The Last Bachelor

by Betina Krahn

  “Ummm. Much.” She slid her hands over his chest, admiring her ring, then transferring that admiration to the smoothly muscled skin beneath it. She kissed his chest lightly, then with soft, lingering strokes of her tongue.

  He rolled onto his back, pulling her atop him, and as his hands slid over her bare back and buttocks, he murmured hotly, “Come here, Countess, and let me thank you once again for making a married man of me.”

  Epilogue

  D E C E M B E R, 1 8 8 3

  Landon House was richly decorated for the Christmas season, resplendent with fragrant pine boughs and crimson velvet ribbons, and warmed by the light and the scent of beeswax candles. A quiet evening’s entertainment was under way in the great drawing room, while Phipps and his staff laid out a simple buffet in the dining room.

  Antonia sat in her favorite crimson tea gown—the one that still covered her greatly expanded stomach—listening to Victoria Bentley’s strong, clear voice leading the others in Christmas carols. In recent months she had cut back on her entertaining a great deal—her sole concession to impending motherhood. She glanced around the room and felt her heart swell at the sight of her Paxton House ladies sitting like aged cherubs among their other guests. She had insisted they continue on at Paxton House in her absence, though in truth they were at her house in Hyde Park nearly as much as they were at home.

  There had been a number of changes since her marriage a year and a half before. Cleo had finally joined her beloved Fox Royal, after another severe stroke the previous winter. Old Hoskins had decided to retire, on generous pension, only to become the caretaker in a monastery. The ladies of Paxton House had taken in three more widows, and now Eleanor and Pollyanna oversaw the day-to-day running of the house. Paddington and Hermione had decided to travel and spent the better part of the last winter on the Mediterranean. This year they were waiting until after Christmas and the imminent birth of Antonia’s baby before making the journey to their rented villa in the south of France.

  Remington slipped into the room, spotted Antonia, and tiptoed to the back of the group to join her on the settee. He put an arm around her and pulled her close, giving her a lingering kiss. His lips were that odd combination of outer cold and inner heat that spoke of his long ride home in an ill-heated carriage. He had spent the day visiting his Sutton Mills project and whispered an apology for the delay.

  “That narrow bridge … traffic was terrible,” he whispered, taking advantage of the fact that the others hadn’t seen him yet to nuzzle her ear.

  “Ummm. I shall have to speak to my local MP about the disgraceful condition of this nation’s roads,” she said with a hum of contentment. Then she glanced at Albert Everstone, who was downing yet another glass of champagne. “Later, however. How were the mills faring?”

  “Your investment is doing splendidly. With the new machinery they’ll double production easily.” His eyes glowed as he toyed with a strand of hair from the nape of her neck. “Clever woman, deciding to strike a deal with that handsome fellow from Carr Enterprises and loan him the money to clinch the deal.”

  “Clever man, agreeing with your wife’s insistence that she keep her property in her own name and handle her own investments. She’s made you money, you know.”

  He chuckled and glanced around before claiming her lips with a good bit more than fiduciary interest. “She’s made me more than money,” he whispered, staring into her eyes. “She’s made me happy.”

  And that happiness had been responsible for Remington’s wholehearted support of the Married Women’s Property Act, passed a year ago. He was still working to provide support for women’s suffrage and emancipation, though with an entirely different motive from before.

  She caught sight of Phipps standing in the doorway, scouring the room for her, and waved silently to him. Remington sat straighter and released all but her hand as the butler hurried over with a look of dismay.

  “I’m so sorry, my lord.” He wrung his hands. “But there is someone here to see you. I’ve told her you are busy, but she is most insistent.”

  Remington’s eyes narrowed at the word “her.” “Who is it, Phipps?”

  The butler winced. “Miss Hillary Fenton, sir.”

  “Damn.” Remington set his jaw and made to rise, but Antonia grabbed his sleeve and held him back.

  “Remmy dear,” she said in a falsetto voice. “I’ll handle it.”

  Soon she was floating through the center hall toward the morning room. Shortly, Hillary arrived—in a state, as usual. One glimpse of Antonia and she halted just inside the room. “It’s you. I specifically asked to see Remington.” She huffed irritably and put away the handkerchief she had ready.

  “Good to see you, too, Hillary. What is it this time?” Antonia said with a tart smile that was more warning than pleasantry.

  “It’s the Christmas money. The settlement-house roof developed a major leak, and we had to use the Christmas money to fix it.” Since Remington’s marriage Hillary had been converted to the cause of downtrodden women and had thrown herself body and soul into the redeeming work of helping the poor, unfortunate women who had fallen prey to the appetites of men. She was a member of the board of the Magdalen Society. “Our funds are so short we can barely provide food, much less a decent Christmas dinner. And some of the women have children. Oh …” Out came the handkerchief after all, and she dabbed at her eyes. “It breaks my heart to see the little ones going without.”

  Her sidelong look—half-accusing, half-imploring—had been perfected through long years of employing feminine wiles to get what she wanted from men. This time it fell to Antonia’s middle. Antonia was going to be a mother, it said. How could she bear to think of any child in need?

  Antonia stood there, feeling protectively and motherly and embarrassingly blessed by happiness and good fortune—which was exactly what Hillary had intended. She usually drew a hard line with Hillary and Carlotta and their theatrics and demands, and Remington was content to let her handle them, woman to woman. But it was Christmas. And the thought of any child in need was difficult to bear.

  “How much?” Antonia said, planting her hands on what was left of her waist.

  Hillary brightened instantly. “Five hundred should do.”

  “Five hundred?” Antonia gasped. “That’s enough to buy a dozen children clothes and food for a year.”

