by Betina Krahn
“There there,” Hermione said, patting her in encouragement.
“Even in our marriage bed I never seemed to do anything right. He criticized my affectionate nature and said I wasn’t … ladylike … in my conduct toward him.” Tears of shame rolled down her cheeks.
Antonia had heard enough. “The mean-spirited wretch! Well, you don’t have to withstand another minute of it. You can come back to stay with us here.”
A chorus of agreement broke the tension in the room; it was exactly what they had hoped she would say. But all were a bit surprised to have Camille Howard edge forward with tears in her eyes and a heartfelt offer.
“She can share my room.” She smiled at poor Alice, then at Antonia. “We’ll have a lot to talk about.”
Supper that evening was a bit more festive than usual, with two new but familiar faces at the table and lots of stories to share. The subdued pleasure carried into the drawing room afterward, where Victoria played the pianoforte, Alice sang, and Molly and Aunt Hermione led several others in a scandalous dance-hall song or two.
Just as they were pushing back the chairs to make room for an impromptu reel, Hoskins appeared at the drawing-room doors with a scowl etched deep into his brow.
“A caller, madam,” he intoned crossly.
“At this hour?” Antonia said, somewhat out of breath from the exertion of moving chairs. “It’s late for visitors, Hoskins—”
The old butler opened his mouth to speak, but out came a feminine voice. “Oh, please, Lady Toni!” Hoskins started and glared at someone just behind his shoulder. With a grumble he threw the doors open, and there stood a voluptuous, thirtyish woman with a rounded face set with soft eyes. She was biting her lip and looking desperate indeed.
“D-don’t you know me, Lady Toni? Aunt Hermione? It’s Margaret. Margaret Everstone.”
“Of course we know you, Margaret!” Antonia hurried to greet her, taking her hands and drawing her into the midst of the group. “What brings you here this hour?”
“I got your letter, Lady Toni, and I—I just—”
Through tears and reassurances and occasional outbursts of anger, yet another tale of marital woe came tumbling out.
“Albert Everstone,” Margaret began furiously, “is the stingiest man that ever walked God’s green earth! He’s so tight, he opens old envelopes to write letters on. He won’t go to church for fear he’ll have to put something in the collection, and lately he has taken to wearing the same drawers for a week just to save on laundry bills!”
There were gasps and groans as her harrowing tale unfolded. And when she was through, another valise was carried up the stairs, and Paxton House had given shelter to yet another wife who had fled nuptial turmoil … and returned to the penitent generosity of her matchmaker.
At that same hour, in the bar of White’s Club, Bertrand Howard and Basil Trueblood sat at an out-of-the-way table, staring morosely into tumblers of Scotch.
“Just like that,” Howard said with bewilderment. “Not a word of warning. Just gone. Went to stay with a friend, she said. Truth be told, I didn’t know she had any friends.” He lifted his gaze to Trueblood, who shook his head in sympathy.
“Good riddance, I say,” Basil muttered, tossing back another drink of liquor. “Mine left me a damned note. Says she can’t live with a man who picks apart everything. I am a reasonable man, Howard, God knows. It’s not my fault the woman cannot suffer even the smallest criticism. She was always puckering up over something or other … and then her eyes would get all red and her nose would swell up like a strawberry … and she would make that annoying little ‘eek-eek’ sound whenever she cried. Well, it was enough to rile any sane and reasonable man”—he looked to Howard for confirmation—“wouldn’t you say?”
“Ohhh”—Howard came out of his reverie with a scowl and lifted his glass—“abs-solutely.”
For a while they just sat staring off into the distance, drinking, not speaking.
“To top it all,” Trueblood ventured miserably, “the woman made four spelling errors in the wretched note she left me. I’m probably well rid of her.”
“We’re well rid of them, all right. Wives are nothing but trouble.” After a moment Howard rubbed his face and sighed, “I just wish I knew where she had gone.”
