She continued, driven by some sort of blind, destructive misery. “You do not understand what I am saying. I wrote that letter, and then Esme and I arranged for it to be revealed at her dinner.” His expression didn’t change. “Don’t you see? I decided that I wished to marry you, and so I trapped you. You had no choice other than to marry me.”
A leaden silence descended on the dining room, broken only by Fanning entering the room. Like all good servants, he knew instinctively that privacy was required and left without bringing the next course. Darby indicated with a jerk of his head that he would ring for him if desired.
Henrietta drank the remainder of her glass of wine. “I deliberately compromised you.”
“Why did you go to such lengths to marry me?” he asked, finally.
“I wanted the children,” Henrietta said. But it was too easy, and too untrue. “I wanted you,” she said. She was absolutely filled with rage. Rage against fate, rage against her body, rage against her husband, most of all, herself. If she’d never done such a stupid, stupid thing as marry him, she wouldn’t be contemplating that blue bottle.
“Ah,” he said. “Why?” He sounded mildly interested.
“You were different from the men of Limpley Stoke,” she snapped. “You kissed me. I wanted your children. You needed my inheritance.” She shrugged. “Does it really matter?”
“I suppose not. May I ask how this rather unsavory revelation affects our future married life?”
If he was angry, she couldn’t tell from his tone: there was no anger, merely distaste. A great, weary distaste.
She had a terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach, as if she were crushing something delicate and precious, as easily destroyed as the frost fairies on a window. But then—what did their married life matter, in proportion to what she would do by drinking that bottle?
“Immediately after Esme’s dinner party, before we discussed the sheath, you suggested a marriage in which you would keep a mistress and I would act as something of a nursemaid to your children.”
“As I recall, you were the one who raised the question of a mistress.”
She ignored that. “We shall revert to that idea. I cannot ask you to sacrifice yourself, given that I brought this marriage upon you by fraudulent means.”
She faced him, head high, tearless. “After tonight”—and she meant, after she drank that bottle—“we no longer share the same body, as you put it. My body will be mine own again.” That was almost the worst of all. After experiencing Darby, after being part of Darby, there could be no returning to one’s own skin without despair.
“You seem to be angry at me, Henrietta. And you are offering me reasons to be angry at you. Why?”
She looked at him and hated—hated—his calm. Why wasn’t he angry with her for wrangling him into marriage? Because he didn’t give a twig, that’s why. Even without sleeping with her, he still had the nursemaid he needed.
Henrietta had always been a terrible liar. “I’m not angry at you.” She could hear the rage in her own voice.
“My mother did her best to entice my father into displays of anger similar to hers. I will not show myself a lesser man than my father in this respect, Henrietta. I will not dance to your piping. If I have offended you in any respect, I would be happy to discuss the offense.”
“Your mother was probably trying to force your father to show some reaction,” Henrietta said rather shrilly.
“It always seemed to me that she was trying to dictate his feelings.” His long fingers played with the stem of his wineglass.
There is no penetrating his calm, Henrietta thought. He must feel nothing for me. “I have no doubt but what we both regret this marriage,” she said, hearing her own churlishness. “I certainly regret my—my rashness in writing that letter. But I will not make scenes, Darby. I will not behave like your mother, I assure you. I am perfectly prepared to recognize that you have other—that you have interests outside the house.”
His eyes were black in the candlelight. “And what of your professed love for me? So quickly dismissed, is it, that you can watch me take a mistress with equanimity?”
“One says many things in the heat of passion that should not be aired in the morning. You said that yourself.” Her voice was hard, and she spat it with all the rage she felt in her soul.
“True enough.” He put down his glass. “Shall I summon the carriage? I expect you would like to powder your nose before we leave for the ball.”
“The ball?”
“Naturally. We did send our acceptance.”
“But I thought you would not wish me to go, given—”
“Given that I must needs find myself a mistress? Why no, my dear. I see no reason to deprive you of pleasure.” He pulled out her chair, and if it had been anyone other than Darby, she’d have thought there was rage in the gesture.
43
Dancing Like a Fool
Lady Felicia Saville felt a mild glow of pleasure. By any reasonable assessment, she was the most important guest at the Duchess of Savington’s ball. Of the seven patronesses of Almack’s—the young matrons who could make or break a reputation—she was only one to be in London this early in the season.
It was up to her and her alone, to make or break the reputations of provincials who sought entry to the ton. So far, the ball had been disappointingly thin as regards such caterpillars. She had declined only one request for a voucher to Almack’s, and that didn’t involve a delicate weighing of negotiations and favors. Mrs. Selina Davenport had traded on their very small acquaintance, but Felicia felt no more than a fillip of interest when refusing her request for a voucher. The woman was virtually unclothed; what her fellow patronesses would make of Mrs. Davenport needed no intuition, and she would never be granted a second voucher even if Felicia had promised her one.
Her cousin pranced through the crowd toward her. “Bunge,” she said, holding out her hand. “It is such a pleasure.” It wasn’t really, but the Honorable Gerard Bunge generally had slanderous news to report and that fact made him a palatable companion.
“Felicia, my dear, Simon Darby has taken a wife!”
