A Regency Charade (16 page)

“It’s
you
who’s m-made it ugly and b-bitter,” she accused, dashing the last of her tears from her reddened eyes. “And I kn-know
why
you’ve done it, too.”

He turned from the window, arrested. “What do you mean?”

She bit her lip and twisted the soggy handkerchief in her fingers. She hadn’t intended to bring the matter up. She’d thought about it deeply and decided against it. She knew instinctively that she was making a mistake, but this entire conversation had gotten beyond her control, and she couldn’t seem to help herself. “I’m n-not such a ninny hammer as you evidently think me! Accusing
me
of lying and h-having b-base motives … when all the while, it’s
you
who are lying and base! Do you think I’ve heard nothing of your doings with my c-calculating little cousin Clio?”

“So … you’ve heard that, have you?” He strode across the room and placed himself squarely before her. “Whatever you may choose to think, ma’am, Clio Vickers has nothing whatever to do with this. I learned a thing or two while I was abroad, you know, and one of the things I learned was that one can often salvage what seems to be a losing campaign by creating a diversion. You women are
born
, I think, with instincts for battle strategy. But don’t think you can use Miss Vickers as a diversionary strategy
here
. It won’t wash. Your admitted infidelity with Edmonds is the issue, not some unsubstantiated and malicious gossip concerning your cousin and myself.”

“Dash it, Alec, there
was no infidelity
between Blake and me!” she cried.

He waved away her words with an impatient gesture. “Please! Not another denial. Repetition does not make it convincing.”

“Only because you don’t wish to be convinced. If you did, I shouldn’t need to say anything. The obvious fact that I didn’t marry him would have been convincing enough.”

“Well, I do not find it so.”

“So I see. Nor the fact—or haven’t you yet heard it?—that Blake has been married these three years or more?” It was a last hope, and she suggested it with a faint elevation of her spirits, but Alec had been so distant, so strange, so unwontedly cruel throughout this meeting that any means of touching him seemed remote indeed.

“No. That fact, ma’am, merely substantiates my conclusions.”

This response quite confounded her. “What conclusions?” she asked.

“Yours is not the only case, you know,” he said distantly, “in which a lady has found it more convenient to be married to
one
man while she bestowed her favors on another.”

Priss’s eyes flew to his face in shock. “What is it you’re
saying
?” she queried, her mind refusing to take in his hideous suggestion.

He fixed a steely eye on her. “If you insist on the whole truth, my dear, you may have it. You married me at the insistence of your mother, who convinced you that your possession of my considerable fortune had decided advantages over a life of impecunious romance with Edmonds. As all ladies of society with an ounce of sophistication soon discover, a married woman, especially one with a pitifully naive husband such as I was, has considerable freedom to do as she likes. What better way to have a life of luxury and a lover as well? And if that lover is
also
married, the cloak of respectability is double-thick, isn’t it?”

Like someone in a hypnotic trance, she rose from her seat. Her lips were ashen and her eyes wide. “
You think
…
that Blake and I
…?” Her voice was a mere whisper, so great was her effort to speak.

“That is
exactly
what I think.”

“And that we
still
—?”

“I have no interest in the present state of your affair, ma’am.”

The floor seemed to lurch beneath her feet. Her hand reached out until it found support on the arm of the sofa, but her eyes never left his face. She could feel her limbs trembling and the blood pounding in her ears. She did not know what had happened to cause the change, but this man was not the Alec she’d married. She was filled with such revulsion that she felt physically ill. If she were a man, she would have set at him at once with sword or pistol and not ceased until he lay bleeding at her feet. If she were a simple country girl, she would have scratched his eyes out. But she was neither of these. She was merely a discarded wife … a foolish, romantic dreamer … with a ruined past she could no longer bear to remember, and an empty future she did not dare to contemplate.

But for the present, she knew only one thing. This creature standing before her filled her with loathing. “Give me the papers!” she said with venom. “I’ll sign them! I’ll sign
anything
that will allow me never to set eyes on you again!”

Chapter Twelve

It had been a shattering scene. If it had occurred on a stage, a curtain would have fallen on her ringing declaration of disdain. But this was not a play. No curtains fall on the dramas of real life; the scenes just continue, on and on. In this case, the continuation turned the drama into a farce—for there was neither pen nor inkstand to be found in the drawing room!