A booming voice called their names, and they looked up to find Albert Everstone bearing down on them across the bar. The portly MP was red-faced and his neck veins were at full swell—he was more exercised than they had ever seen him. He rushed over to the table, flung himself into a chair, and snatched up Trueblood’s glass, downing the contents in one desperate gulp.
“What’s got you in such a lather, Everstone?” Trueblood demanded irritably.
“She’s gone, the wretched scattergoods!”
“Who is gone?” Howard sat straighter, scowling at him, then at Trueblood.
“My wife—Lady Spendthrift!” Everstone roared, flinching afterward from the stares his outburst brought their way. Lowering his voice to a pressured stream, he bent forward and slapped a folded note onto the table. “Got home a bit ago and found this propped on my empty dinner plate. Not a scrap of supper to be seen … just this note. And on brand-new paper!”
When they reached for it, he snatched it back and jammed it into his vest pocket. “The woman tried to spend me blind, I tell you. Always had her hand out. Money for food or replacing perfectly good linens or paying some worthless quack of a doctor, over a bit of nothing. Now she’s upped and left me. Gone.” He poured himself another drink in Trueblood’s glass and downed it.
The heat of the Scotch gradually drew the venom from his manner and his words. He sank back into his chair as the fact of his wife’s leaving was finally sinking in. His anger drained, leaving him genuinely shaken.
“Took just her clothes,” he murmured. “Didn’t even take the hot-water bottle I gave her last Christmas. I checked.” After a long moment his shoulders rounded and his voice lowered to a rasp. “Paid more’n nine shillings for that clay pig.”
Howard jerked his head toward Everstone and gave Trueblood an unsettled look. “His wife, too? Good Lord—it’s an epidemic.”
“What’s an epidemic?” Everstone looked up.
“Wives leaving. Mine did, and Trueblood’s, too. Now yours. And the worst is, we don’t even know where they’ve gone.”
“Well, I damn well know where mine went,” Everstone said irritably. “Hotfooted it straight back to Lady Matrimonia, she did. Said so in her note.”
“Back to Lady Antonia?” Howard murmured, the awful sense of it dawning. His gaze connected with Trueblood’s, and both pairs of eyes widened as the impact of their wives’ destination sank in.
“Lady Matrimonia giveth”—Trueblood groaned—“and Lady Matrimonia taketh away.”
The headlines that greeted Londoners the next morning ranged from the absurd to the erudite. But the one that was most eagerly awaited—from the paper that always seemed to beat the others to the story of the earl and the widow, Gaflinger’s Gazette—was simple but devastating:
THE LADY FORCED TO DEGRADING LABOR!
The notorious earl was not content with compromising Antonia Paxton and dragging the lady’s name through the scandal-mire, the article asserted. He continued to harass her, besieging her at her house, dragging her off the streets … demanding that she fulfill an ill-begotten wager that any gentleman of conscience would have forgotten the instant the question of the lady’s honor was raised in public.
Worse yet, the sources of this information were beyond reproach: a number of correspondents from leading newspapers, an MP, a Bank of London executive, and the scores of Londoners who had passed by Carr’s Emporium on the previous afternoon. The article related in lurid, moralizing detail how the good widow was put on degrading display in the shop windows, and lingered with outraged sympathy on how pale and drawn she appeared, and how bravely she held back her tears of shame.
The women of Paxton House read the Gaflinger’s account
and were speechless as Antonia entered the dining room for breakfast that morning. She felt their eyes searching her, and halted, checking her buttons, her hair, and her bustle with a frown of confusion.
“What is it? Have I forgotten something?” she asked.
“Are you sure you’re all right, Toni dear?” Aunt Hermione said with a worried look. “I should have stayed with you yesterday, I know, but I honestly thought—”
“What are you talking about?” Antonia poured herself a cup of tea at the sideboard and carried it to her chair at the table. She set it down and took the paper Eleanor offered her, frowning at the sight of that vile masthead. But her eyes widened when they fell on the article about her. As she read the outrageous account, she paled, her jaw loosened, and she sat down on her chair with a plop. The others exchanged worried looks as they watched her shock turn slowly to outrage.
