intoxicating as the last, as different, indeed, as it was possible to be from the tentative clumsiness of their honeymoon. She'd been right about that.

John pushed this thought aside as Mary's lips parted under his. Blood began to pound in his veins. He let his hands roam over her and brought his fingers up to cup a curve of breast. Her small moan as he teased it thrilled him. There were ways, he'd learned on his travels, to drive a woman distracted. He was newly inspired to try them all.

“Mr. Bexley! Sir!” John raised his head and discovered Arthur Windly standing in the half-open doorway.

Drat the boy, couldn't he see that he was emphatically not wanted in this moment? “Go away…”

Arthur hopped from foot to foot as if the floor were covered with hot coals. “The kitchen's on fire!” he cried.

“What?” said Mary and John simultaneously.

They ran, John with an eye out for whatever might be useful against a fire. He snagged his greatcoat from a chair in the entryway and raced on. Arthur was right behind him, babbling, “It weren't me. I didn't touch that chimney or the stove or nothing. I was scrubbing a great dirty pot in the scullery. I didn't even see how it…”

Mary was directly behind Arthur as they hurtled down the last stair. She stopped so suddenly that she almost toppled over, as the scene in the basement kitchen was terrifying. Mrs. Tanner stood well back from the big old fireplace, wringing her hands and watching flames run along the soot on the inside of the chimney and dart out into the room. Her screech when she saw them arrive was earsplitting. Kate had a broom and was beating at the tongues of flame on the hearth, without much effect. The acrid smell of burning filled the room, along with puffs of black smoke. A lick of flame burst out and threatened the walls, and Mary nearly shrieked herself.

Before she could move John had snatched up a large pot from the woodstove. He lunged right inside the fireplace and heaved its contents upward in a wide spray. Soup—was it soup?—splashed over the bricks, dousing some of the fire. The pipe running up the chimney from the stove hissed and steamed.

Arthur grabbed a second pot and thrust it toward John. Mary thought this one contained mashed potatoes. John waved it away and began beating at the remaining flames with a cloth he'd found somewhere. He leaned further into the chimney and reached up, thumping at the accumulated soot, bringing down a shower of black fragments and more smoke. “Watch out!” Mary cried, terrified he'd be burned.

He showed no sign of hearing. He kept on long after Mary could see any sign of flames, reaching higher, ducking when he loosened more flakes of soot, blinking it out of his eyes and leaning in again. Finally, he stood back, breathing hard, and let the scorched and blackened cloth drop to the brick floor.

Mary hurried over to him, but he held up both hands to forestall her. John's face, hands, and shirtfront were coated with soot. His hair was black now rather than brown. His greatcoat—the cloth he had been using, as she saw now—was ruined. “Is it out?” Mary said.

He nodded, then bent, putting his hands on his knees.

“I couldn't even think, and you just…you leapt in and saved the house.”

“There was no time to summon help,” he said.

Chimney fires could easily destroy a dwelling. Indeed, they often did in London. Mary started to shake. “You could have been badly burned!”

John straightened and, amazingly, grinned at her, his teeth a startling white against his sooty features. “I wasn't. Only a trifle scorched.” He looked positively energized by the emergency.

“What are you doing, you wretched boy?” exclaimed Mrs. Tanner.

Balancing the pot he still held in one hand, Arthur had jerked open the oven door and tossed the mashed potatoes inside. When he turned to find everyone staring at him, he said, “I saw smoke coming out.”

“My roast was burning,” wailed the cook. “And now you've covered it with the potatoes. A proper mess you've made, which you will be cleaning up, you young devil. And the dinner all spoiled.”

Arthur ignored her. “That was beyond anything great!” He gazed at John with hero worship shining in his eyes.

Mary surveyed the streaks of soot twisting up the whitewashed walls, the soup pooled in the hearth, and the hissing, dripping stove. The place smelled dreadful. She took deep breaths to still her trembling. “The chimneys should have been swept before this place was leased,” she said.

“Be sure I'll be speaking to them about that,” said John. “I was told the house had been completely refurbished after the last tenant.” After a final look up the chimney, he strode into the scullery and put his head under the pump.

“My kitchen!” Mrs. Tanner threw up her hands and gave way to hysterics.

