Scandalous Scoundrels

by Aileen Fish

  “I warned you, boy,” Margaret screeched.

  “What on earth?” But he knew. He and Bernice had heard the sound of a door closing in the hallway. Veronica had been standing just outside his room. Christ, Emily must have seen her leave his room.

  He drew himself up to his full height and glared down at Margaret. “Nothing happened. Where is Emily?”

  “She’s gone,” Margaret spat at him. “Run off to Lord only knows where to lick her wounds. Wounds that you inflicted. How could you?”

  “When?” he demanded, ignoring her words, focused only on finding Emily. “How?”

  “Miss Em… She just went flying out of the house… After she seen that…that woman in the hall.” At Tilly’s stuttering words, Nick looked beyond Margaret to find the girl looking at him with tears streaming down her face.

  Nick took a deep breath. “Surely she’s out riding with her father.”

  “Charles is outside quizzing the stable hands,” his father replied with a shake of his head. Nick realized then that his father was still in his dressing robe as were Lady Margaret, Oliver and Joan. Only Tilly and Bernice were dressed for the day.

  “Who roused the household?” he asked.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” Tilly wailed. “So I knocked on Lady Maggie’s door.”

  “The commotion awoke the rest of us,” Oliver added.

  Looking around at his family, at the sorrow and condemnation written upon their faces, he wondered how it was possible that none of them knew him at all.

  Nick strode through the throng, his gait purposeful, his head pounding, and his heart heavy.

  He saddled a horse while Charles Calvert followed him around the stables bellowing.

  “Groom said she come running in like a mad woman, hair waving around her, and her coat flapping around like a bat’s wings. A bat’s wings!”

  “I’ll find her,” Nick replied with a calmness he was far from feeling.

  “She took off on Danny Boy as if the hounds of hell were after her!”

  “I’ll find her,” he repeated, wondering if Charlie was reciting the groom’s cliché metaphors or simply adding them to the tale.

  “I thought all that was finished,” the older man said as he leaned down to cinch the saddle Nick had thrown over the horse’s back.

  “All what?” Nick glared over the horses back at Emily’s father.

  He waved one beefy hand in the air before growling, “Don’t you judge my girl. Em’s a strong woman, but even the strong ones make mistakes. She’s paid for her mistakes with a pound of her own flesh!”

  Nick had neither the time nor the patience to discover what the other man was rambling about. He jumped into the saddle, ignoring the pain that shot through his temples with the movement.

  “I’m right behind you,” Charlie called as he ran from the stable and Nick saw a groom holding the other man’s horse in the yard.

  Nick headed off to the North only because it was the route he and Emily invariably took on their morning rides. Emily liked to watch the morning sun throw shadows across the woods and fields before bathing the valley below in golden light, to toss stale bread to the ducks wintering along the banks of the small pond.

  He rode for over an hour, occasionally catching glimpses of Charles and Oliver and his father away in the distance. He saw no sign of Emily.

  He picked his way through the thicket surrounding the woods where Emily had encountered the wild dogs. Margaret had had the woods cleared and thinned the day after her niece’s misadventure. He thought it unlikely she’d re-enter those trees anytime soon, cleared or not, but one never knew what strange turn his fiancé’s mind was likely to take, so into the shadowy forest he went.

  If Emily had been there she was gone now.

  As he crested the rise above the woods he saw Margaret’s carriage lumbering down the long drive. The vehicle was just turning onto the road to the village when he caught up with it.

  “Any word?” he asked when Margaret leaned her head out the open window. She rapped on the roof and the driver brought the carriage to a stop.

  “I know where she’s gone.” The lady blinked repeatedly, whether from the sun that had risen high in the sky or to hold tears at bay, he couldn’t determine. “Tie your horse to the back and get in.”

  “My horse is faster that your carriage,” Nick replied. “Tell me where she is and I’ll bring her home.”

  “Tie your horse to the back and get your arse in this carriage,” Margaret commanded. “I have a tale to tell you before we find her.”

