Victoria and the Rogue

by Meggin Cabot

  Rebecca, always highly sensitive to calamities such as these, immediately lifted her hem and glanced about the floor.

  “You had it a moment ago,” she said reassuringly. “I’m almost certain.”

  “Oh, if it’s trodden upon,” Victoria wailed, “I shall be sick! Positively sick!”

  She was aware that Captain Carstairs was watching her with a very skeptical expression on his face, one dark eyebrow lifted with the other furrowed disapprovingly. But she steadfastly ignored him, keeping her gaze on the floor as she “searched” for her fan.

  “Is this what you’re looking for, my lady?” asked the fair-haired gentleman with a smile as he held out Victoria’s fan, which he’d bent and retrieved from where it had fallen at his feet.

  “Oh, there it is!” Rebecca cried gladly. “And look, Vicky, it isn’t a bit trodden on.”

  Victoria accepted her fan with a grateful glance in the blond gentleman’s direction. “You are too kind, sir,” she said. “It is good to know that there are some gentlemen left in England.” She shot a dark look in Jacob Carstairs’s direction. “Might I know the name of my chivalrous rescuer?”

  The blond gentleman blushed charmingly.

  “Abbott, my lady,” he said. “Charles Abbott.”

  “How lovely to make your acquaintance, Mr. Abbott,” Victoria said, relieved that Charles Abbott proved to have neither a lisp nor a stutter. He would, she decided, do very nicely for Rebecca, as Victoria, who had a quick eye, observed that Mr. Charles Abbott wore a signet ring, but no wedding band, upon his finger, meaning that he was in possession of some fortune, but not a wife. “I, of course, am Lady Victoria Arbuthnot, and this is my cousin, Miss Rebecca Gardiner.” Rebecca curtsied prettily in response to Charles Abbott’s bow. “Oh,” Victoria added with deliberate indifference, “and this is Captain Jacob Carstairs.”

  Charles Abbott clicked his heels together smartly upon his introduction to Jacob Carstairs, but his gaze was, Victoria saw with approval, on Rebecca, who really did look very beautiful indeed in her borrowed finery.

  “She likes opera and the works of Sir Walter Scott,” Victoria whispered to Mr. Abbott, under pretense of flicking a piece of lint from the young man’s broad shoulder.

  Charles Abbott proved he was as quick as he was handsome, since the next words out of his mouth were, “You would not happen to be familiar with The Lay of the Minstrel, would you, Miss Gardiner? For there is a point in it these fellows here and I find sorely perplexing….”

  Victoria saw that her cousin looked very pleased indeed, but did not hear how she responded, since Jacob Carstairs leaned down and said, very distinctly, in her ear, “Witch.”

  Victoria had no choice but to take umbrage at this unfair assessment of her character.

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” she said with a sniff. “But I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You manage your relations the way Napoleon manages his troops,” Jacob Carstairs said, not entirely without approval.

  Victoria flicked opened her fan. “Nonsense,” she said, fanning herself energetically, though still keeping a careful eye on her cousin and her new admirer.

  “Are the Gardiners even aware,” Jacob wanted to know, “of how you’ve twisted their lives about to suit your own? I understand their cook is terrified to serve anything but lobster turbot—which, if I recall rightly, was your favorite dish back on the Harmony—and that the younger Gardiners have actually begun acting like little ladies and gentlemen because you promised if they’d behave themselves to buy them a live monkey.”

  “I can’t even begin to imagine what you’re talking about,” Victoria said airily.

  “I suppose that’s your plan with Hugo Rothschild,” Jacob said. “You intend to turn him into an automaton, the way you have the Gardiner children.”

  “Automaton?” Victoria echoed with a snort. “Be your age, Captain. What on earth would Lord Malfrey do with a monkey? What nonsense.”

  “It isn’t nonsense,” Jacob said. Something about his gaze, as he stared down at her, began to make Victoria feel distinctly uncomfortable. Jacob Carstairs’s gray eyes were entirely too knowing—and too bright—for Victoria’s peace of mind. Why, the way he looked at her, she felt almost as if… well, as if he could read her mind! Read her mind, or see down her bodice, she didn’t know which. Either way, his stare was making her feel as if the room were too hot—it was—and her corset stays too tight— they weren’t. How curious that a man she despised as thoroughly as Victoria despised Captain Carstairs could make her feel so… well, vulnerable.

