by Meggin Cabot
Victoria felt as if something were clutching at her throat—rather the way she felt when one of the younger Gardiners demanded a piggyback ride down the stairs, then held her in a stranglehold all the way down.
“But surely…”Victoria shook her head, as if trying to clear it. “Surely when I tell my uncle the truth…”
“He might even believe you,” the dowager Lady Malfrey said with a shrug of her plump shoulders. “Who knows? But even if he does, it won’t matter. No one else will, you see. There’ll be talk. You won’t be welcome at Almack’s anymore… or anywhere else where polite society gathers…. It really was very obliging of you to agree to meet my son, and even more obliging of the weather to rain. Not that it would have mattered if it had stayed dry. He’d have found a way to get you here someway or other.”
Victoria stared at Hugo’s mother in horror. She could not believe what was happening. It was like something out of one of the books Rebecca was always reading, the ones she kept under her bed and that Mrs. Gardiner knew nothing about, in which innocent young maidens were ravished by foreign gentlemen or held captive in pirate caves.
Only this was no book! This was really happening, and not to an innocent young maiden, but to Victoria! Lady Victoria Arbuthnot!
Granted, there were no foreign gentlemen involved, and certainly no pirates. But Hugo’s mother’s plan was diabolical just the same! Why, the woman intended to hold her captive overnight, and make out in the morning that Victoria had stayed there willingly for some sort of romantic tryst with Lord Malfrey.
When word got out (and it would; the dowager would see that it would) that Victoria and the earl had spent the night together alone—for the dowager would be sure to let Mr. Gardiner know that she had not been home—Victoria would have no choice but to marry the earl… marry him or be branded a scarlet woman, a hussy, a…
Victoria, instead of fainting like the heroines of Rebecca’s favorite novels usually did, demanded of her captress rather sharply, “Where’s Hugo?”
The dowager Lady Malfrey did not look at all miffed by Victoria’s tone. She replied, affably enough, “He’s next-door. And if you’re hoping to appeal to his gentlemanly nature, don’t bother. This was all his idea.”
Victoria simply did not believe the dowager. She said, “I want to see him. Send him to me now.”
The dowager laughed. “You, my dear, are hardly in a position to be making demands. And may I remind you to whom you are speaking? I am going to be your mother-inlaw. You had best start treating me with the respect I am owed. After all, once you are married to my son, your fortune will be his.”
Victoria realized, with a sinking heart, that what the dowager said was true. Sadly the law dictated that any wealth or property a woman possessed became, upon her wedding day, her husband’s.
Which was why Victoria suddenly shouted, “I’d sooner die than marry that poncey git!” and thrust an extremely unladylike elbow into the dowager’s clavicle.
Then, while Hugo’s mother struggled to catch her breath, Victoria started barefoot down the hallway—for she had given up her shoes, as well, to have the mud scraped from them—intent upon finding her clothes, donning them, and leaving this horrible house forever.
Sadly, however, she did not get very far. A door opened, and none other than the ninth Earl of Malfrey himself emerged from behind it, looking not a little surprised to see Victoria bearing down upon him in nothing but her underclothes and a blanket.
“Here, here,” Hugo said, catching Victoria by the arm as she attempted to dart past him. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m going home,” Victoria said, twisting to be free of his hold. “And if you dare to try to stop me, I’ll… I’ll call the Bow Street Runners on you!”
“I’m certain you would if you could,” Hugo said with a laugh. “But I don’t think they’ll be able to hear you calling from here.”
Victoria, struck to the core by this betrayal, narrowed her eyes at him and said, “It’s true then. You are on her side.”
Lord Malfrey glanced at his mother, who was still attempting to recover from the blow Victoria had given her, and was breathing hard and clutching her throat.
“Yes,” Hugo said. “Of course. Mama and I are a team—Ah!” The earl snatched his hand out from between Victoria’s teeth, which she’d sunk into it with all her might. But he did not, as Victoria had been hoping, release her. He caught her up around the waist instead, lifting her halfway off the floor as she kicked and clawed to free herself.
