It’s Only a Scandal if You’re Caught

by Farmer, Merry

  He rushed around to the mews to fetch Tiger, but once he was mounted, he wasn’t sure where he should go or what he should do. The brave thing would have been to ride over to Marlowe House to face Lord Malcolm directly and demand to know what he’d done. But only a fool rode into a war with a superior power without at least some kind of preparation. He turned Tiger north, but by the time he reached Oxford Street, he changed his mind about going to the St. John’s Wood flat to see if Bianca was there and if she knew the full impact of Lord Malcolm’s revenge.

  He turned west, heading to the only place he knew he would find full support and safety, Clerkenwell. But even before he took Tiger to the mews behind his flat he could feel something was wrong. The women he’d known his whole life stared at him and whispered as he rode up Farringdon Street. A few of the business owners he’d been knocked around by as a boy nodded and tipped their hats to him. The entire neighborhood seemed to hold its breath and watch him.

  He opted not to bother taking Tiger to the mews. Instead, he dismounted in front of his building and charged one of the boys idling in the street to hold him. Instinct whispered that he would need to ride again at any moment.

  Sure enough, when he charged up the stairs to the second floor and his flat, he was met by the sight of his landlord changing the lock on his door and a pile of crates, cases, and a trunk lining the hall. Nanette stood over them, buckling the trunk and looking as though she’d been through a hurricane.

  “What is the meaning of all this?” Jack demanded, stomping toward his landlord.

  “Jack, thank God.” Nanette jumped into his path, placing both hands on his chest to hold him back.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded of the landlord, half ignoring Nanette. “That’s my flat.”

  “Not anymore it ain’t,” the landlord said.

  “I’ve paid you all the rent I owe,” Jack said, his whole body heating with alarm. “I’ve taken good care of the place. Why are you doing this?”

  “You don’t live here anymore, Jack,” Nanette said. The wariness and regret in her eyes said it was more than just the flat.

  “Like hell I don’t,” Jack growled.

  Nanette shook her head, gripping the lapels of Jack’s coat tightly. “You really don’t.” She lowered her head sadly. She reached into the pocket of her ragged skirt and took out a large envelope constructed of the finest paper Jack had ever seen and edged in gold. “That Lord Malcolm Campbell was here earlier,” Nanette went on, a terrified catch in her voice. “He ordered Mr. Scott to evict you. He said you live in St. John’s Wood now.” She gulped, presenting the envelope. “And he said to give you this.”

  Jack took the envelope with numb hands, fumbling to open it. His stomach tied in acid knots at the sight of the royal insignia its contents bore, the gold leaf, the elaborate script. As he read hastily through the letter, his chest constricted to the point where he couldn’t breathe.

  “Victoria Regina Imperatrix, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India, and of Our other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, To Our right trusty and well beloved Lord John Craig, Baron Clerkenwell, Chevalier Greeting.

  “Whereas Our Parliament for arduous and urgent affairs concerning Us the state and defense of Our United Kingdom and the Church is now met at Our City of Westminster We strictly enjoining Command—”

  Jack couldn’t read on. His vision blurred as he stared at the writ of summons. He shifted to the side so that he could lean against the wall. He needed it to hold him up as he scanned through the most important part of the bloody document in his hand again. “Lord John Craig, Baron Clerkenwell.”

  “That bloody bastard,” he hissed. “That conniving, shitting cunt.”

  “What is it?” Nanette asked, worry in her eyes. She leaned over to glance at the writ, but Jack knew full well she couldn’t read it.

  “He’s gone and had me made a bloody, fucking baron,” Jack hissed.

  “You’re a nob now?” his landlord asked, brow flying up so high it made him look like a puppet in a Punch and Judy show.

  Jack nodded, swallowing the bile that rose up his throat. Some men strove their whole lives to buy a title or to perform acts of enough heroism to be granted one. It took an extraordinary act of government and a recommendation to the Queen herself to grant someone a title. But Lord Malcolm had connections, just as he’d said. His close friend was the Home Secretary. He’d managed to slap a bloody barony on Jack within a matter of days. Sir Edmund’s address, and his fury, made perfect sense now. Jack outranked him. The son of a whore outranked a military hero.