  A second later she was certain he could read her mind when he warned, “One day, Lady Victoria, you’re going to meet a man whose will can’t be bent to suit your purposes. And I’m not talking about Lord Malfrey, either. I mean a real man. And when that happens…”

  Victoria raised her eyebrows. “Yes?” she inquired.

  “You’ll fall in love with him,” Jacob Carstairs said shortly.

  Victoria could not help laughing very heartily at that.

  “Oh, Captain!” she cried, flinging out a hand to keep him from saying more—for surely if he did, she’d die laughing. “You are so droll! As if I could ever love anyone but Hugo!”

  But Jacob Carstairs wasn’t laughing at all. He regarded her gravely with those sea-gray eyes, looking almost—she did not think she was imagining this—as if he felt sorry for her.

  Sorry! For her! Lady Victoria Arbuthnot, who had forty thousand pounds! Really, it was too excessively diverting.

  “You don’t love him,” Jacob said somberly. “You can’t possibly.”

  It was then that, out of the corner of her eye, Victoria caught a glimpse of something. She could not say what it was, exactly, that caused her to turn her head just when she did. All she knew was that, in spite of how very, very interesting she found what Jacob Carstairs was saying, she could not seem to keep her gaze upon his face. Instead she glanced over her shoulder, back toward the doors to the room they were standing in….

  And found herself looking at the handsomest man she had ever seen. A man in evening dress, with golden hair, a manly jaw, and a smile just for Victoria.

  “Oh, can’t I, then?” she asked Jacob with a radiant smile.

  And then she turned to fly into her fiancé’s waiting arms.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Well?” Victoria spun in a circle before Lord Malfrey. “How do I look?”

  “Pretty as a picture,” his lordship declared. “Prettier, even.”

  Victoria stopped spinning, then ran her hands nervously over her muslin skirt to smooth it. Her fiancé’s assertion was all well and good, but she felt she might need a less subjective opinion. “Becky?” she asked, with a nervous glance in her cousin’s direction.

  But Rebecca was hardly paying attention. She had one hand up, shading her eyes—though the sun was putting in a halfhearted appearance, being mostly hidden behind the clouds that seemed perpetually to cover the English sky— while she scanned the green lawn before them.

  “I don’t see him,” she said, sounding dismayed. “Are you sure Mr. Abbott received an invitation, Lord Malfrey?”

  “Of course I’m sure, Miss Gardiner,” Hugo said with a laugh. “I added his name to the guest list myself. Now tell your cousin how lovely she looks, so we can join the rest of the company.”

  Rebecca threw Victoria a glance that could only be called perfunctory. “Vicky, stop fussing,” she said. “You look fine.”

  But this casual remark was hardly enough to satisfy Victoria, who had spent the whole of the morning in front of her bedroom mirror, castigating Mariah for not getting her hair coiled to perfection and her gown wrinkle-free. Nothing looked right—not her upswept hair, not the high-waisted white gown, not the blue silk sash just below her bosom, not the sapphire bobs in her ears, shimmering like stars, nor even the deceptively simple—but murderously expensive—blue-and-white straw bonnet she wore atop her head.

  And Victoria wanted everythin
g to look right, because today was the day every girl dreamed of… while at the same time fearing it with every fiber of her being. For today was the day Victoria was to meet for the first time the woman who would be her mother-in-law.

  “Mother will love you!” Hugo had exclaimed, when Victoria had expressed her reservations about this meeting to him. “Are you mad? How could anyone help but love you, Vicky?”

  But Victoria did not share her husband-to-be’s confidence in the matter. She knew that every home could have only one chatelaine, and she was determined that, in Hugo’s home, that would be she. But supposing the dowager Lady Malfrey was unwilling to allow her to take charge?

  Well, the dowager Lady Malfrey would simply have to be gotten rid of.

