Taming of Annabelle (13 page)

‘It seems he was much enamoured of Miss Cummings, a reigning belle some six or eight years ago. She and Brabington were expected to make a match of it. He had no money but her parents
liked Brabington and were prepared to help the young couple out. He proposed and was cruelly rejected. A week later she became engaged to Lord Alistair Grant, who was practically in his dotage. But
very rich. Very rich, and with a title, you see.

‘A week before the wedding, Brabington – he was plain Captain Peter Simpson then – inherited the marquessate and a considerable fortune. Round to his house comes weeping Miss
Cummings, begging him to marry her, saying she loved him all along. “Then why wouldn’t you marry me? Why do you wish to marry me now?” And she replies, all pretty
innocence, that things are all changed now he has the title. He sent her to the rightabout and went out and got roaring drunk.’

‘I’m surprised you heard all this,’ said the vicar. ‘Brabington didn’t strike me as the type to broadcast his affairs.’

‘He didn’t. We all ignore servants and forget that they gossip just as we do and that they often have a nasty habit of listening at doors.’

‘Gad’s ’Oonds!’ gasped the vicar. ‘If my Bella opens up her mouth and says anything to imply she married him for
anything
other than love . . . why,
he’ll leave her. She’ll end up one o’ them lost demi-widows.’

The vicar pulled a half hunter out of a capacious pocket in his waistcoat and stared at it. The wedding breakfast had begun at three. Night was pressing against the window panes. It was now ten
in the evening.

‘When do you think he’ll try to mount her?’ he said.

‘Really Charles,’ said the Squire with a fastidious shudder. ‘For a man of the cloth, you have a vulgar tongue. I think too many hours on the hunting field have coarsened your
language. To speak so, and of your own daughter!’

‘Well, when?’ said the vicar impatiently.

‘About now.’

‘And . . . ?’

‘And unless he is a man devoid of sensitivity, he will shortly be shooting from his house like a cannon ball and hell-bent on getting as drunk as possible.’

The vicar sighed and moodily poked the fire with his boot.

The Squire coughed delicately. ‘We could of course take the carriage and wait outside the house . . . A little advice from two older gentlemen, say?’

‘He’ll probably shoot me,’ said the vicar gloomily.

‘Perhaps. Let us go.’

The Marquess of Brabington had kept the town house in Conduit Street much the same as it had been in the late Marquess’s day.

It was tall and thin, more spacious inside than it looked out. But the rooms were sombre and dark. There were a great deal of landscapes ornamenting the walls, their canvases so badly in need of
cleaning that it was often hard to tell what part of England they were meant to portray. Annabelle felt crushed, almost extinguished by the dimness and silence of the rooms. The servants were very
elderly, the Marquess not having the heart to get rid of any of them. Although Annabelle had already seen the house – in the company of her mother, Lady Godolphin and Minerva – the
Marquess took her over it again, apologizing for its masculine dinginess and urging her to make any alterations she saw fit.

But although he was warm and affectionate and loving, Annabelle trailed after him from room to room, like a sulky schoolchild, and, for the first time, he found to his horror he was becoming
irritated with her.

Then he chided himself, remembering that she was very young and that she had just been separated from her family.

If he had taken her in his arms or had made any reference to the pleasures of the night to come, then Annabelle might have burst into tears and confessed her fears.

But his easy manner, his atmosphere of
expecting
everything to be well with her, made her lose courage.

They shared a glass of wine and some biscuits before retiring for the night. The housemaid, Betty, had been appointed lady’s maid to the new Marchioness and she was so busy putting on airs
in the kitchen that she almost forgot to attend to her mistress and prepare her for bed.

Annabelle sat like a statue while Betty brushed out her hair, looking so lost and miserable that the maid was at last moved to pity and exclaimed, ‘Oh, Miss Bella, if there’s
anything you would want to know, anything your Ma didn’t tell you . . .’

But Annabelle only said crossly, ‘You must call me my lady, Betty, and do try not to be so familiar,’ and so Betty tossed her head, and went silently off to lay out my lady’s
night rail.

