It’s Only a Scandal if You’re Caught

by Farmer, Merry

  “Someone is going to an awful lot of trouble to keep you from uncovering the full truth,” Sir Edmund went on. His moustache twitched and his eyes hardened. “It’s a shame for them that you will be given complete control of this investigation and the full complement of resources Scotland Yard has to bring the mastermind to justice.”

  Bianca went from being frustrated and baffled to brimming with elation so fast that her head swam. She gripped Jack’s arm for support. Knowing he was fully restored to grace at Scotland Yard was even better than her invitation to rejoin the May Flowers.

  “You will, of course, retain your position as Assistant Commissioner,” Sir Edmund went on. “Along with an increase in salary, considering the importance of this and other investigations I would like you to undertake.”

  “Other investigations?” Jack asked, shifting closer to Bianca and sliding his arm around her waist once more.

  Sir Edmund nodded. “I fear that in our current political climate, with the Irish Question pressing down on us so desperately, we may see more violence over the issue, from both sides. As of yet, your specific role as Assistant Commissioner hasn’t been defined, but I would like to change that. I would like you to head up a task-force that will investigate any violence that comes about as a result of the political situation.”

  “Do you want me to subdue any Irish protests or do you want me to protect them?” Jack asked, eyes narrowed.

  “Both,” Sir Edmund answered with a shrug. “The law must remain impartial, after all. We must protect all within our borders.”

  Jack eyed him for a long while before saying, “Understood, sir. I accept.”

  Sir Edmund seemed relieved. “Good,” he said, his shoulders relaxing at last. “Now, see to your lady wife. I understand she has been injured?”

  “Just a bit, Sir Edmund,” Bianca said, touching the goose egg under her hairline gingerly.

  Sir Edmund nodded. “Several doctors were called to the scene along with officers,” he said. “I believe they are out front, or perhaps at Lord Birmingham’s house down the street. He has graciously offered his home for those evacuated from this house to gather themselves before returning to their own homes.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Jack said. Sir Edmund was distracted by the chief officer demanding his attention, which meant Jack could focus fully on Bianca. “Come on,” he said, taking her hand. “We really should have a doctor look at your injuries as soon as possible. And if there’s a way he can determine if the baby is unharmed—”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the baby,” Bianca insisted, resting a hand on her stomach. That only made her notice the wretched state of her burned gown. She frowned at it in distress.

  “I’ll buy you a new dress,” Jack said, grinning at last as the danger of the moment finally passed. “I’ll buy you all the new dresses an Assistant Commissioner and Baron of Clerkenwell can afford.”

  Bianca laughed. She slid her arms around him, leaning in to hug him for all she was worth. “I don’t care about dresses. The only thing I want covering my body is you.”

  “How could I say no to that?” Jack grinned right along with her.

  He shifted her so that he could rest a hand under her chin and tilt her face up to his, then slanted his mouth over hers in a deep and tender kiss. It filled Bianca with warmth, in spite of the coldness around them. It made her feel loved and accepted down to the core of her being. The pain that gnawed at her would soon be gone, but Jack would be with her forever. Class and position be damned, the place that she belonged was in his arms.

  He broke their kiss but continued to hold her, smiling at her as though seeing her for the first time. “I love you,” he said. A flash of seriousness filled his expression. “I don’t know what I would have done if any harm had come to you.”

  “Fortunately, we don’t have to find that out,” she answered, pivoting so that they could walk, hand in hand, around to the front of the house.

  “So will you accept the offer?” he asked once they reached the busy street in front of the house.

  Carriages of all sorts were attempting to stop and pick up passengers while a fire brigade stood by. Wagons had already been brought in to cart the explosives away. Party guests and curious onlookers alike crushed together to get a look at what was going on. The scene was chaotic, and yet Bianca had never felt more at peace.

  “I don’t know,” Bianca answered, indecision creasing her brow. “I’m not sure I have a taste for politics anymore.”

