The Marquis who Hated Women

Chapter One ~ 1853-1

Chapter One ~ 1853“It’s getting late, I must go.”

The Marquis turned over as he spoke and started to rise from the bed.

Inez Shangarry gave a little cry of protest.

“Oh, no, Osborne, no! You cannot leave me so soon. I want you.”

The Marquis shook himself free of her clinging arms and started to put on his discarded clothes.

Lying back against the pillows with her dark hair falling over her naked body, Lady Shangarry made an enticing picture.

“You cannot leave me, you cannot,” she murmured. “It’s still very early and there are so few evenings when we can be together like this.”

There was a glint of fire in her eyes and her red lips pouted provocatively.

“You are very persuasive, Inez,” the Marquis said as he moved across the room to the dressing table to pick up his discarded cravat.

“I want to be persuasive and I want to be with you, you know that,” Lady Shangarry said in a low seductive voice, “but it is difficult sometimes. When we are alone together, I know that you are the most attractive and the most perfect lover that any woman could desire.”

The Marquis tied his black cravat with experienced fingers. Then, as he reached for his evening coat, he turned to look back at the silk-draped bed and its attractive occupant.

“I am going to the country tomorrow,” he said, “and, as I wish to leave early, I think it important for me to have my ‘beauty sleep’ just as you will need yours.”

“That is far from a compliment,” Inez Shangarry countered petulantly. “I want you to stay with me. Surely, Osborne, after all we have meant to each other, you can grant me just a few more minutes of your time?”

“I hardly think it would be just a few minutes,” the Marquis remarked in an amused voice.

It was in fact difficult to believe that any man could resist the allurements of Lady Shangarry, who was recognised as having the most perfect figure in the whole of London.

She was acclaimed by all the connoisseurs of beauty, including rakes, roués and men like the Marquis who were noted as being extremely particular in their choice of female companionship.

The Marquis was well aware not only of his reputation for being fastidious but also that almost every woman he looked at with any favour was only too willing to fall into his arms.

He had, however, resisted the allurements of Lady Shangarry for some time, although he knew that she was manoeuvring for him with the confidence of a woman who has found that few men can resist her.

Finally, because she was not only beautiful but also because she amused him, he had succumbed to the invitation she expressed in every look in her eyes and in every movement of her voluptuously curvy body.

Now, because she was so insistent on his staying longer than he wished, he wondered if in fact she was not becoming somewhat of a bore and if the end of their liaison was already in sight.

The Marquis was noted for being completely ruthless where his love affairs were concerned.

He preferred to do his own hunting, but unfortunately the chase was always brief since the objects of his attention made little effort to escape him.

All too quickly any woman who he was interested in settled into a familiar pattern of becoming clinging and demanding.

At thirty-three the Marquis had resisted every possible trick and trap to entice him up the aisle into respectable matrimony and preferred women already married, who relieved the boredom of their lives with a continuous succession of lovers.

The result was, of course, that he was disliked violently and aggressively by a large number of husbands and as one wag put it, ‘the Marquis has only to appear in any Assembly to raise the blood pressure to apoplectic intensity of half the men present’.

Although various threats had been made against him, no one so far had managed to catch the Marquis red-handed.

He was so discreet and so careful in public that rumours concerning his love affairs rested only on conjecture and surmise rather than on any actual proof to betray him.

“Darling, you are the most handsome man I have ever seen,” Inez Shangarry cooed from the bed.

“I am flattered, Inez,” the Marquis replied, but his tone was cynical.

“I mean it,” she continued insistently, “and that is why I want to kiss you. Come here. You cannot refuse me one last kiss.”

She held out her white arms as she spoke, but the Marquis laughed and shook his head.

“I have been caught that way before!”

He was only too well aware that, if a man bent over a woman in bed and she pulled him down upon her, he was helpless. He was sure that that was Inez Shangarry’s intention and it made him all the more determined to escape.

She was insatiable, he thought. She did not seem tired after the fierceness of their love making, while he himself felt a definite reaction that made him wish to be free of the warm scented room.

There was the heavy fragrance of flowers mingled with an exotic perfume that Inez Shangarry always used and which her lovers found lingered on their clothes long after they had left her presence.

There was no doubt, the Marquis thought, that she was exceptionally beautiful. At the same time there was something lacking that he could not quite put a name to.

She could make him laugh by the sharpness of her wit, which most other women failed to do, but, although their association was fiery and tempestuous, he knew that he was not in the least in love with her.

In fact as usual his heart was completely untouched so that if he never saw her again it would have not troubled him in the slightest.

“I must go, Inez,” he said. “Thank you for an enchanting evening, and I do hope that we shall be able to dine again together very soon in the near future.”

