The Wager

It became a contest of wit and ingenuity to find out how much he could get away with, how many rules he could break, in what misconduct he could indulge without Dean Stampos hearing of it. Desmond found he could quaff any strong drink his money could buy and his schoolboy stomach could hold. He found he could gamble away every cent of money his father sent him, his mother sent him, his grandfather advanced or he could beg, borrow or steal from the other boys. He believed it was Ronny Withers who also introduced him to the ladies who introduced him to pleasures of the flesh, though he was drunk at the time and did not really remember the painted jade who led him into one of the little cubicles, or what had happened there in the dark, let alone the schoolmate who had accompanied him to the den the night they sneaked away from Ketterling.

Yet in the end, Desmond was not as clever as he supposed, and when one day his father arrived at the school and Peter was called to a meeting in the dean’s office, Stampos was able to produce a file of proof of the boy’s misbehavior. Desmond was summarily dismissed.

He returned to the family home in Birmingham. His mother thought it was to her watchful care, but it was to a city that offered vice with as much increase over that available at the Ketterling school as a stream realizes when it enters a lake. Desmond eventually became a skilled gambler, but that education cost him the legacy an uncle had left him, all of the money his grandfather had meant for him to have after his death, when the boy took over Kingsbrook, and his father’s good graces.

And though in the beginning, there at Ketterling, and even when he returned home, he felt a twinge of conscience now and then, the nudges became fainter, the remorse negligible. He was not aware of feeling particularly ashamed even when, at last, his father summoned him to his office in town and told him that after the escapade of the weekend before—Desmond did not remember what had happened; he only knew his gold watch and chain were gone again and one of the carriages was wrecked beyond repair—Mr. Desmond could not allow his son to stay in the family home any longer.

Mr. Desmond did not like to suggest that the boy go to live with his wife’s father at the estate the old man was determined to leave him, and felt guilty at the relief he felt when Georgia tearfully suggested it herself. Sir Arthur Chadburn was a straitlaced old gentleman who would not countenance his grandson’s debauchery, and Peter, Mr. Desmond knew from experience, was bound and determined to be debauched. Mr. Desmond did not like to imagine the result of the stress Peter would cause the elderly gentleman.

As it turned out, though, even as father and son were having their grim confrontation, a letter was being delivered to Mrs. Desmond announcing the death of her father. So Peter assumed ownership of the Kingsbrook manor and estate outside of Reading, and his father, with a stony face but a clear conscience, sent the boy away, vowing he would never see him again.

It was unbeknownst to his father, young Desmond was sure, that his mother sent him a semiannual stipend that more or less kept him afloat. It was meant to supplement the estate upkeep, but more often than not it supplemented Desmond’s gambling expenses. Fortunately, his gaming had improved to the point where he could pay the few Kingsbrook servants with fair regularity and travel to all the great gambling Meccas here in England and on the Continent to make additional monies for himself and the estate.

It was a difficult, strenuous life he had chosen for himself. Despite his dismissal from boarding school, he was accepted into the Reading University on his scholastic merit. Though the lessons came easily, he would not focus on his education and left the university after four years with no better idea of what to do. By then he had been disowned by his family; he had lost the generous remembrances of his uncle and grandfather. His father had roared and his mother had wept, and through it all Desmond kept his jaw stubbornly squared and refused to admit to any shame.

Now, though, as he stood between the pillars of the little stone gazebo, facing the girl he had claimed as prize in his latest game of cards, his cheeks grew warm and he was forced to acknowledge his own ignominy.

He would have given anything to have relegated this meeting to someone else, but to have taken that happy option would have required a fuller disclosure than Desmond intended to ever give anyone about what had happened that night.

He cleared his throat. “Good day, Miss Trenton,” he said.

She did not answer, only continued to watch him warily.

He took another step into the gazebo, and she hitched herself farther away from him on the bench, as far as she could without falling to the stone flooring.

He sighed.

“Miss Trenton, I wish I could convince you that you do not have to fear me, but I do not suppose that is possible now. Here, I will stand with my back against this pillar. I will not take another step toward you the entire time I am here. And you, if you could, may relax your hold on the edge of the bench there so your knuckles are not quite so white.”

He nodded toward where she gripped the stone seat, apparently clinging for dear life. She released her hold and then looked up at the man standing on the other side of the little enclosure, his back dutifully flat against the supporting pillar. She folded her hands in her lap, but dismay and terror still filled her eyes with dark shadows.

