by Betina Krahn
He didn’t have to look very far.
In the corner, at the very same table where he had been recruited into their mad revenge scheme, sat five of the six men who had all but ruined his life.
His face was flinty as he strolled to the center of the bar and smacked the polished wood with an open palm, sending the clap vibrating through the room. Those intrepid enough to turn and glower glimpsed the violent glint in his eye and quickly thought better of confronting him. He ordered his usual brandy and tossed it back, savoring its potent afterburn.
Basil Trueblood lifted his gaze from the brown study of his drink and caught sight of him. He reddened and grabbed Carter Woolworth’s arm, then Albert Everstone’s. The sight of him positively galvanized them. They lurched to their feet and stumbled toward him. Remington braced and doubled up both fists, anticipating the delicious surge of satisfaction he would feel upon landing that first punch.
“Landon—where have you been?” Woolworth said frantically, then lowered his voice to a forceful whisper when several men turned to stare. “You’ve got to do something!”
“It’s as much your fault as ours,” Everstone declared, widening his stance to steady himself.
“If you had just married her and kept her on a short chain, none of this would have happened,” Trueblood whined, glancing nervously over his shoulder.
“We cannot go to the courts without a public scandal,” Bertrand Howard hissed with a desperate look. “And they have no family to appeal to—you’re our only hope!”
Remington stared at their drink-flushed faces, stunned, his anger momentarily deflected by their bizarre charges.
“It’s my fault? What in bloody hell are you talking about?” he growled, straightening, his shoulders swelling. “I ought to thrash the lot of you within an inch of your worthless lives for what you’ve done to me—invading my house in the dead of night and turning my life upside down—”
He smacked his glass down on the bar and made to leave, but they closed ranks around him, and Everstone got up the courage to grab his arm. Once he had it, not even Remington’s steeliest glare could make him release it.
“Listen here, Landon,” Woolworth said desperately, “you’ve got to help us. The Dragon’s got our wives, and she won’t let us talk to them or even see them.”
“She admitted they were in her house. But when we tried to haul them home, she tossed us straight out!”
“You’ve locked horns with her before—you can find a way to make her listen!”
“They’re our wives, goddammit! They belong to us!”
“Turned ’em against us, she did. And they up and left us.”
“Let me get this straight,” Remington said, anger outstripping his disbelief. “Your wives have left you? And it’s somehow my fault?” He jerked free of Everstone’s grip and vibrated with the urge to plant his aching fists in the middle of their strained and bloated faces. “You’re mad—stark raving lunatics—the lot of you! I should have known two months ago—the minute you started blathering on about dragons and marriage traps—”
As he said the words “marriage” and “trap” in the same breath, he suffered an intense revisitation of the morning’s argument with Antonia. She had gestured to some women he had never seen before—young women—and had spoken of their miserable marriages. She said they had fled overwork and maltreatment, callousness and indifference, in the marriages she had made for them.
“Good God,” he said, staring at them, “they were your wives.” As they looked at each other in confusion, he realized that part of Antonia’s anger and distrust of marriage had come from the way these wretches had treated the women she had married off to them. And he knew if he didn’t leave immediately—now—that he was going to do exactly what he had imagined doing when he set foot in the bar: plant his fists right in the middle of their infuriating faces.
“Well, I’d say you got exactly what you wanted, gents,” he snarled. “You got rid of a bit of unwanted baggage and got your precious freedom back in the bargain.” Shoving them roughly aside, he strode for the door.
They looked at one another for a minute, torn between red-eared chagrin and impotent fury. In the same moment each of them made the same decision, and together they scrambled for the door. Racing up the steps and into the lobby, they saw the porter handing Remington his hat and walking stick.
“Landon!” Everstone called out. “You can’t jus’ walk out on us!”
“Oh, but I can,” Remington said with a furious gleam in his eye, donning his hat. “Watch me.”
He stepped out into the street. And as the doorman stood holding the door for them, thinking they intended to exit as well, they did just that. Rushing out into the street, they spotted Remington headed for the cab stand two blocks down and lumbered after him, calling his name.
He heard them coming and quickened his step. Swinging up into an open cab door, he snarled his address to the driver. But before the door closed and the driver could get under way, his pursuers seized the horses and prevented them from moving.
“Drive on!” Remington ordered the driver.
“Dammit, Landon!” Everstone shouted. “You’re to blame for the entire thing!”
“You’ve wrecked our marriages—you owe us!” Woolworth declared.
“You didn’t marry her and put her out of business. Now we’re paying for it!” Richard Searle gave the cab door a punishing thump with his fist. “Come down out of there and talk to us man to man!”
“Driver—there’s a tenner in it for you if you get this cab moving now!” Remington snarled. With added incentive the driver slapped the reins sharply and the coach lurched forward, sending Howard and Trueblood—by the horses—skittering out of the way.
The five abandoned husbands stood in the street, panting, shouting, and shaking fists as the vehicle disappeared from sight. Then as their outbursts thinned and died on the silence, they wilted and stumbled back to the club, looking as if the stuffing had just been knocked out of them.
