Lady Maryann Rivington heard the door close behind the footman who had delivered the summons from her mother.
Pray don’t let Mama be ill. Not tonight. Not on the night of my betrothal ball.
“Hurry, Jane!” In a flurry of skirts, Lady Maryann rose from the dressing table. “My gloves. And where did you put the rose Lord Tammadge sent?”
“One miserly flower.” The maid, a sharp-featured young thing whose head was stuffed to overflowing with romantic notions, gave a disparaging sniff as she pinned the white bud in its pearl-encrusted silver holder to her mistress’s ball gown.
“Should ’ave been red roses. A dozen of ’em.”
“The rose is perfect.” Absently, Lady Maryann adjusted the folds of gold silk draped over an underskirt of heavy white satin.
The gown was perfect; the flower was perfect; and the ball promised to be the perfect conclusion to long and tedious negotiations of a marriage contract between Lady Maryann, youngest daughter of the Earl of Rivington, and Francis, Eighth Viscount Tammadge.
If only Mama has not fallen victim to one of her sick headaches.
Irene, Lady Rivington had been in high spirits all morning, but Maryann knew she had been closeted with her husband in the small ground-floor study for quite half an hour during the afternoon. Maryann had heard the roar of her father’s voice on the floor above, where she was adding the final touches to the floral decorations on the dining table.
Well, procrastination paid no toll; so she had best see what the summons was all about. Her future was settled. Even a canceled ball could not spoil her plans.
Maryann’s slippered feet fairly flew along the corridor to her mother’s chamber at the opposite end of the magnificent London town house. Once, she tripped, but instead of slowing, she merely tugged her skirts a little higher. Breathless, she burst into the familiar room with its pretty rosewood furniture and draperies of Brussels lace.
“Mama—”
Maryann came to an abrupt halt. She tilted her head this way, then that, for a different perspective of the elegant woman gowned in a creation of mauve silk, diamonds sparkling on her ears and neck, her luxuriant honey brown hair swept up in an elaborate coiffure.
“Mama, you look lovely. No one will believe you’re the mother of five grown children and a grandmother of eight.”
“Thank you.” Irene Rivington smiled faintly, remembering when a three-year-old Maryann had first copied the head tilting from her German grandmother, the Baroness von Astfeld und Hahndorf. It was a habit the girl had never discarded.
“You don’t have a headache, do you, Mama?” asked Maryann, closing the door. “That’s what I feared when James brought your message.”
“I feel perfectly well, dear.” Irene replaced the stopper on a flacon of perfume, rose from her dressing table, and moved briskly to the brocaded day bed beneath the window.
“Come and sit with me, Maryann,” she said, wishing her voice were as brisk and purposeful as her movements. “There is something I want to discuss.”
She watched her daughter cross the room. Her youngest child, the one most like her in appearance, Maryann was small and lithe as Irene had been before she became a wife and mother. Now Irene was small and plump. Maryann had also inherited her mother’s wide gray eyes and rich, honey brown hair, wearing it in short, riotous curls framing her face.
“Mama?” Maryann said softly. “What has happened? You said there’s something to discuss.”
Irene gave a start. She had a duty to perform. Despite Rivington’s prohibition.
She met her daughter’s steady gaze. “It is about your betrothal.”
Maryann went cold inside. Surely Tammadge had not cried off on the eve of their betrothal ball! She counted on getting married; only a husband could remove her from her father’s house.
“Child, are you sure you wish to go through with it?” Irene asked anxiously.
“But of course!” In her relief, Maryann broke into a peal of laughter. A proper fool she’d been to think Tammadge would cry off. He was a gentleman; he’d never commit such an outrageous faux pas as jilting a lady.
“It is all arranged, is it not, Mama? The announcement was in the papers, tonight is my betrothal ball, and in five months I shall be a married lady and reside over my own establishment.”
“Yes, but—” Irene looked at her daughter helplessly. She’d had her words all planned, but in the face of Maryann’s complacency the carefully rehearsed warning stuck in her throat.