  “No?” Jack paused, turning to her, his brow lifted in surprise. “Bianca Craig, no longer interested in politics?”

  Bianca shrugged and walked on with him. “These last few weeks have been eye-opening,” she said. “I’m beginning to wonder if there isn’t another area where my outlandish boldness and dogged determination might come in handy.”

  Jack broke into a smile. “What did you have in mind?”

  She bit her lip as they neared the area where two doctors appeared to be assessing the condition of swooning noblewomen who had no more wrong with them than frazzled nerves.

  “Do you think the other ladies like Nanette, the women of your old neighborhood, would take kindly to an institution of some sort that would help them out of prostitution and teach them the skills they might need to find honest employment?”

  Jack grinned. “I’m sure some will. Others are perfectly happy where they are.” He paused. “Help with medical necessities and literacy is always welcome, though.”

  “Then perhaps I’ll turn my attention in that direction,” Bianca said.

  Jack rewarded her inclination toward generosity by pulling her into his arms for another kiss. “As if I needed another reason to love you,” he said, kissing her tenderly.

  “I’m sure I’ll provide you with plenty of opportunities to question your love in future,” she said with a laugh, hugging him close and reveling in his solid warmth.

  “I doubt that,” he said. “Nothing could ever make me love you less than I do right now.”

  Epilogue

  Jack’s nerves were raw and panic pulsed through him at the ferocious cries coming from the upstairs room at the Clerkenwell Ladies Home. Sweat poured down his back from the July heat, and not even the breeze wafting down the hall from the open window at the front of the building could calm his nerves.

  “Settle yourself, man,” Lord Malcolm growled from his chair in front of the door. “She’s only doing what women have done since the dawn of time.”

  Jack paused his pacing and glared at Lord Malcolm. “Didn’t your first wife die in childbirth?”

  Lord Malcolm blanched just enough for Jack to feel oddly satisfied. “Tessa was weak,” he muttered. “Bianca is far from it.”

  That much was true. Bianca was the strongest woman he knew, in body and spirit. She had thrown herself on a lit torch to save him and countless other people from being blown to smithereens in December. Then she had rolled up her sleeves and set to work establishing Clerkenwell Ladies Home as soon as the holidays had ended. She’d sought out the building Jack paced in more or less on her own, handled the negotiations for purchase on her own—which had startled the purchasing agent to no end—and she had interviewed the staff of nurses and teachers who helped the less fortunate women of Clerkenwell make whatever improvements to their lives that they set their hearts on.

  That wasn’t enough to stop Jack’s knees from shaking when another ear-splitting shout ripped from the other side of the door that Lord Malcolm guarded.

  “Let me go in,” he demanded, marching straight up to Lord Malcolm as if he would drag the man from his chair and beat down the door. “She obviously needs me.”

  “She’s got a nurse and a midwife with her, not to mention Katya, Cece, and your Nanette,” Malcolm said, refusing to budge.

  “She needs me,” Jack insisted as Bianca’s cry turned into a series of short, loud pants. “I should be in there.”

  “You’d only get in the way,” Lord Malcolm insisted,
then added. “She should be in a hospital.”

  “She refused to go,” Jack reminded him.

  Indeed, Bianca had worked every day from the moment Clerkenwell Ladies Home’s doors opened, in spite of her pregnancy. She had traversed the streets telling Jack’s former neighbors about her intentions in opening the place and had helped serve meals and teach sewing classes. Jack had no idea Bianca had so many practical talents. He suspected she’d had no idea either. But after refusing to rejoin the May Flowers, she’d had plenty of time to learn. And Bianca was nothing if not a fast learner.

  She’d gone into labor that morning, or so Nanette had told him when she’d appeared in his Scotland Yard office just before he was set to treat Fergus O’Shea to lunch in order to update him on the Denbigh investigation. Not that he had much to report. Denbigh had been devilishly good at hiding his tracks. But none of that had mattered from the moment Nanette announced he was about to be a father.

