Lord of Scandal

by Nicola Cornick

  Ben Hawksmoor had wanted her. She had felt it in his touch and seen it in his eyes. She lived a protected and cosseted life and she knew little of physical desire, but today she had felt its power herself and the feeling had been very, very tempting.

  She raised her chin and met Withers’s hot, angry gaze with a cool glance of her own. “You know full well, my lord, that I did not seek out Lord Hawksmoor. I only went down into the crowd to find John. If I was at fault in doing so—”

  Withers cut her off. “If? Of course you were at fault! What are you? A nursemaid?”

  “No,” Catherine said, “but I was concerned for my brother.”

  “Let the servants worry about your brother,” Withers said. “You are always doing stupid things to try to help others. You are supposed to be a lady, Catherine! Although I suppose one must make allowances for the fact that your family is steeped in trade—”

  Catherine could feel the hot color burning her face. He had brought up the matter of her family’s social inferiority so many times in the past. “I make no allowances for it. I was most attached to my grandparents.”

  “A merchant on the distaff side of the family,” Withers said, the sneer of old money in his voice, “and your father nothing more than a nabob, too.”

  “If you object to my father’s company,” Catherine said, her voice shaking with anger at his hypocrisy, “you hide it well. I believe you should address your comments to him and not to me, sir.”

  “And so I shall.” Withers took a sharp turn about the room. “I shall speak to him about recalcitrant daughters who behave like ill-bred little cits when they have had plenty of money thrown at their education in order to turn them into ladies.”

  Catherine’s pride burned. It was the cruelest irony that all the luxury and ease her parents and grandparents had struggled for was hers for the taking, when all she longed for was the open horizons and the challenges of the life they had led. She had been brought up to make polite conversation in airless drawing rooms while all the time she itched for excitement and travel and new experiences. Her godmother, Lady Russell, last heard of in Samarkand, was one such intrepid traveler and her letters, received infrequently from far-flung places, gave Catherine huge pleasure and made her long even more to be released from the gilded trap. If her hopes and aspirations made her less of a lady in Lord Withers’s eyes, she thought, then that was not something she could regret.

  She raised her chin. “Has it occurred to you, my lord, that if Lord Hawksmoor mistook my quality it was because I was in your company?” She took a deep, reckless breath. “I hear your reputation is none too sweet, is it, my lord? And you had the ill manners to address me by my given name with a familiarity that suggests a certain lack of respect. You may be a nobleman, albeit one descended from the illegitimate son of a king, but it is manners that make a gentleman.”

  The silence was blistering. Withers’s face had turned from bright red to ashen-pale. He took a step toward her and Catherine’s heart missed a beat. That very day she had witnessed the pleasure he took in cruelty. Now he looked as though he wanted to vent all that brutality on her.

  “I will not tolerate such behavior in my future wife,” he said, through his teeth. “You will not reproach me for my conduct, madam, when you are wild to a fault.”

  Catherine’s loathing for him burned in her veins. “And I will not tolerate you as a husband, sir, so we may break this betrothal that neither of us wants and be happy.”

  Withers took a step forward and caught her arm, pulling her around to face him so brutally that she wrenched her shoulder and could not prevent a gasp of pain. She saw his eyes shine with satisfaction to see that he had hurt her.

  “You little jade,” he snapped. “You have no choice. I am not letting you go. I will have you and I will break you.”

  “You will not.”

  “I said you have no choice.”

  Catherine closed her eyes. Once again the question of the hold Withers had over her father beat in her brain. When Sir Alfred had told her that he had accepted Withers’s offer for her hand, she had been appalled. Plenty of men had asked Sir Alfred for permission to pay their addresses to her. They had all been rejected as unworthy. Withers had not. Her father had blustered something about him being a respected man and a colleague. Respected he was not, for the whole Ton spoke of him as a loose fish. As for being a colleague, it was true that he was Catherine’s third trustee, appointed by Sir James Mather, her grandfather’s banker, after Jack McNaish’s death. Catherine had not understood the appointment then and she did not understand it now. Her grandfather, she knew, would have kicked Withers out of the house in disgust.