  “I won’t stand for this,” he said at last, pushing away from the wall, his breath returning in sharp, desperate pants. “I won’t let him get away with this.”

  “You’re a ‘my lord’ now,” Nanette said, gaping at him. “Should I bow to you?”

  “No,” Jack shouted. “Don’t you ever bow to me. You’re family.”

  Anger flashed to tight, aching helplessness, and he threw his arms around Nanette, squeezing her hard and closing his eyes. He refused to let a single piece of paper, no matter whose signature was on it, drive a wedge between him and the only family he’d ever known. And yet, he knew it had. He knew Lord Malcolm was the very devil—a devil who knew exactly how to make good on his promise to ruin his life.

  “I have to go,” he said at last, his voice cracking. He took a step back. “Would you do me a favor and make sure these things reach the flat in St. John’s Wood?”

  “Of course, love,” Nanette said, her eyes still wide with bafflement, her voice lost. “Just give me the address.”

  Jack gave it to her, then rushed back downstairs and out to where the boy was still holding Tiger. He tossed the boy a coin, tucked his writ of summons into the inner pocket of his coat, and mounted as fast as he could, then set off for St. John’s Wood at as much of a gallop as he could manage on the crowded streets.

  He reached the flat in record time, taking Tiger to the mews then rushing up to the flat itself. The writ of summons seemed to burn against his chest like a bullet in his heart, killing Jack Craig from Mrs. Farringdon’s brothel and replacing him with a mystery. But his frustration and weariness were pushed to the side the moment he unlocked the door and stepped into the flat.

  Bianca was already there, draped across the sofa, weeping profusely. She was dressed in a relatively plain morning dress but her hair hung down her back in a braid. What truly caught Jack’s eye though were the pair of trunks that looked like they’d been dropped in the middle of the room.

  “Bianca,” he said, at a loss for any other words, crossing the room and dodging the trunks to plop on the sofa beside her.

  “Jack,” she wailed, glancing up at him with a red, puffy face and streaming eyes. “They’ve thrown me out of the May Flowers.”

  She threw herself at him, nearly knocking him sideways as she plunked her head down on his shoulder, all anger forgotten. Jack froze in surprise for a moment before slowly circling his arms around her. “Bastards,” he muttered, though part of him wanted to laugh. Lord Malcolm was forcibly building him up at the same time that Bianca’s friends were tearing her down. He supposed they were supposed to meet in the middle somewhere.

  “What are all these trunks doing here?” he asked, suddenly exhausted to his core.

  “Mama says we’re to live here,” she said, straightening and sniffling wetly. She seemed to make an effort to buck up and wiped her face with the handkerchief he hadn’t seen clasped in her hand.

  “What, now? Before we’re married?”

  Bianca sent him a mournful look. “No, not truly. Not yet. But I was told to pack my things and bring them here immediately. I’m to be a guest in my own house until Saturday.”

  “Saturday?” Jack frowned. “That’s the day after tomorrow.”

  “Mama and Lord Malcolm have booked St. Stephen’s Chapel on Saturday morning for the wedding,” Bi
anca said, deflating.

  “But the banns haven’t even been read,” Jack protested before thinking things through. “They can’t—” But they could. If Lord Malcolm could produce a writ of summons, making him a baron, he could obtain a special license to wed. “Fucking hell.”

  “Don’t sound so pleased about things,” Bianca snapped, jerking away from him. “I thought you wanted to marry me.”

  “I do,” he said, rubbing a hand over his face. “But Saturday?”

  “What’s wrong with Saturday?” Anger replaced the sorrow that had made a mess of her face.

  “Two days?” Jack unbuttoned his coat, shrugging it off, and reaching for the writ as he did. “You tell me what’s wrong with marrying less than a week after a forced proposal.”

  “But we’ve known we wanted to marry for years,” she fired back.

