by Meggin Cabot
“Well,” Victoria said, feeling more vexed with him than ever, “then you will have to wait forever, for I plan never to be unattached again.”
Jacob, though the dance abruptly finished, forgot to bow in response to Victoria’s curtsy. Instead he just stood there looking down at her with a very astonished expression on his face.
“What?” he said, seemingly quite unaware that all the other couples save themselves were moving from the dance floor. “You still intend to go through with it?”
“With what?” Victoria thought that, for all he was in charge of a shipping line worth many thousands of pounds, Jacob Carstairs was rather dim. “My wedding to Lord Malfrey? Why, certainly. I think I already informed you of that.”
“But… but your aunt and uncle,” Jacob stammered. “I saw the way they reacted to the news. Surely they can’t… they haven’t given you permission to wed him.”
“Of course they haven’t.” Really, but Victoria almost felt sorry for Jacob Carstairs. He was not taking the information that his little scheme of ruining her future had failed at all well. Victoria, herself a habitual schemer, had learned to take her own foiled plots in stride. “But I don’t need their permission to marry. I am of age, and can do as I like. They don’t approve, but they can’t stop me.”
“Then you are still engaged to him?” Jacob demanded. “And intend to remain so?”
“Indeed,” Victoria said. “Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because Hugo Rothschild,” Jacob Carstairs blurted, “is a rogue!”
Slander! Victoria had never heard such a blatant lie in her life. And she doubted that Almack’s had ever played host to such libel, as well, at least if the way everyone was staring at them as they stood nose-to-nose—well, Victoria’s nose to the captain’s chest, to be perfectly truthful—in the center of the room was any indication.
“A rogue!” Victoria echoed scathingly. “I like that! If that’s true, what, pray, do you call yourself, Captain?”
“A concerned friend,” Jacob replied from between gritted teeth.
“Ha!” Victoria laughed in his face. “And what kind of friend, Captain Carstairs, goes about trying to destroy another person’s one chance at happiness?”
“If Hugo Rothschild is your one chance at happiness,” Jacob said in a snarl, “then I’m a hurdygurdy man!”
Victoria narrowed her eyes at him. “In that case, your monkey seems to be missing,” she informed him.
“This,” Jacob Carstairs said, suddenly turning away from her and striding from the dance floor, “is intolerable. Where is your uncle?”
Victoria, aware of all the stares they were attracting, hurried after the captain, having to run a little in order to keep up with his long, manly strides.
“What do you want my uncle for?” she asked curiously. “I already told you, he can’t stop me from marrying whom I like.”
“Ha,” Jacob Carstairs said with a certain amount of scorn. “We’ll see about that.”
Very interested in this turn of events, Victoria trailed after him, not noticing that Rebecca was tagging along as well until she heard her call her name.
“Vicky!”
Victoria turned her head and saw Rebecca tripping along beside her.
“Oh,” Victoria said. “Hello.”
“What is happening?” Rebecca wanted to know. “What were you and the captain arguing about out on the dance floor? Everyone was looking! I was so embarrassed for you.”
“Just Lord Malfrey,” Victoria informed her cousin with a shrug.
“Lord Malfrey?” Rebecca, resplendent in another gown she’d borrowed from Victoria, looked more beautiful than ever, in spite of the wilting heat of the crowded room. “Oh, dear. Captain Carstairs dislikes him so.”
“I know it,” Victoria said. “He is going to have words with your father. He thinks there is something Uncle Walter can do to prevent my marrying Hugo.”
Rebecca reached out to grip Victoria’s arm, keeping her from flying after the agitated young ship captain.
“He what?” Rebecca demanded rather loudly.
“He thinks he can stop me from marrying Lord Malfrey,” Victoria explained. Heavens, but her cousin was slow to understand the simplest things sometimes. “Come along, Becky. If we don’t hurry, we’ll miss all the fun!”
“Fun!” Rebecca looked as stunned as if Victoria had pinched her. “Is that what you think it is? Fun? ”
Victoria, eager as she was not to miss a moment of what promised to be an amusing spectacle—Captain Carstairs rebuking her uncle, that is—could not help but notice a spark of anger in her cousin’s blue eyes.
