Lord of Scandal

by Nicola Cornick

  And then, one evening in April, Maggie had returned from a trip to Madame Tussauds waxworks with the children, and everything had changed.

  Sir Alfred was in his bedchamber, preparing for a most pleasantly anticipated evening at the house of his mistress in Chelsea. His cravat had been starched into firmness, his coat was padded with wadding to fill out his shoulders and his shoes had a discreet heel to increase his stature. He looked a fine figure of a man and he had no doubts that Rosabelle would tell him so, too.

  He heard his family return, for John was shouting and the baby was wailing, and Sir Alfred’s head was already splitting from the noise and he could not wait to be gone. He went out onto the landing and observed his wife standing at the bottom of the curving stair. The nursemaid was holding the bawling child, and her face was drawn and tired with hunger and exhaustion.

  “We have not eaten the whole day!” John was saying to Tench. “Mama went off with a strange man and barely showed us the exhibits at all. I was so bored and I am so hungry now.”

  Maggie turned when she heard Sir Alfred’s step on the stairs. He looked down into her face and felt a huge sense of shock. Gone was the pretty wife who had recovered from her laudanum dependency. She was flushed and was trembling a little, and her eyes were feverishly bright. She held out her arms to him and Sir Alfred felt a wave of revulsion. He actually took a step back. He could not banish the vision of her the time he had seen her standing in that very place, broken and desperate, prepared to sell her body for a bottle of laudanum. And thinking of it, he could feel the red heat of anger fill his brain, breaking down all the defenses he had built against the truth. The mother of his children was a whore. She had debased herself with Withers before and now it seemed she had done exactly the same thing again.

  “Darling!” Despite the embarrassed gaze of the servants, she ran up the stairs and embraced him. She smelled of sweat and perfume. “I missed you!”

  Sir Alfred released himself with deliberation and held her at arm’s length.

  “Take the boy to the nursery,” he said to the maid, “and see that he is fed and put to bed. The baby, too.” He turned back to Maggie and suddenly he did not care about the astonished stares of the servants. “Who was this strange man with whom you spent the day?”

  “He was only someone we met whilst we were looking at the exhibits,” Maggie said. She fidgeted with the stitching on her gloves. She did not meet his eyes. “He was a visitor to London so I offered to show him about a little.”

  “You are all goodness, my love,” Sir Alfred said politely.

  Maggie had turned a little pale at his tone. She started to chatter but Sir Alfred did not hear her. His mind was far away, making connections, noting the febrile excitement in his wife’s manner, which surely had no natural cause, for it was the stimulation caused by the laudanum that had always preceded the crash in her spirits. He wanted to grab her reticule and search for the bottle there and then.

  “I am going out,” he said abruptly, cutting across Maggie’s words, and he left his wife standing dumb-struck in the hall.

  IT WAS DARK AND DANK in the graveyard of Saint Crispin’s church. Sir Alfred picked his way carefully through the headstones and skirted an open grave that yawned like a scar, awaiting its load in the morning. The gravedigger’s hut was set against the wall, shielded by yew trees, in the shadow of the church. The door was not locked. Sir Alfred put his hand to the knob and turned it silently.

  It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the deeper darkness inside and in that moment he thought he had made a mistake and that Withers was not there at all. From the beginning, when Withers had taken to sponsoring the body snatchers’ vile trade, he had liked to go out with them, liked to watch as they broke open the graves and dragged the fresh corpses out. He had boasted of it to Sir Alfred sometimes, telling him the tales deliberately to turn his stomach and make him almost retch with fear and disgust. Sir Alfred knew it had been part of the means by which Withers had broken his spirit. And it had worked. He had been a weak and ineffectual partner in Withers’s crimes.

  As he hesitated, Sir Alfred heard a sound, the striking of flint, and he screwed up his eyes against the flare of the lantern. Withers was sitting in a corner of the shed, a knife lying idly by his hand. He got to his feet.

  “I knew it was you,” Withers said. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I needed to see you,” Sir Alfred said.

  “You stink of cologne,” Withers said disagreeably. “Did you wear it to try to attract that wife of yours back to your bed? I heard she had come back to you.”

  “No doubt she told you herself when she met you today,” Sir Alfred said.

  Withers just laughed. “Perhaps she did, old man. You know what she is like. Can’t live without me, eh, one way or another.”

  Sir Alfred felt odd and light-headed. His mind was full of flashing pictures of Maggie on her knees before this man begging for laudanum, offering herself in return. The man he had sold his own flesh and blood to. He could tell that Withers had an absolute contempt for him because he had left the knife discarded on the floor as he moved across to open the door and look out on to the graveyard.

  “The body snatchers may come tonight,” Withers said over his shoulder. “Or tomorrow for certain. I thought we might go across to Saint Day’s and disinter that little harlot Lily St. Clare and sell her body to the quacks.”

  The buzzing in Sir Alfred’s head increased. Without conscious thought, he took his pistol from his pocket and brought the butt of it down on the back of Withers’s head. The man crumpled slowly, quietly to the floor.

  Sir Alfred stood still for a moment, blinking. In the end, it had been easy. He should have done it long ago.

