Scandalous Brides

by Amanda McCabe

  “Yet you suspected.”

  “Um, perhaps, yes. I know Elizabeth, and I know you. Or at least I did once. I knew that your spirits were the same. Wild, and perhaps a bit misguided, but well meaning.”

  Nicholas’s fist clenched around the snifter of brandy. “So this was some sort of test you devised.”

  “Not at all. Really, Nicholas, you always did make things out to be far more complex than they are. Because you would understand what she was about, I thought you were the one who could persuade her to see reason and give up this silly gypsy life.”

  “I hardly think her life is silly,” Nicholas snapped. “She is a fine artist, a great one even, and she has many clients and a brilliant future.”

  “You see, my friend? You do understand her.”

  Nicholas took a deep, steadying breath. “What will you do now? Drag her back to England?”

  “I hardly think ‘drag’ is the right word. That conjures up such images of cavemen. And yes. She will come back to England with me. Was that not the point of this absurd exercise?” Peter sighed, and seemed almost pensive as he looked down into his own glass. “I can try to make her understand, perhaps even forgive me, for my behavior, only if we are at home where it is quiet. Here she is too caught up in her wild ways.”

  Nicholas’s fierce anger, his desire to plant Peter a sound facer, had subsided to a dull roar behind his eyes. All he really had now was an ineffable sadness. He had lost so much in one morning. He had lost everything—his love, his honor, his future. “How am I to make her forgive me?”

  Peter gave a strange half smile. “That, Nick, I cannot tell you. Will you also be returning to England?”

  “Yes. I could not stay in Venice.”

  “No. That would not be wise. I hear that Elizabeth’s Amazon friend can shoot the ace from a card at fifty paces. I should not like to encounter her in some dark alleyway.” Peter drained his brandy and stood. “I want you to know, Nick, that I bear you no ill will for how all this turned out. You will always be welcome at Clifton Manor, should you ever choose to call.”

  With that, he departed, fading into the milling crowd and leaving Nicholas alone with his drink and his thoughts.

  “You may bear me no ill will, Peter,” he muttered. “But what of your sister? And what of myself?”

  As Elizabeth prepared to step into the boat that would carry her from her one true home, Georgina caught her in one last farewell embrace.

  “Georgie,” Elizabeth said in a strangled voice. “Write to me very often, and tell me all your doings, every detail. All your commissions, and parties. And tell Stephen I said good-bye.”

  Georgina wrinkled her nose. “I will tell him, if that is what you want. And you must write to me of all your doings.”

  Elizabeth laughed. “Oh, yes, I shall tell you of the sheep and the grass growing!”

  “No, tell me of your painting. I will send all of your work on, and you must not neglect it.”

  “I will not neglect it. I couldn’t.”

  “Elizabeth,” Peter called impatiently. “It grows late.”

  Elizabeth kissed her friend’s cheek one last time. “I will see you soon, Georgie.”

  “Yes. Perhaps sooner than you think!”

  “Do not do anything foolish, such as follow me to Derbyshire! You would hate it there.”

  “Do something foolish? Me? Never!” Georgina pressed a small box into Elizabeth’s gloved hand. “Here.”

  “What is this? A gift?”

  “Yes, but not from me, I fear.”

  “Then who... ?”

  Georgina’s lips tightened. “It is from Nicholas. He asked me to give it to you before he left, right before I lost my temper at him utterly and said some very rude things.”

  Puzzled, Elizabeth opened the box, and stared down in astonishment.

  There, flashing in the late afternoon sunlight, was a sapphire-and-diamond ring. A betrothal ring.

  For one instant, Elizabeth wanted only to cry out all her grief and disappointment. Then she wanted to fling the thing into the canal.

  In the end, she just closed the box and stuffed it into her reticule. Perhaps, one day, when some of the pain had faded, she would want to take it out and remember how, for a brief while, a man had made the sun shine in her life every day.

  Chapter Sixteen

  A new volume of poetry lay open on the lap of

  Elizabeth’s new bishop’s blue carriage dress, and her eyes were cast down upon it, but she had not really read a word in ten miles or more. Nor did she see the green glories of the English countryside that flew past the carriage windows, palest blue sky and hedgerows glistening in the morning mist.