“Now, Vicky,” the earl said with a chuckle. “Don’t take on so. I know this is a damnable way to go about it, but you and I were always meant to marry. You know that. There was a time when the idea was hardly repugnant to you. Try to remember—ow, now that hurt!— how you used to feel about me, and we ought to get on fine.”
As he spoke, the earl half dragged, half carried Victoria back to the spare room. Victoria put up a valiant struggle, but in the end, Hugo—who was apparently immune to pinches, kicks, scratches, and hair pulling—was simply stronger and bigger than she was. He deposited her unceremoniously on the bed, then, before she could beat him to it, flung himself out the door, slamming it hard behind him— even worse, he thought to snatch up Victoria’s reticule on the way out, and take it with him. So now she did not even have a hope of bribing a servant to free her! Wretched man.
“Vicky,” the earl said from the other side of the door as Victoria fell upon it, beating it with her fists. “Be reasonable. Will being married to me really be such a hardship? We’ll have a jolly time, I promise you. And it isn’t as if there’s some other fellow you like better.”
Victoria, upon hearing this last, gave the door a kick with her bare foot that succeeded only in sending jolts of pain up her leg. The door itself didn’t budge.
“Vicky,” Lord Malfrey chastised her from behind the door. “Really. Is that any way for the daughter of a duke to behave? I do hope you’ll have calmed down by breakfast. I’ll bring it up to you myself, if you like. One egg or two?”
“Don’t”—Vicky went to the mantel and picked up the ormolu clock—“call me”—she threw the clock with all her strength against the door—“Vicky!”
The clock didn’t even break. The glass faceplate shattered, but that was all. And behind the door, Lord Malfrey only laughed harder.
“Oh, Vicky,” he said. “At least life with you will never get boring.”
And then Victoria heard a sound that made her blood run cold—a key scraping in the door’s lock.
And that was that. She was locked in. She would not, she knew, be released until morning. Morning, at which point the name Lady Victoria Arbuthnot would be synonymous with…
Well, mud.
Perfect. Just perfect. Victoria sank down upon the bed and found that she was trembling. With rage, she told herself. She was weak with it. White-hot rage, not fear. For Victoria was not afraid. She wasn’t. She…
Was. Who wouldn’t be? She was trapped in her undergarments in a stranger’s bedroom, and come morning her reputation would be in ruins, her good name worthless.
Well, one thing Victoria knew for certain: she would never marry Hugo Rothschild, no matter what her uncle or anyone else said. She’d sooner go back to India than marry that blackguard, that mountebank, that…
…rogue.
But even as she told herself that all was not lost—she could, after all, simply say no when the preacher asked if she took this man to be her husband—she realized that if she refused to marry Hugo, it wouldn’t be just her own reputation that would suffer. No, the Gardiners would be irrevocably hurt as well. Would Charles Abbott want to marry the first cousin of so brazen a girl as Lady Victoria Arbuthnot? And what of Clara? What were Clara’s chances of ever finding her one true love, when her family would lose their tickets to Almack’s because of Victoria’s refusal to marry the man in whose home she spent a chaperonless night?
It was one thing permanently to destroy her own
life. It was quite another to destroy the lives of the people she’d come to love. Yes, love. Victoria loved the Gardiners, for all their faults, from Uncle Walter and his harumphs to Cook and her tureen of beef.
For their sake, she was going to have to marry Hugo.
Victoria felt, for the first time all evening, sick to her stomach.
Marry Hugo! Marry the earl! Only a week before she’d have laughed giddily at the suggestion. Of course she was going to marry Lord Malfrey! She loved him, didn’t she?
But Victoria knew now that what she’d felt for the earl hadn’t been love. She had admired him, certainly, for he had cut a very dashing figure on the deck of the Harmony. She had been attracted to him, because he was so very handsome, with his blue eyes and golden hair. And she had certainly allowed herself to be flattered by him… something at which he’d definitely excelled. Flattering her, that is. Certainly no one else on the Harmony had ever bothered to mention her emerald (well, hazel, actually) eyes, or highly kissable mouth….
