Authors: Christine Trent
But Marie was adamant. It was an important transaction and required her physical presence.
So Marguerite boarded a ship once again—a peaceable journey, thanks be to God—for Lisbon. After a few weeks of travel, she concluded her business in mere days, finding the city’s cloth merchants congenial and eager to do business with someone of Madame Tussaud’s fame. But it was nearly impossible to leave. She was invited to dine every evening with practically every merchant in the guild seeking an opportunity to host her. They pressed countless gifts on her, bowing and scraping their pleasure at obtaining custom with the renowned waxworker.
Really, couldn’t this have been conducted without taking me away from my work? I’ve got four incomplete figures in the workroom that could have been finished by now.
With relief she was finally able to crate up her pile of gifts for Marie, secure their new contracts inside a specially constructed pocket in her dress, and begin the exhausting journey home.
Marguerite was pleasantly surprised to find both Marie and Joseph waiting when her ship docked. Although she had written to her friend with her planned arrival date, she fully expected Marie to be too busy with the exhibition to even consider greeting her upon reentering Ireland.
Once her possessions were unloaded from the ship and tied to the top of a hackney, the three embarked on the final leg of Marguerite’s journey back to their lodgings.
Inside the rattling carriage, Marguerite sat across from Marie and Joseph. “Who manages the exhibition today?” she asked.
A curious look passed between mother and son.
“No one manages. I closed it for the day.”
“Closed? The exhibit? Just to meet my ship? Marie, are you quite all right? In the years I’ve known you, when have you ever closed the exhibition for no good reason?”
“My reason is good.” Marie smiled.
Marguerite shook her head. What had happened to her friend while she was away?
“Oh, I meant to tell you. I have all of our signed agreements sewn in my dress. I’ll give them to you as soon as we arrive at our lodgings.”
“Perhaps later. You need a bath and change of clothes. Need time to rest.” Marie reached over and patted Marguerite’s knee.
The exhibition was closed and Marie was suddenly interested in relaxation? Was the woman daft?
But after a long soak and a change from her dusty and sweaty traveling clothes, she had to admit that Marie was right. She hadn’t rested since—well, when had she last lain back to simply close her eyes and be still?
She propped herself up on her bed with her wet, lavender water-scented hair drying around her, and a copy of the newly published novel
Leonora
in her hands. She read for just a few minutes with the afternoon sunlight streaming into her room, before her weariness overcame her and she shut her eyes for a dreamless nap.
Marguerite awoke like a contented cat, stretching and rolling over, her eyes lazily half-open to observe the world. Why couldn’t life always be this peaceful? How had her life ended up a series of tumultuous acts in a stage play, each one punctuated by death? Well, it was all over, and she wouldn’t berate herself over her temporary blindness where Darden Hastings was concerned. Life from now on would be right here, with the Tussaud wax exhibition.
I have no regrets about my return. Do I?
The sun was making its descent into the horizon. She touched her hair. Completely dry.
A soft rap at the door forced her out of her languid state.
It was Marie. “Marguerite, I left my sketchbook and pencils at
the exhibit. I think in the workroom. Will you retrieve them for me? I have ideas for a new tableau and want to work on the design tonight.”
Marguerite yawned drowsily. “Of course. Let me just get my keys.” She went to retrieve the set of keys that locked both the front door of the exhibition and the workroom door.
Marie followed her into the room. “You plan to wear that?”
Marguerite looked down at her pale blue dress. It was a simple gown, part of the trousseau Claudette had purchased. “Yes. Why?”
Marie threw open her armoire and began riffling through the dresses hung on hooks. She pulled out a green cotton dress with a wide brown sash tied underneath the bodice.
“You should wear this one.” She held it out to Marguerite.
“To pick up a sketchbook? Marie, you’re acting more than odd today. Are you feeling well?”
Marie pressed the gown into her arms and kissed her cheek. “Yes, this dress is necessary for picking up my sketchbook.”
