A Very Unusual Wife Read online

  In his case he had come into the title when he was only nineteen and had from that moment been his own master and obliged to answer to no one.

  He had found his life so entrancing where women were concerned that he had no intention of marrying until the last possible moment, although there had been times when he had had to fight very hard to remain a bachelor.

  This was, of course, against women who had been widowed, for he had never at any time been so foolish as to show any interest in an unmarried girl.

  He knew that to do so would be tantamount to proclaiming an interest in her with marriage very much in view.

  However, when Lord John Russell told, him what was expected, he had thought that to be Master of the Horse might compensate for what he was certain would inevitably be the complete and utter boredom of being married.

  His wife would be an unfledged gauche young woman with whom he had no interests in common, except that she would give him a son and heir.

  But his common sense told him that he had to marry sooner or later and if the pill was to be sugared by the horses from the Royal Stable and then it would not be so hard to swallow as it might otherwise have been.

  He had therefore searched his memory to think when he had seen any attractive young women at any of the balls and parties he had attended almost nightly.

  He then discovered that the only unmarried girls he could recall had been the Ladies-in-Waiting to the young Queen.

  It was not only that they were an uncommonly plain lot, but he also had no intention of becoming too closely involved with the Queen and the Prince Consort’s intimate circle.

  He had already found that the evenings he had spent, which were as few as possible, at Buckingham Palace were extremely dull and he had no wish to add to them because his wife held a position at Court.

  ‘One of us is quite enough!’ he told himself.

  He knew that at the back of his mind he had always had the idea that when he was married, his wife would stay at Falcon and not come to London more than was absolutely necessary.

  Despairing of finding a solution, he had taken one of his closest friends into his confidence.

  Major Charles Marriott was in the Horse Guards.

  He agreed immediately that there was nobody in the whole Kingdom more suited to be appointed Master of the Horse, but added that the idea of his having to marry in order to attain such a position horrified him.

  “You have always hated the idea of being married, Alston,” he said, “and you know as well as I do that even the most scintillating beauty palls on you after a month or so. How then could you stand being tied to one woman for the rest of your life?”

  “There is no alternative,” the Marquis said briefly. “Now, come on, Charles, be constructive! You must know some girls!”

  “Not if I can help it!” Charles Marriott replied. “No, wait a minute!”

  He put his fingers up to his forehead as if to help himself to think, then said,

  “There was one rather pretty girl I noticed last Season. As a matter of fact she rather reminded me of Sapphire Carstairs.”

  “You mean she looked like her?”

  “A pale reflection.”

  “What was her name?”

  “I am trying to remember! Oh, yes! She is the daughter of Warnborough, whom we often see at White’s. You know, the red-faced man. I think you said that he was a neighbour of yours.”

  “The Earl of Warnborough!” the Marquis exclaimed. “His estates march with mine.”

  “There you are then,” Charles Marriott said, “what could be more convenient? At least you know what stable she has come out of and there will be no unpleasant surprises to be unearthed after you are married.”

  “It’s certainly an idea,” the Marquis agreed. “Actually, I rather like Warnborough. He rides well, in fact very well, and is Master of the pack I hunt with occasionally, when it is too much trouble to go farther afield.”

  “Then that problem is solved!” Charles Marriott said. “I suppose we had better have a drink on it!”

  A few days later the Marquis had seen the Earl of Warnborough at White’s Club and thought it a good opportunity to suggest that, as their lands were adjoining, their families might be closer.

  He had phrased it, he thought, tactfully and with a certain amount of elegance and the Earl had smiled and nodded his approval.

  It was two days later before he remembered that he ought also to confirm the proposition in writing.

  The Earl’s reply, which his groom brought back to him from Warne Park, had been exactly what he had expected.

  He therefore sent the Earl another letter saying that, as he unfortunately had to return to London immediately, he would be delighted to dine at Warne Park in two weeks’ time and in return perhaps the Earl would bring his wife and daughter to dinner at Falcon a few days later.

  He had gone back to London with the comfortable feeling that he had done his duty and there could now be nothing to prevent the Queen from appointing him as Master of the Horse almost immediately.

  It did not strike him until he found the note waiting for him at Falcon House in Park Lane that Sapphire Carstairs might be upset!

  Then he realised that there was another hurdle to be jumped before he was, as he put it to himself, ‘galloping down the straight’.

  Now, it having turned out better than he had dared to hope, he went off with a great feeling of satisfaction to see the Prime Minister wondering how much money he would be permitted to spend on making the alterations to the Royal Mews that were urgently needed.

  He also wanted to restock what was, in his opinion, a stable that was not worthy of a small City tradesman let alone a reigning Monarch.

  *

  Left alone, Lady Carstairs had at first thought despairingly that when the Marquis married she might lose him.

  Then she told herself sensibly that she herself was married and it need make little or no difference to her relationship.