He took her hand as he spoke and lifted it to his lips, but as he did so her fingers tightened on his and she urged him insistently,

“Kiss me, Osborne, stay with me a little longer. I want you – I need you. I cannot let you leave me!”

There was such a passionate note in her voice together with an almost frantic determination to keep him that the Marquis looked at her in surprise.

As he did so, he heard a faint sound from the room below them. It was very faint, but he knew that Inez Shangarry had heard it too.

Then she held onto him even more tightly and her voice rose a little as she pleaded,

“I love you, Osborne! I love you. Kiss me! Please kiss me.”

The Marquis freed himself from her and, moving swiftly across the room went not to the door that led to the landing but through another, which opened into a dressing room occupied by Lord Shangarry when he was at home.

The room was in darkness but the Marquis crossed it in a few steps and pulled back the curtains over the window.

It was a starlit night with the moon appearing fitfully between drifting clouds.

The Marquis flung up the window to look out.

As he expected, there was a drop of about twelve feet onto a roof below and again a long drop from there to the Mews.

Without wasting any time he let himself down by his arms and then with his body fully outstretched he dropped lightly and with athletic expertise onto the roof beneath him.

Once there he climbed over the edge and this time with the help of a drainpipe descended onto the rough cobbles of the Mews.

He heard the sleeves of his evening coat splitting at the armholes as he did so, but then his tailor had never envisaged his indulging in such acrobatic feats when he was dressed for dinner.

The shadows in the deserted Mews were dark and the Marquis moved quickly from where he was standing into the darkness created by one of the stable doors. Then he looked up at the window he had left behind him.

He did not have to wait more than a few seconds.

At the open aperture the head of a man, who leant out and looked searchingly at the roof beneath the window and then into the Mews.

The Marquis kept very still. He recognised Lord Shangarry quite clearly and he knew that he had just escaped from a cleverly and well-baited trap.

It must have been some sixth sense, he thought, that had made him feel that Inez’s insistence on his staying longer had been overacted or perhaps he had a special perception where women were concerned.

He had thought for some time that Inez’s desire to possess him was growing to the point where it could be dangerous.

He well knew that if, as she had intended, her husband had found them making love, there were only two courses open.

The first was that Shangarry should divorce her, in which case she would eventually become the Marchioness of Linwood and however great the penalties of scandal and social ostracism the ultimate result would justify them.

Alternatively, and the Marquis could not help thinking that this might be more likely, Lord Shangarry would demand a very large sum of money to assuage his outraged feelings and soothe his pride.

Watching him staring from the open window the Marquis was quite certain that the plot had been concocted between them.

Now, when he thought of it, he remembered someone at his Club saying that Shangarry was deeply in debt and from things that Inez had told him he was certain that they were finding it hard to make ends meet.

What then could be better from their standpoint than to be in a position to blackmail, discreetly, of course, someone as rich as himself?

They knew that he would not wish to be involved in anything so unsavoury as a Court case and he could certainly afford to pay handsomely for his misdemeanours.

‘I have been a fool!’ the Marquis told himself.

Then, as Lord Shangarry, cheated of his prey, slammed the window shut, he cursed beneath his breath.

‘Damn the woman! Damn all women! I hate them all – I always have!’

The violence he felt surprised even himself and yet it was in part true.

He did dislike women as a s*x.

Although he used them for his own ends, finding a fleeting and very transitory pleasure in their company when they surrendered themselves to his desires, he had never met a woman whose companionship he preferred to that of a man or whom he left with any sense of regret.

The way Inez had behaved tonight, he thought, was typical of the female of the species.

Looking back, he could see how she had gradually inveigled her way into his consciousness and how the mere fact that all other men sang her praises had made him feel that she was more desirable than in fact she was.

When it came down to it, she was very like every other woman who he had made love to and there was nothing at all unique about her.

Now he could only curse himself for being as brainless as any unfledged youth in letting himself nearly be caught in a situation that it would have been impossible to extricate himself from with any dignity.

“Curse them – curse them both!” the Marquis swore.

Then, after waiting until he was quite certain that Lord Shangarry was no longer peering through the window, he turned and started to walk up the Mews.

In the stables, as he passed them, he could hear the sound of horses moving restlessly in their stalls and occasionally the whistling of a groom who had been kept out late and was rubbing down his animals before he himself went to bed.

There were the smells of leather, hay and horseflesh, which the Marquis knew well.

It made him think of the country and conjured up in him a sudden longing to be free of London and the social gossip and intrigue, which he disliked, most especially if it concerned himself.

He had walked quite a little way before he stopped suddenly as it came to his mind that however skilfully he had escaped from the Shangarry house he had left two pieces of incriminating evidence behind. His hat and his evening cloak.