Wedding of the Season: Abandoned at the Altar

by Laura Lee Guhrke

  “He was limping along the Stafford Road,” Geoff went on blithely as if she hadn’t spoken, stepping past her to survey the cakes on the tea tray. “He was muttering your name and cursing like a sailor. Given those two facts, who else could it be?”

  “Limping?” Eugenia cut in before she could reply. “Oh dear. Did he sustain an injury in Egypt, I wonder?”

  “Will wasn’t hurt in Egypt,” Geoff informed his mother with obvious relish as he took a seedcake from the tray. “He was injured right here in Stafford St. Mary, not more than half an hour ago, thanks to our own dear, sweet Beatrix.”

  “What?” Eugenia cried in lively astonishment and turned to her. “Beatrix, what is this all about?”

  “Nothing,” she denied, even as she thought of Will’s knee and felt the faint whisper of a slightly guilty conscience. “He’s not injured,” she added, as much for her own reassurance as for her relations. “It’s all a hum.”

  “It isn’t,” Geoff contradicted, his mouth full of cake. He turned toward his mother, adding, “Beatrix struck him down with the Daimler.”

  “I did no such thing!” Beatrix cried, stung by the accusation. “And I don’t see how you know anything about it anyway,” she added, going on the offensive. “You weren’t there.”

  “When I saw him limping, I stopped the bicycle and spoke to him. He told me all about it, including that his injuries were caused by that motorcar our cousin Julia gave you. Though how Groves heard about it, I can’t even guess, unless he overheard me when I was telling Paul the news.”

  “You told Paul?”

  “Of course. He and Will were deuced good friends, after all, and I thought he’d want to know.” Geoff flashed a sly grin at her. “Trathen will probably be interested in this news, too, but I shan’t tell him. I’ll leave that to you, Trix. You have to tell him, you know,” he added as if assuming she wouldn’t. “He’s bound to find out, and then he’ll wonder why you didn’t mention it. Besides, he hates that Daimler, and he deserves to know his future bride is running down her former suitors with it.”

  “Well, this is a fine kettle of fish,” Eugenia murmured. “Oh, Beatrix, when you insisted on bringing that dreadful motorcar back from Cornwall, I knew it would mean trouble. It came from Julia, after all. That girl has always been a trial.”

  “I didn’t hit Will with the Daimler,” she reiterated through clenched teeth.

  Eugenia did not seem reassured. “I’ve told you again and again, you drive too fast. Your father would never have approved, I’m sure.”

  Beatrix was sure of it, too, but she wisely refrained from validating that particular point.

  “I remember when I visited you both in Cornwall last summer,” Eugenia went on. “Why, Julia boasted that she had driven that Daimler along the coast road from Gwithian to St. Ives at thirty-seven miles an hour. Thirty-seven! On those bumpy, twisting roads? Heavens, it’s a wonder she didn’t kill herself. I told her so, I remember. I was most concerned for her safety.”

  Which was precisely why Beatrix had seen fit not to tell Auntie she’d been along the day Julia had taken the Daimler to St. Ives.

  “I never drive at such speeds,” Beatrix pointed out. “I am always a most careful motorist.”

  “I’m sure you are, dear, but as your dear papa asked me on his deathbed to take care of you, I have the right to be concerned for your safety. And I am not the only one who worries about you with that Daimler. Dear Trathen doesn’t like it, either.”

  “There’s a good reason for that, Mama,” Geoff put in. “Trathen doesn’t like the Daimler because he secretly wishes we were living about a hundred years ago.” He gave a derisive snort. “He’s so old-fashioned and dull.”

  “He is not!” Beatrix said, compelled to defend her future husband. “Aidan prefers a carriage to a motorcar, because motorcars are noisy and . . . and . . .” Her voice trailed off as she desperately sought a reason that didn’t sound dull as ashes.

  “See?” Geoff countered, looking triumphant and causing Beatrix to groan in aggravation.

  “Stop quarrelling, you two,” Eugenia said. “The fact remains that Trathen agrees with me about that motorcar.”

  That much was true. Aidan had expressed doubts as to the Daimler’s safety and questioned whether driving such a vehicle was a suitable pastime for a young lady. But though she deeply valued Aidan’s opinion and was usually happy to accede to his wishes, on this one thing, Beatrix had refused to waver.

