Season for Scandal

by Theresa Romain

  She wondered the same for herself.

  She couldn’t have dreamed so long of escape if she hadn’t had love to lean on. Her mother. Xavier. More recently, Louisa. They were so much a part of her life that she took them for granted, never doubting that if she left, they would welcome her back. And so there was no danger in thinking of running away. She had never done anything on her own: leaving Edmund for Xavier House, gambling with Sheringbrook wearing Xavier’s jewels—always, her plots and schemes depended on others to help her.

  But Edmund didn’t have that foundation. He had left Cornwall as a boy and never returned. He had no one to rely on; nothing but himself. So he’d built that self up bright and strong, and he’d won Jane’s heart without even meaning to.

  And for that, she had left him.

  Never before had it occurred to her that she blamed Edmund for failing to make her happy. Yet she had told him, more than once, that he wasn’t responsible for how she felt. She shouldn’t put that burden on him. It didn’t belong anywhere except herself.

  It was heavy, though; so heavy to admit that she had been wrong. Not wrong in loving, or wanting to be loved, but in giving up. Jane Tindall had never given up on anything; there was no reason for Jane Kirkpatrick to be a poorer creature.

  She sank onto the trellis-patterned carpet before the hearth, hands extended to catch the fire’s warmth.

  Two days ago, she and Edmund had talked frankly at last. They’d lanced wounds. Gotten angry with one another. She couldn’t love him anymore for being her white knight, pure of heart. He was selfish and jealous and high-handed; no better inside than other men.

  But. She could love him for something different. Better. Real. Because no matter what he felt inside, he chose to give the world his best. Even when it was a matter of determination more than desire, he pieced together goodness after goodness, leaving people the better for being around him.

  And because of this, she—selfish and jealous and high-handed herself—had a new world of reasons to love him.

  With a world of reasons, though, there was no place to hide from what she wanted. No way to escape her desperate longing for him to return that love.

  She pushed herself to her feet. Enough. Enough, now. She must think of what she had that was good. Of the love she possessed. Though she had once thought he took her with nothing, that she was irretrievably in his debt, she brought more to their marriage than she had realized.

  To one side of the morning room stood a fine-grained walnut writing table. The black chess queen stood at the corner, watching her fruitless fidgets.

  Jane strode to the table, drew a sheet of paper toward her, dipped a quill, and began a letter. “We’re playing a different sort of game now,” she told the chess queen.

  My dear mother, she scrawled. As Christmas draws near, I am wishing you very happy. I know you prefer not to travel to London, so I shall send Christmas to you. Kirkpatrick and I chose this lace for you . . .

  Writing his name was a tiny, harsh pleasure. And writing to her mother, who would enjoy the rare letter very much, was a pleasure, too. A sweet one, as Jane imagined Mrs. Tindall’s ruddy face lighting up, knowing her only child was thinking of her.

  Jane continued her letter for a cheerful page, omitting the news of her recent scandal. Ringing for a servant, she asked that the finished letter be bundled with the lace she’d chosen weeks earlier. If sent now, it would reach Mytchett before Christmas.

  She wouldn’t spend Christmas with her mother, but she loved her homely, contented mother no less for the distance between them, or for their differences. They had each found a world to live in that they liked.

  And even though, in the whole of the beau monde, only a few people would speak with her, Jane didn’t feel as though her life was small anymore after all.

  “Your sandwiches, my lord.”

  “Thank you, Pye.” The week’s long sessions in the House of Lords had put Edmund behind on his correspondence, and he intended to spend this drizzly Sunday afternoon catching up on the papers that cluttered his desk.

  Instead of leaving the study after depositing the tray, Pye remained standing by Edmund’s desk. The butler was far too well-mannered to fidget, but the tension of his posture fairly shouted of strain.

  Edmund set down the penknife with which he’d been sharpening his blunt quills. “Something you wish to tell me, Pye?”

  “I don’t wish to speak out of turn, my lord.”

  Edmund laid down his quill as well and fixed the butler with his full attention. “Please. Speak freely. Is something amiss?”

