The Scandal of the Season

by Annie Burrows

  And then they were kissing and panting, and clawing away any item of clothing that prevented their greedy hands from feasting on warm, naked skin. And it was the runaway cart all over again. A cart laden with so much need that anything getting in its way would have been flattened. She had to be naked, and horizontal, with his naked body pressed against hers. Nothing else mattered. Especially not when he seemed to be feeling exactly the same. When his need matched hers. He was as frantic to get close, and closer still, until their flesh merged at the point of greatest need, in a mutual cry of accomplishment, though hers was tinged with pain.

  Not that it slowed either of them. They were careering to some kind of mutual, spectacular destination, she could sense it. Fortunately, he knew just how to steer them, with his clever fingers and the demanding thrusts of his body. Until, just as that cart had come crashing to its inevitable destruction against the bole of the elm tree at the bottom of the hill, sending bales and barrels bouncing and bursting in all directions, she shattered, her spirit soaring through the air, her wits gloriously scattered to the four winds.

  And he was with her. Groaning, and shuddering, and clinging as tightly to her as she was clinging to him.

  ‘Cassy,’ he panted. ‘Oh, Cassy, Cassy...’

  ‘Cassy!’ This voice, a shriek, came from the direction of the doorway, causing the Colonel to rear back and glance over his shoulder.

  And there was Rosalind, standing in the doorway, her bonnet trailing from her fingers, her eyes and mouth wide with shock.

  For a moment. Then she clapped her free hand to her mouth to stifle a giggle and ran from the room.

  ‘Do not worry,’ said the Colonel, peeling himself away from her sweat-slicked body. ‘You can tell her we are to be married.’

  ‘Mmmm.’ She sighed, relaxing back into the pillows.

  Then he went very still, his gaze fixed on where their legs were still twined together.

  ‘Blood...there’s blood on your thigh...’ He looked back into her face, as though what he’d seen confused him. ‘How can that be?’

  ‘How can what be?’ All of a sudden Cassy didn’t feel so glorious any more. There was a chill creeping into her stomach. A chill of foreboding.

  Shouldn’t he be cradling her in his arms now? Talking about how soon they could get a licence? Discussing where to hold the ceremony?

  Instead, he was backing away, not only emotionally, but physically. Reaching for his shirt and tugging it over his head. And all the while she was silently pleading with him not to say what she dreaded he was going to say.

  ‘How can you have been a virgin?’

  He’d said it.

  ‘I should have thought,’ she said, tugging the bit of quilt she wasn’t lying on to cover what suddenly felt like shameful nakedness, ‘that was obvious.’

  ‘Not to me,’ he said, hunting round the floor with a kind of desperation, until he located his breeches, as though he felt just as embarrassed as she now did. ‘Or I would never have...’ He looked at the rumpled bedding, the way she was clutching as much of the quilt as she could over as much of her body as possible.

  And there she’d been thinking he believed in her total innocence!

  ‘Your virginity is something special,’ he said, thrusting one leg jerkily into his breeches. ‘You should have saved it for your wedding night.’

  How...how dare he find fault with her morals?

  And what did he mean by your wedding night? Shouldn’t he be talking about our wedding night? After all, he’d just told her she could tell Rosalind...

  Oh! Oh, what an idiot she was. He hadn’t said one single word about marriage until Rosalind had come in and caught them together. All he’d talked about was his need. By which he’d meant his physical need, hadn’t he?

  How many times had she heard her aunts talk, with revulsion, about the way men could bed any woman who was willing, while caring nothing for them at all, and put it down to their needs.

  Whereas she could never have let him do what he’d just done if she hadn’t been so sure love came into it somewhere. And the way he’d been talking, opening himself up to her in a way she was sure he’d never done with anyone else, had made her think she held a special place in his heart. That he trusted her with secrets he could never tell anyone else.

  When all the time it had all been so much froth spewing from that imaginary ginger-beer bottle she was coming to heartily detest.