  Even so, there was some truth in Lord Withers’s words, painful as it was for her to admit it. A debutante, especially one who still smelled of the shop, had precious little choice if she was not a willing sacrifice to the marriage bed.

  She swallowed hard and stared him out. “I could be a governess or a schoolteacher—”

  Withers laughed harshly. “You are underage. You have no references. No one would employ you. Besides, we would find you and bring you back.”

  He was drawing her closer to his body. Catherine resisted and felt his grip tighten. She could feel how aroused he was. His erection pressed against her, swelling hugely. There was a look of pleasurable excitement in his eyes now. She knew her opposition made it all the more enjoyable for him and the thought revolted her.

  “If you brought me back I would run away again,” she said, through shut teeth. “I will go abroad. I will find Lady Russell and travel with her. You cannot force me to your will! I do not want to live the life of a society lady—”

  “Your wishes have nothing to do with it. You will do as I command, on your back, in my bed, whenever I demand it.”

  His crudeness took her breath away. As Catherine gaped at him, he slapped her hard, across the face.

  The dinner gong sounded from directly outside the drawing room and they both jumped. Tench, the Fentons’ butler, threw open the door.

  “Dinner is served, my lord, Miss Fenton….” Tench’s face was arranged into its customary expressionless mask but his eyes flickered nervously. Catherine could have sworn he had heard their raised voices and had interrupted them on purpose, risking Withers’s wrath to do it.

  Withers bit out an expletive, dropped Catherine’s arm and strode past the butler as though he were not there, raising his hand to sweep one of the precious porcelain vases from the hall table as he passed. It fell with a sharp crack and smashed on the floor. The street door slammed, shaking the house.

  “That will be one less for dinner, Tench,” Catherine said into the silence that followed.

  The butler looked shaken. “Miss Fenton—” he said.

  Catherine shook her head sharply, her fingers going to the tender skin of her cheek where it burned hot, but not as fiercely as her temper.

  She followed Tench silently out into the marble checkered hall. A footman had already scurried off to find a broom to sweep up the broken shards of china. Withers had gone, but Catherine knew he would be back. With each rejection on her part, his determination hardened, became more brutal. She had a disturbing instinct that his revenge, once they were married, would be correspondingly cruel. She shuddered. It could not be allowed to happen. She had to find an escape.

  She went into the dining room and took her place at the table. The rest of the family were already assembled. Sir Alfred Fenton was very strict about etiquette, as though it could give his family the aristocratic gloss that they lacked in their pedigree. The room was quiet, as it always was, with the silence her father demanded at dinner. She caught his gaze on her and saw him glance at the red mark on her cheek, but he said nothing and looked shiftily away, and Catherine’s heart shriveled a little more. Her father had once been such a strong man. Under Withers’s domination he had shrunk like a slug before the salt. There was no one left to protect them now. Catherine knew she was on her own.

&nbs
p; They started to eat. The silence was deep. It gave Catherine ample opportunity—too much opportunity—to stop thinking about Withers and start thinking instead about the man who had held her in his arms earlier that day. The contrast of Ben Hawksmoor’s tenderness with Algernon Withers’s brutality was stark. Even now she could not think about the contact of his cheek against hers, the touch of skin against skin, without a hot shiver scalding her blood.

  She had heard that Ben Hawksmoor was dangerous. Such information was drummed into debutantes until the more reckless of them longed to elope with the very rakes they were warned against.

  Never be alone with a man.

  Never touch a man who is not related to you.

  And, Catherine thought, never permit the most notorious scoundrel in the whole of London to hold you in his arms in case you find it impossible to forget his touch and concentrate on your dinner.

