A Breath of Scandal: The Reckless Brides (3 page)

There was nothing to do but gather Mama into a comforting embrace. “Hush,” Antigone soothed. “I am not reckless, Mama, I promise you. I am perfectly capable of handling Velocity—I’m as safe on her as if I were in a rocking chair. But Mama, if you don’t want me to be taken from you, why have you arranged for that very thing with Lord Aldridge?”

Mama shook her head, and pulled away to pat at her face with her already damp handkerchief. “You don’t understand.”

“Obviously.” Antigone tried to rub some warmth into Mama’s frail arms. “But you needn’t worry. I won’t be leaving. This business with Lord Aldridge will all come to nothing, for we couldn’t suit any less. Good Lord, the man’s old enough to be my grandfather.”

“He is not.” For all her sobbing frailty, Mama still had a great deal of argument in her. “There is nothing wrong with a mature man seeking a younger bride. How else is he to get an heir?”

The idea of getting so much as a cup of tea for Lord Aldridge held all the appeal of being dragged through a bramble, but the thought of getting an heir for the man—she was a country girl, after all, and had a complete understanding of the messy mechanics of the deed—was an abomination so unimaginable, it was simply not to be considered. “Mama, he’s ancient. You must know I cannot.”

“Why can you not? He is not so old as that, and he has aged exceptionally well. He is almost as handsome as he ever was. You should have seen him in his day! You have but to look at your ring to see.” She gestured to Lord Aldridge’s gift, gripped tight in Antigone’s fist. “He could have married any woman he wanted. But he never did. Broke hearts from here to London and back, I should think. And now, of all people, he wants you. Why must you be so quick to turn your nose up? Why must you question such a piece of incredibly good fortune?”

Because Antigone did not want to play brood mare to even so supposedly fine an aging hunter as Lord Aldridge. Because, truth be told, she just couldn’t picture herself doing it. Not just the getting of the heir—though she felt all gooseflesh again at the remembrance of his dry, papery touch. She could not imagine herself in the cold marble corridors of Thornhill Hall, or in his lordship’s town house in London. Because “hoydenish” was the word most often used to describe her, not “refined” or “elegant,” or any of the things Lord Aldridge himself was, and should want in a wife. It made absolutely no sense. “Because
of all people,
he cannot want me.”

But Mama was not to be moved. She tried another approach to press her point. “Why can you not think of someone besides yourself? What of your sister?”

The need to protect and care for Cassandra was an old theme of Mama’s, and doubly unfair, because Antigone did think of her sister. Constantly. Antigone had been Cassie’s staunch champion, her buffer against the world for years now, ever since the day ten years ago when she had bloodied Billy Landthrup’s nose for making fun of Cassie’s stammer. Lord help them all, what a dustup that had been, with Billy taller and older by at least three years. But Antigone had served notice that day that anyone who teased her sister would have to go through scrappy, hoydenish, tenacious Antigone Preston to do it, and the challenge still stood.

“What of Cassie? But now you mention it, why should Lord Aldridge want me and not Cassandra? She is both the eldest and the most beautiful. Not that I would wish for her such a man—his gaze is much too calculating and appraising—but surely such an influential man would want a beautiful wife. Why should he want me instead?”

Mama could only shrug—she did not care about Lord Adlridge’s apparent lapse of logic, only its result. “I have no idea. He did not ask for her. He asked for you. And Cassandra is meant for better things.”

The careless words were another shocking kick, like a horse’s hoof to her chest. A different sort of pain left her breathless. “And I’m not?”

Too wrapped up in her own emotions to consider another’s, Mama dismissed her bruised feelings with an impatient wave of her handkerchief. “Oh, you know what I mean, Antigone. He
would
chew her up and spit her out, but you—you’re impervious, and strong enough to withstand him. And with her beauty, Cassandra should have her pick of the highest men in the land, not just our musty corner of West Sussex. She
could
have her pick of such men, if only they could see her.”

“If only she wanted to be seen. But she does not, Mama, and you know trying to make her a social triumph can only increase her unease, and with it her stammer.”

“She does not stammer with you, at home.” Mama gripped her arm. “You must help her, and make her at least try to be more social. Do you not see? This is our chance.”