Betty at last left and Annabelle climbed into bed and lay shivering despite the heat of the fire. She had a suite of rooms adjoining those of her husband – her husband, the stranger.

Her mind seemed to fly along on different levels of thought. At the top, she was cross because Betty was untrained and should have warmed her nightgown at the fire and passed a warming pan over
the sheets. On the next, she longed for Minerva, although she knew that was mad, but she wanted the Minerva who always had rescued her from scrapes in the past. Further down lurked the handsome
face and figure of Lord Sylvester, forever lost. And right at the bottom, thrumming and throbbing away, the ancient fear of the virgin, lying on the edge of the unknown.

She had extinguished all the candles so that the room was dimly lit by the rosy glow of the fire.

At last the door opened, and the Marquess strode in. A spurt of flame from a log threw his great black shadow dancing over the walls.

Annabelle lay very still, rigid. She had never felt so cold, so young, so frightened. With all her heart and soul, she longed to put the clock back and find herself alone in her narrow bed in
the vicarage.

He divested himself of his dressing gown. Annabelle peeped through her fingers and saw the red light of the fire shining on the muscles of his naked legs beneath his nightshirt and screwed her
eyes tight shut.

He climbed into bed and she quickly turned her back on him and scrunched up into a protective ball like a hedgehog.

‘Well, my sweeting,’ he said in a husky voice. ‘I think you should at least kiss your husband goodnight.’

A wild hope seized her that that was all he wished – one goodnight kiss. She cautiously turned around and he gathered her into his arms and pressed her cold figure down the length of his
warm, hard, muscular body.

He kissed her lightly on the tip of her nose, and she could sense, rather than see, that he was smiling.

He kissed her cheeks and her eyelids and then, very, very gently, he kissed her mouth, his hands slowly stroking the length of her body.

Annabelle began to feel warm and strangely comforted. The gentle soothing kisses and caressing stroking seemed to go on and on, until she could feel a tremor of excitement beginning to invade
the pit of her stomach. His mouth pressed a little harder on hers and then began moving across her lips.

The tremors of excitement built up in Annabelle, until he put one hand on her breast and buried his mouth deeply in hers. She was swept with a feeling of wild elation and moved langourously in
his arms.

The Marquess raised his mouth at last, and, cradling her in his arms, he looked down at her tenderly.

Alive now with adolescent lust, shaking and eager for more discoveries, Annabelle hardly knew where she was or what she was saying. As he drew her tightly against him again, she gasped,
‘Oh, Sylvester,
love me
!’

And all at once the room seemed to go cold and black.

With one abrupt movement, the Marquess swung his long legs over the edge of the bed and strode from the room, banging the door behind him.

Outside the Marquess’s house in Conduit Street a closed carriage was standing under the feeble light of one of the parish lamps. In it sat Squire Radford and the Reverend
Charles Armitage. They felt they had been waiting forever. The vicar pulled a silver flask from his pocket and, after offering it to the Squire, who refused, he drank a great gulp of brandy. He
fidgeted for some minutes and then took out a large silver snuff box like a small coffin, flicked open the lid and took a hearty pinch. He sneezed appreciatively and wiped his nose on his sleeve,
cursing as the silver buttons on his cuff got in the way.

Squire Radford shuddered fastidiously and handed the vicar a clean handkerchief.

‘Just think, Jimmy,’ said the vicar dreamily. ‘
Two
fortunes in the Armitage family. I could have the finest pack in England.’

‘I have always considered it eccentric for a man of your means to have a private pack. Have you not considered a subscription hunt?’ asked the Squire.

‘Aye, well, there you have me. Truth to tell, I could not bear all the argyfying and organization and whatnot.’

‘I hope,’ said the Squire, a trifle severely, ‘that your efforts to save Annabelle’s marriage are prompted by concern for her welfare and not by dreams of perfecting your
pack at the Marquess of Brabington’s expense.’

‘Brabington’s as brilliant a rider over a country as ever cheered a hound,’ said the vicar, ignoring the Squire’s last remark. ‘He’ll see my way of
things.’

