The Horizons of Love

Chapter One ~ 1878-1

Chapter One ~ 1878“It’s absolutely ridiculous!” Lady Wymonde asserted in a sharp voice.

At the same time she looked very lovely as she spoke, although her husband, scowling at the letter he held in his hand, did not notice.

Lord Wymonde, who was getting on for forty-five, was beginning to lose the trim figure he had when he was younger.

He was, however, still an excellent horseman and an acknowledged hard rider in the hunting field.

“It is no use arguing, Lucy,” he said. “Either we take Ina with us to Chale, or we do not go!”

“Now you are being absurd,” Lady Wymonde said angrily. “How can I ask Alice to have an unfledged schoolgirl in the kind of party she had arranged at Chale? You know as well as I do that your tiresome niece will be out of place.”

“Nevertheless she is my niece,” Lord Wymonde replied, “and that means you will have to chaperone her for the rest of the Season and see that she is invited to all the fashionable balls.”

“It’s intolerable that at thirty I should be a chaperone,” she countered, “I want to be dancing myself, not trying to find partners for some gauche and unattractive girl.”

They both knew that she was thirty-six last birthday, but great beauties were traditionally ageless and Lady Wymonde was undoubtedly one of the most outstanding beauties in all of London.

She would, in fact, have said that she was less than thirty, but their son, Rupert, was twelve, and as he was already at Eton, it was impossible to make him out to be any younger.

Lord Wymonde folded the letter and put it into his pocket.

“As the post has been delayed owing, I imagine, to the inefficiency of the French,” he said. “Ina will be arriving tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Lady Wymonde’s voice rose in a shriek.

Almost gasping for breath she added,

“And you expect me, when I will not have a moment to myself all day, to meet her and make her respectable enough to go to Chale on Friday?”

“As I have already suggested, we can stay at home,” Lord Wymonde answered, “but doubtless your host would miss you.”

There was a note of sarcasm in his voice that Lady Wymonde noticed and it checked the angry words that were already forming on her lips.

George was easy-going and on the whole a complacent husband, but she knew that she dare not push him too far for, where his family pride was concerned, he could be very difficult.

That was why he was making a fuss about his niece and Lucy could think of nothing more infuriating at this moment when she was engaged in one of the most exciting and thrilling affaires de coeur she had ever known to be landed with a young girl.

She disliked girls, she always had. It was not only because they had the one thing that no amount of money could buy, which was youth but they were undoubtedly restrictive in a house party that was chosen for its sophistication and wit.

She knew only too well what a party at Chale entailed and, as this one was being given particularly for her, she had been very careful in her choice of the Marquis’s other guests.

“I want you at Chale,” he had said the other evening when they were sitting out at a ball given by the French Ambassador.

It was always difficult to talk privately, and even when the Marquis called on Lucy in the afternoons when George was at his Club, there were few times when she could contrive that no one else would be present.

“You know how much I want to talk to you alone,” he added.

Lucy allowed a small smile to part her exquisitely curved lips.

She knew exactly what he meant by ‘alone’. He wanted to kiss her and, Heaven knows, she wanted that and a great deal more.

She glanced at him from under her eyelashes and thought that never in all her years as an outstanding success had there ever been a man as attractive as the Marquis of Chale.

Usually Lucy was quite content to be admired, to be paid compliments and know that men were frustrated by her indifference which only made them desire her even more.

“You drive me mad! You are so cold and cruel,” they would say passionately. “How can I make you love me?”

How often Lucy had heard this and how often had she replied,

“You know I am fond of you, but – ”

There had always been that ‘but’ and if a man became too ardent, Lucy, while enjoying every moment of it, would always say wistfully,

“I have to be careful. George is very jealous.”

But with the Marquis everything had been different.

First of all she had sought him out.

The mere sight of him walking into the ballroom looking so tall, so handsome and so imperious and at the same time so bored, had made her feel very different from the way that she had ever felt about a man before.

When they danced together, she had known that he was mildly interested in her looks, but there was nothing especially eager in the way he put his hand on her small waist.

She had been well aware as they moved on the dance floor that his heart was not beating any quicker, while hers was behaving in a very unusual manner.

It had taken two months before he made the first overtures and during that time Lucy had almost despaired.

She tried every wile to intrigue and arouse him, but she had the feeling that he saw through all the little manoeuvres that had captured other men and recognised them for what they were.

Then at last, when Lucy was almost desperate, he had kissed her one afternoon when they were alone in her drawing room at teatime.

And it had ignited between them a flame that began to burn more brightly every time they met

To Lucy it was a revelation because those who had found her cold were entirely right in their supposition.

She was a cold woman, interested only in herself and her beauty, and not moved by anyone else’s suffering except for her own.