  The butler took a step forward. “Not as such, my lord. I simply wondered whether we—that is, the household staff and myself—might be expecting Lady Kirkpatrick to return often. If so, we can make appropriate arrangements for her comfort.”

  “I have no idea.” Edmund pinched the bridge of his nose, expecting to ward off a headache at the thought of Jane.

  But it didn’t come. And the plate of sandwiches looked good. He took one and studied it: thick, indelicate slabs of bread, ham, and cheese. When he bit into it, the salty-smoked flavors seemed like the first food he’d ever eaten. Instead of rebelling with a twist of pain, his stomach growled for more.

  “Very good, Pye,” he said, once he’d swallowed his massive bite. “My compliments to the cook.”

  As the butler turned to leave, Edmund added, “Pye, as to your earlier question.”

  “My lord?”

  “I don’t know what Lady Kirkpatrick plans, or how often she might return. But I think she’ll call again.”

  The butler’s mouth twitched. What a red-letter day this was turning out to be. “Very good, my lord. I shall see to her ladyship’s comfort when next she calls. Might we also put up a bit more greenery to mark the holiday?”

  “Make it mistletoe,” Edmund agreed. “In every doorway, if you please.”

  No one could refuse a kiss under mistletoe. Why, last year, at Xavier’s house party, Jane had almost smothered him with kisses under a berry-covered branch.

  He’d thought she was young and eager and wild. He hadn’t known she loved him then. If he had, he could have been wiser.

  When Pye bowed himself out, Edmund stuffed the rest of the sandwich into his mouth. So. His butler had almost smiled at the idea of Jane’s return. The servants liked her, didn’t they?

  Hell. He liked her, and the house seemed empty now that she was gone. But less so than it had earlier, before she had called.

  He didn’t know what she was doing with her time now that she was living apart from him. But that not-knowing didn’t lead, as Turner had vowed, to not-trusting. He trusted Jane not to betray him in the physical sense.

  Turner had failed, as always, to account for human decency. Within her family, Jane had the reputation of being a terror, yet she was good through and through. Loving. Thoughtful. Honest. The opposite of Edmund himself, whom everyone thought of as good and who came from stock as dirty as a pig farmer’s trousers.

  Which reminded him: his steward in Cornwall, Browning, had sent the requested parcel. It squatted in the chair across Edmund’s desk, where he had been ignoring its presence for days. No more.

  Dusting his hands off, he rose from his seat and looked down at the paper-wrapped package. Time to learn whether Turner had been telling the truth.

  He sliced the string with a penknife, then unfolded the paper to reveal a stack of small leather-bound volumes. His father’s date books. He had hoped they were still located in the ancestral home somewhere, and the capable Browning had located them. It looked like he’d sent the former baron’s notes from all of the 1790s.

  It was distasteful to think of one’s own conception, or the conception of one’s sisters. How much Edmund would rather pretend that his generation alone was sexual; that the human race had, until his birth, sprung from flowers or been dropped from the sky.

  Unfortunately, he could not. Someone had fathered his sisters. And Edmund turned the pages of th
e date books to see whether that person could have been the late Lord Kirkpatrick. The baron had kept careful account of his travel; he was often in London for the Season, or with friends in the Home Counties, where the hunting was easy and the land was soft and gentle.

  The records showed that the baron had been gone a great deal of time. Oh, it wasn’t impossible that he had fathered Catherine and Mary. Babies came in their own time, and he had been at home some time between ten and eight months before the birth of each of Edmund’s sisters.

  But did they resemble the late lord? Edmund’s eyes were like his father’s, blue as the sky never was in London. His mother’s, too, were light. Turner had dark eyes.

  What about Mary and Catherine? He couldn’t remember.

  He shut the book and looked at its black-leather cover, tooled in a pattern of scrollwork. A great K was chased in gilt in the center of the cover. Here was the year 1794 as his father had lived it, so distant in time and memory as to bear no relation to anyone Edmund had known. He had been only four years old. Tutored by the ever-present Turner, already sopping up history and language. Ignorant of, oblivious to, the man’s true nature, or his mother’s feelings.