  She thought that, if the Marquis’s wife was a young and unsophisticated girl, it would be far easier for him to keep her in ignorance than if she was a contemporary.

  ‘It will be all right – I know it will be all right!’ she told herself, staring at her reflection in the mirror and feeling with satisfaction that it would be impossible for any woman to be lovelier than she was.

  At the same time it was infuriating to think that as the Marchioness of Falcon, some insignificant chit would wear the fantastic jewels she had always coveted, sit at the end of the table in the Baronial dining room at Falcon and be hostess at the Marquis’s parties.

  It was a position that she had been able to occupy when on the last few occasions she had stayed at Falcon.

  ‘I shall hate her!’ Sapphire Carstairs told her reflection in the glass.

  Her blue eyes flashed back at her, her lips assuming a downward slant that was very unbecoming.

  Then suddenly she smiled and added,

  ‘Equally, I would be charming to her and make myself her friend! That will ensure that she will be only too eager to have me advise her in London and in the country and, of course, she will want me to help her in everything she does, so that I shall see more of Alston than I would do otherwise!’

  It was clever thinking and Sapphire Carstairs was very pleased with herself for being so intelligent.

  She had always heard that when a woman was thought to be very beautiful she was supposed at the same time to be brainless, but she prided herself on being intelligent in many ways that were beyond the comprehension of other women.

  Actually what she had was a shrewdness and a genius for self-preservation.

  She had, in fact, before her marriage been of no particular importance.

  Her father was a widower, the owner of a small country estate, and had just sufficient money to be able to entertain for his debutante daughter the year she was presented at Court.

  Although he had always considered Sarah very lovely because she resembled h
er beautiful mother with whom he had been very much in love, he had not been prepared for the furore she created when she appeared in the Social world.

  With the admiration and acclamation of their friends, she blossomed like a rose and within a month was talked about as being the most beautiful girl in England.

  Lord Carstairs, whose first wife had died in childbirth, was a staid man of thirty-eight, who had been swept off his feet at the sight of her and, despite the difference in their ages, had persuaded Sarah’s father that they should be married.

  It was undoubtedly a far more brilliant marriage than Sarah or any of her relatives might have hoped for and she therefore became a bride at the end of her first Season.

  From that moment she had set out to captivate not only the Social world where she appeared as a debutante but in the far more important and more sophisticated one of people who entertained each other in the great houses of London.

  Before his marriage to Sarah, Lord Carstairs had as a bachelor a somewhat limited entrée to this world, but now every door was open to them both.

  Somebody had once said cynically that to be of importance in English Society a man had to be titled and rich. He had not added that all a woman needed was to be beautiful, but that was the truth.

  Beauty was the passport to every party, every ball, every reception and assembly, culminating even in Buckingham Palace itself.

  To Sarah Carstairs it had all the enhancement of stepping into a Fairytale.

  Only after five years of marriage did she begin to realise that some of the men who paid her very fulsome compliments when she danced with them made her heart beat quicker than her husband had been able to do.

  When she took her first lover she was terrified, but after several more she no longer felt guilty about it and grew astute at keeping Edward in happy ignorance.

  Only when she met the Marquis did she find it difficult to think of anybody else or even to remember that she was, in fact, a married woman.

  He filled her whole thoughts every moment of the day and she went to sleep dreaming of him.

  It was not only that he was the best-looking and most fascinating man she had ever met but he also showed her an even more glittering glamorous world than she had seen hitherto.

  His possessions and his whole background were, in her opinion as well as in that of a great many other people, far finer than anything to be found in the Royal Palaces.

  But perhaps the most irresistible attraction about the Marquis, which intrigued her in a way that it was difficult to describe and had intrigued a number of women before her, was his unpredictability.

  No woman could ever be sure when she saw him today whether she would see him tomorrow.

  No woman, whoever she was, had been able to capture him completely so that she could say he was hers.

  A hundred women had cried helplessly for him, as if he was as far out of reach as the moon.

  ‘He is mine! He is mine!’ Sapphire said now to herself.

  But she knew as she spoke that it was not true and however reasonable he had made it appear on the surface, the idea of the Marquis being married was a sudden menace that she had not expected.

  *

  When Elmina learnt that the Marquis had been obliged to leave for London and would not be returning to the country for a fortnight, she heaved a sigh of relief.

  This certainly gave her more time to get some decent clothes and also prepare herself for what she thought would be a series of high jumps which she had to leap over with an expertise in which she was far from feeling confident.

  She passed the days thinking of the times that she had seen the Marquis in the hunting field, thinking of Falcon, of his horses and telling herself it could not be true that he had agreed to marry her.

  She did not underestimate the shock it might be when he realised that she was not Mirabel and yet she appreciated her father’s remark that any man who bought a horse without seeing it deserved all he got.

  That, however, would be a poor consolation if the Marquis disliked her on sight and said firmly that he had been deceived into thinking she was her sister.