Peter Desmond, though an admitted roué, having advanced from dark dens to glittering palaces of prostitution, had never taken a woman against her will or even below her top price. It was his habit, though hardly a regular one, to meet with such ladies and leave them satisfied, as well as pleased, as it were. Despite his decidedly wicked ways, he had never expected to see in a young lady’s eyes the expression he saw in Marianne’s.

He cleared his throat gruffly. “I will come directly to the point,” he said. “I have spent a number of sleepless nights contemplating your immediate future, as I am sure you have.”

The girl nodded slightly.

“If I understood you correctly that night…” the young woman’s pale cheeks suddenly blazed at the mere mention of the episode, and Desmond uncomfortably cleared his throat again “…you are not a regular girl of Mr. Carstairs’s then?”

Marianne looked at him blankly, furrowing her brow slightly in her attempt to understand his meaning.

“You do not…work for Carstairs?”

“I am the ward of Uncle Horace,” Marianne whispered.

They were the same words Carstairs had said to him, the same words he had laughed over and repeated to Abbot and Phillips, almost the exact words Mrs. River had employed to announce Miss Trenton’s arrival. Why, then, did they mean something so very different when the girl whispered them?

“Yes, of course,” Desmond murmured. “Nevertheless, I do not believe you should return to Mr. Carstairs’s establishment.”

He watched her carefully, trying to gauge her reaction to his decision. Would she quarrel with him and be difficult? Did she want to return to that pit?

She shook her head, but did not venture any comment.

Desmond nodded briskly. “Right. I should tell you then, I have been into London to consult with legal counsel, reviewing the situation in which we find ourselves.”

Marianne’s expressive face registered surprise. After what Mr. Desmond had done, how could he go to a representative of the law?

“I do not know if you are fully aware of the circumstances that brought you here, Miss Trenton, but Mr. Carstairs wagered his guardianship of you and lost. I won.” He could not keep the ironic tone from his voice. “My lawyer informs me that, though unusual, such a transfer of responsibility can be legal. There are papers and signatures involved, but Mr. Bradley assures me that dating from my meeting with Carstairs and the others at the Grand Hotel, you may be considered in my legal custody.”

“Oh.”

It was a very small sound, but Desmond hoped there was more surprise in it than fright. But there was some fright in her eyes, which cut him to the quick. Seeing her here, clothed in dress and pinafore that made her look like a child fresh from the nursery, Mr. Desmond was, as his housekeeper had been, struck by how young she appeared. If she had arrived at Kingsbrook dressed this way, or had come to supper that night in this outfit instead of that indecently provocative green gown that seemed to set her hair ablaze, Desmond would never have attempted what he had.

Now the gentleman hitched his back in discomfort against the hard rocks, but kept his shoulders squarely against the pillar. “It is my intention to enroll you in a respectable boarding school.”

He had arrived at that happy solution in the long waking hours of that night before he left for London, though he was not prepared for the amount of money such a solution would cost. Mr. Bradley, his solicitor, had informed him a “good” school would cost every bit of the money his mother sent him each year. It was lucky for Desmond that he had done the girl no physical harm, or this damned conscience of his, which had chosen a most inconvenient time to reintroduce itself, would have had him selling Kingsbrook to recompense her.

As it was, he would be required to tighten his belt and pass up his forays to Paris and Monte Carlo for the next few years. As he discussed the proposition with Bradley and contemplated the sacrifices that would be required of him, his resolve had faltered a bit. He might have been willing to seek another solution, but as the lovely young girl sat quivering on the cold stone bench before him, his chin firmed and he determined to limit his gambling trips to London and Liverpool as long as she was enrolled, if need be.

By gad, it felt good to be noble!

“I have made no inquiries yet, so if you have a preference for the part of the country in which you wish to be located, or for a school you may have heard about, I will certainly give your choice consideration.”

“I—I attended Miss Willmington’s classroom on Miller Street for a while,” she whispered.

“You have had some schooling?” Desmond asked, surprised. He had assumed the girl, though not a professional yet, was merely some street urchin Carstairs had picked up, preparing her for market.

The girl nodded.

“You can read and write, then?”

She nodded again.

“And work figures?”

Her lips turned up unconsciously, and Desmond drew in his breath at the delightfully whimsical effect the slight change in her expression produced.

“Some,” she said softly. Marianne’s introduction to, and practice with, numbers had been grueling, the difficulty compounded by any help her father tried to give.

At the thought of her father, the glimmer of a smile left her lips, and Desmond exhaled in disappointment. “Well, that will make a difference, of course,” he said. “Do you wish to return to Miss Willmington’s school?”

