Lady Lucy's Lover (2 page)

Now Lucy wondered how she had failed her husband. What had driven him back to the arms of his mistress? In the early days, their lovemaking had been tumultuous and quick, the Marquess rolling over on his side and dropping off to sleep as soon as it was over. Lucy had been vaguely disappointed, but young enough to enjoy the affectionate attention of her young husband at balls and parties when they went out together.

On public occasions, he showed all the tenderness and sweetness towards her that mysteriously evaporated as soon as they were alone.

But she had been sure of his love.

And then little by little he had begun to slip away from her. The house and estates in the country were left neglected. Now another Season was about to begin and they had not left town, even for a day.

Lucy had seen the famous Harriet Comfort. Ann had pointed out that lady when she and Lucy were driving in the Park. The courtesan had looked more like a respectable
mondaine
matron than a member of the Fashionable Impure and that made it all seem harder to bear. An absolutely stunning beauty would have made matters easier to understand. But Harriet—with her correct clothes and her patrician nose and large, liquid, slightly protruding eyes—hardly seemed to have the face or figure to launch a thousand ships, let alone drive one young lord from his marriage bed.

Then there were the increasing amounts of unpaid bills which were stuffed carelessly into the pigeonholes of her husband's desk. Any suggestion that they might be paid was greeted with scorn by her husband, who was in the habit of pointing out that only common people paid their tradesmen's bills.

Their townhouse was beautifully furnished in the latest fashion. Thin spindly chairs straddled their rosewood legs across the pale blues and creams of oriental carpets. The upholstery was mostly of striped silk and the curtains at the windows were of heavy striped silk also. Every sofa was backless and striped. It was sometimes like living in an elegant silk cage, thought Lucy, who missed the unfashionable clutter of her Sussex family home.

And then there were the clocks. Everyone who had attended the wedding had given them a clock, it seemed, and they ticked busily away in the silence of the house.

Although the butler faithfully wound them every day, they never seemed to chime at the same time. The tall case clocks boomed sonorously, the little gilt ones tinkled, and the grim marble ones emitted silvery chimes. Yet all the chattering, ticking and tocking and whispering of the clocks seemed to intensify the silence, as if underlining the fact that time was flying, flying, flying and the master was always from home.

London was bewildering to a young matron who was not yet old enough to have acquired a protective veneer of town bronze. In this the new nineteenth century, the dissipations of the last seemed to be intensified, with many of the members of the ton being driven by boredom into eccentricity. Snobbery and exclusiveness were increasing. Almack's, those famous assembly rooms, was paramount, ruled by its ten great patronesses with a rod of iron. The round of fun, fighting, cock fights, bets, routs, operas, assemblies, and tarts was trodden industriously and lampooned ferociously by Rowlandson in his cartoons, and in other cartoons, notably “The Adventures of Tom and Jerry.”

The clubs and the great political houses focused the intellectual, political, and fashionable worlds; Devonshire House for the Tories, Holland House for the Whigs.

The only sin was to be Found Out. Liaisons and affairs were permissible only if they were never brought to the notice of society or the press. Complaisant husbands often accepted their wives' illegitimate offspring as their own. Very few men were considerate enough to use contraceptives, the Marquess going so far as to tell his blushing bride that he supposed she would breed quite soon and those fine kid leather sheaths were disgusting and making love with one of them on was like taking a bath in your stockings.

But Lucy had not become pregnant. She longed for a child with all her heart, hoping that the birth of a boy and heir to the Marquess would surely make him settle down and become accustomed to the responsibilities of marriage.

The rattling of carriage wheels on the cobbles outside made Lucy fly to the window. Her husband had arrived home. But in what a condition!

He was being supported up the steps by two friends who were scarcely more sober than the Marquess himself. Lucy ran into the hall just as the butler opened the door.

