The Spanish Marriage (15 page)

Thea began to apologize. “I won’t embarrass you
by going along with you....”

“Fiddlesticks. A cool cloth across your eyes for half
an hour, and wipe that paint off your face—how I could have chosen such a
grossly inappropriate color for you is beyond me!—and you’ll be
perfectly viewable. Whatever it is that troubles you today, my lamb, you scored
a very pretty triumph last night, and I have no intention of letting that advantage
go to waste. If I cannot wangle a voucher to Almacks’ for you by the end
of the day, I am a far poorer strategist than I think I am. Now come here,
lamb, and lie down. Lewis, fetch a cloth and the
eau de cologne
.”

In an hour Thea admitted she did feel a little better. She
stubbornly refused to tell Lady Ocott what the matter was between her and her
husband, but the older woman did not seem fazed. “You will tell me when
you’re ready, I don’t doubt.” Dismissing the problem as
easily as that, Lady Ocott bundled Thea into her pelisse and took her off to
spend money at the glovemaker’s and
parfumerie,
and incidentally
to encounter half-a-dozen of the hostesses of upcoming events as they stepped
from their carriages or out into the street from shop doors. Again Thea had the
sense that she was being artfully, beautifully managed, but Lady Ocott was so
cheerful and unfeignedly delighted with each encounter that it was impossible
to do anything but imitate her delight as best she could, going through the
motions of conversation while a tiny, vicious voice inside her head repeated
over and over that she had spoiled everything with her lie.

As they were descending from a shoemaker’s where Thea
had placed an order for three pairs of kid slippers, they encountered a cloud
of young women bent on entering the same door. One of them looked from Lady
Ocott to her companion, then bent and whispered into the ear of her nearest
companion, who turned and whispered a reply. Lady Ocott feigned disinterest and
swept past them, but Thea caught the first woman’s glance as she passed:
mocking, curious, infinitely superior.

“Who
was
that?” she murmured to Lady
Ocott.

The older woman sighed gustily. “I had hoped she might
have disappeared by now, sent off to rusticate by her husband’s family.
Heaven knows they’ve cause enough. That, lamb, is Lady Towles.”

Thea stopped in her tracks and turned to look behind her. Lady
Towles, who had been Adele Frain before her marriage? This certainly warranted
a closer look, and the opportunity to see the woman Matlin had wanted to marry,
had called for out of his delirium.

It appeared that Lady Towles had the same idea. Her friends
had continued into the shoemaker’s shop, and she stood alone, posed with
one foot on the step and displaying a neatly turned ankle in what Thea thought
a deliberately coquettish manner. Everything about Lady Towles was deliberate
and opulent, from the deep chestnut of her hair to her figure to her expression
of sensuous amusement. Her high-necked satin pelisse draped negligently about
her shoulders and her muslin dress was both modish and alarmingly transparent
for street dress. She was undeniably beautiful, but for the first time since
she had met Douglas Matlin, Thea was conscious of disappointment in him.
This
was his Adele?

“He was very young, then, my dear,” Lady Ocott
murmured behind her.

Thea turned away guiltily. “Was it so obvious, what I
was thinking?”

Lady Ocott laughed. “My God, who wouldn’t think
such a thing? Just as she was thinking you an insignificant little squab, and
wondering whatever did Douglas see in you? Adele Frain could never fancy anyone
passably attractive next to herself.”

“She is rather overwhelming.”

“Overwhelming? Dear heaven, my sweet life, she’s
like being smothered in hothouse roses! Well, you’ve seen each other now;
so that bit of suspense is done with, but do be careful of her, lamb. She’s
no more scruples, or morals, I might add, than an alley cat. She attaches men
just for the fun of it. Not,” she added fairly, “that I think she’d
have any luck with Douglas.
That
charm has run its course, anyway. Well.”
Lady Ocott squeezed Thea’s arm affectionately. “Who could compare
the two of you? Adele Frain was a lapse of taste on Douglas’s part, if
you ask me. We all owe her undying gratitude for being unable to forego having her
cake and flirting with other men.”