  Jack had the feeling she wanted to fight simply for the sake of fighting. He, however, was not in the mood. He sighed, slumping against the back of the sofa, and tossed her the writ. “At least you won’t have to marry a middle-class nobody son of a whore,” he grumbled.

  Bianca took up the writ, removing it from its envelope and reading it. Her jaw dropped open and her already red face went splotchy. “Is your name really John?”

  “No!” Jack jerked straight again. “It is and always has been Jack, plain and simple. Lord Malcolm not only forced this farce on me, he changed my name in the process.”

  “I can’t believe he would do something so low,” Bianca huffed, shaking her head over the writ.

  “So high, you mean,” Jack said bitterly. “I’m not lower-class anymore. I’m one of you nobs now, whether I want to be or not.”

  He half expected Bianca to shout at him, demanding what was wrong with being a noble. Instead, she seemed to wilt as she sat. “This is not at all how I imagined my life unfolding,” she sighed.

  Jack laughed humorlessly. “Me neither.”

  He was furious. He was frightened. His head spun. He’d become a nobleman, lost his job, and he was about to become a husband and father. Life as he knew it was over, and the thing that had taken its place was as foreign as Egypt. But at least Bianca was with him. At least she could be his now.

  He reached for her, drawing her into his arms. She let him pull her close, and she sagged against him, dropping her head to his shoulder with a sigh that said more than words could.

  But even that moment of fragile peace and camaraderie wasn’t allowed to last. Within seconds, a knock sounded at the door.

  “Bloody hell,” Jack mumbled under his breath, then called out, “Who is it?”

  “Knudsen and Ball, tailors, my lord,” a stiff, proper male voice replied from the other side of the door.

  “What now?” Jack sighed, reluctantly pulling away from Bianca and standing.

  When he opened the door, a thin, bespectacled man greeted him with a smile. An assistant with a massive trunk stood behind him, looking far less pleased. “Good afternoon, my lord. I’ve been sent by Lord Campbell to fit you for a new wardrobe. As I understand it, congratulations are in order at being lifted to the cozy heights of the aristocracy, and it is Lord Campbell’s wish that you be completely outfitted for your new rank, including all the proper articles for your ceremonial duties in the House of Lords.”

  “Of course, that is Lord Campbell’s wish. We wouldn’t want to disappoint Lord Campbell,” Jack said through clenched teeth. He stepped back, running a hand over his face. “All right, come in and do your worst,” he said.

  The truth was unavoidable. Jack Craig wasn’t respectable enough to marry Bianca, so Lord Malcolm and Lady Katya were bending over backwards to make sure Lord John, Baron Clerkenwell—the title itself was a joke and a slap in the face, meant to forever remind him that he still wasn’t good enough, he was certain—was exactly who they wanted their daughter to marry. He’d been robbed of his job, his home, his family, and now even the clothes on his back. All that remained to be seen was whether anything would be left of the man he was.

  Chapter 13

  It was not an auspicious start to a new life.

  Bianca finished heaving up the small amount of breakfast she’d managed to eat from the heaping tray of food her mother had had sent to her room at Marlowe House, then stepped wearily to the side, sinking into her armchair by the window.

  “I can’t do it,” she groaned, touching a hand gingerly to her stomach. “I can’t march out in front of a crowd of people to marry Jack in a church. Couldn’t we just send for a priest and have a private ceremony downstairs in the library?”

  “No,” her mother said, her brow etched in a frown as she directed the two maids who scurried around the room, fluffing the copious rows of ruffles on Bianca’s hastily ordered wedding dress and laying out combs and pins to style her hair. “And we’re not Catholic, so you don’t get a priest.”

  Bianca sighed, pushing herself to sit straight, in spite of the way it made her stomach turn. “I don’t care what we are. I’d settle for one of those Hindustan holy men waving ostrich feathers over us if Jack and I could just be married privately.”

  Her mother turned her glare directly to Bianca. “Do not insult the faith of others with ridiculous notions,” she snapped. “And you will not marry privately. It would be seen as an admission of wrong-doing.” She crossed to Bianca’s chair, scooped an arm around her back, and forced her to stand. “The scandal is bad enough, seeing as the reasons behind this marriage somehow managed to leak their way into society gossip.” She narrowed her eyes at Bianca.