The Marquess's friends were sober enough to register the outrage on the Marchioness's pretty face and unceremoniously dropped their bundle onto the tiles of the hall floor, making a stumbling, hasty departure. The butler snapped his fingers and two footmen came running forward to lift my lord from the floor and carry him to bed. Feet trailing on the ground, the Marquess was dragged across the hall, his arms around the shoulders of the footmen. He let out an inane giggle and looked slyly at his wife. “Bit foxed, my sweeting,” he mumbled.

The footmen stood irresolute. “Take my lord upstairs and put him to bed,” snapped Lucy, and, turning on her heel, she walked back into the drawing room and slammed the door.

Of course, he had come home drunk many times before, but never in the middle of the afternoon. After a while, Lucy began to chide herself for being missish. Her husband was behaving like any other man. Somehow, she, Lucy, had failed him as a wife, which was why he found it necessary to seek his pleasures elsewhere. She must make one tremendous effort to look as beautiful as possible at the Courtlands' ball. She would be loving and affectionate. She would charm him as she had done in the past, and their married life would become the way she had always dreamed it should be.

Lucy decided to take a nap to fortify herself for the social rigors of the night to come and by the time she fell asleep she had thoroughly made up her mind that she was a very hardhearted and selfish wife indeed.

Did not all men drink to excess and gamble to excess? Only the other day, it was said that a man had collapsed in front of White's Club in St. James's and the members had crowded to the window and had immediately begun laying bets as to whether he would live or die. A passerby had suggested bleeding the poor man but had been howled down by the gamblers who protested that this would affect the fairness of the betting.

She remembered the Marquess as he had been during the brief period of their engagement—warm and loving and tender. And so with the resilient optimism of youth, Lady Lucy fell asleep, convinced she would awake to a different world and a different marriage.

It was very hard to accept the reality of the situation when she was at last dressed in a gown of sheerest muslin, embroidered with seed pearls and worn over a slip of white satin.

Her golden hair was parted on the left side with curls hanging down over the left cheek. Drop earrings of Roman pearls completed the ensemble. Her reflection in the long glass had told her that she was in looks. The brilliance of her blue eyes detracted from the insipidness of her fair coloring, for blonds were not considered fashionable. She had descended the stairs to the small Blue Saloon on the ground floor where she normally awaited her husband. But as the minutes added up to a whole half-hour and still he did not come, she began to feel anxious and dispatched the first footman with a message for my lord.

But it was the butler, Wilson, who returned with the intelligence that my lord was feeling a trifle
seedy
and requested that my lady should go to the ball without him. My lord would join my lady later.

Lucy's pretty pink mouth compressed into a hard line. She wanted to send Wilson back upstairs again bearing a few sharp and choice words but there was something about all butlers that intimidated Lady Lucy. Sometimes she toyed with the fantasy that there was a special manufactory for turning out butlers from the same mold: fat and pear-shaped with large white faces and large pouches under the eyes and a pervading aura of sheer disinterest in the vagaries of the human race.

So instead she said quietly, “Very well, Wilson, have the carriage brought around.”

While she awaited the arrival of the carriage, Lucy crossed to the window and pulled aside the curtain and looked out.

How frightening and dark and violent London seemed when one had to venture out alone.

The street lamps cast barely more than a glimmer over the surrounding gloom of the square. They were glass globes half filled with whale oil and with bits of cotton twist for wick.

The globes were black with dirt, for the lamplighters who were employed to look after them, to light them at dusk and extinguish them at midnight, were “a contingent of greasy clodhopping fellows” with filthy fingers, who seemed incapable of filling a lamp without spilling the oil onto the head of anyone passing under their ladder.

Across the street, in the mansion directly opposite, had lived Lady Cummings, who had died only the other day. The house of death was shuttered and curtained, its door knocker wrapped around with flannel; on the front doorstep, dressed from head to foot in black, his pale face looming like a disk in the flickering light of the street lamp before the house, stood a professional mute, miming the agonies of despair for sixpence an hour (Sundays extra).

