It Started with a Scandal

by Julie Anne Long

  So very, very ironic that a shiftless Irish fiddler should in fact have more right to her than he did.

  He gave a short, bitter laugh at the burden of being honorable and the caprices of fate.

  And yet he could offer her nothing more than pleasure and the fringes of his life, and she knew it.

  But if he could, he would give her safety and certainty forever. He would take away limbo so that she never needed to worry again.

  And so he set about doing that.

  He smoothed out a sheet of foolscap and dipped the quill in. His hand was just now barely fit to perform the fine movements writing required.

  And he paused as another truth settled over him, weighted and final: he could not imagine yet gripping the hilt of a sword or curling his hands into fists to throw at men if necessary. It would be weeks before he was fully himself again, and it would require yet more patience of him.

  He sat motionless with the realization, final as a death.

  He sighed, and began.

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Fountain,

  An injury to my hand necessitates brevity, so please forgive the lack of formality. Your daughter Elise is employed as my housekeeper in Pennyroyal Green, Sussex. She has not requested that I write, and I must humbly beg that you never tell her of this letter. She is one of the finest ­people I have ever met. Her son, Jack, is a handsome, clever, and delightful child, and anyone would be proud and honored to know either of them.

  She misses you and her home terribly, though she will not say it aloud. Since you likely know your daughter, you know she is proud, and that feeling as though she has brought shame upon you haunts her.

  I lost half of my family and most of my properties in the revolution, so I can assure you that I know the cost of losing someone you love, and would not wish it upon anyone.

  I felt compelled to write to you because you still have a choice. You don’t have to lose her forever. If it is pride keeping you apart, I assure you that she would love to see you again. All you must do is write to her care of this address.

  I have sailed the oceans and fought wars and won and lost fortunes. I still know only two things for certain: Life is short. Love matters most.

  Sincerely,

  Philippe, Lord Lavay

  He would send a messenger with it. The footmen could flip a coin for the honor.

  He sat back and held very still, the quill motionless in his hand. Never had so few words seemed so weighted.

  And then he dipped the pen in the ink and wrote one more message to be taken to London:

  It is with deep regret I must decline the offer of an assignment. I am not yet fully recovered from the previous assignment.

  He wouldn’t sign it. It would have felt a bit like signing his own warrant, anyway.

  Chapter 22

  THE DAYS BEFORE BOXING Day and the Christmas pantomime passed in a flurry of costume sewing, as Elise had essentially indentured her spare time to Mrs. Sneath for quite the rest of the season in exchange for being allowed to keep the completed footman uniforms. The Christmas puddings had been prepared well ahead of time, and she planned a feast of roast goose for the servants.

  Lord Lavay would be spending Christmas Day with the Countess and Earl of Ardmay.

  He’d been scarce, lately. Her bell had been quiet.

  The staff spent a merry day bedecking the house with boughs of greenery, and come evening they sat down to a leisurely, delicious, cheerful meal in the kitchen. Everyone drank at least one glass of mulled wine. Elise gave the staff leave to go to bed early, since Lord Lavay wouldn’t be home tonight, and she looked forward to an evening of reading to Jack, then perhaps even reading something delightful for herself. A horrid novel would be perfect.

  She arrived in her room, pleasantly full and flushed from the wine, sleepy enough to drop into slumber without counting Lavays, to brush her hair and tuck Jack in and sing him to sleep.

  She moved slowly toward the desk.

  And as if she’d been watching it from somewhere above her own body, she saw her hand reach out and touch her hairbrush.

  It didn’t disappear. It wasn’t an apparition, nor was it a dream.

  Furthermore, it was tied with a beautiful red satin ribbon.

  She sank down in her chair, her heart glowing like a sun in her chest.

  “How did he know?” she whispered.

  She gave a soft, amazed laugh. She gently lifted the familiar, much-­loved brush, and held it in her hand as if it were his hand. The initials were soon blurred with tears.

  She swiped a hand across her eyes

  That was when she saw a small box labeled, “For Jack.”

  She sniffed. “Jack, my love, this is a gift for you from Lord Lavay.”

  “For me? Hurrah!” He took it with him to the bed and plopped down to open it. She turned to smile at him, but something caught the corner of her eye.

  She’d almost missed the letter beneath it addressed to her.

  She recognized the handwriting, and her heart stopped.

  Her hand went to her mouth in shock, and all sensation fled her limbs.

  For a moment she was absolutely certain she couldn’t open it. She was afraid of what she might find inside. Whether it was ghastly news, or more censure.

  Courage, Elise.

  She took a deep breath.

  The foolscap rattled as she slid a finger beneath the seal.

  Dear Elise,

  We love you and have missed you every minute of every day since you’ve been gone. We have long since forgiven you for your startling news, but we are a prideful and stubborn family as you know, and we can be impulsive and quick-­tempered, too. These qualities are the best and the worst of us. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive us. Please come home and bring Jack. We will love him, too.

  Love,

  Mama and Papa Fountain

  “A lion! The Giant gave me a lion! I have a lion! Raaaawwr!” Jack had managed to get his box open. “Can we act out Androcles tonight with the lion? Mama? Mama?”

