The Wildest Rake: a stunning, scandalous Restoration romance Page 8

  Rendel had grinned, a rakish insolence in his handsome face, and replied in kind, bringing a fresh wave of laughter, but she had seen no smile mirrored in the grey eyes. They remained hard and expressionless.

  Her father could walk and talk again, but his illness had left him with a slight palsy, a trembling of his head which he could not control, and his mouth was oddly askew, dragged up at the left corner in a queer simulation of a smile.

  He used a stick now, bent like an old man, but he had been able to resume trading, taking a young man into the household as his assistant.

  Rendel had spent some hours closeted with a lawyer before their marriage, and Cornelia knew that he had straightened out her father’s affairs. She must be grateful to him. But the gratitude was a bitter burden. She felt that it imposed upon her the necessity of trying to like him, trying to please him. She ought to do so. She must do so. But it was harder than anything she’d had to do in her life.

  They had been married in St Stephen’s Church, shivering in the damp chill of the stone walls, the light falling dustily from high windows, through the grey shadows which filled the church.

  The words of the service had sounded far away, as though she heard them under water, but she had made the correct responses. Only Rendel knew that, as he placed the ring upon her finger, she shuddered briefly. His narrowed eyes had shot to her face. She had felt his gaze and, vulnerable, white, tried to smile.

  They passed in procession back through the church, the organ playing loudly, triumphant. Andrew was at the back of the church. Her feet stumbled slightly as she saw him in the pew, but she quickly recovered. Rendel’s hand tightened on hers. She glanced up and met his watchful, comprehending eyes.

  Enemy, husband, friend, she had thought then, with a grim sort of amusement.

  A strange combination.

  He seemed, always, to be able to read her mind, almost to know, before she did, what she would say or do. Her feelings towards him were so complicated that she had ceased, in despair, to try to make sense of them.

  During her father’s illness Rendel had been a constant visitor, bringing fruit and wine, sitting with the Alderman and reading to him from the street broadsheets he bought for him, playing cards and amusing the family with the latest songs upon the lute. He proved to be thoughtful, considerate and good company under circumstances which might have been expected to bore him to distraction.

  When they were alone he maintained a fraternal kindness which she found a great relief. Now and then, though, they stumbled into the old armed conflict; he teased, taunted, infuriated her.

  Once, touched by some generous gesture towards her father, she had begun to apologise to him for her old distrust. His features had grown cynical, his eyes bored.

  ‘I do it for my own reasons,’ he had snapped. ‘You need not thank me. Do not read any high moral value into a small gift.’

  She had scowled at him, at once repelled.

  He remained inscrutable.

  Cornelia could not reconcile all the different faces her bridegroom assumed and discarded at will.

  She knew him for a rake, a gamester, a roaring gallant of the Court. She had seen him gentle as a woman with her father, lifting the old man’s inert body from the bed as though he were a mere feather’s weight. She had heard him sing merry children’s songs to her mother, watched as he mercilessly teased Nan into a reluctant smile.

  That there were yet other aspects hidden beneath his smiling, tormenting mask she was convinced, but she was also sure that he would never reveal them to her willingly. Whenever she chanced upon some thread to the labyrinth of his secret mind, he rapidly drew down his shutters and excluded her again.

  Once, coming into her father’s chamber while Rendel watched him, she had found him reading. He laid down the book while he lit the rushlight. The chamber was dusky with the coming of twilight.

  She picked up his book and was surprised to find it a volume of poems, sonnets by the writer Shakespeare.

  Rendel, turning, had taken the book away and pushed it out of sight, his face expressionless.

  ‘I have never read those verses,’ she had said curiously. ‘Should I like them, do you think?’

  ‘I will read them to you one day,’ he had said, oddly, a thickness in his voice.

  She had sat down in his chair. ‘Read some to me while I watch my father,’ she had invited. She loved to hear poetry read aloud.

  He had turned away, shaking his head. ‘No,’ he had said. ‘Not yet.’

