Tilly (11 page)

As the dinner progressed he noticed that Tilly seemed to be keeping her end of the table very well amused. Even old Sir Giles Barncaster, a fierce and florid Tory M.P. reputed to loathe all young women, was laughing appreciatively at something she said, and then his voice rang out loud and clear: “Gad, Lady Tilly, but you’ve got a remarkably well-informed mind!”

Toby’s handsome face was leaning too near Tilly’s white shoulder.

No one looking at Tilly could even begin to guess at the turmoil of feelings beneath the delectable bosom of her Parisian gown. She had forgotten that her husband was so handsome. Evening dress became him, the stark
black and white of its formality setting off his golden head and classic profile. He had acquired a slight tan on his travels, and in a bemused way Tilly noticed, in the blaze of the candelabra, that there was a faint line of gold hair on his cheek.

Aileen was fretting and fuming and wishing she could strangle Toby. She never would have accepted Tilly’s cheeky invitation had not her ladyship penciled a note on the bottom of the gilt-edged card informing the Glenstraith family that Toby Bassett was already in residence at Chennington.

Aileen’s sour eyes took in the beauty of the formal dining room with its high painted ceilings, its cases gleaming with fine china and silver, and its Adam fireplace. She eyed the well-trained footmen in their splendid livery with a jealous eye. The duchess kept a large staff at her town house in London, but Aileen’s newly awakened jealousy saw everything that Tilly had as grander and better. She envied Tilly because Tilly was married and able to wear dashing, bold colors before which she, Aileen, in her palest of pink gowns, faded into insignificance. Aileen, unlike Tilly, had never had to study the art of conversation, for she had considered her beauty enough attraction. Now she had a
panicky feeling that all these men around her were actually not listening to her but straining their ears to hear what the fascinating marchioness was saying.

“You know,” she said rather loudly to her dinner partner, a young fresh-faced man called Jeremy Beaton, “you’d never guess the poor Beast used to work for me.”

“Who?” said Jeremy politely.

“I mean Tilly,” said Aileen with that silvery laugh of hers, which eventually grated on the nerves because it always ran up and down exactly the same scale.

“Oh, yes,” said Jeremy. “I heard she was your companion before her marriage. Why did you call her ‘the Beast’?”

“Because she was so ugly,” said Aileen, laughing. “Of course, she’s changed a little, but then money and clothes do make a difference.”

“Indeed they do,” remarked Jeremy in chilling accents. “Lady Tilly is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. Why, Toby’s quite smitten with her!”

“Toby Bassett is my fiancé!”

“So he is,” remarked her companion with infuriating calm. “Sorry. Forgot.”

The Duchess of Glenstraith was wishing she had not come. She was wishing she had
not let Aileen talk her into organizing the marriage with Bassett. Young Bassett was rich and of good family, but so were a lot of other young men on the London scene. Now she was forced to sit and watch that toad all dressed up in vulgar scarlet queening it from the end of the dinner table. The fact that she, the duchess, took precedence over Tilly in rank was small consolation. Age, as well, went before beauty, so they said. But the only place she would go first would be the grave, as far as Her Grace could see anyway. And there was her husband, quite animated, discussing his latest acquisition—some singularity anemic nudes drawn by Ricketts—to this interloper into the top ten thousand. What did Tilly know of Art Nouveau anyway? Quite a lot, it dawned on the duchess with dismay. She noticed Toby stretching a nervous hand toward his wineglass and gave a loud bark. Toby withdrew the hand instantly and flashed her the sort of look that no dutiful man should give to his future mama-in-law.

The ladies at last retired and, under cover of the general conversation over the port and walnuts, the marquess turned his problem over in his mind. After the way he had treated her, he could hardly tell Tilly that she had to
hop into bed with him at the earliest opportunity in order to fulfill the terms of his father’s will. Then the thought of hopping into bed with this new and exciting Tilly was infinitely bewitching. The marquess’s prowess with women had never been in doubt. He could not see that his wife would prove any exception. He would have to begin to woo her as quickly as possible.

He was impatient to begin his wooing right away and found, to his irritation, that it was going to be harder than he had imagined. His wife suggested a stroll in the gardens, but that invitation seemed to include all the guests.