‘Furthermore,’ pursued the Squire, ‘money is not always the answer. Take the Reverend John Russell of North Devon. You must have heard of his celebrated breed of fox terriers.
Well,
they
were all bred from a little white bitch he bought from a milkman at Oxford.’

‘Never heard o’ him, and I’m sure it’s all a hum,’ said the vicar sulkily. Then his face brightened. ‘I tell ’ee, Jimmy, I’ll be glad to get shot
of the metropolis. No place for a hunting gentleman. Them newspapers, too, are always sneering at the hunting clergy. And the lot of ’em are agin blood sports. Then why don’t they go
for the pheasants? I
hates
pheasants. They’ve dispossessed the fox and demoralized the country. Foxes are crafty and that’s what makes the sport the greatest. Did I ever tell you
about that Green Man Inn over the far side o’ Hopeminster? They kept a tame fox in the kitchen to run in the wheel as a turnspit. One day, Reynard gets out and plays havoc with the geese and
then disappears.

‘We had hounds out next day and we picked up his scent not far from the inn. He led us a thirty-mile chase across country did that fox, and then he doubles back in a great ring, dives into
the inn kitchen, leaps into the wheel, and starts turning the spit as if he had never left. The hounds would have had him, but that fat cook, Bessie, she loves that fox, so she covers him with her
petticoats and starts screeching and laying into the hounds with the ladle. He died of old age, did that wretched fox. T’ain’t fair.’

The Squire sighed and tucked the bearskin rug closer about his legs and felt with his feet for the hot brick.

‘Do you care at all for your daughter?’ he demanded.

‘O’ course I do,’ said the vicar grumpily. ‘I’m out here in this demned damp night.’

‘Listen!’ said the Squire, raising a finger.

There was the slamming of a street door.

The vicar thrust his head out of the carriage window.

‘Gone away!’ he cried, espying the tall figure of the Marquess striding off down the street. He lifted the trap with his stick and shouted. ‘After him, damn you!’

The coach rumbled forwards.

For some time the Marquess of Brabington was deaf to all else but the thudding rage in his ears until he became aware that he was being hailed with loud cries and halloos.

He stopped dead and turned to face the vicar, who was hanging out of Lady Godolphin’s carriage window.

‘
You!
’ said the Marquess in accents of loathing.

‘Get in,’ said the vicar.

‘At this moment,’ grated the Marquess, ‘I wish to have nothing to do with either of you or your family.’

‘Which is why we are here. We knew you would be leaving in a rage.’

‘You
knew . . .
’

The Marquess, who had been turning away, turned back, his face white and drawn in the pale blurred light of the street lamp.

The vicar’s head disappeared to be replaced by that of Squire Radford. ‘It must seem very odd to you, my lord,’ he said in his precise voice, ‘but I assure you, your
feelings on the matter are not original. These things do happen on the best regulated wedding nights.’

‘I think you had both better explain yourselves,’ said the Marquess.

‘But not here,’ replied the Squire. ‘A bottle of burgundy in Humbold’s coffee house, I think, would ease our worry and tension. Come, my dear sir.’

He swung open the carriage door. With a shrug of his shoulders the Marquess stooped, and climbed into the carriage.

Annabelle struggled awake to the sounds of a muted altercation in the dressing room next door to her bedroom.

Suddenly the quavery voice of Jensen, the Marquess’s butler, rose in exasperation. ‘See here, my girl,’ he said. ‘If my lady chooses to hire an untrained girl from the
country as her lady’s maid, then it is my duty to train you. We have always kept the highest standards in the Brabington household, and we do not mean to see them lowered. Now. You do not
brush
out a silk gown. It should be rubbed gently with a piece of merino kept for the purpose. My lady’s bonnets should be dusted with a light feather plume. The mud from my
lady’s boots should be removed with a soft sponge dipped in milk. Now, you light the fire in the dressing room and sweep the hearth, and place my lady’s linen before the fire to warm.
Then the hair brushes should be washed in soda. Never wash combs. It splits the tortoiseshell. We will buy you a small brush especially for this duty . . .’