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“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 head-first into it.
At about the time Roland Vawtry was tumbling into a pit, the new Marchioness of Dain’s hind-quarters 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.
The next day, Dain’s private secretary had arrived with a brace of servants and taken over. After that, all Jessica had had to do was give an occasional order and accustom herself to being treated like an exceedingly precious and delicate, all-wise and altogether perfect princess.
Not by her husband, though.
They had been traveling for more than eight hours, and though they stopped frequently to change horses, that was for not a second more than the one to two minutes it took to make the change. At Bagshot, at about four o’clock, she’d needed to use the privy. She’d returned to find Dain pacing impatiently by the carriage, pocket watch in hand. He had strongly objected to her taking five times longer to answer nature’s call than the stablemen did to unhitch four horses and hitch up four fresh ones.
“All a male need do,” she’d told him patiently, “is unfasten his trouser buttons and aim somewhere, and it’s done. I am a female, however, and neither my plumbing nor my garments are so accommodating.”
He had laughed and stuffed her into the carriage and told her she was an infernal bother, but she was born that way, wasn’t she?—being born female. Nonetheless, the second time she’d needed to relieve herself, a few miles back at Andover, he’d grumblingly told her to take her time. She’d returned to find him patiently sipping a tankard of ale. He had laughingly offered her a sip, and laughed harder when she drained the quarter pint he’d left.
“That was a mistake,” he’d said when they were once more upon the road. “Now you’ll be wanting to stop at every necessary from here to Amesbury.”
That had led to a series of privy and chamber pot jokes. Jessica had never before understood why men found those sorts of anecdotes so gut-busting hilarious. She had moments ago discovered that they could be funny enough if related by an evilly
clever storyteller.
She was at present recovering from an altogether immature fit of whooping laughter.
Dain was lounging back in the seat, which, as usual, he took up most of. His half-closed eyes were crinkled up at the corners and his hard mouth had curved into an endearingly crooked smile.
She wanted to be vexed with him for making her laugh so intemperately at the crass, puerile story. She couldn’t be. He looked so adorably pleased with himself.
She was in a sorry case, to find Beelzebub adorable, but she couldn’t help it. She wanted to crawl into his lap and cover his wicked countenance with kisses.
He caught her studying him. She hoped she didn’t look as besotted as she felt.
“Are you uncomfortable?” he asked.
“My backside and limbs have fallen asleep,” she said, shifting her position a fraction away. Not that one could get away, even in this coach, which was roomier than his curricle. There was still only one seat, and there was a great deal of him. But the air had cooled considerably with evening, and he was very warm.
“You should have asked to step out to stretch your limbs when we stopped at Weyhill,” he said. “We shan’t stop again until Amesbury.”
“I scarcely noticed Weyhill,” she said. “You were telling one of the most moronic anecdotes I’d ever heard.”
“Had it been less moronic, the joke would have gone over your head,” he said. “You laughed hard enough.”
“I didn’t want to hurt your feelings,” she said. “I thought you were trying to impress me by displaying the uppermost limits of your intellect.”
He turned an evil grin upon her. “When I set out to impress you, my lady, believe me, intellect will have nothing to do with it.”
She met his gaze stoically, while her insides went into a feverish flurry. “You are referring to the wedding night, no doubt,” she said composedly. “The ‘breeding rights’ for which you’ve paid so extortionate a price. Well, it will be easy enough to impress me, since you’re an expert and I have never done it, even once.”