A full moon silvered the velvet lawns, which seemed to roll off into vast infinity. Heavy roses tumbled and rioted from ironwork trellises and stone urns. The air was heavy with their scent, but the beautiful scene was not made for romance, reflected the marquess wryly, with all these extra characters dotted about.

At last he decided to move into the attack and, extricating himself from the conversational grasp of Mrs. Barchester, he moved forward to the group around his wife and, smiling politely at everyone, gently slid her arm through his own and smiled down at her.
“I have hardly had a chance to exchange a word with you in private since I arrived home,” he murmured.

The other guests tactfully began to move away with the exception of Toby Bassett, who stuck like a limpet.

Tilly tried to act calmly, but the pressure of his arm against her own was doing strange things to her breath.

To the marquess’s relief the duchess and Aileen closed in on either side of Toby, like jailers, and bore him off.

“Now, Tilly,” began the marquess, urging her away from the vicinity of the rest of the guests, “tell the truth. Are you very angry with me?”

“No,” lied Tilly calmly. “Why on earth should I be?”

“Because of that report in the newspapers.”

“Oh, that. It was true, was it not?” Tilly swung around and looked full into his eyes, and he could not bring himself to lie.

“Yes. I am afraid it was true.”

“Well, then,” rejoined Tilly brightly, “you did warn me it was more of a business contract than a marriage. You will go your way and I will go mine. And I
am
looking forward
to going mine. So many
delicious
young men around!”

He stopped and pulled her to him. “But I don’t want you to go in any other direction than this,” he whispered.

She opened her mouth to reply with some witty and cynical remark but no sound would come out as she watched his mouth descending, oh so slowly, toward her own in the moonlight. He had removed his gloves and his bare hand was already caressing the nape of her neck. Tilly clutched the lapels of his jacket for support and closed her eyes.

“Your shawl, my lady.”

The couple jerked apart. Tilly swung around, flushed and embarrassed. The marquess was furious. Francine stood there demurely in the moonlight with a large white cashmere shawl over her arm.

“The night air, my lady,” she went on, ignoring the marquess’s glare, “so bad for the lungs.”

The marquess dismissed Francine with a curt nod and turned again to his wife. But the treacherous English climate was against him as well. A chilly breeze had sprung up that was strengthening into a full-fledged wind by the second. There were cries of dismay from
the ladies, who began scurrying toward the house.

For Tilly, the spell was broken. She was appalled to think that she had been on the point of giving in too easily. Men, the wordlywise Francine had said, never appreciated anything easy. They walked in silence, side by side, toward the house.

“Where did you get that maid?” asked the marquess.

“From Lady Aileen,” said Tilly. “Well, I didn’t
get
her, I lured her away, so to speak.”

“Funny,” he said, looking at her with his fair head cocked to one side, “I could never imagine you concerning yourself with matters of dress.”

“Oh, we all have to grow up sometime,” Tilly replied lightly.

The guests were organizing themselves for the usual late-evening session of cards. Tilly detested playing cards but hustled her husband into a foursome with the duchess, Lady Aileen, and Toby.

The duchess was a poor cardplayer in that she loudly and obviously suspected everyone of cheating and then kept employing childish ruses like pretending to drop her fan in order to see the marquess’s hand. The hair on her face had begun to sprout again, and he found
it most unnerving to look down and see her large face coyly peeping over the edge of his arm.

Toby’s hands were shaking so badly that his cards fluttered like dry leaves before a desert wind. He eyed the marquess’s glass of whisky and soda with burning eyes, as if by some telekinetic means he could suck its contents across the table and into his mouth.

At last the long evening came to an end as the rising wind began to howl around the mansion and the servants moved quietly about with baskets of kindling and scuttles of coal.

The rest of the weary servants heard the bell ringing, a signal that they could put their respective charges to bed and try to catch some much-needed sleep.

Masters rose wearily to his feet and tugged down his striped waistcoat. “I say again,” he remarked severely to Francine, “that it is not our place to interfere in the… er… married lives of our betters.”