  Oh, not by killing her, of course. Victoria had a profound distaste for violence, and besides thought murder entirely too easy—unsporting, actually. It would be far more challenging simply to try to convince Hugo’s mother of the benefits of living elsewhere… Bath, perhaps. Or Portofino. Portofino was said to be lovely….

  Oh, it would be so much nicer if it didn’t come to that! It would be so much nicer if Hugo’s mother turned out to be rather a dim sort of woman, only too happy to allow Victoria to take over the running of her household. Or, better still, if she happened to turn out to be a shrewd woman who recognized at once Victoria’s superior management skills, and stepped dutifully out of the way.

  Either way, Victoria was about to find out just what, in fact, her future held: for Hugo had placed her hand upon his arm, and was steering her toward the large party gathered beneath one of the largest oaks in Hyde Park, for a festive picnic in honor of his bride-to-be.

  When Hugo had mentioned that his mother wished to hold a bridal picnic, Victoria had wondered—to herself, of course—if the woman was not perhaps unsound in the head. But now that she approached the series of white sheets spread out upon the grass, and saw the uniformed footmen, in their powdered wigs and coattails, standing about with silver trays of champagne glasses and bowls of fat ripe strawberries dipped in sugar, she saw that the word picnic, in England, meant something far different than it did back in India. In India picnics were hardly popular affairs, thanks to the heat, the constant threat of attack by tigers or bandits, and the throngs of impoverished beggars that gathered around the picnic blankets with their palms stretched out and their mouths opened hungrily. Victoria had never once attended a picnic where she did not end up giving away three quarters of her own food to the less fortunate, while her uncles had always insisted on embarking on such outings with an armed escort of no less than twenty men… an undertaking that made picnics in their area hardly a popular form of entertainment.

  Picnics in England were obviously something else entirely, if the coolly elegant scene before Victoria was any indication. There wasn’t a tiger in sight, let alone any armed militiamen. If there were beggars, they certainly ventured nowhere near. And as for bandits, the closest to them Victoria could detect was another group of well-dressed picnickers a few hundred feet away.

  Hugo guided Victoria toward a pleasantly plump older woman who had laugh lines radiating from the corners of her bright blue eyes, and a lot of very dark—surely dyed— curls peeping out from beneath her bonnet brim.

  “Mother,” Hugo said to the woman with a bow, “may I present at last my bride-to-be, Lady Victoria Arbuthnot.” Victoria, her heart beating wildly—for all she could think was, Supposing she doesn’t like me?—curtsied prettily and said, “So honored to make your acquaintance, ma’am.”

  The dowager Lady Malfrey, however, was not one to stand on ceremony, since she instantly reached out and seized Victoria by both shoulders and pulled her in for a long—and rather tight, to Victoria’s way of thinking— embrace.

  “At last, at last!” cried the dowager Lady Malfrey. Her voice was quite childlike in its tenor and pitch. “I have heard so much about you, Lady Victoria, I feel as if I know you already! But you are so much prettier than anyone said. Hugo, why did you not tell me she was so very, very lovely?”

  Hugo stood looking down upon them with a twinkle in his blue eyes—eyes that, Victoria saw now, he’d inherited from his mother.

  “I believe I did,” he said with a chuckle. “Did I not tell you she was fair as the evening star?”

  To be compared to the evening star was, of course, a compliment beyond all compliments, and Victoria, blushing with pleasure, thought she might actually die from joy… but first she rather hoped to extricate herself from her future mother-in-law’s embrace, as that good woman still held on to her with a surprisingly strong grip.

  “We shall be the best of friends,” the dowager declared, her cheek very soft upon Victoria’s. “The best of friends, I can already tell. Welcome… welcome, my child, to the family.”

  While this greeting was very nice indeed, it instantly set Victoria on her guard, for she knew very well that mothers- and daughters-in-law could never be friends. Allies, perhaps, against the men in the family, who would inevitably muddle things with their imprudent purchases and dirty boots. But never, ever friends. Victoria had listened as each of her ayah’s daughters wept after moving in to her husband’s home, only to find that the mother-in-law who had insisted before their wedding that they were the best of friends had turned around and spoken badly of her to the servants and all of her other daughters-in-law at the earliest opportunity.

