A Lady’s Lesson in Scandal (3 page)

A quavering voice called from the next room. “Cornelia? Cor—”

The cough that punctuated that call roused Nell to sit up. The room was spinning around her. She wiped blood from her nose. Rage tasted bitter as bile. She hated him. She hated Dickie Jackson. Hate, hate, dizzy, hot; she hurled the useless fork aside.

Cloth rustled in the next room: Mum was trying to sit up.

Nell took a large breath. “I’m all right,” she said, forcing herself to her feet, hurrying past the torn curtain, crossing the distance to the pallet. “Shh, Mum, lie back. I’m all right.”

“No,” Mum said. Her graying hair was a pale nimbus around her shadowed face. “God save you. God spare you. God keep us all …” She turned her head aside to cough.

Nell laid a hand to her back, supporting her into easing back down to the floor. “It’s all right, Mum. Go back to sleep.”

“You must ask … for help. He is wicked but he will help.”

“All right,” Nell murmured. She brushed her hand
over her mother’s hot, dry cheek. The fevers always got higher in the evenings.

Mum turned her head away, fretful. “Listen,” she said. “Write to him. I hoped … I did it for you, Cornelia. His lust, he was a devil. Lewder, more prideful even than Michael. Lust and lewdness …”

Brilliant. The last thing Mum needed right now was the exertion of one of her fits. “Calm down. Just lie quietly.”

“No.” Bony fingers caught Nell’s arm and dug for attention. “Gird yourself. Ask God to protect you. But tell him who you are. Tell him … I thought to save you. Part of him for my own. To
save
a part of him.” A hack took Mum, wet and violent. The effort to breathe wracked her thin frame.

“All right. I’ll tell him.”
Damn
Michael. Damn the Malloys upstairs, too, who’d taken it into their heads that Mum was a minor saint. They encouraged her talk of demons and angels; they asked her to intercede for them. “Mum, you need to sleep.”

“I’m lucid.” For a startling second, Mum sounded as firm and sharp as she once had, back in the days when she’d boxed Michael’s ears for taking the Lord’s name in vain and forced him onto his knees beside the rest of them for three hours every Sunday. “You can go back now, Cornelia. I forgive you.”

“I’ll go back. Just calm.”

“You must go to your father. Lord Rushden is waiting.”

Nell froze. Lord Rushden? The father of that girl in the photograph?

The coincidence lifted the hairs on her nape. “Mum, what do you mean?”

“Oh, the devil,” her mother said, sighing. “But I forgive you.”

“Forgive me for what?” Nell whispered.

“You must speak to your father.” Mum’s voice sounded peculiar, suddenly—queer and girlish. “You must speak to his lordship.”

Her
father
? “Mum.” She barely dared to breathe. “What are you saying? You can’t mean that Lord Rushden …”

“Never let him tempt you,” Mum murmured. “Resist sin.”

“You’re raving.” Nell’s throat closed on a hard swallow. “Donald Miller is my father.” Mum had talked of him. A nice, respectable gentleman farmer from Leicestershire, who’d died of the cholera when Nell had been a babe in arms.

“Never,” Mum said, still in that wispy, dreamy voice. “A lie. Only Lord Rushden, Cornelia. Long ago, before. He
will
help you. I took you for your sake. But I can help no longer. Only write to him.”

Her heart was pounding in her throat. Impossible to think it, but she could find no other interpretation: her saintly mum was admitting she was a bastard. The bastard of a lord.

No wonder she looked like that girl in the photograph.

She leaned forward, gripping her mother’s hand hard. “Would he pay for a doctor for you?”

“Oh, Cornelia …” Her mother’s high laugh sent a chill down her spine. “The devil will do far more than that.”

F
ew pastimes were so tedious as a party thrown to prove the host’s depravity. Colton’s rout was no exception. The walls had been covered in dark velvet, the electricity shut off. The only light came from iron candelabras positioned throughout the room. A miserable-looking string quartet sat in the corner, sawing out what Simon belatedly recognized as
Te Deum
played backward. Over their heads, an upside-down cross dangled on a chain from a darkened chandelier. The hired girls in the room—those who still wore clothing, at any rate—were dressed as nuns.