  When he had left she found the book and glanced through the poems again. They were strange, archaic, queerly exciting. Her reading had ranged from the high dignity of Milton to the light flippancies of the Cavalier poets, but she had known nothing like these. They set her senses jangling and made her tremble without knowing why.

  That Rendel should like them aroused her curiosity. She might have expected him to enjoy the crude humours of the new poets, the roistering gallants of this Restoration age, but the Shakespeare sonnets had a strange depth, a weight, like the body of an old wine, potent with sediment from the past. He puzzled her in this as in much else.

  Looking at him now, from under her eyelashes as they danced, she thought with a sense of excitement of the night ahead. He had not so much as kissed her hand since the day they plighted their troth.

  His height and physical strength struck her forcibly. She was suddenly hot. She thought thirstily of the wine which was passing among the seated guests whose age forbade them to join the dancing.

  Her mother touched her arm, smiling. ‘It is time,’ she whispered, very flushed herself.

  Cornelia felt the heat mount to her temples. She tugged free of Rendel and almost ran to the door, stumbling over her train. The guests, seeing her depart, began to talk and laugh. The dancing stopped. The perspiring musicians laid aside their instruments and mopped their brows.

  The bridal maids giggled as they undressed her. For this night, she and Rendel would sleep in her parents’ room, in the great chamber itself. She stared at the unfamiliar bed and tried to pretend laughter to match theirs, but her lips felt stiff, her eyes wide with apprehension.

  Her mother looked at her wistfully, pushing back the heavy fall of chestnut hair.

  ‘You will be happy, my love,’ she whispered, as though more in reassurance of herself than of Cornelia. ‘He is a good man.’

  Cornelia nodded. ‘Yes,’ was all she said.

  Mistress Brent bit her lip. ‘I truly believe we were mistaken in him at first. He has been a good son to us.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cornelia said again.

  She would have said anything to quieten her mother. All she wanted was to be alone. She needed time. She felt like someone in the path of a swiftly advancing tide.

  Soon she would be drowning, unable to stir a finger to save herself. Unless she could find some cliff of hope to climb, some small ledge of comfort to cling to above the stormy waters.

  The men were coming up the stairs.

  She could hear their drunken singing, loud, unsteady. One stumbled. They heard him clatter down the stairs again, thumping against the wall.

  The others laughed and jeered at him.

  ‘Into the bed,’ her mother told her, frantic now at their approach. ‘Hurry!’ The curtains were hurriedly swished around her. She sat upright in the bed, her face white and rigid, listening, able to see a little through a tiny crack between the bed curtains.

  The door banged open. The wedding serenade began, cheerful and dissolute, all the men excited by this traditional ritual, clapping Rendel on the back enviously. There was something in the bridal which made all women weep, all men ribald.

  ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ Rendel said. ‘You are keeping me from the borders of delight. I pray you leave us now.’

  She heard their bawdy answer dimly, but sat without movement, plaiting her fingers, her heart thudding.

  The noise withdrew, the door closed with a finality which made her start.

  R
endel moved softly about the chamber, alone now.

  She heard the rustle as he undressed, and barely dared to breathe, waiting for him.

  He seemed to take an eternity.

  The curtain suddenly parted. She looked round, mouth dry as a kiln. The candle flashed one image on her mind—his face, dark, glimmering, demanding, filled with a ruthless intensity that stopped her heart for a second.

  The candle was held up.

  Rendel stared at her, slowly, his eyes lapping like fire along her naked shoulders, arms, the smooth curve of her breasts above the sheet she was clutching to cover herself.

  ‘Madame,’ he said thickly, his voice slurred by wine, ‘are we alone?’

  She stared in confusion, wondering if he was too drunk to know what he said.

  He smiled at her expression. ‘Master Andrew,’ he intoned piously, dipping the candle like a priest performing an exorcism, ‘if your spirit wanders here, I conjure you to depart. ‘

  Cornelia felt a blaze of reckless anger. Her fear and excitement vanished. ‘Hush, you drunken fool,’ she hissed. ‘Are you mad to speak so on your wedding night?’