  Impatient and frustrated, Nick jumped from his horse and did as the lady ordered. Once in the carriage he glared across the space separating him from Emily’s aunt.

  “No matter what happens next between you and my niece,” Margaret said, “I’ll have your word as a gentleman that this story goes no further than this carriage.”

  “What happens next is that I marry your niece and we live happily ever after,” Nick growled.

  “Your word,” she hissed.

  “I’m surprised you would take it,” Nick replied and all the bitterness he felt at his family’s lack of faith in him was in his voice.

  “Pshaw,” she answered with a wave of one gloved hand. “I know you didn’t make the pretty with the Nasty Baggage. I was just frightened and angry and in need of a whipping boy.”

  “You have my word,” he responded with a nod to her words.

  “We are going into the village, to the apothecary’s shop, and likely to the green behind the church.” Margaret patted the seat beside her. “We’ve a quarter hour before we arrive.”

  “I’d be there in less than five minutes on horseback,” he pointed out as he moved to sit next to her.

  “Emily won’t be in any condition to ride.”

  “Why?” he asked as dread danced along his spine. “What in the hell is she doing?”

  Margaret took a deep breath and let it out on a sigh that was very nearly a moan.

  “Emily was a bit of a hoyden when she was growing up,” she began softly, “Charlie let her run wild and her mother spent most of her days in bed preparing to birth a baby or recovering from the loss of one.”

  “This is the tale you pulled me from my horse to hear?” Nick demanded in exasperation. “I already know Emily’s mother died in childbed and her father ignored her unless she was up to some mischief or other.”

  “Hush,” Margaret admonished with a smack to his thigh. “The meat of the story means nothing without the bones. Just keep your mouth closed and your ears and heart open and you might yet come to understand the lady you intend to make your wife.”

  Nick reined in his impatience and frustration to sit quietly listening to a story he thought he already knew.

  He was mistaken, terribly, incomprehensibly, astoundingly mistaken.

  “Now, where was I?” Margaret asked before turning to look out the window. When she turned back Nick nearly smiled at the fierce look of concentration upon her face. “Ah, yes. Emily was ten years old when Anne passed on birthing another stillborn babe. Nate was six and his raising fell to Emily. No sooner was her mother’s body in the churchyard then Charlie brought his mistress Martha and baby Charlie to live at Emerald Isle. Two years later Patsy came along and shortly thereafter Martha went to join Anne in the family plot.”

  Margaret paused as if waiting for Nick to respond.

  “I know all of this,” he finally said, wondering if she truly thought that all he and Emily had done in the long hours of the night was mangle the sheets.

  “So you know Emily raised those three and the Danson boy with only the help of servants and the occasional tutor and governess.” At his nod she continued. “She never felt a part of what passed for society in the little village nearby or in bustling Baltimore. Her life wasn’t comprised of mint juleps and debutante balls. Emily’s life was filled with grammar lessons, bedtime stories and snotty noses. Later, she acted as Charlie’s hostess at business dinners and later st
ill picked up the slack in the stables when her da went wandering far and wide in search of the best price for cotton and female companionship.”

  “And starting a school for the servants and slaves,” he interjected when she stopped to draw breath. “And sewing clothes for the poor with women of questionable morals.”

  “Just so,” she agreed. “She didn’t have much opportunity to meet gentlemen, to learn their ways. The only thing she knew was what she saw at Emerald Isle, a father with two illegitimate children and little caramel-skinned children living in the cabins behind the house.”

  “And what she saw at the other plantations nearby,” Nick added quietly. “Other gentlemen with slave quarters filled with caramel-skinned children.”

  “So when those gentlemen’s sons came calling, they were strangers to her, men who were looking to make a good match. And Emily was surely the best match to be found in Calvert County, in all of Maryland to hear Charlie tell it. Emily wanted nothing to do with the local swells, had no intention of going down that path. She turned them all down, one after another, until they stopped calling.”

