Elm turned the steering wheel again as they came around another bend, the force of it pushing Valerie against the door. Then a sheep appeared in the headlights, its eyes as wide as Valerie’s. Elm steered hard to avoid hitting it. The tires screeched as he stood on the brake, the car spinning in a dizzying circle that sent it twirling off the road. Bits of grass and bushes caught in the headlights, the countryside and night blurring together until a large bang made the metal and wood around them shudder and brought everything to a jolting halt.
Valerie released her tight grip on the door handle, wincing with the pain in her upper arm. The smell of petrol mixed with wet grass filled the car as she struggled to focus on where she was and what was around them. Elm breathed hard beside her, his door crushed in against him, the splintered tree bark the only thing visible outside the mangled window.
“Elm, are you all right?” Valerie reached for him, the pain in her arm tearing through her. Blood slid down from a large cut on her upper arm and stained the top of her elbow-length gloves and the satin dress.
“I don’t know.” He moved his right arm to open the door and winced. “I think something’s broken.” He reached around with his left hand and tugged at the handle but nothing happened. He leaned back against his seat, dazed, a trickle of blood seeping from a cut on his forehead. “I can’t open it. Can you open yours?”
Valerie bit her lip against the pain in her arm to work the handle until the door swung open with a grating metal squeal. She stumbled out, the wet grass dampening her hands and skirt before she stood, horrified by the sight of the car curved in a mangle of chrome and red paint around the tree. How they hadn’t been flung from their seats or made a permanent part of the bark, she didn’t know. Reaching in through the passenger side, she helped Elm crawl over the seats and stagger from the wreck.
“Bloody hell.” He sank into the grass, his shoulder at an odd angle from his neck. He touched the cut on his forehead, wincing before examining the blood on his glove.
“Are you all right?” Valerie slid the white handkerchief out of his inner coat pocket and pressed it toward his forehead before he stopped her with his good hand.
“You need it more than me.” He pushed the square back to cover her wound.
She grimaced at the sting and the stain spreading out to ruin the linen. “What are we going to do?”
They were God knows where in the countryside and they needed help.
“I don’t know. I can’t move my arm.”
She stood, peering into the darkness surrounding them.
“Where are we? What’s near here?”
“I don’t know.” He lay back in the grass, his skin moist with a sheen of sweat.
She peered up one side of the dark road and down the other. There was no sign of a lit window across the fields or even the lights of a nearby village. She could walk, but she might wander for hours until someone found her, and she couldn’t leave Elm.
Then, over the rustle of the leaves and grass, came the faint hum of a motor in the distance. “Someone’s coming.”
She staggered to the road, bruised and sore from the collision. She stood on the pavement as the headlights came into view.
She raised her good arm and flapped the bloody handkerchief. “Help, we need help.”
The round headlights of the two cars grew brighter as they approached, the light of the first one blinding Valerie as it pulled to the side of the road. Sir John Simon and his chauffer jumped from the car, looking past her to the smoking and crumpled Bentley. “Good God!”
Lady Simon hurried to Valerie as fast as her hefty steps could carry her. “Miss de Vere Cole, are you all right? Is Mrs. Chamberlain in the car? Is she all right?”
“She’s at Blenheim, but Lord Elmswood is badly hurt.” She pointed to where he lay in the grass, and Sir John and his chauffer rushed to help him.
Lady Simon glanced back and forth between Valerie and Elm, the light of recognition about what she’d stumbled on dawning across her round face. It was more than an accident. It was a scandal.
The second car pulled to a stop behind Sir John’s. Dinah, Katherine, and Richard stepped out, taking in the scene with horror.
“Valerie!” Richard hurried to take hold of her arm and turn it to view in the headlamps. “Are you all right?”
Valerie sank down into the grass, Richard helping ease her to the ground. “Elm needs you more than me.”
“Keep the handkerchief pressed tight to the wound,” he instructed Dinah and Katherine. “That’ll slow the bleeding. I’ll be back.”