  After that, he worked quickly and as silently as he could. He scooped Withers up, panting with the effort—the scoundrel was heavier than he had thought, and he was very unfit—and placed him in the rough wooden coffin that was on the table. Withers was still breathing, though he was unconscious. The coffin wood was cheap and soft, and it splintered as Sir Alfred forced the nails through the lid. A pauper’s coffin, but he knew the nails would still hold.

  It was hard work dragging the coffin out into the graveyard and he was afraid of the noise, but no one came. Saint Crispin’s was traditionally a pauper’s church and no one really cared whether the body snatchers dug the corpses up or not. The poor were legion. There were always more sick and dying to populate the graves.

  Sir Alfred tipped the coffin into the empty grave, then took the spade that was leaning against the wall of the hut and went back out to cover it with earth. He thought that he could hear a faint noise now from within Withers’s wooden prison, the sound of fingernails scratching against the lid. He smiled grimly to himself and shoveled all the harder.

  THE BODY SNATCHERS DID NOT come that night, but they did come the night after, just as Withers had predicted. Seeing a freshly turned grave, they knew there was the very thing they wanted—a brand new corpse. Even so, they were somewhat surprised when they broke open the coffin.

  Algernon, Lord Withers, had certainly not rested in peace. Contorted, struggling, he had evidently been trying to fight his way out when he had suffocated to death.

  For a long moment, the shadowy figures stood about his grave, leaning on their shovels, laughing. Then the ringleader reached down into the coffin to drag the body out.

  “Never mind, lads,” he said. “We can still turn a profit from him.”

  CATHERINE WAS LYING in her husband’s arms in the big bed in their chamber at Hawksmoor. The fine plaster of the ceiling above them was peeling from the winter damp, but a fire roared in the grate and they were wrapped up tight and warm. She turned her head against Ben’s shoulder and smiled sleepily at him. Hawksmoor was all they had now and it would take an inordinate amount of work to make the place serviceable again, but then as Ben had reminded her, she had once said that she wanted to live in the country and now she had her wish. In
truth it did not matter to them where they were, as long as they were together.

  The press had been astonished when Ben had announced that he was retiring from London, but the Prince Regent had kissed Catherine with rather more enthusiasm than Ben had liked to see, and had wished them luck. There was always a new scandal for the penny prints anyway, most of them provided by Lady Paris de Moine. She had named Gideon Hawksmoor as the father of her child, had taken him for every penny she could, and then had eloped with her coachman.

  Catherine watched the firelight play across the walls and snuggled closer to Ben as he shifted her within his arms and started to kiss her. His hands were caressing her very gently now and she moved to the pleasure of his touch. But before they made love, she knew there was something she had to tell him, one last thing before they could close the book on the past and look forward to rebuilding Hawksmoor together.

  “Ben?”

  Her husband made the kind of halfhearted sound of acknowledgment that meant he would far rather kiss her than talk. Catherine put a hand against his bare chest and held him away from her.

  “Ben…”

  “Mmm…” He was kissing her shoulder, nibbling at her skin so that the soft shivers of excitement ran down her spine. Catherine tried to concentrate.

  “Ben, there is something we have to talk about.”

  Ben stopped kissing her, sighed and raised his hazel gaze to hers. “Yes, Catherine?”

  “When Aunt Agatha called here last week on her way to Scotland,” Catherine said, “she told me that she wished to settle some money on me.” She held his gaze. “Since Papa had been unable to fulfill the marriage contracts, she said that she thought it was only right and proper that as my godmother, she should do so.”

  Ben had gone very still. His eyes were dark.

  “How much did she offer?” he asked.

  “Thirty thousand pounds,” Catherine said.

  She held her breath. Ben had rolled away from her now, propping himself on one elbow as he watched her face.

  “And what did you say to her?” he said.

  Catherine fidgeted with the edge of the sheet. “Well, I said that I would discuss it with you, but…”

  “But?”

  Ben raised one dark brow. Catherine thought that there was amusement in his eyes but she could not be sure.

  “But that I thought you would tell her that we did not want her money, because…”

  “Because we had one another and we needed nothing more?” Ben gave a great shout of laughter and pulled her back into his arms. “That woman is as cunning as a fox!”

  Catherine pressed against the warm reassurance of his body. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  Ben brushed the hair away from her face and bent to kiss her gently. “Only that when Lady Russell was here on her way to Scotland last week she took me aside and offered me a marriage settlement for you of thirty thousand pounds,” he said. He looked down at her and Catherine’s heart turned over to see the love in his eyes. “I was going to tell you tonight.”

  Catherine raised her hand to his cheek. “And what did you say?” she whispered.

  “I told her that I would discuss it with you.” Ben laughed. “But that I thought that I knew what you would say.”

  “That we did not want her money, because we had one another and we needed nothing more?”

  “That’s right,” Ben said. “I have all I ever want here in my arms, Catherine. I love you. What does the money matter to me when I have you?”

  Catherine slid her hand around to the nape of his neck and drew his head down so that she could kiss him.

  “I love you, too,” she murmured. “I knew that was what you would say. What does the money matter, now that I have you?”

  ISBN: 978-1-4603-0794-6

  LORD OF SCANDAL

  Copyright © 2007 by Nicola Cornick

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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