Those Endearing Young Charms (13 page)

"You are jealous," said Emily, "of a cat." And inside her head, a voice was screaming at her to behave herself.

"I have no reason to be jealous," he said with a shrug. "Only men in love are jealous."

Emily winced.

Well, sneered her inner voice, what did you expect? He gives you a beautiful ring and kisses your hand, and all you can do, instead of saying thank you, is to worry about a horrible cat with a torn ear.

"The reason I am justifiably annoyed," the earl went on, "is because you did not pause to thank me for the ring."

"Thank you, Devenham."

"Too late. Have you finished? Then perhaps you would like to retire and leave me to the more pleasant company of this decanter of port. It provides solace and comfort when nothing else is offered."

For one split second, Emily was on the point of begging his forgiveness. But he looked so hard, so unyielding; and then there was always that feeling about him, that _emanation_ from him of the presence of another woman.

"Do not worry," she said, rising to her feet, "we will soon be in London and you can return to the arms of your mistress."

The slight flicker of surprise in his eyes made her own suddenly fill with tears, and she walked quickly from the room and slammed the door behind her.

The deuce! thought the earl bitterly. Some scandalmonger has told her.

Emily entered her bedroom, too angry to cry. So there _was_ a mistress. The expression in his eyes had given him away. She was glad, glad, _glad_ she had not encouraged his advances, not allowed his _nasty,_ soiled, _used_ body anywhere near her own. She was shaking with rage, incensed with rage; her whole being was sour with a rampant jealousy as green as the ring on her finger.

_Miaow!_ Emily jumped in the air with fright and then stared at the bed, unable to believe her eyes.

Stretched out on the counterpane was the cat, Peter.

At the same moment, she heard the maid Felice's light step in the passageway outside.

Emily ran forward and grabbed the cat, bundled him into the wardrobe, and slammed the door. She was leaning with her back against the door when the maid came into the room.

"I will not need you tonight," said Emily. "I will undress myself."

_Yowl._

The maid stared at Emily, who put her hands over her face and yowled a fairly good imitation of the cat. "I-I am sore distressed, F-Felice," she wailed. "Go quickly."

"Yes, my lady," came the maid's anxious voice. "First, let me find my lady's night rail and turn down the covers and..."

_Yowl_ went the cat, and yowl, yowl, _yowl_ went Emily. Felice knew of the ban on Peter. Emily was terrified that if the maid found out about the cat, she would immediately go to Devenham.

"Go away," screamed Emily.

Felice fled. With a sigh of relief, Emily opened the wardrobe door.

"Poor Peter," she said, picking up the cat and carrying it to the bed. "Poor, poor Peter."

She stroked the cat's fur and talked nonsense to it while it purred loudly and bumped its large head, with the ragged ear, against her chin.

"How on earth did you manage to travel this far? At least he will not try to see me tonight, Peter,"

said Emily, setting the cat down on the floor. "He is much, much too angry with me."

She began to take off her clothes and prepare for bed.

Felice was a very worried servant. That her mistress was in a demented state was all too painfully obvious. A good servant should not interfere in the affairs of her mistress and master. But what if my lady was yowling in that odd way because she was ill? And what if the earl found out that Felice had been negligent in her duty by leaving my lady alone?

Felice was very much afraid of the Earl of Devenham.

She was halfway down the stairs leading from Emily's room, standing on the landing, when the earl's Swiss came up with an armful of freshly starched cravats.

Felice liked the Swiss, who was called John Phillips. His real name was Jean-Philippe Danton, but he had anglicized his name long before entering the earl's service. He was from the Canton Vaud, so Felice was able to lapse into her native tongue. In muscular strength he did not compare well with the second footman, being a wiry little man with a sallow face and a quizzical expression, but Felice had become as fond of him as she could be of anybody she was not exactly in love with. Talking in French, she told him of the scene just enacted by Emily.

"You must go and see my lord," counseled John. "He is drinking wine in the parlor. My lady could have the vapors."

With Gallic bluntness, Felice pointed out it was not the time of the month for my lady to have the vapors, but, with a little shrug, agreed she should say something to the master.

The fact that the earl looked singularly grim and forbidding did not deter Felice, who thought it was any proper aristocrat's place to look stern and forbidding.