But love? She had never loved Hugo. She had only said yes to his proposal in the first place because she’d known it would annoy Jacob Carstairs. Yes! She was willing to admit it now, the shameful, horrible truth of it all. She had said yes to Lord Malfrey’s proposal because she’d known Jacob Carstairs had overheard it, and that her saying yes would irritate the captain no end.
What kind of reason was that to agree to marry a man? Even the most generous of souls would have to agree: an exceptionally poor one.
And what kind of girl did that make her? What kind of girl said yes to a man’s marriage proposal because she was hoping it would make another man—yes! Yes, she admitted it!—jealous?
For she had hoped against hope that Jacob Carstairs would be jealous that she was marrying the earl, and would beg her to marry him instead.
Not that if he had, she’d have done so! Perish the thought! Jacob Carstairs was a thoroughly provoking, completely irascible man, with his Miss Bees and his snide remarks and his always thinking he knew better than she did.
And stubborn! The height at which he wore his collar points certainly proved that. The man was impossible, a thorough reprobate. It was ridiculous that his kisses should make her head spin the way they did, ridiculous they should make her so weak at the knees. He was a rogue of the first order, and the last man on earth Victoria would ever consider marrying.
But Victoria would have liked him to have asked her— nicely—just the same.
Sitting on the bed, staring blindly out the window, Victoria wondered what Jacob Carstairs was going to think when he found out about her having spent the night in the earl’s rooms. Surely he, of all people, would know that Victoria had been tricked into it. Worse than tricked. Held against her will. Surely Jacob, knowing Victoria as he did, would guess that she would sooner have died than disgrace herself—and her family—in such a way. Surely Jacob…
Jacob Carstairs, Victoria realized with growing horror, wouldn’t think any such things. He would think she was just a silly girl who’d gotten herself into a silly situation from which she ought to have been able to extricate herself. She was Miss Bee, after all. Miss Bees did not—simply did not—get kidnapped by earls and held against their will.
Instead, they escaped.
Slowly Victoria’s gaze focused on the window she’d been peering blindly out of for so many minutes.
A window. There was a window in her room.
Getting up from the bed, Victoria crossed to the window and laid her fingers over the casement latch. It lifted easily. A second later the window was swinging outward…
…and the cool night air hit her face, smelling sweetly fresh after the rainstorm. Leaning forward, Victoria looked out. The bedroom in which she was imprisoned was on the far side of the house. Below her lay a garden, dripping and dark. Beyond the garden wall was the street, empty this time of night, and still shining wetly in the moonlight. If she could climb down into that garden, it would be very easy to scale that wall and follow that quiet, narrow street to freedom.
Except…
Except that she was in her undergarments. Her under-garments and a blanket. And she was barefoot. Even if she were to find a Bow Street Runner—and Victoria hadn’t the slightest idea how one was supposed to go about summoning one—what would they think of her, a blowsy-looking girl with uncurled—uncombed!—hair, wearing nothing but pantaloons, a camisole, and a blanket?
Victoria felt she hadn’t any choice but to risk it. Which, she asked herself, was worse: being found wandering the streets in one’s underthings, or being found in the rooms of a man in the early hours of the morning? If her reputation was going to be ruined anyway—and Victoria was by now convinced it was going to be, marriage to the earl or no marriage to the earl—why not have it ruined on her own terms? She would, she knew, forever after be known as the debutante who paraded around Mayfair in her undergarments.
But Charles Abbott, she felt rather strongly, would sooner marry the cousin of that girl than the cousin of a girl who spent the night with a man to whom she was not yet wed….
Her course of action decided, Victoria wrapped the blanket, which had come loose during her tangle with Lord Malfrey, more tightly around her body. Then she climbed carefully onto the windowsill and swung her bare feet into the still, damp air…
…reminding her of another time she’d been forced to make a less than dignified climb down from a dizzying height.
Don’t look down, Jacob Carstairs had advised her then, when she’d hesitated atop the rope ladder from his ship, and you’ll be all right.
