Season for Scandal (16 page)

“Now it won’t sound original.” Xavier regarded his glass with some doubt. “Ah, well. For a good cause. Best wishes for future happiness to our newly wed pair. And to the rest of you, too. Why should all of you be denied my best wishes, simply because you didn’t happen to marry my cousin Jane?”

At the opposite end of the table, Louisa added, “Very diplomatic, and sensible, too. Good wishes cost the giver nothing, but may mean everything to the one receiving them.”

“Lady Xavier is always saying wise things like that,” Xavier said.

A small smile touched Louisa’s lips. “Lord Xavier thinks he can discomfit me by analyzing everything I say. But if he recalls the fact that I married him, he will surely realize that I cannot be discomfited.”

Jane said, “Xavier, I think she just gave you a compliment
and
a curse, all at once.” The rest of the table relaxed into chuckles and chattering.

“Happiness in marriage,” Bellamy muttered at Jane’s side. “There’s a fable as sure as the City of Atlantis.”

“Not at all. Why, just look.” She indicated the foot of the table, from which Louisa regarded her husband with a smile. It was the sort that ought to be reserved for private moments, intimate pleasures. There was nothing salacious in it; it was just so honest. The smile of a woman delighted to be in company with the man she loved; the smile of a woman in love.

“Miracles do happen,” Bellamy admitted. “Families are lost, then found again. Men are born who change the course of a nation. Today of all days, we should remember that.”

“Why today?”

He blinked at her. “Why? Well—because. We’re drawing near Christmas.”

“Then why today? Why not . . . oh, five weeks from today, or however long it is?”

“Ah, Lady Kirkpatrick, when you reach my age, you’ll regard every day as an opportunity. To right a wrong, to do one’s best.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Jane decided.

The meal continued with toasts and brioche and the promise of new day after new day. It was all going rather well. Eventually she would master this life as a baroness.

Since she wasn’t given all that much to master, it ought to be within her power.

Again she searched out Edmund across the table. He was in full bloom, bringing a laugh to Lady Irving’s lips and a smile to the watching Lady Sheringbrook.

His mouth made all the right shapes, but there was no joy in his eyes. Had they always been like that, or had she never looked closely enough to notice before?

Jane wondered whether happiness in marriage—though not a fable—was a rarer miracle than she had supposed.

Chapter 12

Concerning Revolution

All through dinner, Turner had chatted with Jane, playing the man of business, the world traveler. And all through dinner, Edmund had been forced to play a part, too: the friendly bridegroom who had nothing on his mind but the meal before him. And the conversation of his hostess’s blunt-spoken aunt, Lady Irving, who sat at his right.

“You’ll never keep that wife of yours satisfied if you can’t keep her closer than this,” the widowed countess said after two glasses of wine, not that she needed the assistance of spirits to speak her mind. “Brides need a lot of tending, you young rogue.”

“Tending? Like gardens?” Edmund blinked innocently at his dinner companion.

“I thought you’d enough experience with women not to be such a ninny.” With a practiced hand, she straightened her bright orange shot-silk turban. “
Tending
, man. Tending. Make her feel—hmm.”

“Treasured,” said Edmund, just as Lady Irving added, “Pleasured.”

They looked at one another and grinned. “Treasured would work, at that,” the countess granted. “But she’s neither treasured nor pleasured while she’s sitting next to that jumped-up ninny of a tradesman.”

Edmund could hardly disguise his pleasure in hearing Turner called a jumped-up ninny. “Perhaps,” he replied, “my wife is so well satisfied with my company that she has no need for large doses.”

The countess’s smile vanished. “It would be dangerous to think so.” She set down her wineglass, turning its stem between her fingertips. “Dangerous to take a wife for granted, especially at this early stage of your marriage.”

“Dangerous? How so?” Edmund tried for a light tone. From the corner of his eye, he watched Jane and Turner. The false Bellamy. The liar who held Edmund’s past and future in his blunt-fingered hands. Hands that he had just lain over Jane’s.

Edmund’s insides felt knotted and acid-burned. Somehow, he had to get Turner out of his life and away from those who relied on him, but he had no more notion how to do that now than he had twenty years before.

