The Outrageous Lady

Chapter Three

Chapter One 1806The heat from the candles in the huge chandeliers was overpowering and the movement of the dancers combined with the heavy fragrance of flowers did nothing to alleviate a feeling almost of suffocation.

Two people detached themselves from the glittering throng and walked slowly along the wide corridors of the great mansion belonging to Lord Marshall, a close friend of the Prince Regent.

“Where are you taking me, D’Arcy?” the lady asked, as they left the music behind and the only sound was the soft tap of her small feet over the polished floor.

“Somewhere quiet,” he replied. “There are too many people and too much noise. I want to talk to you.”

The lady laughed, but there was no humour in the sound, attractive though it was.

“Not again, D’Arcy, I could not bear one of your ‘little talks’ tonight.”

The gentleman did not answer, he merely opened a door off the corridor and they entered an empty sitting room lit only by silver sconces on either side of the mantelshelf and a candelabrum on the writing desk.

The lady looked round her.

“What a charming room! I have never been here before.”

“It is Marshall’s sanctum and as such forbidden except to his most intimate friends.”

“Which you consider yourself to be?”

“He is a bore, but I have known him for a great number of years.”

The room was cool and the curtains were drawn back from the open windows so that what breeze there was in the darkness outside was not excluded.

There was, however, not enough to make the candles flicker and the lady fanned herself slowly and rhythmically with a painted fan.

The gentleman stood looking at her before he said,

“You are more beautiful tonight, g*****a, than I have ever seen you!”

She barely acknowledged the compliment, only the corners of her mouth curved for a moment in a half-smile.

There was no doubt that she was in fact a great beauty.

Her dark hair, arranged in a fashion brought over from Paris, framed her face with its perfect symmetry.

Her most arresting feature was undoubtedly her large eyes, which should have been dark but were in fact a strange deep green flecked with gold that reminded her many admirers of sunlight on a clear stream.

They were very expressive eyes and, as they contemplated the man standing in front of her, they held an expression that was unmistakably wary.

“Well, D’Arcy?”

The question seemed to goad him into a sudden fury.

“Dammit!” he cursed. “You know exactly what I want to say.”

“And you know the answer, so why repeat words that have become a tiresome refrain?”

“Is that all I mean to you?” he asked.

He looked at her and there was a touch of fire in his eyes.

Dressed in the very height of fashion he was in fact perhaps as handsome in his way as she was beautiful in hers.

There were few people in the ballroom who looked at the Earl of Sheringham dancing with Lady Roysdon and had not thought that they matched each other both in appearance and reputation.

But Lady Roysdon showed no sign on her beautiful face of the wild life that had made her the talk of the town, while the years of debauchery had begun to take their toll of the Earl.

There were lines under his eyes that were undoubtedly the signs of dissipation and the pallor of his cheeks came from a long succession of late nights and too much port.

Because he was angry he walked restlessly about the room tugging the lapels of his tightly fitting coat with nervous fingers.

“We cannot go on like this!”

“Why not?”

“Because I want you, because you are playing with me, because no longer will I be kept at arms’ length!”

“That is for me to decide.”

She spoke indifferently as if the conversation had already begun to bore her.

Realising that was what was happening, the Earl flung himself down beside her on the sofa to say insistently,

“I cannot bear it any longer, g*****a! Tonight when I saw you laughing at me with the Prince Regent I reached breaking point.”

She was not looking at him, but staring with unseeing eyes across the room at a rather badly painted picture of some dead game.

“I told you before we came to Brighton that you would have to make up your mind to let me love you,” the Earl said.

“And if I do not?”

Her tone was light and it sounded as if she was laughing at him.

“Then I think I will kill you!” he said slowly.

“My dear D’Arcy, why so dramatic all of a sudden? You know perfectly well you have no wish to kill me. All you want is for me to become your mistress.”

“I will marry you. You know I will marry you, as soon as that corpse you call your husband is dead.”

“That corpse is my husband.”

“How can you be faithful to a man who can neither see nor hear, who is not a human being but only a lump of flesh that breathes?”

“As long as George breathes, I am married to him.”

“That is what you have said a thousand times before.”

“Then why not face the fact that I have no intention of becoming your mistress?”

“How long does that mean I shall have to wait?” the Earl asked despairingly.

Lady Roysdon did not answer and after a moment he said,

“Do you imagine that if Roysdon were not a rich man he would still be alive? No! Those blasted doctors keep him in this world so that they can fill their pockets. How long is it since he had his stroke?”

“Nearly five years.”

“Immediately after your marriage?”

“Yes.”

“And in that short time what did he teach you about love?”

Lady Roysdon did not reply and after a moment he urged,

“Let me teach you, my beautiful one. Let me initiate you into the ecstatic emotions which have been enjoyed not only by men and women but by the Gods themselves.”

Lady Roysdon gave another of her little laughs,

“You are becoming poetic, D’Arcy. Soon you will be writing odes to my eyebrows like that tiresome young man we met a month ago. I cannot remember his name.”

“I have no wish to write about you,” the Earl said savagely. “I want to hold you in my arms, to kiss you and make sure you belong to me.”

Lady Roysdon yawned.

“I do not belong to anybody except George,” she said, “and, as he does not need me, I belong only to myself.”

