The Outrageous Lady Read online

  Author’s Note

  The background of Brighton and the descriptions of night haunts in London are all correct. The Prince Regent’s friends, the eccentrics and the Steine are all from reports written at the time.

  Highwaymen, like smugglers, abounded round the places visited by the rich and fashionable Society, which centred round the Prince Regent.

  The public whipping of women and girls was discontinued in 1817, but continued in private until 1820.

  Galatea, which is Greek and means Ivory, is pronounced ‘galayshia’.

  Chapter One 1806

  The heat from the candles in the huge chandeliers was overpowering and the movement of the dancers combined with the heavy fragrance of flowers did nothing to alleviate a feeling almost of suffocation.

  Two people detached themselves from the glittering throng and walked slowly along the wide corridors of the great mansion belonging to Lord Marshall, a close friend of the Prince Regent.

  “Where are you taking me, D’Arcy?” the lady asked, as they left the music behind and the only sound was the soft tap of her small feet over the polished floor.

  “Somewhere quiet,” he replied. “There are too many people and too much noise. I want to talk to you.”

  The lady laughed, but there was no humour in the sound, attractive though it was.

  “Not again, D’Arcy, I could not bear one of your ‘little talks’ tonight.”

  The gentleman did not answer, he merely opened a door off the corridor and they entered an empty sitting room lit only by silver sconces on either side of the mantelshelf and a candelabrum on the writing desk.

  The lady looked round her.

  “What a charming room! I have never been here before.”

  “It is Marshall’s sanctum and as such forbidden except to his most intimate friends.”

  “Which you consider yourself to be?”

  “He is a bore, but I have known him for a great number of years.”

  The room was cool and the curtains were drawn back from the open windows so that what breeze there was in the darkness outside was not excluded.

  There was, however, not enough to make the candles flicker and the lady fanned herself slowly and rhythmically with a painted fan.

  The gentleman stood looking at her before he said,

  “You are more beautiful tonight, Galatea, than I have ever seen you!”

  She barely acknowledged the compliment, only the corners of her mouth curved for a moment in a half-smile.

  There was no doubt that she was in fact a great beauty.

  Her dark hair, arranged in a fashion brought over from Paris, framed her face with its perfect symmetry.

  Her most arresting feature was undoubtedly her large eyes, which should have been dark but were in fact a strange deep green flecked with gold that reminded her many admirers of sunlight on a clear stream.

  They were very expressive eyes and, as they contemplated the man standing in front of her, they held an expression that was unmistakably wary.

  “Well, D’Arcy?”

  The question seemed to goad him into a sudden fury.

  “Dammit!” he cursed. “You know exactly what I want to say.”

  “And you know the answer, so why repeat words that have become a tiresome refrain?”

  “Is that all I mean to you?” he asked.

  He looked at her and there was a touch of fire in his eyes.

  Dressed in the very height of fashion he was in fact perhaps as handsome in his way as she was beautiful in hers.

  There were few people in the ballroom who looked at the Earl of Sheringham dancing with Lady Roysdon and had not thought that they matched each other both in appearance and reputation.

  But Lady Roysdon showed no sign on her beautiful face of the wild life that had made her the talk of the town, while the years of debauchery had begun to take their toll of the Earl.

  There were lines under his eyes that were undoubtedly the signs of dissipation and the pallor of his cheeks came from a long succession of late nights and too much port.

  Because he was angry he walked restlessly about the room tugging the lapels of his tightly fitting coat with nervous fingers.

  “We cannot go on like this!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I want you, because you are playing with me, because no longer will I be kept at arms’ length!”

  “That is for me to decide.”

  She spoke indifferently as if the conversation had already begun to bore her.

  Realising that was what was happening, the Earl flung himself down beside her on the sofa to say insistently,

  “I cannot bear it any longer, Galatea! Tonight when I saw you laughing at me with the Prince Regent I reached breaking point.”

  She was not looking at him, but staring with unseeing eyes across the room at a rather badly painted picture of some dead game.

  “I told you before we came to Brighton that you would have to make up your mind to let me love you,” the Earl said.

  “And if I do not?”

  Her tone was light and it sounded as if she was laughing at him.

  “Then I think I will kill you!” he said slowly.

  “My dear D’Arcy, why so dramatic all of a sudden? You know perfectly well you have no wish to kill me. All you want is for me to become your mistress.”

  “I will marry you. You know I will marry you, as soon as that corpse you call your husband is dead.”

  “That corpse is my husband.”

  “How can you be faithful to a man who can neither see nor hear, who is not a human being but only a lump of flesh that breathes?”

  “As long as George breathes, I am married to him.”

  “That is what you have said a thousand times before.”

  “Then why not face the fact that I have no intention of becoming your mistress?”

  “How long does that mean I shall have to wait?” the Earl asked despairingly.

  Lady Roysdon did not answer and after a moment he said,

  “Do you imagine that if Roysdon were not a rich man he would still be alive? No! Those blasted doctors keep him in this world so that they can fill their pockets. How long is it since he had his stroke?”

