The Last Bachelor

by Betina Krahn

  Heat crept beneath Remington’s starched collar, as one unpleasant possibility occurred to him. “Is she tall, smartly dressed … with a voice like a screeching hinge?”

  The steward nodded, then curled one side of his nose as if smelling something unpleasant. “If you know this woman, your lordship, please come and see her off the premises before I am compelled to employ more vulgar means of removing her.”

  Remington did indeed know her. In point of fact, he had been dodging her for two days. She had besieged his house with missives, sent her personal servants to his offices to insist he call upon her, then, late in the day, had arrived in person at his offices, causing him to have to flee down his own back stairs like a thief trying to avoid detection. Notes, messengers, and even her personal appearance at his office he might have withstood with some grace. But to invade his male sanctum, his club. And White’s, of all places! Had the harridan no decency at all?

  Roiling up out of his well-controlled depths came a surge of righteous anger. If years of dealing with her and the others like her had taught him anything, it was that decency was usually too much to expect of a woman. And this one was worse than most. He was sick to death of her incessant demands, hysterical appeals, and strident dependence. He paid her bills, oversaw her investments, and even pacified the household retainers who had to put up with her. But it was never enough.

  Well, this time she had pushed him too far. He fixed the beleaguered steward with narrowed eyes and a taut half smile that contained equal measures of fire and ice.

  “Do what you will with the woman, Richards. It is none of my concern.”

  Turning a shoulder on the steward’s confusion, he settled back in his chair and beckoned to the barman, calling for a new deck of cards and a fresh bottle of Scotch. He met Woolworth’s startled look with a vengeful smile. “It appears I won’t be leaving just yet. Cards, gentlemen?”

  The steward came running back moments later, ashen and wringing his hands. “My lord, my lord! That female person—”

  Behind him, above the drone of voices, came the sound of a woman’s scream. Talk in the bar ceased, play in the billiards room halted, and every breath in both rooms was bated in shock.

  Remington swore mentally, tightened his grip on the cards in his hand, and ignored her. But the termagant held an unexpected trump card: his name. “Remington Carr, how dare you refuse to see me!” she screamed. “I know you’re in there! Let go—unhand me, you thug! Remington, you cannot abandon me—ohhh—”

  Every eye in the bar turned in his direction, and a general murmur of outrage rose from the far end of the room. But he braced to weather the humiliation, telling himself it could not be the first time a scheming female had penetrated the club’s pristine male provinces. He had to stand his ground and refuse to allow her outrageous behavior to draw him into a public row. There was nothing for it but to gut out the embarrassment. He took a deep breath and steeled his tautly stretched nerves.

  “Good God,” Everstone said, shoving to his feet when the struggle made it to the door of the bar. “She’s got past Richards—she’s headed in here!” Several of his table mates lurched to their feet, their expressions ranging from fascination to terror.

  “Dash it all, Landon,” Woolworth demanded, staring frantically between the fracas in the doorway and Remington. “You must do something, man!”

  “So I must,” Remington said with seething calm, considering the pasteboards in his hand. “I’ll have three cards.” Adamantly oblivious to the wild tussle going on just thirty feet away, he laid three cards down on the tabletop and waited for the dealer to fulfill his request.

  The others gazed, confounded, between the porters grappling with the woman calling Remington’s name and his towering indifference to the spectacle. Never in their lives had they seen a more audacious display of coolness under fire. This incident would undoubtedly go down in clubmen’s lore along with the time old Lord Glasgow flung a waiter through a window and gruffly told the club secretary to “put him on the bill.”

  “Well, gentlemen, are we playing or not?” he demanded, seeming decidedly more concerned with the delay of the game than with the potential ruin of his reputation.

  Following his lead, they sank back onto their chairs and glanced at each other in amazement. As the shrieks of the interloping female faded toward the street door, their admiration for the unorthodox earl mounted to worshipful proportions. Here, their looks of shared wonder said, was a man who truly knew how to handle women.

