The Scandal of the Season

by Annie Burrows

  Once the footman in his hostess’s livery had poured it, he stood with the full glass in his hand, surveying the assembled guests.

  It wasn’t long before he spotted her. Standing at the edge of the dance floor, as she’d been doing the first time he’d seen her this Season. Although this time, she’d attracted a court of the type of men the General had warned him about. Respectable, titled, wealthy men on the lookout for a wife.

  And he could hardly blame them for considering her. She stood out among the insipid debutantes on offer, in a gown of cream silk with splashes of scarlet here and there. It was not the least bit daring, yet something about the cut of the bodice made a man want to bury his face in all that luscious creamy flesh it framed.

  He put the glass down, the wine untasted. Even one sip would be too much. He was barely in control of his wayward thoughts just through looking at her. He was not going to give her any further advantage in this encounter. He’d come out badly on every other occasion they’d clashed.

  No. Not every other occasion. The first time he’d met her he’d been courteous and in full command of the situation.

  But that had been before Corunna. Before...

  His hand went to the buttons of his waistcoat again, checking they were all fastened tight, before setting out round the edge of the dance floor, to where she was standing. Waiting for him. Oh, she was still pretending to listen to the simpleton who was ladling out the compliments, but she’d been aware the very moment he entered the room. Probably the house. There was that invisible silken cord connecting them again. He was absolutely certain that she could feel its pull, too, though he could not have explained to anyone how he knew. He just did.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said, cutting right through the current spate of flattery one of her court was spouting.

  ‘Why, Colonel Fairfax,’ said Miss Furnival, batting her eyelashes as she turned to look at him over her shoulder. Where had she learned that trick? She’d never employed it before. Was she doing it for his benefit, or to try to make her other admirers jealous? ‘How delightful to see you.’

  ‘Is it?’ The moment he’d barked the words he reprimanded himself. Hadn’t he vowed that, tonight, he was not going to lose control of his temper? How could he have been on the edge of doing so the minute he got within speaking distance of her? Or was it because he could smell her perfume? Or because now that she’d turned round to face him, all that tempting, creamy skin was in touching distance?

  ‘That is,’ he corrected himself, ‘it is delightful to see you, too. Looking so...’ He couldn’t help letting his eyes trace the edge of her neckline which was embroidered with a red motif. It made him think of the luscious flavour of sun-ripened wild strawberries. With cream. His mouth watered as he imagined sinking his teeth into...

  ‘Lost for words, Colonel?’ She shook her head at him. As though she knew exactly what he’d been thinking.

  ‘I am a man of action, not words,’ he said, taking her arm and propelling her out of the midst of her court, to a chorus of complaints.

  ‘Really, Colonel,’ she said.

  ‘If you can convince me that you’d rather stand there listening to that bunch of libertines proposition you than take a walk with me, then I will gladly return you to them.’

  She pulled her lips together. ‘What makes you think anyone has been making the kind of propositions you so clearly think I deserve?’

  ‘For one thing, you have left them all behind to take a circuit of the ballroom with me, when so far I have done nothing but berate you. It is almost as if you would rather face that than listen to any more of what they have been dishing out.’

  ‘If that is true, then it must contradict your opinion of me,’ she pointed out. ‘Surely, those kinds of propositions are the very thing I came to London to receive?’

  Her statement gave him an odd feeling. Because it was true. If she was the kind of woman who’d come to Town to get her claws into yet another victim, she should be revelling in all the attention she was getting now. Yet she’d turned her back on it the moment he’d offered her the chance to leave them all behind.

  Another inconsistency between what he’d thought he’d known and what Issy claimed about her. Though now was not the time to dwell on that.

  ‘I did not come here tonight to resume hostilities,’ he reminded himself, as well as making her aware of the fact.

  ‘Really?’ She looked up at him through narrowed eyes.

  ‘No.’ He sighed. ‘I had intended to explain why I feel obliged to...make amends...for...’