She promptly launched into a dramatic description of Emily's distress.

"Thank you," said the earl, when she had finished. "You may go. You did well to tell me. I will go to Lady Devenham immediately."

With a pleasant feeling of duty well done, Felice went downstairs to the kitchens to make herself some tea and to gossip with the inn servants, and the earl went to his wife's room. The door was locked.

He knocked on it until he heard Emily call out, "Who's there?"

"It is I, Peregrine," he called. "Felice tells me you are upset."

Inside the room, Emily looked at the cat and the cat looked at Emily. At the sound of the earl's voice, its fur had started to rise.

"I am very well now," called Emily. "I had the headache."

"Open the door."

Emily had always wondered what wringing the hands meant. Now she knew.

If Devenham found the cat, he would divorce her, or beat her, or kill her. If she put the animal in the wardrobe, it would simply yowl and cry, and she did not think the earl would be as easily fooled as Felice.

Made bold by desperation, she called, "Go to your room, my love. I will join you there in a moment."

There was silence while she waited with beating heart.

Then the earl's voice, surprised and amused, said from outside the door, "Very well, my sweeting.

Do not keep me waiting long."

His footsteps retreated.

"There!" hissed Emily at the cat. "You useless lump of carriage rug. I am going to lose my virginity so that he does not wring _both_ our necks."

Feeling like a French aristocrat about to go to the scaffold, Emily picked up a candle in its flat stick and hurried along the corridor in the direction of her husband's room. In her fright and anxiety, she forgot to pull her own door securely behind her.

She pushed open the door of the earl's room. He was in his nightshirt.

Gracious, thought Emily, the man must have _torn_ his clothes off to get undressed so quickly. Then she thought it strange that a man dressed in a white nightshirt with a great deal of lace about the throat and wrists should manage to look so compellingly masculine. The black hair that met in that widow's peak and those thin black eyebrows over the flat silver eyes gave him a satanic look.

His mouth curved in a sweet smile, and all at once, Emily felt that everything was going to be all right and that perhaps she should be grateful to the wretched cat for making her take the necessary step.

He held out his arms, and Emily walked into them and buried her head against his chest, feeling the heat from his body and the steady thud of his heart against her cheek.

He lifted her gently in his arms, carried her to the bed, and laid her down. He stretched out beside her and took her in his arms again. It was very odd, thought Emily, that they were lying on top of the covers. Surely, one went underneath to perform all those dark and sinister midnight deeds. And he had left the candles burning!

He gathered her to him and pressed her body against his own. He kissed her eyelids, the curve of her jaw, and the tip of her nose. She could feel her breasts swelling and hardening and hoped idiotically that this was all natural and that they were supposed to do that. She noticed he smelled faintly of wine and lavender water and soap. His lips gently covered her own, and she forgot about everything else. Or nearly.

Just as her body felt as if it were melting and fusing into his own, just when her lips were parting under his, just when the sweet surging, bittersweet pain in the pit of her stomach was about to lead her to crave further intimacy, there came a soft thud at the door.

Low down on the door.

Peter.

Emily suddenly went rigid in the earl's arms, waiting for that first telltale yowl.

Abruptly, the earl freed his mouth and propped himself up on one elbow. "What is the matter, my love?" he asked, his voice husky, seductive.

Thud.

Emily cringed, but the earl had heard nothing -- yet -- and was waiting for her answer.

Poor Emily thought of his rage and fury if he found the cat outside. She did not realize that if she had only surrendered to him, then he would have let her have a whole zoo.

_"I can't."_

She wrenched herself from his arms and his bed and hurtled out of the room, clad only in her flimsy nightgown. She tripped headlong over the cat, scrambled to her feet again, grabbed the animal, and ran to her own room, slammed the door behind her, and locked it.

What am I to do? thought Emily. Oh, poor Peregrine. He will hate me forever.

"I _hate you,_" she said to the cat who was now purring ecstatically on the bed, prancing up and down and digging its claws into the quilt.

Then Emily's eye fell on the little jug of milk on the tea tray. She poured some into a saucer and carefully added a few drops of laudanum.