“Maryann, you are not yet nineteen. Lord Tammadge is five and forty if he is a day.”
“You saw no problem with the age difference when Lord Tammadge asked for my hand.”
“Are you in love with him?”
Her daughter’s gray eyes widened. “Were you in love with Father?”
Irene hesitated, her gaze fixed on the white rose pinned to Maryann’s ball gown.
“I hardly, knew Rivington. The marriage was arranged. But,” she added almost inaudibly, “when I was eighteen, I still dreamed of falling in love.”
“I, too, dream of love.” A smile teased the corners of Maryann’s mouth. “I believe a girl cannot help dreaming. And that’s all right as long as she doesn’t allow it to cloud reality.”
“You’re thinking of Elizabeth.”
“Poor Bess. If ever a bride was in love, it was she. And what did it get her? A husband who squanders his money on mistresses and opera dancers while Bess sits at home and cries.”
Irene knew it was true. None of her elder daughters had found happiness with their spouses.
Correctly interpreting her mother’s silence, Maryann drove home her point. “And look at Emily, Gussy, and Margaret. They were in such a hurry to escape Father, they married the first men who showed an interest in their dowries. Now they’re stuck in the country with their dour-faced, penny-pinching husbands. They merely exchanged one kind of tyranny for another.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” Irene said, ignoring the voice of reason pointing out the shortcomings of her own marriage. “If you were to meet the right man …”
“Lord Tammadge is most eligible. He is well mannered, personable, respected and admired by his peers. He has a large house in Grosvenor Square, and he certainly does not have a need of my dowry. He proved that when he agreed to have the money placed in an account in my name.”
Lady Rivington made no reply, and Maryann shifted restlessly. Sitting still was a penance. She preferred to be up and pacing, but it made her mother nervous. She compromised by tapping a foot.
“This is my second season, Mama. No one half as eligible as Tammadge offered for me last year, and besides, Father gave me no choice. He refused all offers I did receive. And next year,” Maryann added in a voice of doom, “I’ll be considered on the shelf with little prospect of contracting a marriage.”
“At times, I wonder if spinsterhood is indeed the awful fate it’s said to be.”
Maryann suppressed a shudder. Spinsterhood meant living under her father’s thumb, or a lifetime devoted to nieces and nephews. She rose, shaking out her skirts.
“Mama,” she said firmly. “You have no need to worry about me. Marriage to Lord Tammadge will suit me just fine.”
“There have been rumors about him …”
“I have yet to meet a man—or a lady for that matter—who hasn’t caused some kind of stir or other.” Maryann cocked an eyebrow at her mother. “Dearest, even you are no exception.”
“What?!” Irene Rivington sat bolt upright, flecks of color burning on her cheeks. “I have never done anything—”
“No, of course not,” Maryann assured her. “It’s not your doing that your friends speculate on the cost of your gowns and hats. It is Father’s awful roar, which can be heard from here to Blackfriars.”
“Oh.” Lady Rivington’s indignation died. “I didn’t think you noticed. You’re forever in the Sloane Street gardens, muddying your hands and skirts.”
Maryann’s daily visits to Mr. Salisbury’s Botanic Gardens had long been a bone of contention between mother and daughter. Maryann ignored the remark.
“How can I not notice when I see you laid up on your couch? Father’s shouting always gives you a headache.”
“But to accuse my friends of taking an interest in my bills! Maryann, that is unkind of you.”
“Oh? Only last week, when you were indisposed after Madame Blanchard sent the bill for the mauve silk you’re wearing, bets were offered that Father would cancel the betrothal ball.”
“Nonsense. Rivington has too much pride to cancel the ball for any reason but the king’s demise.”
“And what’s more, Father has no call to lose his temper over a gown. You don’t spend extravagantly, and he is far from being purse-pinched.”
