A Marriage Made In Heaven

Chapter 1 1827-1

Chapter 1

1827

The Duke of Buckhurst brought his team of horses to a standstill outside the impressive front door of his house in Park Lane.

As he did so, he pulled his watch from his waistcoat pocket and said in a tone of satisfaction,

“One hour, fifty-two minutes! A record, I think, Jim!”

“Two minutes better than last time, Your Grace,” Jim answered from his seat at the back of the phaeton.

With a smile on his rather hard lips, the Duke stepped out onto the red carpet that had been hastily run down the steps by two white-wigged footmen wearing the distinctive family livery.

The Duke walked into the marble hall with its magnificent double staircase rising to the first floor and a butler took his tall hat and driving gloves.

“The Marchioness and Lady Bredon are in the salon, Your Grace,” he said respectfully.

“Damn!” the Duke ejaculated under his breath.

He was about to turn in a different direction when he heard footsteps behind him and his brother-in-law, the Marquis of Hull, came in through the open door.

“Hello, Buck, I see you have arrived!” the Marquis exclaimed unnecessarily.

“What is going on,” the Duke enquired, “a family conclave?”

“I am afraid so,” the Marquis answered.

The Duke of Buckhurst’s lips tightened, but he did not say anything for the moment. Then he remarked,

“Tell my sisters I am back, Arthur, and will not keep them waiting long and see that the champagne gets them into a better mood than I anticipate they would be otherwise.”

The Marquis of Hull did not laugh, he merely walked rather pompously towards the salon, while the Duke went up the staircase and into his own rooms.

He had been told that his sisters wished to see him while he was in the country and he was already expecting that as usual they would be reproaching him for some misdemeanour.

While he considered it none of their business, he was well aware from experience that they would be very voluble on the subject.

The Duke’s two sisters were older than him and, when he arrived in the world as the answer to his father’s dreams and ambitions, he had been in most people’s opinion abominably spoilt from the time he was in the cradle.

Certainly his two sisters had done their best to spoil him and the task was completed as soon as he grew up by innumerable beautiful women who pursued him, pandered to his every whim and were prepared to entrust him not only with their hearts but with their reputations.

It was not surprising, since he was exceedingly handsome, rich and the head of one of the most important families in the country, that the Duke was not only spoilt but had a reputation as a roué that had made his name a byword in Society.

Because it was impossible for anything to be hidden from gossipmongers, he was a cartoonist’s delight and a newspaper was seldom published without making some reference to him in their columns, so that the populace looked on him as a figure they could admire, envy and applaud.

When he appeared on the Racecourse, he was cheered from one end of it to the other much more loudly than the King, which was not surprising, and whenever he drove down Piccadilly he was admired not only by the Beau Monde but also by every crossing-sweeper.

“’E’s not only a sportsman, but also a man!” one lorry driver was heard to say and that just about summed up the Dukes attraction.

It was inevitable that he should, in the opinion of those who considered themselves to be pillars of Society, go too far.

His love affairs, which multiplied every year, needed little exaggeration to make them scandalous, and the mothers of debutantes, though ambitious for a distinguished and aristocratic son-in-law, hurried their girls away from the man they feared might contaminate them.

These precautions were quite unnecessary since the Duke was not interested in young girls, preferring sophisticated women whose husbands were either too complacent or too cowardly to object to the time he spent with their wives.

Nevertheless, the members of his family incessantly worried about the gossip that the Duke evoked with everything he did and were even more worried that at thirty-four he showed no signs of settling down and providing an heir to the title and the vast estates.

As the Duke changed from his driving clothes, he thought with a cynical twist of his lips that when he went downstairs he would undoubtedly hear the usual long-drawn-out plea for him to marry and live a more conventional life.

“Why the devil should I?” he asked aloud and his valet, who was helping him dress and had been with him for many years, did not respond, knowing that the Duke was talking to himself and not to him.

“Tomorrow I am going to Newmarket, Yates,” the Duke said, “and, as I shall want you there when I arrive, you had better leave in the brake an hour before I do.”

“I anticipated that, Your Grace,” Yates replied, “and I’ve got everything packed.”

“Good!”

However, the Duke was thinking of something quite different as he left his bedroom to walk slowly down the stairs.

No man could have looked smarter or more magnificent.

Although the Duke would have been extremely annoyed if he had been told that he was a ‘Dandy’, he was undoubtedly a ‘Beau’, or perhaps his nickname of ‘Buck’, which had been his ever since he was a schoolboy, suited him better.

The difference between him and those who slavishly strived to be a ‘Tulip of Fashion’ was that he wore his clothes, which fitted him to perfection, as if they were a part of him and he was completely unconscious of them.

At the same time no one wore more skilfully or more elegantly tied cravats and Yates knew that the polish on his master’s Hessian boots was the envy of every other valet in the Beau Monde.

The Duke reached the hall and, as the front door was open and he saw the spring sunshine outside and a slight wind moving the young green leaves of the trees in Hyde Park, he had a sudden impulse to return to the country and not face his family who were waiting for him.