“I finished there,” she said softly. “It was for children.”

“I see.” He swallowed heavily. The girl before him was still barely more than a child. “Very well. We must find another place then, but now I see I do not have to look for a classroom that offers the most elementary instruction, but can place you with girls your own age.”

Marianne continued to stare at him wordlessly, with large, disconcerting eyes.

“I shall set the works in motion then,” he said. “It may take a week or two, but I will take rooms in Reading until I find a place for you. You may make yourself at home here in Kingsbrook, and Mrs. River will help you with anything you need. Do you have any questions about your schooling?”

He paused to give the girl a chance to speak, but she shook her head.

“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.

Chapter Four

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 Odyssey.

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.

The academy was housed in an unremarkable gray stone building of three floors, with two smaller adjoining buildings. One of the outbuildings served as the kitchen, from which food never arrived hot at the long table in the dining room, though the room was on the ground floor, with a door that opened directly onto the walk leading from the cookhouse.

The other outbuilding was for physical exertion and exercise, “as necessary to the well-being of the body as nourishment.” Mrs. Avery, a spiky woman of rail-like thinness, was a great advocate of the benefits of physical exertion and exercise.

The main portion of the school, where the girls spent most of their time, was inside the big center building.

Mr. Desmond’s careful inquiries had indeed located a very creditable institute of learning for “young women of quality of that advanced day.” Occasionally, though, as Marianne attended Miss Gransby’s elocution classes, Mrs. Lynk’s deportment classes or Mr. Brannon’s ancient history classes, her attention strayed, and she wondered if a school slightly less tailored to young women of quality might not have been more interesting.

Mrs. Avery taught the Latin classes. “Not all schools for young ladies include the study of Latin,” she often reminded them. “Young women are taught to speak softly and work their needlepoint, while all the most sublime thoughts of mankind are locked away in the classic languages. Young men are taught Latin. Boys of eight years old are taught Latin. You young women are extremely fortunate to receive that same mystic key.”

Rickers delivered Marianne to the gaunt stone edifice on the afternoon of this fine day in the latter part of June.

“Miss Trenton.” It was Mrs. Avery herself who greeted the new student. “Welcome to the Farnham Academy. I hope you will be happy here.”

Marianne hoped she would, too, and murmured vague words of agreement. She was shown to her room, or rather, to the dormitory where half the girls in the school slept. The other half, the younger girls, ages eight to twelve, slept below stairs in much more cramped quarters.

Next to her bed was a stand with two drawers for her smallclothes and other personal possessions. Marianne, like everyone else, was issued a lightweight, brown woolen skirt and two muslin blouses to be worn to classes. The skirts, blouses and any dresses the girls might have brought with them from home hung in a long common closet at the end of the room.

Owing to Mrs. Avery’s emphasis on exercise, and the laundry being done only once a week, the odor that issued forth from the closet when she folded back the screen was heady, and Marianne was not at all sure she wanted to hang her things in there. But she had little choice, so she changed dutifully from the frock she had worn from Kingsbrook into the school uniform. Rejoining Mrs. Avery in the receiving hall, she was shown to her classes.

“’There is a place within the depths of Hell/ Call’d Malebolge…’“ A thin, pale girl, who looked younger than Marianne was reading aloud from a worn book she and her deskmate were sharing. The little woman at the head of the class clapped her hands sharply and the reader stopped, looking up, like the rest of the girls, to curiously study the new student disturbing their lessons.

“Girls, this is Miss Marianne Trenton. Miss Trenton, you may sit there, in the last desk. Judith, see that Miss Trenton has a copy of Mr. Aligheiri’s Divina Commedia. Nedra, you may continue. We are in Hell, Miss Trenton….”

The girls were pleasant enough, but Marianne was slow to make friends in the school. It was a week before she said a complete sentence to anyone, two before she divulged any personal information about herself, and that was only to reveal her age and birthday to Nedra, the pale reader in that first class.

Marianne and Nedra Stevens were drawn together the same way two falling leaves are thrown together atop a swirling stream.

More or less isolated for the past two, pivotal years of her life, Marianne did not know how girls her age were supposed to behave. So she withdrew into a shell that, even a month later, had been only slightly eroded by Nedra’s gentle personality.

A year younger than Marianne, she presented no threat, and so colorless both in body and spirit as to be practically transparent, she did not intimidate Marianne, nor overshadow her. When Marianne could be dragged from her books, the two girls spent quiet afternoons together.