  Maybe Edmund hadn’t wanted to return to Cornwall because he hadn’t wanted to see how much his mother missed Turner. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to see the sorrow on her face—not for the husband who had died, but for the lover who had left.

  Since Jane had left him, Edmund felt he had gotten a taste of that sorrow. She had wanted escape more than she wanted him, despite her profession of love. In the end, he knew, she hadn’t loved him enough to stay. Just as he knew his parents had not loved each other, or their children, enough to do right by one another. Their family ties were coarse and brittle, nothing but habit.

  Such knowledge destroyed a family—but what did it do to an individual? It had eaten away Edmund’s insides; it had robbed him of sleep.

  But it had not destroyed him.

  He hadn’t always been happy. He hadn’t always been sensible. But overall, he’d been . . . decent. As a boy, he’d done his best, just as he strove to now. He wanted to do right by everyone, especially those who relied on him. He just didn’t always know how.

  Jane was certainly proof of that.

  He made a stack of the date books and slid the pile to the corner of his desk. For a moment he simply stood, lost in thought.

  Then he took a candlestick in hand and made his way up to the attic, where the family portraits were stored.

  Chapter 21

  Concerning a Portrait

  Jane had spent the first weeks of her marriage learning the Berkeley Square house. For all her exploration, though, she’d never ventured to the attic of the building that had so briefly been her home. There had always been enough to occupy her on the floors below.

  But Pye had said Edmund was up here. And so, on this chilly Sunday afternoon, she would be, too.

  Her heeled slippers clattered on the wooden treads of the stairs. The flight was narrower here than on the ground floor, or the first or second. An upper landing took a rectangular bite from the rear corner of the attic. Along the front of the house, door after door indicated where servants’ chambers had been portioned out. At this hour, they were busy about their work or enjoying a half day out, and the space was utterly quiet.

  Turning, she faced the back of the house. Two more small chambers had been divided off here. Beyond them, stretching back to the corner of the house, was a chaotic tangle of cast-off furniture, piled draperies, and leaning stacks of paintings.

  Jane squeezed past a heavy Georgian corner cupboard, abandoned in place as soon as it had been muscled up the stairs. Light filtered dimly here through small windows, half blocked by the accumulated discards of more than a century of inhabitants. Cold leaked in beneath the rafters.

  And to one side stood Edmund. Absolutely silent; perfectly still. His left hand gripped a canvas covering; his right fist was clenched at his side. Pale dust smudged his dark coat, surely unavoidable in this close, cluttered space. Far more unusual was the expression on his face.

  If Jane had to put one word to it, it would be wistful.

  She had never seen Edmund wistful. Not when a dance came to an end. Not when she had departed last night. Not when, those few endless weeks ago, she had admitted she loved him.

  Wistfulness meant you wanted something you couldn’t have. She’d never been able to figure out what he wanted before.

  Unable to resist learning the truth, she sidled past a pair of tea tables, one stacked facedown atop the other. The unsteady affair rocked as Jane brushed past, and a board betrayed her with a squeak.

  Edmund whirled at once. He squinted; the light filtering from behind him must be casting Jane into shadow. “Pye? Is something amiss?”

  “Why you always mistake me for Pye, I’ll never know.” Jane edged a step closer, keeping a wary eye on the stacked tables. “It’s not as though we resemble each other.”

  “Jane.” His clenched fist relaxed. “I didn’t realize you meant to call today.”

  “I didn’t.” Was his heart pounding as quickly as hers? “Today we both find ourselves in an unexpected place.” With a sweep of her arm, she indicated the storage area.

  “You didn’t expect to visit?” His other hand released the wadded canvas, letting it fall over the picture that had made him look so wistful.

  “I thought I ought to come today.”

  “Yes.” He looked down at the painting. “I did, too.”