Kate moved to put an arm around her mother. Her rare show of sympathy seemed to encourage rather than assuage the wailing, however. John finished scrubbing at his face and hands and hair and edged toward the stairs. “I must change out of this shirt,” he said. The cook's noisy weeping seemed to affect him far more than a potentially lethal fire.

Mary nodded amid the wreckage. “Arthur can fetch some food from an alehouse.”

The boy accepted his mission with alacrity. Turning to deal with the cook's vapors, Mary rather wished she could go with him.

The next few days were chaos in the Bexley household, wholly taken up with repairs to the kitchen. A chimney sweep was summoned first thing, but the pipe from the stove had to be removed before he could do a proper job of cleaning. Which meant no cooking could be done—not even a cup of tea or a boiled egg. The household subsisted on bread and cheese and roast fowl and ale from a nearby public house. Mrs. Tanner used the opportunity to take to her bed on the top floor, “prostrate” with nerves.

To Mary's surprise Kate seemed merely amused by the disruptions, and she rallied round to help. She and Mary worked side by side with Arthur and some hired cleaners to scrub the soot off every surface and utensil in the kitchen and put a new coat of whitewash on the walls. After this long and exhausting chore was at last complete, the maid even coaxed her mother downstairs to see the new closed stove Mary had purchased. Kate made the first pot of tea in the refurbished kitchen, and Mary felt more in charity with her than she ever had before, when the harrowing episode finally came to a close.

The disruptions meant that she fell into bed exhausted each night, however. There seemed no moment in those hectic days to revisit the thrilling scene the fire had interrupted. They didn't sit down to dinner together, as there was no proper dinner. They didn't sit cozily in the front parlor of an evening, because there was always another task calling out to be done. Add to that the fact that Arthur had taken to dogging John's footsteps, his skinny frame practically vibrating with admiration. As often as John kindly sent him away, he was soon creeping back, wide-eyed, reverent, and…intrusive. And so they had scarcely an instant alone. Mary might dream of her heroic husband's hands on her every night as she slept, but the reality remained otherwise.

Thus, Mary was more than delighted to leave the house for an evening out. William Conolly had invited the Bexleys on an expedition to Vauxhall Gardens as a return of their hospitality. “I thought you would enjoy the illuminations,” he told Mary as he helped her into a hired carriage to begin the journey to the south side of the river. “And Vauxhall closes at the end of September. So you must see it now or wait until spring.”

“I've heard a great deal about the place,” said John. He looked very handsome in a new evening coat and snowy shirt.

“What are they like?” Mary wondered.

Conolly would only smile. “Wait and see.”

When they walked under the great paneled archway into the pleasure gardens, the first thing Mary noticed was the crowd. Despite the coolness of the evening, throngs of well-dressed strollers peopled a tree-lined walk stretching into the distance. She could see them perfectly by the light of thousands of glass lamps hung among the branches. The effect was dazzling; the sound of a thousand conversations was a surprising roar in the outdoor setting.

They joined the revelers. With Conolly as guide they walked past fiddlers in cocked hats playing under the gilded cockleshell in the midst of the gardens. They paused to hear singers of comic and sentimental ballads. They watched a group of country dancers, earning applause with much jumping, thumping, and laughter. They marveled over a lady in a spangled costume walking a tightrope and solemnly observed the hermit sitting in his illuminated hermitage. John remarked on the unlighted walks off to the sides, and Conolly told him they were known as places for amorous adventures.

Their host had hired a box for supper, and when they'd tired of walking, they retired there, admiring the mural at the back. Servitors brought the thinly sliced ham for which the place was famous. “They say that a Vauxhall carver slices so thin he could cover the whole garden from a single ham,” Conolly said.

“Making it hardly worth eating,” John replied, prodding the near transparent serving on his plate.

“Still, you must have it,” replied his friend. “You can't come to Vauxhall and not have the ham.”

“If I must, I must.” John smiled, wrapped the tissue-thin meat around his fork, and ate the whole slice in one bite. “It tastes”—he paused, letting the others wait—“like ham.”

Their mingled laughter buoyed Mary's heart.

Conolly had also ordered assorted biscuits and cheesecakes and a bowl of the notorious arrack punch. “Take care,” he teased Mary when he dipped her out a cup. “This will go straight to your head.”

