Chapter 10
On a bright Sunday morning on the eleventh day of May in the Year of Our Lord Eighteen Hundred Twenty-Eight, the Marquess of Dain stood before the minister of St. George’s, Hanover Square, with Jessica, only daughter of the late Sir Reginald Trent, baronet.
Contrary to popular expectation, the roof did not fall in when Lord Dain entered the holy edifice, and lightning did not strike once during the ceremony.
Even at the end, when he hauled his bride into his arms and kissed her so soundly that she dropped her prayer book, no clap of thunder shook the walls of St. George’s, although a few elderly ladies fainted.
As a consequence, on the evening of that day, Mr. Roland Vawtry gave Francis Beaumont his note of hand for three hundred pounds. Mr. Vawtry had previously written and delivered other notes of varying amounts to Lord Sellowby, Captain James Burton, Augustus Tolliver, and Lord Avory.
Mr. Vawtry did not know where or how he would get the money to cover the notes.
Once, a decade earlier, he’d gone to the moneylenders.
The way that worked, he learned—and learning it had cost him two years of wretchedness—was, in a nutshell, that if they lent you five hundred pounds, you were obliged to pay back one thousand.
He had rather blow out his brains than repeat the experience.
He was painfully aware that he would have no trouble covering his present debts of honor if he hadn’t had to settle so very many others before he left Paris.
He wouldn’t have had the present debts at all, he reflected miserably, if he had learned his lesson in Paris and left off wagering on any matter involving Dain.
He had won exactly once, and that had not been much of a victory. He had lost two hundred pounds to Isobel Callon when she insisted Dain had lured Miss Trent to Lady Wallingdon’s garden to make love to her.
Vawtry had simply won it back when Dain, contrary to Isobel’s confident prediction, had failed, when caught, to enact the role of chivalrous swain. He had behaved, for once, like himself.
Unfortunately for Vawtry’s finances, that had happened only the once.
Because not a week later, after vowing he wouldn’t have Miss Trent if she were served on a platter of solid gold—after the incomprehensible female had shot him—Dain had strolled into Antoine’s and coolly announced his betrothal.
He had said that someone had to marry her because she was a public menace, and he supposed he was the only one big and mean enough to manage her.
Moodily wondering just who was managing whom, Vawtry settled into a corner table with Beaumont at Mr. Pearke’s oyster house in Vinegar Yard, on the south side of Drury Lane Theater.
It was not an elegant dining establishment, but Beaumont was partial to it because it was a favorite haunt of artists. It was also very cheap, which made Vawtry partial to it at the moment.
“So Dain gave you all a show, I hear,” said Beaumont, after the tavern maid had filled their glasses. “Terrified the minister. Laughed when the bride vowed to obey. And nearly broke her jaw kissing her.”
Vawtry frowned. “I was sure Dain would drag it out to the last minute, then loudly announce, ‘I don’t.’ And laugh and stroll out the way he came.”
“You assumed he would treat her as he did other women,” said Beaumont.
“You forgot, apparently, that all the other women had been tarts, and that, in Dain’s aristocratic dictionary, the tarts are mere peasant wenches, to be tumbled and forgotten.
Miss Trent, however, is a gently bred maiden.
Completely different situation, Vawtry. I do wish you’d seen. ”
Vawtry saw now. And now it seemed so obvious, he couldn’t believe he hadn’t worked it out for himself ages ago. A lady. A different species altogether.
“If I had seen, you would be out three hundred quid at present,” he said, his voice light, his heart heavy.
Beaumont picked up his glass and studied it before taking a cautious sip. “Drinkable,” he said, “but just barely.”
Vawtry took a very long swallow from his own glass.
“Perhaps what I actually wish,” Beaumont went on, after a moment, “is that I’d known the facts. Matters would be so different now.”
He frowned down at the table. “If I’d known the truth then, I might at least have dropped a hint to you.
But I didn’t know, because my wife tells me nothing.
I truly believed, you see, that Miss Trent was penniless.
Right up until last night, when an artist friend who does sketches for Christie’s corrected my misapprehension. ”
Mr. Vawtry eyed his friend uneasily. “What do you mean? Everyone knows Bertie Trent’s sister hadn’t a feather to fly with, thanks to him.”
Beaumont glanced about. Then, leaning over the table, he spoke in lower tones. “You recall the moldering little picture Dain told us about? The one the wench got for ten sous from Champtois?”
