Courting Scandal

by Donna Lea Simpson

  This bit of news would just titillate the gossipmongers even more. But Pelimore would settle it out of court; men always did if they had the money.

  Free of any worry about her status in the city and among people who had turned their backs on her, her mind came back to something Annie had said. The girl had crept away, so Arabella turned to her mother. “Mama, what did Annie mean about your gambling debts?”

  Lady Swinley looked guilty, but her chin went up in a gesture Arabella recognized in herself, and she stood stiffly. “The girl is an idiot! I play cards, but I really seldom gamble, and rarely—well, infrequently lose any amount at all.”

  “Has my dear, devoted husband-to-be settled any gambling debts? Was that a part of your . . . your agreement with him?” Arabella felt a dread calm overtake her, instead of the outrage she should be feeling. She saw True’s worried glance, but had no time to reassure her that she would be fine.

  Lady Swinley’s gaze slid away and she stared at a candle sconce on the wall. “My dear, you know he agreed to settle all of our debts. I . . . I don’t really remember them all! Life is so costly, and especially you, with three fruitless Seasons—”

  “Mother, do not try to evade the question. Did you have gambling debts, and has Lord Pelimore paid them as a part of your agreement with him that I should marry him?”

  Her beady eyes holding a sly light, the baroness said, “Well, no, dear, Pelimore has paid no gambling debts for me at all.”

  Arabella knew there was more but could not think what it would be, until she saw where her wording had allowed her mother an out. “But he is going to, is that not so?”

  Trapped, Lady Swinley nodded. “I feel faint. True, dear, may I have a room?”

  • • •

  Lady Swinley kept to her chamber for the remainder of the day, and all of the next. Arabella did not want to see her mother anyway. She was terribly afraid that if she did see her, she would be unable to contain the ire that was building in her heart. She thought back to Eveleen’s assertion that men treated women as chattel. How would that ever change when women were wont to do the same? Her mother had sold her for a shabby handful of gold; there was no other way to look at it.

  True watched her younger cousin and worried. The revelations of the past couple of days had started her thinking, and she was deeply troubled.

  “Wy,” she said to her husband, “I think we have all misread Arabella, even I.”

  “How so, my love?” Drake curled one fine lock of her hair around his finger and kissed it. He whispered something in her ear, and she blushed a rosy color.

  “Stop! I’m trying to be serious.”

  They were sitting on a patch of lawn in the garden on a blanket, True curled up in her husband’s arms. Arabella was working not far from them, ferociously weeding an until-now ignored corner of the garden. True had told her time and again that they had gardeners for the hard work. She was supposed to do the ladylike chores of planning and pruning, and no more. But she seemed to find an outlet in physical labor, so True let her go at it, knowing that this was how Arabella’s restless nature found relief. And if she had callused hands at the end of it, a little peace was well worth it.

  “I’m always serious, my love,” Drake said, kissing his wife’s ear.

  “I was saying I think we have all misread Arabella. I think she only agreed to marry Pelimore because her mother was having financial problems. I never knew her before to be so avid after money, and from what I heard in the breakfast room, I think Lady Swinley forced Arabella into marrying because they were in financial trouble. I should have thought of it earlier from something she said last autumn, but I was—well, I was distracted at that time.”

  Both were silent. The previous autumn Drake had been very sick and the doctors had despaired of his life, but True had pulled him through with the force of her love and a little herbal concoction.

  “Say you are right. What has that to do with anything now? She’s agreed to marry the old codger and seems quite content to follow through.”

  True looked at her husband incredulously. “Content? She has been miserable! She is eating her heart out over that cad, Oakmont. I don’t know what happened between them; she will not speak of it, even to me. But since he was here there has been even more sadness in her eyes.”

