Victoria and the Rogue (15 page)

thought Jacob Carstairs handsome, when Hugo Rothschild was so clearly a superior physical specimen,

Victoria summoned her courage, and said, “I’m afraid I’ve received some very bad news, my lord.”

Lord Malfrey, who was picking out a tune on the room’s pianoforte, looked unconcerned. “Really, my

love? Don’t tell me your wedding gown won’t be ready on time. I told you to go to Madame

Dessange’s. Brown’s is scandalously overpriced, and never has anything ready in time.”

“It isn’t my wedding gown,” Victoria replied from her chair. She kept her gaze on her gloved hands,

folded tightly in her lap. “It’s my uncles. I’ve received a letter from their solicitors, and it contains… it

contains what I fear might be bad news.”

Lord Malfrey looked up sharply from the keyboard, his blue-eyed gaze very penetrating indeed.

“They’re well, aren’t they?” he asked. “Your uncles?” Then, with slightly less urgency, “Oh, they’re your

mother’s brothers, aren’t they? I’d forgotten.”

Victoria winced. This eagerness on Lord Malfrey’s part to learn whether one of her uncles was likely to

die soon— and possibly leave her yet another inheritance—was not a good sign. Her father, of course,

had been the one with the title and fortune. Her uncles had nothing but their military pensions to live upon.

Lord Malfrey, realizing this, looked unconcerned again, and began plunking out another tune, not very

well.

“My uncles are fine,” Victoria continued with some irritation. Really, this was not going at all as she’d

planned. Perhaps she was not acting disturbed enough. Oh, what she’d give for her cousin Clara’s ability

to produce dramatic tears on demand! “It’s just that… there’s been a terrible mistake.”

“A mistake?” Lord Malfrey hit a few more notes. He seemed to be trying to play a rendition of “Pop!

Goes the Weasel.” “What kind of mistake?”

“Quite a grave one, I’m afraid,” Victoria said. “You see, the solicitors have only just discovered that

there is a codicil to my father’s will.”

Lord Malfrey looked up at that. “A codicil? What kind of codicil?”

“Quite a silly one, actually,” Victoria said. “You see, my father was terribly overprotective of me, even

as a young child, and… well, shortly before his death he inserted a codicil to his will that said his fortune

was to go to me absolutely… but not if I married before I turned twenty-one.”

The lid to the pianoforte crashed down, fortunately missing the earl’s fingers, but only by a fraction of an

inch. He did not appear to notice, however. He sat exactly where he was, staring very intently at

Victoria. All of the color seemed to have drained out of his face.

Victoria thought, with a sinking heart, that this was not a good sign.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Oh, well. She oughtn’t have been surprised.

Victoria had been up all night long rehearsing just what, exactly, she’d been going to say to Lord

Malfrey. She had not been able to help but fantasize about how he’d respond. In her fantasies, when

she’d confessed to Lord Malfrey that she was not entitled to her fortune unless she stayed unwed until

she was twenty-one, he, with a manly laugh, had replied that he perfectly understood and would wait until

the end of time for her.

And all was well.

But this did not appear to be the way things were going to go in real life.

Victoria had never forgotten a story her ayah had liked to tell her at bedtime when she’d been younger.

It had been about a maharaja who so wanted to be sure that his wife loved him for himself alone, and not

his riches, that he ordered a hovel to be built some distance from his palace. Then, when he chanced

upon an attractive maiden who was not aware of his exalted riches, and thought him only a poor

fisherman (they met along the riverbank), he did nothing to disabuse her of the notion. Instead he married

her on the spot, and carried her away to his hovel. His bride, not knowing that the man to whom she’d

pledged her love was actually a maharaja, was quite happy in the hovel, and cheerfully bore him a half

dozen children before her husband finally became convinced of her love for him and broke the news: that

he was not, in fact, a fisherman, but the richest man in all of India.