It was an embarrassing and futile anti-climax, during which Priss stormed helplessly around the room to find an inkstand that wasn’t there (for all the writing tables were located either in the library or the upstairs or downstairs sitting rooms), acutely aware that Alec was observing her movements with an expression of distaste—much as one might watch a child having a temper tantrum. This only served to increase her fury, and she snatched the papers from his hand, ran out of the room and across the hall to the sitting room, Alec forced to follow behind.

She flung open the sitting room door, surprising her mother into a glad outcry. “Prissy, my love, is it over? Have you kissed and made—? Good heavens, what’s the matter?”

Her daughter had brushed past her, her face stiff and unreadable, and made straight for the writing table in the corner. And Alec, equally stiff, had not crossed the threshold of the room but stood waiting in the doorway. “Alec! What’s happening? Aren’t you and Priss—?”

“No, Mama, we’re
not
!” Priss muttered between clenched teeth as she hurriedly scratched her name on the three sheets. “You’re not to say a
word
to him! Not a
word
!”

Lady Vickers, paling in alarm, looked helplessly from one to the other. “But … isn’t he even to stay … to take tea? Everything’s all laid out … the silver … the flowers …!”

Priss threw down the pen, scattering droplets of ink heedlessly across the desk top. “Bother the tea and the silver!” she muttered, wheeling about and crossing back to the doorway again. As she passed the table, she flung out her arm. “And bother the
flowers
, too!” With a violent swing she sent the vase toppling over and rolling across the table, scattering blooms and foliage all over the floor and sending the water in the vase spilling on the white linen to run unchecked over the table’s edge. “
Here
!” She thrust the papers at him roughly. “You have what you came for! Now, please, leave this house! If you should ever have need to communicate with me again, you can do it through Mr. Newkirk.” She pushed him aside and ran past him to the stairs.

Lady Vickers clasped a trembling hand to her bosom. Alec stared after Priss, thunderstruck. In spite of all his supposed sophistication, he had never before seen a woman in a genuine frenzy. He knew he should leave—he
wanted
to leave. But it seemed quite heartless, somehow, to go without a word. “Priss?… er …
ma’am
…?” he called after her awkwardly.

She had already run up the first few steps, but at his voice she stopped, her hand on the bannister. But she did not turn or acknowledge in any other way that she’d heard him.

He took a faltering step toward the staircase. “I … I just wanted to say that … if you have need of … of … er … of anything … you have only to ask Mr. Newkirk, and—”

She whirled around in a fury, her eyes blazing. “Do you m-mean
money
? You … you
dastard
! If you think I would take a
penny
of your blasted fortune, you’re a greater fool than even
I
think you! I wouldn’t
touch
your money … not even if I had to go b-begging for
b-bread … b-barefoot
… in the
snow
!” And she turned and ran up the stairs and out of sight.

He looked after her in stupefaction until he heard her door slam shut. Then he turned to Lady Vickers, who had remained frozen to the spot during the entire altercation. “I hope you’ll tell your daughter, Lady Vickers,” he said, his lips curling sardonically, “that it will not be necessary for her to ‘go b-begging b-barefoot in the snow.’ I fully intend to make a substantial settlement—”

“I shall tell her nothing of the sort,” Lady Vickers declared, drawing herself up to her full height and fixing him with a glare of withering scorn. She crossed to the door and, stalking past Alec with a forbidding frown, she added, “She will want nothing of your settlements. If you ask
me
, Alec Tyrrell, you are the
world’s prize idiot
, and Priss is well rid of you!” Without another glance, she followed her daughter up the stairs.

For a moment Alec stood rooted to the floor, torn between two conflicting impulses—one to shout up the stairway some very choice epithets of his own, and the other to kick the furniture. But he realized that, although both these activities would afford him a pleasurable sense of release, neither would elevate him in the ladies’ esteem—or his own. A discreet cough from the shadows made any other sequel impractical: Craymore was observing him from behind the stairs.

The butler emerged from hiding. “You’ll be wanting your hat and stick, my lord,” he said, proffering the items with an air of unmistakable disapproval.

