A Christmas Scandal (7 page)

“Of course.”

Edward clenched his jaw again. This was not at all what he had planned when he’d invited her to spend time in the library. He’d just wanted to be close to her, alone with her. He’d, perhaps, thought he might get her to kiss him as he was dying to do. Even though, with her being engaged, that would be so, so wrong. It was pure agony being with her and seeing her eyes alight with happiness at the mere mention of her fiancé. What kind of idiot brings up a woman’s fiancé when he’s in love with her himself? It was almost as if he wanted to punish himself for being imprudent enough to fall in love with her.

He hadn’t meant to insult her. Or perhaps he had. He was suffering and she was, well, disgustingly happy. It wasn’t fair.

And then, while he went back to blindly placing books on shelves, it hit him like a blow. He had become one of them. One of those ridiculous lovesick idiots that he’d made fun of since he was in short pants. He was literally feeling ill at the thought of her marrying another man. It wasn’t the altar and flowers that passed through his fevered brain, but nightmarish images of her beneath a faceless man thrusting into her, her face in thrall, her body arched in ecstasy. He wanted to shake her. No. He wanted to love her. But most of all, he wanted her to love him.

Oh, Lord, how in hell had he allowed himself to go this far over the edge? Keeping her letters had been pathetic enough, but at least he could rationalize it in his ever-rational mind. But this…
feeling.
This sick, wonderful, horrible, weak feeling was absolutely untenable. He dared look at her and she was lovely. She was smiling down at her paper the way she would no doubt look down into her Arthur’s eyes when he was making love to her. She paused in her letter writing and gazed up at the ceiling, and his eyes moved from her perfect mouth to her neck, soft, slim, and enticing, and he nearly groaned aloud.

Goddamn her. Goddamn Arthur Wright. But most of all, goddamn him for being foolish enough for falling in love.

Elizabeth laughed aloud at the face Maggie was making as she squeezed into another of her old gowns.

“My goodness, Elizabeth, I had no idea you were quite so…”

“Diminutive?” she suggested.

“Scrawny,” Maggie said, looking down at the two quivering mounds of flesh that were nearly bursting from her neckline.

Elizabeth waved away her complaint. “Take it out a tad and it will be a perfect fit,” she said. “Other than the bosom, it’s quite lovely.” Maggie was more than lovely, Elizabeth thought, looking at her friend fondly. Maggie might have gone through a sad time, but she was the same girl she remembered, the bubbly, happy, ever-optimistic person she’d known nearly her entire life. Despite what must have been a horrific time, she was still Maggie, still lovely with her huge brown eyes and dark curling hair, still Maggie with her carefree smile.

Maggie looked in the mirror, her eyes widening comically at her reflection. Elizabeth had to admit that Maggie looked like one of those Wild West dance hall girls she’d seen in some rather naughty publications her cousins had once shown her. “I can’t breathe,” Maggie said with an exaggerated wheeze.

Elizabeth ignored her friend’s discomfort and eyed her critically. “Sophia, can you fix these gowns?”

Sophia was Elizabeth’s seamstress, a young girl from the village who’d been worked to near starvation by her mistress. It had come to Elizabeth’s attention that Sophia was designing and sewing all the local gentry’s gowns and Madame DeMarin was getting all the credit. Elizabeth, who hadn’t thought about anyone other than herself for the first nineteen years of her life, was finding it rather satisfying to help others. She’d already accumulated an impressive list of the downtrodden who were now gainfully employed by the new Duke and Duchess of Bellingham. One local resident actually had some of his wooden carvings being displayed in the Museum of Metropolitan Art in New York. Sophia, now in the coveted position of personal seamstress to a duchess, was only her latest project.

Sophia eyed Maggie critically before saying, “Yes, Your Grace. It will simply be a matter of letting them out a bit.” Sophia, much to Elizabeth’s vast relief, did not fawn over her like so many others she had encountered. She was painfully blunt and wonderfully honest. “Perhaps some added lace around the bustline.” She was examining poor Maggie’s quivering mounds as she said the last.

“See?” Elizabeth said.

Maggie looked down at the rich deep blue gown. Even in the days when she’d owned ball gowns, she’d never had anything of this quality on her back. Seed pearls adorned the sleeves, hem, and neckline, held in place by gold thread. “It is beautiful,” she said, letting a bit of yearning in her voice.

“I wore it once and I shall never wear it again,” Elizabeth said, smiling down at her ever-growing stomach. “Rand says he never wants me thin again and I am more than happy to comply.”

Maggie gave her friend a withering glance. “The only fat thing about you is your belly.”

Elizabeth pinched her cheeks. “I am positively plump,” she said, “and that is the way I’m going to stay.”

“It is true that a baby changes a woman’s body forever,” Sophia said matter-of-factly.

