Season for Scandal

by Theresa Romain

  First he had to play out this scene, though. He must keep his wits about him.

  “As for Lady Kay,” Edmund added in a mocking tone, “she has walled herself up tight. She and I are done with one another, Turner. Don’t look so surprised. You know I’ve had a great deal of practice with this sort of thing. Women getting in a rage; me paying their bills and never seeing them.”

  Turner’s smile had gone glassy. “So you’ve told me before. Your family in Cornwall, I assume you mean.”

  “Indeed. And I still regard my wife as part of my family, and I won’t have you interfering with her.” Again, a bitter laugh. “But why need I tell you this? You can try to speak to her or meet with her all you like. Wasn’t that your threat? She won’t even see you.”

  “She will. She’s been seeing me all along. Nearly every day since she left you.”

  So smug was the man’s expression that it was easy for Edmund to freeze; bluster his disbelief.

  “It’s true, boyo. Haven’t you heard she’s been playing chess? Who d’you think’s been teaching her?”

  The chess queen. Jane had held it up, a talisman of her promise to help him. A sick pang clenched Edmund’s stomach, a revulsion that evidently painted itself across his features.

  Turner leaned back, satisfied. “Told you the game wasn’t played out yet. Next time I call on Lady Kay, I’ll get what I want from her. One way or another.”

  “You disgust me.”

  “Likewise,” Turner said. “Look at you. Look at the way you live. All walled up. Dragging yourself through each day. You might as well be in prison, boyo. You’ve no idea what to do with your life. You’re wasting it.”

  “Wasting it? By holding my seat in Parliament? By taking care of the family you abandoned?” Many wounds had been opened yesterday; Edmund was still too raw to hide the pain of them. “If you want to see someone who’s wasting his freedom, I’ll fetch you a looking glass. For twenty years, you’ve been away from a woman you said you loved. From girls you say are your daughters, now grown up. You act as though you’ve some sort of moral right to your anger. Blaming me for separating you from them.”

  “Naturally I blame you. It’s your doing that your family—my family—was destroyed, boyo. You know that as well as I.”

  “I couldn’t have caused so much destruction on my own. You and my father laid the fire; all I did was strike the flint. Or declined to stamp out the blaze once started.”

  He remembered Jane’s words: A small betrayal to avoid a larger one.

  There was nothing small about it. But it had been the lesser wrong, nevertheless.

  “If you gave a damn about your lover or daughters,” Edmund added, “nothing would have kept you from going to their side as soon as you were able. Instead, you’ve frittered away months trying to torture me with the thought of you near them.” He laughed. “There’s no place for you anymore, is there? They’re strangers to you now. All you have left is your anger.”

  He didn’t bother looking at Turner. Didn’t want to see what the man’s face showed. Because the words Edmund had spoken sounded uncomfortably like something he could have said of himself.

  “If you know so much about love,” Turner said coldly, “why couldn’t you keep your lady wife at heel?”

  “I don’t know anything about love. But neither do you.”

  The years away had further twisted Turner. Perhaps his mind had dwelled on the wrongs done him, the recompense due him, because the place where his body dwelled was unbearable.

  Maybe he had loved Edmund’s mother once. Maybe the separation from her—from Mary and Catherine—had been devastating, long ago. But he had waited so long, now he could do nothing but wait; he had let hate grow until it smothered love.

  “If you wanted to go to Cornwall,” Edmund added, “to act as a father, or a husband, there’d be no danger in it at all. Because you wouldn’t hurt them if you loved them, and my feelings about the matter wouldn’t signify in the slightest.” Sifting through the litter on his desk, he found a coffee cup and tossed back its dregs, brewed and poured not long before Turner’s arrival. “You want to play chess? There. I’ve taken your pawns.”

  Turner pursed his lips. “Maybe so. But I’ve still got your queen. Don’t be forgetting that.”

  “No one takes possession of the queen. She’s the most powerful piece on the chessboard.”

  “Without a king in play, though, she’s nothing.”

