by Meggin Cabot
Quiet to Mrs. Gardiner, however, appeared simply to mean that no outside guests had been invited to dine with the family.
And so when Victoria and Rebecca, summoned by Perkins, the butler, appeared in the dining room, it was to observe young Annabelle and Judith leading their younger brothers in a mad dash around the table, Elizabeth swinging from the portieres, and Jeremiah dragging an unfortunate kitten about by the scruff of its neck with his teeth, in an apparent imitation of “Kitty.” It was a testament to Rebecca’s beauty—or perhaps to Victoria’s dressmaker back in Jaipur—that the sight of their sister in the borrowed blue gown caused all such activity to cease. Jeremiah even dropped the kitten, who scampered, with much foresight for so young a creature, up the portieres, and thus out of reach of her pint-sized tormentor.
“Becky!” cried Clara, who was closest to Rebecca in age, being fourteen and very aware of the fact that she was well on her way to being as pretty as her elder sister. “You look like a princess!”
Mr. Gardiner said nothing except, “What, tureen of beef again?” after a glance into the chafing dish, but Mrs. Gardiner was full of compliments for her daughter.
“Such a lovely gown!” she cried. “It goes so well with your eyes, my dear. It is very generous of your cousin to loan it to you. It might look well, if dear Vicky will loan it to you again, at Dame Ashforth’s cotillion next week. Take care not to spill anything on it tonight and ruin it.”
“I won’t, Mama,” Rebecca murmured demurely, and Victoria knew that her secret—the one concerning her engagement—was safe. She was feeling very smug— though not at all pleased with the Gardiners’ cook, who seemed to put very little actual beef in her tureen of beef. Victoria saw at once that she and Cook were going to have to have words—when Perkins appeared in the doorway and announced, “Captain Carstairs.”
Victoria very nearly dropped her spoon. Captain Carstairs? Captain Carstairs? Hadn’t she just left him—with hopes that it would be forever—at the docks? What on earth was he doing here, at her aunt and uncle’s house, just a few hours later?
“Hmmph,” her uncle said, not doing at all a tidy job with his napkin. Bits of tureen clung to his beard. “Show him in, show him in.”
“Oh, yes, do,” Mrs. Gardiner, from the other end of the table, cried. “And set another place at the table, Perkins. The captain will want to join us, I’m sure.”
“Hurrah,” cried Jeremiah, upsetting his bowl with a stray elbow. “Uncle Jacob is here!”
Uncle Jacob? Victoria could not imagine that her evening could get any worse. Was she never to be free of the company of this obnoxious young man?
A few seconds later he appeared in the doorway in a fresh waistcoat and shirt, his boots highly shined as ever… but his collar points still at least two inches lower than they ought to have been. The children—a clearly undisciplined brood—leaped from their seats at the sight of him, and surged forward in a wall of beaming faces and beef-tureeny hands, crying, “Uncle Jacob! Uncle Jacob!”
Captain Carstairs managed quickly to extricate himself, however, by producing a bag and declaring, “Yes, it’s me. It’s good to see all of you again. And look what I’ve brought you from Africa!”
The children left off clinging to his coat and fell upon the bag instead, like a pack of ravenous little vultures. Clever of him! Victoria could not help thinking, and wished she had had such a bag back upon the pier, with which she might have defended herself against the Gardiner horde. Jacob Carstairs, free at last, turned his bright-eyed gaze upon the four adults left at the table— five if you counted Clara, who had evidently decided herself too old to leap upon the bag like her younger siblings, but who nevertheless was eyeing it with undisguised curiosity.
“Good evening,” the young captain said, bowing politely toward Mrs. Gardiner, Rebecca, and Victoria. “So sorry to interrupt your dinner. It was good of you to invite me in.”
“Nonsense,” Mr. Gardiner said gruffly. “Sit down and eat.”
“Yes, do, Jacob,” Mrs. Gardiner beseeched him. “That is, if your mother can spare you. I don’t want her to be put out with me, stealing you away your first night back in town after so long a voyage.”
