The Marquis Is Trapped Read online

  “You do know that I want you to stay with me,” she murmured softly. “I shall be very lonely without you.”

  “I can only thank you for an entrancing evening – ”

  “When can we dine together again? Tomorrow, or rather tonight?”

  The Marquis shook his head.

  “I have a feeling I have accepted an invitation from Marlborough House. I will let you know in the morning.”

  He was dressing with a swiftness and expertise that always annoyed his valet.

  He had learnt to tie his tie better than anyone could tie it for him and he smoothed his hair back in front of the mirror.

  It would have been difficult for anyone to guess at what he had been doing for the last three hours.

  He turned from the ornate dressing table to Isobel who was watching him closely.

  She was lying back languidly against lace-trimmed pillows with her dark hair falling over her white shoulders in a most alluring manner.

  As the Marquis walked towards her, she held out both her arms.

  “Kiss me good morning, my darling,” she begged.

  The Marquis smiled at her.

  Then, taking one of her hands in his, he raised it to his lips.

  “I have been caught in that trap before,” he joked.

  If a man allowed a woman to place her arms around his neck when she was lying below him, he would topple over her.

  And then it would be difficult to escape.

  Isobel’s fingers closed over his.

  “You will not forget me, darling Oliver?”

  “That is seriously impossible.”

  “Do stay just a little longer,” she implored. “I have something of importance to say to you.”

  “You are not to tempt me, Isobel, as otherwise my business meeting this morning will be a farce.”

  He moved away to the door before she could reply.

  As he pulled it open, she gave a little cry,

  “Oliver! Oliver! I cannot let you go!”

  He smiled benignly at her.

  Then without another word he went out of the room closing the door gently behind him.

  She could hear his footsteps going quietly along the passage as she bent forward to listen.

  Then she threw herself back against the pillows.

  ‘I will ask him again,’ she decided, ‘the next time he comes. I should have suggested it before he became so sleepy. It was stupid of me.’

  She was almost angry with herself.

  Then, sitting up in bed, she pulled on the soft chiffon nightgown that had been lying on the foot of her bed.

  *

  The Marquis walked briskly up Park Lane feeling the morning breeze on his face.

  The stars were disappearing and in a short time the first rays of dawn would be creeping into the sky.

  He walked with determination.

  He felt somehow it was absolutely essential for him to distance himself from Isobel as soon as possible.

  How on earth, he asked himself, could he have been so foolish?

  How had he not anticipated that sooner or later she would want to marry him as so many other women had?

  For them it had been impossible, as they already had a husband.

  He had recognised by the time he was twenty that it was most dangerous for him to have anything to do with debutantes.

  His father had warned him in the first place and he had already seen several of his contemporaries caught by ambitious mothers and hurried up the aisle well before they could realise what was happening.

  The Season in London, amusing and attractive as it could be, was extremely dangerous for a young man who had a title or a fortune.

  Every aspiring mother was determined that by the end of the London Season her daughter should be engaged to be married.

  Or that she should have received so many proposals that any man accepted as a suitor would feel he had won a difficult battle.

  There were, however, fortunately for men just like himself, who had no wish to be married off, a great many restrictions.

  No well brought up young girl was allowed to be alone with a man – even for half-an-hour in a drawing room.

  All women of every age expected men, the instant they found themselves alone with one, to flirt and admire them.

  The Marquis was exceedingly intelligent and as soon as he left University his father had sent him round the world.

  Thus he automatically sought much more mature conversation than he was likely to enjoy with a debutante.

  Most debutantes had been educated by a Governess who knew little more than the girl she was supposed to be educating.

  When he was resident in London, the Marquis found married women to be exciting as well as amusing.

  Their husbands neglected them for sport or for their duties at Windsor Castle as the Queen was very demanding and liked men round her who were bright and interesting.

  This meant that a great number of beautiful and experienced ladies in Society spent much of their time alone either in their London or country houses.

  It was, of course, as the Marquis soon found out, very much easier when they were in London.

  There would usually be a formal dinner party with a few elderly guests who left early. When they had gone, if one man stayed behind, there was no one left to count the hours of how long he lingered.

  The women that intrigued the Marquis were usually a little older than him.

  They were always amusing and inevitably beautiful and well aware of their own attraction.

  The Marquis actually had more to offer than most of the other younger gentlemen in the Social world.

  He had therefore passed from boudoir to boudoir gaining a great deal of most enjoyable experience.

  But above all he became determined that he himself would not marry until he was very much older.

  Although he would never admit it, he was deeply shocked that all the women he made love to should be so blatantly unfaithful to their husbands.

  It was always quite obvious that he was not the first beau who had eaten their husband’s food, drunk his vintage wines and slept in his bed.