Behind them, in a darkened doorway near the streetlamp where they had besieged Remington’s cab, Rupert Fitch stood with his yellow pad exposed. He checked his list of names to be sure he had them all: Everstone, Woolworth, Trueblood, Howard, and Searle. But in truth, there was only one name that mattered: Remington Carr, Earl of Landon.
Fitch grinned to himself. Wagers with voluptuous widows, midnight liaisons gone awry, virulent suffragette demonstrations, and now a juicy tale of marital carnage: the wrecked marriages of prominent men and accusations of responsibility. Who would have guessed three months ago that his intense and speculative scrutiny of the unorthodox earl’s doings would bear such fruit? The man was a veritable gold mine—a whole career’s worth of scandals and outrages walking around on two feet!
Fitch congratulated himself as he tucked his pad away and swaggered down the street. In his mind he began planning how he would spend the bonus his editor had promised if Gaflinger’s sales jumped yet another five percent. He grinned. A few wrecked marriages ought to be good for at least seven.
Maybe he’d buy a new hat.
The offices of Carr Enterprises were ominously silent the next noon. There was not a typewriter “clack,” a squeak of pen, or a rustle of paper to be heard. Words were exchanged only in whispers, and everyone seemed to be walking on tiptoes.
Remington sat gazing at one calamity and listening to another. On his desk was the front page of Gaflinger’s, bearing the headline:
SOCIETY MARRIAGES ON ROCKS—LANDON TO BLAME!
And standing before his desk was Markham, telling him that not only had the Sutton Mills loan been denied, but Carr Enterprises had been put on the “short list”—categorized with firms and concerns considered to be unacceptable risks. His stomach felt as if it were being crumpled in a fist, and his eyes felt hot and grainy from the sleepless and regrettably sober night he had just passed.
Things could scarcely get any worse. There was a crowd of outraged Methodists outside
his offices all morning, protesting his flagrant sin and immorality. The building owner had paid him a call and insisted that Carr Enterprises sell back its lease immediately, and now there were news writers crawling along the building ledges, shouting questions at him through his office windows. His social reputation was in tatters, his financial standing would soon be lying in the gutter, and the scandals being attached to his name were enough to blacken the once honorable title of Landon for generations to come.
Purely hypothetical generations, he realized; no woman in her right mind would consent to bear children for a woman-attacking, suffragette-enraging, marriage-wrecking beast, even if it did entitle her to be called “m’lady.”
But with all that, the thing that weighed heaviest on his heart was that he wouldn’t be seeing Antonia … not today, nor tomorrow, nor perhaps ever again.
She didn’t like him, she didn’t trust him, and didn’t need him. And in the four days she had spent in his world, he hadn’t managed to change her opinion of him, or of marriage to him, in the least. To make it worse, the killing stroke to his hopes had been supplied by his own dear, dotty old uncle, who had managed to progress from “second childhood” to “second adolescence” and had fallen passionately in love with her aunt and eloped after only a three-day acquaintance.
Three days. He sighed. Things were apparently a lot less complicated at age seventy. People just got down to business and fell in love, and didn’t let little things like pride, personal history, or social philosophy get in the way.
He slowly straightened and his eyes widened. They fell in love.
A house falling on him couldn’t have had more impact.
He had fallen in love, too. Hopelessly, deliriously, inexplicably in love with Antonia Paxton. That’s what this peculiar malady was that had him raging between fever and chills from minute to minute: love. He wasn’t sure how he knew; he just knew … with every nerve in his aching body.
He buried his face in his hands and groaned. Oh, God, he was in trouble. He was in love for the first time in his life—and with a woman who didn’t trust him enough to believe him if he said it was Tuesday!
And in eight short days, when his wedding announcement failed to appear in The Times, the queen was going to have his head on a platter … or something equally memorable and instructive to the lower orders.
Eight days, as it happened, was a rather optimistic estimate. That same afternoon the queen’s keen ears detected the low hum of scandal vibrating through her personal audiences at Buckingham Palace. In an unprecedented move she withdrew to her sitting room and demanded that her secretary procure for her a copy of that scandal sheet, Gaflinger’s. He didn’t have to go far; there was a copy in the footman’s boot, another in the undersecretary’s desk, and a third being passed from pillar to post in the kitchens.
Victoria had him hold it up for her, so that she wouldn’t have to touch it, and donned her spectacles to peruse the headlines. She blanched. “Read it to me,” she demanded. “I want to hear every single word.”
Her color returned and deepened as she learned that several “leading gentlemen” had accosted the Earl of Landon in the street the previous night and accused him of wrecking their marriages. No names were given, apart from the evil earl’s, but it was revealed that two of the men were prominent young lords and one was a well-known MP and Knight of the Garter. The queen’s royal person puffed with outrage, and before he had quite finished the reading, she thrust to her feet and sent immediately for the prime minister.
Discovering he was in love was such a distracting and disorienting experience that it took Remington a while to recover his equilibrium. It was a measure of just how far off his game he was, that it wasn’t until afternoon that he realized he didn’t need a good reason to see her; any old excuse would do to get him inside the door. And those idiots last night had handed him the perfect way to get her attention. He could claim to be there to plead their case … and in doing so, plead his own.