  Giving up the Daimler would have been like cutting out a piece of her soul. Beatrix closed her eyes, remembering the terror she’d felt as she’d sat beside Julia on the road to St. Ives. How she’d gripped the front dashboard, fully aware that there was no door separating her from the edge of the cliff just a few feet away, sure she’d be thrown out of the vehicle any moment and dashed against the rocks far below.

  Yet, along with the terror, there had been exhilaration in it, such glorious freedom. Julia had made her take her hat off, and thinking back on it now, she could almost feel the wind blowing back her hair. She could almost taste the tang in the sea air. She remembered most vividly the moment Julia had suggested she take the wheel, the way her throat had gone dry and her heart had begun to thump frantically in her chest. To this day she didn’t know why she had agreed to her cousin’s wild suggestion, for she didn’t consider herself an adventurous sort of person, but for some reason she had agreed and had slid behind the wheel. And there, in that one, shining moment a year ago, she’d been transformed, and there was no going back.

  What a glorious holiday that had been, reminiscent of the carefree days when Will, Paul, Geoff, and Julia had come home to Devonshire for the summer holidays, when they’d gone to Viscount Marlowe’s villa on Pixy Cove for August and they’d snuck out with Marlowe’s sisters to bathe in the sea at midnight and tell ghost stories in the caves. But though her time in Cornwall with Julia had been a bit like those blissful childhood days, she’d been surprised to discover that she hadn’t missed Will with the same heartrending pain of previous summers. Life, she’d realized, went relentlessly forward, and Cornwall was where she’d gotten over Will. Cornwall was where she’d met Aidan.

  “Beatrix?”

  “Hmm? What?” She opened her eyes and forced her mind back to the present and what Eugenia was saying.

  “Since you struck poor Sunderland, his injuries are rather our responsibility. Perhaps we should send Dr. Corrigan after him?”

  Beatrix made a sound of impatience. “Auntie, I did not hit Sunderland with the car. His horse shied when the Daimler came round the curve, and he wasn’t able to subdue the animal. It threw him—”

  “And when he landed, the horse kicked him, making it difficult for him to walk,” Geoff finished for her. “He’ll have a deuced fine bruise from it, I’m sure.”

  “Exactly!” Beatrix said, making a face at her cousin. “His horse caused his injuries, not me.”

  “No, all you did was leave him there.” Geoff shook his head in mock sorrow at her lack of compassion. “Wounded and in pain.”

  “Oh, Beatrix.” Eugenia sighed, staring at her in disappointment. “You knew he was injured, and you abandoned him? You didn’t return him to town or summon help?”

  Jilting her six years ago on the eve of their wedding, she supposed, wasn’t sufficient provocation for leaving him in the road.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” she cried in exasperation. “He wasn’t really hurt. He took a tumble off his horse, that’s all, the sort of thing that might happen to anyone. It’s happened to him more times than I can remember. He’s only trying to flick me on the raw by pretending to Geoff that I injured him. And if he were in need of a doctor,” she added, turning to her cousin, “what are you doing here? Why didn’t you race into the village on that bicycle of yours and fetch Dr. Corrigan?”

  “Because Mr. Robinson came by just then,” Geoff answered at once. “The old boy had all the duke’s things from the train station piled up in that cart of his, and so
me Indian-looking fellow in a turban was sitting beside him. He gave up his seat on the box to Will—the Indian fellow did, not Mr. Robinson. The Indian stepped onto the dummy board, and Mr. Robinson drove them both to Sunderland Park.”

  “There,” Beatrix countered with satisfaction. “You’ve just proven my point. If Will were injured, he wouldn’t have been able to climb up on the box of Mr. Robinson’s cart.” She returned her attention to Eugenia. “You see, Auntie? There’s no need to fuss over Sunderland. He’s perfectly well. What should be of concern is his reason for coming home. My wedding is only two months away, you know.”

  Eugenia’s frown deepened in puzzlement. “What are you implying, Beatrix?”

  “I don’t know,” she confessed. “But I am curious. Why is he here? He didn’t come home when his father died, nor when my father died—” Her voice choked up, and it took her a moment to regain her voice.