If there was one thing he disliked more than anything else, it was the reproaches and recriminations of his sisters.

While they were too afraid of him to say as much as they really wanted to, the Duke was quite certain that the next half hour would be an uncomfortable one in which, whether he liked it or not, he would be on the defensive.

‘Damn them! Why can they not leave me alone?’ he thought as the butler hurried ahead to open the door of the salon.

He walked into the room, conscious that there was a sudden silence as he did so, which obviously meant that the three members of his family had just been talking about him.

His elder sister, the Marchioness of Hull, had been a great beauty as a girl and her marriage to the Marquis had been considered most appropriate and an excellent match.

His second sister, Margaret, had married Lord Bredon, who was considerably older than she was, and he was not only exceedingly wealthy but an important Member of the House of Lords and had a very enviable position at Court.

Now, as three pairs of eyes watched him, the Duke walked across the Aubusson carpet, thinking as he went that while at times they irritated and annoyed him, his family was a very attractive one and he had every reason to be proud of them.

“How are you, Elizabeth?” he asked fondly, kissing the Marchioness on the cheek.

Before she could reply, he kissed his younger sister and walked away from them to where there was champagne waiting for him on a silver tray.

He poured himself a glass of it, then returned the bottle to the ice-cooler and said with a smile,

“All right, I am listening! What have I done now to bring you here with faces like those of Methodist preachers and undoubtedly words of condemnation on your lips?”

The Marchioness, who had a greater sense of humour than her sister, laughed.

“Oh, Buck, that is just the sort of thing you would say! But this time we have not come to talk about you, but about Edmund.”

“Edmund?” the Duke asked in a dry voice. “What has he done now?”

“You will hardly believe it when we tell you,” Lady Bredon replied.

The Duke settled himself comfortably in the high-backed chair opposite the sofa on which his two sisters were seated.

“If Edmund is in money trouble again,” he said, “I do not intend to pay his debts.”

“It is worse than that,” the Marchioness said.

“Worse than debt?” His cousin Edmund was the heir presumptive to the Dukedom and was cordially disliked by the whole family.

He was, in fact, a very unpleasant creature who not only battened on the Duke for money, but also exceeded every accepted rule of decent behaviour in taking every possible advantage of his family connections.

He was shrewd and crafty and dishonest in small ways and being also consumed with envy, hatred and malice, he decried the Duke on every possible occasion, although he was quite prepared to live on any money he could extract from him.

There was silence and the Duke broke it demanding,

“Well? What has Edmund been up to? It cannot be much worse than what he has done already.”

“He has got married!” the Marquis of Hull said bluntly.

The Duke started and stared at his brother-in-law as if he could not believe what he had heard.

“Married?” he exclaimed. “Who would marry Edmund?”

“Lottie Linkley.” the Marquis replied briefly.

The Duke looked as if the name meant nothing to him. Then he gave an exclamation and his expression altered.

“Lottie Linkley!” he repeated. “You do not mean – ?”

“I do,” the Marquis confirmed, “and Edmund has not only married her, but has also announced to all and sundry that she is already having a baby!”

“I can hardly believe that what you are telling me is the truth,” the Duke said. “Lottie with child!”

He spoke beneath his breath and the Marquis added,

“I had not heard of her for so long that I thought she must be much older than she is. But her actual age, according to Edmund, is thirty-one.”

The Duke drank his champagne as if he needed it.

As he did so, he was thinking that the last time he had seen Lottie Linkley she was performing at a Regimental dinner, which one of his friends had given in a private room at one of the ‘Houses of Pleasure.’

It had been a very wild evening, at which the drink was excellent and plentiful and every gentleman present had an extremely attractive young woman at his side.

But the pièce de résistance came with the port when an enormous cake, covered with candles representing the number of years since the Regiment had been formed, was carried in and placed in the centre of the table.

As the Senior Officer present, it had been the Duke’s privilege to blow out the candles and then a sword was handed to him in order to cut the cake.

As he was about to do so, the top of it was thrown back and Lottie, wearing little more than a few feathers in the Regimental colours, came up like Venus rising from the foam and proceeded to sing an amusing but exceedingly vulgar song to which most of those present knew the chorus.

There was no doubt that she looked very attractive in a theatrical manner and voluptuously seductive.

But there was no need for the Duke’s sisters to tell him that the idea of her eventually becoming the Duchess of Buckhurst was unthinkable.

“Edmund has been saying,” the Marquis continued, “that, as there is no chance of your providing an heir to the title after you announced yourself to be an avowed bachelor, he is determined to make certain of the succession and they are already making bets at White’s as to whether Lottie’s child will be a boy or a girl.”

The Duke rose to his feet.

“Dammit!” he exclaimed. “This is too much!”

“That is what we hoped you would think, dearest Buck,” his sister Elizabeth said. “And you do realise that there is only one thing you can do?”