  So focused was he on the painting, she couldn’t bring herself to pepper him with questions. Except for one. “May I see it?”

  “It’s hardly worth looking at.” But he pulled at the edge of the canvas drape again, drawing it back from the painted surface. Jane stood at his side.

  The portrait was large, more than five feet in height. A family was arrayed in oils amidst a garden cluttered with Roman columns and stonework. The standing figure of a man at the center of the image was almost at her eye level. Though his hair was powdered and pulled back in a queue, his straight nose and brilliant blue eyes proclaimed his relationship to the man at Jane’s side.

  “He has your eyes,” she murmured. “Is this your father?”

  “Yes. And my mother and sisters.” Edmund’s voice was clipped.

  Jane ventured a glance at him; his jaw was set, lips pulled tight. And when she looked back at the portrait, she saw the essential difference: that mouth, that chin. His father’s was slack, even with the flattering brush of the portraitist to give it strength.

  The woman’s features held all the decision her husband’s lacked. Her chin was lifted, a firm jaw that added to her austere beauty. Like the man’s, her hair was powdered in the fashion of the previous generation. Her seated figure was swathed in rich reds, with jewels about her wrists, throat, fingers. Perched on one knee, almost painted in as an afterthought, was a very young child with fair hair, wearing the full-cut gown and ringlets of an infant. Two other children were tucked into the edges of the portrait. A girl with fair hair, about five years of age, and a boy on the left. He was only partially shown, his shoulder and one arm out of the picture. His other hand reached up for his father’s shoulder; his face appeared at the level of the weak-chinned man’s upper arm. The boy’s expression was stern, as though he’d been ordered be a little man.

  “This was the last portrait done of my family,” Edmund said quietly. “In truth, it was the only one done. My parents realized that they’d never managed to get us painted, so the year before my father’s death, the three of us children were daubed into the wedding portrait of my parents.”

  “Why not commission a new one?” Jane wondered. “You look like such handsome children, but there’s hardly room for you in this painting.”

  “There was hardly room for us anywhere.” He made as though to release the canvas cover again, but Jane stilled his hand. Warm fingers under hers; the same hand that had been painted, so long ago, clutching his father’s sh
oulder.

  “Why do you never see them?”

  He scuffed a boot along the floor, looking for all the world like a bull ripping up its pastureland. “I don’t wish to return.”

  “Then why don’t they come here?” She knew she was prodding and prying, but what had she to lose?

  Her question had silenced him. His shuffling feet went still; even his breathing seemed shallower. “I’m used to things as they are.”

  Jane’s nostrils flared. She was ready to rip up a pasture herself, or to shake Edmund by his sturdy, broad shoulders until his teeth rattled loose in his head.

  But a quiet thought cut through her frustration: used to things. He hadn’t said he was happy, only that he was accustomed to the present state of affairs. And she knew she hadn’t imagined his wistfulness. A wistfulness that had nothing to do with Jane, yet made her feel closer to him all the same, because it revealed something that he wanted.

  A family.

  “Your sisters.” She paused, not wanting to press too hard and shatter the moment. “Did they like their gifts?”

  “I’m not sure.” He rubbed the edge of the canvas between his thumb and forefinger. “I never hear from them. They used to send me little notes when they were girls, but I never knew what to write them in reply. I eventually just asked them what I could send them, and they told me. Now we simply communicate through my man of business in Cornwall.”

  “How horrid.”

  Edmund pulled in a deep breath. “It’s best for all of us. They get what they want of me, and I know they are taken care of.”

  “If you think that giving someone a hat is taking care of her, yes.”

  Why had she said that? She hadn’t come up here to pick a battle with him, but to pick up clues. What made Edmund happy or wistful. Why he never visited his family in Cornwall. What drove him to look at paintings he’d had hidden away long ago, judging from the dust motes shaken free of the canvas, floating in the weak light.

  But he didn’t fight her. This man, who had inherited his mother’s determined jaw and his father’s deep eyes, only bowed his head. “It’s not. It’s nothing of the kind. But it’s all I can do.”