Gingerly she tasted the mixture. “What's in it?”

“I have it on the best authority that it's made by mixing grains of the benjamin flower with rum.”

“What is benjamin flower?”

“I have no idea.”

“There was some journalist fellow called Benjamin Flower,” John put in. “Ranted against the French war at the beginning. I think they put him in Newgate for sedition or libel or some such thing.” He tried the punch and raised his eyebrows. “Not likely he had anything to do with this mixture.”

“Your husband is a veritable encyclopedia of political knowledge,” Conolly said to Mary. “We are in awe of him at the office.”

This made John laugh. He had the most wonderful laugh, Mary thought. She didn't hear it nearly enough. She raised her glass to him. “As you should be,” she replied. “He saved our house quite heroically, you know.” She met her husband's eyes and found she really couldn't look away.

Smiling, Conolly drank from his own cup. The story of the fire had been fully explored on their way over. “Ah, there's the Duke of Wellington in that box directly across.”

Mary tore her gaze away from John's sparkling blue eyes and observed an upright man with a jutting profile. He looked every inch the soldier.

“And that is Wrotherton, one of our leading dandies, four boxes to the left.”

“What happened to his neck?” John wondered.

“A fashion faux pas of a neckcloth,” was the reply.

“It looks like a bandage.”

“Very like,” Conolly agreed. “It's probably sturdy enough to support a broken neck.”

John laughed again. He was far handsomer than the famous dandy, Mary thought.

Their host pointed out other notables. He seemed to know everyone. Mary began to wonder about his particular friends and habits. “You seem so familiar with the place. Have you been here often?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Fairly.”

“Was there no one else you wished to invite along this evening?” she asked.

He wiggled his eyebrows at her. “A lady, perhaps? Why are married people always so eager to promote matches? Enough that you are happily settled.” It was said with a smile to remove any suggestion of real complaint.

“You don't wish to marry?”

“My wishes don't really come into it,” Conolly replied.

“What do you mean?”

“That's his own affair, Mary,” put in John.

“No, no.” Conolly gestured expansively. He'd had three full cups of the punch. “It's my family's position, you see. Creates rather a conundrum for me. The young ladies I meet are looking for a far bigger fortune than I have to offer. They expect to live in the sorts of houses they grew up in and have the same sorts of…comforts. And why shouldn't they, eh? No doubt they deserve it. But I can't provide 'em. This or that one may like me but not well enough to give up their luxuries. Yet I'm expected, nay commanded, to get leg-shackled to a girl of my own rank.”

She and John were lucky, Mary thought. Though they didn't come from excessively wealthy families, they'd each inherited a competence. Put together, the amount was ample for a comfortable life. How would it be if they lived in a set of rooms—as she'd been told Conolly did—with no servants except a landlady. Cramped and…insupportable, she thought. She would hate it. “Perhaps an heiress will fall in love with you,” she joked a bit uneasily.

Conolly's wry shrug made her feel gauche. “Their mothers see that they don't get the chance. And there's also the little problem of my reputation.”

“Your…?” Was this what she'd sensed in the portrait? Mary wondered. She saw that John was frowning at his friend.

Conolly's expression shifted. He looked impish. “I played the odd prank at school. My mind just runs that way. The Irish in me, perhaps.”

“Ah, I'd nearly forgotten.” John turned to Mary with another heart-melting smile. “Not only at school,” he said. “I must tell you that Conolly sometimes informs new employees in our office that they are required to provide their own chairs, as the government budget doesn't cover such expenditures. I actually bought one and was hauling it up the stairs when he took pity on me and told me the truth.”

“And a fine chair it was,” declared Conolly, laughing. “Much better than the poor things they give us to sit on.”

“At least no one else saw me,” said John.

“Didn't I make sure of that?” protested his friend.

“You did,” John agreed. “And got the porter to let me leave it with him until the end of the day.”

“Is it the chair at your desk in the study?” Mary wondered.

“The very one,” John confirmed.

She laughed. “It's odd; I recently met someone else who loves playing pranks.”

“Who's that?” Conolly wanted to know.

