Betina Krahn (5 page)

“You see?” Woolworth turned to the others with a wistful expression. “He’s perfect!”

Remington felt the coil of tension that had recently
loosened in his gut tightening once more as Woolworth coaxed him back into his seat. He cast a longing glance at the door as they began to relate hair-raising tales of the atrocities Lady Antonia had committed against male freedom. But he listened, in spite of himself, and gradually began to picture her in his mind: a sour, overbearing old crone bent on making the rest of the world as miserable as she had probably made Lord Paxton.

“Paxton …” He interrupted their diatribe. “I’ve never heard of a Lord Paxton.”

“Her husband wasn’t a lord,” Trueblood informed him. “The old boy was knighted years ago for amassing indecent piles of money, then having the good sense to be generous with his bribes. Bought himself a lady wife.”

“And what does he think of all this?”

“Nothing at all, I’m afraid. He’s dead,” Woolworth answered. “Living with the Dragon probably killed him.”

“She’s a widow, then,” Remington mused, painting fusty widow’s weeds on the grim portrait forming in his mind.

“And she seems to make a specialty of finding husbands for marriageable widows,” Searle said with a sullen tone. “No doubt because they are easier to place. A fellow drops his guard with a widow, figuring she’s safe, since there are no eagle-eyed mothers or spotless virtue to bother about. And a widow usually knows what sort of ‘comforts’ a man likes. This Lady Antonia is diabolical, I tell you.”

A diabolical woman.
Not a particularly rare phenomenon, in Remington Carr’s experience. He’d encountered more than his share of them in recent years and had no desire to get mixed up with another, no matter how deserving a cause it might be. For all the pathos and indignation their stories aroused in him, that single word—diabolical—decided him firmly against becoming involved in their scheme.

“If all is as you say, then indeed, something ought to be done about the woman. However, I must decline to help. I already have a number of projects in the works, and my late father’s affairs continue to press me.”

“See here, Landon, you’ve got to help us,” Peckenpaugh declared. “If this woman is allowed to run loose, you’ll look up one day soon and find yourself the last bachelor in London!”

“Sorry, gentlemen. No doubt you’ll find another St. George to slay your Dragon.”

They looked positively deflated as he downed the last swallow in his goblet and rose. Avoiding their dispirited faces, he turned away and found the club’s steward bearing down upon him with a harried expression.

“Your lordship! Thank God.” The fellow fairly ran the length of the bar to reach him. “There is a woman here to see you, sir. Most insistent. I offered to open the annex to her, even at this late hour, so that you might receive her there. But she barged past both myself and the night porter and has ensconced herself in
the window
”—he groaned—“right in full view of the street!”

The pain in the steward’s expression was genuine. The strategic ground the audacious female had chosen to storm and seize, the famous bow window of White’s, which overlooked St. James Street, was both legendary and revered in the world of London clubs. It was the seat from which the famous and infamous of every generation since Charles II had looked down upon those not privileged to taste the society inside. And now both the club and the window had been stormed and breached by a mere female demanding access to
him
.

“Who is she?” he demanded, knowing her identity didn’t matter. Whoever she was, at this hour and in the window of White’s, she could be only trouble.

“She refuses to give her name or to move until you
agree to see her, your lordship. Says she’s prepared to stay all night if necessary.” The steward tugged his waistcoat irritably back into place. “And I believe she means it.”

Heat crept beneath Remington’s starched collar, as one unpleasant possibility occurred to him. “Is she tall, smartly dressed … with a voice like a screeching hinge?”

The steward nodded, then curled one side of his nose as if smelling something unpleasant. “If you know this woman, your lordship, please come and see her off the premises before I am compelled to employ more vulgar means of removing her.”

Remington did indeed know her. In point of fact, he had been dodging her for two days. She had besieged his house with missives, sent her personal servants to his offices to insist he call upon her, then, late in the day, had arrived in person at his offices, causing him to have to flee down his own back stairs like a thief trying to avoid detection. Notes, messengers, and even her personal appearance at his office he might have withstood with some grace. But to invade his male sanctum, his club. And White’s, of all places! Had the harridan no decency at all?

Roiling up out of his well-controlled depths came a surge of righteous anger. If years of dealing with her and the others like her had taught him anything, it was that decency was usually too much to expect of a woman. And this one was worse than most. He was sick to death of her incessant demands, hysterical appeals, and strident dependence. He paid her bills, oversaw her investments, and even pacified the household retainers who had to put up with her. But it was never enough.

Well, this time she had pushed him too far. He fixed the beleaguered steward with narrowed eyes and a taut half smile that contained equal measures of fire and ice.

“Do what you will with the woman, Richards. It is none of my concern.”

Turning a shoulder on the steward’s confusion, he settled back in his chair and beckoned to the barman, calling for a new deck of cards and a fresh bottle of Scotch. He met Woolworth’s startled look with a vengeful smile. “It appears I won’t be leaving just yet. Cards, gentlemen?”

The steward came running back moments later, ashen and wringing his hands. “My lord, my lord! That female person—”

Behind him, above the drone of voices, came the sound of a woman’s scream. Talk in the bar ceased, play in the billiards room halted, and every breath in both rooms was bated in shock.

