Marchington Scandal

by Jane Ashford

  Lord Stonenden looked puzzled. “Elise Standen? But Katharine knows all about that. It was practically her suggestion.”

  Now Mary looked perplexed. “I beg your pardon?” “The countess and young Marchington—she knows about that. We’ve spoken of it.”

  “About…? I’m sorry, I don’t understand you.”

  “Has she said nothing to you?”

  Mary stared at him.

  “I wonder why.” He retreated into his own thoughts for several minutes; gradually, his brow darkened. “Look here,” he continued finally, “has Katharine said nothing to you about a scheme to separate the countess and Tom Marchington?”

  “Yes, of course,” replied Mary, bewildered. “She asked Tony Tillston—”

  “Tillston?”

  “Yes. I should not tell you about it, I suppose, but under the circumstances… Katharine asked Mr. Tillston to squire Elinor about, to make Tom jealous. Unfortunately—”

  “She had another plan!” Stonenden seemed astonished.

  “Yes, we worried for such a time before we could think of anything.”

  “But I spoke to her. And Eliza Burnham clearly requested my help.”

  “Eliza?” Mary sounded utterly mystified.

  Her companion stood abruptly. “There has been a terrible misunderstanding. I must speak to Katharine at once!”

  Mary rose to face him. “But I don’t… What do you mean?”

  He looked impatiently down at her, then straightened and seemed to get control of himself again. “I see how it is,” he said. “What a damnable tangle.”

  Mary watched his face. “I don’t understand. Were you also trying to separate Tom from the countess?”

  “Am,” he corrected. “And I believe the only thing to do now is to finish the process. Explanations are always less convincing than actions. I shall show Katharine that I had only her interests at heart.” He turned away. “Good day, Miss Daltry. And thank you!”

  “What are you going to do?” she began, but he was already out of the room.

  ***

  Katharine came downstairs to luncheon, looking pale and rather tired. Asked how her painting had gone, she merely grimaced, and the two women ate their meal in nearly unbroken silence. Afterward, when Katharine would have retreated to her studio again, Mary said, “Come into the drawing room for just a moment, dear.”

  “Mary, I really don’t—”

  “Only for a moment.”

  When they had sat down, Mary said, “Lord Stonenden called this morning.”

  Katharine looked up, startled, then quickly dropped her eyes. “Did he?” she replied coolly.

  “Yes. He seemed very concerned about you. I think now that I should have asked you to come down.”

  “Indeed not. I am very glad you didn’t.”

  “But you know, Katharine, I think there may have been some misunderstanding between you and Lord Stonenden. He was telling me—”

  “Really, Mary, I do not care to hear what he was telling you. Please.” She got up and walked over to one of the front windows. “Oh, dear, here is Elinor. I suppose I must see her.” She laughed shortly. “Her faith in me is so touching, and so misplaced. I do not understand why she keeps coming here. I have done as little for her as for myself.”

  “Katharine…” But the servant came in to announce their caller, and in the next moment Elinor was with them.

  Though she wore a very fashionable fawn morning dress, lavishly trimmed with dark green braid, Elinor looked wan and red-eyed. She sat down with them despondently and gazed from one to the other of them with wide brown eyes. Katharine moved uneasily in her chair.

  “How are you, dear?” asked Mary.

  Elinor shrugged. “Your painting is very nice, Katharine. I wanted to tell you. Everyone admired it excessively.”

  “Thank you, Elinor,” said the older girl, touched.

  There was a silence.

  Finally Elinor heaved a great sigh. “I know I am horridly tiresome, and I do beg your pardon, but I am so worried about Tom. I cannot think of anything else, and I…I don’t know what to do.” Her voice broke on the last word, and she groped in her reticule for a handkerchief.

  The other two watched her helplessly.

  “I w-wish I could b-be more s-sensible,” sobbed Elinor, “b-but I don’t know how.”

  “You are being very sensible,” answered Katharine. “Indeed, I have the greatest admiration for your fortitude.”

  “Y-you do?”

  “Oh, yes. In your place, I would have murdered Tom with a hatpin by this time. Or, at the very least, thrown things.”