  “Six years away,” she continued, “yet now, on the eve of my wedding to someone else, he comes home. Why?”

  “Maybe he wants you back,” Geoff suggested, helping himself to another seedcake. “Maybe he’s come to stop the wedding.”

  Beatrix stared at her cousin in horror. “He couldn’t,” she murmured, even as Will’s words from a short time ago about upsetting the applecart came back to her. She swallowed hard. “He wouldn’t.”

  “Ohhh,” Eugenia moaned, pressing a hand to her forehead. “This is a fine kettle of fish.”

  Geoff began to laugh. “I can see it now—all the wedding guests assembled, the journalists with pencils poised, the vicar asking if anyone knows any just cause why these two should not be joined in holy matrimony, and Will stands up—”

  “What did he tell you?” Beatrix demanded, striding over to her cousin. When he didn’t answer, she reached out and grabbed him by the ear. “Did he say that’s why he’s home? To stop my wedding? Did he?”

  “Ouch!” Geoff cried in painful protest. He gripped her wrist and pulled, trying to free himself from her tight grip. “Let go of me!”

  “Beatrix, stop that at once!” Eugenia ordered. “Twisting your cousin’s ears is most unladylike!”

  She responded by twisting harder. “Geoff, if you don’t tell me what he told you, I swear I shall—”

  “Ow, ow!” he wailed, tugging at her wrist. “He didn’t tell me anything! I’m just having you on!”

  Beatrix let go of him with a huff of exasperation and relief. “I should have known you’d rattle on without knowing any facts. Still,” she added, frowning as she returned her attention to her aunt, “in this case, Geoff might actually be right.”

  “Surely you don’t think Sunderland’s come home to make trouble?” Eugenia looked dubious. “No, I can’t believe he’d do such a thing.”

  “I can,” she responded darkly. “He implied as much to me earlier today. And it would be just like him to stand up in church and disrupt the ceremony. He’d think it quite a lark, I daresay.”

  “I still don’t believe it. Sunderland is a gentleman.”

  “Gentleman?” She stared at her aunt in disbelief. “Does a gentleman abandon his bride-to-be a fortnight before their wedding? Does he refuse to come home even after inheriting his title? Does he ignore his ducal responsibilities and duties? No, Aunt Eugenia, Sunderland is many things, but he is no gentleman!”

  “Moderate your tone, Beatrix,” her aunt said with a hint of reproof. “I am scarce half a dozen feet from you and can hear your words quite clearly. A lady of breeding does not shout, remember.”

  She had been shouting, she realized, and she took a deep, steadying breath, trying to employ reason. Surely Will hadn’t come to try to win her back. She wasn’t conceited enough to believe it, and besides, six years had gone by. And she’d been engaged to Aidan for nearly nine months. If Will wanted to win her back, he’d had plenty of time to make the attempt before now.

  Still, whatever the reason for his return, the fact remained that he was here, and she did not put it past him to cause some sort of trouble for her and Aidan while he was home. Whatever his intentions, she intended to discover them.

  “I won’t be having any tea, Auntie,” she said, and marched over to the chair where she had tossed her hat a short while earlier. “I’m going out again.”

  “Best to leave the Daimler here,” Geoff advised, glaring at her as he rubbed his sore ear. “It might be safer for Sunderland that way.”

  Beatrix assumed a dignified air in response. “I shall have Groves send for the carriage,” she answered, and donned her hat.

  “But you just came back from the village,” Eugenia cried. “Where are you going now?”

  “I may have inadvertently injured an old friend of our family,” she answered as she secured her straw boater in place with her hat pin and pulled a few tendrils of her hair from beneath the brim to frame her face. “I must go at once to express my deep distress and concern.”

  She ignored Geoff’s skeptical snort as she started for the door.

  Will made a rueful grimace as his valet rubbed a camphor-scented liniment over his swollen knee. “In situations like this, Aman, I believe I would prefer a stiff whisky and soda to one of your concoctions.”

  The Egyptian servant, who’d treated him for everything from scorpion stings to blackwater fever during the past half-dozen years, corked the bottle of liniment and returned it to the big leather suitcase from which he had extracted it a few minutes earlier. “Indeed, sir?” he murmured in an unflappable fashion worthy of any British valet. “It is a good thing, then, that I asked your housekeeper, Mrs. Gudgeon, to fetch a bottle of whisky and a siphon.”