Aside from her amusement at Lady Ocott’s peculiar
imagery, Thea remained unconvinced. She did not argue the matter. With
conscious dignity she tucked her hand in her companion’s arm and they
started back for Bond Street. All the way back to the chariot, while Lady Ocott
busily pointed out agreeable window-displays, Thea thought of Matlin and of
Lady Towles. Was that what he wanted? No wonder he had been disappointed in his
marriage from the first....

She stumbled and would have fallen had Lady Ocott not had a
firm grip on her arm.

“Dorothea, really. I misdoubt that Douglas has spared more
than a thought in the last year for that wench,” she assured Thea
obliquely. “And look, see who is coming toward us? Smile, for mercy’s
sake, my love: it’s Emily Cowper, and you do want to make an impression.”

Thea did not have time to ask why she had to impress Lady
Cowper, but she smiled, made an effort to chat easily, and was rewarded for her
efforts when, just as she was about to continue on her way down Bond Street,
Lady Cowper turned, took Thea’s hand in her own, told her that she was a
pretty little thing and must certainly come to the assemblies. “I will
send a voucher to you,” she promised, and left with a smile of
significance for Lady Ocott.

“Well, my dear, and did I not tell you? Vouchered for
Almacks’, and before tea at that. I think we have done very well for
today. Let us go home, by all means. I am famished; aren’t you?”

o0o

Where a patroness of Almacks’ had shown favor it
seemed that all but the least fashionable or the most iconoclastic were likely
to be agreeable. Within a week of that first visit to the theatre invitations
began to arrive with her morning chocolate, and her name was included as a
matter of course in Lady Ocott’s invitations. Slowly she was acquiring a
circle of acquaintances who greeted her in the street or in the Park; she was
recognized at parties and sought out. She was a heroine, as Matlin had once
prophesied. At tea she was surrounded by girls just out of the schoolroom who
begged her to tell the story of her escape from Spain. At breakfasts eager
dowagers tssked and commiserated loftily over the trials she had undergone. At
evening parties a seemingly endless stream of young men asked her to dance and
flirted gently with her.

It should have been heaven, the fulfillment of a fantasy.
Had anyone told Thea three months before as she shelled peas in the convent
kitchen that she would someday waltz at Almacks’, be greeted by lions of
the
ton
and have her dress complimented by George Brummel himself, she
would have scoffed delightedly. She found, now, that delight was remarkably
short-lived.

“And you lived in a convent with nuns?” she was
asked for the hundredth time, by a debutante in sausage curls and sprigged
muslin whose sole idea of conventual life was drawn from Mrs. Radcliffe and
Horace Walpole. Thea was trying to see if Matlin was among the throng at Lady
Ocott’s card party; she answered something absently and kept looking.

“And Sir Douglas married you there?”

“Yes. To save my reputation,” she added
unnecessarily.

“How exciting it must have been!”

Thea tried to curb her impatience; had she not thought the same
thing herself, once? “If you call it exciting to be seasick from Oporto
to Bournemouth,” she murmured. Matlin was nowhere to be seen. Another
girl had shouldered through and was asking something. Thea answered absently.
She was all nerves and raw ends; she had not seen Matlin for days, and was
certain that he had decided not to honor his aunt’s party. He was probably
at his club or meeting with someone from the Foreign Office. Lord Ocott, with
the kindest of intentions, had made it easy for his nephew to spend his time
away from the house and away from his wife.

Someone was asking another question.

“I’m sorry, I beg your pardon?” Thea
scanned the crowd again by habit. No sign of Matlin.... She smiled nervously at
the pretty brunette who stood beside her now. Behind her a young man who might
have been her twin was plucking idly at her shoulder and advising her not to
make such a cake of herself. “Give over, Bess. Let a man take his chance
without you gabbling.” He smiled at Thea ruefully. “That is, if you
don’t mind, ma’am?”

Bess pouted artistically for a moment. “Lady Matlin,
this ill-mannered wretch is my brother Tony.”