  Elinor chuckled shakily at this absurd picture. “Perhaps I should have. Perhaps I will. Nothing else has done the least good.”

  “Perhaps you should,” agreed Katharine.

  The others stared at her.

  “Well, Elinor is right. Nothing else has worked. And I begin to think we have let Tom off too easily. Why should Elinor wait quietly while he does what he pleases and creates a scandal? It may be time for you to kick up a dust, Elinor.”

  The younger girl’s eyes were wide. “I don’t know if I could. He hardly speaks now. And when he does, he is sullen and so ill-tempered. He boxed Chivers’s ears yesterday.”

  “Well, he wouldn’t dare box yours!”

  “No.” Elinor sounded doubtful. “He did once, though, when I lost his pet turtle.”

  Katharine laughed. “I think he takes you far too much for granted. That is what comes of marrying a man one has known all one’s life. But if you made a great fuss, I wager he would listen.”

  “Do you think so?” Elinor frowned.

  “I do.”

  “But I have never—”

  “Precisely, Elinor. You have always allowed Tom his way. Perhaps it is time you stopped.”

  Her younger cousin eyed her uneasily. “I always felt so sorry for him, you see. Sir Lionel and Lady Agnes never let him do anything he wanted to do.”

  “I understand that,” began Katharine, when, as if summoned by Elinor’s remarks, another visitor strode into the room as the maid announced, “Lady Agnes Marchington.”

  The three women turned and stared, Elinor with almost ludicrous apprehension. Lady Agnes stood before them, arms akimbo, looking from one to the other truculently. She was a large woman, taller even than Katharine, with a massive, tightly corseted figure and piercing blue eyes.

  Her traveling costume was not the height of fashion, but her air of consequence easily outweighed this slight disadvantage.

  “Well, Elinor,” she said in a deep commanding voice, “they told me at your house that I should find you here.”

  “L-Lady Agnes,” stammered her daughter-in-law, rising hurriedly. “What a…uh, pleasant surprise.”

  “Is it?” Lady Agnes surveyed the others. “Hello, Mary. Katharine.”

  The Daltry ladies greeted her, Katharine with a slight smile. “Will you sit down?” Katharine invited.

  “No. I haven’t time for that. I came only to fetch Elinor and to ask one question.” She fixed them each in turn with a ferocious glance. “Where is my son?”

  Elinor gave a little squeak, and Katharine had to press her lips tightly together.

  “He is not at home,” Lady Agnes went on, “and the servants seem astonishingly unable to tell me where he is, so I ask you, Elinor.”

  “I…I don’t know…that is, I’m not sure. He went out this morning. He never tells me where he is going.” Elinor ended on a gasp.

  “Does he not? Well, that is your own fault, my girl. He would tell you if you asked properly. And if you had given him a proper home, he would not be making a fool of himself and his family as I understand he now is. Come along, we shall wait for him at your house.”

  “I have my carriage,” blurted Elinor.

  “Hah. Well, you must follow me, then. Don’t dawdle. Mary, Katharine, I shall call again when this unfortunate matter is set right. Good day.” And she turned and swept out of the room.


  “Whew!” remarked Katharine. “She is a tartar, isn’t she?”

  “Oh, how did she find out?” cried Elinor. “We are lost now.”

  “I fear I wrote her,” admitted Mary. “I had no idea she was so… When I met her before, she seemed quite charming.”

  Elinor groaned.

  “But, Elinor, this is just what we wanted,” said Katharine. “You did not want to scold Tom. Well, here is someone who will, soundly.” She smiled at her cousin.

  “No, no. It will make him wild,” protested Elinor. “He hates being lectured by his mother.”

  “Elinor!” came a stentorian call up the stairs. “The carriages are here. Come along.”

  Elinor wrung her hands. “Oh, dear…oh, dear. Katharine! You must come with me. I cannot face her alone.”

  “But—”

  “You must! Please, please.”

  “All right, all right. Do not fall into a fit of the vapors. I will come.”

  “I knew you would not desert me now.”

  “I must get my bonnet. You go and tell Lady Agnes you are coming.”

  “Yes. You will come?”

  “I have said so, goose. Go on.”