  Will smiled. “I’m deuced glad I saved your life that night in Cairo.”

  “I am of a similar opinion, Your Grace.” Aman fetched an ottoman from one corner of the study and lifted Will’s outstretched leg onto its padded surface. He then eased the hem of Will’s trouser back down over his swollen knee to his ankle, and gave the hem a tug to smooth out any wrinkles in the fabric, and straightened with a satisfied nod. “It would be best, sir, if you did not put any weight on it for a day or two.”

  Will moved his leg a bit on the footstool, already restless. “I feel like an old man with the gout,” he muttered.

  Aman retrieved Will’s dispatch case from the open suitcase on the floor and held it up in an inquiring fashion. “Perhaps you would wish to write letters while you are indisposed, sir?”

  “I’m not indisposed, and you know how I hate writing letters.”

  Aman had all the placid, fatalistic calm offered by his heritage. He shrugged. “If you prefer to read, sir, I would be happy to bring a book from your library.”

  Will eyed the Moroccan leather case in his valet’s hands and sighed. He did have writing to do, he supposed.

  Not for the purpose he’d come home, of course. When a man wanted to ask a member of his former fiancée’s family for a loan, a letter just wouldn’t do. But he did have other things to write. A summary of the artifacts they’d discovered during the past season, a speech to the Archaeological Society presenting the latest findings, that article he’d promised the Times, a letter to Sir Edmund in Scotland—he reached for the dispatch case and gave in to the inevitable.

  “I’ll need a quill and ink, and something to write on,” he told Aman, and gestured to an elaborate Chinese cabinet in one corner of the study. “If memory serves, my father kept a lap desk in there.”

  Aman retrieved it and the necessary stationery supplies, placing them on the table beside Will’s chair. “If there is nothing else you require, sir, I will begin unpacking your things. Shall you dress for dinner?” He didn’t blink at Will’s sound of derision. “Is that not the custom in Britain, Your Grace?”

  “It is, and a damned silly one, too, especially since I’m dining alone.” He imagined himself in dinner jacket and tie at one end of Sunderland House’s formal dining table, surrounded by gilt-framed paintings and heavy damask draperies, flanked by two long rows of empty chairs,
eating from Limoges plates and drinking wine from a crystal goblet, just as he had been forced to do whenever his parents had been in residence. Will could vividly remember the old man sitting at one end of the table in all his ducal glory, and his mother at the other end, staring icily back at her husband. The silence between them pronounced their mutual contempt more loudly than any angry words could have. He felt suddenly smothered. “God,” he muttered, running a finger inside his collar, “it’s so damned hard to breathe in this country.”

  “Sir?”

  “Never mind.” He eased back in his chair with a sigh. “Trousers and a smoking jacket are good enough for dining alone, Aman. And I’ll eat in the breakfast room, not the formal dining room.”

  “Very good, sir.” The valet bowed and departed, and Will stared at his outstretched leg with aggravation. Ages since he’d fallen from a horse. Due to Aman’s vile camphor liniment, the pain was beginning to ease, but if all went well with Paul, he probably wouldn’t have time to take Mr. Robinson’s wind-fast gelding racing across the moor. He felt a tinge of disappointment at that. He’d always loved the moor—loved the wild beauty, the rugged tors and mossy dells. The moorland from horseback was one of the things in Devonshire he’d really missed during his years away.

  But not the only thing, a devilish voice inside him whispered.

  Unbidden, an image of brown eyes and blond hair came into his mind, and before he realized what he was doing, he reached into the breast pocket of his jacket. He pulled out the folded scrap of newspaper, an announcement torn from the society page of the Times last January.

  The Earl of Danbury is pleased to announce the engagement of his cousin, Lady Beatrix, to His Grace, the Duke of Trathen . . .

  Will’s hand tightened to a fist, crumpling the yellowed scrap of paper, remembering the day he’d seen it. Rooted to his chair at the club in Thebes, he’d stared down at the news that by then had been a month old, reading the announcement of her engagement over and over again, trying to accept it. He’d torn the announcement out of the paper and stuck it in the breast pocket of his jacket, too shocked to even realize what he was doing.