Lady Lucy's Lover Read Free

and, turning on her heel, she walked back into the drawing room and slammed the door.
    Of course, he had come home drunk many times before, but never in the middle of the afternoon. After a while, Lucy began to chide herself for being missish. Her husband was behaving like any other man. Somehow, she, Lucy, had failed him as a wife, which was why he found it necessary to seek his pleasures elsewhere. She must make one tremendous effort to look as beautiful as possible at the Courtlands’ ball. She would be loving and affectionate. She would charm him as she had done in the past, and their married life would become the way she had always dreamed it should be.
    Lucy decided to take a nap to fortify herself for the social rigors of the night to come and by the time she fell asleep she had thoroughly made up her mind that she was a very hardhearted and selfish wife indeed.
    Did not all men drink to excess and gamble to excess? Only the other day, it was said that a man had collapsed in front of White’s Club in St. James’s and the members had crowded to the window and had immediately begun laying bets as to whether he would live or die. A passerby had suggested bleeding the poor man but had been howled down by the gamblers who protested that this would affect the fairness of the betting.
    She remembered the Marquess as he had been during the brief period of their engagement—warm and loving and tender. And so with the resilient optimism of youth, Lady Lucy fell asleep, convinced she would awake to a different world and a different marriage.
    It was very hard to accept the reality of the situation when she was at last dressed in a gown of sheerest muslin, embroidered with seed pearls and worn over a slip of white satin.
    Her golden hair was parted on the left side with curls hanging down over the left cheek. Drop earrings of Roman pearls completed the ensemble. Her reflection in the long glass had told her that she was in looks. The brilliance of her blue eyes detracted from the insipidness of her fair coloring, for blonds were not considered fashionable. She had descended the stairs to the small Blue Saloon on the ground floor where she normally awaited her husband. But as the minutes added up to a whole half-hour and still he did not come, she began to feel anxious and dispatched the first footman with a message for my lord.
    But it was the butler, Wilson, who returned with the intelligence that my lord was feeling a trifle
seedy
and requested that my lady should go to the ball without him. My lord would join my lady later.
    Lucy’s pretty pink mouth compressed into a hard line. She wanted to send Wilson back upstairs again bearing a few sharp and choice words but there was something about all butlers that intimidated Lady Lucy. Sometimes she toyed with the fantasy that there was a special manufactory for turning out butlers from the same mold: fat and pear-shaped with large white faces and large pouches under the eyes and a pervading aura of sheer disinterest in the vagaries of the human race.
    So instead she said quietly, “Very well, Wilson, have the carriage brought around.”
    While she awaited the arrival of the carriage, Lucy crossed to the window and pulled aside the curtain and looked out.
    How frightening and dark and violent London seemed when one had to venture out alone.
    The street lamps cast barely more than a glimmer over the surrounding gloom of the square. They were glass globes half filled with whale oil and with bits of cotton twist for wick.
    The globes were black with dirt, for the lamplighters who were employed to look after them, to light them at dusk and extinguish them at midnight, were “a contingent of greasy clodhopping fellows” with filthy fingers, who seemed incapable of filling a lamp without spilling the oil onto the head of anyone passing under their ladder.
    Across the street, in the mansion directly opposite, had lived Lady Cummings, who had died only the