  Arabella, too far away from them to hear their whispered conversation, sat back on her heels and passed one hand over her brow, leaving a long smudge of dirt there. Drake remembered how prim and proper she seemed to him the previous autumn during her stay at his parents’ home. She was more concerned about her dress and gloves than about anything else. Maybe there was something wrong, but whatever it was, he had every confidence that she would survive. Arabella Swinley was much tougher than his wife thought. Even if her marriage to Lord Pelimore turned out to be the worst thing that ever happened to her, she would live through it.

  However, he hated seeing his wife upset as she was over her cousin’s predicament. But she was betrothed to Lord Pelimore, and a betrothal, though not legally binding for the lady, was a promise. If she broke it off there would be another enormous scandal attached to the Swinley name, and it might never recover. Right now, with her marrying respectably, it could be hoped that her reputation would recover.

  As little as he cared about society and reputation, it seemed to him that Arabella had always cared very much about such things. Could she live ostracized from all that she held dear? And breaking away from Pelimore would not gain her Oakmont, nor financial security of any kind. Drake would do anything for his wife, even allow Arabella to stay with them forever, but he could not support her and her mother’s expensive habits, nor pay off Swinley Manor, if all that had been implied in Lady Swinley’s unguarded moments were true.

  He pulled True back down and nestled her against him. “Sleep, my dear. You are far from strong yet and I brought you out to this shady spot to get you to rest. There’s nothing you can do to help Arabella right now. It is her own life, after all, and she must do what she thinks right.”

  • • •

  The next morning, two mornings after Lady Swinley arrived, she finally deigned to descend for a meal. Arabella, after her initial alienation, had spent much of the last twenty-four hours in her mother’s room and had apparently brought her some sense of peace, for she looked relatively cheerful, or as close as Lady Swinley ever got to that halcyon state.

  All of them were gathered, Drake staying to breakfast when he normally did not, because he suspected his wife was not eating enough to regain her strength. He was fanatical about her health, filling her plate himself at most meals and assiduously making sure that she ate every morsel. He had consulted an old beldame in the village and was following her instructions, even down to buying a nanny goat and urging True to drink a cup of goat’s milk every morning. He was starting to relax a little now that the roses bloomed once again in True’s cheeks, but any little fluctuation in her eating and he would become as guarded as before. The upsets of the last few days had brought him back to his role as her nursemaid.

  True gazed at her plate in dismay, at the pile of eggs and cheese and kippers that she knew she would have to get through before her husband would rest his vigil. Manfully, she started, while Arabella picked at a piece of toast and Drake tucked into ham and kedgeree and a side dish of chutney. Lady Swinley took a cup of coffee and three buttered scones to her place and picked up one of the neatly folded London papers that lay on the sideboard.

  There was silence for a while but for the rustle of the paper, and True’s occasional sigh as a pleading glance at her husband was met with a shake of his head. She knew that he was only doing it for her own good, and if she really said “no” he would certainly never force her to eat; it was not his intention to make her uncomfortable. But it relieved his mind to see her eat, and she would do anything to spare him worry. She remembered too well a time when he was out of his mind with fever, and how she had felt. She knew he had suffered similar agony when s
he was ill before and after Sarah’s birth. He would relax soon. In the meantime she could not deny that she was feeling better for the diet he had prescribed.

  A gasp from Lady Swinley and a high shriek rent the peaceful morning, drowning out the birdsong from the open window.

  Arabella leaped to her mother’s side. “What is it? Mama, are you ill?”

  The baroness could only gasp and point to a piece in the gossip column. Arabella snatched it from her mother’s hand and read it out loud.

  “‘Lord P.’—why don’t they just say his name, for heaven’s sake—‘Lord P. has gone to novel lengths to settle the breach of promise suit laid on him by the importunate Lady J. It can now be told that Lord P. and Lady J. have slipped off to the Continent to be married, as it appears that Lady J. is in an interesting condition, thus fulfilling Lord P.’s requirement of a bride!’ Do they mean she’s going to have a baby? What bosh! ‘Poor Miss S., to whom he was betrothed . . . will she now bring a suit for breach of promise against the gallivanting Lord P.?’ Not likely,” Arabella finished, throwing down the paper.

