Slightly Scandalous

by Mary Balogh

  “Oh, bravo, Morgan,” Eve said. “Though we do not know yet if the marchioness has had anything to do with producing this sudden witness. However, I do like the notion of her finding herself confronted by all the considerable power of the Bedwyns. Of course, Aidan is the most ferocious-looking one of you all. Aidan?” She looked inquiringly at him.

  He returned her look with a blank stare for a few moments before raising his eyebrows and shaking his head slightly.

  “We have been planning a sort of belated wedding trip after leaving here,” he said, “with the children, of course. Their governess has recently married and we have not yet replaced her. We did think of the Lake District as a possible destination, but I daresay Cornwall would serve just as well—if we are invited, that is. Hallmere?”

  A house party of Bedwyns determined to be formidable, even ferocious. An iron-willed aunt bent upon a revenge so ruthless that his very life would be snuffed out if she had her way. Accusations of murder rattling around the neighborhood and a mysterious witness and some sort of official investigation pending. Cousin Calvin Moore, the pious heir, riding with furious haste to claim his inheritance from the man who had got it by committing murder most foul. And a fake betrothal that was to be given yet another extension.

  What red-blooded, sporting gentleman could possibly resist?

  “Certainly you are all invited,” Joshua said, “if you care for a little wild excitement rather than more conventional entertainment, that is.”

  “We are Bedwyns,” Alleyne said with a grin.

  Bewcastle merely raised his eyebrows and resumed his breakfast.

  “But we are wasting time while we sit here talking,” Freyja said impatiently. “We can be many miles on our way by nightfall if we leave this morning.”

  The prospect of a long, unexpected journey to Cornwall, beginning on a gloomy day complete with drizzle and a light fog and ending with a potentially nasty murder investigation starring their future brother-in-law as chief and sole suspect appeared to have cheered up the Bedwyns no end. They were all talking at once and pushing away their breakfast dishes as Joshua left the room with Freyja.

  “Sweetheart,” he said as soon as they were out of earshot, “I presented you with the perfect chance to be rid of me today and the perfect excuse for ridding yourself of me permanently as soon as you are sure circumstances will allow it. Yet you insist upon coming with me?”

  “That woman has gone too far this time,” she said, her chin and her nose in the air, a martial gleam in her eyes. “It will give me the greatest pleasure to demonstrate that fact to her.”

  He chuckled softly. “You may never be rid of me,” he said.

  “Nonsense,” she said briskly. “It will be for just a short while longer. What man in his normal mind would sit alone out on the ocean in his boat during a stormy night just on the chance that someone might row by, not notice him, and then tip his cousin overboard and leave him to drown? And what normal man would not make a great deal of noise and fuss if it did happen and at least attempt to rescue the drowning man? What man would keep his mouth shut about the whole thing for five years and then open it at just the moment when the victim's mother happened to be in a royal rage because her hopes of wedding the murderer to her daughter had been foiled? I would like to have a word or two with such a man.”

  “Lord help him,” Joshua said. “You and Alleyne both. And Aidan and Morgan too, I daresay. Not to mention Eve. Do you not realize, my charmer, that we are getting into a deeper and deeper scrape with every passing day?”

  “Nonsense,” she said again. “And you need not fear that there is going to have to be anything permanent about our connection, Josh. I discovered last night that we have both been spared that fate. That was a relief at least.”

  He stared at her. She was not with child? And yet she had just quite deliberately missed her chance to be rid of him permanently within the next few hours? And then he chuckled.

  “It is your move next, sweetheart,” he said. “You are going to have to find a way out of this betrothal. I am quite resigned to being an engaged man until my ninetieth year.”

  “One hour,” she said firmly as they arrived outside the door of her room. “I expect everyone to be ready and downstairs in the hall not one minute later than that.”

  “Yes, ma'am,” Joshua said, grinning at her as she whisked herself inside the room and shut the door firmly in his face.

  But his grin faded and his stomach performed an uncomfortable flip-flop as soon as he was alone. He was going to have to go back to Penhallow after all, then, was he?

  It was a grim prospect.

  The journey was a long and tedious one. Conversation in the carriage and at the various inns where they stopped for meals and accommodation centered about neutral topics that were probably of no great interest to any of them. Certainly they were not to Freyja.

  She could not believe this was happening. During the silences that a long journey inevitably brought and even during some of the conversations, she tried to trace back every stage of her relationship with Joshua to understand how she had got herself into this deep scrape, as he called it. How had she got from waking up in the middle of one night to find him invading her room to this moment of riding toward his home in Cornwall with him as his betrothed, half her family with them? Her involvement had all started, she supposed, when she had harbored him in her wardrobe without betraying his presence there to that horrid gray-haired old man, who had not even waited for her to answer his knock on the door.

  What would have happened if she had betrayed him? Would the whole of her life now be different?

  She supposed it would.

  So would his.

  They arrived at Penhallow late one afternoon, having driven almost all day along the coast road, admiring the views. It was not a brilliantly sunny day. Neither was it entirely cloudy. At one moment the sea below the high cliffs would be steely gray and rather forbidding, and the next it would be a brilliant blue and sparkling in the sunshine. More often its surface was a mixture of the two extremes.

