Victoria and the Rogue

by Meggin Cabot

  “A mistake?” Lord Malfrey hit a few more notes. He seemed to be trying to play a rendition of “Pop! Goes the Weasel.” “What kind of mistake?”

  “Quite a grave one, I’m afraid,” Victoria said. “You see, the solicitors have only just discovered that there is a codicil to my father’s will.”

  Lord Malfrey looked up at that. “A codicil? What kind of codicil?”

  “Quite a silly one, actually,” Victoria said. “You see, my father was terribly overprotective of me, even as a young child, and… well, shortly before his death he inserted a codicil to his will that said his fortune was to go to me absolutely… but not if I married before I turned twenty-one.”

  The lid to the pianoforte crashed down, fortunately missing the earl’s fingers, but only by a fraction of an inch. He did not appear to notice, however. He sat exactly where he was, staring very intently at Victoria. All of the color seemed to have drained out of his face.

  Victoria thought, with a sinking heart, that this was not a good sign.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Oh, well. She oughtn’t have been surprised.

  Victoria had been up all night long rehearsing just what, exactly, she’d been going to say to Lord Malfrey. She had not been able to help but fantasize about how he’d respond. In her fantasies, when she’d confessed to Lord Malfrey that she was not entitled to her fortune unless she stayed unwed until she was twenty-one, he, with a manly laugh, had replied that he perfectly understood and would wait until the end of time for her.

  And all was well.

  But this did not appear to be the way things were going to go in real life.

  Victoria had never forgotten a story her ayah had liked to tell her at bedtime when she’d been younger. It had been about a maharaja who so wanted to be sure that his wife loved him for himself alone, and not his riches, that he ordered a hovel to be built some distance from his palace. Then, when he chanced upon an attractive maiden who was not aware of his exalted riches, and thought him only a poor fisherman (they met along the riverbank), he did nothing to disabuse her of the notion. Instead he married her on the spot, and carried her away to his hovel. His bride, not knowing that the man to whom she’d pledged her love was actually a maharaja, was quite happy in the hovel, and cheerfully bore him a half dozen children before her husband finally became convinced of her love for him and broke the news: that he was not, in fact, a fisherman, but the richest man in all of India.

  The wife responded by hitting him over the head with a cookpan several times (at least according to Victoria’s ayah), so great was her ire that for years they’d struggled on next to nothing when all along her husband had had millions of pounds of gold at his disposal. But eventually she overcame her anger and went with her husband and their children to the palace, where she proved to be a gracious and compassionate ruler, and lived happily for many, many years.

  If Lord Malfrey had responded to Victoria’s news the way the maiden by the river had, by saying money mattered not to him, and that they would either wait the five years until her fortune became her own, or marry at once and live happily, if impoverished, for the rest of their days, then she’d been quite prepared, unlike the maharaja, to reveal at once that she still had her forty thousand pounds, and that they might dine on champagne and ices for the next fifty years and never know a moment of financial hardship. She wanted to know only that he cared for her a little. Just a little.

  But she could already tell that Lord Malfrey cared for her not at all, and that he was not going to say either of those two things—Let’s wait to marry, then, or Let’s marry at once, and damn the money. No, Lord Malfrey had grown very pale indeed, and looked the way her uncles had always looked when one of them punched another in the stomach during an argument.

  “Twenty-one?” the earl echoed with a gasp. “Can’t marry until you’re twenty-one? But that’s not… that’s not for another five years!”

  “Yes,” Victoria said sadly. Sad not because of the five years, but because of Lord Malfrey’s expression, which was not encouraging. “Five years is a long time. But if one truly loves… well, what is five years, or even ten?”

  Lord Malfrey, however, did not seem to take so romantic a view of things. He got up from the pianoforte so abruptly that the bench fell over behind him. And he did not even appear to notice. Instead he paced back and forth across the room, dragging his fingers through his golden blond hair, and looking, truth be told, like a man bedeviled.