“Our chance for what?”

“To better ourselves. To see that Cassandra marries as well as her beauty and sweet nature demand. This is the first step.”

“Lord Aldridge?”

“Yes! With you engaged to him, we will move in higher circles. We will be invited to Thornhill Hall, and then to the better houses of the district.” For the first time in days, Mama’s eyes were alight with a glint of purpose. And determination. There would be no stopping her now that she had the bit between her teeth. “We must convince Lord Aldridge to hold a ball. And Lord Aldridge will go to London in the spring for the Season. We must see to it that we accompany him. Or his sister, Lady Barrington. She is a very great hostess, of some influence in society. We must have her to our side and have her sponsor Cassandra. Yes. Can you not see how it shall be?”

“You want me to sacrifice myself—all my happiness—upon the altar of society so Cassie can marry well? Without any thought as to what might make her, or me, happy?” The wound was the shocking, cold plunge of a knife deep, deep within until there was no air, no warmth left in her chest. Nothing but frozen pain.

It was so far beyond ridiculous, it was painful. And it wasn’t fair.

Her father would have said, “The fair comes in September, Antigone, my girl, so you’ve got to think of something better than that.” But she couldn’t think. She could barely breathe.

“Happiness,” her mother scoffed. “You’ve read too much of that romantic drivel. Happiness is choosing to take the opportunities that present themselves, nothing more.”

Antigone’s voice sounded bruised, but she didn’t care if she had to beg. “Please, Mama. Don’t ask such a thing of me. We will be fine without Lord Aldridge. I promise you. We will be happy again. Time will pass and grief will loosen its grip and we will be happy again. Please. Please put all thoughts of houses and balls and seasons from your mind.”

“No.” Her mother rounded on her with a face nearly glittering with some heady, heedless admixture of greed and anger and desperate fear. “Antigone, think! You don’t have to
marry
him. You only have to be
engaged
to him. For a time. For long enough for us to get Cassandra a suitable husband. Six months at the least, but a year if you can manage it.” Her mother had turned away, and began to pace, a dark, birdlike silhouette before the light of the windows, the long skirts of her charcoal dress swooping and swirling at her feet in agitation. “It will be three months before you can decently attend a ball, but we can use the time to plan and arrange. We must be introduced to Lady Barrington, before she leaves the country for the London Season. Yes…”

Antigone felt upended, as if the rug had shifted beneath her feet and loosened gravity’s grip on her knees. She tried again—she had to try again to make her mother listen. “Mama, Lord Aldridge does not seem to me the sort of man who will stand for being taken so lightly. Do you not think it is wicked to try and use the man so? Not that I care particularly about his finer feelings—though frankly, I can’t see that he has them—but Lord Aldridge strikes me quite particularly as a man who is not to be trifled with.”

“Then you shall not trifle. You will be all that is proper and good and reticent. Especially reticent. None of your outrageous hoydenish behavior, or frank talk.”

Antigone scrambled to find a logical argument to counter her mother’s dogged, unthinking determination. Anything to keep her mother from sliding them any further down the slippery slope toward Thornhill. “Mama, look at me,” she gestured to her muddy boots and messy, windblown hair. “You ask the impossible.”

“It is not impossible,” her mother snapped. “If you would just trust me. Trust me to know what is best for you. For all of us.”

“Trust? Mama, you can’t expect me to wager my future—all my happiness—against something over which you have no control.” If Antigone had felt the rug pulled out from under her before, now it felt as if the earth were tilting under her feet and she was sliding inexorably down, away from everything she knew and wanted.

“I do expect it.” Her mother whirled back at her, as sharp and relentless as a raven. “I promise you, it will be as I say. You must do this, Antigone Preston, do as you are asked, and for once in your life not try to be cleverer than everyone else. Accept Lord Aldridge’s suit. Accept his gifts, whenever he might give them. Accept your unlooked-for good fortune. You will do this.” Mama’s eyes were aglow with determination. “You will do it for Cassandra, if you will not do it for yourself. You can do no less.”

The words the vicar had spoken less than a hour ago came back to Antigone afresh.
I held my tongue, and spake nothing, but it was pain and grief to me.