  She did not see or feel anything at all. She hadn’t since the last of Venice’s golden spires had faded from her view, and she had sensed herself leaving Elizabeth Cheswood behind and becoming Lady Elizabeth Everdean again.

  The voyage had been uneventful, a series of ships and carriages and inns, meals she didn’t want to eat, too much wine drunk, and no conversation.

  “We should arrive very soon,” Peter commented. He looked stylishly bored, as he had for their entire journey, never dusty or rumpled or insulted by her silences. But now his hands twisted and untwisted on the golden head of his fashionable walking stick.

  “Yes. I can recognize some of the countryside.” Elizabeth cut another page of her book.

  “I hope you will be quite comfortable there, at Clifton Manor. Your rooms are just as you left them.”

  “Yes.” Her gloved fingertip traced the printed lines that she did not see.

  “And your maid is still employed there. The silly chit refused to leave, even when Lady Haversham tried to hire her away.”

  “Good. I did miss Daisy.” And nothing else there.

  Peter smiled coolly, almost as if he sensed the unspoken words that hung bewteen them. “No one to dress your hair properly in Italy?”

  “I am quite capable of dressing my own hair, thank you. Daisy was always so very cheerful, though. A great comfort in such a gloomy household.” Elizabeth knew she was behaving childishly, but she could not seem to help herself. It was either that or weep.

  A heavy silence fell in the carriage, broken only by the steady rustle of Elizabeth’s pages turning and the tap of Peter’s stick on the floor. Suddenly, he leaned forward and grasped her wrist.

  Elizabeth was so startled that her book fell from her lap with a clatter. She clutched the penknife in her fist. To cover her confusion, she pulled her hand away and bent to retrieve the book.

  “It will not be like that at Clifton anymore, Elizabeth,” he said, his voice almost . . . was it beseeching?

  “Like what?” Elizabeth murmured, completely taken aback.

  “As it was before you left. I was wrong, very wrong to have behaved as I did towards you. The quarrels, that business with the duke . . .”

  Elizabeth held up her hand to stop the bewildering flow of his words. “Please. Let us never speak of that again.”

  “No. Of course.” Peter sat back, and she could see the old coldness descending on him like a cloak. “I have no excuse. I was not myself when I returned from the Peninsula.”

  That Elizabeth could agree with wholeheartedly.

  “But you have been gone a long time, Elizabeth,” he continued. “Things have changed. I know that Clifton is not Venice . . .”

  Elizabeth snorted.

  Peter went on as if he had not heard her lapse in manners. “But I am certain you can be happy here again. I only wish to make amends to you.”

  Elizabeth was quite sick of men who felt they knew what was best for her, who thought they could order her life to suit themselves no matter what her own feelings were. “Oh, Peter.” She sighed. “The only amends you could have made was to have left me to my own life and not have sent your flunky after me.”

  “Elizabeth, you are wrong about me. I am your brother; I want only what is best for you.”

  “You cannot even beg
in to know what that would be! Only I know what is best for me.”

  Peter merely shrugged. “We shall see.” Then he added, very gently, “And you are also wrong about Nick Hollingsworth.”

  She was saved from answering when the carriage drew to a halt on the gravel drive curving in front of Clifton Manor. Elizabeth peered out from behind the wispy veil of her bonnet. The house had not changed at all, the grand Tudor façade with its incongruous pillared Georgian side wings, which had been added by her stepfather. It was a good deal tidier than when she had last seen it, however, and a bit less forbidding. The ivy was trimmed back, and the stone front steps gleamed beneath the feet of the servants assembled there.

  Despite the polishing, the new flowers spilling from the beds, the crisp curtains behind the windows, the aura remained the same, a miasma of the living of so many generations. So much of her own past was there. The laughter of her beautiful mother, as she let her little daughter try on her gowns; her stepfather carrying her piggyback down the grand staircase; Peter dancing with her at her very first ball. There was also the dead duke. It was all there, waiting for her to take it back up again as if no time had passed at all.

