A Breath of Scandal: The Reckless Brides (41 page)

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Lord Aldridge walked into the room unannounced, but not unexpected. Antigone had heard the door opening below, and listened to the low murmur of voices as his lordship’s butler apprised him of his unwelcome, and no doubt unhinged, visitor.

Antigone made herself sit still, and wait impassively in her chair against the wall as he strolled carefully into the room. Her purgatory in London’s dull ballrooms was at last put to good use. She had just the right amount of bored cheek with which to greet him. “Been out bribing bishops?”

His lordship raised one careful brow, but elected not to rise to her provocation. He took a different, more conciliatory path this afternoon. “I may have been a trifle intemperate in my remarks.”

Oh, yes. His lordship was playing his cards very close today.

“You might,” she agreed dryly. If he was looking for conciliation from her, he wasn’t going to get it.

Aldridge drew himself up. “I wouldn’t advise taking that tone with me, my dear. I was none too pleased to find my stable completely deserted this morning, and several footmen absconded, as well, and I warn you, I am in no mood for tantrumish behavior. But if you have come to make amends, I might be encouraged to feel lenient.”

She shook her head. “I’m not so sanguine, myself.”

Lord Aldridge’s forehead pleated itself into straight, white rows, but he covered his confusion with condescension. “Antigone,” he began in his patronizing, chiding way.

She cut him off. “I am not here to make amends. I am here to end our arrangement. I will say it one last time. We do not suit. I release you from any obligation to me and any financial commitments you have made with my mother. We are finished.”

His face cleared of all traces of confusion. And he smiled. That small, icy impression of secret pleasure that chilled her to the marrow. “You must know by now, I cannot allow it.”

She would not rise to
his
bait. She did not. She did not argue. She did not even rise from the chair, still tilted against the wall in defiant nonchalance. “Lord Aldridge, I don’t like you.” She spoke carefully and slowly, as if she were explaining the basics of mathematics to a child. “You have said you don’t like me. Why would you persist in something that gives you as little pleasure as it gives me?”

“I will not explain myself to you again.” His careful control began to fray around its sharp edges.

“Will you not?” She kept her tone aggravatingly mild. “For your behavior is unexplainable. And insufferable. And probably criminal.”

That last gave him pause, but only for a moment. “Listen to me, and listen to me well, girl.” He rapped his knuckles against a table for emphasis. “I have a duty. I have an obligation to my family name, to my line. I cannot, and will not, allow my line to go extinct. And by our settlement, you, my girl, have a duty to me.”

She shrugged away his twisted notion of duty and obligation. “Find someone else to continue your line. It will not be me.”

“My dear naïve child, I have explained your obligations—”

“I am not a child, Lord Aldridge.” She honed her own voice down to something equally sharp and cutting. “Not in any way. I have not been one for quite some time. And learning of your perversions, of how you like to take your guilty, sordid pleasures, how you go seeking it from young children—boys with no other choices in their poor, miserable lives but to go to the likes of you—has ended forever whatever naïveté I might have had left.”

He had the grace to react—indeed he could not stop the two high points of color splashing across his tight white face. But he maintained his pose of control. “It makes no difference what you know. The marriage contracts have been signed. Your sister’s dowry has been paid. If you would put yourself in jeopardy for breach of suit, would you also put your sister at such hazard? Do you choose to risk her happiness as well as your own?”

“Yes,” she said with thoughtful deliberation. “I think I will.” She was through with letting them play her against Cassie as if they were chess pieces. “I will take that hazard.”

In the face of her bland defiance, his ire began to assert itself. “No. I have invested too much. Too much time and money. I told you, I have purchased you just as assuredly as I purchased that porcelain behind you, and now I mean to collect you. I have played your waiting game and it is at an end. I have a special license and I mean to use it.”

She kicked the chair away from the wall and rose. “I have read the pertinent law, my lord. You cannot do so without my consent.”

“I told you, Antigone. Everything, even bishops, can be purchased.”

“Then I will purchase myself back from you. Here.” She tossed the heavy purse onto the table. “Five hundred guineas. My fortune.”