  “How could you not have known this before?” he kept asking. “How could your uncles have kept this from you? It’s… it’s criminal, that’s what it is!”

  Victoria, watching him, said only, “It’s very unfortunate, certainly.”

  “Unfortunate! It’s ridiculous!” Then he stopped pacing, and stared at her. “Was your father a sadist?”

  Victoria, who decided she had learned all she needed to know, gathered up her reticule. “Not to my knowledge, no,” she replied. “I suppose he was only hoping to keep me from falling prey to men who might wish to marry me only for my fortune.”

  Lord Malfrey let out a bitter laugh. “Well, that’s one way to do it!” he said.

  Victoria stood up. She could not help saying, as she paused to unclasp the buttons on her left-hand glove, “You know, Hugo, many people who have much less to live on than you and I marry and are, by all reports, quite happy.”

  The earl looked at her in utter disbelief. “Who? No one I know.”

  “No,” Victoria said. “I would imagine not. No one you know actually works for a living, do they?” Though she knew now that it was a lost cause, she could not help adding, “My uncle Walter might have helped, you know. He could have found you a post in his shipping business.”

  Lord Malfrey looked incredulous. “Work? Victoria, what do you take me for? Do I look like a man who is cut out to work for a living? And in shipping?” He heaved a shudder. “The only careers that are at all suitable to a man of my rank are the church and the law, and they both require simply odious amounts of schooling. You know I am not bookish.”

  “No,” Victoria said. “You aren’t, are you?” She pulled off her glove and removed the ring with the emerald stone that he had given her. She wondered, vaguely, how he was going to pay for it, since she was now quite sure the story he’d told her about his family portraits was untrue, and that he’d bought the ring on credit, thinking he’d pay for it with her money once they were wed. “Well, this is goodbye, then, Hugo. Or should I say, Lord Malfrey.”

  He looked dully at the ring as she placed it on the little table by her chair. He did not deny that was the end of their relationship. He did not even bother to say he was sorry for it. She could not help wondering if he’d been more civil to Margaret Carstairs. She was somewhat surprised Jacob hadn’t gone after him with a fire poker. But she supposed the earl had left town before the captain had gotten the chance.

  “And there isn’t anything you can do?” Lord Malfrey asked in a plaintive voice. “Any way you can… I don’t know. Reason with them?”

  “With my father’s solicitors, you mean?” She looked at him blankly as she pulled her glove back on. “Reason with them about what?”

  “The will! Your father’s will! There’s got to be a way around that codicil, hasn’t there?”

  The door opened, and the dowager Lady Malfrey came into the room, wearing a white lace cap upon her head and dressed in a robe splendiferous with maribou that was at least two sizes too small for her round frame.

  “What codicil?” she asked, holding a glass of what appeared to be ice water against one temple. “Good morning, Lady Victoria, and forgive me for my late rising. I have quite a megrim. How I hate all this rain! What codicil, my love?”

  As the dowager sank down into the seat Victoria had just vacated, her son exploded, “Mama, Victoria’s made an awful discovery. There’s a codicil to her father’s will that she loses her fortune if she marries before her twenty-first year!”

  The dowa
ger Lady Malfrey turned her blue eyes— which Victoria now saw were not good-humored at all, but actually filled with shrewish malice—upon her son’s former fiancée.

  “What’s this?” she demanded in a voice that rose in pitch and fervor with her words. “Can’t marry until your twenty-first year? But that’s five years from now!”

  Victoria refrained from remarking that, for people who professed a lack of bookishness, the arithmetic skills of both mother and son were exemplary.

  “That is correct,” Victoria said.

  “And you’ve waited until now to tell us,” the dowager exclaimed, “when the invitations are already at the engravers?”

  “You needn’t worry about that,” Victoria said lightly. “I sent a note to the engravers this morning.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” the dowager said. Then her shrewish glance grew suspicious, and she eyed Victoria very closely indeed. “Wait a minute. You sent the engravers a note this morning? Just when did you learn of this codicil of your father’s, my lady? ’Tis only just gone past half after nine! What lawyer’s offices open for business at such a barbaric hour?”