  Men like Ben Hawksmoor were far outside Catherine’s experience. They inhabited a world so alien from the stilted respectability of her upbringing as to make them seem like a different race. A chaperone could detect a scoundrel at fifty paces and would hustle their charges away before any damage was done or a reputation was imperiled. Catherine knew that in one fateful step that afternoon she had almost undone all those years of vigilance. She had clung to Ben Hawksmoor, had forgotten all the modesty and propriety she had ever known, and she had not cared. He had held her in his arms and for a while it had felt like the most precious thing that had ever happened to her.

  Catherine pushed her spoon listlessly around the plate. The only sound was John slurping his pea soup from the best silver. Because they had no guests that evening he had been allowed to join the family for dinner rather than take supper in the nursery. Earlier in the meal he had been full of the excitement of the afternoon.

  “A tall man held me up so that I could see better! The noose was so tight and the body was jerking and dancing all over the place like one of Mr. Carew’s wooden puppets—”

  Maggie, Catherine’s stepmother, had made a faint noise of protest and swayed a little on her chair, and Sir Alfred had said, “John…” with a note of warning in his voice. But Catherine had thought that he also sounded rather pleased with his son. She could imagine him boasting to Lord Withers that John was a chip off the old block—no lily-livered die away vapors from him! And now John had a hearty appetite and he seemed to be the only one around the table who had.

  Catherine pushed her plate away and the footman came forward immediately to remove it. At times like this she felt as though they were all dining off her expectations. Her future paid for the food they ate, the clothes they wore and all the trappings of wealth that her father liked to display in such opulent show. All he had left of his own fortune was bad debts hiding behind a good name. Naturally the Ton did not know that the Fenton fortune was spent and that all that was left was Catherine’s trust money. But Lord Withers was a trustee and he would know….

  That, Catherine thought suddenly, had to be the true reason for Sir Alfred’s tolerance of Withers’s suit. They must have come to some accommodation about the money. Her fortune would belong to Withers when they wed, the law taking the somewhat illiberal view that both she and her possessions belonged to her husband. Perhaps Withers had promised Sir Alfred a cut of the money for his agreement to the marriage. The cynicism of such an arrangement made her feel ill. She knew her father had little affection for her but such coldhearted bartering was difficult to stomach.

  The silence was beginning to feel oppressive now. There were so many matters unspoken in the Fenton family, from her father’s money troubles to Algernon Withers’s mysterious power over them, to Lady Fenton’s poor health.

  Catherine cleared her throat and, ignoring her father’s forbidding glare, addressed her stepmother.

  “Did you pass a pleasant afternoon, Maggie?” she asked Lady Fenton.

  When her father had first married Maggie, he had wanted Catherine to call his new wife mama but she had refused. Her mother had died when Catherine was twelve and Maggie Fenton was only six years Catherine’s senior, now twenty-seven to her twenty-one. It had seemed ridiculous to call her mother. Fortunately Maggie had agreed. Instead they had become friends, very dear friends, and Catherine had loved her new stepmother with an uncomplicated affection.

  That was in the days when Maggie could charm Sir Alfred about her finger, the days when she had been an elegant society hostess, not the pale and nervous wreck of a woman she appeared now as she shredded the fringe of her silk-and-lace wrap beneath the table. As she had grown up, Catherine had realized that her stepmother was not strong and their roles had gradually shifted until Catherine had become the protective one, almost as though she were the elder. She still loved Maggie fiercely, and the half brother and little half sister that Maggie had given her, but now she pitied her as well as loved her.

  Catherine waited, but Maggie did not reply. Her blue eyes were quite blank. It was as though she had not heard a word. On the mantelpiece, the clock ticked loudly. The room was light and airy, painted in a pale green and white that reflected the sunshine in the summer. The spurious portraits on the walls, which Sir Alfred had bought in pretense that they were his distant ancestors, looked as blank as his wife.

  After a moment, Sir Alfred sighed heavily. “Margaret,” he said, “are you not attending? Catherine was asking after your day.”