  She felt a curious lightness, as though a weight was lifted from her. If this paper was to be believed, and she did not see any reason to doubt it, she did not have to marry Pelimore! She would not be tied for life to that snuffling, wheezing old man. She was free, free!

  But it took only a few seconds for her to realize that nothing at all was solved. If she was free of Pelimore, it was only to find her and her mother in the same tiresome predicament as before, and possibly even worse off. She looked over at her mother, who was weeping silently, tears streaming down her face. Nothing was solved.

  Chapter Twenty

  “I have a what?” Marcus asked.

  “You got a visitor, sir . . . I mean, m’lord.” Mrs. Brown fidgeted at the door of the decrepit library, twisting her work-roughened hands in her stained apron.

  What on earth had made the woman start “my lording” him all of a sudden? Normally, in a twisted understanding of his new position, she called him Mr. Oakmont, or Lord Westhaven. He had begun to think it was deliberate on her part, an insolence he should abhor but instead found amusing. Marcus tossed the book he had been pretending to read down on the moth-eaten sofa and stood, stretching his long legs out.

  “A visitor. No one knows me around here. Tell him—or her—to go away. I am in no mood for company.”

  “Beggin’ yer parding, m’lord, I would ast that you do it yerself. He’s a right proper swell, an’ I wouldn’t know how to—I wouldna know what to say.”

  Curious. Mrs. Brown always knew what to say. Once broken through, her outer taciturn shell proved to hide an inner magpie.

  Feeling she had not expressed herself, she glanced once over her shoulder in a shifty manner and crept into the room, whispering, “He’s like a god, sir, like one o’ them Greek god fellers in one o’ the books Lord Oakmont has in here. All golden and noble. He’s the prettiest fella I ever seen, an’ that is God’s own truth.”

  Marcus thought for a moment, then put his head back and roared with laughter. It took a couple of minutes, but he got himself under control and said, “I do believe you have just met Lord Drake, known also as Major-General Prescott. Well, so that is the affect he has on the female half of creation. I am not surprised, and he is indeed the prettiest fellow I ever saw, too. Show him in, Mrs. B.”

  It had felt good to laugh for that minute. Since last seeing Arabella, he had had precious little reason to laugh or smile. Why was it that one often knew what one needed most in the world only when all possibility of attaining it is gone? It was like with Moira. If she had not become pregnant, he would not have asked her to marry him, but after she died he missed her fiercely. His guilt over her condition, the reason for her death, was brutal and torturous and had haunted him for years, even though Moira’s own father had not blamed him. But his grief was inconsolable beyond the guilt. Together he and Moira would have had a good life in the wilderness. She was a tough woman on the outside, but it concealed a streak of sweetness and goodness that many did not see.

  Arabella, while on the outside being far removed from Moira’s cheerful, bawdy good humor, was surprisingly like her inside. He thought that she was a far better person than even she realized, and he had lost her forever. She would be married in mere days, if it was not already done.

  Drake entered the room.

  Marcus managed a smile and said, “Welcome to my humble home.”

  Drake’s eyes widened at the ceiling-high shelves of books. “Lord Oakmont must have been quite a collector to have this array of books at his hunting box.”

  “More books than I have ever seen in a lifetime,” Marcus said, glancing ruefully around at the thousands of tomes. “And this is merely the overflow from his other libraries; there are ten times this many at the Reading home. I’m not much of a reader, I’m afraid. More of a doer.”

  “I would give a lot to have an afternoon in this room,” Drake said, his eyes scanning the titles and widening from time to time. “My God, is that a first edition of Hume’s The History of Great Britain? I believe it is, and a complete collection of—oh, sorry, Oakmont. I get carried away.”

  “Call me Marcus, remember? And you are welcome here any time to peruse the shelves, even if I’m not here. I will tell Mrs. Brown to make you free of the place. I believe she stands in considerable awe of you, Drake. You transformed her into a proper servant in minutes. I can only hope she will go back to being the slattern I have become accustomed to after you are gone.”