“My mother has gone to the opera,” Captain Carstairs said. “She did not know I was to arrive today, and did not feel she could give up such fine seats.”
“Then you are orphaned for the night!” Mrs. Gardiner cried. “And so it is my duty to feed you! Sit, sit, do. There is plenty for everyone.”
“In that case”—Mr. Carstairs dropped into the chair that Perkins had placed at the table for him—“I shall be happy to. There is nothing I enjoy better, as I’m sure you know, Mrs. Gardiner, than your fine cook’s excellent tureen of beef.”
Victoria shot the young captain a look of complete incredulity over her own bowl of the watery stuff. She had always thought there was something a little off about Jacob Carstairs, but now she began to feel that perhaps he was actually mad. He was either mad or he was dissembling, because there was nothing in the least bit excellent about the Gardiners’ cook’s tureen of beef.
Then Jacob Carstairs did something that confirmed Victoria’s belief that he was not wholly sound in the head. He winked at her! Across the dining table!
She was certain he winked only because he knew as well as she did that the tureen of beef was terrible. Unfortunately, however, Rebecca caught the wink and misinterpreted it, flinging Victoria an accusing look. As if, after everything Victoria had said upstairs, there was the slightest chance she had designs on Jacob Carstairs!
If Captain Carstairs noticed Rebecca’s hostile glance in Victoria’s direction, he did not indicate it. Instead he said to the older girl, “Miss Gardiner, that’s a lovely gown you have on this evening. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen it on you before.”
Rebecca seemed instantly to forget her antipathy toward Victoria, and simpered in the young captain’s direction. “Why, thank you, Captain.”
“It’s not hers,” young Jeremiah announced from the floor, where he and his brothers and sisters sat, sorting through the items they’d found at the bottom of the bag Captain Carstairs had dropped, which included, if their appreciative cries were to be believed, shrunken heads and monkey’s paws, though Victoria highly doubted an actual shrunken head would have been allowed through customs. “It’s Cousin Vicky’s.”
Rebecca instantly turned a deep shade of umber, and Victoria uttered a quick and silent prayer of thanks to the Lord for taking her parents before they’d had a chance to provide her with siblings.
“Ah,” Captain Carstairs said. “I see. Cousin Vicky’s. And I trust Cousin Vicky is finding London to her liking?”
Victoria longed to dash her tureen of beef in the handsome young man’s lap. Instead she merely said, “It’s been tolerable—thus far,” and hoped he took the thus far to mean up until his arrival at the Gardiners’ dinner table, which was precisely how she’d intended it.
If Captain Carstairs got her meaning, however, he gave no indication. Instead he picked up the glass of madeira that Perkins had poured for him, and raised it in Victoria’s direction.
“I’d like to declare a toast,” he said. “To the charming Lady Victoria.”
“Hear, hear,” cried Mrs. Gardiner, raising her glass as well. “We are so delighted to have you back in England at last, my child. It’s been too, too long.”
Mr. Gardiner said nothing but “Harumph,” and lowered his glass again.
But young Captain Carstairs was not finished.
“May she take London society by storm,” he went on, still gazing steadily at Victoria, who, with a sudden sinking feeling, narrowed her eyes at him in warning. It was a warning, however, that the young man did not heed. “And not forget us when she is, as I understand she is soon to become, the new Lady Malfrey.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“You did it on purpose,” Victoria said accusingly.
“I swear I didn’t,” Captain Carstairs said with a careless
laugh that infuriated her all the more.
“Don’t swear,” Victoria said with a sniff. “It isn’t polite.”
“Well, then, I promise you I didn’t.”
Jacob Carstairs was looking infuriatingly cool and collected. How dared he look so calm, when Victoria was simmering over with anger at him?
Well, he wouldn’t look half so cocksure by the time Victoria was through with him. It had been remarkably stupid of him to ask her to dance, knowing full well that she was still put out with him for revealing her secret engagement to her aunt and uncle. Perhaps he’d thought because a full week had gone by since the incident, that her ire might be at its ebb. Foolish man! Victoria had once managed to stay angry at her uncle Henry for a full a month, and that had been only because he’d used one of her best shawls to wipe down his pistols after a duel.