Richard left to examine his friend, Lady Simon following him.
Dinah and Katherine knelt beside her. Dinah took off one of her gloves and pressed it against Valerie’s cut and tossed away the soiled linen.
“I suppose this will be good practice if we decide to join the Red Cross,” Dinah joked, but not even her usual levity could break the stiff mood.
“What are you doing here?” They were the last people Valerie expected to see.
Dinah and Katherine exchanged a look before Dinah answered. “Priscilla Brett told Richard to find you because you’d had a spat with Vivien and were upset. He went looking for us, thinking we might help, and we saw you leave with Elm. We were worried, so we followed you. Oh, Valerie.”
“I know.” She was in a larger mess than the car crash.
“His shoulder’s broken and Miss de Vere Cole has a laceration that must be seen to. Where’s the nearest hospital?” Richard asked Sir John.
“Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. We aren’t far from there. We can take them in my car, it’s larger,” Sir John offered.
He, his chauffer, and Richard helped Elm to his feet and guided him to the car. Their Excellencies escorted Valerie to it and eased her inside, Dinah gripping her good hand tight to stop the shaking. She missed the comfort of it when she let go, even if she didn’t deserve it. They should leave her and avoid whatever taint their friendship was about to cast on them. If Lady Fallington didn’t tell everyone that Valerie had gone off in a car alone with her son once she found out, then Lady Simon surely would. The Chancellor of the Exchequer’s wife wasn’t known for her discretion. This story would give more weight and delight to whatever nasty ones Vivien decided to spread about Valerie’s time in France.
“Can you return to Blenheim and collect Mrs. Chamberlain and Lady Fallington and tell them what’s happened and where we are?” Richard asked Dinah.
“I can.” With one last concerned glance, Dinah closed the door on Valerie, while the Simons and Richard climbed in around them. Valerie didn’t see them leave, she barely heard or saw anything during the silent ride to Oxford. Everything she’d worked so hard to achieve this Season was as mangled as the car against the tree.
Chapter Twenty-One
Valerie sat in the back of the Rolls-Royce in front of Cliveden. The sun had yet to rise over the horizon, and the last of the night darkness was soft against the windows. She wore her wrap around her shoulders, still dressed in her stained evening gown, her arm, head, and heart throbbing in pain. She wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and sleep. They’d spent the last few hours in Oxford, where a country doctor had stitched and bandaged her wound while marveling that her injuries weren’t more severe. Richard had been in another room, attending to Elm’s broken collarbone. Valerie hadn’t seen him or anyone besides Aunt Anne, who’d ridden back from the hospital with her in silence, only speaking to tell her not to get out at Cliveden. They were returning to London immediately.
Footmen carried their trunks to the car, loading them under Mr. May’s direction. Miss Logan had packed their things after a telephone call from Aunt Anne from the infirmary.
Valerie leaned her forehead against the cool glass and looked up at the second floor of the house. Dinah stood at one of the windows watching her. Valerie raised her hand to her friend, who raised hers in return before Lady Astor, still dressed in her diamonds and evening gown, drew Dinah away from the window
and yanked the curtain shut.
Valerie leaned back against the seat, Aunt Anne’s soft voice as she thanked the Astors’ butler and footman cutting through the loneliness and regret. She should’ve stayed at Blenheim. Instead, she’d gone off with Elm, chasing the folly of freedom that could never be real, and ruining everything because of it. Tears slid down her cheeks, the exhaustion of the night pulling at her until she drifted off, barely hearing Aunt Anne climb in beside her or the car start and set off for London.
“MAY I COME in?” Valerie peered around the door to Aunt Anne’s room. The salmon-pink walls seemed darker beneath the lights of her lamps, the Louis XV furniture not sparkling so bright. She sat at her dressing table rubbing cream into her face while Miss Logan picked up her clothes.