  He laughed, seeming unabashed by her reprimand, and blew out the candle. The darkness rushed in upon her. Then the mattress shifted as he climbed into bed, suddenly huge and relentless. Before she had time to think, his hands came down on her naked shoulders, pushing her back against the pillows. His mouth sought and found hers.

  It was everything she had feared – and hoped – it would be. She did not bother to deny the hot desire between them, but shook violently under the impact of sudden, searing passion, and stopped thinking.

  She knew now what it was that had stretched, taut as a chain, between herself and Rendel from the beginning. She had always known, she realised, with mounting excitement as his body wrung from hers a fevered abandonment which shattered all her previous conceptions of love.

  What surprised her most was his tenderness. He had begun with heated violence as though intending to force her into submission. But gradually his caresses had grown gentler, coaxing her to response. Once the thought rose into her mind: would it have been like this with Andrew? She pushed it away, shuddering as though at a blasphemy, and for a moment lay impassive under Rendel’s hands.

  He leaned above her in the darkness, his eyes glittering. ‘What is it?’ he demanded huskily. ‘Did I hurt you?’ Then he tensed. His fingers crawled over her eyes, cheeks, lips, exploring with tactile delicacy, as though, like a blind man, he could read her mind with his touch alone.

  He swore softly. ‘I warned you, Madame, I will not tolerate his intrusion between us.’

  Then he began again to kiss her with such hunger that all thought of everything but Rendel – her husband – was banished.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  They left her parents’ house the very next day after the wedding, taking Nan with them. Cornelia had hesitated before asking her husband if Nan might accompany her into her new life. She knew that many people could not tolerate Nan’s presence. They felt uneasy under her fierce stare. Even when they pitied her crooked back, they seemed to resent her need for pity. Some superstitiously looked upon her as a witch.

  But Rendel had merely shrugged at her request. ‘Of course she may come,’ he had replied easily. ‘Even if I did not want her in my house I would not dare to say so—she would undoubtedly make an image of me and stick pins into it. I do not like to be hated.’

  She had looked at him under her lashes, suddenly provoking. ‘Do you not?’

  He had grinned back at her. ‘Oh, yours is good, honest enmity. I do not fear it—we’ll fight our battles naked. Hate that wears no armour is not dangerous.’

  ‘And you think you must win such a battle?’ she snapped resentfully.

  He had smiled in a way that brought hot blood to her cheeks. ‘Oh, I knew from the first moment I saw you that battle was joined. I would not have it otherwise. My triumph will be all the sweeter.’

  ‘Your conceit is amazing,’ she had said, turning away to hide from him the effect he had upon her.

  It irritated her, as the days went by, that he should slowly begin to win Nan over. Cornelia had never heard Nan laugh as she did with him, her eyes snapping in amusement. Rendel abated no jot of his mockery, seeming to care nothing for her hunched back. He teased her when she was cross, asked her to make him a love spell for Cornelia, pretended to believe that Nan had dozens of admirers hidden in the kitchen and called her his sorceress, which, far from making her angry as it would with anyone else, made her bridle and laugh helplessly.

  ‘He’s a black devil,’ she told Cornelia admiringly. ‘He was born for a bad end, mark me.’

  ‘Yet you like him,’ Cornelia accused.

  She felt, stupidly, that Nan had somehow betrayed her by falling under Rendel’s spell too, like everyone else.

  Nan tossed her head. ‘Like him? What a gull you must think me. No rabbit-catcher will pull the wool over my eyes.’

  But Cornelia had not believed her.

  At first Cornelia found life in Rendel’s great London house both alarming and inhibiting. The wooden-faced servants gave her an inferiority complex. She had to force herself to speak to them, to give them orders naturally without blushing. Gradually this grew easier, but she could not help feeling that they resented and despised her. They all knew her background, that she was no highborn lady as they might have expected in their new mistress. Gossip had run like fire through London when the wealthy gentleman so popular in Court circles married a mere city merchant’s daughter. Various lewd constructions had been placed upon their marriage. Curious eyes watched Cornelia’s waistline, expecting it to increase visibly, and some disappointment was felt as the weeks went past and she showed no obvious sign of pregnancy.

