Rake’s Redemption
Beverley Oakley
Chapter 1
Vauxhall Gardens, 1818
* * *
“Are you asking to be ruined, Fanny?”
It was a reasonable question for her scandalised cousin to put to her but Fanny was beyond caring.
Jostled by crowds of merrymakers wearing all manner of costumes at tonight’s masquerade in Vauxhall Gardens, she was not yet ready to go home. Indeed, she had pressing reasons why she should not, in fact, be required to dance to Cousin Isadora’s tune.
“No one will miss me.” Fanny lowered her voice with a glance at their chaperone, Lady Harwood, though she needn’t have worried. The old woman was all but deaf. And, lack of hearing aside, Lady Harwood was only interested in the retainer Fanny’s mother paid her to escort Fanny and her sister and cousin to the entertainments she thought most likely to yield a decent match for one of the girls.
Isadora continued to look disapproving as she started to walk towards the line-up of carriages waiting to convey the guests home. Her thin mouth was pressed together, making her look even more prim, Fanny thought. It was incredible to believe they were related, though admittedly it was distant and through the least attractive side of the family.
“You can’t meet Lord Alverley alone, Fanny,” Isadora said, stopping by the path so that Antoinette could catch up. “You know you can’t.”
“But he’s waiting for me, Isadora. Here in the gardens. He said he wanted to meet me. He’s going to make me an offer, I know it.”
“Then let him make it in the morning. Like a gentleman.”
“You don’t understand.” Fanny had stepped back beneath an elm tree and now she put her hands on her hips and directed a pointed look at her sister to highlight what she perceived as a great injustice.
For there was Antoinette, a little distance away, talking to a young man Fanny had never seen. Flirting with him was a better description, the way she tossed her golden head and her little gloved hands made patterns in the air as she described something to her rapt audience. A rapt audience with a decidedly rakish gleam in his eye.
And Lady Harwood didn’t even seem to mind.
“Look at my sister.” Fanny nodded at Antoinette, barely able to contain her outrage. “It’s her first evening ever at an entertainment like this and her behaviour hasn’t even been remarked upon.”
“That’s because Lady Harwood and I can see Antoinette,” said Isadora firmly. “The moment you disappear the worst will naturally be assumed. You know the rules. I’m surprised you should even think I’d agree to let you dash off, even for a minute.”
“You are not my keeper, Isadora.”
“I may well be in a year or two.” A shuttered look crossed her cousin’s face and, despite her frustration, Fanny felt sorry for her. Isadora was twenty-five and unmarried after the man to whom she’d been betrothed for three years had died of fever the year before. Since then she’d been shuffled between various family members depending on who most needed the services of a pliant nurse, it seemed.
And this was Fanny’s greatest fear; a horror that quite feasibly awaited her if she did not secure a decent marriage offer. For, despite the fact that Fanny was an acknowledged beauty who’d garnered a great deal of interest during her first season the previous year, she came with no dowry.
And now they were well into her second season with one odious offer to consider. One that, if she didn’t take, meant she might well be condemned to a situation as deplorable as Isadora’s. The thought of having to accept the man her mother was so keen she wed breathed added energy into her quest to secure the offer she truly believed was forthcoming from the slavishly adoring Lord Alverley.
“Tell me, Fanny” — Isadora’s gentle doe-like eyes looked suddenly fierce. “Does this gentleman make your heart beat wildly?”
Fanny crinkled her nose. Not because the question seemed so unlike anything Isadora would normally ask but because Fanny thought Lord Alverley rather stupid, actually.
“Or does his pocket book make your heart beat faster?”
While Fanny weighed up her response, Isadora said with a note of triumph, “Then he is not worth losing your reputation over. Not that any man should be. And one who truly loved you — as you would want to be loved — would never risk putting you in such a position, either.”
She turned abruptly, calling out over her shoulder, her voice betraying her sudden weariness.“Come along, Antoinette! You need your beauty sleep as much as I do.”
Then, turning back to Fanny, Isadora raised her pointed little chin with an obvious effort at looking imperious as she indicated the landau, for all the world like a maiden aunt two decades older. “We’ve both had a lovely evening but all good things must come to an end.”
Fanny took a resigned step towards the now open door, Isadora’s dire words ringing in her ears.
Why must all good things come to an end? she wondered when suddenly she heard herself being being addressed in a high, reedy voice. A wonderfully familiar voice that warmed the cockles of her heart as its owner’s tones dripped with dismay.
“Surely lovely Miss Brightwell is not going home at such an early hour?”
Fanny stepped back from the open door of the carriage and sent a dazzling smile at the man who might just possibly become her saviour tonight if she played her cards right. “How delightful to see you, Lord Quamby.” She sighed. “But, yes, I’m going home because my chaperone insists upon it.” She sent him a tragic, beseeching look, adding, “Even though I could dance all night if I only had someone respectable to keep an eye on me.”
“And would your chaperone consider an aged peer and his even more aged mother sufficiently respectable?”
