How to Survive a Scandal

by Samara Parish

  “This is ridiculous. I am a married lady in charge of a household. I delegate. I do not do. That’s what the lady of the house is for.”

  At some point in the early hours of the morning while he’d been lying in bed thinking about her, he’d anticipated her response.

  He took a step closer to her. “A married lady of the house does a whole host of other things.” He grazed her arm with the back of his hand, flinching as desire coursed through him. His cock throbbed as she shivered—a confounding sign that whatever this damnable feeling was, he wasn’t alone in it. He barely managed to perform his next line. “If you want to fill a traditional role, just give me the word. Otherwise, the roster is here.”

  It was a bluff—but she didn’t know that. Her eyes widened in outrage. At him? Or how she felt? He let go of her, and she immediately stepped back.

  “You are a cur.”

  He winked, hopefully convincingly, and retrieved the package he’d left on her desk, handing it to her. “I found this book in the library.” That was a complete fabrication. He’d gone into town first thing to purchase a copy of Mrs. Baker’s Cookery and Cleaning Guide for the Modern Household. “Enjoy your day being useful, my lady.”

  As he turned and walked toward the door that separated their bedrooms, the book sailed past his ear, crashing into the wall.

  “Would you like help?” Cassandra sat on the edge of the long bench that ran through the middle of the kitchen, swinging her legs and holding out a stain-covered cap.

  Amelia shook her head. The ill-fitting, coarsely spun work dress Benedict had given her was bad enough; she wouldn’t stuff her curls into a filthy headpiece.

  “I don’t need help, thank you very much.” Benedict had accused her of being useless, and goodness, it made her blood boil. “Good-for-nothing. Pointless. Of no worth other than the marriage I arranged.” Her father had thrown those insults at her time and time again. To have them echoed here, of all places, was intolerable.

  So she would show him. She would prove him wrong. She would make the best blasted pie he had ever tasted, and he would realize that Lady Amelia Crofton—now Asterly—was the furthest thing from useless.

  She stared at the pots hanging from the wall and wondered exactly what was meant by “medium to large.”

  “Have you ever cooked a pie before?” Cassandra asked.

  “No, but there are instructions. I can follow instructions.”

  “It’s called a recipe.”

  “I can follow a recipe.” With two hands, she lifted the cast-iron pot off its hook. The crash was loud as it fell to the benchtop. The darned thing was heavier than it looked.

  She hefted it onto the stove top. Now what?

  “You’ll need to add more wood to the stove,” Cassandra said.

  Right. If it wasn’t bad enough that she had no idea what she was doing, there was a witness to her incompetence. Not that a lack of cooking skills was frowned on in her circles. But if she could avoid looking like a fool, she tended to take that option.

  “Of course. I’m just checking to make sure the pot fits first.” The instructions didn’t include how to add wood to a stove. She surveyed the room, hands on her hips.

  Cassandra sighed, jumped off the table, and grabbed several logs from the metal box against the wall. Opening the stove door, she tossed them inside. The flames under the stove grew. She turned to Amelia. “Didn’t you ever make jam when you were my age?”

  “No.”

  “Cookies?”

  “No.”

  “Scrambled eggs?”

  Amelia sighed. “I can’t say that I’ve ever been in a kitchen before today.”

  Cassandra hopped back onto the bench. “What did you do when you were young?”

  “I did the same things that I do now—wrote letters, played piano, embroidered.” There was no food in the kitchen, just pots and pans, knives and towels.

  Where in heavens was the food kept if not in the kitchen?

  “What are you looking for?”

  Amelia handed her the instructions.

  “Larders,” Cassandra said, pointing to two doors at the end of the room. “I’ll take the dry larder. You take the wet.” Together they collected all the ingredients needed to make the meal, piling them on the center bench. Amelia picked up the butter.

  The instructions called for a quarter pound of butter. How was she supposed to measure a quarter pound? She shrugged and tossed the entire slab into the saucepan on the stove.

  Cassandra continued to pepper her with questions.

  “Did you climb trees?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Go fishing?”

  Amelia turned to the slab of meat in front of her, the smell making her queasy. “Cassandra, I’m a lady. Ladies don’t climb trees or fish.” Or cook, really.

  “But you weren’t always a lady. You must have been a child at some point.”

  “Stop your questions and tell me what to do next.”

  Her childhood did not bear thinking about. She had been in duchess training from the moment she could walk and talk. She’d never much minded the childhood she’d missed out on because the reward was worth it—but now she’d had neither a childhood nor a title, and that was a bitter, bitter pill.

  “Use this knife,” Cassandra said, handing a long blade to her.

  Amelia held the large kitchen knife awkwardly in both hands and tried to saw through the lamb, but the meat kept moving. Resigning herself, she held the meat still with her left hand, almost dry retching at the cold, sticky texture.

  She held up her fingers and shuddered. He would pay for this.

  Enjoy being useful.

  The nerve. Well, he had a surprise coming. She would make this dratted pie, clean the dratted banisters, do the laundry, and when her things arrived, she would sell some of her jewelry and disappear. It would be a shame to lose any piece from her collection, but it was better than being forced to do manual labor.