  Edmund made a noise of disgust. “Enough metaphors. Lady Kirkpatrick is not a chess piece. And much as I am loath to have my family scandal become public, I am willing to turn a few Bow Street Runners onto your scent should any more jewels go missing in Mayfair.”

  He slapped his hands on the desk and stood. “Now. Need I start saying ‘out’ again fifteen times until you listen and leave? Or will you depart without that sort of tedious repetition?”

  “I’m already on my way.” Turner rose, the brilliant smile back in place. “Got to prepare a snare for a queen, don’t I?”

  Edmund glared at the man until the door closed, until he was once again alone.

  Then, second by unraveling second, he permitted himself to relax. Rolling his shoulders; rubbing at the crease between his brows. The scene had played out well, he thought; Turner would have been suspicious if Edmund didn’t fight back. If he didn’t take any action, or threaten any way to stop the man. Instead, he had blended anger and frustration, and Turner had left in a state of uncertain triumph.

  Or so Edmund hoped.

  He had done all he could; the next move must be Turner’s. Then Jane would play. And then, if all went well . . . checkmate.

  He sat again and scrawled a few notes: one to Jane, then a few other necessary missives, and had them all dispatched by messenger. In case Turner was watching the house, Edmund instructed that the messenger take care not to be followed while delivering the notes.

  Edmund had learned something new about his opponent today: more than he wanted his lover, his daughters, Turner wanted revenge. He wanted Edmund, broken, more than he wanted a family, whole.

  Unfortunate, because it meant Turner had nothing to lose. But there was no way he would win, either.

  Because Jane had been right about Edmund: he didn’t have an empty heart. When he thought himself in danger, his first impulse was to protect not himself, but the women who depended on him. To marry, to father an heir that would secure the barony so his mother and sisters would never be homeless. Not knowing what else to do, he sent them hats and books, but he also gave them much more: every day, they were in his thoughts; every day, he managed his affairs from afar so their lives would run smoothly.

  He hadn’t thought he loved them. After so many years apart, he didn’t even know them. But he certainly loved the idea of a family. And for now, that was enough.

  It had been enough to drop him to one knee before a woman who couldn’t refuse his proposal. Through great good fortune, she happened to love him at the time. Because if she hadn’t loved him, she’d never have become dissatisfied with a marriage of convenience. She would never have left him.

  And she would never have led him to think about what he was missing.

  There was no sense in wishing his life had played out differently. No sense in it, and yet he ached for what he had never had. Loving parents. Sisters who looked up to him.

  A daughter, bold as her mother, or a son and heir with merry hazel eyes.

  A wife who knew his every secret and still loved him.

  Quite a Christmas wish list, was it not? Too much; far too much to ask.

  Time for a distraction. Rising from his desk, he hunted the bookshelves of his study for something to read. Something light and hopeful to help him pass the long, quiet hours of night.

  His hand seized upon a slim volume and pulled it out.

  The title page smirked at him. The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

  “Excellent,” he muttered, turning the page. Melancholy. Depression. Fight
ing and death. The guards were skulking around the battlements of Elsinore Castle, looking for the ghost of their king, who had been killed when his brother poured poison in his ear—an apt description of gossip if Edmund had ever heard one. “Not exactly what I was looking for.”

  He flipped another page; then a passage caught his eye. A speech by the guard Marcellus:

  Some says, that ever ’gainst that Season comes;

  Wherein our Saviour’s Birth is celebrated—

  It was about Christmas. And during that season,

  The Bird of Dawning singeth all night long:

  And then (they say) no Spirit dares stir abroad,

  The nights are wholesome, then no Planets strike,

  No Fairy takes, nor Witch hath power to Charme:

  So hallow’d, and so gracious is the time.

  Hmm. That was rather nice.

  More than nice, actually. Edmund read it again, subsiding into the chair behind his desk. Marcellus was a minor character in the play. He turned up near its beginning to offer information, but also good cheer. When his countrymen became afraid, Marcellus remained optimistic. Christmas, he said, was the time for things to return to their rightful place. Ghosts slept peacefully, and would-be charmers lost their power.