  But inside that imperturbable facade, dark fires of anger were scarcely being held in check. For months the heat had been building in him, and this degrading little spectacle—the invasion of his last male sanctuary—had provided the final spark to set his raw pride aflame. Suddenly he was molten, churning inside.

  “Women, gentlemen, are indolent, manipulative, and unpredictable creatures at best,” he said harshly. “They’re also expensive and self-absorbed and devious beyond belief. And it really doesn’t matter whether you’ve wedded them or not … they’ll have their pound of flesh all the same.” The fierce glow in his eyes as he lifted his gaze from his cards made his companions stiffen in their seats. “Console yourself with the knowledge that, as married men, you may have escaped the unpleasantness of dealing with aging mistresses. They’re the very devil to dispose of.”

  He picked up three newly dealt cards from the table, but the fury mounting in him made it all but impossible to focus on his hand. He was seized by an overwhelming urge to strike back, to do something to right the balance scales in him that had been knocked askance yet again by a woman’s volatile and demanding nature. He had to do something, to strike a blow for manhood as well as for himself. And when he looked up, he read in the wan and hopeful faces of that company of ruined bachelors the opportunity to do exactly that.

  Lady Antonia. A devious and contriving woman. A plague upon the freedom of mankind. A woman in dire need of a comeuppance.

  “So, Woolworth,” he said, taking a deep breath and feeling fresh resolve pour through his tense frame, relaxing it. “Just what did you have in mind for our diabolical Lady Antonia?”

  Chapter Three

  The atmosphere was charged in the House of Commons that sultry afternoon in mid-May. The Gothic arch windows set high in the walls had been opened to provide ventilation, but the only air stirring in the great hall came from the heated blasts of the speakers on the main floor itself. The opposing ranks of green leather benches that lined the main floor were crammed with black-coated members, all exercising the long-standing MP prerogative of commenting on the recognized speaker’s parentage and sanity, as well as his oratorical style and the substance of his discourse.

  Debate on the controversial Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill was under way, and tempers were rising apace with the temperature in the stuffy chamber. The measure was an attempt to change the legal code to permit marriage between a man and his deceased wife’s sister, a degree of relation both the Church and civil authority had decreed too close to permit a conjugal union. The progressive element in the Commons ranted that the “sister prohibition” was a relic of Old Testament days in which the vice of concubinage was rampant, and that it was badly outdated. The conservatives raved that sin was sin, whatever the era, and that if moral law was to be tampered with, the Ten Commandments would soon be reduced to the Ten Suggestions and the whole empire would go sliding straight into the water pipe.

  Neither side bothered to apologize for its scandalous language, even though the gallery that ringed the upper walls of the chamber was overflowing with observers, a number of whom were female. If women took an unfeminine interest in things governmental, both liberals and conservatives agreed, then they had to expect to be shocked from time to time. Still, in deference to those women who might have come with more appropriate social motives—say, to hear a husband’s speech or to flirt with an eligible MP after the session—a wooden screen had been erected along one side of the gallery to shield the
fairer members of the weaker sex.

  It was behind that screen of spindles that Antonia Paxton sat, chafing at the restricted view and at the nonsense being bandied about on the floor below. Wielding her fan vigorously with one hand, she dabbed her heated face with the handkerchief in the other. She had chosen to wear her black-trimmed purple silk with its cuirass bodice, stovepipe skirt, and fashionable bustle, and as the afternoon wore on, she began to feel every prickly lump in her horsehair-padded bustle and each unyielding stay in her corset. It was a struggle to keep the heat of the chamber and her discomfort from distracting her from her purpose in being there.

  She had come to observe the progress of the bill and to take note of which members of the House might be considered friends of the measure, and which were sworn enemies. A fortnight ago she had attended one of the parliamentary hearings on the bill and had come away from the proceedings incensed by many of the members’ attitudes toward marriage. As a result she had written impassioned letters to key members of the House of Commons and had importuned one of her former protégées whose husband was an MP to secure gallery passes for her.