Aldridge watched the weighty sack move and shift as the coins settled within the pouch, poised somewhere between avarice and condescending amusement. “Where did you get such a sum? You have nothing but what I have given you. You have nothing but the clothes on your back. I made sure—”

“I sold the mare.”

He stilled, and she finally saw it—the carefully controlled rage that lived deep within him. “First you steal her and then you sell her? My God, child, do you think I will stand for that? I could have you arrested.”

“I think not.” She made herself sound calm and assured—as if she were discussing something as mundane as the planting of the kitchen garden and not fighting for her life—though her throat was dry and scratchy with terror. “She was mine to sell, and not yours. You may be assured that I made very certain of it. Again, I read the law. But this five hundred guineas is yours—the cost of my portion. I am purchasing your release from my mother’s agreement.”

“Five hundred is not five thousand,” he said, sneering. “Your mother was wrong if she told you the lesser sum.”

“No, she told me you offered her five thousand. And you may sue her for fraud, I suppose, since she entered into a contract without a legal right to do so.” Antigone shrugged to show him how little she cared. “I haven’t read everything of the law, as my mother’s culpability doesn’t particularly concern me anymore. But I’ve been advised to offer you the five hundred guineas, which is more than my fortune, as compensation for ending our agreement.”

“As you say, you know nothing of the law. Nor my power as a magistrate within it.”

“As you say.” She echoed his words to show him his arguments would have no effect upon her. “But I do know this is England, my lord. A country of laws. And you may not make up your own rules just because you are rich, and like to have your own way. You and my mother contracted for me as if I were a minor child. Which I assure you, I am not.”

“What do you mean?” For the first time, his lordship was truly flummoxed. “You are only eighteen, Antigone, however mature you may fancy yourself—”

“You should have paid attention to the mathematics, Lord Aldridge. Papa always said no one ever paid enough attention to the mathematics. You should have checked the facts. The simple truth is that my mother lied. She lied to you and she lied to me. But the fact remains that I am one and twenty. I turned so before my mother signed your papers. And because I assumed you would not be so generous as to take my word for it, I have proof. A sealed copy of an affidavit—a copy, mind you, Lord Aldridge—from the Earl Grosvenor, who also provided the proof of my independent ownership of the mare. And, who it also turns out, is my godfather, and is most distressed by my present circumstances.”

“Grosvenor?” This he had not foreseen, that she might have allies. It was an excellent lie.

“The same. I asked you to think of why a man such as the Earl Grosvenor would give me such a valuable horse, did I not?”

But Aldridge was a card player, and would try to call the bluff. “If you are so sure of his support, why is he not here?”

“Because I did not ask him to be. Because you need to listen to
me
and believe
me
.” She lowered her voice to the hush she had taught Cassie, so he was forced to pay attention. “Because you are going to act like a true gentleman for the first time in your miserable life, and you are going to do what is not only lawful, but what is right, and let me go.”

He would not accept it. “No.” He stood there, opening and closing his fist in a gesture of impotent frustration. The hand was over, and still he would not let go. “No.”

She could hear the thwarted desperation in his voice, and see the frayed edges of his composure beginning to unravel. “Yes,” she countered. The more unhinged he became, the calmer she became. If only to unhinge him more. “There is no other possibility.”

Antigone turned for the door. There was nothing else she needed to do. Nothing else she needed to say.

He moved quickly—more quickly than she would have thought possible given his age—darting in front of the door to block her path. Waiting for her next move with the tense, poised readiness of a duelist. “There is. There must be.”

Antigone backed away slightly, shifting to stand before the windows where the light shining behind her would be in his eyes, and trying to diffuse the tension by keeping space and furniture between them. But she made sure to open the buttons of her coat to give herself access to the handle of her gun. “Do you think to try and force me?” she asked mildly.

“I don’t want to.” He firmed his voice, as if he were trying to convince himself as much as her. “But you leave me no choice but to force you, Antigone. You know that.”