  “Are you ready?” Peter asked. “They are waiting to greet you.”

  Shaken from her fancies, Elizabeth nodded and hastily tucked the book into her traveling case. “Yes, certainly.”

  Jenkins, the elderly butler who had been at Clifton since Elizabeth had come there as a child, was the first to step forward and welcome her as Peter assisted her from the carriage.

  “Lady Elizabeth,” Jenkins said. “May I say what a great honor it is to welcome you home again?”

  The twinkle in his faded eyes belied his formal manner. Elizabeth smiled as she recalled how he had slipped her extra plum cakes at childhood teatimes. “Thank you, Jenkins,” she answered. “It is very good to see you again.”

  “And Mrs. Smith is also quite eager to greet you,” Peter added, indicating the black-clad, rosy-cheeked housekeeper.

  “Mrs. Smith!” Elizabeth cried in delight. “Do you still make that exquisite chocolate trifle?”

  “I do, my lady, and there is some just waiting for your tea this afternoon.”

  Elizabeth kept her careful smile in place as she was introduced to a myriad of unfamiliar housemaids, kitchen maids, footmen, and gardeners. She had quite forgotten how very many people it took to run such a great house, after two years with only Bianca.

  When they reached Daisy, and Elizabeth saw the tears shimmering in her lady’s maid’s eyes, her composure slipped, and all the tension of her long voyage melted. She forgot decorum and position entirely, and threw her arms around Daisy’s small figure.

  “My lady!” Daisy cried in shock.

  “Oh, Daisy!” Elizabeth sobbed. “How I have missed you!”

  “I missed you, too, my lady. I knew you would come home one day, so I never let that Lady Haversham entice me away, even when she wanted to send me to London with her daughter.”

  “You will never know how I wished you were with me in Italy. You would have adored it, after all those romances we read together! So many ruins and black-eyed counts.” Disregarding propriety even further, Elizabeth took Daisy’s arm and led her into the house, leaving Peter behind. She turned automatically toward the great staircase. “My rooms are ready?”

  “Yes, my lady. I supervised the airing of them myself; it’s just as you left it.”

  It was indeed. The pink silk curtains and bed hangings, the lace-skirted dressing table with its gilt Cupids cavorting around the mirror, even the porcelain doll (Martha) propped on the marble mantel were all just as she remembered. Even the paintings on the walls, her own early efforts, had not been moved.

  “Oh, Daisy, I would vow I was sixteen again!” Elizabeth removed her bonnet and sat down on the cushioned window seat that looked out at the gardens. “And the view is quite unchanged.”

  Daisy shooed away the maids who had already set to unpacking Elizabeth’s trunk, and began to shake out the gowns herself. “Italy must have been ever so exciting, my lady.”

  “Oh, yes. Italy was... heaven.”

  Daisy held up the black velvet and satin gown Elizabeth had worn to the opera on that far-off night, when she had thought to entice Nicholas with its daring neckline. “And these were angel’s robes, my lady?”

  Elizabeth laughed. Now she remembered exactly why she had hired Daisy so long ago—her irreverence. “So they were! I wore gowns like that to operas, and balls, and breakfasts, and on gondola rides that lasted all night. And I saw art that only gods could have created. Art everywhere.” She thought with a pang of the unrestored Veronese. “It was heaven.”

  “Well, my lady,” Daisy answered, briskly hanging the black gown up in the wardrobe. “Things can be lively around here, too.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. Lady Haversham’s poodles escaped and tried to eat some of the vicar’s prize hydrangeas a month ago. Ever since then we have heard about nothing but greed and stealing in the Sunday sermons. And the Misses Allan just returned from wintering in Brighton, just bursting with all the gossip they heard there and eager to spread it about. It’s almost Venice, without the art.”

  Elizabeth giggled helplessly. “Daisy, you always could lift me from my sulks! How is it you did not marry while I was away?”

  “It was like this, my lady—no one asked me.”

  “Me, neither.” Elizabeth sighed. “Except for Ottavio Turino, but that does not count. He asks every lady to marry him when he is in his cups. We are better off not married, anyway, believe me.”