  “Until Peter Marshall came calling,” Nick replied mostly in order to remind Margaret that he knew all of this.

  “She latched onto the idea of marrying Peter Marshall like a drowning man latches on to sodden driftwood. He was different than the others. He hadn’t been raised in the tidewater area but in Boston. He’d inherited the plantation from his grandfather. He was quiet and polite, cheerful and proper, a regular dandy apparently. But he didn’t come calling.”

  Nick raised one brow in question.

  “According to Charlie, Emily chased the poor man, studied him, learned all there was to know of his interests and preferences, and made a valiant effort to curb her mischievous ways and be what she thought he desired in a wife.”

  “And still he didn’t marry her.”

  “You know the whys of it? Wearing breeches and swimming in her shift?”

  Nick nodded.

  “Emily waited until she was nearly on the shelf before deciding to trust her heart to a man she thought would remain faithful to her. I imagine she thought her future was secure, that her lot in life would be better than her mother’s, better than all the Calvert women who came before her. She was going to show those nasty old biddies who smiled at Charles Calvert’s daughter to her face while whispering about her family scandals behind her back.”

  “Instead, she landed in a scandal of her own and Marshall broke the betrothal.”

  “Yes, well, after Peter Marshall’s rejection, she was adrift. She hadn’t loved the fool, but her carefully crafted plan for her future was shattered. It’s difficult for women, given that we have so few choices that are truly our own to make, to let go of our girlish dreams of happily ever after. She must have wondered what was wrong with her, that her natural inclinations, her curiosity and stubborn independence, had rendered her unworthy of marriage, unlovable. Her confidence and her belief in her worth were horribly shaken.”

  Nick nodded in understanding, imagining Emily as she must have been at the time, lost and confused. So very different from the woman he had come to know and love.

  “Yes,” he agreed, knowing they were done with the bones and finally getting to the meat of the story.

  “When Charlie and I dragged her kicking and screaming across the ocean into an uncertain future we took her from the only world she’d ever known, the only place she felt safe to be herself. We stripped her of what little confidence she still possessed and her last hope of shaping her own destiny.”

  Margaret paused to draw an unsteady breath into her lungs. “She took sick on the voyage, nothing too serious, a fever with a putrid throat. There was a physician on board who tended her and left her with a bottle of laudanum.”

  Nick’s gaze lifted from where he was watching Margaret pluck nervously at the fraying fringe on the carriage seat. She was staring out the window, her face empty of all expression.

  “Laudanum?” he repeated, not understanding the significance, only knowing instantly that it was significant.

  “At first she only took it for the pain and sleeplessness. But after she was on the mend, she sipped it to escape her own thoughts. Until, unbeknownst to all, including Emily herself, she developed a need for the poison.”

  Nick knew the rest. He had no need to hear more. In his mind he saw Emily at the theater, her eyes with their pin point pupils the only color in her gaunt face, her listless movements, vacant expression and inability to hold onto the simplest thought.

  “Why didn’t you tell me she’d been… That she was…” he couldn’t even think what words to use.

  “An opium addict,” Margaret finished for him.

  “She’s not,” he growled.

  “She is. Dr. Connor, who helped her… I’m getting ahead of myself,” Margaret stopped, squared her shoulders, and Nick knew she was marshaling her thoughts, pulling from reserves of strength to finish the sad tale. “She is an opium addict, will likely always be one.”

  “I’ve seen none of the same signs,” Nick replied, his voice carefully controlled while emotions roared in his head, in his heart. “Christ, the signs that seem so bloody obvious now.”

  “Emily has not had a drop of laudanum since that terrible time,” Margaret hurried to assure him.

  Nick took a shuddering breath, wiped his stinging eyes with his hand.

  “As to why I did not tell you,” Margaret said into the silence in the carriage. “I did not know. She’d been ill, of course I knew that. But I’d never met her before, only knew her from Charlie’s letters. I did not realize she was not behaving normally. And Charlie was off touring railways thinking he’d left her in good hands.”

