Free Polly by M.C. Beaton Page A

“I think you are ashamed of yourself. Furthermore, I don’t believe you love my brother one little bit.”
    “Oh!” gasped Polly, outraged. “You pompous
old
windbag. Just because
you
were disappointed in love…”
    She raised her hand to her mouth realizing she had indeed gone too far. The marquis’s face was a mask of distaste.
    “Allow me to find you a cab, Miss Marsh. I am sorry to cut short our engagement but I have an appointment at my club.”
    “
You
didn’t cut it short.
I
did,” snapped the irrepressible Polly and swept out, leaving him standing over Brown’s best afternoon tea, feeling like an utter fool.
    Had the marquis been less annoyed he might have realized the folly of confiding in his mother. He was very fond of his mother, although most of the time he did not like her one bit.
    On the Sunday, he strode into his mother’s boudoir unannounced, wishing for the hundredth time that the duchess would say good-bye to the 1880s, although he had to admit grudgingly that her boudoir was the only room in the Chase where the twentieth century was not allowed to intrude. The sunny day was shielded from the room by crimson-and-green rep curtains inside and the tendrils of ivy outside, which created a sort of tropical underwater effect in which swam large round tables surrounded by massive books and wax flowers under glass.
    His mama was dealing with her correspondence, dressed in a dirty lace tea gown that was cut low at the back to show an acreage of mottled and unwashed neck.
    “Edward,” she cried, turning and kissing the air about a yard from his face. “You look very grim. What’s the matter?”
    “Miss Marsh,” said the marquis heavily and immediately wished he had not opened his mouth.
    “Oh, no!” cried the duchess. “Not you, Edward. I’m so delighted that Peter is showing such sense.”
    Wearily, the marquis told her of his afternoon tea with Polly and of Peter’s dishonorable intentions.
    “Well!” said the duchess, breathing a sigh of relief and then looking rather shifty. “After all, what a lot of fuss about nothing. How
Victorian
you
are
being, Edward. After all, one knows that simply scads and scads of people these days have mistresses. I mean, you yourself—”
    “I do not seduce virgins or innocent girls,” said her son coldly, “and I believe Miss Marsh to be both. Furthermore,” he added, holding up his hand, as his mother would have spoken, “she comes from a very respectable family. I have had tea with her mother.”
    “
Really
,” said his mother, outraged. “There are a lot of times, Edward, when we do not see eye to eye, but until now I have never known you to have a penchant for fraternizing with the lower orders.”
    The marquis felt himself becoming very angry indeed. “You’re a snob, Mama,” he said curtly. “Unfortunately what Polly Marsh said about you seems to be true. You are exactly like a snobbish shopgirl!”
    “She
dared
to say that!” screamed the duchess. “Then if you didn’t slap her face for her cheek, I am going up to town tomorrow, going straight into Westerman’s, and I am going to do it myself!”
    The marquis regarded her thoughtfully. “Do, by all means, Mama, but everyone will think, first, that you’re frightfully common and, second, that Peter means to marry Miss Marsh and that you are jealous.”
    The duchess breathed heavily. “Then I shall see that she’s fired.”
    “Equally common,” said her son, who by now had his temper well in check. “Anyway, if you do, I shall make a
very
funny story about it and tell it round the clubs.”
    “You wouldn’t
dare
!”
    “Try me… as our American cousins would say.”
    “I shall speak to your father.”
    “Do. But it won’t do any good, you know. He prefers to go on as if Westerman’s doesn’t exist. He hated that picnic, you know. It was all Blundell’s idea.” Blundell was the duke’s secretary.
    The duchess gave her elegant son a withering look but could think