  Just as she now detested what they’d just done. Strange, how, while she was in the throes of it, she’d thought it was glorious. But now it just seemed sordid. To let a man who’d never done anything but insult her into her heart and her body, in broad daylight, simply because he’d needed relief, release from that heavy burden he’d been carrying alone for so long.

  She almost let out a bitter laugh when she thought of how Godmama had wanted to make him look foolish. For she was the one who’d been a fool. Because she’d let him do exactly what he’d threatened, from the first. He’d just made it impossible for her to marry anyone else. By ruining her. In fact, not just by reputation.

  Just as she’d been on the verge of becoming respectable again.

  She shifted up the bed and drew up her knees as he got his other leg into his breeches and buttoned up the fall.

  ‘I will speak to Rosalind,’ she said in a firm voice. Which was astonishing, considering it felt as if she was shattering all over again, inside, only not in a good way this time. ‘She won’t tell anyone about this if I ask her not to. So you don’t need to worry about having to marry me.’

  ‘Of course I do. You were a virgin. You cannot think I am the kind of man who goes round deflowering virgins and then walking away from them as though it was nothing, can you?’

  So she’d been right. He hadn’t been thinking in terms of marriage until he’d discovered her innocence. Or been caught in the act by Rosalind. Or both. So now he felt duty-bound to marry her. She drew in a deep breath. Well! She had no intention of letting him treat her as though she was nothing more than yet one more obligation he had to bear. She deserved better. If she ever did marry, which had never been likely, but was even less likely after this, then it would only be to a man who wanted to marry her because he couldn’t bear the thought of having to live without her. Not because he’d been carried away in a fit of...whatever it was that had just had the Colonel in its grip...and was now suffering from the pangs of remorse.

  And what was she doing, cowering against the headboard like some...timid little mouse? If she wanted to get dressed, then the fact that he was standing there staring at her was not going to prevent her from doing just that.

  Indignation had her flinging aside the quilt and stalking across the room to where she could see her chemise dangling from the back of a chair.

  ‘No, that’s not the kind of man you are,’ she agreed, shaking out the chemise with a snap, so that she could pull it over her head.

  ‘Then...’

  ‘You are a far worse sort,’ she said, once she was covered to her knees, if only by a sheet of flimsy cotton. ‘You are the kind of man,’ she said, stalking over to where her gown lay sprawled on the floor, ‘who persecutes innocent women in the hopes of driving them out of Town, without sparing a single thought,’ she said as she bent to pick it up, ‘to what brought them to Town in the first place.’ She paused after straightening up, realising in the same moment that not only was she going to need the services of a maid to help with the fastenings, but that there was absolutely no way she could summon one to this room, right now, not with a half-naked, guilt-ridden man standing right next to her bed. Which made her even angrier than ever.

  ‘I—’ he said.

  ‘The kind of man,’ she interrupted, ‘who believes the worst sort of gossip about a woman without a shred of evidence, then goes on to treat her as though she is that kind of woman.’ She waved her hand in the d
irection of the rumpled bed. ‘And then further insults her by acting as though it would be a huge sacrifice to marry such a woman!’

  ‘It would not be a huge sacrifice...’

  Cassy had not thought she was capable of getting any angrier. But that stress on the word huge proved she’d been wrong. It drove her to a whole new level of anger, something akin to what must happen when a volcano erupted.

  ‘If you think I would ever consider marrying a man like you, then you must be touched in your upper works!’

  ‘But we...’ Now it was his turn to gesture towards the bed on which she’d just surrendered every scrap of her dignity.

  ‘That,’ she said, pointing in the same direction as him, ‘was nothing more than a momentary lapse of good judgement. Which I not only regret, but have absolutely no intention of ever repeating, which I would be obliged to do if I was foolish enough to give in to your argument about the need to marry.’

  He flinched, as though she’d slapped him. And she almost wished she had. Especially when he recovered in the blink of an eye and took a breath to begin a counter-argument.

