Secrets of a Scandalous Heiress

by Theresa Romain

  “Emily, Joss Everett said he wants to hold my hand all the time. All the time!”

  As soon as she looked about, she realized her mistake: it is a truth universally acknowledged that when one bursts into a room shouting an item of a personal nature, the room will be populated with more people than one expects.

  Fortunately, only one person was present beside Emily. Seated side by side on the long velvet settee were the countess and a slightly older woman with scraped-back black hair and apple-round cheeks. Dressed in deep blue serge of a beautiful cut, this unknown person held a stack of pattern books on her lap.

  The lamps had been lit against the dim of late afternoon. One sat on a side table, casting its bright circle onto the pages of the topmost book. Emily reached over to turn a page, revealing a drawing of a woman in evening dress. “I like this gown too, Madame. Only perhaps you could make it up with a red gauze rather than a pink.”

  Then she looked up at Augusta with a most aggravatingly calm smile. “Augusta, may I present Madame Rougier, a delightful designer of gowns? Madame, this is my dear friend Miss—ah, Mrs. Flowers. She is playing a game we enjoy, in which we each state facts that are mildly interesting but also completely obvious. You have stated that Mr. Everett wants to hold your hand all the time. Let me see… Gravity holds people onto the earth. Day is brighter than night. My husband’s favorite beverage is chocolate. Do you wish another turn, Mrs. Flowers?”

  “You are incorrigible.” Augusta’s attempted frown flipped into a grin as she and the dressmaker nodded their greetings.

  “Another point for you,” Emily said. “Well, my wandering, wayward friend, do you care for tea? Madame and I have nearly finished our discussion, and we were about to ring for a tray. Or maybe you would prefer a cold dinner?”

  “No need; I already dined.”

  Emily lifted her brows. Without further comment, she closed the volume and turned to the older woman. “Madame, I find that I have grown ambivalent about the best color for the trim. Let us continue our discussion at another time.”

  Clearly curious, the dressmaker made a valiant effort to remain. In a low, accented voice, she said, “Your young friend would perhaps like to examine the patterns before I take leave, no? She too is in need of the new gown?”

  Augusta looked down at her clothing and realized she was still swaddled in the voluminous cloak. Untying its strings, she dropped it on the hearthrug. The apple-cheeked woman let out a squeak of distress. “No! You must always hang the wool cloak!”

  Emily coughed delicately. “Madame, please call again tomorrow and we shall choose all the trim. For the moment, it seems my dear friend is in some sort of distress, so you see that I must aid her. Perhaps you’ll take a bit of refreshment in the kitchen before you leave?”

  The Frenchwoman looked crestfallen, but she dropped a perfect curtsy. “But of course, my lady. Comme vous voulez.”

  “A footman will return your pattern books later,” Emily said. “Thank you so much for calling on me.”

  When the door had closed behind the older woman, Augusta and Emily turned to each other. “What was that about?” they both said at once.

  Augusta was less polite—or more jittery. She blurted out first, “You’re having new gowns made?”

  Emily shrugged. “What else is there to do? I must spend my time somehow.”

  “But your health—”

  “One can only drink so much sulfur water. And by ‘so much,’ I mean ‘I never want to do it again.’ A bath is pleasant, but it takes only an hour. And most of the callers come for Mrs. Flowers. If she is not at home, they simply trickle away.”

  In a froth of canary-bright silk, with a gold chain about her neck and rings on her slim fingers, Emily looked the picture of luxury. Yet never had she made Augusta feel vulgar or less than. Even now, her mobile mouth was curved in a smile. “This is your doing, dear friend. You inspired me to summon someone to create a new gown for me. You threw my Lady’s Magazine on the floor, and when I saw it, I thought, Yes that would do to fill a day or two. So I sent for the dressmaker everyone wants at the moment. Madame is far too busy, yet I kept her here for nearly two hours. Now she shall be even busier, and she shall waste more of my time as she fusses about with interminable fittings and mixes up the orders and runs short of trim with one sleeve left to ornament.”

