Love Has His Way

CHAPTER ONE ~ 1802-2

The rest of his time was occupied with his estates and large staff.

Sarne Hall, his fine mansion in Kent, was not only one of the largest and most admired houses in the country but the parties when he entertained there were so interesting and at the same time so exclusive that it was said that even the Prince of Wales would beg him for an invitation.

The Marquis owned other properties, all of which had something interesting and unusual about them, but he then expected his houses to excel as he expected all his possessions to be perfection down to the very last detail.

“The trouble with you, Sarne,” someone had said to him only last week, “is that you are too good to be true and the only thing that is lacking as you run over us with your chariot wheels is that you have no wife to cut you down to size!”

“Do you really think a wife would do that?” the Marquis asked with a twist of his lips.

“Women have a manner of making a man ‘toe the line’ in one way or another,” his friend answered.

“Then I shall be the exception,” the Marquis said. “I assure you I shall choose my wife as carefully as I choose my horses.”

“Knowing your damned luck,” his friend said, “she will doubtless be such a high-stepper that she will win the Gold Cup at Ascot and trot home with the Derby Stakes!”

The Marquis had laughed.

“You are setting me such a very high standard that I shall be wise and remain as I am a perennial bachelor.”

“You will certainly want a son to inherit so much wealth.”

“There is plenty of time for that,” the Marquis replied confidently.

He was, as a matter of fact, avoiding marriage because he had seen that, as far as many of his friends were concerned, it was a most unenviable state.

He had been very fortunate in that he had inherited the title before he was twenty, which meant that he had no father to pressure him into an arranged marriage such as was usually accepted as inevitable by the young men of his own age with whom he had been at Oxford University.

“Why the devil did I ever get so tied up with that virago who just makes my life a hell on earth?” one of his closest friends had asked him two years after they had left Oxford.

“You were too young to know your own mind,” the Marquis said.

“My mind?” his friend almost shouted, “my father’s mind! If you only heard the way he went on at me.”

He mimicked his father’s voice as he said,

“‘She will suit you admirably, my boy, comes from a very good stock and has a dowry of eighty thousand pounds, which is just what we want at this moment and there will be much more when her father dies’.”

“You should have looked at her rather than what she had in the bank,” the Marquis said unsympathetically.

“She seemed all right,” his friend went on. “It was only when the knot was tied and there was no escape that I realised what had happened to me.”

He sounded so unhappy that the Marquis had offered him the only consolation that was available.

“Come and stay with me in Grosvenor Square,” he said. “I will introduce you to some of the prettiest ‘bits of muslin’ in the whole of London.”

“Thank you,” his friend smiled, “and Sybil can scream herself stupid for all I care. If I cannot escape from that strident voice of hers I think I shall go mad.”

This was only one instance out of very many the Marquis had of how a marriage could demoralise and upset a man. As he told himself that it was the sort of thing that could never happen to him, he realised how quickly a woman could bore him and knew that, if this was inevitable where his mistresses were concerned, it was no less a foregone conclusion with a wife.

He therefore enjoyed his bachelorhood and never gave marriage a thought, except when he was reminded by those who could not mind their own business that one day he would have to have a son and an heir.

He agreed that was something he would require eventually but, as he had not yet passed his twenty-ninth birthday, there was certainly no urgency.

As he sipped his own excellent champagne the maid next brought in a number of dishes, which she set on a side table and the Marquis, who was a connoisseur of food and employed the best chef in London, walked across the room to inspect them.

They certainly looked and smelt appetising and he thought that there would be no need to resort to his pâté, which he perceived was also there should he need it.

He sat down at the small table with Nicole opposite him and, as he ate a really excellent meal served expertly by the maid, who was also French, he found himself thinking that once again his exceptional luck had brought him Nicole.

She looked lovely in the candlelight and he liked the way her dark eyes slanted upwards a little at the corners and her face, although it owed a great deal to artifice, was also clear and unblemished.

They talked of the theatre and she made him laugh with some of her descriptions of the temperaments thrown by the leading ladies and the eccentricities of the Managers.

“Have you been in the theatre long?” he asked her.

“For three years,” my Lord.”

“Then why have I not seen you before?”

“Thees ees my first engagement at Covent Garden.”

The Marquis was well aware that her salary would not enable her to live in the comfort and luxury of the house that he was dining in and he wondered if he should ask her who had been her protector and who was paying for the very excellent dinner he was eating.