  “I suppose it’s fitting for the next Baron Clerkenwell to be born in his family seat,” Lord Malcolm told Jack with a teasing grin as Jack studied the door, debating how he would rush in.

  Jack’s gaze dropped from the door to Lord Malcolm. “And you thought ennobling me would ruin my life,” he said, narrowing his eyes.

  Lord Malcolm shrugged and sighed. “I did. You proved me wrong.”

  In fact, as news of his barony spread among his old friends and neighbors, they adopted Jack’s title as an odd point of pride. Especially after the news of his and Bianca’s heroism in Kensington was splashed all over the newspapers. The people of Clerkenwell, low and high—or at least as high as that part of the city got—embraced him as their honorary leader. A house in the slightly fancier end of the neighborhood had been located for him and Bianca to purchase, and even though they’d only resided there for a handful of months, already there was a feeling of renewal and an urge to improve in the air.

  Bianca let out another cry, but this time a chorus of muffled female voices rang with encouragement along with her. Jack held his breath. Even Lord Malcolm twisted in his chair to listen. Bianca was shamelessly loud, but within moments, a second, louder cry joined hers—the cry of a baby.

  Jack’s stomach flipped and his heart slammed against his ribs. He stood, frozen in expectation, staring at the door. Lord Malcolm jumped up from his seat and whisked his chair aside, but even then, Jack couldn’t move. The infant’s wailing continued, along with coos and rejoicing from the women.

  Moments later, Nanette threw the door open, a huge smile on her face. “Congratulations, papa,” she said, then lunged at him, hugging him tightly.

  Still stunned, Jack could only stand there, gaping into the room. Nanette let him go, then shifted to his side and planted a hand on his back to push him. He stumbled forward at first, then rushed on.

  “Jack,” Bianca called from the bed. Her hair was matted to her head with sweat and she was splayed in an undignified manner. The nurse rushed to cover her lower half, but Jack certainly wasn’t focused there. His beautiful, strong wife held a wriggling, messy baby to her breast. “You have a son,” she said, voice thick with emotion.

  The breath Jack felt as though he’d been holding all day, for months, rushed out all at once. He sped across the room to the bed, sliding to sit beside her. He slid an arm around her shoulders and held both her and his son close.

  “He’s perfect,” he said, raising a hand to tentatively stroke his son’s cheek.

  “He’s strong,” Bianca said, sniffling back her tears of joy. “Just like his father.”

  “Just like his mother, you mean,” Jack said, kissing her forehead and holding her even closer.

  “He’s perfectly healthy,” Lady Katya said. “And all things considered, it was a smooth and easy birth.”

  “I’m a bit jealous,” Cece added, beaming, from the other side of the bed. “Our little Hadrian gave me such a hard time this past winter.”

  “But he’s a perfect angel now,” Lady Katya added, stepping to Cece’s side to hug her. Both women gazed blissfully at Bianca and the baby before Lady Katya asked, “Do you know what you’re going to name him?”

  Jack glanced to Bianca, who smiled at him in return. “Nathan,” she answered, glancing down at the baby, then at Lady Katya and Cece. “Partially in honor of Natalia, who is going to be livid at you for forbidding her to be here.”

  “Yes, well, your sister is livid with me for all sorts of things,” Lady Katya said. “But she already adores you for suggesting she take your place as a May Flower.”

  “I still don’t know why you declined,” Cece sighed. “But that’s a discussion for another day.”

  “My work is here now,” Bianca said, winking at Nanette, who hovered just close enough to be considered part of the scene and part of the family.

  She followed her statement with a massive yawn.

  “I think it’s about time for mama to get a bit of sleep,” the midwife—who had been busy cleaning up the mysteries of what happened to a woman after the baby came out—said. “Shoo with the lot of you.”

  “Give me just one moment,” Jack said as the others filed happily out of the room.

