Tilly by M.C. Beaton Page B

a bemused way Tilly noticed, in the blaze of the candelabra, that there was a faint line of gold hair on his cheek.
    Aileen was fretting and fuming and wishing she could strangle Toby. She never would have accepted Tilly’s cheeky invitation had not her ladyship penciled a note on the bottom of the gilt-edged card informing the Glenstraith family that Toby Bassett was already in residence at Chennington.
    Aileen’s sour eyes took in the beauty of the formal dining room with its high painted ceilings, its cases gleaming with fine china and silver, and its Adam fireplace. She eyed the well-trained footmen in their splendid livery with a jealous eye. The duchess kept a large staff at her town house in London, but Aileen’s newly awakened jealousy saw everything that Tilly had as grander and better. She envied Tilly because Tilly was married and able to wear dashing, bold colors before which she, Aileen, in her palest of pink gowns, faded into insignificance. Aileen, unlike Tilly, had never had to study the art of conversation, for she had considered her beauty enough attraction. Now she had apanicky feeling that all these men around her were actually not listening to her but straining their ears to hear what the fascinating marchioness was saying.
    “You know,” she said rather loudly to her dinner partner, a young fresh-faced man called Jeremy Beaton, “you’d never guess the poor Beast used to work for me.”
    “Who?” said Jeremy politely.
    “I mean Tilly,” said Aileen with that silvery laugh of hers, which eventually grated on the nerves because it always ran up and down exactly the same scale.
    “Oh, yes,” said Jeremy. “I heard she was your companion before her marriage. Why did you call her ‘the Beast’?”
    “Because she was so ugly,” said Aileen, laughing. “Of course, she’s changed a little, but then money and clothes do make a difference.”
    “Indeed they do,” remarked Jeremy in chilling accents. “Lady Tilly is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. Why, Toby’s quite smitten with her!”
    “Toby Bassett is my fiancé!”
    “So he is,” remarked her companion with infuriating calm. “Sorry. Forgot.”
    The Duchess of Glenstraith was wishing she had not come. She was wishing she hadnot let Aileen talk her into organizing the marriage with Bassett. Young Bassett was rich and of good family, but so were a lot of other young men on the London scene. Now she was forced to sit and watch that toad all dressed up in vulgar scarlet queening it from the end of the dinner table. The fact that she, the duchess, took precedence over Tilly in rank was small consolation. Age, as well, went before beauty, so they said. But the only place she would go first would be the grave, as far as Her Grace could see anyway. And there was her husband, quite animated, discussing his latest acquisition—some singularity anemic nudes drawn by Ricketts—to this interloper into the top ten thousand. What did Tilly know of Art Nouveau anyway? Quite a lot, it dawned on the duchess with dismay. She noticed Toby stretching a nervous hand toward his wineglass and gave a loud bark. Toby withdrew the hand instantly and flashed her the sort of look that no dutiful man should give to his future mama-in-law.
    The ladies at last retired and, under cover of the general conversation over the port and walnuts, the marquess turned his problem over in his mind. After the way he had treated her, he could hardly tell Tilly that she had tohop into bed with him at the earliest opportunity in order to fulfill the terms of his father’s will. Then the thought of hopping into bed with this new and exciting Tilly was infinitely bewitching. The marquess’s prowess with women had never been in doubt. He could not see that his wife would prove any exception. He would have to begin to woo her as quickly as possible.
    He was impatient to begin his wooing right away and found, to his irritation, that it was going to be harder than