But with the Marquis it was different and, because she knew agonisingly that he was six years younger than she was, she scrutinised her face in the mirror, looking for every tiny line that might become a wrinkle and for every surplus ounce on her beautiful body that might be the forerunner of middle age.

‘I am young, I am young!’ Lucy told herself every morning.

She felt as if she could will her body into the lissom slenderness she had had when she was seventeen and had left the schoolroom to find to her astonishment that she was beautiful.

Her fame had not, of course, come overnight. She had to wait a year until she was married to George

It was then as Lady Wymonde that she had taken Society by storm.

She learnt to dress and she learnt to say amusing things in her obviously contrived musical voice

Most of all she realised that by looking beautiful and cold she made men flock to her side determined, with a conceit that existed in every one of them, that they would melt the ‘Ice Maiden’.

They failed and Lucy had begun to believe that she was, in fact, apart from most women who admitted, in the secrecy of their boudoirs, that love was something they yearned for and desired.

“I hate men who want to touch me and maul me about. I find it extremely tiresome,” Lucy had said to her three most intimate friends.

“You cannot be serious,” one of them exclaimed.

“But I am,” Lucy insisted. “When I know that a man is in love with me I enjoy the swimmy look in his eyes, but quite frankly, I do not wish him to kiss me.”

“Lucy, you cannot be telling the truth!”

“I am.”

“Then you are unnatural,” a woman who was a little older than the rest said sharply.

Lucy had not minded.

She knew what she wanted and was determined to get it. It was simply to have a position in Society that was unassailable, frequent invitations to Marlborough House and, of course, the knowledge that no party could be a success unless she was there.

Then she had met the Marquis of Chale and he had turned her little world upside down.

‘I suppose this is love,’ Lucy said to herself at first incredulously.

Then, as the Marquis had proved himself to be more elusive than she herself had ever been, she knew that the ice was melting and it was a decidedly frustrating sensation.

But she had won! She had won!

The Marquis was now pursuing her and the first major step had been when he said that he wanted to give a party at Chale for her.

Of course she had been there before.

Alice, the mother of the Marquis, was an old friend who contrived to make her parties a success by inviting distinguished, rich and famous men with the most beautiful women in England as entertainment.

The mixture was sufficient to ensure that anyone who was asked to Chale considered it a privilege apart from the fact that the house itself was fantastic.

It was enormous, comfortable and made the guests feel as if they had stepped into a dream Palace where there were a hundred genii waiting to grant them their slightest wish.

“How do you manage to make everything run so smoothly, Alice?” Lucy had once asked the Dowager Marchioness.

She had laughed.

“I can tell you in two words, Lucy. Organisation and money!”

It was this sort of remark that invariably evoked screams of laughter and Lucy had thought how she would give anything in the world to be the Chatelaine of Chale.

Not that there was any possibility of that happening, unless George had a fatal accident, or apoplexy from drinking too much port.

Even so, Lucy told herself, it would not be easy to make the Marquis marry her.

For one thing she was quite certain he was not the marrying type, although sooner or later he would need to have a son and heir.

But that was something that Lucy had no wish to give him, although she thought that she might make the effort, if it was a question of marriage.

After Rupert had been born, the heir to the title that George was exceedingly proud of, Lucy had said,

“No, more!”

“I think it important for us to have more than one child,” George had insisted.

“Important or not,” Lucy had replied, “I have no intention of spoiling my figure.”

She had known that George was disappointed as his first wife, who had died five years before he married again, had been unable to have any children.

But Lucy told herself that she had done her duty and no man should ask for more especially when his wife was as beautiful as she was.

The Marquis would, of course, want an heir. What man did not hanker after having a son to succeed him?

But Lucy was determined that she would not think of his marriage, unless it was to herself, for a very very long time.

‘We will be very happy,’ she thought reassuringly.

She knew as she glanced at herself in the mirror that no man could ask for anyone more beautiful or more alluring than she was at this moment.

Love had given her face a new radiance. It had also softened her eyes and perhaps her features.

She had always been every man’s ideal of an English rose.

Her hair was the gold of ripening corn, her eyes the blue of a summer sky and her skin very white. There was just a touch of pink in her cheeks, while her lips, as dozens of men had told her, were made for kisses.

“I am beautiful, beautiful!” Lucy had exclaimed when she awoke this morning. “And, when I am with the Marquis at Chale, then the last barrier between us will fall and I will have him where I want him – at my feet!”

She preened herself a little in the mirror that reflected her as she sat back against her lace-edged pillows in the large bedroom where the windows overlooked Hyde Park.

‘I love you!’

She could almost hear the Marquis saying the words in his deep voice, which had the power to move her even when he made the most commonplace remark.

When she rose and dressed with the help of two lady’s maids, she felt as if she was moving to music.