Victoria and the Rogue

by Meggin Cabot

  MEG CABOT

  Victoria and the Rogue

  For Benjamin

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  "Lady Victoria?"...

  CHAPTER TWO

  England!...

  CHAPTER THREE

  "How lovely it must be to be rich,"...

  CHAPTER FOUR

  "You did it on purpose," Victoria...

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Victoria let out a merry laugh...

  CHAPTER SIX

  "Well?" Victoria spun in a circle before...

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  "Oh, Lady Victoria!" the dowager...

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  "But are you certain you want to go,...

  CHAPTER NINE

  Victoria, a good deal taken aback...

  CHAPTER TEN

  Victoria stood before the mirror...

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Oh, well. She oughtn’t have been...

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  After such an ignominious end to...

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Victoria refused to admit that...

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Victoria thought that perhaps Hugo’s...

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  It was not as steep a climb...

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  There were, of course, any number...

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Well, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t warned...

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  "Captain Carstairs," Victoria said,...

  READ MEG CABOT’S OTHER HISTORICAL NOVEL…

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  BOOKS BY MEG CABOT

  CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Atlantic Ocean, Gibraltar, 1810

  “Lady Victoria?”

  Victoria turned her head at the sound of her name being called so softly from across the ship deck. The moon was full. She could see the person calling to her quite clearly by its silver light… but she doubted that he, in turn, would be able to perceive the blush that suffused her cheeks at the sight of him.

  Yet how could she help but blush? The sight of the tall, flaxen-haired lord nearly always brought color to her cheeks—not to mention a curious flutter to her pulse. He was so handsome. What woman would not blush when such a good-looking man happened to glance her way?

  And tonight Lord Malfrey was doing a good deal more than glancing. Indeed, he was crossing the deck to come and stand beside her at the ship railing, where she’d leaned for the past half hour staring at the hypnotic band of light that the moon was casting upon the water, and listening to the gentle lap of waves upon the sides of the Harmony, the ship that had carried them all from India.

  “Good evening, my lord,” Victoria murmured demurely, when the earl reached her side.

  “You are well, Lady Victoria?” Lord Malfrey asked with just a hint of anxiety in his deep voice. “Forgive me for asking, but you hardly touched your dinner. And then you left the table before dessert was served.”

  Victoria did not think it would be at all romantic, standing as they were beneath that lush silver moon, to inform the earl that she’d left the table because the roast had been so scandalously underdone that she’d felt it her duty to go to the galley and have words about it with the cook.

  It was not her place, of course, to have done so. Mrs. White, the captain’s wife, was the one who ought properly to have taken the ship’s cook to task.

  But Mrs. White, in Victoria’s opinion, would not know a roux from a bearnaise, and quite probably liked her meat undercooked. Victoria had never been able to abide slovenly cooking. And it was so simple to do a roast properly!

  But this was hardly the kind of thing one brought up before a young man like Lord Malfrey. Not under a night sky like the one above them. Besides, one simply did not speak of underdone meat in front of an earl.

  And so instead Victoria said, stretching a hand eloquently toward the moon, “Why, I only wanted a breath of fresh air and happened upon this view. It was so lovely, how could I return below and miss such a breathtaking sight?”

  This was, Victoria thought to herself, a bit of a high-flown speech. There were those on board, she knew, who might well make retching noises had they happened to have overheard it.

  Fortunately, Hugo Rothschild, the ninth Earl of Malfrey, was not one of those people. His blue-eyed gaze followed the graceful arc of her arm, and he said reverently, “Indeed. I have never seen such a beautiful moon. But”— and here his gaze returned to Victoria—“it is not the only breathtaking sight to be seen here on deck.”

  Victoria knew she was blushing quite hard now—but from pleasure, not embarrassment. Why, the earl was flirting with her! How perfectly delightful. Her ayah back in Jaipur had warned her that men might try to flirt with her, but Victoria had hardly expected someone as handsome as Lord Malfrey to pay her such civilities. It was beginning to seem as if the evening, which had looked rather dismal in light of the disastrous roast, was shaping up very nicely indeed.

  “Why, Lord Malfrey,” Victoria said, lowering her sooty eyelashes—though they were not really sooty, of course, as Victoria was a scrupulous bather. But they were, or so her ayah had informed her, as black as soot, anyway. “I can’t think what you mean.”

  “Can’t you?” Lord Malfrey reached out and suddenly took the hand that she’d purposefully left lying upon the ship’s railing, temptingly close to his. “Victoria—may I call you Victoria?”

  He could have called her Bertha and Victoria would not have minded in the least. Not when he was pressing her hand so tightly, as if it were the most precious thing in the world, against his chest. She could feel his heart drumming, strong and vibrant, beneath the cream-colored satin of his waistcoat. Goodness, she thought with some astonishment. I believe he is about to propose!

  Which he promptly did.

  “Victoria,” Lord Malfrey said, the moonlight bringing into high relief the planes of his regularly featured face. He was such a handsome man, with his square jaw and broad shoulders. He would, Victoria decided with some satisfaction, make a very dashing husband indeed. “I know we have not been acquainted long—just under three months—but these past few weeks… well, they’ve been the happiest I’ve ever known. It breaks my heart that tomorrow I shall have to leave you to travel on to England alone, for I have business to attend to in Lisbon….”