  Victoria smiled pleasantly at the dowager. “How perceptive you are, madam,” she said. Then, turning toward Lord Malfrey, she said, “My dear Hugo, I cannot continue this facade. There is no codicil. I lied to you just now. My fortune is my own, as it always has been.”

  Lord Malfrey stared at her for a moment. Then a look of great happiness spread across his handsome features.

  “A joke!” He looked ready to burst with relief and joy. “It was all a joke! Oh, Vicky! How rich!”

  But the dowager Lady Malfrey’s gaze was upon the emerald ring in the center of the little table before her.

  “Joke?” she echoed. She lifted her gaze and sent a piercing look in Victoria’s direction. “It wasn’t a joke at all, was it, Lady Victoria?”

  “No, my lady, it wasn’t.” Victoria did not know how she stood there before them as tall and as straight as she did. Her knees were shaking, and disappointment was causing her throat to ache.

  Stronger, however, than her disappointment was Victoria’s shame in herself. She could not believe she had been so easily—and completely—duped. For a part of her had truly believed that Jacob Carstairs was wrong, and that Hugo Rothschild had loved her—had loved her from the moment he’d first seen her, as he’d assured her that night in the moonlight on the deck of the Harmony, when he’d proposed. A part of her had truly believed that the earl would have done anything—even become employed—for her. It was truly the hardest blow she’d ever been dealt in her life—worse even than losing her parents, since she so dimly remembered them—learning that Hugo Rothschild didn’t care a jot for her.

  But it was better—far better, she told herself—to have found out now, before the wedding, than after. Now she was ashamed, it was true. But she was more or less unscathed. Had she found out about Lord Malfrey’s true nature after the wedding, though… well, she’d have been trapped in a loveless marriage.

  At least this way she was free. Free to walk out that door and marry whomever she liked.

  Only… who? For the only other man who had ever made her heart skip a beat, as Lord Malfrey had, was a man she despised with every fiber of her being…

  …as well as the man to whom she owed thanks for her present state of utter wretchedness.

  “I had hoped, Lord Malfrey,” Victoria said, tears— as yet, she was thankful, unshed—of wounded dignity making her voice unsteady, “that you did not care solely for my fortune, and that you loved me at least a little. But I can see now that I was mistaken in that hope. Please consider our engagement at an end, and do not attempt to contact me ever again. I hope you will understand if I see myself out, and do not wait for your servant. Good morning.”

  Victoria turned to go, but was unfortunately not quick enough to escape Lord Malfrey’s impassioned plea that she give him another chance—that of course he loved her, only he was so stunned by the news she’d imparted that he hadn’t expressed himself the way he’d meant to. Nor did she manage to slip out in time to miss the dowager Lady Malfrey’s fainting fit.

  And Victoria being Victoria, she was perfectly incapable of simply walking away when there was a creature in need. And so instead of exiting icily, as she’d intended, Victoria rang for the dowager’s maid and stayed at the unfortunate lady’s side, chafing her wrists and pressing hartshorn upon her, until aid in the form of a rather slatternly-looking abigail arrived. Sadly, this also meant that Victoria was forced to listen to Lord Malfrey’s apologies that much longer.

  They were, so far as apologies went, eloquent and impassioned. But they did nothing to dissuade Victoria from, once the young man’s mother regained consciousness, repeating her good-byes and departing with as much haste as she could.

  It was only when she was seated at last in the Gardiners’ chaise-and-four and on her way home again that Victoria gave herself permission to cry….

  But of course when she was finally willing to allow herself to weep, she found that she could not. Though her throat ached mightily, her eyes were perfectly dry. She rode home in a state of shock, unbetrothed and unwanted, unable to cry and yet seething inside. It was bad luck for Captain Carstairs that he happened to be the first person Victoria encountered upon setting foot back inside the Gardiners’ door.

  “What?” she demanded rudely, seeing him coming down the hallway with Jeremiah and Judith riding upon his back, peacock feathers in their hands to serve as switches. “You’re still here?”