Vawtry nodded.
“Turned out to be a Russian icon, and one of the finest and most unusual works of the Stroganov school in existence.”
Vawtry looked at him blankly.
“Late sixteenth century,” Beaumont explained.
“Icon workshop opened by the Stroganov family, Russian nobility. The artists made miniatures for domestic use. Very delicate, painstaking work. Costly materials. Highly prized these days. Hers is done with gold leaf. The frame is gold, set with precious gems.”
“Obviously worth more than ten sous,” Vawtry said, trying to keep his tone casual.
“Dain did say she was shrewd.” He emptied his glass in two swallows and refilled it.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the tavern maid approaching with their meal.
He wished she’d hurry. He didn’t want to hear any more.
“Value, of course, is in the eye of the beholder,” Beaumont went on. “I’d put it at a minimum of fifteen hundred pounds. At auction, several times that, very likely. But I know of at least one Russian who’d sell his firstborn to have it. Ten, possibly twenty thousand.”
Lady Granville, daughter of the Duke of Sutherland, one of the richest men in England, had brought her husband a dowry of twenty thousand pounds.
Such women, the daughters of peers, were far beyond Mr. Vawtry’s reach, along with their immense dowries. Miss Trent, on the other hand, the daughter of an insignificant baronet, belonged to the same class of country gentry as Mr. Vawtry himself.
He saw now that he’d had a perfect opportunity to cultivate her, after Dain had publicly insulted and humiliated her.
She had been vulnerable then. Instead of merely handing her his coat, Vawtry might have enacted the role of chivalrous knight.
He might, in that case, have stood before the preacher with her this very day.
Then the icon would have been his, and clever Beaumont could have helped him turn it into ready money…
ready to be invested. Roland Vawtry could have settled down with a pretty enough wife, and lived in tranquil comfort, no longer dependent on Dame Fortune—or, more to the point, the whims of the Marquess of Dain.
Instead, Roland Vawtry was five thousand pounds in debt.
Though this was not very much by some people’s standards, by his, it might have been millions.
He was not concerned about the tradesmen he owed, but he was deeply anxious about the notes of hand he’d given his friends.
If he did not make good on them very soon, he would not have any friends.
A gentleman who failed to pay debts of honor ceased being deemed a gentleman.
That prospect was even more harrowing to him than the threat of moneylenders, sponging houses, or debtors’ prison.
He viewed his situation as desperate.
Certain people could have told him that Francis Beaumont could detect another’s desperation at twenty paces, and took great personal pleasure in exacerbating it. But those wise persons were not about, and Vawtry was not an overly intelligent fellow.
Consequently, by the time they’d finished their meal and emptied half a dozen bottles of the barely drinkable wine, Mr. Beaumont had dug his pit, and Mr. Vawtry had obligingly toppled headfirst into it.
At about the time Roland Vawtry was tumbling into a pit, the new Marchioness of Dain’s hindquarters were showing symptoms of rigor mortis.
She sat with her spouse in the elegant black traveling chariot in which they’d been riding since one o’clock in the afternoon, when they’d left their guests at the wedding breakfast.
For a man who viewed marriage and respectable company with unmitigated contempt and disgust, he had behaved with amazing good humor.
In fact, he had seemed to find the proceedings infinitely amusing.
Three times he’d asked the trembling minister to speak up, so that the audience didn’t miss anything.
Dain had also thought it a great joke to make a circus performance of kissing his bride.
It was a wonder he hadn’t thrown her over his shoulder and carried her out of the church like a sack of potatoes.
If he had, Jessica thought wryly, he would have still managed to look every inch the aristocrat. Or monarch was more like it. She had learned that Dain had an exceedingly high opinion of his consequence, in which the standard order of precedence played no role whatsoever.
He’d made his views very clear to her aunt, not long after he’d given Jessica the heartachingly beautiful betrothal ring.
After taking Jessica home and spending an hour with her in the parlor, perusing her lists and menus and other wedding annoyances, he’d sent her away and had a private conversation with Aunt Louisa.
He’d explained how the future Marchioness of Dain was to be treated. It was simple enough.
Jessica was not to be pestered and she was not to be contradicted. She answered to nobody but Dain, and he answered to nobody but the king, and then only if he was in the mood.