  “Nearly five years.”

  “Immediately after your marriage?”

  “Yes.”

  “And in that short time what did he teach you about love?”

  Lady Roysdon did not reply and after a moment he urged,

  “Let me teach you, my beautiful one. Let me initiate you into the ecstatic emotions which have been enjoyed not only by men and women but by the Gods themselves.”

  Lady Roysdon gave another of her little laughs,

  “You are becoming poetic, D’Arcy. Soon you will be writing odes to my eyebrows like that tiresome young man we met a month ago. I cannot remember his name.”

  “I have no wish to write about you,” the Earl said savagely. “I want to hold you in my arms, to kiss you and make sure you belong to me.”

  Lady Roysdon yawned.

  “I do not belong to anybody except George,” she said, “and, as he does not need me, I belong only to myself.”

  She rose slowly to her feet.

  “Come, D’Arcy, I want to go home.”

  The Earl rose too, to stand in front of her with an expression of resolution on his face.

  She sensed his intention and looked up at him to say quietly,

  “If you touch me, D’Arcy, I swear I will never see you again!”

  “You cannot treat me as you treated Charles and half-a-dozen others!”

  “I can – and I will!” she answered sharply. “So beware!”

  “You drive me mad!”

  “No madde
r than you are already.”

  As if he knew that he was defeated, he moved a step away from her to say,

  “I will take you home.”

  “I have my own carriage, thank you.”

  “You will come with me,” he ordered. “I have not yet finished talking to you.”

  “There is no need to add fuel to the gossip there is about us already.”

  “Why should we care what anyone says?” the Earl enquired. “Unless everybody in the Social world is blind, they know I love you and they know that sooner or later you will be mine.”

  “You try to make them think, because it is a salve to your pride, that I am yours already.”

  She raised her small pointed chin a little higher as she added,

  “It annoys me that people should believe what is untrue.”

  “What do they matter?” the Earl asked roughly. “You are not usually so chicken-hearted, Galatea.”

  “In a few weeks’ time I shall be twenty-one,” she said. “I am beginning to think I should behave in a more circumspect manner.”

  The Earl threw back his head and laughed.

  “Circumspect? You? What has happened to the rebel who came with me to the Haymarket to dance in the same room as the sweepings of Piccadilly?”

  She did not answer and he went on,

  “The jester I took to Covent Garden to bewilder and tease the bucks watching the parade of Cyprians? Who has partnered me in a number of pranks that have made us both the toast of St. James’s?”

  Lady Roysdon turned her head to one side.

  “I heard today that they call me ‘the Outrageous Lady Roysdon’.”

  “They also call you ‘the Most Beautiful Woman in England’. You can take your choice.”

  “I felt – ashamed after we went to Bridewell.”

  “I cannot think why,” the Earl replied. “The whole thing was a joke and we laughed, if you remember, as we drove home together.”

  “You – laughed.”

  “And we will laugh again as I drive you home now,” the Earl said. “Come, Galatea, let us say goodnight to our host.”

  He offered her his arm, but, when she would have placed her hand on it, she changed her mind.

  “No,” she said. “I cannot go back to that overcrowded ballroom. Besides, as you are well aware, we should not leave before the Prince Regent.”

  “Then we will slip away without making our farewells.”

  The Earl’s eyes rested on her lovely face before he said,

  “Other people, even the Prince Regent, intrude upon us when all I want is to have you alone.”

  There was a note of passion beneath the last word and once again there was a glint of fire in his narrowing eyes, warning Lady Roysdon that her control over him was near breaking point.

  She had to be on her guard all the time where D’Arcy Sheringham was concerned.

  He had pursued her since the first night they had met at Carlton House and had become, without asking her permission, her inseparable companion.

  She had been very young and completely innocent of the Social world, a wife with a husband who lay in a darkened room attended by a whole army of doctors and nurses.

  She would have felt very lost that first Season in London had not the Earl always been there to escort her and undoubtedly to amuse her.

  Because he was so experienced where the female sex was concerned, he had been wise enough not to frighten her.

  It was in fact her very innocence in the Society in which they moved that was a more effective chaperone than any human being could possibly have been.

  The mere fact that she knew so little safeguarded her like a protective wall.

  The most critical of women who were spiteful because she was so beautiful had really nothing tangible to complain about.

  But nothing in life stands still and, as the Earl grew more importunate and more demanding, Lady Roysdon grew wilder and their behaviour made it impossible for anyone to ignore them.

  Licence and impropriety as displayed by the Prince Regent’s close friends was nothing new.

  He had for years surrounded himself with a number of people who shocked not only those who centred round his father’s dull and boring Court, but also the public who had to pay for the heir to the throne’s wild and ever-increasing extravagance.

  The caricaturists showed the Prince Regent as a voluptuary and to them it seemed entirely appropriate that he should include so many reprobates among his closest friends.