  “She will waste your money too.”

  “Ah, Jemmy told me not to worry about that,” Emily said, referring to her good-natured husband. “It’s the waste of time that really interests me.”

  “Having gowns made seems a very…London sort of thing to do,” Augusta replied cautiously. This was intended as a coded message: Are you feeling better? Would you like to go home?

  Emily understood every social code. “If one cannot be in London itself, one must recapture bits of it.” Not yet. But I’m trying to make a good show in the meantime.

  Augusta dropped her into the seat abandoned by Madame Rougier. “How and why must one recapture bits of London?”

  “Because days must be filled, though they seem so long. In Bath, at least, I can toss away time arranging a new household. To decide how best to keep the housekeeper from fighting with the cook, and keep the lady’s maid from flirting with the footmen. There is no Jemmy to be far too indulgent with the servants or the children or…me.”

  The countess’s eyes were the clear blue green of the ocean; as she blinked, they shone with tears. Yet her voice held steady as she added, “I am grateful that you’re here with me. As two guests, really. If I hadn’t the entertainment of sorting out Miss Meredith and Mrs. Flowers, I should fall into a decline.”

  “Thank heavens for my deceitful tendencies, then, for red gauze would never do if you fell into a decline. You should have to have your new gowns tossed out.”

  She tried to match Emily’s light tone, though she understood what her friend did not say and perhaps did not even realize. The countess’s distractions, careless though they might seem, ended in helping others. Her blithe cheer made a pleasant household for servants and guests or a pleasant encounter in the Pump Room with their new acquaintances. So easily, she could have tumbled into a deep pit of grief and dwelled on her loss. Instead, she distracted herself through the daylight hours. One never knew when a happy moment would flutter by on vivid wings, hoping to be captured.

  The night was more difficult, of course. Augusta knew how endless a night could seem, how a loss could make the world seem dark. But grief paled over time. What was black went gray instead.

  And then there were those precious bright moments, so sunlit-sharp that Augusta shied from them even as she craved them. Like a kiss so sweet she could not bear its taste, so hot she felt burned by the thought of it. A dinner invitation, a clasp of hands, a good-bye that had not quite felt like a good-bye.

  “I am glad,” she said at last to Emily, “that you summoned a dressmaker. You shall look lovely in her creations.”

  “Another point for you,” Emily said. “Is it my turn to say something obvious, then? What about, “You have something to tell me’?”

  As Augusta laughed, the countess added, “Do you really think you can rampage through my drawing room, shouting about holding hands with an unwed gentleman, and not expect me to be the least bit curious?” She shifted a small tasseled cushion and settled against it. “Tell me all about it.”

  So Augusta did—about her weariness with Mrs. Flowers, and the walk to Joss’s house. She did not mention his dishabille, though her cheeks went red. Maybe even…warm.

  “And then he invited me to dine with him,” she added, “and we went to the White Hart. And I gave away my gloves to the barmaid. And he told me that one of his grandparents was Indian.” She realized she was blurting and drew in a deep breath. “None of those facts are related. I think. And I don’t think he wanted to tell me about his grandmother’s birth.”

 
“Why ever not?”

  “Maybe just because it’s something personal.” Her brows knit. “I pointed out that the prime minister is part Indian, and then he became huffy and said that the prime minister could wear a dress and bonnet if he wished.”

  “I will do you both the kindness of assuming you have left out large parts of that conversation,” Emily said. “You are quite right about the prime minister’s birth. Perhaps your Mr. Everett thinks the same rules do not apply to him as to Lord Liverpool, but I rather think having Indian birth shows that his family is adventurous and well traveled. And that they love and marry whomever they wish.”

  Augusta blinked at Emily. “Maybe. Yes.”

  “And surely he wouldn’t have told you if he didn’t want you to know. Which he does, because he said he wanted to hold your hand all the time, or something to that effect,” Emily concluded. “Good heavens. While I frittered away the afternoon, you were busy indeed.”