  ‘Make amends?’ She shot him a look of incredulity, swiftly followed by one of suspicion. ‘What, precisely, do you think you need to make amends for?’

  ‘For the rumours which are circulating about you. For, possibly, making you the butt of gossip, by the way I have singled you out. There may be other reasons why fresh rumours have started to circulate about you. It is possible that someone simply has matrimonial designs on one of those fellows circling round you. And whatever you may have done in the past, you don’t deserve to suffer from this kind of sneaky, underhanded campaign to blacken your name.’

  ‘I...’ She looked up at him in a bewildered fashion. ‘I don’t understand why you are suddenly so concerned with my reputation, now, when you have had no hesitation in flinging it in my face at every opportunity...’

  ‘It was not well done of me,’ he admitted. It had been shocking, the way he’d lost all self-control, merely because she’d been laughing. He hadn’t been able to understand how she could have had such an effect on him. Could still not understand it. Although he hadn’t exactly spent a lot of time attempting to work it out. Instead he’d pushed it aside, the way he’d pushed so many other distasteful things aside. Concentrated his mind on things he could actually do something about...

  Which brought him back to the reason he’d sought her out tonight.

  ‘But it is one thing, confronting you, privately, about things I know have happened—’ and there was no denying the fact that she had attempted to elope with Gilbey, even if he wasn’t totally sure about the rest of it any longer ‘—quite another to spread false tales about you behind your back. That kind of cowardly attack sickens me.’

  She made a derisive sound halfway between a snort and a laugh. ‘Look, Colonel Fairfax, I don’t know what you hope to achieve by trying to persuade me you hate the effect that rumours may have upon me, but let me tell you, I am well used to being the butt of gossip. And I learned long ago that there is nothing I can do, or say, to make people change their opinion of me. So I just have to ignore it. Apart from taking note of what it says about the person who is spreading it. My true friends,’ she said, giving him a pointed look, ‘won’t listen to it. And as for everyone else...’ she tossed her head ‘...you may think what you like. I,’ she said with emphasis, ‘do not care.’

  ‘That’s as may be. And while your strength of character is, in this instance, an admirable quality...’ And it was. And now he could see just how the years had altered her from that timid schoolgirl into the woman who stood her ground as she related, in just a couple of sentences, what she’d had to endure. ‘Nevertheless, I shall do what I can to counter the latest rumours, by telling everyone I can that there is absolutely no truth in the rumours about you being merely a seamstress. Because if people start to believe that, they might go on to assume you are attempting to invade society under a false guise and those eager swains who were paying you such fulsome compliments to your sparkling eyes would instead start turning on you like ravening wolves round a shorn lamb. They’d gobble you up, Miss Furnival,’ he said, coming to a halt by some open terrace doors.

  ‘Oh, no, they wouldn’t,’ she said bitterly. ‘I have had to put up with that sort of attention ever since...’ She waved her hand in a way he interpreted as referring to her unsuccessful elopement.

  And yet she hadn’t taken u
p any of those offers. Which meant...well, he wasn’t sure what it said about her, except that it was all of a piece with the way she’d leapt at the chance to escape the suitors who’d been surrounding her, just now.

  ‘Besides, if you went around denying I am a seamstress you would be making a fool of yourself, which is the last thing I want.’ She closed her mouth, and flushed, as though she’d admitted something she didn’t want him to know.

  ‘But—’

  ‘But nothing,’ she said firmly. ‘Those rumours, at least, are not untrue. I am very much a seamstress, or at least, that is how I was earning my living when Godmama—’ She cut herself off, once more, as though regretting admitting so much.

  Which of course roused his curiosity.

  ‘Explain,’ he said.

  ‘Why should I?’

  Because if she didn’t, he’d push her out through those terrace doors, drag her into some dark corner and kiss the truth out of her defiant little mouth.

  No, he wouldn’t, though. That would be giving in to the kind of behaviour he most deplored.