“How dare they?” she erupted, cramming the paper into one hand and shaking it as if she could somehow dislodge and rearrange those hideous words by physical force. “Distortions, misinterpretations, and outright lies—every bit of it!”
“It is?” Pollyanna said, melting with a relief that was shared by the others around the table.
“Well, of course it is! You don’t honestly think Remington would be capable of such callous, ruthless—” She halted, reading in their faces that they had indeed thought it. It escaped her, momentarily, that she had thought it as well, and as recently as yesterday. Just now all she could think was that her ladies had worked side by side with him, entertained him, and shared their stories with him, and they should know better. Looking around at their wary gazes, she realized that if they believed such stuff just because it was printed in the wretched newspapers, then how much more would other people, who had never set eyes on him?
“Remington Carr is most certainly an arrogant, devious, and relentless man,” she declared, coming to his defense. “But he would never force a woman into brute labor … without a very good reason.”
Antonia’s sentiment, however, was not shared by the occupants of London’s leading residence. A number of papers bearing accounts of the earl’s ungentlemanly behavior had found their way into the family apartments of Buckingham Palace. Try as they might, there was no way the queen’s daughter, secretaries, and personal staff could keep her from seeing at least one of them.
“Wha-a-at?” she roared, coming up out of her chair. “He’s done what?”
“Apparently he’s insisted the lady fulfill her part of that ‘Woman Wager,’ ” her secretary said, grimacing at the sight of his sovereign’s rising ire. “He has put her to work. Men’s work, according to some; brute labor, according to others.”
“The ignoble churl.” Victoria strode to the window and narrowed her eyes as she looked out over the busy courtyard, as if to pierce the distance and rebuke the offending earl. “He continues with his hideous campaign to revile and degrade both that unfortunate lady and all other members of her sex by association. It would seem our wishes and our expectations regarding his nuptials are being ignored.” Her round face took on the aspect of rose granite.
“He had best beware … or he shall find the rope we give him just long enough to hang him.”
Promptly at nine o’clock that morning, a cab drew up before Paxton House, and the driver announced that he was there to convey the lady of the house into the City. Antonia deliberated a much shorter time than previous mornings before changing into a tailored gray skirt and fitted jacket and selecting her best black velvet hat and matching Swedish kid gloves. Aunt Hermione declined to accompany her, saying there were too many things that demanded attention at home, and so Antonia entered the cab alone.
But inside that hire coach she found Remington waiting with a satisfied look that made her cheeks heat. “Only an hour,” he said, glancing at his watch and tucking it back into his vest pocket. “Considerably better than yesterday,” he added, dropping his voice to an intimate murmur. “I do believe we’re making progress.”
“Don’t count on it, your lordship,” she said, straightening her spine. “I simply don’t think either your reputation or mine could withstand another embarrassing incident just now.”
“Well, there is a way to be sure there are no further incidents, Antonia,” he said, letting his eyes drift over her.
“Indeed there is,” she said tartly, knowing just where that comment was leading. “I could move to Pigworth on Taunton and wear a bag over my head in public.”
He threw his head back and laughed—a free, deep-chest sort of sound that caught Antonia by surprise as it invaded her skin and hummed along her nerves. She couldn’t hold back her smile, though she did manage to turn it toward the window. When he sobered, he settled a searching gaze on her.
“Marry me, Antonia,” he said quietly.
She looked at him and found him relaxed against the seat. Only his eyes hinted at the intensity behind that question.
“No,” she said, turning away to look through the smudged cab window. For some reason she felt a need to soften that rejection. “Marriage has nothing to offer a woman in my situation.”
“Nothing?” he said with a hint of exasperation.
“Nothing I don’t already have.”