Simon laughed under his breath as he stepped inside. Why this enduring fixation on nuns? The faces in the raucous crowd were largely familiar to him, and as usual, he did not see a Catholic among them. He could only conclude that something in the Anglican tradition cultivated fantasies of popish defilement.

At least he saw no black mass under way. Small mercy, that.

As notice of him spread, greetings came right and left—an MP leaving off with a half-naked woman to sketch him a bow; three city magnates toasting him so enthusiastically that most of their whisky landed on the carpet. He replied with cordial nods as he looked through the crowd for his quarry. A babble of excited speculation reached his ears, mentions of his sins both real and imagined. Mostly imagined, of course.

He felt his lips twist. Old Rushden had never
understood that. He’d believed everything he’d heard of his heir, and even now, Simon could not regret that he’d never tried to convince the bastard otherwise. Even tonight, on the precipice of final ruin, Simon could not see how it might have gone differently. His guardian had judged and damned him from the get-go; he’d never had a chance.

“Rushden!” Harcourt approached, skirting a pair of half-dressed dukes who were directing a girl’s gyrations atop a banqueting table. She looked no older than fifteen, still able to smile enthusiastically on idiocy. “You came!”

“And so did you,” Simon replied, his gaze lingering on the girl. As one of the lordlings made an open-handed grab for her breast, he sighed. Very tempting to offer her a coin to fund her escape, only she wouldn’t take it. This gathering presented the best business opportunity she’d ever receive.

He turned his attention to Harcourt. “And why are you here?” He was the last man to scruple at drunken revelry, but this lot wasn’t reveling as much as showing off for each other. Harcourt generally kept better company.

“I know, a sad scene.” Harcourt drove an unsteady hand through his ginger hair, causing a curl to flop across his eye. “But the night is slow. And I thought you’d be at Swanby’s soiree! Wasn’t your newest pet performing there tonight?”

Simon nodded. “It ended an hour ago.” He’d instructed Andreasson, the Swedish pianist whose talents he currently sponsored, to bang out several discordant pieces. Lady Swanby’s guests had pretended to enjoy the music and would be sure to report enthusiastically on it tomorrow, the better to advertise their
attendance to those who’d not been invited. “Made quite a stir.”

Despite his efforts, the blackness of his mood must have showed in his voice, for Harcourt narrowed his eyes and stepped closer. “Never say it went poorly!”

The idea surprised Simon into a laugh. “Of course not.” His discoveries were always en vogue. To disagree with the Earl of Rushden’s artistic opinions was to risk being thought a bumpkin.

Of course, that might change once it became known that he was all but broke.

“Then what ails you?” Harcourt asked.

He shrugged and took a drink from a passing servant’s tray. The liquor’s burn felt noxiously chemical. He didn’t see much point in keeping silent on the court ruling; the newspapers tomorrow would trumpet it across the nation.

But as he lowered the emptied glass, he found he did not want to speak of it just yet. His disbelief still felt too large to put into words. Never mind that his predecessor, the ninth Earl of Rushden, had been insane. Never mind that only a madman would have commanded his fortune to be divided between a living daughter and a dead one; that only a madman would have designed a legacy that left the next earl penniless, the family estates to rot and crumble, the retainers to be sacked, and the lands to go to seed.

Never mind all this. The court had decided to uphold old Rushden’s will anyway.

Somewhere in hell, the bastard was enjoying his revenge.

Simon let go of a long breath. No, he would waste no further effort on this nonsense. Let the journalists struggle to explain it. “Nothing ails me,” he said, and
felt relatively certain, after a moment, that he meant it. Life was a great, big, ludicrous joke. Anyone who took it seriously was a fool.

Harcourt still looked doubtful. Simon pulled up a smile for good measure. “Have you seen Dalziel hereabouts?” It hadn’t been a good day, but it still could end well.