  She gripped her dress, the dress she couldn’t get into properly without someone’s help, in both hands. And thought of Rosalind. Rosalind could help her. She’d returned from her outing with Captain Bucknell and she’d already seen the worst.

  And the Colonel couldn’t follow her to Rosalind’s room because his boots were still downstairs, being dried and polished by one of the menservants who knew how to do that sort of thing. And if she would find it hard to run about a house she knew extremely well, with hardly any clothes on, then it would be twice as hard for him. Well-nigh impossible, in fact.

  So she put an end to his chances of carrying on with his argument by the simple expedient of darting to the door and running away.

  ‘Cassy,’ he snapped. ‘What the devil do you think you are doing?’ He followed her across the room and got as far as the doorway to the upper landing before his lack of boots brought him to a standstill. ‘Cassy, come back here,’ she could hear him yelling after her. ‘We have not finished this discussion!’

  Oh, yes, they had.

  And if she had her way, they would never have any sort of discussion, about anything, ever again.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It didn’t take much effort to persuade Rosalind not to breathe a word to Godmama about what she’d witnessed.

  ‘She’s your godmother,’ she said, a bit ungraciously, as she buttoned up the back of Cassy’s gown. ‘It’s up to you what you tell her or choose not to.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Rosalind let out a bitter-sounding laugh. ‘And to think she’s always holding you up as an example to follow. Prim and proper, I always thought you. But you’re as sly as she is.’

  ‘Oh, no, I’m not! Truly.’ Cassy whirled round as Rosalind fastened the last button. ‘I didn’t plan, er...that.’ She waved one arm in the direction of her own room. ‘I just...’ She wrapped her arms round her waist. ‘I got carried away,’ she admitted, miserably.

  ‘I must say you don’t look too happy about it,’ Rosalind conceded. ‘Ain’t he going to marry you, then?’

  ‘Actually,’ Cassy retorted, ‘I am not going to marry him.’

  ‘Oh? Why’s that? I thought you was keen on him.’

  ‘I was.’ Or she could never have let things go so far. ‘But it turns out I was sadly mistaken in his character. No,’ she said with a shake of her head. ‘That’s not quite right. It isn’t his character that’s lacking. It’s what he thinks of me that I don’t like.’

  Rosalind looked down at her shoes. ‘Yes, I know what that feels like.’

  ‘At least,’ said Cassy, ‘after this, you are speaking to me again. I don’t know what I would have done if you’d kept your door shut and refused to let me in today.’ Her cheeks, already glowing, grew even hotter as she imagined running all over the house with her gown undone.

  And Rosalind apparently was thinking the same thing, because she began to grin. ‘You’d have shocked all the servants, who would have told the Duchess, and then you would have had to marry that old Colonel, that’s what.’

  ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about,’ said Cassy with a shudder of horror. ‘So, thank you again.’

  ‘No need. I’m sorry I wouldn’t speak to you last night. Captain Bucknell said that wasn’t fair. That you weren’t ever in on the Duchess’s schemes.’

  ‘Well, certainly not deliberately to swindle your father, no,’ said Cassy fervently. And then went on to explain the things she’d hoped to be able to say the night before.

  * * *

  By the time they had to go and change for dinner, Cassy felt she had repaired most of the damage done the night before.

  She went back to her room with a bit of reluctance, almost afraid she’d find the Colonel still there. But there was no sign of him. Or that he’d ever been there. The bed was no longer rumpled, there were no clothes strewn anywhere they shouldn’t be and...he’d even opened the window a bit, to let fresh air remove any lingering scent of their encounter.

  She supposed she should be glad he’d thought of everything. That he’d expunged every trace of what they’d done. But she couldn’t help feeling hurt that he’d taken the time to conceal what he’d referred to as if it had been a crime. That he’d made absolutely sure he wouldn’t get found out.