“Why, Becky,” she said, wondering what on earth could have upset her cousin now. For Rebecca, Victoria had discovered during her weeklong sojourn with the Gardiners, had a volatile temper, and was somewhat prone to dramatics. “Whatever is the matter?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Rebecca snapped.
Victoria could only ascertain, from the high color in the other girl’s face, that she was in some sort of physical discomfort. Accordingly, Victoria asked solicitously, “Are your stays too tight? I warned Mariah—”
“No!” Rebecca grew even more red-faced at the mention of her corset. “Good heavens, Vicky, are you completely dense? Can’t you see what’s happening?”
Victoria blinked. “I guess not,” she said. “I suppose you’d better tell me.”
Rebecca stamped a slippered foot. “Oh, you are the most infuriating girl! Can’t you see? He’s in love with you!”
Victoria blinked some more. “Who is?”
“Captain Carstairs!”
CHAPTER FIVE
Victoria let out a merry laugh.
“Oh, Becky,” she cried. “You are droll. Stop joking now, and let’s go watch the captain and your father. It’s sure to be diverting.”
“I’m not joking,” Rebecca said, tightening her fingers on Victoria’s arm so that her grip actually began to hurt. “Captain Carstairs is in love with you!”
“Becky.” Victoria, seeing now that her cousin was perfectly serious, tried her best not to smile. It wouldn’t do, she knew, to laugh too hard at Rebecca, who was a serious sort of girl. Still, it was amusing. The idea of Captain Carstairs, who could never seem to look at Victoria without seeing—and then commenting upon—a fault, being in love with her! La, what a joke!
What wasn’t a joke, however, was how Becky seemed to feel. The older girl was angry—really angry—and Victoria supposed she couldn’t blame her. The captain’s behavior was infuriating… especially because it was so peculiar. Jacob Carstairs didn’t care for her a jot.
But Victoria supposed she could see how Becky might misinterpret his motivation. Which only made her more convinced than ever that she needed to find a gentleman more deserving of her cousin’s ardor than the horrid Jacob Carstairs.
“Captain Carstairs is hardly in love with me,” Victoria explained patiently. “If anything he despises me, and has made his contempt perfectly well known.”
“If he isn’t in love with you, why does he care so much about whether or not you marry?” Rebecca wanted to know.
“Captain Carstairs doesn’t care whether or not I marry,” Victoria replied as calmly as she could. Really, but romantic, imaginative girls like Rebecca were such a lot of work. Victoria was quite glad she had no imagination to speak of, and could turn her mind to practical things, like financial planning and household management. “He just doesn’t want me to marry Lord Malfrey.”
“Because he’s jealous!”
“Because Captain Carstairs has some sort of absurd prejudice against Lord Malfrey,” Victoria said. “I don’t know why. It has something to do with poor Lord Malfrey not having any money. He went so far as to call him a rogue.”
Rebecca looked suitably shocked. “He didn’t!”
“He did. Which, if that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black, I don’t know what is.”
“Oh, Vicky,” Rebecca said, her blue eyes wide a
s forget-me-nots. “Captain Carstairs is as far from being a rogue as… well, as Papa is!”
“Suit yourself,” Victoria said, unwilling to raise her cousin’s ire any more than it already was by strenuously disagreeing, as she would have liked to. Really, but she would have to find a nice young man, and soon, for Becky to fall in love with, or she would never hear the end of Captain Carstairs. “Honestly, Becky, you really needn’t bother your head about Captain Carstairs and me. We are quite thorough enemies. Why, I believe he hates me every bit as much as I hate him.”
This mollified Rebecca only slightly.
“It does seem as if he hates you,” she admitted grudgingly, “the way he is always criticizing you. Like last week at dinner, when he laughed at your idea that women should be allowed to run military operations from Whitehall.”
“There,” Victoria said, though she did not find that memory quite as comforting as Rebecca evidently did. She quite fancied that, if only the British Empire would recognize her superior organizational skills, she could handily settle a half dozen of its most pressing foreign conflicts by teatime. Still, she stifled her protest and said, “You see? If he were in love with me, would he have laughed quite so hard?”