Lady Irving rested her hand on his arm, drawing his gaze back to her. “Think about the sort of marriage you want, young man. If you’d like to whore around London, coming home only to get an heir, then by all means, carry on.”

“I would never treat my wife thus.” Well, not the whoring-around-London part.

Spin spin spin
. Lady Irving rotated her wineglass by its stem again, then folded her hands in her lap. “I suppose not. But Jane is my niece’s cousin-in-law, which makes her almost my family. I would hate to think she married a damned fool.”

“So would I.”

With a low bark of laughter, the countess said, “That’s a start, young man. That’s a start. Now, mind you keep her pleasured and treasured.”

“I’m trying,” Edmund muttered. “If she would only let me give—”

He cut himself off, not wanting to discuss the failure of his usual being-good-to-everyone methods on Jane, but the countess seemed to understand. “It’s like that, then; I see. Jane can be a stubborn wench. Just like her aunt-in-law, or whatever relation I am to her.”

Her garish orange turban slipped, loosing a few strands of auburn hair. “I might have spoken out of turn; I can guarantee it won’t be the last time I do so. But mind you think less about what she won’t allow and more about what she will. Don’t give up on that wife of yours. She’s a girl after my own heart, and that means she won’t give hers lightly.”

“Yes,” Edmund said, not knowing exactly what he was agreeing with. Jane had told him—once, only once—that her heart was already his. But for how long if there was always a wall between them, whether of plaster and brick or of deathly politeness? How long could love last, unfed and unwatered? And did he even want it to?

At the mere thought,
fed
, his stomach wrenched with a protest. With Turner across the table, and Lady Irving testing his resolve to keep a damned smile on his face, he regretted every bite he’d choked down.

Fortunately, the conversation around the table took a turn then, and the group started toasting one another. By the time the women rose to leave the dining room, Edmund had put a lid on the dreadful feelings Turner awoke. He had slipped once, early in the meal; Jane had caught him glaring at Turner. She could not have known why, yet the distance that slivered between her and Turner had pleased Edmund.

She came no closer to Edmund, but as long as she was farther away from Turner, he would settle for that. And though there was no opportunity to speak to her before the women trailed into the drawing room, leaving the men behind at table, her departure placed walls between her and Turner. Physical walls, surely more of a barrier than the one between her and Edmund.

He would settle for that, too.

Around the long wooden table, Xavier offered cigars. “From Fox of St. James’s,” he said, naming one of the
ton
’s favorite tobacconists. Port came next. The ever-tipsy Lord Weatherwax, whose blunted nose was already beginning to redden, took a glass in each hand and had drained both before the other men had laid hold of their own port.

“Dreadful weather and whatnot,” said cherubic Freddie Pellington, standing before the fire and rubbing his hands together. “Dash it, London’s no place for a gentleman in autumn. Can’t keep my cravat starched properly with all the mist in the air.”

“Damned nuisance to come back to London so early.” Lord Alleyneham, a stern-faced earl, hooked his ebony-headed walking stick on the back of his chair, then belched and stretched out a hand for a glass of port. “Ought to be in the country shooting, what? I would be, but for the damned rebels at Peterloo. Bloody traitors.”

Ah, the Peterloo massacre, as the papers were calling it. Edmund had lately been so caught up in his own problem—the problem that now stood in the corner of the dining room, playing with a gold cigar case—that he’d forgotten the lords who had left town had been recalled for a special session of Parliament. Over the summer, a peaceful worker protest in Manchester had been broken up by cavalry, with gruesome results. The Prince Regent and Home Secretary were determined such a thing would never happen again: not the attack, but the very act of protest.

“Ought to have been shot, the lot of them,” Lord Alleyneham was now adding. His tongue chased the last drops of port around his glass.

“Many of them
were
shot,” Xavier said. “Yet they were not armed, were they? They were simply hungry. On the backs of people like these rests our livelihood; should we not lessen their burdens when we can?”

Lord Alleyneham’s mouth went flat. “Sounding rather Whiggish, aren’t you? Thought you were a good Tory. Member of White’s and all that.”

“Goodness has nothing to do with one’s political leanings.” Xavier bowed his head to the older earl. “Though I am honored that you should associate goodness with me in any way.”