Captain Carstairs, on the other hand, had ruined Victoria’s life.
This was not, Victoria felt, an exaggeration, either. Since his thoughtless announcement that night at dinner, Victoria’s existence had turned into a living nightmare. Her aunt would not leave her alone on the subject of her engagement. Every time Victoria turned around, it seemed, all she heard was Lord Malfrey this, and Lord Malfrey that. How Victoria wished Lord Malfrey would hurry up and get home from Lisbon, so that she might appeal to him to have a word with her relations—or at the very least, convince him to elope at once, and remove her from their company forever. For they were driving her to distraction with their petty admonishments and concerns.
What business was it of theirs anyway whom she chose to marry? If she wanted to marry an Indian fakir, who were they to try to stop her? For heaven’s sake, her uncles had sent her to England with instructions to find a husband. Well, she’d found one… and a more exemplary groom simply did not exist. Lord Malfrey was everything that was gentlemanly and admirable—intelligent, polite, attentive, and very, very handsome.
So what was the problem?
“You’ve only known each other a few months,” was Victoria’s aunt’s lament. But a few months was a great deal longer than many couples knew each other before taking their vows. Why, in India, more often than not a bride did not even meet her husband to be until their wedding day! And here Victoria had spent three whole months at sea getting to know hers! No, “You’ve only known each other a few months” was no sort of argument.
Her aunt, Victoria knew, was only put out because Victoria had managed to get a husband before Rebecca had. Which wasn’t entirely fair, because Rebecca had only her pretty face to recommend her, and no fortune to speak of. Victoria was perfectly aware that a part of Lord Malfrey’s attraction to her was her inheritance. She did not blame him for it. Men had to eat, too, same as women.
But she also knew that, had she been horse-faced or even, God forbid, redheaded, Lord Malfrey would not have taken the time to learn of her fortune. He would have dismissed her out of hand. No, her money made things easier, certainly, but it was her person first, and then her purse, that Hugo Rothschild had found so attractive.
But what was so very wrong with that? What was a marriage if not a business transaction? Victoria could not help thinking that the Indian way of courtship and marriage made more sense than the way the English went about it. In India parents decided, often at birth, whom their children would marry. When the boy and girl came of age, certain transactions ensued, generally involving goods of some sort. Some girls were worth many goods, some only a few. After these transactions, the couple was joined in holy matrimony, and everyone went home with their allotted goods, and that was that.
In England, it was entirely more complicated. No marital arrangements were made on the part of the children’s parents at all. Instead, mothers and fathers kept their daughters tucked out of sight until their sixteenth or seventeenth birthdays, at which point they were suddenly pushed into society—something Victoria had learned was called a girl’s “coming out,” or “first season”—and paraded in front of the marriageable bachelors who happened to be in town and not back at their country estates, still shooting grouse, as they’d been doing all winter. The single men then decided which of these many girls they liked, and then from there, which girl had the largest dowry.
The English style of courtship seemed perfectly barbaric—and unfair to the girls, Victoria felt. For what if a girl were not attractive, or poor? Who would want to marry her then? Perhaps the worst part of the English courtship rituals, Victoria learned soon after her arrival on English soil, was something called Almack’s. It was nothing more than a series of large rooms in which everyone who was anyone in London society gathered every Wednesday night in order to dance and show off their new spring wardrobe. Almack’s was, to Victoria, a nightmarish crush of humanity. It made her long for the airy and open market squares of Jaipur, which held occasional festivals, when it was not monsoon season, at which everyone from neighboring villages showed up. How she missed the sparkling saris, the fire-eaters, the highly spiced savories!
There was nothing comparable at Almack’s. Bland punch, stale biscuits, and even staler conversation. There were no fire-eaters, and not even a single elephant.