“No,” Rebecca admitted. “And I once heard the captain telling Mama that he prefers quiet, sensitive girls like me. Everyone knows you aren’t in the least sensitive.”
Victoria, who thought that sensitive was really just a polite way to describe girls who were incapable of taking care of themselves, was not surprised to hear that the captain liked young ladies of this particular bent. He seemed the type of fellow to prefer a girl who fainted at the sight of blood, as Victoria was certain Rebecca would, to one who would calmly stanch its flow with a pocket handkerchief, as Victoria had done the time her uncle Jasper accidentally ran his bayonet through his big toe.
“Er,” she said. “Yes. So don’t you see, Becky? Captain Carstairs can’t possibly be in love with me.”
“But if that’s so,” Rebecca said with a final suspicious glance, “why is he always looking at you? Because he is, Vicky. Whenever he thinks you aren’t looking he stares and stares. He did it at supper, and he’s been doing it here all night long. Even when he was dancing with me, he kept looking across the room at you!”
Victoria laid a comforting hand upon her cousin’s puffed sleeve.
“Of course he did,” she said kindly. “Because he’s wondering how on earth two cousins could be more different. I’m sure he’s looking at me and asking himself, ‘Now why can’t Lady Victoria be more like her pretty cousin Miss Gardiner? Miss Gardiner would never allow her perfect china-white skin to get so brown in the sun. Miss Gardiner would never tell her maid that if she caught her folding instead of hanging her silk gowns again, she’d dismiss her. Miss Gardiner would never reduce Cook to tears with her scathing indictment of her tureen of beef.’”
Rebecca’s scowl brightened. “Goodness, I never thought of it like that. You’re quite right, Vicky. Captain Carstairs couldn’t possibly be in love with you. You are so very interfering.”
This wasn’t entirely what Victoria wanted to hear, but at least her cousin had stopped glaring so balefully at her, which was a definite relief. “Champion,” Victoria said. “Now let’s go see what your father says when Jacob Carstairs asks him why he hasn’t forbidden me from marrying Lord Malfrey.”
Though Rebecca put up a token resistance—it wasn’t right, she said, to spy upon gentlemen, particularly her own father—Victoria managed eventually to drag her across the room, causing quite a stir and no small amount of headshaking from the gallery of matrons who observed this unorthodox behavior in the hallowed rooms of Almack’s. The general opinion of the matrons—and throughout London—seemed to be that Lady Victoria Arbuthnot was rather a handful. The majority of the society matrons felt quite sorry for Beatrice Gardiner, who’d been put in charge of the headstrong girl.
But at the same time they couldn’t help rather envying Rebecca’s mother, because Victoria’s handling of the Gardiners’ cook had already become the stuff of legend. The description of Victoria’s ashen complexion when presented with tureen of beef a second night in a row had made its way through London’s finest kitchens, eventually trickling upstairs from the servants’ quarters and into the boudoirs of Mayfair’s finest hostesses. Her quiet request to be excused, her subsequent trip through the baize door and down to the kitchen, her polite but firm instructions to the Gardiners’ cook that never—never—was she to serve tureen of beef in that household again, or she would be made to suffer the consequences, had caused many a cook who had for years terrorized her employers with threats to quit if her food was criticized to quake with terror. Already the warning had been passed from cook to cook throughout the land: only those with a stout heart and a steady hand with a basting brush need apply for work in the household of the new Lady Malfrey.
No one blamed Beatrice, of course, for her niece’s reputation. The young lady was an orphan, after all, and had had the misfortune of having been raised in India like a little heathen, since for all intents and purposes, her uncles had ignored her until she grew too strident in her criticism of them for them not to pay attention. Then they had promptly shipped her off for their poor sister to deal with. Such a pity, too, because her dearly departed mother had been such a great beauty, such a gentle creature… so gentle, in fact, that she was quite hopeless with the help….
Sadly, Jacob’s speech was just winding down as Victoria and her cousin approached.
