Marry in Haste (25 page)

“Oh.” She did not know what to say.

“You will think it heartless, perhaps, but I cannot tell you what a relief it is to me.” And then, in a rush, “Oh, Camilla, give me time, and I may be some kind of a husband to you yet.”

“Of course.” But little Edward, disturbed by their voices, rolled over and gave something between a yawn and a grunt. “Come,” she said, “we shall wake him.”

“He sounds just like a pig,” said his father.

There was so much to be said, so many stories to be exchanged, that they all sat up till the small hours while Lavenham told of the hardships of the voyage to the Brazils (“But they were as nothing, compared to my anxiety for you.”). And Camilla and Chloe, in return, described their rustication in the convent grounds and then their flight with “Mr. Smith.”

“He seems devoted to you,” ventured Lavenham at last.

“Oh, to Camilla, yes,” answered Chloe. “As for me, he found me an unspeakable burden from first to last, and made no secret of it. But, Lee, you look dead—have you the migraine again?—as for me, I intend to be up and riding on the downs before breakfast.”

“But the Duke is to call on us,” Camilla reminded her, and then, forgetting the Duke at sight of Lavenham’s pale and furrowed face, “Chloe is right; you have the migraine, Lavenham. I can see it.”

“Yes, but at last, I have my wife, too, to soothe it away with her clever hands.”

It was the signal for the party to break up. Conducting Lavenham to his room, Camilla paused for a moment at the door. “Do you really wish me to try and soothe away your headache?”

“If you are not too tired.” There was something chilling about the formal phrase, and as she followed him into the room Camilla felt, with something like despair, that after all nothing had changed. They had slipped back, fatally, into the old intolerable position. She was still, after all that had passed, a figure in a farce, a wife and not a wife.

Lavenham closed the door behind her, removed his jacket, and lay down with a sigh of relief on the wide bed. Her thoughts in a rebellious turmoil, she began the familiar task of soothing away his pain. He lay quiet for a while, yielding himself to her ministration, then, suddenly, turned over and grasped her wrists.

“Is it possible that you can still love me? After all I have done to you?”

Too late, now, for pride and pretence. “How can I help it?” she said simply.

Slowly, tenderly, his hands were travelling up her arms to her bare shoulders. “You should have let the girl undress you,” he said. “You will find me but an awkward lady’s maid, but, oh, my love, if you can truly forgive me, I mean to be a good husband.” His hands had found the fastenings of her dress now, but were indeed making but a bungled job of it.

“Let me.” As their hands touched, her impatience matched his. There was the sound of tearing cloth, a little sigh of satisfaction (from him? from her?) as her dress fell, an empty shell on the floor, and he pulled her down on the bed beside him. His lips moved hungrily across her shoulder. “To think I could have forgotten,” then, as she opened her mouth to speak, he closed it with his burning lips on hers.

The morning was gay with larks as Chloe rode up the downs behind the house, with only a groom in attendance. Her grandmother always breakfasted in bed and neither Camilla nor Lavenham had come down in time to prevent her escape. Now, taking great breaths of cool, salt-flavoured air, she set her horse to a gallop, congratulating herself on having got clean away from them all. It had been easy enough to see, last night, that Camilla and Lavenham were set for a reconciliation and domestic bliss, but how could she endure to share it? They treated her as a child—and all of them had apparently forgotten that today was her eighteenth birthday. They should be congratulating her on being grown up at last, but they were too much occupied with their own affairs. And why not? she asked herself bitterly. All she had done with her life so far was make a fool of herself, first over the music master, then over Charles Boutet. It was no wonder her family had little patience or thought for her ... And now ... But she would not let herself think of her newest folly, the madness of loving the Duke, who cared more for his old mother than for her. She put her horse once more to the gallop, leaving her grumbling groom far behind.