The cat eagerly lapped up the milk, finished it, stretched, and began to wash itself in front of the fire, while Emily fretted and waited and tried to will it to go to sleep.

"I dare not give the beast any more," she said aloud, "or it might die."

Meanwhile, the Earl of Devenham had bitten the pillow, punched the wall, drunk half a bottle of brandy, and taken himself out to the back yard of the inn, where he doused himself under the pump.

Wet, cold, demoralized, and weary, he climbed the stairs to his room.

Emily was standing in the middle of his room, waiting for him. The cat had gone to sleep at last.

"Peregrine," she said softly and held out her arms.

The earl gave her one horrified look. "I have had more than a man can stand this evening, madam,"

he grated. He marched her to the door, pushed her out into the corridor, and locked the door behind her.

Emily returned to her own room and cried herself to sleep.

In the morning, she wearily dragged herself from bed, punched air-holes in a bandbox, and stuffed the drugged and heavy cat inside. The earl breakfasted in his room.

Silently, they climbed into the carriage together. Emily put the bandbox with the cat on the seat opposite and placed her jewel box and another bandbox next to it as a sort of camouflage.

The earl said not a word. He seemed once more master of himself and his emotions -- "faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null."

He looked every inch the perfect English aristocrat. His calm dead face seemed to say: "These are my carriage, my servants, my wife," in that order.

His heavy eyelids drooped and he fell asleep before the inn was out of sight.

He awoke on the outskirts of London. Emily cheerfully commented on the weather -- cold -- the suburbs -- quaint -- and the state of the nation -- confused, to which he replied, "Indeed, odso," and

"really," until she lapsed into uneasy silence.

They were nearing his town house in Clarence Square in the West End of London, when the bandbox lid began to move. Too frightened to do or say anything, Emily sat as if turned to stone.

A large, furry head poked out, and one green eye surveyed the Earl of Devenham and his stricken lady.

"I am glad you will have company in London, my lady," said the Earl of Devenham, looking at the cat, "for you will have little of mine."

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*Chapter Nine*

London was different from the London Emily had known. The West End was a world away from the bustle and commerce of the city. At first, there seemed to be a certain monotony in the view: the pavements wide and smooth; every door with its stone steps, its iron railing, and its lamp; each house exactly the same as its neighbor, except for the number on the door and the name of the occupant. At night, the straightness of the streets was made more so by a long line of lamps set out in regular order.

Even the dusty squares were set about with buildings, as neatly as a child's toy, facing a railinged square of cropped trees, cropped bushes, and cropped grass.

Any hope of spring seemed to have died. The days were cloudy and foggy, of a uniform gray.

Sometimes a ray of sun would pierce the perpetual mist, making it float at the end of the streets, bathed in a golden hue, but all too soon the brief light would be extinguished as the fog rolled across the sun again.

The air was loaded with small flakes of soot, a sort of sooty snow, which fell gently on the clothes of the fashionable, sticking to clothes and linen. Under its modern title of influenza, the malady the French called catch-cold had recently swept London.

The Thames did not divide London as the Seine did Paris, that is, with half of the city on one side and half on the other. The other side of the Thames, that is, the Surrey side, was only an extensive suburb dotted with depressing warehouses and manufactories.

Emily thought that London, had she been able to fly above it, would present a patchy black and white appearance, like the hide of some huge, sleeping animal. The buildings were mainly constructed of Portland stone. Smoke blackened the white walls, and the rain washed only certain parts of them. Here there would be a whole column as white as chalk, and there, its neighbor, as black as the soot which darkened it.

It was in the evening, when what little light there was began to fade, that London became a magic place with carriages rolling over the cobbles and houses ablaze with lights. Then the shops came into their own, with many thousands of candles lighting up silverware, engravings, books, clocks, glass, pewter, paintings, women's finery, gold and precious stones, and endless coffee houses and lottery offices. Each street looked as if it were lit up for a fair. The apothecaries harlequinned the streets with the light from their display glasses filled with spirits, purple, yellow, and verdigris-green. Most dazzling of all were the confectioners with their candelabra and their hanging festoons and Spanish grapes and pineapples, their pyramids of apples and oranges, their rich cakes and tarts, all served by exceptionally pretty girls with silk caps and white arms.