Edwardian Candlelight Omnibus (60 page)

Aileen was sobbing angrily into a pocket handkerchief.

The marquess swung around with relief as Tilly appeared in the doorway, with a straw boater crammed on her carroty hair.

“Tart!” howled the duchess. “Serpent!”

“Serpent yourself!” said Tilly. “You great hairy cow. You can take that backboard of yours and plonk your great bum on it and sail off down the Themes to oblivion, for all I care.”

The marquess winced at the vulgarity and Aileen went into strong hysterics.

“I’ve a good mind to slap you for your impertinence,” said the duchess, lumbering forward threateningly.

“Just you try,” gasped Tilly, putting up her small fists, more like a schoolboy than ever. “Come on, then. Let’s have you!”

The marquess picked up his enraged fiancée and carried her out of the house and bundled her into his carriage. “That’ll larn her,” said Tilly, flushed with success.

“By marrying me, you have revenge enough,” said the marquess severely. “Now, straighten your hat, sit up straight, and be silent!”

“Yes,” said Tilly meekly. “Where are we going?”

“You are going to stay with an old friend of my mother’s, a Mrs. Plumb. I thought there might be some trouble, so I called on her before I saw you. She is very old but I could not take you anywhere else, since my relatives would certainly not welcome you. They wished me to keep the marriage—and the money—in the family.”

“Were you so sure I would accept?” asked Tilly, suddenly shy.

“Well, yes,” he said slowly. “After all, your position was not a happy one. But nonetheless, Tilly, you must curb these exhibitions of unladylike behavior, no matter how severe the provocation. And your language!”

“Spent too much time on the hunting field,” said Tilly with an unrepentant grin.

Her spirits were bubbling and soaring like champagne. It was just like a novel. They would be married. She, Tilly Burningham, the Beast, was to marry the Beauty. Love must follow. Why, all her novels told her so!

Mrs. Plumb lived in a great mock Swiss chalet in Fitzjohn’s Avenue, just north of Swiss Cottage.

The marquess rang the bell for what seemed an age before the door was opened by an elderly butler.

The butler inclined his head in a stately manner and indicated that they should follow him. He led them through a dark hall to the back of the house and into the garden, where an old lady was snoozing under the shade of a large oak.

“The Honorable Miss Buggering and the Most Nutty Mucker of Heppleford!” announced the butler.

“Don’t worry,” said the marquess soothingly as he noticed the startled expression on Tilly’s face. “He’s dotty. Been like that for years. Old lady can’t fire him; wouldn’t dream of it.”

Mrs. Plumb woke up with a start. She was a very frail old lady, dressed in gray lace, lying on a chaise longue like some insubstantial ghost in the bright sunshine.

“Welcome, Philip,” she said, offering a withered cheek to be kissed. “And this is…?”

The marquess introduced Tilly, who seized Mrs. Plumb’s gloved hand and operated it like a pump handle. “So you are to be Philip’s bride,” said the old lady, shrinking slightly back into the cushions of the chaise longue, as if to retreat from the boisterous Tilly.

“I’ll leave you two ladies to chat,” said the marquess unfeelingly, not noticing the dismay on the two faces turned toward him. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Tilly. It will be a very quiet wedding, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Tilly hurriedly.

“Yes, please,” said Mrs. Plumb faintly. “You may have the conservatory for the reception. So little there to damage.”

She held out her hand to be kissed by the marquess and then lay back against the cushions and closed her eyes.

Left alone, Tilly eyed her nervously. “Jolly ripping of you to have me,” she ventured.

“You must excuse me. I must sleep,” said Mrs. Plumb, opening her faded blue eyes. “Tell Jumbles—the butler, you know—to show you to your rooms. You must be exhausted.”

Tilly reluctantly complied, although she would have liked to stay in the fresh air of the garden with its bright flowers and cool grass.

The butler was nowhere to be seen and she suddenly did not have the courage to poke around strange servants’ quarters looking for him. She finally came across a startled betweenstairs maid who conducted her to a pleasant suite of rooms on the second floor. The furniture belonged to the eighties of the last century, being of the hot, overstuffed variety. But a great elm tree grew right outside the windows of both sitting room and bedroom, shielding them from the brassy glare outside.