“Oh ho!” Harcourt broke into a grin. “Never say he’s still hiding the book from you? I can help you with that.” This offer was punctuated with an ostentatious cracking of Harcourt’s knuckles. Since retiring from the Fusiliers, he was at loose ends, and nothing cheered him more rapidly than the prospect of violence.

Simon hadn’t anticipated needing to go to such lengths. But why not? That Dalziel had taken the money and failed to surrender the manuscript seemed, after this very long and inexpressibly irksome day, deserving of bloodshed. “By all means,” he said with a shrug.

He started forward into the crowd, Harcourt at his elbow. Hail-fellow-well-met thumps buffeted his shoulders; waggling brows and slurred encouragements trailed in his wake. As he sidestepped a knot of men who’d gathered to watch the finance minister rip the habit off a brunette, he found himself suddenly, darkly amused. The middling classes prated so earnestly in magazines about the rewards of hard work, ingenuity, learning, right living. A look around this room would serve them the most effective rebuttal imaginable. Their nation was governed by horny, overgrown schoolboys.

“Colton will be beside himself to find you here,” Harcourt remarked. “Was asking after you earlier. Said he hadn’t seen you in weeks.”

Colton was the host of this event. Intent on proving
his credentials as a man-about-town, he’d been courting friendship from any half-notorious gentleman he could locate. Avoiding him grew tedious; encouraging him was a deadly mistake. “I’ll tell him I went off to find God,” Simon said dryly. “That should quell his interest.”

As the remark echoed in his ears, it began to sound less ludicrous than portentous. The court ruling left him little choice but to hunt for a wealthy bride. Alas, rakes excelled on the marriage market only when in a state of reform.

The crowd parted and he spotted Dalziel. The man was standing a short distance away, behind a long table atop which an unclothed woman was serving as the platter for canapes. When anxious, Dalziel ate; at present, he was plucking up cheese and grapes with speed and enthusiasm.

His animal sense registered danger: he glanced up and did a comical double-take as his eyes met Simon’s.

“You,” he gasped, then stumbled as the woman playing the part of the table slapped his clumsy hand away from her eye. Regaining his balance, he wheeled to flee.

“Hold there!” In three long strides, Harcourt caught Dalziel and turned him around by the shoulder, slamming him up against the wall with enough force to make a nearby candelabra rattle.

“Don’t hurt me!” Dalziel squeaked as Simon strolled up. The lovely lady on the table gave Simon a smile and reached out to take his empty glass.

“My thanks,” he said to her.

“Shut your face,” Harcourt was bellowing at Dalziel. “You’re lucky if I don’t gut you. What do you say, Rushden? A facer to start?”

Dalziel whimpered. “No, no—for God’s sake! Please …”

Putting his hands in his pockets, Simon looked Dalziel up and down. The man was generally quite florid, but just now his puffy face had gone as pale as Italian cheese. He’d clearly been enjoying himself this evening; his waistcoat was improperly buttoned and his cuffs gaped open. Was there such a thing as poor form at an orgy? Simon put the question aside for later consideration. “You have something of mine,” he said.

Dalziel’s mouth worked. He had the wide-eyed, startled look of a small creature trapped in sudden bright lights. “Please, I—I want no trouble.”

“Pathetic,” Harcourt commented.

“No trouble is required,” Simon said. “Simply hand over the book.”

“I’ve not got it!”

“But feisty,” Harcourt said in impressed tones.

Simon cut his friend a silencing look, then leaned toward Dalziel. “This game bores me. You’re not clever enough to play it, and you won’t like how it ends.”

The color rushed back into Dalziel’s face. “It’s no game,” he squeaked. “You—you didn’t honor the terms!”

“Terms? You named the price. I accepted it.” The manuscript was not particularly valuable; no true collector would have coveted it. But Simon did, and Dalziel, knowing this, had asked for an undeservedly high price. “Don’t tell me,” Simon added with open scorn, “that a hundred pounds did not satisfy you?”

“Zero,” Dalziel whispered.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Zero,” Dalziel said through his teeth.

“Cheek,” growled Harcourt. He tightened his hand around the man’s neck, his knuckles turning white as Dalziel loosed a gasp of pain.