  Catherine reflected that her father always used a person’s full name. She had a vague memory of her mother calling her Kate when she was a child. That time was long gone, along with the warmth and love and laughter that had once filled the house in Guilford Street. These days it was exquisitely decorated—Lady Fenton’s taste—but empty and cold. Sir Alfred was seldom there. Catherine suspected he rented another set of rooms elsewhere, where he spent most of his nights. They all knew he had had a series of women in keeping almost from the start of his marriage to Maggie, and probably before. Catherine knew that such things happened in society but it hurt her, for Maggie’s sake. Her stepmother had never appeared strong enough to bear such blows and, since the birth of her daughter Mirabelle a year before, she had withdrawn even more into herself and sometimes seemed barely present at all.

  “I went to Bond Street,” Maggie said, without raising her eyes from her plate, “and then for a drive in the park with Lady Raine.”

  Silence descended once again. John started to climb on his chair to reach across the table for a piece of bread. His mother said nothing. The footman leaped forward to offer the basket. Cold meats were brought in. Catherine’s mind started to wander.

  No man had ever held her close in tenderness before.

  The color burned Catherine’s face as she thought of Ben Hawksmoor again. He had held her as though he meant it. There had been an astonishing moment when she had looked into his hazel eyes and seen the pain and the anger in him, and had thought that she understood the demons that drove him. She had felt so close to him. But as soon as he’d let her go, she had been overwhelmed by the strangeness and intimacy of their encounter. And then he had stepped back and smiled that charming smile and something had changed between them and he was as careless and dangerous as the matrons said he was.

  “Catherine met Lord Hawksmoor today.” Sir Alfred’s voice cut straight across her thoughts.

  Catherine jumped and her hand knocked the salt dish, scattering the white grains across the polished wood of the table. The footman leaped forward again but was waved back irritably by Sir Alfred. Catherine saw that he was staring at his wife from under lowered brows. His eyes were fierce with something Catherine did not understand.

  He repeated, “Catherine met Lord Hawksmoor today. He rescued her from the mob at the hanging when she was foolish enough to go looking for John.”

  “She need not have bothered,” John said, petulantly kicking his heels against the chair legs. “I was not lost!”

  No one paid him any attention. Sir Alfred was still staring at his wife and Maggie’s f
ace had gone as white as tissue paper.

  “We exchanged a few words only,” Catherine said hastily. She was aware of a desperate need to deflect attention away from Maggie, whose fingers, shredding the silk shawl, had speeded up their work. Catherine could hear little ripping sounds as the material came apart.

  “Indeed,” Maggie said. “Lord Hawksmoor is not a suitable acquaintance for a young lady.”

  “Nor for a married one,” Sir Alfred growled. “Just as Edward Clarencieux was unsuitable.”

  Maggie caught her breath on a painful gasp and suddenly Catherine had a vivid memory of the day that she and Maggie had been walking in the park back in the summer, when Ned Clarencieux had been so charming and Maggie so vivacious. As the gentlemen had strolled away, with many a provocative backward glance, Maggie had laughed and caught Catherine’s arm and told her that she should cut men like Clarencieux dead.

  “For they are too rakish for you to trifle with, Catherine, until you understand what you are doing. It is the greatest hypocrisy but once you are married you may do as you please.”

  There had been something bitter in Maggie’s face as she had added, “There must, after all, be some consolations for the tedium of married life….”

  At that moment Ned Clarencieux had turned and raised a hand in farewell, and Catherine had seen Maggie’s face brighten and a smile light her eyes, although she had turned her head away flirtatiously so that Clarencieux would not see it.

  Catherine remembered with a cold stab of the heart that Clarencieux had been Ben Hawksmoor’s friend, an adventurer, cut from the same cloth.

  “Hawksmoor,” Sir Alfred was saying viciously, “should not be accepted in polite society. He should never have inherited the title. He is worthless—a gambler and a wastrel.”

  “Very much like many gentlemen of my acquaintance,” Catherine said, stung into responding.