“At best, sir, your niece will be dragged down to his level,” the captain was pontificating. “At worst, her reputation will be ruined, and she won’t be able to show her face in a single decent household in all of London.”
Victoria bitterly regretted having missed the beginning of this speech. It sounded quite a good one.
“Er,” Rebecca’s father was heard to reply. “Um. Ah.”
“Show some spirit, Uncle Gardiner,” Victoria urged him, with enthusiasm. “Tell him to save his breath to cool his porridge.”
But her uncle only turned very red in the face, muttered something about going in search of punch, and departed. Jacob Carstairs turned on Victoria with blazing eyes— really blazing, the way a tiger’s eyes blazed just as it was set to pounce—and said in a very deep and commanding voice, “If your family won’t do anything to keep you from making this excessively foolish match, Lady Victoria, I can assure you I will.”
“Oh, Captain Carstairs,” Rebecca said, batting her eyelashes worshipfully at the young captain. Really, but Victoria was going to have to put an end to this absurd fixation of her cousin’s very soon indeed. “It is so kind of you to take such an interest in my cousin’s welfare.”
It was at that point that Jacob Carstairs, who’d seemed livid with rage, appeared to remember himself, and, dropping the furious gaze, looked a bit ashamed… as well he ought, thought Victoria with some satisfaction.
“Your concern for my future is much appreciated,” she said, a little let down that this, then, were all the fireworks to which they were to be treated. “But I can assure you, you have nothing to fear. I am quite capable of making my own decisions, Captain. I have been doing so all my life, you know.”
Captain Carstairs only shook his head. “There are dangers here in England you’ve never dreamed of, my lady. And I’m not talking about scorpions or quicksand. Or,” he added even more ominously, “tureen of beef two nights in a row.”
This sounded thrillingly portentous… enough so that Victoria’s pulse quickened, and she leaned toward Jacob Carstairs eagerly.
“What do you mean?” she asked breathlessly. “Captain Carstairs, do you know something about my fiancé that I don’t?”
But Jacob crushed her hopes of finding out that Lord Malfrey had a hidden deformity or a mad twin brother with whom he occasionally traded places by saying curtly, “Only that he is not a man of honor.”
This was such a disappointing response that Victoria rolle
d her eyes. “Is that all?” she asked.
“Isn’t that enough?” Captain Carstairs demanded, his dark brows furrowed.
Rebecca, who’d been standing nearby the whole time, piped up with, “It is a very serious accusation, Vicky. I am certain it is not one the captain would make lightly.”
“I’m sure you are right,” Victoria said, so as not to hurt her cousin’s feelings. She was not, however, the least impressed by the captain’s warning. Why, her uncles had often accused men under their command of being less than honorable. But these charges almost always turned out to stem from the dullest of crimes, such as not keeping their mistresses in very high style, or failing to see their horses properly watered after a long ride. Victoria supposed the captain had some equally boring charge to lay at the feet of the earl, and in truth, she could not have been less interested in hearing it.
“La,” she said when she felt enough time had passed that Rebecca and Captain Carstairs would think her suitably chastened. “Shall we go pitch biscuits out the window at the dogs?” For this seemed to Victoria the most entertaining activity that Almack’s had to offer thus far. She’d noticed some of the younger boys engaged in it, and quite envied them.
Rebecca and Jacob Carstairs exchanged meaningful glances.
“Vicky,” Rebecca said, “I don’t think you quite understand what the captain is trying to tell you.”
Victoria rolled her eyes again. Lord, what was wrong with the English? They did go on and on about things— but not the right kinds of things. Really, if it hadn’t been for Victoria, the Gardiners might have had tureen of beef seven nights a week and not uttered a peep about it. But about something as trivial as whom she was to marry, no one seemed capable of remaining silent.
It was all Captain Carstairs’s fault, of course. Odious man! Victoria was going to have to find someone new for Becky to love, and posthaste. She noticed a promising-looking fair-haired young man standing a little ways away, saw with approval that his mustache was neatly trimmed and his collar points high, and tossed her fan surreptitiously in his direction, then exclaimed, looking down at her bare wrist in horror, “My fan! Oh, Becky! I’ve lost my fan!”