  He turned to Bianca once they were relatively alone, taking a moment to soak in the unbelievable joy of being a family at last.

  “He’ll want for nothing, you know,” he promised Bianca in a quiet voice. “I plan to give him all the things I never had—a family, a stable home, a chance to succeed in life.”

  “But you had all those things,” Bianca said, nestling against him and gazing down at little Nathan. “In a way, at least.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But now I feel as though my family is complete.”

  “Surely not.” Bianca snapped straight, causing the baby to flail and fuss just as he’d begun to settle. “I would imagine you’d like quite a few more of these.”

  “Is that what you want?” he asked, brow lifting.

  “Of course,” she said, nestling against him once more. “We need plenty more to carry on the family legacy. And I don’t suppose they’ll be avoidable, once I get back to a point where I’ll want you suckling at my breast instead of him.”

  Jack laughed. “Always insatiable, are we?”

  “With you as my husband?” She grinned from ear to ear. “Always.”

  * * *

  I hope you’ve enjoyed Jack and Bianca’s story! I was so happy to be able to write it at last. And it was fun to be as realistic as possible when it came to the consequences a young couple would face if they were caught behaving as society said they shouldn’t in an era when strict rules of propriety were observed. At least outwardly. We think of the Victorians as being staid and prudish. I’m sure you’ve heard stories of table legs being covered with skirts out of sheer horror. Those stories are all ridiculous balderdash, of course. While it’s true that some elements of the middle class were priggish, so much of the bill of goods we’ve been sold about Victorian morals and manners comes from religious pamphlets and guides about what should happen, not what was actually happening.

  I recently heard a quote to the effect that there are two versions of history—what actually happened and the way we remember it. Just as today, in the Victorian era, there was a wide range of beliefs about how people should behave that spanned the uptight prudishness that we have come to think of as Victorian and reckless abandon that flew in the face of social convention. So much of that rigid view of “what Victorians were like” was a creation of the post-Edwardian and post-WWI generation, the wild children of the Roaring Twenties, many of whom lived a life of fast-paced abandon as a way to forget the horrors of the Great War. In fact, a great deal of the derision that has been heaped on Victorian shoulders is thanks to Lytton Strachey’s 1918 book Eminent Victorians, in which he poked fun at the older generation of the world he lived in. But I could write a whole essay on how our view of the past is skewed by the lens each new generation looks through.

  What isn’t so much a matter of opinion is
the issue of social advancement in 19th century Britain. In short, it was rare. The late 19th century in America was the age of Horatio Alger and the notion that anyone could rise through the ranks of class to make something of himself, no matter where he started. That simply wasn’t true in Britain during the same era. And while it’s a bit of a stretch on the one hand for Jack to end up with a title, on the other hand, titles were being created, bought, and sold like candy as the newly wealthy Industrial class sought out ways to assert themselves into the upper ranks of the British nobility. All that was needed to be granted a title was an “in” with someone high up in government who could make the recommendation to the Queen. Jack certainly had that in the form of Lord Malcolm Campbell and his friends.

  Just one other quick note, in case you were wondering. I deliberately used a lot of slang terms in this book for effect, and in case you were thinking that words like “knackered”, “screwing”, and “knickers” are anachronistic to 1885, they’re not. I was careful to look up every word I wanted to use on the Online Etymology Dictionary, so I can verify that they were all in use. Some words I wanted to use got cut because they were too modern. It’s amazing how old some of our “modern” slang words are!

  Speaking of members of the nobility, will Lord Denbigh ever be caught for what he did to Lord Fergus O’Shea? Will Fergus ever recover enough to walk again and perhaps take the investigation into his own hands? And will Lady Henrietta Tavistock be there to help him or will she have her hands full as the government and the Liberal Party falls apart spectacularly in the summer of 1886 (which it actually, historically did)? Find out all of this and more in The May Flowers book 3, The Scandal of a Perfect Kiss.

  * * *

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