The utter lack of other diversion made the presence of Jacob Carstairs surprisingly welcome. He did not, according to her cousin Rebecca, come often to Almack’s. But upon Victoria’s first visit to the place, there he was, looking very well in evening dress, though his collar points were still distressingly low—the lowest in the room, in fact. Victoria had thrown her cousin a significant look upon noticing them, as if to say, See? What was I telling you? No respect for fashion whatsoever.
Still, unfashionable collar points or not, Captain Carstairs greeted both girls very cordially, and asked each of them for a dance—to Rebecca’s delight, and Victoria’s disgust. If Jacob Carstairs thought that she was going to meekly forget the humiliation he’d put her through the week before, he was in for a rude shock.
“You knew I hadn’t yet told my aunt and uncle about my engagement to Lord Malfrey,” Victoria said as Jacob Carstairs took her hand for the dance she’d promised him. “Admit it. You were hoping to cause a scene.”
“Which I did,” Captain Carstairs said, not even attempting to hide his happy smile at the memory of Victoria’s aunt falling into a swoon and her daughters’ attempts to revive her. Victoria’s uncle’s reaction had not been nearly as satisfying. He had merely called for Perkins to bring him a whiskey.
“Well, I don’t think it’s anything to be proud of,” Victoria said severely. “You put the entire house into an uproar.”
“I didn’t,” Jacob said. “You’re the one who wanted to marry a man your family doesn’t approve of, not me. I just informed them of the fact. It doesn’t do any good to kill the messenger.”
“My family doesn’t disapprove of Lord Malfrey,” Victoria informed him. “It’s my marrying so soon after my arrival that they don’t like. Not that there’s anything they can do about it.”
Jacob lifted a single dark brow. “Isn’t there?”
Victoria gave a haughty toss of her head. “Hardly! What can they do? They don’t hold my purse strings; I do. I can do as I like.”
“And what you like,” Jacob said, “is to marry Hugo Rothschild. A man you hardly know.”
“Why does everyone keep saying that?” Victoria shook her head in wonder. “I know him very well indeed. I was with him for a month longer than I was with you on the Harmony, you’ll remember.”
“As if I could forget,” Jacob said obliquely. Then he demanded, “And just what was Lord Malfrey, a gentleman whom I understand is in some financial straits, doing in Bombay, anyway? Did you ever bother asking him that?”
“Of course I did,” Victoria said. “Lord Malfrey was seeing to the sale of some property left to him by a distant relation.”
“In India?”
“That’s correct.” Victoria wondered why she was bothering to explain her fiancé’s business affairs to this man, who was not even a relation, but seemed
to harbor some sort of absurd proprietary feelings toward her just the same. “And now he’s off to Lisbon to spend the proceeds buying back some family portraits that he was forced to part with a few years ago, when he was in somewhat different financial straits.”
Jacob Carstairs looked disgusted. “Good Lord,” he said. “And you really want to marry this fellow? It seems he can barely manage to keep his personal affairs in order.”
“Of course he can’t,” Victoria said. “That’s why he needs me.”
“To pay his bills, you mean,” Jacob said, rudely.
“To help him organize his life,” Victoria corrected him.
But she instantly regretted her unguarded words when Jacob Carstairs let out a bark of laughter, and cried, “Good Lord, I’d almost forgotten. Of course a fellow like that would appeal to a busy bee like you. Why, he needs no end of improving.”
Victoria leveled a very meaningful gaze at Jacob Carstairs’s collar points and said, “I can think of a few things I’d like to improve about you.”
“It all makes sense now.” Jacob did not seem to have noticed the direction of her gaze, nor heard her remark. “The Hugo Rothschilds of the world are irresistible to all little Miss Bees like you. Tell me, where did you intend to start with him? His finances, of course, are in lamentable condition. But if I were you, I’d begin with his mother. I understand she’s quite a gorgon.”
“I’ll tell you where I’d start with you,” Victoria piped up. “You need to learn to keep your—”
“Ah, no,” Jacob said, lifting a warning finger. “You and I are not engaged. I have not paid for the privilege of one of your improving speeches—elucidating as I am sure they must be. You will have to save your lectures for me until such time as you are unattached again.”