She rose slowly to her feet.

“Come, D’Arcy, I want to go home.”

The Earl rose too, to stand in front of her with an expression of resolution on his face.

She sensed his intention and looked up at him to say quietly,

“If you touch me, D’Arcy, I swear I will never see you again!”

“You cannot treat me as you treated Charles and half-a-dozen others!”

“I can – and I will!” she answered sharply. “So beware!”

“You drive me mad!”

“No madder than you are already.”

As if he knew that he was defeated, he moved a step away from her to say,

“I will take you home.”

“I have my own carriage, thank you.”

“You will come with me,” he ordered. “I have not yet finished talking to you.”

“There is no need to add fuel to the gossip there is about us already.”

“Why should we care what anyone says?” the Earl enquired. “Unless everybody in the Social world is blind, they know I love you and they know that sooner or later you will be mine.”

“You try to make them think, because it is a salve to your pride, that I am yours already.”

She raised her small pointed chin a little higher as she added,

“It annoys me that people should believe what is untrue.”

“What do they matter?” the Earl asked roughly. “You are not usually so chicken-hearted, Galatea.”

“In a few weeks’ time I shall be twenty-one,” she said. “I am beginning to think I should behave in a more circumspect manner.”

The Earl threw back his head and laughed.

“Circumspect? You? What has happened to the rebel who came with me to the Haymarket to dance in the same room as the sweepings of Piccadilly?”

She did not answer and he went on,

“The jester I took to Covent Garden to bewilder and tease the bucks watching the parade of Cyprians? Who has partnered me in a number of pranks that have made us both the toast of St. James’s?”

Lady Roysdon turned her head to one side.

“I heard today that they call me ‘the Outrageous Lady Roysdon’.”

“They also call you ‘the Most Beautiful Woman in England’. You can take your choice.”

“I felt – ashamed after we went to Bridewell.”

“I cannot think why,” the Earl replied. “The whole thing was a joke and we laughed, if you remember, as we drove home together.”

“You – laughed.”

“And we will laugh again as I drive you home now,” the Earl said. “Come, g*****a, let us say goodnight to our host.”

He offered her his arm, but, when she would have placed her hand on it, she changed her mind.

“No,” she said. “I cannot go back to that overcrowded ballroom. Besides, as you are well aware, we should not leave before the Prince Regent.”

“Then we will slip away without making our farewells.”

The Earl’s eyes rested on her lovely face before he said,

“Other people, even the Prince Regent, intrude upon us when all I want is to have you alone.”

There was a note of passion beneath the last word and once again there was a glint of fire in his narrowing eyes, warning Lady Roysdon that her control over him was near breaking point.

She had to be on her guard all the time where D’Arcy Sheringham was concerned.

He had pursued her since the first night they had met at Carlton House and had become, without asking her permission, her inseparable companion.

She had been very young and completely innocent of the Social world, a wife with a husband who lay in a darkened room attended by a whole army of doctors and nurses.

She would have felt very lost that first Season in London had not the Earl always been there to escort her and undoubtedly to amuse her.

Because he was so experienced where the female s*x was concerned, he had been wise enough not to frighten her.

It was in fact her very innocence in the Society in which they moved that was a more effective chaperone than any human being could possibly have been.

The mere fact that she knew so little safeguarded her like a protective wall.

The most critical of women who were spiteful because she was so beautiful had really nothing tangible to complain about.

But nothing in life stands still and, as the Earl grew more importunate and more demanding, Lady Roysdon grew wilder and their behaviour made it impossible for anyone to ignore them.

Licence and impropriety as displayed by the Prince Regent’s close friends was nothing new.

He had for years surrounded himself with a number of people who shocked not only those who centred round his father’s dull and boring Court, but also the public who had to pay for the heir to the throne’s wild and ever-increasing extravagance.

The caricaturists showed the Prince Regent as a voluptuary and to them it seemed entirely appropriate that he should include so many reprobates among his closest friends.

Two of the most notorious Dukes in England – Queensberry and Norfolk – were frequent guests of his not only in London but also at Brighton.

Norfolk, an extremely ill-educated man, was said to be not only the most drunken but also the dirtiest gentleman in the country, while Queensberry was cleaner but a good deal more depraved.

He was sharp-looking, very irritable and swore like a thousand troopers. And the long list of women he had seduced grew daily even though he was growing older.

Besides the Dukes, there were the wild members of the Barrymore family.

The seventh Earl of Barrymore was a young man who was rapidly dissipating a fortune of over twenty thousand pounds and whose crude and heartless practical jokes on innocent people had earned him the nickname of ‘Hellgate’.

His brother, a Parson, was a compulsive gambler ever on the verge of going to prison and was consequently nicknamed ‘Newgate’ after the prison for criminals.

Their youngest brother, called ‘Cripplegate’ because he had a club foot, had a savage temper which was shared by his sister for whom ‘Billingsgate’, a fish market where the women were notoriously foul-mouthed, was an exceedingly appropriate sobriquet.

In Brighton, calling themselves the ‘Merry Mourners’, they had gone out at night carrying a coffin and, knocking on the doors of middle class citizens, had announced to the terrified maidservants that they had come to collect the family corpse.