After letting herself inside the dark exhibition hall, she lit the lamp kept on a small stand near the door. She stepped through the tableaux back toward the workroom where she hoped to find the sketchbook, if Marie’s memory of its location was correct. Otherwise, she’d need to light up the entire exhibit and go through each tableau on a hunt for it.
How strange. There was a candlelit glow coming from the rear of the exhibition. Had Marie left lamps burning? She was never so careless. But even if she had, how could they have lasted so long?
Marguerite held her own taper up for a better view as she approached the lit area. How very strange. It seemed to be coming from the location of their Trafalgar tableau. Except … it was different.
It was no longer Nelson’s death scene. The large canvas painted to look like the inside of
Victory
remained, but the figures and props had changed, and many-branched candelabra glowed brightly in various positions nearby. The scene now showed Nelson standing before a round table with four chairs around it. On the table
were tiny wooden replicas of French, Spanish, and English ships in formation lines for battle. Seated in three of the chairs were Hardy, Collingwood, and Darden, all in uniform and looking down at Nelson’s proposed battle plan.
Darden? Why would Marie select him for a tableau? He wasn’t well-known to the public. She had to admire Marie’s work. Darden was made so skillfully that it was as if she’d done it from a life mask.
Marguerite stepped into the tableau to look more closely at Darden’s figure. She set her lamp down in the middle of the miniature ship grouping and bent to study the figure more closely.
It blinked.
She raised up and took two steps backward, a hand to her pounding chest. Surely she had imagined it.
The figure spoke in a deep, familiar voice. “I’m sorry, I just can’t maintain this position any longer.”
Marguerite tamped down a shriek. “What is this? Who are you?” She peered down again. “Darden?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I don’t understand. Why are you here? In Dublin? After closing time in the wax exhibition? Pretending to be a wax figure, for heaven’s sake?”
“Would you believe it was all Madame Tussaud’s idea?”
“It was Marie’s idea for you to pose as a statue in an empty wax salon?”
“Well, put like that, it’s not quite as romantic as she promised me it would be.”
How had she gone from a pleasant, idyllic nap to facing down Darden Hastings, all in the space of an hour?
“How could this possibly be romantic?”
Darden explained that he had written to Madame Tussaud, seeking her assistance in wooing Marguerite back. He knew Marguerite would refuse his letters and he had to come up with a more creative way of seeing her.
“But how could you know I would reject your letters? You’ve never sent me one.”
“Marguerite, you made your feelings about me and the British government quite clear that day at Westminster. You repudiated the whole lot of us.”
“Oh. Yes, I suppose I did do that. But how did you come to be in Dublin?”
“Lord Howick gave me leave. Madame Tussaud wrote to me with her conviction that you weren’t happy in Dublin. She developed a plan for having me surprise you privately, before you could think to turn me away. And I believe she sent you off on some wild-goose errand to Portugal so she could have time to put the tableau together.”
Marguerite shook her head in wonder. “Unbelievable.”
“Are you angry with her? With us? I simply had to find a way to get you alone to talk to you one last time. I ask that you hear me out, and if you still hate me, well then, I will leave and I promise to never purposely cross your path ever again.”
He pulled out the fourth empty chair with his booted foot and patted the seat with his scarred left hand. His hand, the tableau, and the movement of his foot brought all of her time on
Victory
flooding back over her once again. His warm embraces, his powerful protection of her, his ridiculous sense of duty. Her knees felt like they would not support her much longer.
I love him. God help me, I do.
She nodded her head and sat silently.
They were seated a mere foot away from each other. He had the scent of cloves about him again, on his breath and in his hair.
He must carry them about for chewing.
Darden leaned toward her. “I hardly know where to begin. I wasn’t quite sure you’d even talk to me inside this rather preposterous setting of Madame Tussaud’s.”
“Marie has always had a talent for the theatrical. I never imagined she’d use it on me.”
“I suppose we never really quite know people the way we think we do. And perhaps you haven’t really known me. Not in the way you should.” Darden took her hands in his, and she could see relief in his eyes when she didn’t pull away.