  At the back of his mind the Marquis became more and more aware that this was something he would never tolerate in his own wife.

  At the same time it was quite impossible to resist the invitation in a pair of lovely eyes or the soft movement of two red lips that told him what he wanted to hear.

  With all his experience in London, Isobel had been his first widow.

  Now, as he was walking home, he realised how by only a hair’s breadth he had managed to escape the trap she had set for him.

  As he looked back over his affaire-de-coeur with Isobel, he was sure that she had intended to marry him from the very first moment they had met.

  Now he could fully appreciate the little things she had said that had seemed of no significance at the time.

  If he had been intelligent, he would have read the warning signs.

  ‘How can I have been such an idiot?’ the Marquis asked himself again as he turned into Grosvenor Square.

  His house, which had been in the family since the Square was first built, was the largest and most fashionable in Mayfair.

  He knocked on his front door and the night footman hurried to open it for him.

  The Marquis now walked into the hall that was lit by only two candles on the marble mantelpiece.

  “Any messages for me, Henry?”

  “Only some letters, my Lord.”

  They were lying on a table and the Marquis looked at them.

  “They can wait for Mr. Foster in the morning.”

  “I’ll put them on his desk, my Lord.”

  The Marquis walked up the stairs.

  As usual he had ordered his valet not to wait up for him, but everything was ready for him in his room.

  He undressed, but instead of getting into his bed, he walked to the window and pulled back the curtains.

  Now the first rays of light were flickering over the roof and the last evening star was fading with the darkness. There was the soft hush in the air that always comes before the dawn.

  The Marquis was thinking only of himself and the soft voice of Isobel suggesting that they should be married.

  The idea horrified him.

  How could he possibly marry any woman he could not trust and who would be unfaithful to him the moment he left home?

  He had always hated the idea of being tied down – of taking a wife as was expected of him because it was so important he should produce a successor and heir.

  He felt as if marriage would imprison him.

  It would take away his freedom, which, although he had not thought of it often, was very precious.

  He had seen so many of his dear friends captured and compelled to live a life that was entirely different from anything they really enjoyed.

  The longer he participated in the Social world, the more he considered that its rules and regulations were ridiculous.

  Debutantes and all young girls, he had found, were treated as if they were treasures and they went nowhere without a chaperone.

  Nevertheless, if they managed to sit out too long with a young man at a dance, the parents could accuse him of ruining her reputation and then he would be obliged to offer her marriage.

  If anyone danced two consecutive waltzes together, every chaperone in the room would start whispering loudly and excitedly to those sitting nearby!

  Such a daring procedure spelt out the stirring word – ‘betrothed.’

  The Marquis had soon become conscious that every ambitious mother was after him as a matrimonial catch.

  He received innumerable invitations from hostesses he had never met for balls, dinner parties and soirées of every desc
ription.

  His secretary had learnt to refuse them on sight, but they still came piling into the letterbox day after day.

  When the Marquis attended a ball, which was often, he took great care to dance only with married ladies.

  Wearing their tiaras, they smiled at him invitingly as soon as he arrived in the ballroom.

  It was their invitations he accepted, despite those which came regularly to him from Marlborough House.

  The Prince of Wales liked young gentlemen who were handsome and influential.

  He himself had set the fashion for the first time for a gentleman to have an affaire-de-coeur openly with a lady of his own class.

  ‘The Jersey Lily’ as she was called, had opened new paths in the Social world that had always been sealed in the past. Once Princess Alexandra had accepted Mrs. Langtry, it was quite impossible for anyone else in Society to ignore her.

  It made things, the Marquis considered, very much easier in some ways, but it certainly meant that the husband in question was always made to look a complete fool.

  ‘I will not allow that to happen to me,’ the Marquis determined.

  Then he wondered if he would be able to prevent it.

  Unless a man married a woman so unattractive that no one else would waste any time on her, it was impossible to ensure that when he was away from home someone else was not taking his place at his table and in his bed.

  On his twenty-sixth birthday the Marquis had given a party at his ancestral home in the country, Kexley Place, and a great number of his relatives had come to stay.

  Almost all of them had asked him at some time or another when he intended to be married.

  He had refused to argue about it, merely saying,

  “When it suits me – and that will not be for a very long time.”

  “But, Oliver,” they protested hotly, you have to have a son. Do you realise the Marquisate will end completely if you do not produce an heir?”

  “I wonder if that will matter one way or another,” he had replied provocatively.

  He had then received loud screeches of horror from every relative to whom he said it.

  When he visited London, he had thought he would feel uncomfortable at taking another man’s place where his wife was concerned.

  But somehow it was impossible not to be attracted by an invitation in two intriguing eyes.

  He found himself again and again walking home at the break of dawn having enjoyed yet another rapturous encounter with a beauty whose husband was conveniently away in the country.