She smiled at him. She could do nothing else. She looked at Lord Evelyn Aldridge with all the certain surety that came from knowing what she was about to say was absolutely, irrefutably true. “You
always
have a choice, Lord Aldridge. Think very carefully on what you are about to do before you attempt to do me any harm.”

Lord Aldridge wasn’t listening. He wasn’t listening to anything. Not her words, nor the movements that came from behind the doors, which burst open with a splintering crash.

Will Jellicoe shouldered his way into the room “I’ve heard enough,” he said in a voice that brooked no opposition. He was followed by others—the Earl Sanderson and Lord Jeffrey and Broad Ham with his brace of gleaming coaching pistols drawn and held high.

But Antigone had eyes only for Will Jellicoe. Will Jellicoe, standing tall and powerful in his captain’s uniform. Will Jellicoe, whom she had feared she would never see again.

Will Jellicoe, who spoke to Aldridge in a low and quiet and deadly voice, in the calm, natural way of a man who could make himself heard above a cannon’s roar. “Move away from her.”

But Aldridge was still not listening. And certainly not thinking. From somewhere inside his tightly fitting coat he drew a small pistol and aimed it at her.

She wanted to have the courage to face him down. She wanted to be able to ask archly if he were drunk or suicidal, but her throat had narrowed to a single thread of breath. Everything narrowed—the room grew exponentially smaller.

Her papa would have told her such a thing wasn’t possible—that the mathematics wouldn’t allow for such a thing. But there was nothing but Lord Aldridge’s gun before her. And her gun all the way down inside her coat. And the guns that she could hear the other men draw and cock back into lethal readiness.

But mostly there was Aldridge’s gun, the small beady barrel wavering at her head. She saw Aldridge’s eyes behind it, dark and feral with his untethered rage. With the menace he could no longer keep hidden behind his carefully constructed façade. The menace that snaked through his body and slithered up his shaking arm.

The flickering portion of her brain that was still capable of thought took careful and hopeful note of the small but salient fact that the mad man hadn’t cocked it. Not yet, though the gun was still gripped tenaciously in his shaking hand.

“No,” he said again with a sharp, spirant sound of desperate frustration. “She is mine. Ten years I’ve waited for a girl who would suit me. Ten years. Look at her. Do you think I’m going to find
that
anywhere else?”

She supposed he meant she was boyish. She supposed he meant that she alone had the strange set of qualities that would make her acceptable as his wife. She supposed she was meant, as her mother had once said, to be flattered. But his declaration didn’t feel like a compliment. It felt like a curse.

“Put the gun down and move away from her,” Will repeated through his teeth. “If you even look across the room at her again, I will shoot you where you stand. And then I will kill you with my bare hands. Do you understand me?”

The blunt force of Will’s voice battered Aldridge into awareness and understanding. He turned to follow the voice and was shocked, and then furious, to find the multitude of pistols pointed directly at his pinprick of a heart.

His voice shook with the mad fury of a man unfairly deprived. “Who do you think you are to come in here, to my own house, and order—”

“By God,” Will roared. “Put the gun down. Now. Or so help me—”

Aldridge faltered under Will’s withering wrath and his arm began to sag.

Will looked as if he would have advanced on Aldridge and knocked him down with all the precise, competent retribution of which he had promised her that first night he was capable. But the earl stopped him with a hand.

“William,” he said in a voice of low calm, trying to inject a note of sanity into the scene.

But it was too late for sanity. The pinched heat of thwarted fury and pride burned high spots of color on Aldridge’s cheeks. He wasn’t done yet. He smiled, that small, nasty, secret smile that was all in his eyes, and said, “No matter. Take her then, if that is what you want. After all, I’ve already had what I wanted from her. She does make an admirable boy, does she not?”

The bolt of blank shock that blew across Will’s face told her Aldridge’s dart had struck his mark. It was fleeting, the hit, just a frisson of doubt shooting through his eyes, but it was enough. With one snide, filthy innuendo, Aldridge had won.

She couldn’t—she damn well wouldn’t—let him win.

In the moment of stunned silence before Will could fully muster his faculties to lunge at Aldridge, and tear the throat out of the man, she moved.