  Margaret lifted her hands, turned them this way and that, before giving an inelegant snort. “He’d left her in the worst possible hands. I had a mind only to see her wed to you, never mind that she was such a peculiar girl, so quiet and meek one minute, then laughing like a lunatic at some jest only she understood. But I wanted her money in your pockets, yours and Andy’s and mine. Even when I started to have visions of saddling you with the same sort of wife your father had. No offense, your mother was a sweet lady for all that her belfry was filled with bats.”

  Nick couldn’t even begin to take offense at the apt description of his mother, a woman he’d barely known, a woman who’d spent most of his childhood locked away in her room. He was filled with a pulsing rage.

  “Christ, woman, it’s only money,” he snarled. “We would have figured something out. There was no need to destroy a girl. Hell, it would have destroyed me to be saddled, as you so delicately phrase it, with a lunatic for a wife!”

  “Emily is not a lunatic!”

  “By your own admission you thought she was. You thought your niece was a peculiar girl, laughing at nothing, with bats in her belfry. And you still brought her to London for a fucking Season. Jesus, Margaret, I’ve seen perfectly healthy, perfectly sane ladies crack under the pressure of a London Season!”

  Margaret stared at him with round eyes, her breath rushing out in little pants and sighs.

  “Ah, hell,” Nick muttered. “Look, Maggie, I’m just so damned shocked and angry and I need a whipping boy.”

  “No, you are absolutely right,” she replied, blinking back tears. “I deserve your anger and your condemnation, and then some. You haven’t even heard the worst of it.”

  “I don’t think I care to hear anymore.”

  “Too bad,” she responded, back to her normal ferocity in the blink of an eye. “We’ve still five or more minutes before we reach the village and there is more you need to know.”

  Nick looked away from her pale face and shining eyes, out the window, and sure enough he could see the village in the distance. Emily was somewhere in that village, alone and hurting, believing that he’d broken the only promise he’d made to her that truly mattered.

  “Tell me,” he ordered as he turned to face Margaret once more.
>
  “Emily recovered from the fever and putrid throat and seemed healthy, if still somewhat weak, so we began to prepare for the Season.”

  “There’s no need to rehash the events in Town. I was there. I lived them.”

  “But what you don’t know is that we, that is Charlie and I had drummed it into her head that you would make her an ideal husband if only she would curb her tongue and behave with a minimal amount of decorum. She was drinking laudanum like it was tea by then and I suppose in her opium-addled mind she thought you would reject her if she showed you her true self.”

  “So she hid her light under a bushel,” Nick murmured.

  “After the gossip rags got ahold of her, when they stuck that ridiculous moniker on her and it became obvious to all you were looking elsewhere for an heiress, we had a right awful row. She started spouting nonsense about scandals and improper behavior. She said she’d created scandals without even trying, scandals the likes of which we stuffy English had never seen.”

  Nick couldn’t help the raspy chuckle that escaped at her words.

  “As she stood there swaying back and forth like a drunken sailor, shouting at me it finally occurred to me that something was not quite right.”

  “Ah, so that’s when it occurred to you.” Nick did not even attempting to hide his sarcasm.

  “I started thinking about all those letters Charlie wrote over the years, letters filled with tales of his daughter’s hijinks and mischief, all of the scrapes and snafus she’d gotten into. I remembered all the times his letters made me laugh until I cried.”

  “And you realized you’d yet to meet that girl, your brother’s wild daughter,” Nick replied when she drifted off in the memories, a faint smile flitting across her lips.

  “So I wrote to my brother telling him that Emily was in trouble, that I was taking her to the country,” she continued. “He joined us here as soon as word reached him. Unfortunately, it was nearly two months before my letter found him. They were moving around, those railway-mad gentlemen, riding all over the country.”

  “And during those months?” Nick wasn’t certain he wanted to know what had happened during that time. He suspected those two months ended with a jagged scar between Emily’s breasts.