  Elinor turned to walk downstairs as Katharine started up to her bedchamber to fetch her hat. “Oh, this will be dreadful,” murmured the former, “dreadful!”

  Seventeen

  Lady Agnes reached the Marchington town house before Elinor and Katharine, and she was awaiting them in the drawing room, arms folded over her formidable bodice, foot tapping. Elinor positively cringed when she entered, and Katharine, though somewhat amused, still wished herself elsewhere.

  Lady Agnes was surprised to see her. “Katharine?” she said with raised eyebrows. “What are you doing here?”

  “I thought I might be of some assistance, Lady Agnes.”

  “Assistance?” The other appeared astonished.

  “I begged her to come,” exclaimed Elinor. “She has helped me all along, and I wanted her here when I told you—”

  “Helped you?” Lady Agnes looked Katharine up and down. “Can it be that I have you to thank for the way this affair has been botched? I thought it was Elinor, which was only to be expected, of course. But I had been told that you were a young woman of sense.”

  Elinor made a strangled sound.

  “You were obviously misinformed,” replied Katharine. “My presence here is evidence of that.”

  Glimpsing the twinkle in her amber eyes, Lady Agnes snorted. “If you think this is amusing, I don’t wonder you botched it. I do not, I promise you. My only son disgracing the family with a highborn trollop! If this escapade reaches my husband’s ears, you will all be sorry for it.”

  “You haven’t told him, then?” gasped Elinor.

  “I have not.” Her mother-in-law glared at her. “Yet.”

  “Thank heavens. But Lady Agnes, I beg you not to scold Tom. He hates it so, you know that, and he will only—”

  “Scold? I mean to do far more than that! I shall drag him back home by his ear, like the naughty boy he is behaving as, and administer the hiding of his life.”

  Katharine tried to imagine the beefy Tom Marchington being “hided.” As she looked at his mother, she could.

  “But, Lady Agnes,” pleaded Elinor. “He won’t come. He won’t listen to anyone. And I am afraid you will only drive him to do something worse!”

  “He will listen to me! But where is he?” She stalked over to the bell rope and pulled it vigorously. When the butler came in, she ordered, “Bring me Chivers, at once!”

  “Who is Chivers?” whispered Katharine to her cousin. “I know only that he had his ears boxed.”

  “He is Tom’s valet,” murmured the other girl miserably. “He has been with him forever.”

  After a few moments, a slender, ruddy man entered the drawing room. Though he was dressed as a gentleman’s gentleman, Katharine thought he looked more like a groom. He also looked distinctly frightened when he saw Lady Agnes.

  “So, Chivers,” said her ladyship. “What have you been at, allowing Tom to run wild? I seem to recall telling you to keep watch over him and not let him fall into any of his distempered freaks.” She lowered her voice awfully. “But perhaps I am mistaken.”

  “No, your ladyship. I have done my best, but Master Tom doesn’t heed me any longer.”

  “Why not?”

  “I…I couldn’t say, your ladyship.”

  “No? Well. I can venture a guess. You always indulged Tom shockingly, given half a chance, and I daresay you have done so again.” She glared around the room. “You have all done so. And I am here to put an end to it, Chivers! Where is Tom?”

  The little man had jumped at his name, and now he seemed to shrink into himself. “I don’t know, your ladyship.”

  “You don’t know?”

  Chivers quailed. “No, ma’am. He went out in his town dress.”

  “Were you not instructed to monitor Tom’s activities in London and keep us informed?”

  “Yes, your ladyship, but—”

  “But of course he could not,” snapped Katharine. “A man’s valet cannot be spying after him all the time. And you should not have asked it, Lady Agnes.”

  Tom’s mother spun to face her. “I do not see that this is any concern of yours, Katharine. I think it would be best if you returned home. The Marchingtons can deal with their own problems.”

  “Can they? I have seen very little evidence of it.” Katharine put her hands on her hips and faced Lady Agnes, in spite of Elinor’s inarticulate whimper behind her. “I must say I think Elinor is right,” she continued. “I was of the opinion that Tom needed a sound rating, but if you speak to him as you have been here, you will do nothing but drive him to greater excesses. Any man would rebel at that sort of language.”