  She couldn’t speak.

  She turned around and tried to smile for him, at the cunning wooden lion with the dyed woolen mane.

  She was quite simply too full to speak.

  “Yes. Of course, Jack.”

  He bounded over to her and draped his arm around her shoulder to lean into her. “Why are you crying, Mama?”

  She pulled him into a long, squeezing hug.

  “I’m just very, very happy about our Boxing Day gifts, Jack, that’s all. I will tell you why a little later. Perhaps after your pantomime.”

  ON BOXING DAY, Philippe slipped into the church just in time to witness the startling Christmas miracle of his own footmen somberly escorting three very short wise men up to where the baby Jesus lay in a manger, surrounded by kindly animals, one of whom was a frisky sheep named Jack. He wore floppy ears and had been bedecked in a great nimbus of fluffy wool.

  A host of miniature fidgeting angels, all sporting halos suspended upon stalks, most of whom were missing any number of teeth, one of whom scratched her bum as they sang, hovered around them, and they all collided like billiard balls when they were supposed to queue neatly to sing.

  Seamus Duggan played “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks at Night,” and the children sang in their high, sweet voices. And though he’d been instructed not to wave at all, Jack waved to him.

  All in all, it was one of the best times Philippe had ever had at the theater.

  And damn Seamus Duggan, anyway. But Philippe closed his eyes and let the voices and the fiddle wash over him. It crept into the raw, jagged places in his soul, and for that moment, anyway, he felt a sort of surcease. Seamus Duggan was a ne’er-­do-­well, but ironically, he was a freer man than Lord Lavay.

  When Philippe opened his eyes, he spotted the ba
ck of Elise’s head immediately. She was wearing a red wool dress, and her dark hair twisted and loosely pinned, the red ribbon he’d given her threaded through it, gleaming like its own halo. He could even now imagine the silk of it against his hands. She was leaning forward, as if she could get closer to Jack if she could. Lending him every part of her support.

  He smiled.

  Curious heads turned toward him. He saw a contingent of Everseas in the audience, presumably there to lend support to their cousin the vicar. Olivia Eversea was among them, Landesdowne by her side.

  Philippe didn’t particularly belong here, but he wasn’t unwelcome. He was a curiosity, a thing of awe, someone to admire and remark upon and gossip about, a visitor in their midst.

  Pennyroyal Green would always have visitors in its midst.

  It was better to belong to someone or something, as he and the Earl of Ardmay had agreed.

  HE SLIPPED OUT as the evening concluded and hovered outside the door as a flood of little angels and sheep poured out of the church, mingling with villagers. As he waited for them, he felt precisely as conspicuous as he must have looked, ignoring all the curious eyes and goggling stares of various females.

  “Giant! You came!”

  Usually Jack bounded everywhere. Particularly since he’d been recruited to be a sheep. But this time he shuffled over, and it wasn’t entirely due to the bulk of the costume. Something seemed amiss.

  “You were a brilliant sheep, Jack.”

  “Thank you, Giant. Thank you for the lion! I love it very much. It made my mama cry.”

  Philippe looked at Elise in alarm.

  “Jack,” Elise said in warning. “It was just that the gifts were . . . the gifts were wonderful. Thank you, Lord Lavay.”

  He merely nodded, too moved by what he saw in her eyes to speak.

  Jack really seemed peculiarly subdued, despite the triumph of the pantomime. His eyes were downcast, when usually they darted everywhere, hungry to see everything. His face was clouded and sullen. Philippe had never seen Jack anything but purely delighted to be alive, his face always aglow, like a miniature sun, spreading light.

  “Are you not happy about your performance, Master Jack?” he ventured.

  “It was fine,” he said. It was almost clipped.

  “Thank you for coming, Lord Lavay. It was kind of you,” Elise said.

  “I was unaware that footmen were present at Jesus’s birth. I suppose one’s education never ends.”

  “I imagine much of history is still an enigma to us.”

  He smiled, then turned away, his smile fading into something somber and resigned.

  One simply did not engage in lengthy social conversations with one’s housekeeper outside of the house, after all. Not without exciting the sort of comment neither he nor Elise could weather. And taking refuge in manners was really all that was left to them.

  Meeting. Parting. Meeting.

  Parting.

  For tonight would likely be the moment everything was decided.

  “I have a social engagement this evening, Mrs. Fountain. I will be dining with Lady Prideux and Lord and Lady Archembault at the home of Lord Harry, so it will not be necessary to prepare a meal for me.”

  He watched her take in the words as if she’d been withstanding jabs with pins. Her spine went straighter, her face went taut and pale.

  But he didn’t want to lie to her.

  “Thank you for the notice, sir.”

  She meant it in more ways than one.

  “And . . . and I have written to the king to decline his offer.” He turned away from her when he said it. As if he couldn’t bear to see her absorb the news.

  Elise stood motionless, suddenly deaf and blind to the milling crowd.

  It meant he’d made his choice, and Lady Prideux was it.

  She didn’t know how long she was silent. The sun might have risen and set a dozen times over, for all she knew.

