The Wager

“May I help?” Marianne offered.

So Mrs. River and she shelled peas, and then Marianne and Alice polished crystal under the housekeeper’s watchful gaze. Marianne took supper that night in the servants’ quarters and for the first time felt quite comfortable, almost jolly here at Kingsbrook.

By the next day she was ready to explore the estate. “Might I go about on the grounds?” she asked Mrs. River.

The woman smiled. “Indeed you may, child. A breath of fresh air will do you a world of good.”

Mrs. River pulled a loosely woven shawl from a hook and gently pushed Marianne toward the open doorway. She pointed out the walkway and suggested a route that would take her past the most charming sights of the Kingsbrook estate.

Marianne carefully put her foot outside the door, as if she was testing the frigid waters of some mountain spring before plunging in. She took another step. As soon as she was across the threshold, Mrs. River, with a soft chuckle, shut the door behind her.

At first Marianne wandered at random. After an excursion or two across meadows and flower beds left her with a muddied hem and a torn seam, she found that following the flagstone walkway was definitely the path of least resistance. And Mrs. River had been correct: whoever had plotted the route had done so with an eye to displaying all of the charms of the lovely estate.

The dense woods appeared to be clogged with a riot of ferns, mosses and ivy. The meadows were bejeweled with dahlias and delphiniums, and wild orchids and red campion were placed to achieve exactly the right balance and effect.

The pathway took Marianne across an arched wooden bridge over the bubbling brook. She saw another deer and wondered if the animals were treated as pets on Mr. Desmond’s lands. She did not have a lump of sugar with her, but was quite certain the delicate doe would have taken it from her hand if she had.

She was watching her footing carefully because the trailblazer, in what must have been a moment of irrepressible mischief, had laid the path stones perilously close to the bank of the stream, when she looked up and found herself standing in front of a squat stone enclosure. Walking around to inspect it, she discovered it to be open to the air, with pillars of stacked stones supporting a sloping slate roof. It was evidently a gazebo, with the same primitive quality as the landscape and as painstakingly created.

From the bright, sunlit meadow, the place appeared dark and forbidding to Marianne. She peered around anxiously, feeling unaccountably threatened by the heavy pile of stones. Taking a breath to bolster her courage, she mounted the steps. Walking between two of the pillars into the shady interior was like entering a cave. But once inside, she found it a very pleasant retreat, with a smooth stone bench to rest upon. The curious acoustics seemed to deaden the sounds of the woodland as effectively as the closing of a door.

Marianne sat down.

She looked out onto the meadow, straining to hear the rustle of the breeze stirring the grasses. Gazing between the dark stone pillars at the sun-dappled scene was like looking at another world—a brighter, more innocent world. Marianne’s eyes stung and tears began to flow down her cheeks. It was a world she could not be a part of now.

Not just because of what had happened, but because of the dark, more secret thoughts that pushed into her head: the image of him standing before her, half-clad, his bare legs pressed against her skirts; the remembered sensation of his heavy hand and strong fingers on her breasts, against the sensitive skin of her upper thigh. She wondered, though she did not like to and pushed the guilty thought away as quickly as she could, what it would have been like had Mr. Desmond gone slower, if she had been a willing partner. A great deal of whispering and sniggering went on about the subject, and Marianne wondered what on earth all the interest was about. She had experienced no great pleasure in the act. In fact, she could not remember “the act” at all. She wondered if, under the right circumstances, it could be as pleasant as people said. She tried to imagine what the right circumstances would be, and as a number of indecent scenes appeared before her mind’s eye, she attempted to push those thoughts away as well.

Without a doubt, she was irredeemably vile and sinful.

She buried her face in her hands, trying to block out the images, trying to return to the girl she had been a week ago, knowing in her heart that girl was now part of her irretrievable past.

If Peter Desmond felt guilty about nothing else, he should feel guilty for that.

She was not alerted to another presence in the peaceful little glade until she heard the scuff of a shoe on the stone steps leading into the gazebo. She jerked her head up to meet the very eyes she was trying to forget, though their depth and intensity seemed almost to have burned their impression into her living flesh.

She gasped.

Desmond winced as if she had spat in his face.

She looked like a rosebud as she drew away from him, folding tightly within herself, pink and tender, young and immature, but with great promise in her delicate petals. Desmond realized he had bruised the bud, and his cheeks grew warm with an unfamiliar shame.

It had been many years since Peter Desmond had felt shame. He would have thought his conscience had atrophied completely by now. He remembered vaguely feeling ashamed when young Ronny Withers had gotten him drunk that first time, there at Ketterling, and he had missed classes the next day and been called into the dean’s office.

“What have you to say for yourself, Master Desmond?” Dean Stampos had inquired darkly. Dean Stampos had been a big man, with heavy black brows and the voice of doom.

“I—I believe I was intoxicated, sir,” young Desmond had gulped.

“Believe?” Dean Stampos thundered.

“I was intoxicated, sir.”

“Six lashes, boy, and do not let me hear of such a thing again.”

If Dean Oliver Stampos had ended his direful sentence merely with “Six lashes,” Desmond really believed he would not have fallen from grace—at least not so quickly—nor plummeted to such depths. But the awesome symbol of authority in his young life had added those next eleven words, and do not let me hear of such a thing again, and the exceptionally bright boy had at last felt challenged by his schooling.

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?”