Irene, who had cause to know the workings of her husband’s twisted mind, had for some time suspected that the Earl of Rivington was not as well off as he led others to believe. But if she dared economize by wearing last season’s gowns, his anger, fed by an inordinate pride and what he considered his duty to his name and standing in society, would be worse than when she presented him with a dressmaker’s bill.
“I think,” she said, “we are straying from the point. Speculation about gowns and hats is not the kind of gossip I meant.”
“You meant rumors about Lord Tammadge and his ladybirds.” Maryann gave her mother a wise look that sat oddly on her youthful features. “I, too, have heard the gossip, and it doesn’t worry me a bit. It’s not as though I expect Tammadge to live in my pocket once we’re married.”
Irene swallowed. The rumors were worse, much worse. She had changed her mind a dozen times whether or not to tell Maryann since, earlier that afternoon, her maid reported the sordid tale. Irene had even consulted her husband, something she rarely did and which had done no good.
Rivington’s face had turned purple as he berated her for listening to servants’ gossip. He had forbidden her to mention the matter to Maryann. Lord Tammadge, he had reminded his wife furiously, was a gentleman of impeccable birth and breeding.
Chastened, Irene had nodded and promised to put the gossip out of her mind.
Three hours later, she had sent for Maryann. But as she studied her youngest daughter now, she changed her mind once again. The rumors—which, as Rivington pointed out, circulated only among the servants—might be false after all. She prayed they were.
Repeating the wicked tale to Maryann would serve no purpose but to upset the girl. She would not be allowed to break the engagement if she wanted to. Aside from the fact that a lady did not jilt a gentleman without suffering dire consequences, Rivington had made it clear that his youngest child would marry Viscount Tammadge. And no argument about it!
I ought to count my blessings, Irene told herself. For once, Maryann has the same goal as her father.
“Mama, let’s go downstairs. The dinner guests will arrive presently, and you know how Father hates to be kept waiting.”
Irene sighed. Clasping her gloves and reticule, she slowly got to her feet, assuring herself that she was doing right by not disturbing Maryann’s peace of mind. An integral part of her daughter’s charm was her innocence, her frank and open manner, which would surely suffer, and perhaps wither away, if she learned about the rumors. Her bubbly, irrepressible nature, though, was slowly stifled by Rivington’s harshness.
But that was something she must not dwell on. Not tonight. It always made her ill because she was powerless to do anything about it.
She looked at her daughter, who met her gaze with perfect calm.
“I swear,” she said, glad to focus her worries on something relatively innocuous. “It is not normal for a young girl embarking on such a serious step as matrimony to be as calm and placid as you are.”
“I have every reason to be placid.” Maryann led the way from the third floor to the first, where the reception rooms and the formal dining room were located. “When I marry Lord Tammadge, I’ll not only have my dowry but also the income from consols he settled on me.”
She stopped on the landing. With the air of a contented kitten, she looked at Lady Rivington. “Mama, do you realize that I shall have four thousand pounds income at my disposal annually?”
“Heavens, child! You sound like a banker or a solicitor. Neither your sisters nor I understood or cared anything about marriage settlements.”
And that, thought Maryann as she continued downstairs, is the reason why Bess, Margaret, Emily, and Gussy are miserable, and why Mama has headaches and is obliged to spend many a beautiful day on her couch when Father flies into a rage.
Languishing in her rooms was not a life Maryann could tolerate. Neither was silent suffering acceptable—nor was the harshness of an unloving father who would permit no character trait in a daughter but meekness and passivity.
Maryann was far from meek, but in order to do all the things she wanted to accomplish, she must have a certain measure of freedom and money. Viscount Tammadge would give her both. The freedom of a married lady to move about as she pleased, and the money to indulge her most ardent desire.
In return, Lord Tammadge had promised, she need do no more than give him her wifely support when he entertained and, in due course, present him with an heir to his vast estates.
Well satisfied with the arrangement of her future, Maryann joined her father and her sister Elizabeth with her unfaithful spouse in the salon to wait for Lord Tammadge and those of the guests who had been asked to dine before the ball. It was not until much later, during the sixth course of the lavish dinner, that she wondered once again about the interview with her mother.