Tilly kicked off her shoes and lay down on the bed, clasping her hands behind her neck and staring up at the ceiling.

Bit by bit her excitement began to fade, to be replaced by cold doubt. Already she missed Francine’s reassuring presence. And what would she, Tilly, wear as a wedding gown? There would surely be no time to get one made and even Tilly knew one simply did not wear ready-made clothes, particularly to one’s wedding.

Then she remembered she had her mother’s wedding dress in an old trunk with the rest of her belongings, which were being sent for. It would just have to do.

The marquess returned briefly that evening to tell her the wedding was set for a week ahead. He was pleasant, smiling, and businesslike. Mrs. Plumb appeared to have detached herself from the whole proceedings and Tilly was left to handle much of the arrangements for the wedding herself.

She was sorely in need of another woman to talk to, to advise her, to allay her fears. The marquess’s formidable aunts and their disappointed daughters were to attend, but they were of no help.

One evening during the following week, Tilly carried her mother’s wedding dress downstairs to ask Mrs. Plumb for her advice. But Mrs. Plumb had merely glanced at it through half-closed eyes and murmured, “Very pretty.”

Tilly longed for the courage to consult a dressmaker, but the bills were already heading in the marquess’s direction for food and flowers and wine and extra servants, since the servants in Mrs. Plumb’s mansion were mostly too old to cope with the added work and fuss.

Then there was the cost of the marquee to be erected in the garden and the fashionable orchestra to be paid.

The weather blazed on remorselessly and the letters to
The Times
prophecied drought.

It was a very hot and tired Tilly who finally stood at the altar for the wedding rehearsal. The marquess arrived with Toby, who was to perform the part of best man. Both seemed in high spirits—in more ways than one, to judge from the strong smell of brandy emanating from them.

Tilly’s maid of honor was a timid, quiet girl, an acquaintance from Tilly’s Jeebles days, called Bessie Cartwright-Smythe. Tilly went through her part of the ceremony, anxious that she should not do anything wrong.

The marquess and Toby left immediately afterward to attend a bachelor party in the marquess’s honor, the silent Bessie went off to stay with an aunt, and Tilly was once more on her own. An old friend of her father’s, Colonel Percy Braithwaite, was to give her away and was spending the evening at his club.

The eve of her wedding!

She lay on the chaise longue in the garden, staring up at the faintly moving leaves of the oak tree, feeling increasingly nervous. She had not yet even tried on her mother’s wedding dress.

She thought of her husband-to-be with a sort of half-formed adolescent longing. If only he would smile at her tenderly—even hold her hand. He surely could not be indifferent to her, thought poor Tilly, unaware that that was the very reason that had prompted the marquess to propose.

I shall probably sleep with him
, thought Tilly, feeling very warm at the thought.
But what on earth am I supposed to
do?
The duchess always says that only the lower classes feel passion—witness the Fallen Women—but all my romances are about lords and ladies. Perhaps he is distant with me because he feels it would be ill-bred to betray his feelings. And babies! He will want an heir. But how is it achieved? Surely not like the farm animals. Oh, these are dreadful thoughts…
.

And so Tilly’s mind raced on and on as a cool sliver of moon rose above the baking city.

After awhile she felt her eyelids begin to droop and she reluctantly took herself off to her hot bedroom. As she was dropping off to sleep an anguished thought struck her. She had forgotten to hire the services of a major-domo to announce the guests and she shuddered to think of the muddle old Jumbles would make with their names. And then she fell into a deep nightmare in which the marquess, aided by Aileen and the duchess, was pushing her into a home for Disreputable Women because she had betrayed too strong a passion for her husband.

The day of Tilly’s wedding dawned brassy and hotter than ever. She was awakened at dawn by the energetic hammering of the men erecting the marquee in the garden.

She dressed and went downstairs to find the house abustle with strange servants carrying chairs, potted plants, and silver. Mrs. Plumb appeared early as well, roused at last to a sense of her duties to her young guest. Tilly was bustled back upstairs with Mrs. Plumb’s antique lady’s maid to begin the long and painful preparations for the wedding ceremony.

