Lady Lucy's Lover Read Free Page A

other day. The house of death was shuttered and curtained, its door knocker wrapped around with flannel; on the front doorstep, dressed from head to foot in black, his pale face looming like a disk in the flickering light of the street lamp before the house, stood a professional mute, miming the agonies of despair for sixpence an hour (Sundays extra).
    Lucy let the curtain fall with a sigh. What a marvelous city London had seemed on her first Season.
Then
she had not noticed the danger or squalor, feeling secure and protected with her tall, gallant Marquess always at her side.
    The golden days of their courtship flicked through her mind as the carriage rumbled on its way to the Courtlands’ ball. The excitement of warm kisses, pressures of the hand, all leading to that magic moment on her wedding night when she surrendered to him entirely. Lucy bit her lip. It was hard to admit even now that what should have been the culminating moment of glory, the crown set on their romance, had turned out to be… well… disappointing. Of course, he had drunk a great deal at the wedding. Almost unbidden, Ann’s slightly mocking voice sounded in her ears: “Why not take a lover, Lucy?”
    But that was unthinkable. The first glory of their love would return. All she could do was to try to understand him and say nothing that would drive him further from his home.
    A tear of a size and beauty to rival the drops of her earrings rolled slowly down her cheek and she impatiently brushed it away.
    Lord and Lady Courtland received Lucy at the entrance to the ballroom. “Your husband is not with you?” said Lady Courtland, making it sound more like an accusation than a question.
    â€œHe is unfortunately detained, my lady,” said Lucy, curtsying low. “He will join me presently.”
    She made her escape into the ballroom and joined Ann Hartford and her husband, Giles. Giles was small and plump in contrast to his wife’s tall elegance. Ann tactfully restrained from commenting on the absence of the Marquess. “A very good start to the Season, Lucy,” she murmured. “All the world and his wife are here. We even have the impeccable Mr. Brummell and the Prince Regent is to honor us with his presence.”
    Lucy fanned herself, for the ballroom was very hot, lit as it was by hundreds of wax candles. The Exclusives were well represented. It was in the nature of high society to exclude undesirables and in that respect Regency society was already unique in the determined way it went about exclusion.
    The ton called itself exclusive, its members the Exclusives, its ruling principle exclusivism. Innumerable hedges were built against intruders, elaborate rules for membership and subrules were set up, for the whole mess of taboos and shibboleths was society’s way of keeping that dreadful
ennui
at bay.
    It was even unfashionable to be married in church (“one simply
dies
of cold”) and the Marquess had advised his unsophisticated bride not to remind society that they had been married in one, albeit a country church. Married couples were not expected to remain faithful to each other. But then most of them did not marry for love. It was for the most part a business partnership—your lands added to my lands, your fortune to mine. But Lucy had believed, and still believed, in love. Her parents, for all their vagaries of fortune and their social climbing, undoubtedly cared for each other. Ann Hartford doted on her chubby Giles. And so she secretly held the brittle fashionables in contempt—the hungry women with their transparent gowns, swelling bosoms, and rouged cheeks who drifted restlessly from one lover to another.
    Not all of the men at the ball favored Mr. Brummell’s fashion in evening dress—blue coat, white cravat, and form-fitting tights showing a discreet length of striped silk stocking above a dancing pump. Some preferred the still-conventional fashion of knee breeches.