  If Christmas was the season for the supernatural to wane, then might the natural go on the wax? With fairies and witches hobbled, could people accomplish miraculous feats?

  Like reconciliation with one’s family, and the past’s ghosts laid to rest? Peace in one’s heart? Goodwill toward men? The very idea seemed miraculous, after all these years.

  He let The Tragedie fall shut.

  How odd that he should end in a marriage of convenience when his mother had done the same and been so unhappy. But she had already given her heart away. Edmund kept his locked up tight.

  Or if Jane was to be believed, he had given it everywhere. But he’d reserved little for her, though she deserved it more than anyone.

  Not merely because he was obligated to her, or bound to her by law. No, it was because he realized that Jane would be satisfied with nothing less than the best of him. Not the best bonnets or horses or pastimes. Him.

  And so if he could find a way to please her—well.

  Well.

  That would really be worthwhile.

  Chapter 25

  Concerning the Queen’s Gambit

  The days before Christmas fled in a tearing hurry. Edmund’s body spent one more day in the House of Lords, but his attention was entirely elsewhere. Scribbling a storm of notes, sent around London in servants’ baskets and tucked in with the post. Arranging the pieces on the chessboard, to use an analogy Turner might appreciate.

  As the sun began to set on Christmas Eve, Edmund covered himself in an old, battered cloak and hat, then slipped through the back exit of the house. Striding quickly, he cut across the corner of Berkeley Square and joined the throngs of tardy shoppers and servants clutching stacks of parcels and carrying just-plucked geese for tomorrow’s dinner, scolding the ever-present urchins whose grubby hands darted into pockets and tugged at reticules. The air smelled of roast meat and carried the tang of cool weather before rain rolls in.

  He took a winding route to Xavier House in Hanover Square; it wouldn’t do to be seen or followed by Turner at this late stage. The moon was a silver semicircle in the velvet-dark sky; an occasional gas lamp contributed a golden glow. Edmund’s feet covered his winding path more quickly than he had expected, and well before the expected hour, he was knocking at the servants’ entrance of Xavier House and being admitted by the earl himself.

  “When you married Jane,” Xavier said without preamble, “my life was supposed to become less complicated. I wanted to be in Surrey by now, you know.”

  “You are a slave to your own better nature.” Edmund shook off his ancient cloak and hat, hanging them on a hook near the door.

  “Yes,” murmured Xavier. “Or my curiosity. It’s been months since I witnessed one of Jane’s schemes firsthand.”

  “I am most grateful that you and Lady Xavier are willing to postpone your travel until Boxing Day.”

  Xavier waved a hand. “A Christmas dinner can be enjoyed in London just as well as it can in the country. I’ll be at Clifton Hall in time to give out the gifts to my servants and tenants, which is likely all they desire.” He clapped Edmund on the shoulder. “You and Jane will join us tomorrow for dinner, I hope?”

  “Let us see how tonight’s events play out.”

  “As you wish.” Xavier shrugged. “Come, I’ll show you up to where we’ll observe.”

  They walked through the servants’ quarters and up the back staircase, opening the door onto a landing faced by a green door to the servants’ quarters and next to it, a closet. “This closet shares a wall with the drawing room,” Xavier explained.

  “You’re going to make us wait in a closet. Really?”

  “Yes. Since you don’t want to involve the magistrate by confronting Bellamy openly—”

  “Not tonight.”

  “—and this isn’t an ancient, crumbling abbey riddled with secret passages, a linen closet is all I have.”

  Edmund raised a brow.

  “I had the table linens taken out.” Xavier fiddled with the door handle of the closet. “And a footstool brought in case of need. Does that help?”

  “If there’s room for three, and a way to peep into the drawing room.”

  “My dear wife insisted that holes be drilled through the wall, then checked them from the drawing-room side to make sure they’re hidden at the edges of pictures. We shall be able to spy upon Jane with no one the wiser.”

  “And how is Jane?” Edmund swallowed thickly. “Is she all right?”

  “Are you joking? My drawing-room wall has been damaged and my Christmas travel plans are upset. I’ve never seen her so delighted.”

