When Marrying a Duke.... Helen Dickson

      ‘Because of what happened at Happy Valley—and then in China Town—you were awful to me.’

      He grinned and with his finger and thumb tweaked her chin playfully. ‘You deserved it.’ Momentarily distracted when the music stopped playing, he glanced into the ballroom. ‘Please excuse me. I think it’s time I returned to my wife.’

      Marietta didn’t move as she watched him go, not realising that in years to come they would both have reason to think back on this short time they had spent together on the veranda at Government House, as flower girls, fire-breathing dragons and caterpillars snaked their way through the streets below.

      The rest of the evening passed all too quickly for Marietta. Her father retired to a card room, there to join other merchants to drink some fine brandy and to discuss the previous year’s profits and losses. Marietta returned to the dance floor where she was reunited with her friends. With her father out of the way she drank some champagne with Oliver and danced with some of the young officers in the colony, who exclaimed ingenuously about her looks and the way she danced, making her feel very grand and grown up. Would Lord Trevellyan ask her to dance? she wondered. She hoped so. Eagerly she looked for him, disappointed when she couldn’t see him. Assuming he must have left with his wife, from that point her evening declined.

      Later, when Marietta walked past the table where Lord and Lady Trevellyan had been sitting, she looked down and spotted a fan on the floor beside a chair. She recognised it as being Lady Trevellyan’s. Retrieving it, she thought she would have one of the servants return it to her hotel, but as she was making her way to the ladies’ rest room, she saw Lord and Lady Trevellyan standing alone close to the main entrance and assumed they were on the point of leaving and awaiting their transport.

      She hurried towards them, but something she saw on Lord Trevellyan’s face made her pause. Hidden by the fronds of a large potted plant, she saw that as Lord Trevellyan looked at his wife there was revulsion on his face, and above all contempt. Having no wish to intrude or to listen to what they were saying, Marietta stepped back, but if she were to move now they would see her and she had no wish to be accused of eavesdropping.

      ‘Did you have to make a total spectacle of yourself, Nadine? Everybody was watching.’ Max’s mood was mocking, cruel and angry as he addressed his wife.

      ‘Why should I care?’ she asked.

      ‘Why? Because it’s embarrassing that’s why. I’m your husband, in the same room, and you were making a degrading spectacle of yourself.’

      His voice was sharp and Nadine recoiled from the coldness in him. He saw the tautness return to her face along with the ice-cold politeness, which was the sum and substance of their marriage.

      ‘What’s wrong, Max? Are you jealous?’

      ‘Jealous? No. Just humiliated. What you do in private is your business. What you do in public, when I’m present, involves me, too.’

      ‘What about you?’ Nadine asked quietly. ‘What about what you get up to?’

      ‘I don’t embarrass you in public.’

      ‘No? Then it’s all right for you to spend almost the entire evening on a lantern-lit veranda alone with a woman?’

      His look became one of scorn. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. If it is to Miss Westwood you are referring, she is seventeen—hardly out of the schoolroom—a juvenile. You’ve got a very suspicious nature, Nadine.’

      ‘I’m your wife.’

      ‘And I’ve heard it all before. You have a weakness. You can’t help yourself.’

      ‘What do you want, Max? Little did I know when I married you that the position I thought honourable would become my own special prison.’

      Max paused a moment and gazed at her coldly. ‘A prison of your own making, Nadine. You do well out of it. And you needn’t worry about me in that respect. I won’t be cutting off my nose to spite my face. You’re only one woman among many, and for a man it’s easy to find relief for his baser needs.’

      ‘Nothing would please me more,’ she replied, equally as cold.

      ‘I’m sure that’s true—but be warned. Don’t tempt my temper too far. Tread carefully and perhaps you will survive.’

      In the silence that followed, the conversation Marietta had overheard hung in the air like the acrid smell of smoke that lingered after a fire. Her cheeks burned with mortification as she stared at the open doorway through which they had just disappeared, her mind a blank. How could Lady Trevellyan think that she … and her husband! Oh, the very idea was too awful, too embarrassing to contemplate. The evening suddenly felt bleak and black and her earlier high spirits had been dented. Everything was well and truly ruined.

      The following day Marietta’s father became very ill, the worry of it driving all thoughts of returning Lady Trevellyan’s fan from her mind. She had been in the breakfast room when Yang Ling came to tell her. Marietta sprang to her feet, her face blanching in sudden terror.

      ‘It’s your father, Miss Marietta. He’s had some sort of attack. The doctor has been sent for.’

      Her father was in bed propped up against the pillows, the mosquito net having been turned back. Fighting for breath, he turned his eyes to his daughter as she stumbled across the bedroom.

      ‘Father—what—what has happened?’

      She sank to her knees beside the bed and took hold of one of his hands, which rested on the snow-white sheet, and into her head came the fragmented thought that this was the first time she had seen her father ill in bed. Despite her worries concerning his health of late, he had always been about his business. The thought that he might die terrified her and she clung to him as a child clings to its mother in a childish nightmare.

      ‘What is it, Father? Tell me? Oh dear, where is the doctor?’

      ‘Calm down, Marietta. It’s only a bit of a turn.’ His voice was a thread, but his blue-tinted lips turned up in a small smile.

      ‘I know, I know, but we can’t be too careful.’

      The doctor came—old Dr White, who attended her father on a regular basis. He was a tall, angular man, dressed from head to toe in black except for a stiff white collar trapped beneath his jawbone. He took his patient’s wrist and placed his ear to his chest and whispered to Marietta that he didn’t like the sound of it, but to keep him warm and feed him nourishing broth and custard.

      ‘Give him this draught to help him sleep and I’ll call again tomorrow.’ It was laudanum. ‘If you should need me, Miss Westwood, send one of the servants and I will come at once.’