  ‘Indeed, why should you? You owe me nothing. And given the way I hounded you when you first came to London...’ He drew her away from the terrace doors, back in the direction of the people thronging the ballroom. It was high time he started employing his brain, rather than letting his body do all the thinking for him. ‘I suppose,’ he mused, ‘you must have run through the money Lieutenant Gilbey left you and found yourself in reduced circumstances.’

  ‘No, I have not run through it. Not that you have any right to enquire into my financial circumstances. Really,’ she said with exasperation, ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this much.’

  ‘But if you still have his money at your disposal,’ he mused aloud, ‘then I don’t see why you could possibly have been working as a seamstress. Unless...was it a ploy to get the Duchess to feel sorry for you, so that she would bring you to Town where you could have the Season your family never gave you?’

  ‘It was nothing of the sort,’ she said, coming to a halt and rounding on him. ‘For heaven’s sake, use your head!’

  That remark came so close to what he’d just been thinking he needed to do that it had about the same effect as if she’d slapped him.

  ‘I took you for an intelligent man,’ she continued, scornfully. ‘So why have you overlooked so many pertinent facts? Hmm? Such as, for instance, the fact that Guy was only a younger son, who needed to go into the army, or find some other career, because he had no fortune of his own.’ Her face was flushed with indignation, her greeny-brown eyes sparking with anger. He shouldn’t have noticed, but the way she was breathing was making her bosom tremble as it rose and fell, rose and fell...

  ‘Just how much money do you think a boy in those circumstances could possibly have bequeathed me?’

  He tore his eyes from the sight he had no business enjoying quite so much and bent his mind to what she’d just said.

  ‘How much?’ He repeated what she’d just said to pull his mind back to the topic they were discussing and away from where it had been straying. But she took it as a question.

  ‘Eight hundred and thirty-two pounds, that’s how much,’ she said, reminding him they’d been talking about money. ‘Which my aunt’s man of business invested for me. I draw the interest on a quarterly basis. Do you wish to know exactly how much that amounts to, if you must keep dwelling on pounds, shilling and pence?’

  ‘No,’ he said, appalled. If she was telling the truth, and he could not imagine she could have plucked such a precise figure out of thin air at such short notice, then it made perfect sense for her to supplement it by working with her needle.

  Only...if she was telling the truth, which supported what that other girl had spread about her, it was two to one against what his sister had told him. A cold fist formed in his stomach. Why would she have lied to him? Unless...she had some personal grudge against Miss Furnival? Was that it? Had she deliberately primed him with a lot of black lies so that she could use him as a weapon against an innocent woman?

  No, no...he desperately scrambled for some other explanation. One that would exonerate his sister from blame. Had she, perhaps, been misinformed herself?

  ‘I am not ashamed of earning my living by doing honest work,’ Miss Furnival was saying, with a militant tilt to her chin. ‘And I never asked Godmama for a Season in London. She took me completely by surprise when she came to me,’ she ground on, while his conscience withered and twisted under the suspicions that were starting to form. ‘And the reason I accepted her invitation to come to Town was because she made it sound as if it would be fun. Fun!’ She looked round the ballroom in a haunted fashion. ‘If I had not promised to—’ Once again, she pulled up before telling him exactly what she’d been thinking and squared her shoulders. ‘You are not going to hound me out of Town. And nor is anyone else. So what if people suddenly decide I’m an impostor, just because I’ve had to work for my living for the last six years? So what if they do think that it could blight my chances of making a so-called brilliant marriage?’ Her lips curled in scorn. ‘I didn’t come to London in search of a husband in the first place. Now, if you would not mind returning me to my godmother’s side, I believe this conversation is at an end.’