  Of course, she didn’t want to be found out, either. And she didn’t want to marry the Colonel simply as a means to salve his conscience. But the two opposing reactions kept on struggling for supremacy as she got changed and neither had gained the upper hand by the time she went to the dining room. Instead, the fact that he could only regard marriage to her as a form of penance for sin robbed her of her appetite.

  Fortunately Godmama was in such high spirits that she didn’t notice that Cassy was only pushing her food round her plate rather than putting much of it in her mouth and swallowing it.

  ‘My dears, I have had such a successful afternoon,’ she said, beckoning one of the footmen to pour her some wine. ‘It didn’t take me long to work out that it must have been that awful girl from Market Gooding you ran into the other day who is responsible for starting the gossip about you having to work as a seamstress. But I have more than twenty years’ experience of turning malicious gossip to good account. And this time I believe I have been particularly brilliant. In fact, I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if I haven’t destroyed that minx who dared meddle with me and mine,’ said Godmama wrenching a bread roll in half with a sharp twist.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Cassy, who couldn’t bear the thought of anyone, not even Miss Henley, ending up socially destroyed. Because she knew, first hand, how awful that could feel.

  ‘Oh, you need not worry, my dear,’ said Godmama, slathering the roll with butter. ‘I did not tell one single lie. No, I just laid the truth out in such a way that everyone will feel sympathy for you and dislike for your enemies. All I had to do was admit that I believed Miss Henley must be motivated by envy after seeing that you are being sponsored by a duchess—when the best she can do is a cousin of her mother who is a baroness—and by her fury to discover that you are far better-born than she could have guessed, and her spite after learning that her seamstress is invited to ton parties while she can only skirt round the fringes of society. I never once denied that you were obliged to work for a living for some years, merely expressed my sadness that your stepfather is so mean that it came to that at all.’

  In short, she had made Cassy out to be some poor maligned victim, with Miss Henley and her stepfather playing the role of villains.

  ‘Godmama,’ she protested, ‘you haven’t thought about the effect this might have on my aunts. For one thing, although I might be going to tonnish balls this Season, once the Season is over, I will have to go back to Market Gooding and take up my needle again.’ It wasn’t as if she’d ever e
xpected to find a husband and, after what had happened this afternoon, the chances of her marrying anyone had reduced considerably. ‘If society turns on Miss Henley and then her family decide to exact retribution, they could very easily prevent people from bringing work to my aunts. The Henleys do have a lot of influence in the area, even if they have very little in Town...’

  ‘Pftt!’ Godmama slashed her butter knife through the air as though cutting through her objections. ‘You cannot persuade me that your aunts really need to work for their living. It’s all a smokescreen, isn’t it?’

  ‘Godmama! Please, you cannot put them at risk by saying...’ She shot a look at Rosalind. Fortunately, she was trailing her spoon through her soup with an abstracted air and didn’t appear to have noticed the secret Godmama had almost let slip.

  ‘Oh, very well,’ said Godmama with a pout. ‘I won’t add any more fuel to that particular fire. Anyway,’ she said, brightening, ‘I rather think we’ve already cooked that girl’s goose. Before long, if I’m not very much mistaken, she will come crawling to you...’

  Godmama had a great deal more to say, but at the mention of having Miss Henley crawling, Cassy remembered how badly she’d wanted to make the Colonel crawl to her. How she’d felt when she’d got him to his knees. And how hollow her apparent victory had turned out to be.

  She wanted to tell Godmama that she didn’t want to make anyone crawl. That she never had. That she wished she’d stayed safely in Market Gooding. That she wished she could go back. Tomorrow. Only that would appear terribly ungrateful, considering all that Godmama had tried to do for her. And it wouldn’t be fair on Rosalind, who couldn’t very well stay on in London without the pretext of being Cassy’s companion.

  She picked up her spoon and dipped it into her soup.

  It was bad enough that she’d behaved so badly, in secret, this afternoon. She couldn’t compound her error by running away and leaving these two ladies in the lurch.