  She bit her lip and curled her fingers around the railing of the gallery, wishing she could demand to be recognized and speak on behalf of the women she knew would be securely married if not for that cruel and antiquated law. But the smells of stale smoke and exercised male heat billowing up from below underscored the fact that this was an exclusively male arena, and that however informed or powerful a woman’s views, she had to rely upon a man to express them here. The combination of her growing personal and political discomfort brought her to the edge of her nerves.

  “If old Pickering utters one more ‘thou shalt not,’ I swear I shall climb out of this balcony and have at him with my purse,” she muttered from between gritted teeth. Rearranging herself yet again on her hard seat, she cast a glance at Aunt Hermione, who sat beside her wearing a look of wilted forbearance. “The ripe old cod. Just look at him.” With a nod she directed her aunt’s gaze to the front row of the Opposition bench, where a portly, bulbous-featured old fellow sat looking like a dyspeptic bulldog.

  “Disgraceful,” Hermione agreed, tugging at her bonnet ribbons.

  When Sir Jerome rolled to his feet yet again, Hermione groaned audibly and Antonia narrowed her eyes and fingered the chain handle of the handbag in her lap. But the old knight yielded the floor to a hitherto unheard speaker, a young backbencher named Shelburne, who proceeded to take the debate in an alarming new direction.

  “One reason put forth in support of this vile bit of legislation,” the new speaker intoned, “is that permitting marriage between a man and his deceased wife’s sister would be a significant step toward reducing the problem of surplus women.”

  Surplus women. That hideous term again. Antonia fought an almost irresistible urge to throw her purse over the railing at him.

  “But we cannot afford to change our law to suit the whims and caprices of social fortune.” He grasped his lapels and inflated his chest as he warmed to his subject. “We cannot abandon our most sacred principles of morality for the sake of providing husbands for a few women, no matter how poor and wretched the creatures may be.”

  There was a wave of reaction: “here, here’s” mingled with hoots of derision and rumbles of consternation. “I cannot speak to the fine theological points of this matter. But I can and must speak to the fact that there are better ways to deal with the unsavory imbalance in the numbers of eligible men and women. Let me read to you the suggestions of one more learned than I in this matter: Lord Remington Carr, Earl of Landon.” He lifted a magazine and adopted an oratorical stance.

  “Lord Carr writes in Blackwood’s Magazine this month: ‘It has been suggested that one way of dealing with the problem of surplus women is to gather them up and transport them to the colonies, where they would find usefulness as wives and companions of the men on the frontiers of the empire. But there is no evidence that these noble men laboring to enlarge British fortunes abroad are pining for marriage. Indeed, many of them may have fled England’s shores to avoid being trapped in that onerous and inequitable union.’ ”

  Antonia’s heart began to pound and her eyes burned dryly as she stared at the speaker without blinking. Onerous … inequitable … how dare he speak about marriage so? Then the name of the author of those words righted in her mind. It was Remington Carr, Earl of Landon—author of that vile, antimarriage piece she had read two months ago in the Spectator, and also of a series of articles demanding that women be given the vote, which had appeared in the Telegraph over the last three weeks. It was he who had coined that noxious phrase “surplus women.” Now even the renowned Blackwood’s was printing his scurrilous ramblings!

  “ ‘Instead’ ”—the young MP read on—“ ‘I venture to offer a modest proposal for dealing with spinsters, widows, and other surplus women. These unfortunates have been duped by the popular, oversentimentalized ideals of Home and Family into believing that they are entitled to the support and status of their own homes—to be provided by men. But most of these women shall never marry, never preside over a home of their own. And even if they could, marriage is no guarantee of security. Nowhere is this more painfully obvious than in the case of widows, those pathetic women who have learned firsthand the folly of depending on another for the security and substance of their lives. The false ideal of marriage is as much a trap for these poor, deluded women as it is for the unhappy men who find themselves snared in it.