  “Yes, it is,” Hillary said with a look that, for the first time in Antonia’s memory, held a genuine bit of warmth and concern. “And I’ll see that it does.”

  Antonia sent Phipps for her bank book and wrote out a draft.

  “Thank you, Antonia,” Hillary said warmly, before retreating behind her inner walls again. “Well, I must be off and leave you to your precious party.”

  As the sound of Phipps letting Hillary out the door drifted back down the hall, Remington stepped into the room.

  “That a girl … be tough with them. Let them know they can’t wheedle and manipulate and push you around,” he said, quoting her. As she glowered at him, he chuckled and came to take her into his arms and kiss the scowl from her face.

  “She caught me in a weak spot … children and Christmas,” she said a bit sheepishly. She raised her mouth to his and sighed as he kissed her lavishly. “If she shows up next year on December twentieth, I’ll let you handle her.”

  He grinned and escorted her back toward the drawing room, feeling a bit mischievous. “You know, I’ve been thinking,” he teased. “Hillary is a nice name for a little girl …”

  Antonia stopped in the center hall and grabbed him by both sleeves, scorching him with the fire in her eyes. “Not Hillary!” she demanded, with such force that he burst out laughing.

  “Well, we’d better think of a name soon. She’ll be here before we know it.”

  “I already have a name.” She released one sleeve and touched her mounded stomach. “I’ve been meaning to bring it up. It’s not very fashionable, but it has wonderful associations for me … and I think for you, too
.”

  “Oh?” He drew her into his arms again. “And what name is that?”

  “Cleo,” she said, then bit her lip, watching his reaction. The sudden luminosity to his eyes made her catch her breath. And for a brief moment they felt a curious, glowing warmth waft through their senses and wrap around their shoulders. Memories, the past, dragged across the strings of their joined hearts.

  “Cleo it is, sweetheart,” he said softly.

  And he kissed her.

  Author's Note

  I hope you enjoyed Antonia’s and Remington’s story. If the substance of their conflict seemed oddly current to you, it may be because, in a very real sense, history repeats itself. It was in the middle-class drawing rooms of London, in the 1880’s and 1890’s that the question of a woman’s rightful place in the world was first asked.

  Discussion of “The Woman Question” was prompted in part by an increasing number of well-born women in England who found themselves raised to the Victorian expectation of woman as “wife, homemaker, and mother,” but without any prospect of marriage and with no means of support. As Antonia states, well more than half a million women in England found themselves in just such straits. The reasons for this state of affairs were a shortage of eligible men and an increasing reluctance toward marriage among middle- and even upper-class men. Marriage for such men would have meant trading a comfortable bachelor existence for the restrictions and comparative penury of marriage; their time and salaries would have had to stretch to meet the needs of a wife and, eventually, children.

  Thus, embarrassingly large numbers of respectable women who had been indoctrinated in the Victorian ideal of womanhood were left adrift in society. The advertisements Antonia read from Cornhill were indeed taken from old issues of Cornhill Magazine. All are regrettably genuine. Notices and ads seeking employment or merely “a place to sleep and a bit of bread” were a regular feature of the newspapers and magazines and are to modern ears pathetic in their appeals. Presumably, claims of being uneducated, abandoned, and unable to do anything of value were meant to evoke pity in their readers. I am indebted to my sister, Sharon Stone, head of the English Department at Granville High School in Ohio, who uncovered these excerpts while doing research for her master’s thesis and generously shared them with me. It was, in fact, her research into Victorian women writers and our discussion of the debate ignited over these “surplus women” that generated the idea for this book.

  In popular publications and in scholarly tracts of the 1880’s, questions were raised about the morality of women working outside the home and on ways these unmarriageable women could be made self-supporting. Just what—politicians, social theorists, and reformers asked—could these surplus females actually do? Their proposals for appropriate “female labor” run the gamut from simple-minded to chilling.

  The 1880’s-90’s and 1980’s-90’s bear yet other striking similarities. Both eras feature a woman of dignity and bearing sitting on an embattled British throne—and waiting in the wings of both is an heir whom the public and the media fear will destroy the monarchy. I have depicted Queen Victoria as my research shows her to have been at this stage of her life: reclusive, obsessed with her widowhood, and—for a female monarch—surprisingly hostile to women in any role outside the home. She actively opposed higher education for women, and enlisted her prime ministers in the fight against women in the professions. She insisted that a woman’s lot was to be a wife and mother, yet paradoxically bore a great distaste for marriage—called it “a trap which young girls would never allow themselves to fall into, if they knew what was in store for them.”

  Another shared feature of both eras is the eager and sometimes unscrupulous British press. The great newspapers of the day were largely reputable and printed news for the middle and upper classes. But there were numerous weeklies, journals, and “ha’penny papers” (precursors of the tabloid journalism rampant in Britain today) that catered to the burgeoning “underclass” of readers—working-class people who were becoming literate as a result of the Elementary Education Act of 1870. But, of course, love of scandal knows no boundaries of class or rank, and these scandal sheets found their way into the poorest tenement and into the palace itself. The despicable Rupert Fitch has real-life counterparts on both sides of the Atlantic today.

  As to the heart of the story: the views of men’s and women’s roles and of marriage are purely mine. I have long believed that men and women have much more in common than not. And while our biological and social roles often seem to take us in different directions, we are brought together again and bonded to one another in marriage … sharing strengths and weaknesses, experiences and abilities, sorrows, dreams, and hopes. It is in the grace of a good and loving marriage that we can find the encouragement and the freedom to risk and to grow … to become that which is written in every fiber of our beings … that which we are meant to be.

  The Last Bachelor

  © 1994 Betina Krahn

  ISBN: 0553565222

  BANTAM

  Ed♥n