  The only reasonable way he could explain this would be to assert that he had seen Mirabel in London and admired her from a distance, but according to her sister their paths had never crossed.

  ‘What I have to do is to make him at least like me as I am,’ Elmina said to herself.

  She had the feeling that it was going to be a very hard task.

  When she was riding with her father, they deliberately did not talk of the Marquis, but of what was required on the estate.

  In fact, at the back of both their minds was the thought that, if the Marquis was their neighbour and looked favourably on his new in-laws, it would be easy for him to help in many ways with problems that at the moment were heavy burdens on the Earl’s exchequer.

  It was not merely a question of money – it would be a matter rather of exchange perhaps of stallions for breeding mares or for the Marquis’s bulls, which were the finest in the County, to serve the Earl’s cows.

  They would also share in other ways, such as implements for the farms, like threshing machines and ploughs and their labourers could assist each other with the harvest.

  ‘In fact,’ Elmina said to herself, ‘our marriage could open the floodgates of benefit for Papa if only the Marquis and I can get on with each other.’

  At the same time she told herself she wanted far more than that.

  She had never seen another man who equalled the Marquis or in any way lived up to her ideals as he did.

  She had never been very impressed with the young men who had pursued her sister, Mirabel, when she was at home or in London. Except, of course, for Robert whom Elmina had liked on sight and thought that Mirabel would be extremely stupid if she did not fall in love with him.

  All the other men had seemed effete and foolish. Many of them did not ride as well as she expected of them and knew little or nothing about horses, which inevitably made her despise them.

  “How can a man use a horse to convey him from place to place without being interested in his breeding, his training and above all the way he is stabled?” she asked her father angrily when she thought that one of their guests was being unnecessarily severe with the horse he was riding.

  “You are setting too high a standard, my dear,” the Earl remarked.

  “I cannot help judging everybody else by your standards, Papa,” Elmina replied. “You are an outstanding rider, everybody says so and at the same time you love your horses and look after them.”

  The Earl had laughed.

  “I think the truth is that you look after them for me and, if I am remiss in anything that concerns my stables, I am quite certain that you would rapidly take me to task!”

  “Everything I know is what you have taught me,” Elmina argued.

  She knew it was a compliment that her father appreciated.

  She thought later in the day, however, as she went upstairs to the attic that the person she had learnt most from, in fact, was Chang.

  He had taught her so much about the handling of horses that, although she had been extremely good with them before, now she knew that there was really no horse in the world she could not manage if she determined to.

  He had also taught her, although her parents would have been astonished and, perhaps horrified if they had known, the art of Jujitsu and Karate.

  He had never spoken of it because, as he told her later, it was something a man who was proficient at it never boasted about.

  But she had chanced to come to the stables one evening late and seen Chang being threatened by a visiting tradesman who was very drunk.

  He had arrived with a parcel having driven his horse for some miles at breakneck speed.

  The poor animal was sweating and was almost too exhausted to make the return journey when he climbed into the cart.

  He started thrashing the horse unmercifully when Chang intervened.

  The
man, who was tall and a large burly chap, got down onto the ground and, reversing his whip so that the thick end was like a club in his hand, was ready to attack Chang with it.

  The moment Elmina appeared she saw with horror how small the Chinaman looked by comparison and how large and menacing his opponent was.

  She was a little distance from them and ready to run forward to try to stop them when to her astonishment, as the drunken man tried to strike Chang on the head with the blunt end of the whip handle, he suddenly seemed almost to fly backwards in the air and then crash to the ground.

  For a moment Elmina thought that Chang had not moved.

  Then she realised that, with his leg straight as an iron bar, he had struck his opponent with his foot and the force of it had carried him about six feet from him and left him sprawling on the ground.

  As she watched, Chang walked towards him and, taking the whip from his hand, broke it in two.

  Then, as the man seemed almost incapable of getting up, he helped him to his feet and into the cart.

  Then Chang had gone to the head of the tired and frightened horse, patted him and talked to him before sternly telling the driver to take better care of his animal and had sent a very chastened man out of the yard.

  “How did you do that?” Elmina had asked.

  Chang smiled at the astonishment on her face.

  “It is Karate, my Lady.”

  “What is that? Tell me!” Elmina begged.

  That was the beginning.

  It was not only the beginning of learning how to defend herself, should the need arise, but a new way of thinking.

  It was Chang who explained to her that barehanded fighting had been developed in both India and China before the Bodhidharma first arrived in China in 520 AD.

  She was obviously so interested that he went on to explain how this Indian monk was the third child of the King and a brilliant student of Zen. He had created a Temple where monks were taught a special breathing technique, which was the basis of a legendary system of weaponless fighting and mental concentration.

  From Chang she learnt how the Buddhists inspired Kung Fu and how for centuries the monks in China and Japan had studied Kempo.