The wife responded by hitting him over the head with a cookpan several times (at least according to

Victoria’s ayah), so great was her ire that for years they’d struggled on next to nothing when all along her

husband had had millions of pounds of gold at his disposal. But eventually she overcame her anger and

went with her husband and their children to the palace, where she proved to be a gracious and

compassionate ruler, and lived happily for many, many years.

If Lord Malfrey had responded to Victoria’s news the way the maiden by the river had, by saying

money mattered not to him, and that they would either wait the five years until her fortune became her

own, or marry at once and live happily, if impoverished, for the rest of their days, then she’d been quite

prepared, unlike the maharaja, to reveal at once that she still had her forty thousand pounds, and that

they might dine on champagne and ices for the next fifty years and never know a moment of financial

hardship. She wanted to know only that he cared for her a little. Just a little.

But she could already tell that Lord Malfrey cared for her not at all, and that he was not going to say

either of those two things—Let’s wait to marry, then, or Let’s marry at once, and damn the money. No,

Lord Malfrey had grown very pale indeed, and looked the way her uncles had always looked when one

of them punched another in the stomach during an argument.

“Twenty-one?” the earl echoed with a gasp. “Can’t marry until you’re twenty-one? But that’s not…

that’s not for another five years!”

“Yes,” Victoria said sadly. Sad not because of the five years, but because of Lord Malfrey’s expression,

which was not encouraging. “Five years is a long time. But if one truly loves… well, what is five years, or

even ten?”

Lord Malfrey, however, did not seem to take so romantic a view of things. He got up from the

pianoforte so abruptly that the bench fell over behind him. And he did not even appear to notice. Instead

he paced back and forth across the room, dragging his fingers through his golden blond hair, and looking,

truth be told, like a man bedeviled.

“How could you not have known this before?” he kept asking. “How could your uncles have kept this

from you? It’s… it’s criminal, that’s what it is!”

Victoria, watching him, said only, “It’s very unfortunate, certainly.”

“Unfortunate! It’s ridiculous!” Then he stopped pacing, and stared at her. “Was your father a sadist?”

Victoria, who decided she had learned all she needed to know, gathered up her reticule. “Not to my

knowledge, no,” she replied. “I suppose he was only hoping to keep me from falling prey to men who

might wish to marry me only for my fortune.”

Lord Malfrey let out a bitter laugh. “Well, that’s one way to do it!” he said.

Victoria stood up. She could not help saying, as she paused to unclasp the buttons on her left-hand

glove, “You know, Hugo, many people who have much less to live on than you and I marry and are, by

all reports, quite happy.”

The earl looked at her in utter disbelief. “Who? No one I know.”

“No,” Victoria said. “I would imagine not. No one you know actually works for a living, do they?”

Though she knew now that it was a lost cause, she could not help adding, “My uncle Walter might have

helped, you know. He could have found you a post in his shipping business.”

Lord Malfrey looked incredulous. “Work? Victoria, what do you take me for? Do I look like a man

who is cut out to work for a living? And in shipping?” He heaved a shudder. “The only careers that are at

all suitable to a man of my rank are the church and the law, and they both require simply odious amounts

of schooling. You know I am not bookish.”

“No,” Victoria said. “You aren’t, are you?” She pulled off her glove and removed the ring with the

emerald stone that he had given her. She wondered, vaguely, how he was going to pay for it, since she

was now quite sure the story he’d told her about his family portraits was untrue, and that he’d bought the

ring on credit, thinking he’d pay for it with her money once they were wed. “Well, this is goodbye, then,

Hugo. Or should I say, Lord Malfrey.”

He looked dully at the ring as she placed it on the little table by her chair. He did not deny that was the

end of their relationship. He did not even bother to say he was sorry for it. She could not help wondering

if he’d been more civil to Margaret Carstairs. She was somewhat surprised Jacob hadn’t gone after him

with a fire poker. But she supposed the earl had left town before the captain had gotten the chance.

“And there isn’t anything you can do?” Lord Malfrey asked in a plaintive voice. “Any way you can… I

don’t know. Reason with them?”