“I can tell from your expression, Craymore, that you want to say something,” Alec said with a sigh. “Go ahead and speak your mind … if you must.”

The butler shook his head, all his earlier warmth gone. “It’s not my place to say what I think, my lord. But if I were your father (and since I’m acquainted with your lordship since you were a babe in arms and your sainted mother permitted me to dandle you on my knees, I have sometimes felt like a substitute parent, you might say), I would say that you’ve acted mighty like a … a …”

Alec held up a restraining hand. “I know. A fool.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Thank you, Craymore. Good day.”

He stepped out into the fading sunlight and sighed in considerable relief as the door closed behind him. But his ordeal was not yet over. No sooner had he reached the street than he came face to face with Isaiah Hornbeck, obviously bound for the place he had just left. The older man grinned and grasped his hand. “Afternoon, Lord Braeburn. Y’re lookin’ at home to a peg. But are ye leavin’ already? Don’t tell me I’ve missed tea—her ladyship distinctly said to present myself at four—” He stopped himself abruptly, and his expression changed with the suddenness of the daylight when a small cloud obscures the sun. “Oh, no!” he exclaimed with alarm. “Ye haven’t gone and cut yer wife
again
!”

“If by that expression you mean to suggest that Lady Braeburn and I have not reconciled,” Alec answered stiffly, “you are quite right.” He met Mr. Hornbeck’s glower of disapproval with one of his own. “And if you’re about to tell me that I’m a fool, you needn’t bother. I’ve already heard it from four different quarters this very afternoon!” He lifted his hat, nodded brusquely and strode off down the street.

Alec found his spirits not a little depressed by the encounters, and his return home did not bring him the relief he’d hoped to find, for Kellam’s attitude was so marked in its disapproval that Alec was not permitted to forget what caused it. The batman went about his household duties with his nose decidedly out of joint. The fellow did not deign to speak to his employer with anything but the rudest of monosyllables, and in all ways was so impossible that Alec almost considered terminating his employment. When he mentioned the possibility aloud, however, Kellam merely snorted, for both of them knew that they were too tightly bound for Alec ever to take such a drastic step.

Even his evening’s festivities at White’s, in the company of Ferdie, failed to cheer him, and when he suddenly realized, with an exclamation of self-condemnation, that he’d forgotten all about his promise to Gar, he knew that his evening was quite ruined. He took himself round to Gar’s hotel as soon as he could make good his escape from the club, but his friend, whom he awakened from a deep sleep, was groggy, sullen and piqued over Alec’s neglect. It took all of Alec’s talent for persuasion to bring himself back into Gar’s good graces.

Gar moved in with him the next day, but even that turned out to be less agreeable than he’d anticipated. Garvin Danforth had changed, of course, yet in many ways he’d remained disturbingly the same. His mind was still in the ivory tower world of scholarship. He was completely absorbed by the work he was doing for his uncle, Lord Hawthorne, whose collection of many thousands of volumes of scholarly tomes had been sadly in need of organization before Gar had come on the scene. The fellow could speak of nothing else but his bibliographical discoveries. Alec could easily sympathize with Gar’s excitement over having discovered an unknown translation of Tacitus or an unfamiliar edition of Erasmus’
The Praise of Folly
, but the fellow did tend to prose on at inordinate length over these triumphs. To make matters worse, Gar tended to disapprove of everything Alec did, and he did not hesitate to voice his disapproval very frankly and at great length. “I had no idea you were a
gambler
, Alec,” he’d say. “Lord Hawthorne says that gambling is the scourge of the upper classes, and I am inclined to agree—”

Alec would try to put in a few words in self-defense. “A few games of cards can hardly be considered—” he’d begin.

But Gar would not be stopped. “A game of cards leads so easily to a game of Faro, and before one knows it, one is
gaming
, you know. I’ve heard that twenty thousand pounds can be lost in one evening at your club! Twenty thousand! Isn’t that monstrous? Why, entire estates can be lost in such profligacy! And it is such an addiction that the gamester soon begins betting on anything—a race between two flies on the wall, or whether or not a certain lady will succumb to a certain gentleman’s wiles! Can you not see the way in which the corruption deepens?”