  They fell silent then, a pondering sort of quiet. Augusta’s mind whirled like a spinning wheel, strands of thought knitting frantically together, then twisting into a new form.

  He hadn’t seemed to want her to know. But was it that fact in particular, or was it a reluctance to tell her anything personal? He didn’t reveal much about his cousin Sutcliffe either.

  And if he didn’t want to tell her anything about himself—why was that? She had meant to listen at dinner, not to talk, yet somehow she had been the one revealing too much again.

  She knew quite well that she and Joss didn’t belong at the same table. He was the grandson of a baron and baroness; Augusta’s grandparents had been grooms and scullery maids before they worked their way into upper service. Her father had worked at the Portsmouth docks as a youth. One day, he had developed a lotion to soothe the chapped, rope-burned hands of sailors. When it caught on at a few pennies a pot, his young wife had convinced him to add floral oils and present it to local apothecaries as a cream for young ladies.

  Thus had begun Meredith Beauty more than thirty years ago: a large idea ladled into small jars in a small flat in a large building. Her parents had told her once they could see the dockyard’s Victory Gate from their window, flanked by golden spheres. Queen Anne had once passed beneath its lacy iron span. In one direction, it was a gateway to the Channel, in the other, to a different sort of life.

  So she had heard. She had never been to Portsmouth. And in the end, her parents had never returned from their final journey there.

  Dimly, she noticed Emily drop the cushion tassel she had been twisting. “Now why would he permit you to know all about his family background? That, my dear, is an interesting question.”

  It was a mark of how far into her mind Joss had insinuated himself that when Emily said my dear, the words fake widow seemed to be missing from the phrase’s tail. For a moment, she had to blink her way back from a journey to the coast, from a dinner at the White Hart. “I think,” she said slowly, reasoning it out, “he felt he owed me a secret. Since he has been keeping mine.”

  “That makes perfect sense.” Emily clapped her hands together. “And that also explains the bit about how he wants to hold your hand until the end of time, or whatever it was you said he said.”

  “It does?”

  In one fluid movement, Emily pulled free the small cushion from behind her back and smacked Augusta with it. “No. Of course it does not explain that. No, he was either drunk or sincere. How much ale did he have at dinner?”

  “Only one tankard.” Augusta rubbed at her upper arm. “Ouch, Emily. Have a care with the cushions. And my arm.”

  Ignoring this admonition, the countess folded herself onto the settee. “Only. One. Tankard.” She spoke the words with crisp enjoyment, as though taking bites of a cucumber sandwich. “That is very, very interesting.”

  “To me, it is—confusing.” Augusta wasn’t sure that was the right word, but it was as right as any she could think of. “Other than that moment, he seems to want to keep me at a distance.” Just as she did to him. “And he does not like Mrs. Flowers.”

  “The heretic!”

  “But I’m not sure I like Mrs. Flowers either.”

  Emily frowned. “Is this one of those moments where I am meant to disagree and convince you otherwise? Or would you prefer I concentrate on abusing Mr. Everett?”

  “No. Neither.” She reached for the cushion that had smacked her arm. Silk cloth embroidered with silk thread. Costly. “I think I was rather horrid to him.”

  She thought so, but she wasn’t sure. What would seem horrid to a man who gave no compliments, who had no tolerance for foolishness—unless it came from his employer. And oh, that damnable smile that made her want to kiss him and flee him at once. He was as astringent and bracing as over-brewed tea. “He doesn’t know me as well as he thinks he does.”

  “And whose fault is that?” Sometimes Augusta forgot that Emily was the mother of two young sons. Not so at the moment, when the countess’s gimlet stare speared her.

  Rubbing at the sleek cushion, Augusta let the silk run soft under her fingertips. Smooth as the old wood of the White Hart’s tables. She had stabbed that table; why not leave her mark here too? She found a seam and worked her nails into it until a stitch split.

  “It’s my fault,” she said at last. “But I don’t want him to know me. I don’t know me.” Pop. Another stitch gave way. “Not since my parents died.”