She waved her fan idly, as if the news were old to her. In fact she was riveted with interest. If seven young matrons controlled the female side of the ton, Simon Darby was their male counterpart. His physical beauty and exquisite sense of dress meant that his attention to a young woman (or lack thereof) was as sought after as Brummell’s, and served the same purpose as Almack’s vouchers.
“I admit surprise. I would have thought Darby had long ago decided against the marital state,” she said languidly.
“Took my advice.” Bunge’s chest swelled out a little. “I told him to marry an heiress, and that’s just what he did. Haven’t seen her yet. Should be here tonight though.”
“Of course!” Felicia said, belatedly putting two and two together. “I did hear of Lady Rawlings’s happy condition.”
“Exactly.” Bunge twitched the seam of his crimson stockings straight. “Betting is seventy to one in White’s that the child will be male.”
“Ludicrous. Who can possibly know such a thing as the child’s gender?”
“Betting on the child’s father is a great deal more lively. Last I looked at the book, Rawlings himself was only leading by a faint margin, and that after he died in his wife’s bedchamber!”
“I suppose Darby didn’t have a difficult time finding himself an heiress,” Felicia said. “What a pity he didn’t wait until the season. It would have been such an interesting courtship to watch. Do you suppose that his new father-in-law is in trade?”
“I suggested the woolly breeder,” Bunge said with an eruption of giggles. “But no. He married a daughter of the late Earl of Holkham. The man apparently left her an unentailed estate in Wiltshire.”
Felicia considered it a requisite part of her duties as a hostess of Almack’s to memorize Debrett’s Peerage. “Let’s see,” she said slowly, “that must be the elder daughter, unless
Darby stole the younger girl from the schoolroom.”
“Didn’t hear anything about her age,” said Bunge. “But it must be the elder because she inherited the estate.”
“But that girl is deformed,” Felicia said with a little gasp. “She was never brought to London for a debut, you know.”
“Perhaps it was a love match,” Bunge suggested. “Over-looked her deformity due to passion. Or if not passion…hard currency.”
“Do stop tittering,” Felicia said with all the freedom of a second cousin. “It is such an unattractive habit. I wish I could remember what was wrong with the elder daughter—”
But everyone was turning about and looking at the ballroom entrance, where the butler had just announced, “Lady Henrietta Darby and Mr. Darby.”
“Nothing wrong that I can see,” Bunge observed. “She’s a ripe one.” Lady Henrietta stood next to her husband wearing a gown whose panels floated about her like gossamer wings. Tendrils of gold curled gently around her face. Even from across the room, it was obvious that her eyes were a luscious blue. Bunge could taste the envy in his mouth. “Trust Darby to come up smelling like roses.”
Lady Felicia had married early and well, and for a few years the ton had considered her to have made a good marriage. But now everyone knew that Henry Saville was stark raving mad. The tip-off was when he rode a horse up the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral, insisting that the horse was his brother and should be baptized without delay.
So Felicia watched the Darbys with her eyes narrowed. She didn’t mind admitting that she found the company of ravishingly happy couples hard to bear. But after a few minutes of watching the Darbys, curiosity replaced her agitation.
“There’s something odd there,” she told Bunge.
“What? What?” Bunge was always eager for gossip but desperately unobservant, to her mind.
“The newlyweds,” she said slowly. “Lady Henrietta doesn’t seem—look! Darby just deserted her to dance with Mrs. Ravensclan. What a grotesque affront to his wife. I can hardly believe it.” Felicia felt a growing sense of cheer. “Come along, Bunge,” she said impatiently, “let’s go befriend the poor woman.”
Darby was finding it difficult to completely ignore his sharp-tongued little wife. He had something of a rudimentary plan when they arrived at the ball: he meant to desert her in the rudest fashion possible, then flirt extravagantly under her very nose. That would presumably make her feel an iota of the black misery that had engulfed him since dinner. How dare she believe him a man of so little honor that he would take a mistress, after what she had said…after what she had said. No one could talk of love and yet believe he was without honor.
She didn’t know him after all. Or love him.
His jaw set.
It would do his wife good to realize that he was a power in the ton. He wasn’t some country bumpkin, to be tricked into a contrived marriage. He was respected. His influence was felt throughout London, or the civilized world, which was the same thing.
He swung his partner through the motions of a country dance and looked back to feast on his wife’s discomfort.
He swallowed a curse. Felicia Saville had appeared out of nowhere and was introducing Henrietta to that nitwit, Lord Bellington.
The dance ended. Perhaps he should return to Henrietta. There was no doubt but that his behavior would be noted by half the ballroom, given that Lady Saville was performing a role that should be his. His eyes narrowed. Henrietta was greeting Lord Bellington with that smile of hers, the one that melted a man’s bones. He turned on his heel and found himself before the buxom Selina Davenport. She greeted him with the sloe-eyed desire that he wanted only from his wife.
An hour later, his wife was established as a roaring success. Acquaintance after acquaintance had congratulated him on her exquisite beauty, her wit, her sense of dress. Their eyes sparkled maliciously as they noted his absence from her side. They positively giggled in his face when he couldn’t bring himself to answer urbanely to their little barbed comments.