  “It’s for the best,” she said at last. Her voice was frayed and small. It had needed to pass through what felt like the gauntlet of knives in her gut before it emerged, after all.

  And it was such a lie. How could anything that kept them apart be for the best?

  She supposed a circumstance in which he wasn’t being shot at or dodging sword thrusts was marginally better. Both were horrible.

  She stood, strapped to a Catherine wheel of emotion, as Jack shuffled his feet near her. She would never be allowed to show it. She could not afford to sob into a pillow or throw a vase.

  She would simply need to find a way to transmute all of that into love. And love him without having him.

  “A good day to both of you, Mrs. Fountain.” His own voice was a thread, too, faint and hoarse. He somberly touched his hat and turned to leave, like a man heading to a funeral, rather than a festive dinner.

  ELISE WATCHED LAVAY go and looped her hand around Jack’s shoulder, as if to keep her knees from giving way. She could feel an invisible pull, as if Lavay had her very heart on a red ribbon and was towing it away.

  Jack’s costume was beginning to list and shed. She had promised Mrs. Sneath to help with the cleaning of the church after, as part of the many things she had promised in exchange for keeping the footman uniforms.

  “Are you feeling well, Jack, my love?” Elise lay a hand across his forehead. “It’s exhausting to be a sheep, I know, when you’ve been a boy your whole life.”

  “I’m fine, Mama.” He scowled and slid from beneath her hand as if she’d laid a toad on his head instead.

  “Are you constipated? Too many tarts?”

  “No, Mama! Cor! Can we just go home?”

  “Cor”? Another word she would have to expunge from his vocabulary.

  She stared at him, a worried frown between her eyes.

  His eyes were on his shoes. Which were still decorated as little hooves.

  “Of course, my love,” she said after a moment. “But in an hour or so, so we can help Mrs. Sneath clean up after the festivities. We’ll have tarts to celebrate.”

  “I’m not hungry, anyway.”

  These words more than anything were a stab to the heart, and now she was truly concerned.

  “I’ll go find Liam,” he said, and went jogging off, without waiting to hear what she thought of that.

  “I SAW MARIE-­HELENE two months ago,” Lord Archembault said. “She is a beautiful young lady, Lavay. A credit to your family.”

  Yes, but how were her gowns? he was tempted to ask. Weren’t her gowns tired?

  The dinner was a delectably done hare in sauce, and the home was gracious, situated on a rise from which you could look down and see both Alder House and the vicarage, as well as the Pig & Thistle, in the distance.

  The company, Philippe thought uncharitably, was stultifying.

  “I’m proud to hear that you think so. I hope to see her very soon, when I return to France.”

  He met Alexandra’s eyes across a silver candelabra, the sort of thing refugees from the revolution often seized as they fled.

  She gave him an intimate little smile. She knew an understanding was nigh; the air all but buzzed with it. All he needed to do was incant the right words to make it official, and she’d likely heard “when I return to France” as “when we return to France, and take over the place.”

  She would be returning to London tomorrow, and would get passage to France there.

  He tried to imagine dinner after dinner after dinner sitting across from her, for the rest of his life. What would they talk about? Their children, presumably. Perhaps all the things they would do with their money.

  What would it be like to make love to her?

  Everything in him shied away from the notion, and surely that was wrong. Surely making love to a woman like her should not be a chore.

  These ­people bored
him, he realized. It felt nearly traitorous, and yet. They spoke to him as though the revolution had never occurred, and for some of them, it had merely struck them a glancing blow. The irony was that his attempts at preserving a way of life they all assumed was superior and to which they were all entitled—­his privateering with the Earl of Ardmay, sharing a ship and bloody battles with men like his bald, foul-­tempered Greek cook, Hercules, being attacked on the Horsleydown Stairs—­had made him nearly unfit for it. They had reshaped him in such a way that he could never be inserted neatly into the slot he’d left behind. It was a rarified, beautiful, comfortable way of life. It was a fine, fine way of life. It was the way of life his sister had come to expect, and the life he wished for her.

  But now these ­people had naught to do with who he’d become.

  But perhaps he merely felt this way because he’d been unmoored for so long. There was no place he considered home.

  If he could return to Les Pierres d’Argent, it might restore him to equilibrium. Remind him of all he had fought for.

  All evening, he felt as though he was reciting the lines to a play he’d performed a dozen times before.

  “Your grandfather brags about you, too, Philippe.”

  Philippe smiled. “I’m fortunate to still have a grand-­père who is proud of—­”

  “Lord Lavay.”

  They all swiveled in astonishment. One of the footmen who had crept in and out, as silent as cats, all evening, had spoken. It was as if the candelabra had spoken.

  “I’m terribly sorry to interrupt, but I’m told it is an emergency. Someone is waiting for you in the foyer.”

  Philippe looked into the footman’s face. Something he saw in it made him slowly rise, folding his napkin very deliberately.

  Portent stood his hair up on the back of his neck.

  “This way, sir,” the footman said quietly.

  Philippe followed him and came to a halt on the chessboard-­patterned foyer.

  His footman-­valet Ramsey stood just inside, illuminated by a pair of mounted lanterns, which had bleached his face of color. Rain was pooling on the floor around him.