  Dreadful Lisbon! How Victoria hated the sound of that foul city, stealing away this excessively charming young man! Lucky Lisbon, that it should get to bask in the glow of the delightful Lord Malfrey.

  “Oh, well,” she said, trying to sound airily unconcerned. “Perhaps we shall meet again in London by and by—”

  “Not by and by,” Lord Malfrey said, flattening her palm against his heart with both hands. “Never say by and by when it concerns us! For I never met a girl quite like you, Victoria, so beautiful… so intelligent… so competent with the help. I cannot imagine what a perfect creature like you could ever see in a pitiful wastrel like myself, but I promise that if, whilst I am in Lisbon, you will wait for me, and then upon my return deign to give me your hand in marriage, I will love you until the day I die, and do nothing but try to make myself worthy of you!”

  La, Victoria thought, very pleased at this turn of events. How jolly this is! A girl goes to chastise a cook for underdoing the roast, and comes back to the table a bride-to-be! Her uncle John would be quite put out when he heard about it, however. He’d wagered Victoria wouldn’t get a proposal until she’d been at least a year in England, and here she was getting one before even setting foot on shore. He wouldn’t be at all happy about owing her uncles Henry and Jasper a fiver.
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  The three of them would be taught a sharp lesson indeed! Imagine them sending her off to England so unceremoniously, simply because she had suggested—merely suggested, mind you—that one of them marry her dear friend Miss… Oh, what was her name again, anyway? Well, it was simply ridiculous, not one of them agreeing to marry poor Miss Whatever-Her-Name-Was, when Victoria had had such a lovely wedding planned. Now it was her own wedding she’d be planning instead! Perhaps when her uncles caught a glimpse of her own wedded bliss, they’d give Miss Whatever-Her-Name-Was a second look….

  “Oh, dear,” Victoria said in tones of great—and completely feigned—distress, batting those sooty lashes as her ayah had recommended. “This is all so terribly sudden, Lord Malfrey.”

  “Please,” Lord Malfrey said, clutching her hand even more tightly, if such a thing were possible. “Call me Hugo.”

  “Very well… Hugo,” Victoria said in her most womanly voice. “I…”

  It was always a good idea, Victoria’s ayah had told her, to leave young men in some suspense as to your true feelings for them. Accordingly, Victoria was about to tell young Lord Malfrey that his ardor had taken her completely unawares, and that as she was but sixteen and hardly yet ready for matrimony, she’d have to turn down his kind proposal… for now. With any luck, this answer would throw the poor young man into such a fit of passion that he might do something rash, such as heave himself overboard, which would be very exciting indeed. And if he survived the dunking, Victoria would be assured of a good many more proposals from him when he returned from Portugal, which would give her something to look forward to whilst she was staying with her horrid aunt and uncle Gardiner.

  All of her hopes for a dramatic—and hopefully very damp—climax to this tender scene were dashed, however, when, just as Victoria was about to turn down Lord Malfrey’s proposal, a deep and all-too-familiar voice reached her from across the ship’s deck, its accents, as always, dripping with sarcasm.

  “There you two are,” Jacob Carstairs drawled as he stepped out of the shadows by the rigging and into the silver puddle of light thrown by the moon. “The captain was wondering— Oh, I say, I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

  Victoria snatched her hand out from beneath the earl’s grip. “Certainly not,” she said quickly.

  Stuff and bother! What a tiresome young man this Jacob Carstairs was! Since he’d joined the Harmony at the Cape of Good Hope six weeks earlier, he seemed always to be appearing at the most inopportune times, such as whenever Victoria and the earl happened to find a rare moment alone together.

  And it wasn’t as if Captain Carstairs—for in spite of his youth, the interfering young gentleman was a naval officer—were so very pleasing a companion. Why, he wore his collar points shockingly low, instead of level with the corners of his mouth, as Lord Malfrey and all the most stylish young men were wearing them. And he had been exceedingly disrespectful to Victoria the time he had overheard her advising Captain White that his crew would be a good deal less discontented if they were only made aware of the merits of higher thought. Victoria herself had volunteered to read to them every noontide from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, and had been a good deal put out when Captain White politely declined her kind offer.

  Mr. Carstairs, however, had not been a bit polite about it. He had taken to calling her Miss Bee—as in busy bee— and had ventured that if she was always this intent on offering her assistance to people who hadn’t asked for it, it was no wonder her bachelor uncles were sending her to live with relatives back in England.

  And yet here Jacob Carstairs was, butting his nose into the private affairs of his fellow ship passengers! Why, it was infuriating!

  Lord Malfrey seemed to think so, too, if his next words were any indication.

  “Actually, Carstairs,” the earl said in his smooth, cultured tone, “you are interrupting something.”

  “So sorry,” Jacob Carstairs said, not sounding the tiniest bit sorry. “But Mrs. White wants Lady Victoria.”