Fanny bit her lip as she waited hopefully for the response from Isadora, and from Lady Harwood who’d already shuffled into the carriage and seemed like she had no idea what was going on. Surely, they couldn’t refuse? Not the request from Fanny’s unlikely friend and ally, crippled Lord Quamby who was seated in his comfortable landau with his wizened old mother bundled up in the corner like an ancient porcelain doll.
It was well known that the eccentric earl took his mother everywhere. She seemed insensible half the time but what did that matter?
Especially if she was taking on the duties of a responsible chaperone.
“I shall deliver Miss Brightwell back to her home before the clock strikes two,” Lord Quamby promised.
After making the requisite show of deference to the earl, and with a resigned shrug of her shoulders and a nod at Fanny, Isadora shepherded a pouting Antoinette into the landau and pulled the door sharply closed behind them.
Chapter 2
This was not how the evening was supposed to unfold.
Lord Quamby’s intervention had seemed like divine intervention two hours ago. Fanny had sipped champagne and eaten oysters and made him laugh, revelling in her elevated status and conscious of the admiring glances all about her.
He’d happily let her go when she’d told him, with no attempt at lying, that she’d be obliged if he and his mother would excuse her as she had an important assignation with a young lord whom she was certain was going to make her a very respectable and life-changing offer.
Lord Quamby had been delighted. Scratching his old-fashioned russet bag-wig and raising his monocle to gaze at her with open admiration as his footman had assisted Fanny down from his carriage, he’d farewelled her on a cloud of bolstering well-wishes, as convinced as she was that she would soon be seated beside him at the next grand supper where status determined everything.
But n
ow, in the shadows of the lantern that hung outside the supper house where she’d gone to meet Lord Alverley, Fanny registered the dismay on the young man’s face and realised she’d just made the biggest miscalculation of her life.
Alverley shuffled his feet, unable to look her in the eye. And this, after a very great deal of kissing and fondling that had given her completely the wrong idea about his intentions. “I’m afraid I can’t marry you, Miss Brightwell. Forgive me.”
The distant strains of the orchestra now playing in Vauxhall Gardens’ rotunda competed with his awkward let-down. He cleared his throat and mumbled, “Lady Georgiana has been my intended bride since we were children…I thought you knew that.”
Despite her shock, Fanny kept her smile in place. Regardless of the fact that everything in her short, young life had been leading to this moment, it didn’t falter. If there was one thing her mother had taught her it was that dignity must be maintained at all times. Even when the unstable ground beneath her feet brought back Fanny’s ever-present fears she was on the verge of being tossed overboard and fed to the sharks.
Her mother would do it, too.
Carefully she drew in a breath while tears stung the back of her eyelids.
The future which, a moment before, had seemed so full of glorious possibilities, now seemed like a black void ready to swallow her. Or, at least, it was waiting with barely concealed impatience to sweep her into a morass, destroy her youth and beauty and then spit her out and cackle at the destruction of her feeble hopes and dreams.
Fanny swallowed past the lump in her throat, still keeping her smile plastered in place as she envisaged a thousand dreadful calamities she hoped would overcome his lordship for his shoddy treatment.
Tonight was supposed to be the night she’d burst through the front doors of their borrowed townhouse, triumphant as she declared to her mother that she had succeeded in her most important mission—make a match that would restore the Brightwells to their former position on society’s ladder.
With difficulty, Fanny breathed out. She would not cry, but she would not make it easy for him, either. There was a limit to how accepting Fanny could be, even for the sake of dignity. Lord Alverley wanted Fanny to forgive him for such a betrayal when her future lay in tatters? Her mother would never forgive her.
Clutching the spider-gauze fichu of her daring masquerade costume, she stepped back to avoid his open-armed approach.
Lord Alverley wanted her, but not as his wife. Could he really imagine she’d sacrifice her reputation, and that of her family, to be his mistress? That was almost what he’d intimated. As if the Brightwell’s poverty and the scandal into which their late papa had plunged them meant she should be grateful to him for such an offer.
“You deceived me, Alverley.” It was true. He’d led her to believe he was in love with her and she’d almost formed a fondness for him—for her mother’s sake, only— because there’d been precious few other suitors prepared to take a dowerless bride whose father, well-born though Baron Brightwell had been, had married so far beneath him. And then her father had done even worse by them all.
“Fanny, wait—” His eyes were beseeching.
Cow’s eyes.
She’d thought it from the start, so why had she persisted in this futile courtship? Surely she should have been clever enough to trust her instincts?
But of course she’d persisted because Lord Slyther had been waiting in the wings.
An alternative worse than death.
Grotesque Lord Slyther, with his moist skin and his repulsive breath, had known Fanny was on a doomed mission to find a husband who would satisfy Lady Brightwell’s exacting criteria as well as the yearning of Fanny’s ridiculously sentimental heart.
Lord, what Brightwell of Fanny’s generation could afford to be sentimental?
She shook her head not trusting herself to speak as she turned away. She realised it wasn’t only Alverley’s deception that had landed her in this predicament. She had to take responsibility for her own gullibility. The normally careful, calculating Miss Fanny Brightwell had miscalculated, and soon her mother would remind her that Lord Slyther was both just punishment and more than a girl like her could have hoped for.