  “I would like to paint the sea,” Morgan said. “It would be a marvelous challenge, would it not? I suppose most of us usually imagine that it is one color, or at least one color at any particular moment of any particular day. But it is not. One would need a whole palette of colors to paint it well, and even then . . .”

  “And yet if you were to wade into the sea and let a handful of the water trickle through your fingers,” Joshua said, “you would see that it is colorless.”

  “The color is projected onto it from something else,” Morgan said.

  “The sky?” Alleyne suggested.

  “But if you climb a high mountain,” Morgan said, “you find that the sky—the air—is also colorless. What gives the sky color? What gives the water color? If we could get inside a blade of grass, as we can get inside water and air, would we find that it too is without color?” Her eyes were shining with the intensity of the puzzle.

  “And how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Alleyne said with a chuckle. “Even if I could count them, Morg, I would wonder what was the point.”

  “Color, interpretation, come from our minds,” Freyja said. She held up a staying hand when Morgan drew breath to speak again. “But what gives our minds that capacity, I do not know. Perhaps there is something beyond our minds—something of which we are unaware.”

  “Awareness itself?” Morgan said.

  She was a strange girl, Freyja mused. Beautiful, accomplished, daring, as proud and haughty as any of them, as boldly contemptuous as Freyja herself of some of the starchier rules and conventions of society, she nevertheless had intellectual depths and this almost mystical awareness of the mysteries of existence that most people did not bother to question even if they noticed them.

  What would happen to her sister, Freyja wondered, now that she was grown up and about to be launched on society? Would she find a man who would appreciate her, who would allow her enou
gh rein to feel free, who would not clip her wings?

  And what would happen to her? Once this foolish business of a murder accusation had been cleared up, she was going to have to end her betrothal to Joshua. There must be no more putting it off again for any flimsy reason that presented itself. But then what would happen to her?

  “You may paint at Penhallow,” Joshua said to Morgan, “and probe all the mysteries of the universe with your brush. But, speaking of Penhallow, the house is about to come into view around this bend.”

  The bend was necessitated by the presence of a river valley cutting across the landscape. The cliff turned sharply inland and then fell gradually away to a steep hillside. The road had been built along the top of it. Below was a river, wide and slow-moving at this point on its course, flowing onward to the sea. The slopes on either side were green and rocky and carpeted in many places with pink thrift and yellow gorse and white clover. On the near side of the valley were the church and houses of a village, close to the sea, climbing the hillside for lack of enough flat land beside the river.

  On the far, western side of the valley, perhaps half a mile from the sea, and perched on a wide plateau more than halfway up the hillside, was a large, imposing gray stone mansion. It was half turned to face the sea, smooth-looking lawns all about it and continuing down the hill with beds of brown earth that must be flower gardens in the summer. Surrounded as it was on all four sides as well as above and below by the wild beauties of the Cornish seacoast, the house and park were like a perfect, cultivated gem.

  There was something about Freyja's first sight of Penhallow that was pure physical sensation, almost as if a fist had collided with a dull thud into her ribs below the heart. It was almost painful.

  The road was descending slowly but rather steeply into the valley and the three-arched stone bridge Freyja could see there. On the other side the road followed the line of the river north for a while before climbing out of the valley on the other side. There was also a steep, curving driveway up to the house and a smaller, though not inconsiderable stone house at the bottom of it—a dower house, perhaps.

  Morgan and Alleyne were crowded against the window on their side of the carriage, looking out. Joshua was looking over Freyja's shoulder.

  “Impressive indeed,” Alleyne said.

  “Beautiful!” Morgan said softly.

  Joshua was silent. And tense. Freyja could sense his tension even though he did not touch her. This was where his aunt and cousins lived. Where he had spent an unhappy childhood as an orphan in his uncle's home. This was where he had wanted never to return. And where he would fight suspicion and innuendo and hostility and hatred and accusations of murder.

  It was his. It was his inheritance, his source of wealth and prestige, his responsibility. It was the millstone about his neck.

  She knew almost nothing about his life here, about what had driven him away, about why he had been so reluctant to return. But she was about to discover much, she supposed. She was not sure she wanted to. She had always thought of Joshua as a laughing, carefree, charming man with little depth of character. She had thought of him as pleasant to flirt with, pleasant even to lie with, but not in any way desirable as a lifelong partner. She had always expected to be able to say good-bye to him without any real regrets.

  She hoped all that was not about to change, but she had a horrible sinking feeling that perhaps it was.

  For no reason she could fathom, and without at all intending to, she sought his hand with her own and held it firmly. He laced his fingers with hers and gripped so tightly that she felt pain. Normally she would have reprimanded him sharply or tried to outgrip him. But she sat quietly and made no protest at all.

  The wheels of the carriage rumbled over the bridge and Freyja was aware of a wide and beautiful view along the river to the sea. Both were sparkling like a million diamonds in the sunshine, the clouds having just moved off the face of the sun.