On the way to her house he rehearsed several opening gambits and straightened his tie at least a dozen times. By the time he descended from his carriage and reached for the familiar brass knocker, his mouth was dry and his palms were damp. When there was no response, he imagined old Hoskins standing on the other side of the door with a belligerent glare, and set the side of his fist to the door.
When the door finally swung open, it was Eleanor who greeted him. Her eyes were puffy, her shoulders were rounded, and there was an air of exhaustion about her.
“Your lordship.” She glanced anxiously over her shoulder.
“I’m afraid you’ve come at a bad time.”
“I have to see her, Eleanor.” He sounded a bit too desperate in his own ears and spoke louder. “And I intend to stand here and pound on the door until she sees me. I ran into a few of her former ‘victims’ last night and they told me that their wives … had left …” He scowled, realizing that his words were having no effect.
“It’s Cleo!” Eleanor blurted out, tears spilling down her cheeks. “She’s dying!”
Remington felt as if he’d been sucker punched. His head snapped back and he found it difficult to draw breath. “How? What happened?”
“A stroke, the doctor says. It happened just after you left yesterday. Lady Toni has been with her all night … won’t leave her side.”
Remington pushed the door back himself and entered, heading straight for the stairs at the rear of the hall. Eleanor trotted along after him, directing him to Cleo’s room. In the hallway he passed Molly and Maude and Prudence and Pollyanna. Each met the distress in his gaze with shared misery and reached out to give his hand a squeeze as he passed.
In Cleo’s room he found Antonia bending over Cleo, bathing her face. For a moment he stared at the old lady’s small form in the middle of the large bed. Without the liveliness of her eyes and the restless, birdlike energy of her movements, she looked gaunt and drawn, every bit of her more than eighty years. Emotions deep inside him wrenched painfully tight.
Antonia heard someone moving behind her, straightened as if her back were aching, and looked around. She froze at the sight of him.
“Antonia,” he said softly. She was wearing the same dress she had worn yesterday, and she looked as tired and rumpled as it did. It was all he could do to keep from pulling her into his arms.
“What are you doing here?” she whispered in choked tones, searching his face, unable to believe her senses. She was terrified of moving, afraid of discovering that he was only a hysterical vision conjured by her pain and longing. Just the minute before, she had been wishing with all her heart that she could see him, and touch him, and feel that precious surge of sensual energy that he always generated in her.
“How is she?” he asked, ignoring her question. He paused by the foot of the bed, then slowly worked his way up the side of it to Antonia.
“There’s no change,” she said just above a whisper. “She hasn’t awakened.”
Every step he took seemed to force air into her chest, to make her breathe deeper, and to pour much-needed strength into her wilted spirit. His eyes were soft in the dim light, and the subtle spice of his soap mingled with the scent of his starched shirt in her head. He looked so genuinely concerned, so caring, that her knees weakened and she had to work to remain upright.
“Are you all right?” he said, putting out a hand to steady her. “When did you sleep last? Have you had anything to eat?”
She shook her head, nodded, then looked up, confused. His touch and her hunger for the solidity and surety it offered combined to overcome her pride. It felt as if she had been here forever, worrying, praying, tending Cleo. And now that her spirits were at low ebb, he appeared and all she could think was that she wanted to curl up against him and feel his warmth all around and through her.
“Toni,” he said softly. And then because he couldn’t help himself, because he was aching inside, too, and because he needed to touch her as much as she needed to be touched just t
hen, he took the risk of a lifetime. He reached out to cradle her face in his hands. He held his breath.
And she didn’t pull away.
Her eyes closed as she absorbed his touch, letting the solace of it pour into her aching heart.
“Why don’t you get some rest? There are plenty of others to sit with her.”
“No, I want to stay. I need to stay,” she whispered, feeling tears seeping between her lashes.
“Then I’ll stay, too.”
He left no room for negotiation. He simply stayed through the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, watching, waiting with her. He helped to bathe old Cleo’s face and raise her head for a drink of water. And as night came on, he removed his coat and spelled Antonia in the chair by the bed, holding the old lady’s cool, reedy hand in his.
Unconsciously, he adopted Antonia’s curious habit of speaking to the old woman, despite the fact that she was half-deaf and asleep. He told her about the new shows and plays being staged in the Vauxhall and Covent Gardens and promised to take her to one when she woke up. He reminded her that she had a lot of responsibilities; memories to dust and stories to tell. And as the night deepened and gloom settled over the chamber, he glanced at Antonia and told Cleo that she was worrying Lady Toni half to death and that she’d better stop this nonsense and wake up, so Lady Toni could get some rest.
It was a good thing Antonia had her arm around the post at the foot of the bed; without its support she would have slid to the floor as his words weakened her knees. He saw her wilt and had his arms around her in a minute, transferring her dependence from the bedpost to his arms.
“Lean on me, sweetheart.” He pulled her close and held her, giving her his strength and, in a more subtle way, offering her whatever else she might need from him. Neither heard Eleanor slip out and close the door behind her, leaving them alone.