The tongue-lashing would be almost worse than what was happening right now.
“Fanny, I—”
“Please, leave me, my lord,” she managed in something just above a whisper. “I should never have agreed to visit you here, alone. If you have any regard for me, you’ll say nothing about this if only to preserve my reputation.”
“Just one final kiss.” His voice was too near her ear when she thought he’d comply and slink into the shadows. The thought of being touched by him, ever again, made her recoil, and as she spun away, her flimsy-soled slippers skidding on the gravel, her ankle gave way beneath her. She felt the brush of leaves, the scratch of branches, and thought of the pitiful sight she would make as her mother vented her fury upon her.
Fanny was to have made the Brightwells’ fortunes. She amended this in the split second available for thought. Fanny had begged to be given one last chance before the ghastly alternative that would ensure the Brightwells’ survival…
…but Fanny had failed.
The ground rushed to meet her. So! This was to be the final indignity—to land in the dirt at his feet!
She closed her eyes, throwing out her hands and tensing as she anticipated the pain, wishing the price of her failure could be similarly condensed.
Instead, strong, unfamiliar arms scooped her up and an amused voice murmured in her ear, “Young lady, I think you’d be far safer tucked up in your own bed than consorting with this obviously unsatisfactory gentleman.”
Fanny blinked up into a pair of dark eyes that glinted at her through the slits of his demi-mask. Her first instinct was to cleave closer to whomever was prepared to offer rescue from her current nightmarish predicament; then remembering that her instincts had been decidedly off lately and that if she had any chance of getting home before her mother discovered her missing, she made a violent attempt to struggle out of his arms.
The chest against which she was now pinioned seemed to ripple with amusement. To her fascinated horror it was a naked chest, hard and tense beneath the fine linen of his pirate costume. “It seems you are a disadvantage, madam. Allow me to remove you from further embarrassment.”
For just a moment, Fanny was robbed of speech. Then anger rose to the fore. This man, fascinating though he was—and no doubt all the more because he was in masquerade—was belittling her. He had no idea of the magnitude of the disaster Fanny now confronted and his levity in the face of her humiliation, still so fresh, swept away the gratitude she might otherwise have felt.
“Put me down,” she ground out as Alverley, after a hesitation, stepped forward, saying, “Your intervention, sir, is appreciated…”
When the stranger made no move to set Fanny on her feet, Alverley’s voice became diffident. “However, we must rejoin our party. Please…put the lady down.”
Was Alverley afraid? For her? For her reputation? The reputation he was prepared to see shredded in front of all the world—or, at least, those who mattered. Or did Alverley fear for his own safety, since her saviour’s piratical costume revealed that this was a man who did not resort to padding to bolster his masculine attributes?
The pirate tightened his hold on Fanny and regarded Alverley critically. “I gained the impression the young lady has no wish for your company, sir.”
Fanny was not going to deny it. Having realised the futility of her struggles, she simply gave up. Why not enjoy the intimate warmth for a few minutes of someone who wasn’t a whey-faced bounder like Alverley? Someone who would actually whisk her out of Alverley’s orbit.
Perhaps she shivered, for suddenly the arousing, mellifluous tones of this pirate stranger sounded intimately in her ear as he stepped back from the supper house where she and Alverley had arranged their assignation. “You are cold, madam, and this man has
caused trouble enough. I think it’s time we took our leave.”
“Sir, I must object!”
It wasn’t Fanny who said this but she made no attempt to respond to Alverley who sprang forward as she was swung wide, her bare arm feeling the brush of Alverley’s vainly grasping fingers before she was borne into the gloom.
A crowd of revellers rounded the bend, sweeping Alverley into their midst as Fanny was carried in the opposite direction. Still she did not struggle as his shouts faded into the distance.
“I’m surprised you didn’t scream?” The stranger’s voice was conversational as he rapidly traversed the serpentine walk that led to the river; as if it were a normal occurrence for a pirate to bear a damsel in his arms.
The strong beat of his heart through her fine muslin gown made Fanny’s beat all the more erratically, as he went on, “Isn’t that what ladies do when they’re kidnapped?”
“I thought you were rescuing me.” Despite her doubt regarding his intentions, she found his sardonic humour appealing. She consoled herself with the thought that she need only scream and he would set her back upon her feet. She would be free.
It was not a liberating thought. Free to tell her mother she had misjudged matters? Free to become an object of pity—if not ridicule—to her so-called friends?
She decided to surrender herself to fate for the moment, clinging to him more tightly as he negotiated a hazard upon the footpath. Trying to sound bolder than she felt, she added, “Besides, bringing attention to my predicament might injure my reputation.”
“While my attentions won’t?” They were by the river now. A short crossing would take them out of the gardens. Almost disappointed, she acknowledged she’d been in good hands after all. Her rescuer was going to put her in a hackney carriage when they got to the other side.
Lord, what was she thinking? Of course that was what must happen. If she wasn’t home at a decent time, Fanny would be marching up the aisle to join Lord Slyther before the week was finished.
Rake's Redemption (Scandalous Miss Brightwells Book 1) Page 1