Remington swore mentally, tightened his grip on the cards in his hand, and ignored her. But the termagant held an unexpected trump card: his name. “Remington Carr, how dare you refuse to see me!” she screamed. “I know you’re in there! Let go—unhand me, you thug! Remington, you cannot abandon me—ohhh—”

Every eye in the bar turned in his direction, and a general murmur of outrage rose from the far end of the room. But he braced to weather the humiliation, telling himself it could not be the first time a scheming female had penetrated the club’s pristine male provinces. He had to stand his ground and refuse to allow her outrageous behavior to draw him into a public row. There was nothing for it but to gut out the embarrassment. He took a deep breath and steeled his tautly stretched nerves.

“Good God,” Everstone said, shoving to his feet when the struggle made it to the door of the bar. “She’s got past Richards—she’s headed in here!” Several of his table mates lurched to their feet, their expressions ranging from fascination to terror.

“Dash it all, Landon,” Woolworth demanded, staring frantically between the fracas in the doorway and Remington. “You must
do
something, man!”

“So I must,” Remington said with seething calm, considering the pasteboards in his hand. “I’ll have three cards.” Adamantly oblivious to the wild tussle going on just thirty feet away, he laid three cards down on the tabletop and waited for the dealer to fulfill his request.

The others gazed, confounded, between the porters grappling with the woman calling Remington’s name and his towering indifference to the spectacle. Never in their lives had they seen a more audacious display of coolness under fire. This incident would undoubtedly go down in clubmen’s lore along with the time old Lord Glasgow flung a waiter through a window and gruffly told the club secretary to “put him on the bill.”

“Well, gentlemen, are we playing or not?” he demanded, seeming decidedly more concerned with the delay of the game than with the potential ruin of his reputation.

Following his lead, they sank back onto their chairs and glanced at each other in amazement. As the shrieks of the interloping female faded toward the street door, their admiration for the unorthodox earl mounted to worshipful proportions. Here, their looks of shared wonder said, was a man who truly knew how to handle women.

But inside that imperturbable facade, dark fires of anger were scarcely being held in check. For months the heat had been building in him, and this degrading little spectacle—the invasion of his last male sanctuary—had provided the final spark to set his raw pride aflame. Suddenly he was molten, churning inside.

“Women, gentlemen, are indolent, manipulative, and unpredictable creatures at best,” he said harshly. “They’re also expensive and self-absorbed and devious beyond belief. And it really doesn’t matter whether you’ve wedded them or not … they’ll have their pound of flesh all the same.” The fierce glow in his eyes as he lifted his gaze from
his cards made his companions stiffen in their seats. “Console yourself with the knowledge that, as married men, you may have escaped the unpleasantness of dealing with aging mistresses. They’re the very devil to dispose of.”

He picked up three newly dealt cards from the table, but the fury mounting in him made it all but impossible to focus on his hand. He was seized by an overwhelming urge to strike back, to do something to right the balance scales in him that had been knocked askance yet again by a woman’s volatile and demanding nature. He had to do something, to strike a blow for manhood as well as for himself. And when he looked up, he read in the wan and hopeful faces of that company of ruined bachelors the opportunity to do exactly that.

Lady Antonia. A devious and contriving woman. A plague upon the freedom of mankind. A woman in dire need of a comeuppance.

“So, Woolworth,” he said, taking a deep breath and feeling fresh resolve pour through his tense frame, relaxing it. “Just what did you have in mind for our diabolical Lady Antonia?”

The atmosphere was charged in the House of Commons that sultry afternoon in mid-May. The Gothic arch windows set high in the walls had been opened to provide ventilation, but the only air stirring in the great hall came from the heated blasts of the speakers on the main floor itself. The opposing ranks of green leather benches that lined the main floor were crammed with black-coated members, all exercising the long-standing MP prerogative of commenting on the recognized speaker’s parentage and sanity, as well as his oratorical style and the substance of his discourse.

Debate on the controversial Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill was under way, and tempers were rising apace with the temperature in the stuffy chamber. The measure was an attempt to change the legal code to permit marriage between a man and his deceased wife’s sister, a degree of relation both the Church and civil authority had decreed too close to permit a conjugal union. The progressive element in the Commons ranted that the “sister prohibition” was a relic of Old Testament days in which the vice of concubinage was rampant, and that it was badly outdated. The conservatives raved that sin was sin, whatever the era, and that if moral law was to be tampered with, the Ten Commandments would soon be reduced to the Ten Suggestions
and the whole empire would go sliding straight into the water pipe.

Neither side bothered to apologize for its scandalous language, even though the gallery that ringed the upper walls of the chamber was overflowing with observers, a number of whom were female. If women took an unfeminine interest in things governmental, both liberals and conservatives agreed, then they had to expect to be shocked from time to time. Still, in deference to those women who might have come with more appropriate
social
motives—say, to hear a husband’s speech or to flirt with an eligible MP after the session—a wooden screen had been erected along one side of the gallery to shield the fairer members of the weaker sex.