It’d been three days since their return from Cliveden. Valerie had spent the better part of them in bed sleeping, reading, and worrying. She barely ate the food Mary brought up, she couldn’t, not while wondering what was going to happen to her. Aunt Anne hadn’t come to see her and every minute she expected Miss Logan to start packing her things for West Woodhay House or wherever Aunt Anne and Uncle Neville decided to banish her. Everyone must have heard the story by now and realized what her father, mother, Mavis, and Mr. Shoedelin had, that she was flawed beyond redemption and not worthy of good society or love.
She perched on the edge of the claw-footed bench at the end of Aunt Anne’s bed and rubbed the itching stitches. She picked at a loose thread on the bench, waiting to hear that she’d finally lost the one person who’d always stood by her. It was too much like the months she’d waited for some word from Father, a sign that he’d heard she was suffering and would do something to help, but he hadn’t. This time she deserved exile.
“That will be all, Miss Logan.” Aunt Anne turned on her stool, drawing her dressing gown tighter around her shoulders. “How are you feeling this evening?”
“Sore.”
“That’s to be expected. You’re lucky. It could’ve been worse.”
“Could it?” She hadn’t heard anything from Their Excellencies either, not a note or a phone call. She wasn’t brave enough to ring them, unable to bear the static on the silent phone lines or to have a butler reject her call.
“The Number Ten press secretary and I have spoken with Lord Beaverbrook and the other newspapermen. They’ve agreed to keep the story of your accident out of the newspapers. However, we can’t stop it from spreading through society, and it will, especially since you had the bad luck of having Lady Simon discover you. Whatever events you attend from here on out, people will look at you very differently.”
“I know.” The clock on the mantel ticked loudly. “Perhaps I should go to your town house in Birmingham. No one will notice me there.”
“Is that what you want?”
No. she wanted things to be the way they were before the accident, dishing delicious gossip over tea or at dances with Their Excellencies, but it’d never be like that again. It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then. She was Alice, except instead of Wonderland she was in hell. “Isn’t that what you want me to do? Uncle Neville doesn’t need my kind of trouble, and neither do you.”
Aunt Anne rested one elbow on her dressing table and studied Valerie, her face, as always, a mask of calmness. Valerie braced herself, certain this would finally be the moment when Aunt Anne became like everyone else and shoved her away. “I won’t pretend I’m not disappointed and that there won’t be repercussions, but I suspect there’s more to this than you’ve told me. I’ll hear it now, if you please.”
Valerie drew the dressing gown sash through her fingers, not wanting to tell her everything, but she deserved the truth, all of it. “The day before we left for Cliveden, I paid a call on my mother.”
“I suspected as much.”
“I wanted to see her, to know why she left.”
“And?”
“She said the most vile things to me, that she never wanted me and I was an unfortunate side effect of marriage. How could she? How could anyone be so selfish or coldhearted?”
Aunt Anne twisted the gold wedding band on her finger. “She was young when she had you and I’m sure you’re under no illusions about the sort of women Horace preferred. He needed her money and she wanted her freedom.”
“But she wasn’t free. She was my mother, and she should’ve loved me, stood by me, and not left.”
“She didn’t, and that’s simply the way of things.”
“Another lesson I have to learn from and carry on.” She could practically hear Uncle Neville’s words in her aunt’s.
“I’m afraid so.”
“What have I learned? That the one person who should’ve loved me the most didn’t, that there’s something ugly in me that drives people away, and it’s only a matter of time before more leave, and all the inheritances in the world won’t change that.” Tears burned her eyes and slid down her cheeks.
Aunt Anne rose and came to sit beside her on the bench. “It’s not your fault she left. Don’t ever think it was.”