  No, friends with the dowager Victoria knew she would never be. But rampaging Zulu warriors would not have dragged the truth of this from her lips.

  “How nice,” she said instead, still wishing the dowager would release her. “I never had a mother, as I’m sure you know. At least, not one that I remember well.”

  “I shall be a mother to you,” the dowager said, giving Victoria yet another rib-crunching squeeze. “A mother and a friend!”

  “That will be splendid,” Victoria said… and was able to draw breath at last when the older woman suddenly released her.

  “Oh, no, not now,” the dowager Lady Malfrey said in a sharp tone that was quite unlike the one she’d used with Victoria. “The petit fours come after the lamb cutlets!”

  Victoria turned her head and saw that the good lady was addressing one of the footmen, who was carrying a silver platter loaded down with tiny chocolate-covered pastries… pastries that Victoria already recognized, even after the mere two weeks she’d been in London, as being from one of the finest bakeries in town.

  While she was, of course, honored that the dowager would go to so much expense on her account, Victoria could not help suspecting that, after her marriage, she was going to be presented with the bill for this little party. For there were, by her count, nearly fifty guests, who would each consume half a bottle of champagne at least (for despite the lack of sun, it was a warmish day). Then there was the cost of hiring the footmen, not to mention the food—lamb cutlets, as Victoria knew only too well from her now-daily consultations with the Gardiners’ cook, were not cheap—and the rental of the silverware…

  Why, Victoria would not be surprised if the whole picnic ran over a hundred pounds! A hundred pounds! And spent by a woman who supposedly didn’t have a penny to her name!

  Oh, no. Victoria and her future mother-in-law were definitely not going to be friends. Not when Victoria began what she knew was going to be the very arduous task of forcing Hugo to retrench. For even her forty thousand pounds would not last, if this was a typical example of how the Rothschilds entertained.

  “Isn’t it a lovely party?” her cousin asked her dreamily an hour or so later. Victoria, who had had her fill of crab cakes and oysters—not to mention Lord Malfrey’s friends, who were of the hearty, backslapping variety—had taken up her parasol and begun to stroll around the edges of the picnic area… allegedly to walk off the effects of the champagne, but actually so that she could keep an eye on the servants, whom she’d begun to suspect were palming the silver.

  “Yes,”Victoria replied without having really heard the question
. There was something amiss about the dowager Lady Malfrey’s friends… many of them, like the dowager, had dyed hair. And their clothes seemed… well, a bit bright. They had all been very charming to Victoria, but there was no escaping the fact that they seemed to her to be rather… common. None of the men seemed to have employment, and she’d fancied that several of the women were wearing face powder. And Victoria was ready to swear that one of the younger ones had actually arrived with her skirts damp—on purpose, to make the material cling to her admittedly well-shaped legs.

  Her aunt Beatrice, Victoria knew, would have suffered apoplexy had she witnessed such a thing. Victoria was very glad that her aunt and uncle had had a prior social commitment and could not attend the hastily arranged picnic.

  “And you know,” Rebecca prattled on, swinging her reticule gaily beside her as she strolled, “Mr. Abbott says it’s the loveliest picnic he’s ever been to.”

  Victoria did not doubt this was so. It was also most likely the costliest.

  But seeing that Rebecca was so happy lifted her spirits a bit. Victoria even went so far as to congratulate herself that it was all due entirely to her own careful planning. Charles Abbott had proved to be an attentive and ardent suitor. More important, however, he had turned out to possess a fortune of five thousand a year, which, while not as impressive as Jacob Carstairs’s income, was nevertheless far more than a girl of Rebecca’s comparatively modest means could reasonably expect in a suitor. It had not been at all difficult to convince Mr. Abbott—who, at one and twenty, was quite ready to fall in love—of her cousin’s merits.

  And it had been even easier to get Rebecca to forget all about her infatuation with a certain ship captain, and think only of Mr. Abbott instead. For as Victoria knew very well indeed, there was nothing more appealing to a young girl than a handsome gentleman who happens to admire her. All it took was a few well-timed compliments and a nosegay in order for Mr. Abbott to replace Captain Carstairs in Miss Gardiner’s heart. Her hand, Victoria was certain, would soon be his.