“With my father’s solicitors, you mean?” She looked at him blankly as she pulled her glove back on.

“Reason with them about what?”

“The will! Your father’s will! There’s got to be a way around that codicil, hasn’t there?”

The door opened, and the dowager Lady Malfrey came into the room, wearing a white lace cap upon

her head and dressed in a robe splendiferous with maribou that was at least two sizes too small for her

round frame.

“What codicil?” she asked, holding a glass of what appeared to be ice water against one temple. “Good

morning, Lady Victoria, and forgive me for my late rising. I have quite a megrim. How I hate all this rain!

What codicil, my love?”

As the dowager sank down into the seat Victoria had just vacated, her son exploded, “Mama,

Victoria’s made an awful discovery. There’s a codicil to her father’s will that she loses her fortune if she

marries before her twenty-first year!”

The dowager Lady Malfrey turned her blue eyes— which Victoria now saw were not good-humored at

all, but actually filled with shrewish malice—upon her son’s former fiancée.

“What’s this?” she demanded in a voice that rose in pitch and fervor with her words. “Can’t marry until

your twenty-first year? But that’s five years from now!”

Victoria refrained from remarking that, for people who professed a lack of bookishness, the arithmetic

skills of both mother and son were exemplary.

“That is correct,” Victoria said.

“And you’ve waited until now to tell us,” the dowager exclaimed, “when the invitations are already at the

engravers?”

“You needn’t worry about that,” Victoria said lightly. “I sent a note to the engravers this morning.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” the dowager said. Then her shrewish glance grew suspicious, and she eyed

Victoria very closely indeed. “Wait a minute. You sent the engravers a note this morning? Just when did

you learn of this codicil of your father’s, my lady? ’Tis only just gone past half after nine! What lawyer’s

offices open for business at such a barbaric hour?”

Victoria smiled pleasantly at the dowager. “How perceptive you are, madam,” she said. Then, turning

toward Lord Malfrey, she said, “My dear Hugo, I cannot continue this facade. There is no codicil. I lied

to you just now. My fortune is my own, as it always has been.”

Lord Malfrey stared at her for a moment. Then a look of great happiness spread across his handsome

features.

“A joke!” He looked ready to burst with relief and joy. “It was all a joke! Oh, Vicky! How rich!”

But the dowager Lady Malfrey’s gaze was upon the emerald ring in the center of the little table before

her.

“Joke?” she echoed. She lifted her gaze and sent a piercing look in Victoria’s direction. “It wasn’t a joke

at all, was it, Lady Victoria?”

“No, my lady, it wasn’t.” Victoria did not know how she stood there before them as tall and as straight

as she did. Her knees were shaking, and disappointment was causing her throat to ache.

Stronger, however, than her disappointment was Victoria’s shame in herself. She could not believe she

had been so easily—and completely—duped. For a part of her had truly believed that Jacob Carstairs

was wrong, and that Hugo Rothschild had loved her—had loved her from the moment he’d first seen her,

as he’d assured her that night in the moonlight on the deck of the Harmony, when he’d proposed. A part

of her had truly believed that the earl would have done anything—even become employed—for her. It

was truly the hardest blow she’d ever been dealt in her life—worse even than losing her parents, since

she so dimly remembered them—learning that Hugo Rothschild didn’t care a jot for her.

But it was better—far better, she told herself—to have found out now, before the wedding, than after.

Now she was ashamed, it was true. But she was more or less unscathed. Had she found out about Lord

Malfrey’s true nature after the wedding, though… well, she’d have been trapped in a loveless marriage.

At least this way she was free. Free to walk out that door and marry whomever she liked.

Only… who? For the only other man who had ever made her heart skip a beat, as Lord Malfrey had,

was a man she despised with every fiber of her being…

…as well as the man to whom she owed thanks for her present state of utter wretchedness.

“I had hoped, Lord Malfrey,” Victoria said, tears— as yet, she was thankful, unshed—of wounded

dignity making her voice unsteady, “that you did not care solely for my fortune, and that you loved me at