Wicked, My Love (4 page)

On Friday, Isabella stood in the parlor on a makeshift stage made of two ottomans shoved together, and rehearsed her Wollstonecraft Society acceptance speech. The early afternoon sunlight fell in slants through the windows onto the green wallpaper. She glanced at the mantel clock to find that only a minute had elapsed since she had last checked. The train carrying the day's mail had rumbled in three hours ago, but still no letter from her stockbroker.

It's too soon for him to reply. Calm down.

But she couldn't. Despite having told Randall not to overreact, she'd spent the next forty-eight hours doing just that. She'd vacillated between telling herself that it was all an itsy-bitsy, tiny, minuscule clerical error, and imagining a violent medieval-like mob, replete with torches and pointy sticks, invading the bank's buildings, demanding their money. Then she saw herself, huddled by the grate at the poorhouse, asking in a consumption-choked voice if another spinster was going to eat the rat crawling across the floor.

“Isabella, you seem distracted today,” Cousin Judith called from where she sat along the back wall. “Is something wrong?”

I'm afraid I'm going to die in the poorhouse, childless and without ever having known a man. Luckily, I won't be alone, as many of my bank's customers will be joining me.

“I'm just nervous about giving speeches,” she told her cousin. “Please, please consider going to London for me and accepting the Wollstonecraft. I can't speak before crowds. I start babbling incoherently or
turn mute.”

“I'll have none of that. Start again where it says ‘Mrs. Wilkinson was a penniless, desperate widow, raising her own eleven children, as well as six younger sisters and four nieces.' But don't look at your page the entire time and try not to mumble.” Judith sat taller in her seat, her spine erect.
“Be confident.”

“Confident,” Isabella echoed weakly. She wasn't confident on days when the skies were bright blue and the robins were chirping, much less on ones when her entire world felt like a brittle layer of ice covering a deep, barren sea of financial ruin and marital doom.

Tap,
tap,
tap.

The
mail!

Mary slipped into the room and curtsied. “Pardon me, Miss St. Vincent, this letter just arrived for you.”

Isabella leaped down, sending the ottomans tumbling and waking Milton from his daylong snooze on the sofa. She rushed across the room, as her heart, stomach, and lungs all rose, vying for a position in her throat, and grabbed the missive. She couldn't wait for a proper letter opener and instead tore at the envelope with her fingernails.

Dearest Unemotional
Shrew,

Please tell me that you have heard from your
stockbroker?

Sincerely, Kindest Regards, & C,

Lord Extremely Calm

PS: It's a regular Judgment of Paris over here. I've run out of compliments for fair faces, bedecked gowns, insipid singing, and hideous sketches. You can only say “vision of luscious splendor” and “dream of transcendent beauty” two or so dozen times before they become trite. Can you recommend a nearby cliff to leap from to end t
his misery?

Her heart, stomach, and lungs all sank to their normal places.

“Excuse me, Cousin Judith, but I must respond to this very urgent correspondence,” she said. As much as she disliked Randall, this was the second time he had saved her from oratorical torture. That numskull was becoming a regular knight in shining armor.

She hurried to her room and penned:

Dear Suicidal
Paris,

I wouldn't expect to hear a reply in less than forty-eight hours. And I'm quite sure the entire matter is a trifling oversight. In fact, I haven't thought about it since I sent the letter.

Sincerely,

Isabella St. Shrewd

PS: Weren't the ladies au naturel for the judgment
of Paris?

A mere hour later she received a reply.

Dear Miss St. Fibber,

By God, you are right about Paris. (You may note that in your ledger.) I'll inform the ladies not to wear anything for the ball. Then, to appease my persistent (nagging) mother, I'll make my famed judgment and seal my marital and political fate with the “right kind” of Tories.

Yours
Truly,

Lord au naturel

On Saturday afternoon, after another angst-filled, dreams-of-ruin-and-despair night, Isabella headed down to the village. She paced up and down the street containing Mr. Powers's house, hoping to catch him if he happened to leave his home.