Keeping her eyes averted from the ground so far below her, Victoria clung to the sill and lowered her bare foot, feeling for a toehold in the bricks.
And she began to descend.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It was not as steep a climb as the one she’d made down the side of the Harmony, but it took considerably longer, seeing as how Victoria had to feel for each foothold, and sometimes couldn’t seem to find any. Fortunately the building was old and not in the best of repair, or she might have found herself stuck clinging to the side of the building, unable to descend any farther.
But she managed to find a few places where brick and mortar had chipped away, and that, coupled with the occasional ornamental lintel, got her most of the way down. She jumped the rest of the way when she got to a first floor window and worried someone might glance through it and see her, then raise the alarm. It was no joke, jumping from such a height without shoes to protect her bare feet from the sting of the ground below. But fortunately the rain had softened the earth, and Victoria, instead of breaking both her legs, sank ankle-deep into the thick black mud of someone’s rose garden.
Disgusted—particularly since she lost her blanket in the process and had to pick it carefully from the clinging thorns of a nearby rosebush—Victoria pulled her feet from the oozing mud and made her way through the dark garden to the wall that separated it from the neighbors’. There was, she saw to her relief, a door in the center of the wall, and when she turned the wrought-iron latch, she found that it turned easily… though not exactly soundlessly. Glancing back over her bare shoulder, Victoria saw that it was unlikely the shriek from the rusty hinges would be overheard. Everyone in Lord Malfrey’s rooms appeared to be asleep—at least, very little light showed through the curtains of his sitting room and bedrooms. She might actually be able to make her escape as easily as that. Except for a few scrapes from thorns, and a set of mud-encased feet, she was unhurt.
How angry Lord Malfrey would be in the morning when he unlocked the door to the spare room and found her gone! La, how Victoria wished she could be there to see his face! It would, she was certain, be a picture.
Then Victoria saw something that quite took her breath away: a head, thrust through the window she’d left open! Lord Malfrey’s head, she saw at once. Why, he must have come back to the room to check on her! She hadn’t a moment to spare. She needed to fly at once, or be caught.
Slipping through the garden door—wincing as its hinges squeaked, for she was certain Lord Malfrey would look that way and spy her—she found herself not, as she’d expected, in the neighbors’ backyard, but in a dark and narrow alleyway between the two garden walls. It occurred to her fleetingly that it was just the sort of place rats liked to hang about.
But she thrust this uncourageous thought from her head—she didn’t have time to worry about rats. Earls were her immediate problem. Victoria lifted the hem of her blanket and began to run as quickly as she dared in her bare feet—conscious that there might be broken glass— down the length of the alleyway. She ran in the opposite direction that Lord Malfrey had been looking, which was toward the street, since she feared the alley would spill her out onto it before his very eyes.
It was no fun at all, Victoria soon found, running down a dark alley with no shoes, wearing nothing but your underthings and a blanket, in the dead of night after a rainstorm. All manner of things squished hideously beneath her feet. Indeed, she would not let herself even imagine what those things might be. And there were dogs behind the high garden walls on either side of her, dogs that sensed her running by and set up a terrific racket, barking territorially. Lord Malfrey, Victoria was certain, would find her in an instant, based solely on the alarm being raised by the dogs of the neighborhood.
And though the moon shone brightly, this was not necessarily advantageous, since it only made Victoria more conspicuous to anyone who might happen to be looking for her. Worse, it cast large parts of the alleyway in deep shadow… shadows from which Victoria could not help imagining all manner of unsavory individuals leaping out and attacking her. Never mind rats or vicious dogs. What about footpads? Or worse, pirates?
Her heart in her throat, Victoria stumbled as quickly as she could down the alleyway. She was approaching, she could see, a street—a blessed street! A street down which hacks rumbled—she saw one go by! Oh, if only she could flag down a hack and take it to her aunt and uncle’s house, and to safety. She hadn’t any money with her, of course, but she was certain she could convince the driver that he would be handsomely rewarded by her uncle once he delivered her….