It was all too soon discovered that Tilly’s wedding dress had been designed to fit her mother’s slim figure. A servant was sent scuttling off to find a seamstress, and Tilly stood miserably while the dress was sewn onto her around two-inch inserts of white satin. The gown had also been designed to cover an 1880s bustle, and there was an agonizing search of the attics before the right undergarment was found.

Despite Tilly’s protests, white enamel makeup, complete with two circles of rouge, one on either cheek, was considered de rigueur for a bride.

Tilly was poked and pushed and turned and pinned and painted and frizzed and finally drowned in Parma Violets, a perfume that always made her sneeze.

The seamstress, the lady’s maid, and a bevy of other female servants who had been dragged in to help finally ceased their efforts and stood in a circle, staring at Tilly in satisfaction.

They had turned Tilly into a fashion plate—but a fashion plate of the 1880s, not the present early 1900s. Not a hair was out of place. The creamy folds of old lace were swept into a large bustle at the back. A little coronet of artificial white flowers held a short veil of fine and priceless Valenciennes lace. A huge bouquet in a silver filigree holder was put into her white-gloved hands and she was propelled toward the door. Between the old-fashioned dress and the enameled mask of her makeup, Tilly looked like a pretty but lifeless waxwork from Madame Tussauds.

But to Mrs. Plumb and the colonel and all the servants lined up at the foot of the stairs, Tilly looked perfect. Compliments were showered on her, all of which Tilly accepted with gruff gratitude.

But as Tilly walked up the aisle, the marquess’s relatives let out gasps of delighted shock and dismay. What a fright the awful girl looked! How clumsily she walked with those great mannish strides! The marquess gave his bride a warm smile. He had wanted to shock his relatives and dear Tilly was doing just that,
splendidly
.

All Tilly’s doubts and fears were swept away the minute the marquess bent to kiss her. His lips were cool and firm, her own, warm and naively passionate.

She walked down the aisle on his arm, oblivious of the hard stares, deaf to the spiteful comments. The “Wedding March” boomed triumphantly from the organ loft and the bells in the Norman tower crashed and clanged their joyous message to the world.

The Honorable Matilda Burningham had made it.

She had captured the best-looking man in London.

She was a marchioness.

“I feel like Cinderella,” said the Marchioness of Heppleford shyly.

No response from her husband.

Tilly sighed and looked out of the window of the carriage to where the great pile of Chennington lay with its medieval spires and battlements standing up against a purple-black sky. The sun was dying behind the thunder-laden clouds in fiery splendor, gilding the gray stone of Chennington with a strange light.

In the calm before the storm, the park through which they were driving seemed extra green, the heavy old trees standing motionless in the sultry heat.

A white swan bent its long neck to study its reflection in an ornamental lake beside the drive, and the weeping willows seemed to twine branches with their mirror counterparts in the flat black water. A marble rotunda gleamed white on its grassy hillock.

The marquess shifted uneasily in the carriage. What a farce of a wedding! That terrible butler, Jumbles, murdering the names of the guests with gay abandon (and the marquess was sure it was neither age nor eccentricity on the part of the butler but hell-inspired mischief that had prompted him to announce the acid Duchess of Dereham as “the Dutchman of Drearie”), and Tilly, chattering and romping like a schoolgirl.

He had promised the delicious Cora that he would be back in her arms by tomorrow at the latest. He would catch the Channel steamer from Southampton this evening, he decided. It was his wedding night, but then, this was not a normal wedding and Tilly was such a strange girl, she would probably find nothing amiss.

The staff of Chennington was lined up in the great hall under the moldering banners of dead and gone Hepplefords to greet the young bride.

Tilly had been used to a large staff of servants at Jeebles, so the formidable array of faces did not daunt her. The marquess noticed that she said the correct thing to each member of his staff and that nagging feeling of guilt about leaving her so soon returned to plague him.

But when Tilly arrived in the long drawing room with its gilded walls and painted ceiling, wearing a suit of a mannish cut, in a shocking shade of pink that argued violently with her hair, he fortified himself from the decanter and became more determined than ever to make his escape.

Tilly chattered happily about a visit from the housekeeper, Mrs. Judd, who had promised to take her on a tour of the mansion on the morrow.

The marquess put down his glass with a little click.