  Drake tore his gaze away from the shelves of books and forced himself to remember the reason for his visit. He gazed steadily at the man before him. “You know,” he said abruptly, strolling into the center of the room, “I was supposed to marry Arabella Swinley.”

  “What?” Marcus stared at him.

  “Her mother and my mother are bosom bows from their days at school. They wanted to make a match of it between us. That is why Lady Swinley, Arabella and True, who is her cousin, came to Lea Park to visit last summer, while I was still convalescing from a wound I received at Waterloo.”

  “I didn’t know that. And you, you sly dog, never mentioned your wife’s name before inviting me to dinner. I might have made the connection if you had, for Arabella—er, Miss Swinley—talked often of her cousin True, and it’s not a common name.” He paused and indicated a chair, but the viscount shook his head, and Marcus remained standing with his guest. “And so, to shorten your story, you didn’t marry Arabella. You married Lady Drake and are now as merry as grigs.”

  Drake examined the man before him. Marcus Westhaven, now Lord Oakmont, was as tall as he was, but with a look of untamed wildness about him. His dark hair was straight and hung below his collar, and his eyes were a peculiar shade of gray, smoky, like the Atlantic after a nasty storm. And it appeared, if True was to be believed, that Arabella Swinley, whom he had damned as heartless, had lost her heart to this fellow, the antithesis of every London beau Arabella had ever fancied in her previous Seasons. But how did he feel about her? True seemed to think there was something between them, but damn it, one did not interfere in a fellow’s love affairs. He had never been the kind who could talk about that sort of thing, and still had trouble with anyone but True.

  What could he say? How could he raise this subject?

  “Get the newspapers here?” he queried abruptly.

  “No. Who wants to look at the kind of rubbishy nonsense the London papers carry? I cannot seem to care for the politics of this insufferably insular island, and the gossip pages are even worse. As if anyone cares who marries whom! London is a poisonous city, and I am venting my spleen for no better reason than that I am in a bilious and foul mood. My apologies, old man.

  “The truth is, I came down here to Hampshire to get away from all of that. Now look here, Drake, what did you come for? You started to tell me that you were supposed to marry Arabella, and then you said nothing more.” Marcus’s eyes turned even darker. “Look,
are you here to tell me that she is married? Has it happened?”

  Drake frowned as he watched the man before him ball his fists, as though he were clenching his whole body against an expected blow. Damn if it didn’t appear as if this fellow dreaded to hear that Arabella was wed, and if that was so, it could only mean one thing. He remembered when he heard—it was not true, but he did not know it at the time—that True was affianced; it was as if someone had driven a knife into his gut and twisted it. It was what had brought on the fever, indirectly, through his own lack of care of himself after he heard that terrible news.

  And so he sympathized. And yet—

  He glanced around him and sniffed the air. “This place is musty. Damp. Not good for books, you know. Should have the place properly aired and a conservator look over the library.” There was silence, and Drake went back to the subject at hand, eyeing the other man curiously. “Why do you think I would come to tell you that news?”

  “I thought Arabella might have sent you, that she would want me to know—” He turned away.

  “Actually, m’wife sent me.”

  Marcus’s shoulders slumped and he sat abruptly, putting his face in his hands. “So it is true?” he said, his voice muffled. “I had lost track of the days. I did not want to know when she married that leprous old fiend, Pelimore. I should have ripped his heart out when I had the chance.”

  “So bitter!” Drake strolled around the room and stared up at the bookshelves. So many classics, shelved here where no one in the world could care for them, in this damp and dank hunting lodge. It was criminal. Perhaps in future he and Marcus would be related and he would have free access . . . but he was getting ahead of himself. The way was not clear, not by a long shot. “You know, I am not one to pry normally, but, well, you seem to be in some pain. Do you . . . can you possibly—damn it, man,” he said, swinging around and staring at his new friend. “Do you love Arabella Swinley?”