Lucy let the curtain fall with a sigh. What a marvelous city London had seemed on her first Season.
Then
she had not noticed the danger or squalor, feeling secure and protected with her tall, gallant Marquess always at her side.

The golden days of their courtship flicked through her mind as the carriage rumbled on its way to the Courtlands' ball. The excitement of warm kisses, pressures of the hand, all leading to that magic moment on her wedding night when she surrendered to him entirely. Lucy bit her lip. It was hard to admit even now that what should have been the culminating moment of glory, the crown set on their romance, had turned out to be… well… disappointing. Of course, he had drunk a great deal at the wedding. Almost unbidden, Ann's slightly mocking voice sounded in her ears: “Why not take a lover, Lucy?”

But that was unthinkable. The first glory of their love would return. All she could do was to try to understand him and say nothing that would drive him further from his home.

A tear of a size and beauty to rival the drops of her earrings rolled slowly down her cheek and she impatiently brushed it away.

Lord and Lady Courtland received Lucy at the entrance to the ballroom. “Your husband is not with you?” said Lady Courtland, making it sound more like an accusation than a question.

“He is unfortunately detained, my lady,” said Lucy, curtsying low. “He will join me presently.”

She made her escape into the ballroom and joined Ann Hartford and her husband, Giles. Giles was small and plump in contrast to his wife's tall elegance. Ann tactfully restrained from commenting on the absence of the Marquess. “A very good start to the Season, Lucy,” she murmured. “All the world and his wife are here. We even have the impeccable Mr. Brummell and the Prince Regent is to honor us with his presence.”

Lucy fanned herself, for the ballroom was very hot, lit as it was by hundreds of wax candles. The Exclusives were well represented. It was in the nature of high society to exclude undesirables and in that respect Regency society was already unique in the determined way it went about exclusion.

The ton called itself exclusive, its members the Exclusives, its ruling principle exclusivism. Innumerable hedges were built against intruders, elaborate rules for membership and subrules were set up, for the whole mess of taboos and shibboleths was society's way of keeping that dreadful
ennui
at bay.

It was even unfashionable to be married in church (“one simply
dies
of cold”) and the Marquess had advised his unsophisticated bride not to remind society that they had been married in one, albeit a country church. Married couples were not expected to remain faithful to each other. But then most of them did not marry for love. It was for the most part a business partnership—your lands added to my lands, your fortune to mine. But Lucy had believed, and still believed, in love. Her parents, for all their vagaries of fortune and their social climbing, undoubtedly cared for each other. Ann Hartford doted on her chubby Giles. And so she secretly held the brittle fashionables in contempt—the hungry women with their transparent gowns, swelling bosoms, and rouged cheeks who drifted restlessly from one lover to another.

Not all of the men at the ball favored Mr. Brummell's fashion in evening dress—blue coat, white cravat, and form-fitting tights showing a discreet length of striped silk stocking above a dancing pump. Some preferred the still-conventional fashion of knee breeches. Despite the iniquitous flour tax, many still wore their hair powdered and wore glittering jewels pinned indiscriminately about their person. Then there were the eccentrics like Henry Cope, filled with a morbid longing to attract attention. He wore only green suits and cravats and it was said he bought green furniture, had his rooms painted green, and excited the ridicule of the lampoonists;

Then there was Lord Dudley and Ward, propping up a pillar and talking to himself at great length, causing the wits to say, “It is only Dudley talking to Ward as usual.”

And then there was…

But before Lucy could examine the sudden breathless shock a single glimpse of a tall dark-haired man at the entrance to the card room had given her, a partner was bending over her hand and requesting her to join him in the country dance.

Lucy was popular, and only her very obvious love for her husband stopped many of the gentlemen from pursuing her. She was a great favorite as a dance partner because she danced beautifully and was guaranteed to say any number of charming and not too frighteningly intelligent things.

From time to time, she twisted her head, looking for that tall, dark man whose very presence had startled her in such a strange way, but she could see no sign of him in the ballroom and assumed that he must be in the card room.