  “That’s good,” Edmund said. “So. She’s happy. That’s good.”

  “Hmm.” Xavier looked thoughtful. “Want to take up your hiding spot now, or wait until the quarry arrives?”

  “We can wait,” Edmund said. “What about Lady Sheringbrook? Has she arrived yet?”

  “She arrived in a hack this afternoon. Louisa and Jane are having tea with her now. Do you want a cup?”

  “Yes. Thanks.”

  Not that he cared about the tea, but he wanted a look at Jane. He didn’t disbelieve Xavier, but . . . well, damn it, he didn’t need a reason why. He simply wanted to see her.

  When the two men entered the drawing room, an odd picture met their eyes. Louisa, garbed in dark-blue velvet, was giving some instruction to a servant. Lady Sheringbrook perched on the edge of a sofa, posture perfect and snowy hair impeccable. Her hands, wracked by tremors, were clasped uselessly in her lap.

  Next to her sat Jane, holding a cup of tea. “Would you care for more, my lady?”

  “Thank you,” said the viscountess. Jane held the cup to the older woman’s lips, and she sipped without spilling a drop on her gray silks.

  “Ladies,” said Xavier. “Lord Kirkpatrick has arrived, as you see, and he is ready to be stuffed into the linen closet.”

  “Positively eager for it,” Edmund agreed, making his bows.

  As he straightened up, he caught Jane’s eye. She looked magnificent. Her hair was coiled back from her face, which looked dignified and eager and lovely and impish all at once. She was dressed in a silk gown the rich green of holly leaves, with emeralds at her throat, and her eyes shone. There was nothing the slightest bit wenchy about the ensemble, yet she looked irresistible.

  Xavier had been right: Jane loved an adventure. It brought out the best in her.

  Edmund had never adequately appreciated the best in her before. During their lost weeks of marriage, he hadn’t wanted to make demands on her; sharing his bed was already more than he should ask, considering he shared none of his trust.

  It was only when he trusted her at last that he realized how much she was willing to give. Brave, forgi
ving, bloodthirsty Jane.

  “I hate to put you in danger,” he told Jane. “Xavier and I each have a pistol, and we shall be in the room in an instant if needed.”

  “Ridiculous,” Jane scoffed. “It’s only a game of chess.”

  Louisa finished her instructions, then joined Jane and Lady Sheringbrook. “I thought you were going to play vingt-et-un. Isn’t that your favorite game on which to lay stakes?”

  Jane took a drawn-out sip of tea. “Not for tonight,” she said, a bit breathlessly.

  Edmund caught her eye. That game of cards—Lord Sheringbrook’s cheating, and Jane’s loss—had bound them in marriage. Brought them together, split them apart. Led them to this moment, this room.

  As he and Jane looked at one another, neither of them seemed to know whether to smile or not.

  The butler knocked. “Mr. Bellamy has arrived, my lady.”

  “Thank you, Hollis,” Louisa said. “Places, everyone.” With a nod to the servants, Louisa went into action. The tea things were banished; Lady Sheringbrook was helped to her feet. “Jane, set up the chessboard.”

  Lady Sheringbrook, Xavier, and Edmund crept to the door, footsteps silenced on the carpet. The three of them slipped out of the drawing room and into the linen closet, which was not big enough for three, no matter what Xavier insisted. They arranged themselves in darkness and silence. Edmund found that by craning his neck forward and ducking his head between starch-scented shelves—empty of linens, as Xavier had promised—he could catch glimpses of the drawing room through the peepholes. At his side, he guessed Xavier and Lady Sheringbrook were doing the same, the latter with the aid of the footstool.

  They were arranged none too soon; Edmund heard a tread on the stairs and a jovial voice on the landing outside the door. “Ah, Lady Xavier. You’re looking beautiful tonight.”

  “You’re too kind, Mr. Bellamy.” Louisa’s voice was all graciousness. “Lady Kirkpatrick awaits your nightly game. Would you like tea sent in?”

  “Something a bit stronger, if you’ve no objection. It’s a night for celebration, after all.”