And as she could not bring herself to agree to so ruinous a plan, Antigone spake nothing.

No. Though her throat was raw and her head ached from the pressure of the tears that did not fall, Antigone Preston did not cry. She wasn’t made for weeping.

She swallowed down the jagged stone of her grief, and set herself to endure.

Chapter Three

More than endurance was going to be needed.

Because she was wrong. There really was no money. None.

For a mathematician who had always delighted in creating equations full of variables and unknowns to explain natural phenomena, her father had proved to be woefully bad at basic arithmetic. In his ledgers of the household accounts, the plusses continuously under-balanced the minuses. There was only the barest and most haphazard of incomes. Throughout the years, every so often a lump sum would appear from some unknown source to keep the books, and with them the Preston family, afloat just as it seemed they would be dragged down into the River Tick. But what those sources of income might have been were never noted.

Antigone pored over the books, looking and looking. But there was nothing.

And if she did not know from whence that income had come, Antigone had no hope of making it reappear. Without that money, without any firm financial ground, Antigone Preston had nothing on which to stand in opposition to her mother. Nothing.

It was, as Mama had so succinctly put it, “Lord Aldridge or the poorhouse.”

And while Antigone was impulsive and angry enough to want to take her chances in the world, and spit into the face of fate, it was winter, and it was bitterly cold. And even a cold house was better than none. And one long look at her beautiful, fragile sister was all it took to convince Antigone to fall into line and agree to her mother’s outrageous and utterly mendacious plan.

But within little more than a week, her endurance began to run dangerously thin. Half an hour into Lord Aldridge’s second visit, Antigone thought she would go mad from simply having to sit in the drawing room and listen to him spout ridiculous opinions about everything from the proper conduct of a hunt to the proper way to amass a collection of expensive, and utterly useless, chinoiserie. Within the hour she was entirely sure she could die from a surfeit of self-inflicted sarcasm. Alas, if only it were possible. On she lived.

A year, Mama had said. Six months at a minimum. She would go mad. She wanted to run screaming from the room. Because she was no damn good at being a decorative sort of girl. Or good. Or obedient. Or quiet.

And the patience and selflessness of the saints themselves would have been exhausted by Mama’s incessant, nonsensical plans. With such insanity abounding, time could do but little to loosen grief’s tenacious grip. Antigone threw herself into creating a viable alternative to the plan to use Lord Aldridge. She wrote letters to the Analytical Society, sending them her father’s work. She badgered his solicitor for some assistance in naming the sources of her father’s income. She fell asleep with her head in the ledgers, searching, searching for some clue, some antidote to stave off their poverty. But there was nothing. And the aching pain of frustration only grew as the end of the first three months of mourning came like the month of March—roaring down upon them like a lion.

Or rather, a lioness.

“We shall have to have a ball,” Lady Barrington, Lord Aldridge’s imperious sister, decreed from the best armchair in Mama’s lovely, if cold drawing room. “This late in the season people will be making preparations to go to London. Nothing else but a ball will keep them in the country. A small ball, to be sure, in deference to your mourning. But Miss Antigone, such as she is, must be introduced to the neighborhood. And of course, beautiful and delightful Miss Preston, as well.”

Lady Barrington was as ample as her brother was spare, but they shared the same sharp hawklike, flinty purpose of will. Mama dared not contradict her. And so a ball it was to be, laid on in all its festive grandeur within the copious ballroom of the Barrintgon country seat, Northfield, where the Prestons were invited to be her ladyship’s guests.

Mama was in alt at the prospect of mingling with the best society West Sussex and the eastern reaches of Hampshire had to offer, but Antigone,
such as she was,
had entirely different feelings.

Normally, she had no objection to a ball. She did love to dance. It was one of the few things—along with riding at breakneck speed—she did really well. She was not always quiet and she was not always exactly correct, but she was always known to be full of friendly enthusiasm. But Antigone’s experience had been limited to country balls set in the rooms above the White Horse Inn on the village High Street, which was a very different thing from a private ball at an influential, wealthy lord’s country estate, with people she did not know—lords and ladies and whatever other manner of gentry Lady Barrington and her brother had chosen to invite.