  The gimlet stare turned to sympathy. “Ah. So this Mrs. Flowers you are saddled with—she’s meant to help you find Augusta again?”

  “She was meant to free me from everything dark. But she keeps me from everything real.”

  “She’s like a meringue,” Emily decided. “When you, my dear, are like a lovely plum pudding. All colors and sharp flavors, and full of intoxicating spirits.”

  This dragged a smile to Augusta’s face, and Emily added, “I rather think Mr. Everett likes the plum-pudding Augusta, not the meringue woman. Don’t you?”

  “Your analogy is imperfect, for I am never sweet around him,” she admitted. “I feel too…unsettled.”

  “Bath is a good place to be unsettled. I hope it is a good place to become settled too.”

  Shadows below Emily’s eyes betrayed her fatigue. “You haven’t been eating your beef, have you?” Augusta pressed. “You are not yourself yet.”

  “If I eat any more beef, I shall turn into a cow and trample you,” said Emily with some crispness. After a moment, she relented. “I am not myself, no. I feel like only part of myself.”

  Augusta pressed her friend’s fingers. Emily’s hand was even colder than hers. Perhaps few outside of Lady Tallant’s family knew what had happened. After the birth of an heir and a spare within a few years of their marriage, she and the earl had not been graced with further offspring. Until a few months ago, when Emily had at last fallen pregnant again.

  Friendly with the countess since the previous season, Augusta had begun the habit of calling on her several times each week. Along with tea and biscuits, callers to Tallant House imbibed Emily’s friendship, so hearty and pure was it. Joss had been right: in Emily’s drawing room, Augusta had felt like herself again for the first time since that week in 1815 when her parents had died and Colin had dropped her like a shameful secret.

  One January day, as Emily poured out tea for Augusta, something had gone wrong with the baby.

  Augusta had called for the earl, had supported her friend’s shoulders and prayed over her rounded belly. A physician had arrived too, but nothing worked. A few dreadful hours later, that was that.

  “Looks like you’d have had a girl, my lady,” the physician commented. “Nothing to get that upset about. Not with two fine healthy boys in the family.”

  White-faced under his tan, Lord Tallant marched the man out of the house. Augusta watched as Emily, fragile in a large bed, turned her face away.

  A few wee
ks later, once Emily was strong enough to travel, they left for Bath. And this was why they had arrived together: for both of them, life had changed terribly in one day. There was no need to pretend it was not terrible.

  Yet Emily found shining moments—ordering a household, planning a wardrobe. Arranging her friends’ romantic lives. She created peace and distraction for herself through control.

  Something Augusta’s life had lacked for quite some time.

  I really must find a lover.

  Her plan had nothing to do with sex or love; everything to do with mastery. There was no banishing grief without it, or the shame of being unwanted.

  As Joss tugged away her control, with what could she replace it? Their conversation had become intimate, and she could not help but think of their bodies becoming so. Already she had felt his kiss, had seen his cravat undone, had followed the line of his throat down to the dusting of dark hair on his chest. A hint of his masculine strength, unadorned by fashion and frippery.

  The idea of an anonymous lover had lost its forbidden charm. No, what she needed was control.

  And if she could not control herself around Joss…then maybe she should try to control Joss around herself. It would not be easy, but surely it would not be impossible. Not if he would give her such plain truths on only one tankard of ale.

  Not even one, really. She had drunk some of his. She should have drunk far more.

  Augusta pressed at her temple, where a tight hairpin had set up a dreadful ache. “Shall I ring for tea, Emily? Or something a bit stronger?”

  Ocean-blue eyes met hers, far too knowing. “We could both use something stronger, could we not? Quite a bit stronger.”

  Sixteen

  Once he had seen Augusta hide herself away in Lady Tallant’s house, Joss walked the few steps to Sutcliffe’s house. The crowd on the Queen Street pavement unrolled like a dropped bolt of cloth, colorful and sleek as it bounced out of Joss’s path. He cut through it, plain and sharp as a pair of scissors.