Midnight Marriage by Brant Lucinda

Author:Brant, Lucinda [Brant, Lucinda]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: england, drama, family saga, Georgette Heyer, eighteenth, France, roxton, 18th, 1700s
Publisher: Sprigleaf
Published: 2011-03-05T07:00:00+00:00

NINE

PARIS, FRANCE, 1770

SIR GERALD and Lady Mary Cavendish were hosting a select soirée for relatives and friends newly arrived in Paris for the celebration of the Dauphin’s marriage to the young Austrian princess, Marie-Antoinette. The royal wedding was taking place in the French capital and to mark such an auspicious and historic event all of Paris was rejoicing. Balls, routs, open-air concerts, plays, operas, fireworks and a hundred free entertainments had been organized for Parisian society high and low. The whole city was in a festive mood. Cards of invitation crossed back and forth society’s gilded salons. Every invitation was accepted, to show off a painted face and the latest towering powdered hairstyle if only for half an hour in a crowded salon before being whisked away in a sedan chair into the heady perfumed atmosphere of the next soirée.

Yet, despite the typically French surroundings of gold leaf furniture, polished parquetry flooring and white and blue paneled walls, the Cavendish soirée was quite markedly an English affair. The guests were either from the English Embassy or young Englishmen staying briefly in Paris at the start of the Grand Tour; people with whom Sir Gerald, who did not have an ear for languages and thus knew no French, could have a decent conversation. Unlike twittering, effeminate painted French nobles, the guests at Sir Gerald’s little gathering knew his worth as a favored relative of the Duke and Duchess of Roxton; Englishmen with whom he could feel a natural superiority.

He congratulated himself on how well the evening was progressing as he looked out across the large square courtyard with its avenue of chestnut trees, gravel walks, fountains and shrubbery illuminated by flickering flambeaux; and at the southern end the imposing black and gold iron gates which kept out the world as it traveled up and down the Rue Saint-Honoré. His wife had been the perfect hostess and the guests were suitably impressed by his noble connections and surroundings. After all, not every relative of the Duke and Duchess was given use of one of the large apartments within the compound of the Hôtel Roxton: a collection of four-storey seventeenth century buildings with mansard roofs, awe inspiring in size and aspect even by Parisian standards.

But as Sir Gerald drank the Duke’s excellent claret and surveyed the aristocratic landscape with his usual pompous self-consequence his thoughts were niggled by the specter of his recalcitrant sister and her lunatic demands.

Every morning he awoke with the expectation that Deborah had come to her senses and accepted her arranged marriage. But every day he was disappointed. He had hardly believed his eyes when reading her letter damning him for marrying her off to the Marquis of Alston. He had expected, at the very least, gratitude, and for his troubles he had received words dripping with reproach and ungratefulness. And when she had demanded he contact his lawyers to discover an impediment to her marriage so that it could be annulled forthwith his bowels had opened of their own accord.

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