  “ ‘Revision of the marriage laws is no answer to the problem of our surfeit of women. I propose, instead, that these unattached females who languish about the landscape be reeducated in the realities of life. They could be trained in a trade or craft and put to work at an honorable wage, so that they may be made self-supporting. This would have the effects of enhancing the general productivity, of providing an inexpensive new source of labor, and of reassigning the burden of their care from the male members of society to their own shoulders, where it rightly belongs. These women have most certainly been trained for dependence by our societal myths. Why should they not be retrained for independence by our societal truths?’ ”

  The young MP went on reading and speaking, but past that point—“trained for dependence”—Antonia heard only one word in three. Marriage and the ideal of the loving family a hoax? Widows called pathetic, dependent, and a burden to others? Women should be forced into shops and factories and mills and offices … required to support themselves by all manner of unseemly labor? Dear God, what would happen to the families? the homes? the children?

  The loathsome earl was proposing nothing less than an assault upon the institutions of Home and Family! The old wretch would dispense with marriage altogether, if he could—the devil take children, decency, charity, humanity, and all other such worthy products of wedlock and family life!

  Through a deepening haze of anger, she watched young Shelburne sit down with a satisfied expression while a storm of controversy erupted around him. The other members of the House jolted to their feet, some outraged, some cheering—both sides spoiling for a fight in the volatile atmosphere.

  The shouting and fist shaking accelerated and soon got so out of hand that the Speaker was unable to hammer the chamber back to order. He called for the Doorkeeper and the Serjeant at Arms, and for a moment it looked as if full fisticuffs would break out. Then, abruptly, the Government forces began to make their way to the doors and a number of the Opposition soon followed, effectively tabling the bill.

  The turmoil in the gallery penetrated Antonia’s shock. She had come here to learn who supported the marriage bill and who opposed it. Well, she certainly had learned. That wretched earl, with his hateful views on women and marriage, was being used as a sort of spokesman for the antireform forces! She was on her feet in a flash, hauling Aunt Hermione up and dragging her across numerous feet and through a dozen apologies on the way to the nearest exit. When they reached the corridor, Hermione pulled back against Antoni
a’s grip and scowled at the sight of the fire in her eyes.

  “Merciful heavens, Antonia! What do you think you are doing?”

  “I intend to have a word or two with that insufferable young pup,” she declared, pulling Hermione toward the stairs once more. “Or perhaps several words.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  They hurried down the steps ahead of the spectators pouring out of the gallery. But once on the main floor, they found the entrance to the Commons Lobby blocked by the gentlemen ushers. They hurried along the side corridor toward the Central Lobby and were caught up in a crush of members and lobby correspondents from a number of the leading newspapers emerging from the Commons corridor. Antonia stood on her toes and craned her neck to locate her quarry across the great hall. He was smiling and shaking hands, receiving what appeared to be congratulations from a half-dozen elder members of the House. Frantic that he would get away, she fixed him in her sights and set a course for him, trundling Hermione along with her.

  “Quite a maiden speech, Shelburne,” a senior-looking MP was saying when she arrived.

  “Quite full of inaccuracies and impertinences, you mean,” she declared as she halted behind him and hurriedly resettled her tailored, high-crowned hat back to its businesslike angle. Young Shelburne and his fellow party members turned with frowns, which changed to either male interest or male indignation at the sight of her.

  “I beg your pardon, madam,” Shelburne said, scowling down his nose. “I was neither inaccurate nor impertinent in my speech. The quotations were read verbatim, and with the greatest respect for the tradition of debate and the company of my fellow members.”

  “Not, however, with any respect for the subjects of that insulting article,” she countered, drawing herself up straight and narrowing her eyes. Hermione, beside her, retreated a half step, knowing what was promised in that fiery look. “By reading such refuse in these hallowed halls, sir, you have affronted all womanhood. This day you have accused women of being stupid, indolent, incapable hangers-on who have no dignity and no rightful place in the home.”