“Quite simply, Marguerite, I love you. I have ever since I met
you. Since that soirée at Edinburgh Castle where I behaved like a complete horse’s ass. I tried to keep it from Brax, because he always had an easy, fascinating appeal for women, and I figured that if someone of his charm made up his mind to have you, I was lost. But I suppose my heart was completely exposed and he sensed it. Being also very competitive, he decided he wanted you and would have you at all costs.”
“I was never his. Not for a moment.”
“But how could I know that? His presence always brought a smile to your face that I couldn’t seem to conjure up no matter how I tried.” He stroked the back of one of her hands with his fingers.
“On
Victory,
I was beside myself, between worry for you and my shipboard obligations. Plus, I knew that I was seeking a responsible position inside Pitt’s government, and I didn’t know if my life could accommodate you. I didn’t want to be a neglectful husband.
“Then when I realized Brax was up to something vile while still courting you, it took all of my own self-discipline to keep from thrashing him personally and leaving him in a sewer somewhere.”
“Darden Hastings, I hardly think self-discipline has ever been a difficulty for you.”
“It never was. Until I met you.” He reached up to push a tendril of hair behind her ear, then resumed his light caressing of her hand. “So tell me, Marguerite, what you think.”
“Honestly, Darden, I think you should simply stop talking.”
Marguerite moved to his lap and wrapped her arms around his neck, a better position for nuzzling him and feeling his arms around her. He obliged by wrapping her tightly in those arms and lowering his head to hers for a kiss. One completely uninterrupted by the sounds of battle or the anguish of torn loyalties. It was deep and all-consuming, a release of desire that had been straining against its chains for nearly two years.
Marguerite felt robbed of breath, but if she died of asphyxiation now, she could have considered her life well spent. But things weren’t finished between them yet. She broke away, but held her face close to his.
“Tell me, Captain,” she said in a whisper, “aren’t there things you wish to know about me before we go any further?”
“You mean, beyond the fact that you’re a rash, stubborn little waxworker who will never give me a moment’s peace the rest of my days?”
“Hmm, I guess there isn’t much to know beyond that.”
She saw that his eyes were twinkling with pleasure as she closed her own for another kiss.
They stayed locked together until some of the candles began sputtering out and their resultant smoke left an acrid smell in the air.
“I believe we have a signal to depart,” Darden said as he broke away.
Marguerite was reluctant to leave the tableau and everything it meant but agreed. She stood and gestured to Nelson.
“Do you think the admiral would approve?”
“I believe he would want to be present at the ceremony himself if he were here today.”
Together they blew out the remaining candles and made their way out of the exhibition together. At the entrance, Marguerite stopped and turned to Darden, taking his disfigured hand in her own and kissing it gently. “There’s just one more thing that remains unsaid.”
“Yes?” Darden’s voice radiated desire.
“I’ve loved you for what feels like an eternity. I think I may have even fallen a bit in love with you at Edinburgh Castle, even though you were quite impossibly rude to me when I met you. But for certain I loved you after you escorted me to take Lord Nelson’s life mask. And I was deeply, madly in love by the time I left
Victory.
I think that if I’d gone the rest of my life without you, I’d have gone deeply, madly insane.”
Nathaniel sipped tea from his terrace, which ran the length of his palatial new residence in Bengal. Polly sat by his side with her own cup. Her eyes still hadn’t lost their look of utter wonder at her greatly improved circumstances.
Circumstances had changed for Nathaniel, too. He’d managed to obtain employment with the East India Company, as a representative of their interests in Bengal. In a masterful move that combined his desire for glory with his new leisure pursuit, he was now an agent ensuring that opium collected here was transferred to one of several foreign intermediaries for smuggling into China. The Chinese had declared the opium trade illegal in their country.
Such a harmless, enjoyable pastime, declared unlawful. He shook his head. Ah well, all the more profit for him. Finally, a simple, secure way to earn vast sums of money in a country where he could be treated like a king.
He reached over and squeezed Polly’s ample thigh. She simpered and leaned over to give him a generous view of her cleavage. Life would be uncomplicated and blissful from now on.