  It would be difficult to approach Penhallow unseen unless one climbed to the headland above it and sneaked down the hill on foot. The approach of two grand traveling carriages, another, plainer one for the servants, and two baggage coaches would have been well nigh impossible to miss.

  Even so, only Jim Saunders was waiting on the gravel terrace before the front doors when the first carriage, in which Joshua rode with Freyja, Alleyne, and Morgan, drew level with them and then pulled ahead to allow room for Eve and Aidan's carriage too. Grooms were approaching from the stables.

  Joshua was first out of the carriage. He shook hands warmly with the steward he had hired in London six months ago and not seen since, and turned to hand Freyja and Morgan down before Alleyne alighted. Aidan was already lifting the children out of their carriage, and the two of them were dashing to the edge of the terrace to gaze downward along the valley to the wide golden beach at the end of it.

  “I came as fast as I could,” Joshua said after he had presented Saunders to the Bedwyns.

  “And a good thing too, my lord,” Saunders told him. “The Reverend Calvin Moore arrived last night.”

  The front doors had opened at last, and glancing up, Joshua saw his aunt standing on the top step, looking frail and wan in her black mourning clothes, a black-bordered handkerchief held to her lips. He wondered if she had expected him. He wondered if she had expected that he would bring Freyja with him. He would wager she had not expected him to bring other guests too. And the Bedwyns were a formidable lot. With the exception of Eve, they were all gazing at the marchioness with their haughtiest expressions. No one could do haughtiness quite like the Bedwyns.

  Joshua almost grinned but decided against it.

  “Aunt?” he said, striding toward her.

  She came down the steps and melted into his arms.

  “Joshua, my dearest boy,” she said. “What a perfectly delightful surprise—and just when I had given up all hope of your ever coming home. I was just now observing to Cousin Calvin . . . But you do not know that he has come for a visit, do you? I was just observing to him that it would be more the thing for you to receive him since Penhallow is yours and he is your heir, but that you had not found the time to come here since your poor uncle passed on. And then Chastity saw the carriages approaching and I knew that my prayers had been answered.”

  No, Joshua concluded, she had not expected him. Neither did she realize that he knew what was afoot, or else she chose not to speak of it immediately. She might, of course, have greeted him quite differently if he had come alone.

  “I am delighted to be here, Aunt,” he said. “I have brought houseguests with me, as you can see. You know my betrothed already. May I present Lord and Lady Aidan Bedwyn, Lady Morgan Bedwyn, and Lord Alleyne Bedwyn? My aunt, the Marchioness of Hallmere.”

  She welcomed them graciously. For a moment it looked as if she were about to hug Freyja, but something in Freyja's stance caused her to change her mind and she contented herself with a warm, watery smile instead. A stranger would have sworn that she had never been happier in her life than she was at this moment in greeting a number of unexpected guests to the house she considered her own.

  “And children!” she exclaimed, clasping her hands to her bosom and gazing fondly at Becky and Davy, who were still admiring the view while their nurse looked on from beside the third carriage. “How delightful it will be to hear the happy voices of children echoing about Penhallow's halls again. It has been many years since you and Albert and the girls were children, Joshua. Those were good days. Will you all come up to the drawing room, where everyone is waiting to meet you? You must be ready for your tea.”

  Joshua turned to offer his arm to Freyja, but before she could take it, someone came hurtling past his aunt in the doorway. She was ungainly in her haste, her arms clamped to her sides down to the elbows, her hands flapping to the sides in a show of excitement. Her round, childish face beamed with happiness. She was laughing convulsively as children do when deeply involved in a game.

  “Josh!” she was saying ov
er and over again. “Josh, Josh, Josh.”

  He opened his arms and she came into them, coming close to bowling him over. Her arms gripped him tightly about the neck, almost throttling him, and her head came down so that she butted him in the chest with her forehead and fairly robbed him of breath. She was still laughing and repeating his name.

  She had grown up in five years—she was eighteen now—but she still looked much the same as she had last time he saw her.

  “Prue!” he said, closing his arms about her. “Prue, my sweetest love.”

  “You have come home,” she told his chest. “I knew you would come home. Josh, Josh, Josh.”

  “Prudence!” his aunt said in awful tones. “How dare you leave the nursery without my permission! Where is Miss Palmer?”

  “It is all right, Aunt,” Joshua said as his cousin began to make grunting noises of distress. “What better welcome home could I possibly be given? I have brought some people for you to meet, my love. If you will leave off hugging me, I will present them to you.”

  “Lady Prudence Moore, my cousin,” he said, looking first at Freyja. “This is Lady Freyja Bedwyn, Prue. I daresay she will allow you to call her Freyja just as she will call you Prue. She is going to be my wife.”

  Now, why the devil had he added that?

  Prue smiled her wide, guileless child's smile at each of the Bedwyns in turn and repeated their names quietly to herself so that she would not forget them. When Joshua had finished introducing them, she looked at him and laughed.

  “And this is Josh,” she said, having noticed that he had not been introduced to anyone.

  “And I am Josh,” he said, smiling tenderly at her and setting one arm about her shoulders.

  “And you have come home.”