  “Don’t look at me like that. I had nothing to do with it,” Bianca defended herself.

  Her mother stared back as though she didn’t believe her. She gestured for the maids to bring the wedding gown forward and began dressing Bianca as though she were a doll. And not one she particularly cared for.

  From her place seated on the corner of Bianca’s bed, Natalia stopped chewing her lip and worrying the fabric of her bridesmaid’s dress long enough to say, “Um, I’m afraid I might have been the one who let the baby cat out of the bag.”

  “What?” both Bianca and their mother snapped, though Bianca’s sound of outrage wasn’t half as effective with her head buried in the folds of her wedding gown’s skirt.

  Bianca struggled out of the skirt, letting it settle around her waist, and glared at her sister.

  Natalia blushed scarlet and glanced down at her hands. “It was an accident, I promise. I went to tea at Persephone Pennington’s house on that day, after Mama and Lord Malcolm shouted at Bianca and Jack so. Percy is my best friend, and I was so startled by what happened that I just had to tell her everything.”

  Bianca groaned and would have flopped back into her chair if her mother hadn’t already grabbed one of her arms to stuff into the gown’s sleeves. “Natalia, you didn’t.”

  “You and I will have a little chat about discretion when this is all done,” their mother told Natalia in foreboding tones.

  Bianca gasped, but not because her mother wrenched her other arm into a sleeve and pulled the bodice tight to button it in back. “You’re the reason I was thrown out of the May Flowers,” she said, breathless with anger at her sister’s betrayal. “If you had kept your mouth shut, no one would have known and the whole thing could have been handled delicately.”

  Their mother shifted to the side, fixing Bianca with a flat stare as if to say the fault was actually hers and there was no way anything would have been brushed under the carpet. That didn’t stop Bianca’s fury from mounting.

  “I’m never going to speak to you again,” she told Natalia. She wanted to sound vindictive and harsh, but her words came out in a bitter sob. That sound made her growl in frustration and declare, “I am so tired of feeling as though I have no control over my emotions or my body.”

  Their mother laughed. “You haven’t begun feeling out of control of those things yet, my dear. Trust me.”

  It was the closest her mother had come to compassion or giving advice since
Bianca had revealed all to her. She longed for her mother’s advice and comfort—she had so many questions about so many things—but not as much as she resented the heavy-handed way that she was handling the entire situation. Yes, she and Jack had made an embarrassingly stupid mistake. If they’d thought for two seconds about what they were doing, they could have avoided it. And yes, her reputation would never recover from the scandal. Every consequence she faced was entirely justified. But at least her mother—the woman who had given birth to her and raised her under the most trying and unusual circumstances—could have taken her side instead of making things harder.

  She suffered through her mother dressing her, nearly vomiting again when she pulled the laces of her corset tighter in order to fasten the bottom few buttons of her bodice. But that was when her patience snapped.

  “Why must you be so cruel, Mama?” she asked, spinning to face her once her gown was fastened. “Yes, I’ve made a mess of things. But I haven’t done anything that you did not do yourself.”

  “Don’t speak to me like—”

  “You conceived a child with a man you loved but weren’t married to,” Bianca shouted over her. “Why is my indiscretion any worse than yours? Why do you hate me so much for being exactly like you?”

  “I don’t hate you, Bianca,” her mother said in a suddenly calm voice. Too calm. “I am furious with you because I love you so much.”

  “I don’t believe it.” Bianca held her ground. “I don’t accept that excuse. Not in my situation nor in any other situation where it has been used.”

  “Whether you believe it or not, it’s true,” her mother said, her face pinched with emotion. It was the sort of rare moment when her mother looked her age. “You have no idea what you’ve done, child.” She rested her hand on the side of Bianca’s face. “I was protected because your father was still alive when Natalia was conceived. I was protected after he died because of the title and wealth he left me. You don’t have any of that protection. You’ve thrown yourselves to the wolves.”