“But you don’t know who I really am, what I almost did.” She twisted the sash tight around her finger, unable to look at her aunt sitting patiently beside her. She was tired of carrying the past and allowing it to determine everything. Aunt Anne might as well know how much Valerie deserved her scorn. Then maybe she’d finally be free of it and the other demons that’d tormented her for far too long. “When things in Ascain were at their worst, I went to see Mr. Shoedelin, hoping he could help. I told him what was wrong, how awful it was, but he didn’t believe me. He wasn’t going to help, and I didn’t know what else to do. We were starving and cold, so I closed the door to his office and I asked him the question I used to hear the women in the alley outside the hotel ask the men at night. I didn’t want to do it, but I was desperate, hungry. I thought if I gave him that, he might give me something, anything, in return.”
“Did he accept your offer?”
“No.” Valerie wiped her face with the sleeve of her wrap, waiting for horror to fill her aunt’s face the way it had Mr. Shoedelin’s. She should stop before her aunt ordered her from the house, but everything she’d held in for so long, the shame, anger, hurt, heartache, spilled out of her like her tears. “He recoiled from me as if I were the worst person in the world, but I wasn’t. I didn’t want to stoop so low, but I didn’t have a choice, and that’s when he finally believed me. He came to Ascain and saw how dreadful it was, the lice, the rats, no proper clothes, heat, or food. He saw what it was really like for us, for Father. He was the one who arranged the place at the convent school. Father didn’t want to send me, he said they’d fill my head with all sorts of papist nonsense, but Mr. Shoedelin said I needed proper care before I became a lost cause. He didn’t send me there because he wanted to help. He sent me there because he thought I was a fallen woman who deserved to be locked away, but I never did anything like that and I never would’ve asked him what I had if things hadn’t been so bad.”
Nothing in her life had made her feel more worthless and bereft of sympathy, love, and affection than that moment. She was an awful person, willing to trade her body for bread. No wonder the people who should’ve loved her most had scorned her. “What kind of woman does such a thing?”
“One who’s in the most vile of circumstances.” Aunt Anne wrapped her arms around her and pulled her close. Valerie clung to her, crying out a lifetime of despair, rejection, and pain.
“I’m so sorry, so sorry for all of it.”
“It’s not your fault. It’s mine.” She rubbed Valerie’s back, her touch comforting and soft. “I should’ve come for you at once instead of waiting for your letter or believing Mr. Shoedelin that you were happy at school. I should’ve gone to France and seen things for myself instead of believing Horace or simply sending money. I should have insisted you remain with me and not allowed Horace to take you back after every holiday or when he wanted you in France. I should’ve told you abo
ut your mother years ago, but I thought it was the one ugly truth I could shield you from. I regret not trying harder to protect you from Horace’s mistakes. I failed you, and I’m so sorry.” Her aunt held her tight, her tears dropping onto Valerie’s forehead.
“It’s not your fault.”
“What happened to you isn’t yours. I loved my brother, but he was a weak man, and you paid the price for his mistakes.”
Valerie clung to Aunt Anne, relief flooding through her as much as love. Her father and mother might be gone, but Aunt Anne would never leave her, she never had. “I’m so sorry about Cliveden and Elm. After the visit to Mother and what you told me about Uncle Neville, and the nasty way Vivien Mosley threw the convent in my face, I wanted to forget myself for a while, but I went too far and ruined everything.”
Aunt Anne gently pushed her back, holding her by the shoulders. “No, you haven’t.”
“I have. Their Excellencies aren’t likely to have anything to do with me, and even if they wanted to, their parents won’t, Lady Astor certainly won’t.”
“There’s someone who shouldn’t be the first to cast stones. Leave her to me. As for your friends, if you give them a chance, they’ll stand by you; not all of them, because that isn’t how people are, but some of them. That’s all you need, but you’ll have to face them to find out.”
Or she could leave London, but everyone would label her a coward as well as a tart if she did. She’d never be able to hold her head up again and everyone would believe whatever gossip they heard about her. If she stayed, they’d have to treat her as they did Lady Ravensdale and Lady Mosley and all their sordid affairs, and Valerie might claw back some of the respect she’d lost. It wouldn’t be easy, but it was better than running away, and it would define her future more than anything else she’d done this Season. “You said cowardice was an awful trait you refused to instill in me.”
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