Oh, hello, Mr. Powers
, she would say in a breezy manner.
Fancy
meeting
you
here. Such a lovely day. Me? Well, I'm just getting some fresh air. By the way, did you ever hear from Merckler Metalworks? I'm positive that you are innocent of stock fraud and theft, and it was all just a small oversight with the stock serial numbers. You would never knowingly endanger the bank, not to mention our upcoming marriage for which you haven't proposed yet, but I'm sure you will. After all, I've already named our unborn children—little Tony, and Aileen, for my mother. You wouldn't want to jeopardize their future, would you?

She had strolled by his house at least a dozen times or more until, across the lane, the men drinking ale by the tavern window began smirking at her. She gave up trying to casually bump into him and went for a more direct approach: knocking on his door.

Two hours later she composed a letter.

Dear Lord
Randall,

Have you seen Mr. Powers lately? I happened to pass by his house when I went strolling this afternoon. Naturally, since he is a partner in the bank, I saw no indiscretion in calling upon him. On the three different times I tried to visit, no one answered, not even a servant.

PS: Of course, I wasn't spying on him, mind you. I was merely curious with regard to the business at hand, which I'm sure is a tiny clerical
error.

“Be strong, be strong,” she whispered as she sealed the envelope.
There's always tomorrow. Remember, he wouldn't miss your dancing lesson for the world.

But Mr. Powers didn't attend church. The vicar gave a sermon, and the congregation stood and sang at the correct intervals. Meanwhile, Isabella clutched her prayer book and rocked in her pew, praying in her head,
Dear
God, dear God
. She never got past those first two words, repeating them over and over to herself.

That afternoon she was determined not to watch every tick of the minute hand on the clock and distracted herself by going through journals and creating graphs of her stocks. Unfortunately, every other article was about stock fraud or a new bank failure.

Mr. Powers never arrived.

She had to admit the truth: either he had lied to her or had been eaten by a pack of wolves.

How
could
he
do
this
to
me? To our unborn children? To my dreams?

Monday was a blur of going back and forth to the post office, asking if she had received a letter and if the postmaster could double-, then triple-check the bags, and “Do you think it might accidentally have been given to someone else?”

After the fifth such visit, the harried man simply said, “You again? No.”

At home, she interrogated all the servants, “Did I receive a letter?”

After the postmaster informed her that he was closing for the day and, no, he wouldn't check the bags again, she trudged home, up to her room, and collapsed on her bed. “Be strong,” her father had told her when, as a small child, she'd watched the men carry her mother's body from the house. “Be strong,” he had said to her when they first arrived at this home in the maddeningly quiet countryside, so different from the home young Isabella knew, of pounding factory floors and crowded London streets. “Be strong,” he had whispered to her on his deathbed.

“Be strong,” she ordered herself now, using her bedspread to wipe away the early formation of a tear. She wouldn't cry. She never cried.

Then she saw it waiting on her desk: an unopened letter! Why hadn't anyone told her? She tore open t
he envelope.

Dearest Besotted Spy of Mr. Powers,

Powers is nowhere to be found. I took the ladies shopping today, secretly ducked away in the millinery shop (they didn't notice), and slipped down to that rascal's domicile. No one was home, no light was lit. I know he was supposed to call on you yesterday. That faithless, lying scoundrel.

Ten trains have arrived from London since our last meeting. Tell me that you have heard from your stockbroker. It's been one hundred and twenty angst-ridden hours of praising embroidery, playing shuttlecocks and archery (ladies are so ruthless to each other in sport), and tossing about at night, suffering nightmares of despair and destruction and being eaten by African lappet-faced vultures. Tell me that our lives are not
ruined.

Yours
Truly,

Lord Doom and Gloom

She smiled in spite of her fears. For the first time in all the years of wishing Randall to the devil, she was grateful for him. Carrying this secret worry was too hard alone.