“Except passion,” he said with a sensuous husk to his voice that made her very glad she wasn’t looking at him. After a moment she heard him expel a heavy breath that might have been either disappointment or disgust. “And, of course, protection.”
“Neither of which I need.”
They had come full circle, and in a mercifully brief time they arrived at the offices of Carr Enterprises. She escaped the tension of the cab, only to find herself thrust into a very different kind of tension inside the offices. The casual air of the other day was gone; everything was brusque and quick this morning. There were decisions to be made and deals to be transacted. Antonia felt a subtle change in Remington, a watchfulness, a tension, as if he were somehow at the edge of his senses, continually poised on the brink of reaction.
Markham and Hallowford and the others she had seen yesterday asked to have a word with Remington straightaway. He informed them he would be leaving soon, to escort Mrs. Paxton out to New Market and the site of the Sutton Mills construction; but they prevailed upon him to delay his trip. There were several urgent matters concerning the Sutton Mills transaction that required his personal attention. He thought a moment, looking at Antonia, then came up with an alternative plan. He escorted her down the hall and introduced her to another kind of work for the morning: learning the indispensable new skill of typewriting. He assigned a young man named Collingwood to instruct her, then disappeared into his office with his managers.
Antonia sat staring at the mechanical contraption before her with a dubious expression. It was a black metal box, cut away on one side to reveal a maze of long finger-like levers that were fitted with round tabs bearing the letters of the alphabet. Collingwood leaned over her shoulder, fitted his long fingers to the “keys,” and punched several of those tabs. Levers jumped up and smacked a paper wrapped around a rolling pin, and in a moment she was staring at her name in neat black letters: MRS. PAXTON. She smiled and looked up at Collingwood.
“Can I try?”
He showed her how to press the keys, then how to place her fingers on the proper letters, and asked her to key some additional words. Out of her deepest recesses came words and she typed them, once, twice, then again and again, each time with more confidence and precision. After a few moments she paused and held up the paper to find that she had typed the words “MARRY ME” fourteen times.
Collingwood sputtered and reddened and she shrank and blushed … and snatched the paper out of the machine. “I-I think I should try again. Something else.”
He nodded and nervously began to talk as he fitted clean paper into his machine. “They say the queen hates these machines … won’t allow typewriting in her sight. But, it’s the coming thing, you know. They’re even training women to be typewr
iters, now. The government has a program to teach young ladies to do it. They say women have good fingers for it—what with all the fine work they do and such. And Carr Enterprises is right in the thick of it—we have a school for typewriters, too.”
Antonia typed “YOU DO?” by pressing one key at a time. She pointed and he read it, then smiled.
“We certainly do. A number of the factory girls take the classes after work each day.”
She typed: COMMENDABLE.
And he laughed, delighted. They carried on that rather unusual conversation for a few minutes, with Antonia’s responses getting longer and more involved. And finally Collingwood decided that she was a good candidate for real training. He showed her how to hold her hands and which keys to strike with which fingers, then gave her several words and phrases to practice without looking at her hands.
The minutes slipped by and quickly became one hour … then two. Antonia was so intent on her work that she scarcely heard it when young Collingwood announced it was time for his dinner and excused himself. On the periphery of her senses she detected a drop in the noise level in the offices, but dismissed it. Minutes later she heard a faint click and felt a draft of air; the door had closed. Then someone touched her shoulders and she gave a startled cry.
“No, don’t let me disturb you,” Remington said, spreading his hands over her shoulders, resting them there. It was an unusual touch, intensely personal yet devoid of sexual content. “Collingwood says you’re coming along very well.”
“He’s a good teacher,” she said, trying to contain her runaway heart. “It’s a little like playing the piano, only here you make words and sentences instead of melodies. It’s … interesting.” She both heard and felt the rumble of his laugh, and realized he was leaning against her chair. She felt him sliding down, probably to his knees.
“I can make it even more interesting, sweetheart.” His low murmur near her ear set her tender fingertips tingling. He slid his hands down her arms and lifted her hands to the keys again.