As they drank the claret, which was so good that the Marquis had sent a case of it to the Prince of Wales, he was not surprised when Nicole observed,

“Ze wine ees delicious, my Lord.”

“I am glad you appreciate it,” the Marquis said. “I find it exceptional. I had it shipped from France only two months ago.”

He saw that she was interested and then he commented,

“It is very unusual to find a woman who is discerning about wine. It must be your French blood or has somebody taught you?”

It was a leading question and he was aware that Nicole evaded it as she replied,

“I am told you have the best of everytheeng at your house, my Lord.”

“I think that is true,” the Marquis agreed, “but I asked you a question.”

“My father taught me a great deal about ze wines and he also insisted I understand food, French food, of course, which he considered was important in life.”

The Marquis was interested.

“Your father is alive?”

“Yes, my Lord.”

“Where does he live?”

“He lives in Little Hamble. You will never have heard of it, but it is a small village in Northumberland.”

Nicole spoke as if she had no wish to continue the conversation and it was easy to pause because the maid was clearing away the last of their dishes and setting a silver tray on which there was a coffee pot.

She filled up the Marquis’s glass of claret, having, he noted, opened a new bottle and put a decanter of brandy in front of him.

All this, the Marquis knew, was preparatory to leaving the room and he felt that the meal, which had been delicious, and the way that it had been served was exactly the right prelude to what lay ahead.

He took up his glass and raised it.

“To a perfect hostess,” he toasted, “and to a superb supper that I know will be the first of many!”

“You are sure of that, my Lord?”

“Very sure,” he answered. “If you are at all doubtful, I am ready to convince you that this is a very special evening for both of us.”

There was a deep note in his voice that he had always found to be irresistible and, as Nicole’s eyes met his over the candlelit table, he thought that it was a long time since he had found a woman who was quite so desirable.

He liked the way she had made no obvious effort to flirt with him or attract him during supper.

She talked in the same way as a Lady of Quality would have done and she ate daintily with an elegance that would have been perfectly in place at Carlton House with the Prince of Wales.

The Marquis also liked the way she had been evasive about some of his questions.

‘There is obviously some secret about her parents,’ he thought, ‘and even if she has been telling me lies she has been doing it so cleverly and so charmingly that I am intrigued rather than sceptical.’

Altogether he thought that his new liaison would prove very enjoyable and he pushed the chair a little way from the table and crossed his legs with an air of consequence.

It was not only his possessions that made them run after him as if he was the Pied Piper, it was his excessive good looks and perhaps the raffish buccaneering expression in his eyes which told all and sundry that what he wanted he took.

One of the Marquis’s ancestors had in fact been a pirate, and he remembered how when he was a boy one of his Governesses who was better read than the rest used to say when he was naughty,

“It’s no use your behaving like a pirate with me. You will do as I say or I will tell your father.”

It had taken him some time to realise that a pirate took by force what he could not get by lawful means and he often wondered whether, if he had not been in the fortunate position of being able to buy anything he wanted, he too would have used force.

If he could not prove it in any other way, he did so by taking the women who he wanted, whether they were the wives of jealous husbands or under the protection of a man who could not provide for them as generously as he could.

He had no scruples but, although quite a number of men would have liked to call him out and fight for their rights, there was not a swordsman or a pistol shot who would have tried to do so, knowing that he was superior in both weapons.

“Tell me about yourself,” the Marquis asked now, “I am not so naїve as to believe that there have not been many ardent admirers in your life before me.”

Nicole smiled a little mysteriously.

“I cannot really believe zat your Lordship wants to hear ze story of my life at zis stage in ze evening.”

“Why not?” the Marquis enquired. “It seems a good moment. When you have finished your claret, I want you to try my excellent brandy. After that we will find it more comfortable to be closer than we are at this moment.”

He picked up his untouched glass of claret.

“You intrigue me and excite me,” he said. “And now tell me about yourself.”

As he spoke, he drank nearly half of the claret in his glass.

Only as it passed down his throat did he think that there was something strange about it.

Then. as he raised the half-empty glass to his nose and smelt it to discover if there was anything wrong, he was aware that something extraordinary was happening to his whole body and he was finding it hard to move – to think –

He struggled against a strange darkness and a paralysis that seemed to be overwhelming him.