  “Kindly tell Mrs. White I shall be there directly,” Victoria said, straightening her lace fichu, and hoping that perhaps in the moonlight Mr. Carstairs hadn’t noticed how very close she and the earl had been standing….

  That hope was dashed, however, when Jacob Carstairs said in a tone that sounded not unlike one of her uncles, “No, my lady. You had better go see Mrs. White now.”

  Victoria felt another hot flush fill her cheeks. How dared he order her about as if she were his middy? Jacob Carstairs, with his impertinent ways and too-bright gray eyes that seemed to see everything, needed a lesson in manners. He ought to learn that young men who wore their collar points too low and who teased young ladies to whom they were not even related would never earn the affection of anyone… particularly any of those said young ladies.

  And Victoria thought she knew just who could best give this lesson to the unfortunate captain.

  Accordingly, she turned to Lord Malfrey, and, giving him her hand once more, said gravely, “My lord, in answer to your question, I would be honored to be your wife.”

  The look of astonishment that flickered across Captain Carstairs’s face at that moment quite made up for Victoria’s no longer being able to look forward to Lord Malfrey’s leaping overboard in frustrated passion.

  In all, she congratulated herself on a job well done.

  Very well done indeed!

  CHAPTER TWO

  England!

  Victoria gazed at the crowded and busy wharf through the captain’s spyglass. So this, she thought, was England at last. She had to confess herself unimpressed. England so far was nothing like her uncles had led her to believe. The dock was almost exactly like the one she’d left in Bombay some three months earlier, being both dirty and exceedingly disorganized-looking. Really, it might almost have been Bombay, except for the general dearth of monkeys.

  And, of course, there was the fact that above their heads hung a leaden and sullen sky, whilst the sky that had stretched across Victoria’s beloved Jaipur had nearly always been cloudless, and as deeply blue as a maharaja’s sapphire—except during monsoon season, of course.

  Really, it was a lot to ask any girl to bear, this dirty sky and even dirtier dock… but it was far, far worse for Victoria, who also had to endure the absence of her fiancé—her secret fiancé—since with the exception of the loathesome Captain Carstairs, no one yet knew Victoria and Lord Malfrey’s happy news. Two days! Two whole days since she’d bid the earl farewell! And now they expected her to endure this bleak sky and shoreline as well? No. It was too much.

  “Is it the rainy season, then, Captain?” Victoria asked, passing the spyglass back to Captain White, who, along with his wife, had acted as her chaperones throughout the long ocean voyage.

  “The rainy season,” the captain echoed with a chuckle. “My lady, in England, I am sorry to say, it is never anything but.”

  Mrs. White, standing beside her husband, looked shocked.

  “Percival!” she cried. “Do not quiz Lady Victoria so. Don’t you believe a word he says, my lady. It is spring, and while it does rain more than usual in England in the spring, I can assure you that we have our share of fine weather, as well.”

  Victoria nodded, but could not help darting a dubious look at the sky. If there was a sun behind that thick layer of clouds, she could see no sign of it.

  Not that it mattered especially, she thought with an inward shrug. She did not need the sun, after all. She had her own special secret to keep her warm. Though should the sun choose to make an appearance at some point, Victoria would not take it at all amiss.

  “Oh, there is the longboat,” Mrs. White said, as the sound of a scrape was heard portside. “In a moment the swing will arrive to take you down, my lady. Now, you mustn’t be frightened of the swing. It is perfectly safe. You could not be in better hands than the crew of the Harmony, as I am certain by now you are well aware….”

  But Victoria was hardly paying attention
. That was because she had seen, out of the corner of her eye, a bright spot of blue amidst all the monotonous grays and browns that made up the garb of the crew. Only one person on board—with the exception of herself, of course—wore such bold colors, and that was someone Victoria hadn’t the slightest interest in speaking to just at that moment—or any moment, to be honest. She turned her face resolutely toward the shoreline, though the damp wind that was tugging on the hem of her pelisse blew from that direction, throwing occasional stinging drops of wet upon her cheeks.

  “…safe as a kitten in a basket,” Mrs. White was going on. Then she broke off with a glad cry. “Why, Captain Carstairs! There you are! I was just saying to Lady Victoria that she needn’t fear the swing, that in fact it is quite safe. Do reassure her as well, won’t you?”

  Mr. Carstairs, Victoria noted after the briefest of glances in his direction, still wore the insolent grin he seemed to have had on ever since Lisbon. Insufferable man! She pressed her lips together and wished heartily, as she’d been doing ever since that unfortunate incident off the Portuguese coast—where the captain had interrupted her moonlit proposal—that Jacob Carstairs might suffer a shipboard accident that would render him comatose.

  Sadly, it did not appear that any such calamity had befallen the young gentleman, since he seemed to have total mastery over his own tongue.

  “I am certain,” he said in the cool, mocking tone that so infuriated Victoria every time she heard it, “that her ladyship needs no such assurances from me. Any young woman who has been brought up, as Lady Victoria informs me that she has, by four decorated British officers in the wilds of Jaipur—an area, I believe she said, that is rife with tigers—is unlikely to be daunted by a mere swing.”