  She noticed the smell of acrid smoke just as Cassandra gasped and jumped down from the bench toward the stovetop. The butter in the pan caught fire a second later.

  Amelia grabbed Cassandra and shoved her away from the flames. The black smoke coming off the pan stung her eyes. Luckily, the fire was small and confined to the pot.

  “I am going to kill your brother,” Amelia said through gritted teeth as she grabbed the kettle of water.

  “Don’t!”

  But it was too late. Amelia turned around at the shriek, but she’d already tipped the kettle. There was a roar as the fire ballooned and droplets of flame shot away from the pan.

  The pain in her shoulder was extraordinary as fire scorched her dress. A lock of hair that hung loose caught alight. Without thinking, Amelia grabbed at the small lick of flame by her head, unprepared for the searing agony of her hand.

  “Aaaahhhh!”

  It was unlike anything she’d felt before. She couldn’t breathe properly. The burn was excruciating—loud and large and overwhelming. It stretched across her entire palm and three fingers, quickly blistering.

  A small whimper escaped her. Why? Why did everything have to go wrong? Was it not enough that she was stuck out here in some godforsaken backwater? Was this torture truly necessary?

  She blew on the burn, trying to soothe it, but the stream of air only intensified the pain. “I…Uh…” Her thoughts refused to come together, overpowered by the sheer fierceness of the burn.

  “Come here.” Cassandra grabbed her by the other wrist and towed her toward the scullery, where she dunked Amelia’s hand in a bucket of cold water. “Let it sit in there until the water warms up. I’ll go fetch another bucket.”

  The twelve-year-old grabbed an empty bucket that sat by the scullery door and rushed outside.

  The sudden emptiness of the room, the unfamiliar setting, the impact of the day and the days before that defeated her. Tears became huge wracking sobs. She struggled for breath.

  She was lost. She was without purpose.


  Her entire life she’d had one job, knowing her only value was in the power and influence she would marry into, and she’d failed.

  At what point Cassandra came back in, she didn’t know. The first she was aware of it, the child was rubbing giant, gentle circles between her shoulder blades.

  “It will be all right,” Cassandra said. “We can go into town and buy a pie from the bakery.”

  “I…I just didn’t want him to be right. I didn’t want to be useless.” She tried to wipe away the tears, mortified that she’d been caught in such a state. A duchess presents a calm presence at all times.

  “We don’t have to tell him. I don’t tell him stuff all the time.”

  Amelia looked at the girl in front of her. Cassandra’s face was sympathetic and kind and welcoming. Amelia couldn’t remember the last time someone had looked at her with such openness.

  “It will be all right,” Cassandra repeated.

  Amelia nodded. She looked for a handkerchief to wipe away her tears and the snot that was running out of her nose, but there was none in sight.

  “Just use your apron. No one will know.”

  Amelia laughed. Just a little bit. And wiped the corner across her face. If she was going to make a fool of herself in front of anyone in this household, she was glad it was this Asterly sibling.

  Then the door to the scullery opened, and the one person she really did not want to see stood in the doorway.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  Chapter 8

  The place was chaos.

  Benedict had walked into an empty kitchen on fire. The stove was alight, there was a leg of lamb on the floor, and a smoldering rag had scorched the bench. The room smelled of burnt oil and something more acrid. He grabbed a lid and put it over the pan, smothering the flames. He grabbed a cutting board and tossed it onto the still-smoking rag.

  Then he’d gone in search of the girls, his heart racing.

  What he’d found stopped him dead.

  Tears had left sooty tracks down Amelia’s face. A chunk of her hair was missing, the ends fried. Her hand sat in a bucket of water in the sink.

  His stomach churned at the sight. “What happened?” he asked, crossing the room in four strides and taking her wrist in his hand.

  An angry red mark marred her otherwise perfect skin.

  “There was an accident.” How his wife managed to sound so composed, so in control, when everything about her appeared so tumultuous, he didn’t know. But her voice was steady, imperious, and determined.

  But it hadn’t been an accident. Not really.

  He’d known she had no idea what to do in a kitchen when he’d given her the bloody schedule. He’d wanted a disaster—for her to fail completely. He just hadn’t expected she’d get hurt doing it.

  He should have known better. “I’m so sorry.”

  “You’re sorry? I didn’t realize that you owned my actions as well as my person, Mr. Asterly. Pray, do let me know when I have some sort of autonomy, even if it is just over my mistakes.”

  He let go of her hand and stepped back. “I apologize.”

  She arched an eyebrow. If he hadn’t seen the tear tracks, if his sister hadn’t been shaking her head in warning in the background, he might not have realized that the woman in front of him was, in fact, presenting an exceptional façade.

  One that he would let her keep, since he’d managed to take everything else from her.

  “Cassandra, go ask Daisy for a salve,” he said. “I’ll cook tonight.”

  Standing at the sideboard, Benedict layered a thick spread of jam over his burnt toast, followed by an equally thick layer of marmalade.

  An enjoyable breakfast had become a science since Mrs. Greenhill had become too blind to cook. Enough jam to mask the taste of burnt bread. Enough bitter marmalade to mask all the sugar in jam.

