In the Arms of a Marquess(33)

Tavy gasped. Ben did not speak.

She pressed a palm to her stomach. His gaze followed the action then lifted to hers, hard as polished steel. Completely foreign.

Her certainty wavered, then beneath his cold regard crumbled.

“Is it true?” she asked, realizing more with each moment what a fool she had been. To imagine he might like her—silly, babbling, awkward—that he might truly want her—plain, unnoticeable, all elbows and knees and freckles. It now seemed ludicrous.

They had always met in secret, outside the notice of her aunt and uncle and the rest of English society. She had not questioned it. She encouraged it. He was her adventure, and she knew it was wrong. He never called upon her at home and she absolutely loved that. She adored having the clandestine company of a man of questionable reputation. A handsome, charming, reckless young man who seemed nevertheless to command the respect of every native in Madras.

How foolish could she have been? How blind? For what else would a man like him want a girl like her?

“Of course it is true,” her aunt spat out, gesturing to the garden gate. “Why else would he come here like this? He knows he cannot enter through the front door.”

“Is it as she says?” Tavy uttered, but his eyes already told her. They were blank, as she had never seen them. “It is, isn’t it?”

“It must be.” His voice sounded nothing like him.

“Young man,” her aunt said stonily, “if you do not remove your person from this property I will have the guard summoned.”

His eyes flickered with anger again for an instant, then coldness. Without another glance at Tavy, he turned and walked away.

He did not return, although she waited, lying upon her bed, weeping, knowing she could not have been so mistaken in him, then knowing that she was the na?ve fool her aunt claimed.

The following afternoon her aunt and uncle closed up the house and took her north. Uncle George, it seemed, had business he was obliged to attend to in distant Calcutta. Tavy waited for her aunt to redouble the condemnation, but she behaved as though nothing at all had passed.

Uncle George, however, changed. Before, he had been kindly neglectful. Now he grew diffident, treating her with an odd, distant respect. Tavy didn’t know what her aunt had told him, but she could not help wondering if Ben had spoken to her uncle that morning instead of Aunt Imene, whether matters would have gone differently.

Six months later when they returned to Madras, Ben was gone. It was only then that Tavy learned how his uncle’s death had left him the wealthiest Englishman in India, and amongst the wealthiest natives. She also learned what he had not told her, what perhaps her aunt had not even known. His future was already set.

“He is a veritable Midas,” a gossiping matron said at tea in the vice-governor’s home.

The matron’s companion tittered. “He is expected to make some Indian princess a handsome prince.”

But he did not. Upon his return to England, only two months after his second brother fell beneath cannon blast at Waterloo, his father and eldest brother perished in a fire that burnt down the family hunting box and killed six servants in their beds. Alongside the death notices the London journal printed the information—as though an afterthought—that the new marquess was expected to marry the heiress his eldest brother had been betrothed to since childhood, the daughter of a recluse Scottish duke who had made his fortune in East Indies trade.

No more Indian princess bride. Benjirou Doreé was a Lord of the Realm now. As such, he was expected to wed as one.

Tavy cried herself to sleep that night a final time, but never again. The young man she had fallen in love with—beautiful, laughing, kind—was no longer. He had disappeared the moment he walked away from her in the garden that morning, leaving her heart torn open. The new Marquess of Doreé, so high above her touch he might as well be a god, meant nothing to her.

Chapter 8

EMBAYED. The situation of a ship when she is enclosed between two capes or promontories.—Falconer’s Dictionary of the Marine

Two dozen guests gathered in the drawing room before dinner. Until their host entered, Tavy only had attention for one.

Lady Constance Read was stunning, and not only because of her natural beauty. When she entered the chamber, her smile and golden spirits seemed to fill it with warmth, her wide, luxuriantly lashed eyes dancing with sincere pleasure to see friends and meet new acquaintances. Tavy wanted to hate her immediately. But since she had never hated anyone, including her Aunt Imene—whom she successfully resisted despising for three full years while living with her—she certainly could not begin with charming, vivacious Lady Constance.

Moving around the room as she greeted people, the heiress finally came to Tavy.

“Dear Miss Pierce, how lovely to see you again.” She reached for her hand.

Tavy stared, speechless, then dropped into a curtsy. Lady Constance remembered her. Then again, it seemed unlikely that unmarried ladies often visited the Marquess of Doreé’s town residence by themselves. Except, of course, Lady Constance.

But her smile now seemed so genuine, and Tavy found herself smiling back.

“It seems, Miss Pierce,” she leaned in and hushed her voice, “that you and I are the only husbandless ladies present at this dull business gathering, for of course that is why everyone is here, although our host will not admit it.” She glanced about with a furtive air. “I propose that the very moment we find the company unendurable, we dash off to the village together to shop, or perhaps shut ourselves in a cozy parlor with a stack of lending library novels and read aloud to one another.”