Turner flipped open his cigar case, then snapped it shut. “If the Peterloo crowd had gone at the cavalry with bricks and bats, there would be none of this puling. Either they’d have got what they wanted, or they’d be punished right clear.”

“Damned lucky they didn’t rise up,” Alleyneham said. “There were what, fifty thousand there? They’d have overwhelmed the cavalry in a second. But then you can’t expect peasants to possess an understanding of arithmetic.” He leaned back in his chair, setting his walking stick to swinging like a clock pendulum.
Tick
, it went, as the ebony head of it rocked back and forth. It seemed the voice of time itself, tugging on Edmund with dreadful force.

The subject was all too familiar to Edmund. Too familiar, the protests by a desperate crowd; too familiar, the violence and blood. More than twenty years had passed, yet it was not long enough to forget.

He tried for a calm voice. “It had less to do with arithmetic than human decency, Alleyneham. Even a child can tell that a crowd is more powerful than a few mounted riders. The workers wanted to be heard, not to hurt.”

Turner raised his brows. “What does a child know of revolution?”

Edmund wished that his pale skin didn’t flush so easily. They might attribute it to the port; Alleyneham and Weatherwax had already grown ruddy. “In an ideal world,” Edmund said, “a child would know nothing of revolution at all. But this is hardly an ideal world. Sometimes children are pulled into the struggles of adults, and they must cope as best they can.”

Xavier looked at him oddly; then an expression of amused tolerance draped their host’s features. “Indeed, Kirkpatrick. In comparison, adults are damnably complacent—at least, we often are in Parliament. I’ve no idea how the voting will shake out, but we wouldn’t be having a special session of Parliament if the Prince Regent wasn’t a bit nervous.”

“Quite right.” Alleyneham blinked pouchy eyes. “Think of that Irish uprising in, what was it?”

“1798,” Edmund supplied. His fingers went cold, and he set down his port glass. At once, he picked it up again so his hands would have something with which to busy themselves.

Alleyneham’s walking stick clattered to the floor. “Right, right, 1798,” he said loudly as a footman raced to pick it up. “Those rebels killed thousands, didn’t they, and laid waste to half of Ireland. And how did it all turn out? With their leaders executed and their Parliament dissolved. People who can’t rule themselves must be ruled with an ever-tighter fist, and there’s an end to it.”

“Ah, but that wasn’t an end to it.” Turner opened his case again, taking his time selecting a cigar.

“How do you mean, sir?” Alleyneham was looking still redder.

“The spirit of revolution survived.” With a tiny blade, Turner lopped off the end of his cigar. “If the government tightens its fist too much, people become accustomed to slipping through its fingers, don’t they?”

“You are right,” Xavier admitted. “There was another uprising in the early 1800s, wasn’t there? Around—oh, I’d say 1803. I had just gone to school when it took place.”

“It went nowhere. Quickly quashed, just like this Peterloo nonsense.” Alleyneham eyed Turner’s cigar case with some interest. “Having one of your fine Indian cigars, Bellamy?”

“Indeed, my lord.” The so-called Bellamy walked over to the earl, holding forth the case. “You’re welcome to one.”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

Edmund watched as England’s greatest fraud handed off a cigar to England’s most complacent old lion. What would Alleyneham do if Edmund were to shout,
he’s lying to you; he’s as bad as those you’ve called traitors. Worse, far worse.

And those cigars could not
possibly
be from India.

He couldn’t shout it, though; it would be the work of a moment for Turner to spit his own truths right back. The man hadn’t plotted treason alone, nor committed adultery by himself. Edmund could never implicate Turner without destroying what was left of his own family, himself, and now—Jane, too.

Inside, he boiled; a boiling that tightened his fingers on the curve of his glass and made him wish it was Turner’s neck. He wanted to crush the man who had taken so much and who was back now, cheerful and vile, to take everything else.

Snip.
Turner cut off the end of Alleyneham’s cigar. “There you are, my lord. Enjoy it.”

“Indeed. I thank you, Bellamy.” Lord Alleyneham took a puff, and an acrid smell like burning manure wafted from the end. “It has an interesting bouquet, hasn’t it?”

Again, Xavier offered his own sort, and the conversation was directed from politics to tobacco before a towering argument took place.