“Anthony Chase, ma’am, entirely at your service.”
He bowed his dark head over Thea’s hand. At his side Bess Chase made a
sisterly
moue
of disgust, and for a moment brother and sister fell into
lighthearted bickering. Thea listened to them in amazement. They seemed so
young, or was it simply that she felt years older? Chase was certainly a few
years her senior. Done with their wrangle, the Chases turned back to Thea with
identical expressions of expectant good will, and because Matlin was nowhere to
be seen and because it was her duty to be a good hostess, and because there was
something particularly engaging about Bess and her brother, Thea smiled and
prepared to answer more questions.

o0o

Although he had deliberately kept himself from any social engagement
that might include his young wife, Matlin had thought he could not avoid his
aunt’s party without creating talk. At the last moment, however, he was
summoned by Canning himself with a report to be translated; so, while Thea
watched in vain for him he was bent over a desk trying to make head or tail of
a smuggled-in dispatch from Spain. He had been increasingly caught up in the
affairs of the Foreign Office; he had no defined place or job and made himself
useful by sharing his information and translating the Spanish he spoke so
poorly. Canning liked him, thought him sensible, observant, and given to
laudable devotion to his work, a trait uncommon in a young, new-wedded man.

“Doesn’t that pretty young wife of yours damn my
soul for keeping you so much from her side?” he asked when he gave Matlin
the report to translate.

The word Matlin heard was
young.
He smiled unhappily and
replied that his wife was far too much occupied in cutting a dash to fret over
his absence.

“Well, if you think so, my boy; but don’t think
we cannot spare you of an evening. I hear Lady Matlin has become quite the
thing; you may want to stake your claim amongst her beaux.”

“Beaux?” Thea, being sought after at evening
parties, tricked out in those damnably low-cut evening dresses, importuned no
doubt, trusting people as she did. He lost sight of the real Thea in a fantasy
he was weaving about her endangered innocence.

Only later, sipping brandy at Whites’, he told himself
that the only person who had hurt Thea was he; the only man who had taken
advantage of her innocence was he; the only one who had no right to ask
anything of his wife was he himself. He drank too much, was assisted home to
Hill Street by a crossing-sweep, and narrowly avoided being taken up for
impertinence to the Watch. Again, he had avoided meeting his wife.

It was not possible to spend all his time at Whitehall or at
Whites’; even the private suppers hosted by his friends ended some time.
He must return from time to time to the Ocotts’ house, and while his own
smaller house in Charles Street was under lease to a doctor from Lincolnshire,
he could not retire there. So he picked among his invitations and chose parties
at which Thea was least likely to appear. It was inevitable that in these
circles, admittedly not always the best, he should encounter Lady Towles.

He was at a card-party at Marlborough House where he chatted
with one of the Lamb cousins and wondered when he could decently retire to the
library; there something more substantial than iced cup was being served.

“Douglas, old man! Say hello to a chap, won’t
ye?”

At the sound of that voice and the clap of a solid, meaty
hand on his shoulder, Matlin turned and found himself looking into the
protuberant brown eyes of Sir Charles Towles. Sir Charles wore an outrageously
cut coat of green superfine, and the starched points of his collar poked into
the puffy rounds of his cheeks. His fair hair, which had earned him the
nickname “Taffy” amongst his cronies, had been lavishly pommaded
and forced into unconvincing curls about his ears and forehead. There were
beads of sweat along his upper lip.

“Hello, Towles.” Matlin made the greeting as
cordial as possible. He had never been a part of Sir Charles’s crowd and
could not understand the reason for his enthusiastic greeting now. Then, as he
caught a glimpse of chestnut hair just beyond Towles’s shoulder, Matlin
thought he understood. In a moment his surmise was confirmed: Lady Towles
joined her husband.

“Douglas, my dear friend.” She extended her hand
to him with a meaningful smile. Matlin took her hand coldly, bowed over it, and
let it go.

“Adele. I felicitate you both, of course. I had not
heard of your marriage until very lately.”

“Oh, yes, you were out of the country, weren’t
you?” Lady Towles’s voice was sweet. She poised her hand delicately
on her husband’s sleeve and watched Matlin through her eyelashes.

Oblivious to undercurrents, Sir Charles nodded emphatically.
“Quite an adventure, eh, Matlin? Must tell me all about it over a bottle
or two some night, eh? And where’s your wife? Understand you married a
Spanish Señorita; is that it?”

“My wife’s mother is Spanish. She was raised in
Somerset, and is quite as English as you are yourself.” Matlin’s
tone was barely civil.