  “You know nothing whatsoever about the matter,” snapped Lady Agnes. “I am a plain woman, and I have always spoken plainly to my son. And,” she added triumphantly, “he has always done as I told him.”

  “Precisely. And that is why he is behaving like an idiot. He has never had the chance to try his own wings. You kept him so hemmed about with rules and orders that he was bound to break out. And now that he is doing so, a thundering scold will simply inflame him.”

  “Young woman! I am at least twenty years your senior, and I believe I know rather more about how to handle my son than an impertinent chit who has not even managed to get herself a husband, though well past the age for it. Kindly refrain from interfering. If you won’t go home, sit down and hold your tongue.”

  Katharine’s eyes had snapped with anger at the beginning of this speech, but as it went on, amusement struggled with outrage in her face, and by the time Lady Agnes finished, she was manfully battling a giggle. Seeing that she could do nothing to alter the woman’s behavior, she turned away to hide her smile and, obediently, sat down.

  “Good,” responded Lady Agnes with a sharp nod. “Now, then. Chivers!”

  But before the little man could answer, the door opened and Tom Marchington walked into the drawing room.

  Katharine thought her cousin’s husband looked distinctly the worse for wear. He was no longer the cheerful ruddy country squire he had been on his arrival in town. His blue eyes were bloodshot, his round face thinner, and his sensible, serviceable garments exchanged for a costume that reflected some of the worst excesses of the dandy set. Moreover, when the young man saw his mother, he went utterly ashen and his mouth dropped open in appalled astonishment. Lady Agnes’s reaction to his entrance did nothing to increase his composure. She fixed him with a baleful eye and cried, “Aha! So here you are at last.”

  “M-Mama!” Tom cast an anguished eye in Elinor’s direction.

  “I didn’t send for her, Tom,” the girl cried. “I didn’t!”

  “Silence.” Lady Agnes looked them both up and down; Tom and Elinor instinctively moved closer together. “You have both, as far as I can see, acted like complete ninnyhammers. You are coming home with m
e today.” She turned to Tom. “You are most at fault, of course, and I shall see to it that you regret your foolishness to the utmost.”

  Tom had quailed at the beginning of this speech, but now he straightened. “You can’t make me go home, Mama, and I don’t mean to. I’m tired of being treated like a child. A man must have a bit of freedom, a chance to look about him. I’ll settle down as happily as the next—”

  “You dare!” interrupted his mother. “You dare to speak so to me?”

  Katharine saw Tom’s hands tremble a little, but he said, “Yes, Mama. You may as well go back home yourself. I intend to stay here for the rest of the season.” His jaw hardened. “And then go to Brighton, perhaps, for a while. Elinor may go with you if she likes.”

  “Tom!” exclaimed his wife, outraged by this betrayal.

  “Or she may come with me, of course,” he added hurriedly.

  “I see,” replied Lady Agnes in menacing tones. “You still have some interest in your wife, then, despite your carryings-on with this Standen woman?”

  Tom, avoiding her eye, looked around the room. His gaze passed over Katharine with mild surprise and lighted on Chivers. “What are you doing here?” he roared.

  Chivers began backing toward the door. “Her ladyship—”

  “Get out!” The valet scurried from the room, and Tom turned back to his mother, seemingly refreshed by his victory in at least one area.

  “Did you hear me, Tom?” said Lady Agnes.

  “Yes, Mama. And I would like to say that I do not believe this is a proper subject for public conversation.”

  “You have made it a subject of public scandal. I don’t see why I shouldn’t talk about it.”

  Her son’s face reddened slightly, and he clenched his fists.

  “Well?”

  “I am simply enjoying a bit of flirtation,” he burst out, goaded. “No more than any man might do. Of course I am interested in my wife and family. I shall settle down quite happily when we go home. Why can no one understand that?”

  “You are a married man, Tom. This sort of behavior, if it must occur, should cease upon marriage.”

  “I know that,” shouted her son. “But you and Papa never let me out of your sight. I had no chance to see anything of the world before I married, and by God, I mean to do it now. No one shall stop me!”