“Does it feel very strange?” Maggie said, finally asking the question she’d been dying to ever since seeing the clear evidence that her friend would, indeed, have a baby.

“Only when she moves,” Elizabeth said solemnly, then laughed aloud. “Rand insists it’s a boy, but I think he secretly is wishing for a girl. It’s almost as if there’s a melon in there rolling about. A melon with feet to kick me. And I’m extremely awkward, waddling about everywhere.”

“I don’t know how I shall do it,” Maggie said. “I cannot sleep if I’m not on my stomach. And that looks to be quite impossible.” She eyed her friend’s stomach with a bit of awe tinged with horror.

Elizabeth laughed at her expression. “I’m not a monster.”

Maggie shot her a guilty smile. “Sorry. It’s just so very strange seeing you like this. It’s so…so…”

“Out of character?”

“Well, yes.”

Elizabeth clapped like a child about to be given a treat. “That is exactly what I’m trying to do: the opposite of everything I did before I met Rand. My children will play in the mud until they’re thirty. And they shall climb trees and sing at the top of their lungs while slouching terribly. And eat whatever they want. Well, perhaps not that, I really do want healthy little children.”

“How many do you plan to have?”

“Twelve. But three or four would do as well,” Elizabeth said.

Maggie made a face, thinking that she wouldn’t want to have relations with a man more than once or twice. “I think I’ll have one,” she said firmly.

“How many does Arthur want?”

For just a moment, Maggie didn’t know what her friend was talking about; then she recalled her lie and turned away to look at her reflection. “We haven’t discussed children yet,” she said, and even though that was true, it still felt like a lie.

“Men want a brood. Proves their manliness,” Sophia mumbled through the pins in her mouth.

“Are you married, Sophia?” Maggie asked.

Sophia looked up at her with an almost hostile look on her face, as if the question was somehow insulting to her. “No.”

Maggie shot a look at Elizabeth, who shook her head slightly in a warning not to say anything more.

After Maggie had tried on more than a dozen gowns, she collapsed into a large chair, completely exhausted. Sophia had gathered up the huge mound of silk, wool, velvet, and lace and promised all the gowns would be ready in time for any Christmas festivities and certainly by the time the season was in full swing in April.

“I think you are conspiring with Amelia to get me to stay,” she accused. “You know very well that my lack of appropriate gowns was the only remaining obstacle to my staying here for the season.”

“I adore Amelia, and there was a real danger she would have to miss her season if she could not find a chaperone. The person I must truly apologize to is Arthur. I’m certain he expects you home earlier than June.”

Maggie thought she would scream if Elizabeth mentioned Arthur one more time. As soon as it was possible for the post to have arrived from the States, she was going end this charade that she was an engaged women. Between Elizabeth and Lord Hollings mentioning him at every other turn, she was going to scream out the truth. She hated this mendacity, especially when it meant lying to her best friend. Lying to Lord Hollings was perhaps less awful, because it gave her some satisfaction to know that her engagement was a source of irritation to him.

Maggie let out a noncommittal “
Mmmmm”
without meeting Elizabeth’s eyes. Compounding her guilt was the knowledge that Elizabeth had shared everything with her, including her ill-fated plan to elope with Henry, the man she’d thought she’d loved.

“I hope you’ll forgive me for saying this,” Elizabeth said cautiously. “But…oh, never mind.” Elizabeth shook her hand in front of her as if erasing her thoughts.

“What do you want to say?” Maggie asked, even though she dreaded what the question was going to be.

“It’s just that—and you are not allowed to get angry with me if I am completely wrong. You have to promise.”

Maggie gave her friend a look of exasperation. “I promise I will not get angry. At least I will not let you know that I’m angry. How’s that?”

“Perfectly acceptable.” Elizabeth braced herself, and Maggie got an uncomfortable feeling that somehow she had suspected the truth about Arthur and was not about to confront Maggie about it. “It’s about Arthur.”

Maggie felt her stomach knot uncomfortably.

“I get the feeling, and please correct me if I’m wrong, that you don’t love him.” She said the last quickly, then winced.

Maggie took pity on her friend and smiled. “It is not a mad, crazy love. More of a mature deep liking.” That was exactly how she’d felt about Arthur, that living with him would not have been awful, but certainly not wondrous, either.

“Oh,” Elizabeth said, clearly disappointed. “Is it because of your…situation?”

“It is that. And the matter that no one else has seemed even remotely interested in me,” Maggie said, laughing. “The only other man who paid any attention to me was Lord Hollings, and he was only
pretending
to be interested to keep all the other mamas away!”

“I’m so sorry,” Elizabeth said, and to Maggie’s surprise her eyes glittered with tears.