  ‘It is wrong! It is wrong!’ the Marquis said to himself on countless occasions.

  At the same time he knew he would be lonely if he went home early to an empty house.

  The best alternative was someone sweet, warm and gentle nestling against his body, telling him endlessly how much she loved him.

  It was clearly something no man had the strength to refuse.

  Now, as the Marquis walked upstairs, he was faced with a different problem that he knew could be dynamite in Isobel’s hands.

  He thought again how foolish he had been not to realise that Isobel harboured a genuine affection for him as well as being exceedingly ambitious socially.

  He had not really considered it of any particular consequence, but he was now aware that she desired a more significant title than the one her husband had given her.

  He had fully recognised, although it did not really concern him, that she was irritated when Duchesses and Countesses took precedence to her at dinner parties.

  She was seldom seated on the right of the host and, looking back, the Marquis could remember little incidents when a lady with a superior title would sweep past her or speak to her in a condescending manner.

  It was all part of the Social game, which he thought was somewhat laughable and in many ways quite idiotic.

  Yet to a woman it mattered – and he knew now that it mattered to Isobel.

  If she were married to him, she would ascend a great number of steps higher up the Social ladder.

  Now he was confronted with the vexed question as to whether he would marry her or not.

  The Marquis was startled by his own feelings of revulsion at the thought.

  If he ever married it would not be to a woman who would be unfaithful to him, nor one who wanted him more for his title and his money than for himself.

  Yet, he asked, was it possible there was any woman in the world to whom these two things did not matter?”

  And anyway he was very determined to marry only when he was really in love.

  ‘I suppose,’ he pressed on in his mind, ‘I am just expecting too much of life as it is lived in this dimension or should one say in the Beau Monde. Women want Social status and money. They know the more beautiful they are, the more they are likely to achieve it.’

  Then, almost fiercely, as if he felt threatened, the Marquis vowed,

  ‘But not where I am concerned!’

  He turned towards the window and pulled back the curtain sharply as if he was slamming a door – and then he climbed into bed and blew out the candles.

  Although he was tired, he did not fall asleep.

  Instead he was wondering what he should do about Isobel. He was certainly used to the curtain coming down on his love affairs unexpectedly.

  How was he going to tell her that their affaire-de-coeur was at an end?

  At this moment he had no wish to see her again and most of all he did not wish to even discuss, as he knew she would insist, whether or not they should be married.

  It would be embarrassing for him and also he was not certain as to how she would take the idea of their affair closing down so abruptly.

  Some women he left had wept copious tears.

  Some had written pleading letters.

  Just one or two had accepted the silence between them as something that could not be altered and made no comment of any sort.

  Later in the morning, his secretary, as was usual in such situations, would despatch a large bouquet of orchids or roses to Isobel.

  There would be no card or letter with it, because it was the Marquis’s sense of protection not to put anything in writing.

  He had never written love letters, as he knew how dangerous they could be if a husband became suspicious about his wife’s behaviour.

  Isobel would receive her orchids, but she would not be aware that they marked the end of an affair that she had hoped would end in marriage.

  Still, she would be expecting him for dinner.

  If not tonight, then the night after or the night after that.

  But what would come after that? If she did not hear directly from him, she would then undoubtedly demand an explanation.

  ‘I have to do something,’ the Marquis reflected.

  Then an idea came to him.

  Foster had told him casually yesterday morning, when he was writing his letters, that the alterations ordered for his yacht had been completed.

  “As the Captain thought your Lordship would like to see them,” Mr. Foster had continued, “he is bringing The Neptune up the River Thames and will moor it just above Westminster Bridge.”

  The Marquis had nodded and then he had continued dictating a letter about some other issue.

  Now he remembered that his yacht would be close by and the Captain would be waiting for his inspection.

  ‘Perhaps I will sail away,’ he pondered and then he wondered where he should go.

  Almost as if he was being prompted, he recalled that amongst his correspondence yesterday morning was a letter that he had not expected.

  It was from an old friend of his father’s, the Earl of Darendell, who had written to him from Scotland saying,

  “Dear Kexley,

  “I have seen your name mentioned a few times in the Social columns of the newspapers and realise that you have been back in England for some time.

  As you will doubtless remember, I was a very close friend of your father’s for many years and I am wondering if you would like to come to Scotland at any time and stay with me at Darendell Castle?

  Our river at the moment seems to be full of salmon, and your father was a very fine fisherman.

  My wife and I would welcome you at any time this month or next and it would be delightful to talk of the old days and how much I have enjoyed staying in your house in Berkshire.

  Yours very sincerely

  Darendell.”

  The Marquis had been touched by the letter.

  He remembered the Earl as a most interesting and intelligent man and he had been one of his father’s oldest friends and they had been at school together.