Gerald Bunge was the worst, hovering at his side like an insect, buzzing about how he couldn’t have found a better spouse. And all the time Bunge’s little body trembled with lust to find out why he was on one side of the room and his wife on the other.
Darby could feel his reputation for urbane calm falling to shreds about his feet. She’d done it, by God. She’d turned him into someone akin to his mother. His self-command was paper thin.
At some point during the evening, he had started drinking. Heavily. Rees turned up at the ball around one in the morning and found Darby wandering through the ballroom, glass of whiskey in hand.
Having known Darby since he was breeched, Rees instantly put together the dazed misery in his friend’s eyes with the fastidiously upright way he was prowling across the dance floor. Like a bloody savage he looked. Last time Rees remembered seeing Darby that way was when his mother—an outright bitch if there ever was one—scanned him from head to foot just before his first London ball, and then made a laughing remark about a popinjay to her husband before turning away.
That evening Darby had bowed so sharply that he almost cut the air, and proceeded to get so drunk that the evening ended in the stables with Rees holding Darby’s head. Of course, he was only fifteen then, as proud of his yellow pantaloons as he was resentful of his knife-edged mother. It always struck Rees as unfortunate that Darcy’s mother died a few months after that episode.
No doubt it was again a woman that had put him in this state. “Where is she then?” Rees asked, hauling Darby off the ballroom floor.
“My wife?” Darby asked airily. “God knows.”
Rees looked around.
“She’s been talking to Henry Piddlerton for the last half hour,” Darby said, revealing that he knew Henrietta’s whereabouts precisely. “The poor old sod is staring into her eyes as if she were the holy grail. Down her gown too.”
Rees sighed and towed him into a card room off the library. “What the hell is going on?” he said, leaning against the door in case Darby tried to make a run for it.
“It’s all quite commonplace, really. I should have taken your advice and avoided matrimony,” Darby said, not meeting his eyes. He ranged the room, picking up trinkets and putting them down with enough force to crack them. “Wives are devils.”
Rees opened the door and sent a footman for a pot of strong coffee.
It took quite a while to pry the situation out of Darby. Only after drinking three cups of coffee did he become at all coherent.
“I tend to agree with you,” Rees said slowly. “At the very least, an expert should examine her hip.”
“She definitely wants the child. I believe that Henrietta’s limp would not be an impediment to carrying a babe.”
“You know nothing of midwifery,” Rees objected.
“Her hip looks precisely like any other woman’s. And who knows what happened during her mother’s lying-in? A bunch of country doctors jumped to the conclusion that the tragedy resulted from that weak joint. I don’t call that sufficient evidence. But she believes—she truly believes—what she’s been told.”
“Then you must tell her different.”
“How? She expects me to take myself off and get a mistress. She’s decided that future bedding is out of the question—and she doesn’t seem to have any other use for me! She thinks I’m the kind of man who would betray her.” Darby ground to a halt. He hadn’t meant to tell Rees that particular truth.
“Bosh,” Rees said, turning around from the mantelpiece and scowling at Darby. “You’re a fool if you believe that tripe. You’re as bad as she is. She’s likely been told that men have to tup a woman every other hour or die trying, and she believes it; you believe that she doesn’t care if you take a mistress. Fools, both of you.” He paused for a moment. Then: “I never had the chance to have a marriage like yours. You know that.”
Darby stared at his friend. Rees looked like a great, growling bear.
“I have no u
se for women. But if Henrietta was my wife—” Rees turned to the door and said it over his shoulder. “Don’t—” He stopped, turned around, and looked his friend straight in the face.
“Don’t lose her.”
Darby emerged from the card room shaken. He’d known Rees for years and never seen him look like that. Almost…almost as if he were lonely.
It only took a minute to locate Henrietta. She was seated on a rounded settee in the corner of the ballroom, being entertained by two gentlemen.
She looked up when he approached. “May I request the pleasure of this dance?” he said, bowing with a flourish.
There was a collective little gasp amongst the men around her, and he remembered too late that Henrietta was lame. That his wife couldn’t dance. He never thought of her in those terms.
She threw up her fan but he could feel the anger glittering from behind it. “You must have misremembered,” she cooed. “I do not dance. I suggest you find some other partner. I shall be quite happy here.” She waved her fan and smiled brilliantly at the Honorable James Landow, seated to her left. The poor besotted fool smiled back as if she had promised him the moon. “We were just discussing the old-fashioned tradition in which a lady invites gentlemen into her boudoir to help her dress.”
Henrietta in a rage was a revelation. Gone was the country mouse. She shone with a glittering, sensual wit that made every man within her orbit come to attention.
“Told Lady Henrietta I think it would be a charming habit to resurrect,” Landow said, with a quick sideways glance at Darby.
“Oh, don’t worry about my husband, dear sir,” Henrietta said with a roguish smile. She tapped her closed fan on Darby’s arm. “We have a thoroughly modern marriage. In fact, we hardly know a thing about each other. He did just ask me to dance!” Her laughter spilled out, but there wasn’t a trace of humor in it.
The two gentlemen seated on either side of her laughed as well, although neither of them met Darby’s eyes.