Now that she'd said it, she wondered if she shouldn't have shared this information. But she didn't see what harm it could do. Caroline hadn't seemed at all shy about her antics. “Lady Caroline Lanford.” Both men looked surprised. “Our neighbor's granddaughter,” she reminded John.

“The Golden Minx?” Conolly said. “That's what society calls her,” he added in response to their puzzled expressions. “Nickname.”

“Do you know her?” Mary asked.

“Oh, quite above my touch,” their host replied.

Something in his tone made Mary glad that the conversation was interrupted just then by the beginning of the fireworks. They got up and went to watch the display from a better vantage point.

John relished the play of colored light over Mary's face as the rockets burst above them. She looked lovely tonight in a pale yellow gown and dark blue cloak. After the drudgery of putting the house to rights, she deserved a good time, and she looked like she was having fun. So was he, he realized. He must see that it happened far more often.

Immediately, his thoughts filled with other ways that they might enjoy each other's company—if only their life wasn't so crammed full of people. He let his gaze rove along the beguiling line of her neck. He watched her chest rise as she oohed over a burst of color above and could almost feel the soft curves beneath the cloth. Tonight, he vowed, when he got her home he would sweep her upstairs before anyone even knew they were there. His body reacted to the thought and the pictures it roused of what would follow. It was time—far past time—to make his marriage whole.

At last, the fireworks ended. They turned away and headed for Vauxhall's gate. They had nearly reached it when John spotted Fordyce, strolling languidly toward them. His mellow mood evaporated. He took Mary's arm to steer her away, but the blasted man had seen them.

“Bexley, Conolly,” came the irritating drawl. “How odd. And a…lady.”

He made it sound as if there was something disreputable about Mary's presence. John felt as if his head was filling with hot coals.

“Mrs. Bexley,” provided Conolly smoothly. “This is Edmund Fordyce. He works with us at the Foreign Office.”

“You're
married
?” Fordyce said to John, scarcely acknowledging Mary. “How very…daring of you.”

Mary was examining the newcomer with interest. Fordyce turned and surveyed her, looking insultingly unimpressed. “I don't suppose I know your people?”

“I don't suppose you do,” she replied.

Fordyce's pale eyebrows went up. “Oh my, do you fancy yourself a wit?”

John just barely stopped himself from going for his throat. Slights to himself were one thing; it was quite another to see this damned coxcomb talking to his wife as if she were a presumptuous nobody. Conolly's tug on his arm did little to divert the fury pumping in his veins.

“We were just going,” Conolly said. “Good night, Fordyce.”

The fellow twiddled his fingers in an insulting farewell. He didn't say it had been a pleasure to meet Mary or make the least effort at politeness. Something like a growl vibrated in John's throat. Conolly tugged at his sleeve again. Perhaps he had heard it. “Come along,” he said.

Fordyce turned and walked away from them. John started to let Conolly steer him away. “You know he is
trying
to vex you,” Conolly murmured, too low for Mary to hear. “Ignore him.”

It was fine to say so. And it was what John habitually did. But with Mary involved…rage burned through him again. That Fordyce would dare treat her so slightingly. The man should be horsewhipped! John pulled his arm from Conolly's grasp. “You go ahead. I'll be along in a moment.”

“Bexley. Don't do anything…”

John ignored his wife's curious glances from him to Conolly and back again. He turned and strode along the path to catch up with Fordyce. Fortunately, the man was still alone. “You are never to speak to my wife in that way again,” he said to him.

Fordyce raised his thin pale brows. “I beg your pardon?”

“You don't and never will. Just hear this, should you ever encounter my wife in future…”

“I can't imagine why I would.”

John just barely resisted grasping the man's neckcloth and choking him. “…you will treat her with respect.”

“Such heat.” Fordyce made a flicking gesture, as if brushing a speck of dust from his coat. “You may call me out if you think I've insulted your little wife.” He put a sardonic twist on the last two words, clearly designed to enrage.

John caught a hint of eagerness in his eyes. Fordyce was just the sort of fellow who would study fencing and keep a pair of dueling pistols. “I'm not going to call you out,” he said contemptuously. “I'm not some creaking antique. Even if dueling weren't illegal, it's idiotic. I'm simply telling you that you've gone too far. You will stop all your stupid tricks and stay away from me.”