frustration during which, despite his pleadings, Sarah had refused to agree to what he asked of her and made him feel that he was a brute to suggest anything that might damage her reputation.
“If I cannot come to your house and you will not come to mine,” he asked her, “what are we to do?”
Her eyes filled with tears as they looked into his and she said in a broken little voice,
“Oh, Boydon, I love you so desperately! But – ”
There was always that ‘but’ the Marquis later thought irritably.
Then it suddenly struck him that the answer to their problem was quite obvious. He would marry Sarah!
He had always known that sooner or later he must marry and produce an heir, but it had not seemed a pressing necessity until he was over thirty, which would not be for another year.
What was more, he enjoyed being a bachelor and had seen far too many of his friends unhappily married to women who had seemed desirable enough until they actually bore their husband’s name and sat at the top of their table.
“Marriage is hell, Elvington!” Lord Wickham had said to him after being married for only three months.
“But Charlotte is so beautiful,” the Marquis replied.
“That is what I thought, until I saw her in the mornings when she is petulant and in the evenings when she is tired. And I will tell you another thing,” Lord Wickham had gone on to complain, “it’s not the looks of a wife that counts, it’s her intelligence.”
His lips had tightened for a moment before he had continued,
“Can you imagine what it is like to know exactly what a woman is going to say before she says it, for twenty-four hours of the day?”
The Marquis had not replied and his friend had added bitterly,
“You are the only one of our crowd who has had the good sense to remain a bachelor. George’s wife takes laudanum and Charles has married a harridan!”
“I have certainly no wish to be leg-shackled!” the Marquis said firmly not only to his friends but also to himself in private.
And yet, he thought, Sarah was different, so different that he was certain she was the woman who was so ideal in every way, so exactly what a man wanted in his wife, that he dared not risk losing her.
He knew even then that he hesitated before committing himself.
In fact, he was now considering Sarah from a somewhat different angle. She was not only a very desirable woman, who set his pulses racing and his heart throbbing when she was near but also someone he could trust.
She must, he thought, be able to take his mother’s place, as hostess in the houses he owned and more important still be as acceptable at Buckingham Palace as he was himself.
He knew this involved something very different to what it would have meant under the last Monarch.
George IV, up until his dying day, had liked the men who surrounded him to be raffish and witty and, because he had always been so himself, promiscuous with women.
Equally, the late King had only admitted ladies to the Royal circle that were attractive to the opposite sex – and easily persuaded to relax their morals.
But Buckingham Palace today had a very different atmosphere. The Marquis often thought it was not the same place now that the staid and prudish little Queen Adelaide was on the throne beside the King.
There was no doubt that she and her much older husband were extremely happy together, but while the King had enjoyed a riotous youth and had fathered ten illegitimate children by the actress Mrs. Jordan, he had now become so respectable that as one Statesman had remarked to the Marquis,
“I always feel as I enter the Palace that I am attending a Prayer Meeting!”
The Marquis had laughed but he knew that, if he wished to keep his place at Court, that he freely enjoyed, his life must be circumspect in every way.
If there was to be the slightest breath of scandal about his wife, Queen Adelaide would make sure that she was excluded from the Royal circle.
Watching Sarah critically the