  It was Daisy’s turn to giggle. “Oh, Lady Elizabeth, what people you met! But what shall you wear to supper? Jenkins says the vicar is coming to dine.”

  “Reverend Bridges? Oh, something very wicked I should think. Something to welcome myself home properly. What about that green velvet with the gold lace? And do be sure to tell Jenkins to have plenty of wine on hand.”

  “My lady!”

  Elizabeth looked back out at the garden, sunset pink now. “I know that everyone here is expecting a scandal now that I have returned; I may as well oblige them. I’ve nothing better to do.”

  Two hours later, a new woman from the travel-stained, weary waif emerged to greet the vicar in the Blue Drawing Room. She had missed supper, but had no intention of missing the Vicar altogether.

  She had exchanged her modest carriage dress for green velvet and gold lace, which Bianca, in a fit of economizing, had created by modifying the Carnivale costume Elizabeth had worn the night she met Nicholas Hollingsworth. Her hair was swept up from her bared shoulders and held by golden ribbons; a faintly glistening powder had been dusted across the daring décolletage.

  In the firelight of the drawing room she almost glittered, like a strange Italian painting dropped into the decorous manor.

  She was not the pastel-clad miss Mr. Bridges, the esteemed vicar of Clifton village, remembered from two years ago, who had stood quietly in the corners of assemblies and always seemed to have paint streaks on her hands and clothes. His last view of her, cringing at her betrothal ball, was quite lost in this dashing lady. He gaped, and could scarcely contain his eagerness to rush out and spread the news among his parishioners.

  Peter’s lips thinned.

  “Mr. Bridges!” Elizabeth cried gaily, holding her ungloved hand, her new sapphire ring sparkling on her ring finger, out to him. “How very long it has been, yet here you are, the same as ever.”

  “Lady Elizabeth,” he answered slowly. “I must say you are not the . . . same as ever.”

  “Am I not?” Elizabeth laughed merrily, trying to imitate Georgina at her most flirtatious. “It is this gown. I am far too old to don white in the evenings now.” She wagged her finger playfully at the silent Peter. “Why, brother dear, are you not going to offer your sister something to drink? I vow I am still quite parched after that long journey!”

  Peter bowed shortly. “There is ratafia, if you like, Elizabe
th. Or I could ring for tea.”

  “Oh, pooh, no! Is that not brandy I see in your glass?”

  “I hardly think ...”

  “I will have brandy. Thank you.”

  Her voice was also new, steely with determination under a smile. Even Peter took heed of the warning. He bowed again, and went to fetch her a brandy.

  Elizabeth settled herself on a chaise by the fire, and smiled up at the vicar. “Now, Mr. Bridges, do sit beside me and tell me all the local news. I am quite perishing to hear if Miss Gray ever married her London viscount, and if Lady Haversham’s daughters are all settled.”

  She whipped open her gold lace fan, and peered at the elderly vicar over its edge.

  Lady Elizabeth Everdean had, quite momentously and dramatically, come home.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Elizabeth watched in the mirror as Daisy looped a long strand of pearls through her elaborate coiffure. She had remembered Derbyshire as quite lacking in social amenities, but in the weeks she had been back they had attended several assemblies, dinners, musicales, and card parties. Many of the local families were in residence before departing for the London Season, and it was considered quite a social coup to have the odd and faintly scandalous Lady Elizabeth at their gatherings.

  And Elizabeth had the distinct sense that Peter was trying, with a grim determination, to cheer her up by dragging her hither and yon, from tea party to dance without a pause in between.

  In her more dreamy schoolgirl days, when she had imagined an exciting Continental life, she would never have thought the fantastical, golden Venice would seem a solid reality and England a bizarre dream. Yet it had happened.

  Clifton Manor, a beautiful house filled with fine furnishings, seemed an uncomfortable place, inhabited by the kind of people who should have been familiar but instead seemed to have strange ideas of what proper behavior should be. They were kind to her and always polite, to be sure, but she seemed not to be what they expected of their Lady Elizabeth, and they watched her closely to see what odd thing she would do next. She felt she was always on exhibit, like a tiger in a menagerie.