  Two of the most notorious Dukes in England – Queensberry and Norfolk – were frequent guests of his not only in London but also at Brighton.

  Norfolk, an extremely ill-educated man, was said to be not only the most drunken but also the dirtiest gentleman in the country, while Queensberry was cleaner but a good deal more depraved.

  He was sharp-looking, very irritable and swore like a thousand troopers. And the long list of women he had seduced grew daily even though he was growing older.

  Besides the Dukes, there were the wild members of the Barrymore family.

  The seventh Earl of Barrymore was a young man who was rapidly dissipating a fortune of over twenty thousand pounds and whose crude and heartless practical jokes on innocent people had earned him the nickname of ‘Hellgate’.

  His brother, a Parson, was a compulsive gambler ever on the verge of going to prison and was consequently nicknamed ‘Newgate’ after the prison for criminals.

  Their youngest brother, called ‘Cripplegate’ because he had a club foot, had a savage temper which was shared by his sister for whom ‘Billingsgate’, a fish market where the women were notoriously foul-mouthed, was an exceedingly appropriate sobriquet.

  In Brighton, calling themselves the ‘Merry Mourners’, they had gone out at night carrying a coffin and, knocking on the doors of middle class citizens, had announced to the terrified maidservants that they had come to collect the family corpse.

  To vie with these characters and a great number more, there was the scandal of the Prince’s supposed secret marriage to the Roman Catholic Mrs. Fitzherbert, his now disastrous marriage to Princess Caroline of Brunswick and his ever-growing mountain of debts.

  But there was another side to the Prince Regent’s character, which those who knew him well found irresistible.

  He had great personal charm, remarkably good taste, was astonishingly knowledgeable on a variety of subjects and could be surprisingly generous to those who touched his heart.

  His servants adored him and a great number of his friends found the manner in which he was treated by his father excused all his excesses.

  It was not, however, a Society in which a woman could take part and not find her reputation suffer in consequence.

  But the more Lady Roysdon was talked about, the more she flouted convention with the help and connivance of the Earl of Sheringham.

  But now her companion and playmate, the man she had ordered about for four years, was straining at the leash and she knew that it was going to be difficult to hold him.

  Actually she had fled from London to Brighton after an episode that had left her feeling ashamed.

  She wanted to be free not only of the pointing fingers, which would undoubtedly make the most of her latest escapade, but also of the Earl himself.

  He had always said that he disliked Brighton and in previous years had not followed the Prince Regent to the spa that had developed simply because of his Royal interest in it.

  Yet when the Prince Regent had arrived three days ago the Earl had come with him and Lady Roysdon knew that the peace and quiet she had sought in the house she had rented in the Steine was at an end.

  He had monopolised her from the first moment she arrived at the ball this evening, sweeping aside the other men who clamoured for her attention with an air of authority that infuriated her.

  She told herself over and over again that she was not the Earl’s property and that he had no rights over her while her husband was still alive.

  Bu
t she felt as if he was piercing her defences with weapons against which she had no answer and that he had become frightening in his determination to own her.

  Now, as he waited for her to put her arm in his, there was an expression on his face that made her draw in her breath.

  Quickly she said,

  “I left my wrap in the hall. Will you fetch it and bring it here? If I go myself I am certain to be waylaid and people will know I am leaving.”

  “That is true,” the Earl agreed, “I will fetch it for you and order my carriage at the same time.”

  She did not protest and he added,

  “I will also send a message to your coachman to go home.”

  “Thank you, D’Arcy.”

  He looked at her as if he was surprised at her sudden capitulation to his wishes. Then, with a faint smile on his face, he said,

  “Mind you are here when I return. Perhaps I should lock the door in case some gallant seeks you out and persuades you to dance with him.”

  “I have no intention of dancing any more tonight,” Lady Roysdon said almost petulantly. “I want to go home. A party that drags on too long is always fatiguing.”

  “You are right. We should have left earlier.”

  “Then don’t let’s linger talking about it,” Lady Roysdon replied sharply. “I am tired, I want to rest.”

  “If I let you,” the Earl said with a twist to his lips.

  Then he opened the door, passed through it and shut it firmly behind him.

  As soon as he had gone, the expression of lassitude on Lady Roysdon’s face disappeared.

  For a moment she stood listening as if to be quite certain that the Earl was not returning at once.

  Then moving swiftly across the room she climbed out of the open window.

  She lifted herself in her narrow gauze gown quite easily over the sill and out into the darkness of the garden.

  For a moment she stood as if taking her bearings and then she set off across the lawn to where in the distance beyond a row of shrubs she saw the flicker of lights.

  She guessed that they came from carriages, cabriolets and phaetons awaiting their owners.

  She found her own carriage without much difficulty.

  The coachman, Hancocks, who had been with her husband’s family for many years, was dozing on the box, but Jake, a young man she had engaged as both groom and footman since she came to Brighton, was chatting with a number of other servants.