***

Randall's mother must have mowed down all the flower gardens, because the interior of the house was practically blossoming for the ball. The scent of a hundred flowers clogged his nostrils. Candles blazed from all the sconces. Across the chalked dance floor, all the daughters of the right kind of Tories looked at him, some shyly under their lashes, others coyly from above fans, or boldly over their shoulders. The same questions lingered in all their eyes.
Will
you
pick
me
for
the
first
dance? Do I get to tell my papa that you spirited me away to the conservatory, dropped on one knee, and then pledged your undying devotion and servitude to me and the Tory party?

Meanwhile, an edict burned in his mother's strident glare:
Pick
one, damn you.

He reached into his coat, fished out a tiny flask, and discreetly poured brandy into his champagne—something stronger to get him through the night. Before returning the flask, he gulped a direct shot for good measure.

His mother was especially distraught after an embarrassing article appeared in that morning's
Examiner
. The writer had delivered a harsh critique of Randall's performance in Parliament, claiming he was a handsome man of little substance and concluding that he was a detriment to the advancement of Britain and her empire. The article then went on to praise Randall's political opponents lavishly.

Normally, Randall could brush aside the newspaper claptrap, but these words had stung because they smacked of his fears. Dammit, he wasn't just a handsome actor reading Tory lines, but a committed politician dedicated to advancing the welfare of his nation over his popularity and selfish ambitions.

Or was he?

The paper had made the rounds among several important guests before his mother found the offensive column. “Get married,” she had ordered her son, tossing the paper into the fire.

Randall had always imagined himself shackled to a graceful beauty with a soft, sweet voice and gentle smile. He wanted what any modern man did: a beautiful angel to adorn his side at societal functions, gaze up at him with admiring, awe-filled eyes, and never say a word of reproach but only praise of his person. Maybe if he weren't being crushed between the boulders of financial ruin and political warfare, he could have fallen for one.

Unfortunately, the one woman who had haunted his thoughts all week, evading him like a coquettish lover, driving his desire higher—his desire to know whether to pack his bags and make for a penniless exile on the Continent, of course—was the least graceful or gentle woman he knew. Certainly one whom he would never ask to marry him. He had sent her a letter yesterday, and that infuriating vixen hadn't bothered to reply. He didn't want to dance; he wanted to stomp down to her house and beat on her door.
Why
didn't you answer me?

“Randall, I got your letter.”

For a moment, he thought he had responded to his own question and in Isabella's voice. He was really going insane now. Then she said, “Too many flowers,” and sneezed. He spun around.

The object of his obsession stood there, her hand pressed to her chest, her glasses misted from her heavy breath as if she had sprinted all the way to his home. She wore a nightmare of blue silk and numerous layers of lace. She sneezed again, and several long strands of hair escaped their pins and hung down her back. Honestly, though, he didn't care about any of that. What worried him were those pleats between
her eyebrows.

Oh, damn.

“I-I heard from the stockbroker,” she said between gulping breaths. “I ran here as fast as I could…well, except I had to turn around at my gate and rush back inside to put on a different gown because I forgot about your ball.”

The orchestra struck up a dance. In his ears, the violin strings roared like a train. He seized her hand. “The stocks are counterfeit, aren't they?”

She opened her mouth, but her words were drowned out as the orchestra leader shouted, “Quadrille.”

Dammit!
He had been on pins and needles to talk to her, and now he had to lead an opening dance. He glanced at the young ladies, all decked out in silk and lace, breathlessly awaiting Paris's judgment. “Just come with me,” he muttered, clamping onto Isabella's wrist and dragging her toward the forming partners.

“Come where?” she cried. “To the poorhouse?”

“We have to dance.”

“Dance!” She rocked back on her heels, making little skid marks on the floor as she frantically tried to pry his fingers from their hold. “We could be ruined. How can you think about dancing? Are you mad? Never mind, I know the answer to that one.”