They had talked at great length, but somehow, Maryann suspected, they had not touched upon the meat of the matter. The summons, her mother’s agitation, all hinted at some weightier problem than a difference in ages or gossip about Lord Tammadge’s fair paphians.
She shot a speculative look at her betrothed, but could see only his classic profile as he listened to the lady on his left. Well, if Mama was troubled about something, there was time aplenty to discuss it. The wedding and her removal from Rivington House were still five months away.
But nothing Mama might say would sway her from the course she had set. Maryann was done with her father’s rule, done with being shouted at, or locked into a dark cellar room for some alleged wrongdoing.
The elaborate meal was finally over. Flanked by her parents on one side and her fiancé on the other, Maryann greeted the endless stream of guests filing up the wide staircase and into the ballroom that took up the full length of the second floor.
She prayed for the ceremony to end. Her glove felt sticky from countless handshakes. Her mouth was beginning to tremble from the effort of maintaining a smile. And a feeling of listlessness that attacked her with increasing frequency since the onset of her second season threatened to claim her once again.
She peeked up at Lord Tammadge. As usual, his thin, long face showed traces of boredom. The expression in his pale eyes was bland. Despite herself, Maryann was piqued. True, there was not a shred of affection between them. Neither one pretended otherwise. But this was the night of their betrothal ball. Surely some show of feeling, a gleam of interest, would not come amiss from the man who had won Lady Maryann Rivington’s hand.
Glancing to her left, she noted that her mother was pale, the smile forced. Her father seemed to be the only one enjoying himself. Always of a taciturn and sour disposition, he actually beamed at each of the arrivals.
Fate had not presented Reginald Rivington, Sixth Earl of Rivington, with the son he desired, only with five very unsatisfactory daughters. Now, with the arrangement of a contract of marriage between his youngest, most troublesome, daughter and one of the most eligible men in the country, he had done his duty by them.
“My lord,” Maryann whispered between curtsies to a beturbaned dowager countess and the wife of an M.P., one of Tammadge’s friends, “the orchestra has warmed up long enough. Do you think we should go in and open the ball?”
Viscount Tammadge raised a hand, languidly fanning himself with a scented, lace-edged handkerchief. “If you like, my dear.”
He did not look at Maryann but scanned a party just ascending the stairs. A spark of interest lit his pale eyes, and he tucked the handkerchief into his pocket.
“Wait just a moment, though,” he said with more fervor than he had expressed when he formally proposed to Maryann. “I should like to welcome a friend. I particularly asked your mama to invite him.”
Maryann had wished for interest—but not in some bore of a friend.
She watched her betrothed more closely. He would always be a distinguished-looking gentleman with the shock of silver-speckled dark hair above a high forehead, the elegant clothes that sat without a crease on his slender frame. But when his face came alive, he was handsome.
If he looked at her like that, with an air of anticipation, even eagerness, Maryann thought wistfully, their marriage might turn out less of a business arrangement than she expected.
Every girl, as she had pointed out to her mother, allowed herself to dream.
Curious as to who had brought about the transformation in her fiancé, she studied the newcomers. Not Lady Jersey or Mrs. Drummond-Burrell, or the stunning blonde accompanying the two patronesses of Almack’s. Lord Tammadge had spoken of a “him.” Extending her hand to the formidable Mrs. Drummond-Burrell, she turned her gaze to the two men following at some distance.
The older, a portly, florid-faced gentleman, was about the viscount’s age. He grinned from ear to ear as he approached the receiving line and shifted small pig’s eyes from her to Lord Tammadge.
No doubt about it. He was the friend, although why he should elicit anything but irritation, Maryann could not begin to guess. She found his gaping quite repulsive.
She directed a cursory look at his companion—and caught her breath as listlessness and annoyance vanished with incredible speed. She looked again; she could not take her eyes off the stranger.