  He stuffed a piece in his mouth before he’d even turned away. It was best eaten quickly and without thinking.

  Turning back to the center of the room, the sight of Lady Amelia in the doorway set him coughing. She had never come down for breakfast before. And he’d never seen that dress with its slimmer fit skimming over her curves. An absurd number of trunks had arrived the day before. At the time, all he’d thought of was the incredible waste of one person owning so many things. Now he wondered how many of those things were going to set his heart racing.

  “Good morning, Mr. Asterly. Have we moved away from using a table? Shall I have it turned into firewood so we can eat like cavemen on the floor?”

  Ah, his wife. Never short of an opinion.

  “Lady Amelia. You are aware that it is seven a.m.? Are you unwell?” He took his seat at the head of the table, where the tea and chocolate were laid out. There was a small, dark stain marring the white linen. Damn her for highlighting every fault just by being in the room.

  “I’m perfectly well, thank you,” she said, crossing the room to the sideboard. She wrinkled her nose at the options in front of her and, after exaggerated consideration, put an orange on her plate. “Clearly I’m stuck here in Abingdale so I might as well get on with life.”

  “Really?” He couldn’t mask his surprise. Despite his throwing open her curtains each morning, she’d stubbornly remained in her room until past ten every day. The mornings had become a battle of wills as she flat-out refused to do whatever was on her list, and he refused to let her off chore-free. Yesterday, they’d compromised. She had chosen mending over beating the carpets. Today he’d gone into his dressing room to discover the rips in his shirts had been patched with elaborately embroidered flowers.

  “I have much to do today, according to your absurd list. If I’m to wash all the bedding, dust the cobwebs, and polish the silver, I’m going to need an early start.” She took a seat to his left, neatened the place settings, unfolded her napkin, and set his pulse off-kilter. Time had not diminished the physical impact she had on him—if anything it had intensified.

  He shifted in his seat. “And you’re actually going to do all those things?” he asked, trying to focus on the conversation.

  She looked at him in a you-must-be-kidding manner. “Of course not. I’m going to visit the tenants.”

  “All two of them?”

  “Precisely.” She picked up the knife and looked at her orange, perturbed as though she had no idea what to do next. For a woman who made condescension an art form, she lacked a significant number of basic life skills.

  “Pass it here.” He cut into the fruit and began to peel. “What brought about this sudden urge to visit the tenants?”

  “Isn’t that what we, the country gentry, do? Visit those less fortunate than ourselves?” Her words had a dark bitterness to them.

  “And the great Lady Amelia wants to sit in a one-room farmhouse with five children climbing the walls, making chitchat with a woman who’s never set foot in London, let alone strolled down Bond Street?”

  He pushed too hard on the last bit of peel, and the blade caught his thumb, nicking the skin just enough for the citrus juice to set it afire.

  She took the orange from him. “I may have lived my entire life in London, but as Duchess of Wildeforde, it would have been my responsibility to call on Edward’s many, many tenants, and although you and I have but two, visiting them is still my duty.”

  She sliced the orange in half with ferocity. “Regardless of what you think of those of my station, the vast majority of us take our responsibilities very seriously.”

  “You do?” In his experience, those of her ilk were more interested in their clubs and brandy and cards than caring for the people that relied on them. That he was forced to help rethatch roofs and fix fences on properties that weren’t his was example enough.

  “I do. The higher your station, the more people rely on you. You need to provide stability, shelter, income—justice more often than not. It’s a heavy burden, something I would have excelled at.”

  “You would have excelled at. So something you’ve neve
r practiced?”

  Her lips tightened. “As I said, I spent most of my time in London.”

  “And your father?”

  There was an almost imperceptible tightening of her hand on the knife. “He had estate managers who worked hard in his absence.”

  “How certain are you of that?”

  She shot him a furious stare. Benedict was tempted to push the matter, but they both knew her father was a bastard, and debating the point was not going to make life any easier.

  “And what will you take with you when you call? Has Daisy prepared a basket of foods?”

  “And inflict this cooking on others?” She speared an orange segment with her fork. “I plan to visit the village first. From memory, the bakery there is remarkable. They can make up some baskets of food that are actually edible.”

  “Excellent idea.” He paused. “And for the record, they will appreciate your visit. Thank you for thinking of this.” He smiled at her and was absurdly pleased to receive a smile in return. Could they be forming a truce? “I didn’t see your lady’s maid amongst the many trunks yesterday. I take it her mother is still unwell.”

  Amelia’s face twisted for the briefest of seconds before settling into a neutral expression, but her tone was clipped as she replied. “Her mother is perfectly recovered. However, Reid won’t be joining me. Apparently, she is now overqualified for the position given my sudden change in circumstances.”

  Oof. That insult was bound to sting. “I am sorry.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  It didn’t seem like nothing, but she clearly did not want to speak of it. So he turned to the day-old newspaper at his elbow. His fingers smudged the ink as he picked up the pages. At the rustle, Amelia looked up, then looked back to her orange, and then back to the pages.

  “Would you like to read it?” he asked.

  She grinned. “Just the society pages when you’re finished with them.”