Drawing up at last, breathless, on the hilltop, she found herself looking down on the house from which she had come, and saw the figure of a horseman ride out of the gate and turn up the long slope towards her. At once she turned her horse’s head away and started at a steady canter down the further slope of the hill. Absurd to imagine that the solitary rider might be the Duke, but intolerable, if it should happen to be, that he should think she had expected him to follow her. She urged on her horse with foot and voice, but it was tiring now and responded only sluggishly to her encouragement. And suddenly, illogically, she was sure that the lone horseman was indeed the Duke come in search of her, having discovered at last to what an extent she had been compromised by that journey across Portugal. She was a romantic heroine—no doubt about that—but one, it had been gradually borne in upon her, not in the very best of taste. Camilla, overwrought with anxiety on Lavenham’s account, had failed to notice the faint, delicate overtones with which society had contrived to indicate that while it was one thing for a married lady and her infant son to escape, glamorously, across Portugal with an eligible Duke, it was quite something else again for an unmarried girl about whose name some faint grey hint of scandal already clung.

Camilla had missed those slight, almost imperceptible with- drawings of rustling skirts, but Chloe had felt every one of them. Her heart sore already because of the Duke’s disappearance first to Ireland and then to Portugal, she had been a helpless target for the gentlest, the subtlest and most intolerable of persecutions. The very admiration of her courage expressed by the ladies she met had contrived to carry in it a hint of shock, the suggestion, always implied, never outspoken, that they were glad it had not happened to them, or, worse still, to their daughters; the attentions of the young men who thronged around her had had a hint of freedom about them that she had found equally detestable and difficult to handle. This had been bad enough, but the thought that the Duke might become aware of it and feel himself in honour bound to offer her his hand was much worse. She looked back. The solitary horseman had reached the crest of the hill and caught up with her loitering groom. She saw them talk for a moment, then the groom, apparently dismissed, turned his horse back the way he had come, while the other figure, black and unrecognisable against the light, began to descend the hill towards her.

With a desperate kick of her heels, she contrived to urge her horse into an unwilling canter and then, at last, a gallop. No use; an occasional surreptitious glance over her shoulder showed her the figure behind steadily gaining and becoming, as he drew nearer, more and more unmistakably the Duke. Absurdly, illogically, she panicked, and her horse, sensing it, wheeled suddenly and started hell-for-leather for home. Its reins were caught in a grip of iron. “Good morning, Lady Chloe,” said the Duke politely.

Short of breath, helpless, and furiously panting, she was aware that her hat had slipped to the back of her head, her cheeks were flushed, her hair, no doubt, all to pieces. His hands still held her horse’s reins; helpless, she faced him. “Good morning, Your Grace.”

“My Grace?” He raised his eyebrows. “We are very formal all of a sudden. You did not treat Mr. Smith with such courtesy.”

“Nor did he me.”

He laughed. “
Touché
.
Will you ever forgive me, I wonder, for that journey? So long as we live, I believe you will be twitting me with the fact that when we first met you were a reluctant brunette.”

“I cannot believe that it is a matter that will concern you greatly.”

“No? Not to have my wife forever out of charity with me. You give me credit for greater fortitude than I possess.”

“What did you say?”

He laughed. “At last I have contrived to startle you out of that society calm of yours. I said, ‘my wife.’ Surely you must know that we are beyond the social pale, you and I, if we do not marry? It is a regrettable truth, but if you do not make an honest man of me, I do not know how I am to face my devoted family—who have, by the by, been praying this age that I would die gloriously on the field of battle.”

“I wish you had,” she said furiously.

“Do you?” Very leisurely, he reached into the deep pocket of his riding coat, produced a piece of paper, and handed it to her. Her eyes huge with amazed indignation, she saw that it was a special licence for the marriage of His Grace the Duke of Weston with Lady Chloe Beatrice Sophronisba Lavenham, Spinster.

“You take things, surely, somewhat for granted,” she managed. And then, “How did you know about the Sophronisba.”

“Your guilty secret? Your brother told me, of course, when he consented to the match.”

“Lavenham? Consented? I do not understand you, sir. My brother has said nothing to me of this.”

“Naturally, since I asked him not to. I prefer to do my own wooing. Besides, he has had his own affairs to think of. We settled it all when we first met, in Portugal, and, being men, have not spoken of it since.”

“In Portugal? You knew already what would be said?”