  In March, the Commons resumed sitting and Rendel was busy with his official business.

  Cornelia had enough to occupy her time in learning the management of the household, and was glad to have him out of the house for a time. His presence made it difficult for her to concentrate.

  Living cheek by jowl with him, she could not help but learn to admire and like him. Rendel was, surprisingly, good tempered and kind, she found, both with herself and the servants. Generous to a fault, he bought her many gifts, both large and small, from a small squash-nosed spaniel pup to a breath-taking emerald pendant on a chain of purest silver filigree. During the daytime he was a merry, easy-going companion. She could relax with him, enjoying an hour of lute music or a game of cards, finding his wit engaging and his mischievous grin endearing.

  At night, their relationship changed. From the moment he opened the door of her chamber her heart began to thump, her blood to pump violently, her senses to leap passionately into life.

  The urgency of his love-making did not seem to grow less as time went by—almost, she felt, he was waiting for something, watching for some response from her which never came. She could not understand him. His passion never failed to sweep her away on the same dark tide. What more did he want from her?

  She had expected him to fill the house with riotous Court gallants, but she found that their chief visitors were sturdy, polite country squires, or discreet men of business who would have as easily fitted into her father’s house.

  Lord Warburton and his wife visited them occasionally. Dorothy was unbending with her brother’s new wife. Her glacial courtesy was more chilling than downright rudeness. His sister had been angered by their marriage. She openly let Cornelia know that she felt Rendel had disgraced the family by marrying a merchant’s daughter, especially one who brought no vast fortune with her. Had Rendel married for money, Dorothy would have understood it better.

  Lavinia and Sir George Lambeth were more frequent visitors. Lavinia came to drink chocolate and gossip, or to carry Cornelia off with her to Madame Charett’s shop in Covent Garden, to buy a French mask for a ball, or study the latest fashions.

  Frivolous but endearingly open, Lavinia soon became a real friend, and Co
rnelia grew to value her visits.

  Sometimes she suspected her husband was rather more than fond of the pretty, blonde girl whom he had known all his life. The ease of their relationship spoke volumes. They chatted lightly, referring constantly to old memories, and Lavinia cheerfully teased Rendel about his new status of respectable husband. In her company Rendel was relaxed, amiable, and the three of them spent many pleasant hours together, hours which gave Cornelia a different angle on her husband’s character.

  It was Lavinia who, when she heard that Cornelia was to go to Whitehall to curtsy to the King, hesitantly warned her against listening to gossip about Rendel. ‘People can be so spiteful,’ she had said wistfully, her blue eyes evasive.

  Cornelia had looked a query, at once alert.

  ‘I am very sure Rendel would be angry if he knew I had even breathed a word to you,’ Lavinia said slowly. ‘But gossip has a way of getting back to one. Someone, someday, is bound to tell you, and I have always felt that it is best to know the truth rather than hear a garbled version of it.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Cornelia commanded.

  ‘What I know of it I heard from Rendel himself,’ Lavinia said. ‘He would not lie to me—he never has. But I have heard another story, quite different, and if you heard it you might be wounded.’

  Cornelia laid a hand over Lavinia’s small, restless fingers. ‘You are making me fear the worst,’ she said, half laughing.

  Lavinia sighed. ‘It is just that before he met you, Rendel was the Countess of Wolverton’s lover.’ She blushed and made a face. ‘It is best to be frank. They were lovers. He told me as much. But he had already grown tired of her company before he met you. The affair was over.’ She smiled at Cornelia. ‘Truly, I know it was. But, you see, she is now the King’s mistress, and the Court gossip has it that Rendel was ordered to marry so that she would be free to go to the King.’

  Cornelia swallowed, her throat tight. ‘I see.’

  Lavinia hugged her half-angrily. ‘No, you do not see. It is not true. The King knew nothing of Rendel’s marriage. Nor did the Countess—indeed, Germaine is furious that he has married so soon. She is a possessive creature. I would not put it past her to speak of it to you herself. She is spiteful as a cat. I wanted to warn you before you met her at Court. There is so much back-biting and envy among them all. I would hate you to be hurt.’