“For goodness’ sake, Elizabeth, it is not a great tragedy,” Maggie said, even as she remembered that what had truly happened to her was, indeed, fairly tragic. She almost gave in to hysterical laughter at that moment, the result of which made her appear to Elizabeth ecstatically unconcerned about her situation.

“It’s just that to find a great love is so completely wonderful.” Maggie, who could count on one hand the times she’d rolled her eyes in disbelief, rolled her eyes. “It’s true,” Elizabeth said earnestly. “There is nothing better in the world than to love someone with all your heart and know,
know,”
she said, putting both hands over her heart, “that they love you as much or even more.”

“Oh, Elizabeth,” Maggie said, amused and touched by her friend. “You truly are the luckiest girl.”

Elizabeth beamed a smile, and Maggie prayed she wouldn’t bring up the topic of Arthur again, at least until she produced the fake letter from her fake fiancé.

Two weeks later, Maggie and her mother received their first post from America. It was a letter from Aunt Catherine, which she’d apparently written a week before they’d even departed so it was considered rather miraculous that a post arrived so soon after their own arrival. The Pierce women had the same thought at the same time: they could use the aunt’s letter as a ruse and claim it was from Arthur, breaking off his engagement to Maggie.

So when the letter was presented to Maggie, she picked it up, held it against her breast rather melodramatically, and raced to her private suite on the pretext of reading a love letter in private. Harriet followed discreetly behind, acting like the perfect, curious mama who is so thrilled she has found a husband for her only daughter.

When her mother entered their sitting room, Maggie nearly succumbed to a bout of hysterical laughter and she handed over the letter to her mother.

“This couldn’t be more perfect,” Harriet said, clapping her hands together. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes glittering with excitement. “Now you shall have to cry. Or at least appear as if you have been crying.” Her mother tapped the unopened letter thoughtfully against her palm. “Onions ought to do the trick. The only question is how to get them here without anyone knowing.” Maggie watched in fascination as her mother considered the problem a bit more, then shook her head. It was almost like watching a farcical play; this could not be her real life, could it? “These servants are militant. The other day I asked one of them to light the fire in the grid and you might have thought I’d asked him to invent fire. Apparently only the maids are supposed to
light
fires. I shall never be able to retrieve an onion myself and I cannot think of a reason why I should ask for one.”

“You might say you’re afraid of vampires,” Maggie said dryly.

“That’s garlic, my dear.” Harriet squinted her eyes together as if doing so would give her an idea. “Can you cry?”

“You’ve trained me not to.”

Harriet pulled a face. “I don’t need your fresh mouth at the moment, Margaret. I need your tears. Certainly enough awful things have happened in the past six months that you can produce a few. Think about poor Papa in jail. He’s cold and alone. Or worse, there’s a positively awful man with him in his cell. He’s uneducated and…he smells and is particularly ugly. Papa is missing us terribly and especially the opera.” Her mother’s voice got suspiciously tight. “He’s all alone and here we are, living in a palace without a care in the world, planning the most wonderful season and he’s…he’s…” With that, her mother buried her face in her hands and began crying copious tears.

“Mama, I’m supposed to cry, not you,” Maggie said, coming over to embrace her mother, who continued to sob. She knew she should not laugh, so used all her willpower not to.

“I suppose it will seem particularly real if it looks as if I’ve been crying, too,” Harriet said in a rather waterlogged tone. “But you are not doing your part.”

“I am trying,” Maggie said, allowing herself to laugh. “See?” She put a great effort toward becoming somber and pointed to her eyes, which were completely void of tears.

Harriet didn’t think Maggie was very amusing, and her comment only served to produce even more tears from her mother. A dry-eyed Maggie continued holding her mother, trying to absorb her bodyracking sobs. Suddenly, Harriet thrust her away, the expression on her face almost hateful.

“Why ever did you do that?” Maggie asked warily.

“You
should be crying, not I,” her mother said angrily.
“You
are the one who got us into this mess. You are the one who gave your virginity to a man without the benefit of a wedding.
You
are the cause of your father embezzling money, the reason he’s rotting away in prison. Do you think he would have felt such pressure for money if not for your lofty ambitions?
You
had to go to Newport.
You
had to attend all the same balls as Elizabeth, which meant more and more ball gowns and jewelry, things we couldn’t even begin to afford but which you happily accepted without a single thought to their cost.”

Maggie shook her head in shock, all levity of the moment completely wiped away by her mother’s horrible words, and her eyes flooded with tears, spilling over to course down her cheeks. “But that’s not true. I never asked for any of that. I was grateful, but how could I have possibly known what Papa was doing in order to fund all of those things?”

Harriet let out a sound of disgust. “You threw away the only man who was ever willing to marry you. Do you truly think you are such a catch? Do you really think you’ll find any man to marry you? Perhaps if you trick him. Is that what you were trying to do with Arthur? Is it?”