  “I thought I made myself clear,” Captain Carstairs said, with a smile she supposed other girls might find charming, but which she found only insufferably roguish. “We simply have got to talk, Miss Bee.”

  That was the final straw. Victoria could take many things—the foul weather, her hair’s refusal to curl, even betrayal by the man to whom she’d pledged her heart. But she couldn’t, simply couldn’t take being called Miss Bee on today, of all days.

  And so, uttering a prolonged and heartfelt scream, she barreled past Captain Carstairs and two of her very surprised cousins, and ran up the stairs to her room, where she astonished Rebecca by diving beneath the covers of her bed and refusing to come out from under them for the rest of the day, despite continued entreaties by Rebecca, Mrs. Gardiner, Mariah, and even Clara, who brought the unwelcome news that Lord Malfrey was below, and wished a word.

  It was only then that Victoria, still in her bonnet, lifted her head and conveyed the unhappy truth: that her wedding to the earl was off, and that she would appreciate it if everyone were to leave her alone for the rest of the day.

  The Gardiners, stunned but sympathetic, did as Victoria bade. She was left alone, with only Mariah to hover about and ask if she could bring her ladyship anything, such as ices or back copies of the Ladies’ Journal, which were, Mariah confided to Cook, the sorts of things she herself would want, if her man had up and left her.

  Lord Malfrey was sent away with looks of great suspicion and mistrust, since the Gardiners did not know it was their niece, and not the earl, who’d broken off their engagement.

  Only Captain Carstairs, hearing the news from a very agitated and happy Clara (who dearly loved tales of gloom and heartbreak, particularly any that involved her female relations), seemed unsurprised, and said only that he hoped Lady Victoria felt better upon the morrow, when he would return to call upon her. Then he went home whistling, to Clara’s great disapproval, in spite of the rain, the solemnity of the occasion, and the fact that gentlemen simply did not whistle.

  In fact, Clara later informed her sister, it was a very good thing she had transferred her affections from Captain Carstairs to Mr. Abbott, because Uncle Jacob, Clara confided, seemed rather insensitive… a sentiment with which Rebecca, in light of the whistling, was forced to agree.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  After such an ignominious end to her engagement to Lord Malfrey, Victoria by rights could have spent the rest of the following w
eek in bed, and no one would have thought ill of her. A girl who’d suffered a broken engagement for whatever reason—whether she had broken it off herself, or her former fiancé had called it quits—was a piteous girl indeed, and there wasn’t a matron in London who wouldn’t have understood if Victoria quietly withdrew from society for the rest of the season.

  But Victoria simply had too much to do to spend more than twenty-four hours wallowing in her own grief. After all, she had all of her wedding plans to cancel, not to mention Rebecca’s romance with Charles Abbott to coordinate. And then there were the younger Gardiners, who, by her catching them at such a tender age, might be molded by Victoria into respectable citizens of the commonwealth. Clara needed to be taught that dramatics were all well and good in their place, but that that place was nowhere outside of the schoolroom. And young Jeremiah still, upon occasion, lifted the household pets, and oftentimes his little brother, by the head, a habit of which Victoria was determined to cure him.

  Mrs. Gardiner—though she might not be aware of it—needed Victoria’s help in keeping the household running smoothly, and Mr. Gardiner had, through Victoria’s careful tutelage since her arrival, actually begun saying things other than “Harumph” at the dining table. He was, Victoria felt confident, just days away from actually uttering a whole sentence about something other than the food. To quit now would be, in Victoria’s mind, as catastrophic as the floods that sometimes swept through the Indian villages near which she’d grown up, killing hundreds and leaving just as many homeless.

  Victoria simply couldn’t give up on any of these projects at so crucial a stage, and so was up and out of bed the next morning, with eyes still devoid of redness—for even in the dead of night, when the thought struck her like a knife that she was unattached again, and would have to start all over if she ever wanted to get married, she had not been able to shed a tear.