“I knew at last that I could not live without you. My good Chloe, why do you think I went away but to try and forget you, and why have I come back, but because I can’t do it? Marriage has always been the thing of all others I meant to avoid. Do you seriously think that a little gossip would drive me into it? I shall be a deplorable husband: I shall drink and ride to hounds and probably beat you, but, I flatter myself, you will be as bad a wife. Do you not think we might make a fine cat and dog affair of it, you and I, and snap our fingers at society?”

She had sat, so far, frozen in her saddle, but now she could not help laughing. “It is a most moving proposal, sir, and I am grateful to you for your efforts to spare me the knowledge of its real motives. But it is no use. I know as well as you do that only consideration for my brother drives you to it. Well, rest easy, and tear up your licence, for I’d not have you if the gossip were ten times as loud.”

“No?” He took the licence readily enough, but tucked it carefully back into his pocket, from which he produced a small leather box. “Then your birthday present is sadly wasted. Unless you wish to use it for your wedding with Charles Boutet.”

He handed her the box and she could not help opening it and looking for one heart-wrung moment at the two rings that nestled there side by side, one a magnificent ruby, the other a plain gold band. She looked up at him. “I ... I do not understand.”

“You thought me a monster, did you not, to ride off so callously yesterday, but I had to fetch these. No Duke of Weston has been married without the ruby since the Conquest—or before, for all I know—and I look on marrying you as a desperate enough venture without risking a family curse.”

She could not help laughing. “Your proposal, sir, is grossly flattering!”

“Is it not? Shall we not have a fine quarrelsome life of it, you and I?” He took her hand. “But it is your birthday. Let me give you joy.” He slid the ruby ring on to her engagement finger. “If you call it joy to be engaged to a bully, which I know all too well is what you think me.”

She looked up at him. “I ... I do not know what to say. Are you
sure
?”

“Sure that I love you? Having fled you, from London to Ireland, and from Ireland to Portugal? I am back, my love, and you only lose time arguing, for I mean to have you.” Suddenly, his arms were round her, his lips found hers. For a long time, peacefully, their horses grazed, heads down to the close turf.

“Well,” he said at last, “am I still to destroy the licence and make my cousins happy?”

She turned her flushed face up to his. “I should be sorry to waste your trouble.”

“Well, thank the Lord for that,” was his surprising reply. “In that case, we must hurry. Mr. Fisher will have given us up long since.”

“Mr. Fisher?”

“The Reverend Mr. Fisher, vicar of Hove, who has been waiting our coming this two hours past.”

“You cannot be serious?” But she knew he was.

“Never more so. Why should society have the chance to whisper at our wedding? And why should I have to wait longer for you? Besides, I might change my mind, or you yours. The risk is too great.” And he kissed her again to underline the remark.

Rising late, with the lethargy of pure happiness, Camilla was surprised to learn that Chloe had been out riding for more than two hours, and that the Duke of Weston had called and had ridden after her. When she reported this to Lavenham, he merely smiled. “They will return, no doubt, in their own good time.”

Lady Leominster, however, when she came down, every hair and patch of rouge in place, was anxious and angry. “That child will shame us yet,” she said, “mark my words but she will. To have run off again, and on her birthday, too.”

“Her birthday?” Camilla exclaimed. “Oh, why did you not tell me?”

“I had other things to think about,” said her husband.

At that point, their first caller was announced, and for the next hour they came in droves, full of congratulations, fuller still of questions. In the face of Camilla’s and Lavenham’s obvious happiness, questions were hardly in order, but Chloe’s absence produced a plentiful crop. “Dear Lady Chloe ... such a romantic story ... such a pity the dear Duke is ... well ... you know ...”

Smiling, listening, answering, Camilla began, with growing horror, to realise what Chloe must have been going through. Anxiety gnawed at her. She looked to Lavenham for reassurance, but he, too, was deep in a babble of question and compliment which seemed to grow more and more strident as time passed and still Chloe did not appear. Camilla had been through despair and back again, had found Chloe’s lifeless body at the foot of the cliff, or drifting with the tide, when a red-faced footman opened the doors of the room, cleared his throat to ensure silence, and announced, in stentorian tones, “Their Graces, the Duke and Duchess of Weston.”