Sally Cheney - The Wager

“If you think of something, you may ask Mrs. River. I will leave complete instructions with her. If I do not see you again before you leave, Miss Trenton, once more allow me to express my regrets over our little misunderstanding.”

He took a deep breath of relief. There. It was over. He had done all he could in redemption for bringing the girl here and behaving like an animal, and now, if he was lucky, he would never have to see her again and could put this episode behind him. In the future, he would be happy for the solitude of Kingsbrook, thankful for the privacy of his bed. He was even tempted to give up gambling, though he did not go so far as to make the personal pledge. His losses he could cover; it was his winnings that were so appalling.

He pushed himself away from the pillar.

Marianne had dropped her eyes, seeming to be fascinated by the fingers twisting in her lap. “Mr. Desmond, what if…” she began softly, timidly, unable to let him go without asking her most fearful question.

“Yes?” he said, encouraging her as gently as he could when it appeared she would not finish her sentence.

“What if I am pregnant?” she whispered.

Desmond’s shoulders fell back heavily against the pillar. In fact, it was fortunate the solid pile of stones was there to catch him.

“You are not pregnant, Marianne,” he said. There was a gruffness in his voice that suggested how touched he was by the child and her anguished question.

“But after that night…”

“Nothing happened that night.”

“Nothing?” She looked up at him, her beautiful eyes opened wide in doubtful wonder. “But you—you…”

“I behaved like a brute, but I assure you the act was not consummated that night. You are as pure and inviolate now as you were when you left Mr. Carstairs’s home in London. And you are safer here than you ever were there.”

The girl’s eyes filled with tears of relief. “Really?” she asked uncertainly, hopefully.

He wanted more than he had ever wanted anything in his life—more than he had wanted Galston’s Way to win the Derby that year when he might still have repaid his grandfather; more than he had wanted that ace of clubs that would have finished his straight flush and sent him home victorious at least once before his father threw him out of the house; more even than he wished, sometimes late at night as he lay in some narrow cot in a strange city, that good old Ronny Withers had sunk to the bottom of the English Channel before he ever came to Ketterling—to gather this trembling girl in his arms and smooth away the fear and distrust he had taught her. But he had promised he would stay where he was, and the finger of God could not have moved him from this place.

“Really,” he replied earnestly.

She gave a shuddering sigh and dropped her eyes again.

She was not going to have a baby.

Marianne had been terrified by the events of that night and totally confused. Her perception of the sexual act was based solely on the cheap novels she read. In them the man kissed the woman—very much as Mr. Desmond had kissed her—clothes were discarded and body parts exposed, and in the next chapter the woman was with child.

Her fear had been practically paralyzing, and now her relief made her bones feel gelatinous. But she believed Mr. Desmond. Not only because he knew more than she did about what had happened that night and how much more was actually required to produce a baby, but because of the look on his face and the timbre of his voice when he spoke.

“Good,” she whispered, but he did not answer, and when she looked up she was alone in the gazebo again.

As she stared across the empty space, out into the deep green of the bower beyond the columns of stone, her mind was cleared of the dark pall of fear that had held her in its grip. But in its place, she heard Mr. Desmond’s words again and was free to contemplate their meaning.

“I assure you the act was not consummated that evening,” he had said. Mr. Desmond, she knew, was very rich. And very wicked. He was sending her to a fine boarding school, but was he taking such action only to save her for himself another day?

It was not the first time Marianne misunderstood the gentleman’s motives, nor would it be the last.

It was not a week later that Mrs. River received news and instructions from Mr. Desmond informing her, and his ward, of an upstanding women’s institute of education that he had located near Farnham. A place had already been secured for Miss Trenton.

During the interim, as he had promised, Mr. Desmond left Kingsbrook to allow Marianne privacy. Feeling curiously at home in the big house now, she spent the days flitting from room to room, most often coming to rest in the library, with its tall shelves packed with books, collected over decades.

That the library was not the compilation of one person was evidenced by the varying topics of interest represented: birds, history, tropical plants, political essays, even a few slim volumes of poetry produced by obscure poets whose names Marianne had never heard before. There were books about rocks and books about etiquette, and a rather large selection about horses and horsemanship, horse equipage and shoeing, feeding, bedding and medicine. That last, the book on horse medicine, was a very old volume that included a chapter on demonic possession and another on the use of equine leeches.

On a low shelf along the north wall of the room, easily within reach and just a little above the girl’s eye level, were books with some rather intriguing titles: Medea, Antigone, the Iliad, the Aeneid. One whose cover was nearly torn off, and which fell open easily and lay flat, suggesting it was often taken from the shelf and read, was entitled the Odys sey.

But Marianne was disappointed when she opened them to find them all, and many more besides, written in a foreign language, some even in a foreign alphabet that looked like bird scratchings and mystic symbols.

In all the immense inventory of the room, there was not one book of the sort Marianne was used to reading. No Berkshire Maiden, no Eleanor Simple, no The Life of Roman Charles and the Ladies He Encountered, subtitled A Misspent Youth. Nevertheless, she was enthralled by the new ideas suddenly available to her.

She was in the library reading, in fact, several days later, when Mrs. River brought her a letter that had just arrived in the post.

“It is from Mr. Desmond,” the housekeeper said, holding the letter and empty envelope before her. “He says he has found a school for you. He says…well here, let me read it to you. ‘The Farnham Academy is outside of the town proper. I believe Miss Trenton will enjoy the quiet, and Mrs. Avery, headmistress of the school, assures me they provide the finest education befitting a young woman of our advanced day.’ There now, does that not sound grand? He says you are to leave Kingsbrook a week from the day he wrote the letter, which would make it…let me see. Day after tomorrow.”

Marianne felt her stomach tighten, but she was not sure whether it was from anticipation or dread.

“Though he adds if that is too soon, you are to be allowed all the time you need. But I do not think that is the case. Alice can have you packed in one afternoon. Do you not agree?”

Marianne had little choice but to nod in response to Mrs. River’s brisk question.

Without any further discussion, Marianne Trenton found herself two days later once again behind Rickers, in an open coach on her way to the Farnham Academy for the Edification of Young Ladies of Quality.

She had been at Kingsbrook for just twenty-one days, but they had been the most tumultuous days of her young life. She was surprised to feel an ache of homesickness in her throat as a turn in the road concealed the manor house and parkland surrounding it. Her days at Kingsbrook had perhaps not been happy, but they had become an important part of her.