“I
know
the men,
moi
,” said Francine with such intensity that her listening audience wondered just what her experience had been. “If he gets what he wants on the first night, then
pouf!
—all will be lost. A few days of the
honeymoon and then my lord will be off to his amours.”

“What on earth can
we
do?” demanded the cook, tucking a strand of gray hair under her cap.

“I’ll think of something,” was all Francine would say. “Now, I must put my lady to bed…
alone
.”

She whisked herself off and Mrs. Judd watched her go with a worried frown. “It’s all right for the likes of a Frenchie to talk about them things,” she vouchsafed at last. “But I’m a very sensitive person, I am. My sensibilities are
shocked
.”

“She’s got a good heart has Francine,” said Masters after some deliberation. “Best do as she says.”

Upstairs, the marquess tightened the sash of his dressing gown and squared his shoulders. It had seemed a good idea to put his wife’s suite of rooms at one end of the West Wing and his own at the other. Now it was simply a damned nuisance. It would be the first time he had crept along the corridor of a country house in the small hours of the morning on legitimate business, so to speak. He stepped out into the dimness of the corridor.

Empty.

Or so he thought. From the shadows at the far end, Toby Bassett watched him go and felt immeasurably sick and depressed. But then, why should not a man spend the night with his own wife?

He realized he had been weaving unreal fantasies about Tilly, forgetting she was married, and to his best friend too.

Then somewhere in the quivering, jellylike hurt of his mind, a little imp seemed to whisper, “
Philip
always
has a decanter in his room. And if
you
were in Tilly’s arms, would
you
hurry back?
”

He took a deep breath. The duchess had made sure that his room was innocent of even a flask. He moved quickly down the corridor, feeling as if his life had taken on new hope. He pushed open the door of the marquess’s sitting room. There, winking, glistening, and beckoning in the firelight was a full decanter of whisky and standing beside it, like a knight in shining armor, was a glass and a silver siphon of soda. He floated toward it with a rapt expression on his face. His feet hardly seemed to touch the ground.

Also still awake and also in the West Wing, the Duchess of Glenstraith was sitting on her daughter’s bed, holding her hand. “So that’s
it, Mumsie,” finished Aileen plaintively. “She’s got Philip and now she’s taking Toby away from me as well.”

“Someone should speak to her husband,” said the duchess, hitching the massive folds of her Jaeger dressing gown closer around her flannel nightdress.

“You
must
speak to him,” said Aileen, sitting up straight. Her hair was in curlpapers and her face was covered in an oatmeal pack. She looked like a singularly beautiful case of leprosy.

“I shall go to him now, before he retires,” said the duchess firmly, “and do my duty.”

Aileen blushed under the crust of oatmeal that was hardening rapidly on her pretty face. “Won’t he be in… well… Tilly’s room?” she said in as thin a voice as possible so as not to crack the mask.

“No, poppet.” The duchess heaved herself to her feet. “Even such a common type as Tilly Burningham wouldn’t forgive her husband so soon for his philanderings with that French trollop. Leave it to me.”

The marquess paused on the threshold of his wife’s room. She was sitting at her dressing table and her maid was brushing her long red hair in smooth, even strokes so that it
crackled in the light. The marquess jerked his head to dismiss Francine, but to his amazement the maid showed no signs of leaving and continued to brush her mistress’s hair.

He walked forward into the room. “Please leave,” he said sharply to Francine, taking the brush from her hand.

“She can’t,” said Tilly hurriedly. “She has ever such a lot to do here.”

The marquess gently eased his wife to her feet and propelled her toward the door. “Then we shall leave her to it,” he said. “I wish to be private with you, and my rooms will be the very place.”

Tilly opened her mouth to protest. She was wearing a charming nightgown and negligee of creamy slipper satin, no longer protected by her layers of underwear and stays. The sudden awareness that her husband only seemed to be wearing a dressing gown and nothing else stopped her from uttering a word. She was unresistingly led away, only glancing back over her shoulder to catch the worried look on Francine’s face.

Halfway along the corridor in the direction of the marquess’s rooms, Tilly stopped and turned, trembling slightly. “I have changed my mind,” she said firmly. “I wish to go to bed.”