  Yes, he supposed it was. Because he could not press on with it, with her, until he’d discovered just why his sister had told him that Miss Furnival had swindled Lieutenant Gilbey’s family out of a fortune they claimed should have gone to them. And since she wouldn’t have been working as a seamstress if Gilbey had left her a fortune, he was going to have to ask Issy some very searching questions. Because eight hundred and thirty-two pounds was nobody’s idea of a fortune.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘Well,’ said Cassy, the moment she, Godmama, Rosalind and Captain Bucknell got into Godmama’s coach to go home. ‘Not only have I got Colonel Fairfax trying to ruin my enjoyment of the Season, but now I find that someone has been so busy spreading the story about how I’ve had to earn my living over the last few years that he thinks people will assume I’m an impostor and that nobody would ever want to marry me!’

  Oh, he hadn’t said it outright. It had been what he believed, though. Otherwise why would he have assumed someone had started rumours to spoil her matrimonial ambitions?

  Rosalind turned to look at her with a puzzled frown. ‘But you’ve got a handful of titled men dangling after you now...’

  ‘Which could just mean they have not found out yet,’ said Godmama, thoughtfully.

  ‘But I thought,’ said Rosalind, ‘that now her uncle has acknowledged her...’

  ‘Yes, but that is all he has done,’ said Godmama ruefully. ‘He has not invited her to his home, let alone got his Countess to call upon us. So it is all still a bit...tenuous, given that, you know, she did elope with a soldier, out of the schoolroom, and has had to work in a menial position for some years.’

  ‘Are you telling me,’ said Rosalind, ‘that you got Cassy to town, knowing that her reputation was so bad you might never be able to mend it?’

  ‘Oh, dear me, no,’ said Godmama. ‘I thought I could easily deal with a scandal that happened that long ago—’

  ‘Well, it looks as if you were wrong,’ said Rosalind, interrupting very rudely. ‘And what is more, it sounds to me as though you deliberately duped Papa into parting with his money so you could fund a Season for her,’ she said, eyeing Cassy with resentment. ‘Since she’s the one they’re all interested in. There was never any chance of getting me married to a title, was there?’

  ‘No, no, it is not as bad as that,’ said Godmama, twining her fingers together in her lap. ‘I mean, I managed to fire off both my daughters very successfully, without a penny to back them, so I thought if I did have a lot of money at my disposal I was bound to do as well, even for someone like...’

  ‘Someone like me, were you going to say?’ Ro
salind was quivering with what looked to Cassy like the beginnings of serious temper. Captain Bucknell appeared to think so, too, because he started sliding deeper into his corner. ‘And you didn’t deny you were using Papa’s money to try to restore Cassy’s reputation, did you?’

  ‘Well, no,’ Godmama admitted. ‘But then I really didn’t think of that to start with. You know that I only wanted to find some way of preventing my stepson from forcing me to return to Theakstone Court. And the only success I have ever had was seeing my daughters marry well, in spite of all the disadvantages I had to work against. So I thought I could do the same for another girl. Truly, Rosalind,’ she said, stretching out her hands again, ‘it was only once your papa and I reached our little agreement that I saw we needed a pretext as to why I was launching you, without it looking as though I was doing it just for the money. And that was when I thought of bringing Cassy into it.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ said Rosalind, making Cassy gasp and Captain Bucknell wince. ‘I think this is a deliberate swindle,’ she declared as the coach came to a halt outside the mansion in Grosvenor Square. ‘You are forever trying to gammon people, then laughing at them behind their back once you’ve done it. If it wasn’t for Cassy trying to rein you in, you wouldn’t scruple to tell barefaced lies!’

  ‘Well, really,’ said Godmama. ‘How rude!’

  ‘And how could you think she would deliberately set out to swindle you?’ said Cassy, as the coach came to a halt.

  ‘It’s all very well for you,’ said Rosalind to Cassy, as Captain Bucknell, who’d been looking increasingly uncomfortable as the argument heated up, shot out of the carriage like a bankrupt pursued by creditors. ‘You’re one of them, even if you have got a tarnished reputation. And I’m going to write to Papa tonight,’ Rosalind ploughed on, shooting Cassy as well as Godmama a venomous look as she gathered her skirts. ‘He will know how to deal with the likes of you,’ she snarled over her shoulder as she got out.