Season for Scandal (24 page)

“Speaking of rumor.” Xavier paused. “Sheringbrook’s right, though I hate to say it. Talk about Jane leaving your home is—well, it’s likely to spread quickly. There’s no reason for Jane to be staying under our roof when we’re only a few streets away from you. It would be different if she or Louisa were increasing, but . . .” Xavier shrugged. “My mother and Lady Xavier’s mother both died in childbed. I’m not eager for my wife to take the same risk.”

Edmund said a quick prayer of thanks for the stout good health of Jane’s mother. “I don’t mind what people say about me. Many people think I’m a bit of a nodcock because I like poetry and giving compliments and making women smile.”

“Nothing wrong with that.” Xavier looked as though he were struggling not to smile.

“I know.” Edmund gave his snifter one more spin; brandy sloshed over the lip. “But that only makes it funnier—to some—that my wife has left me.”

The earl went sober at once. “It’s not funny at all.”

“I hope Jane isn’t the subject of mockery,” Edmund said. “That’s all I hope. She’s very dignified.”

“Jane? Dignified?” Xavier spluttered again.

“Well, yes.” Edmund frowned, thinking. “In a sort of prickly way. She wants nothing but the truth. No secrets. She wants to do everything correctly. She gives and takes no quarter.”

“I hadn’t thought of it like that. You’re right.” Xavier gave Edmund an odd look. “I’ll try to send her back to you.”

“You needn’t bother.” Edmund motioned for a waiter to refill his friend’s snifter. “Nothing will change her mind except her heart. And vice versa.”

He would never bar his door to his wife—but why should she ever come back through it? He obviously possessed nothing she wanted anymore. Certainly not her heart.

Edmund returned home a few hours later, more sober than he wished. His first effort to retrieve his wife from Xavier House had failed. There would be a second, even a third, if the situation required. He would not give up on her.

But he had no notion what form the second attempt should take. His best tool was words, and words had failed. Sweet words, pleading words, words of anger. Jane was immune to all of them.

He ought to shove her into a trunk and kidnap her. That seemed like the sort of adventure she’d like.

The smile that crossed his features was bleak.

He moved through the quiet drawing room, where the servants had let the fire dwindle to coals. He lit a taper in a candlestick; the small flame caught the gloss of Jane’s Chinese vase, seated atop a table that seemed far too small to keep it steady. Yet steady it remained, though servants bustled by innumerable times per day to clean the carpet or build up the fire. The vase wouldn’t dare disobey Jane by letting itself be damaged.

Edmund stepped closer to it; close enough for the candlelight to catch the gilded back of one of the dragon-shaped handles.

He should send the vase to her at Xavier House.

He’d be damned before he’d send the vase to her at Xavier House.

He sighed, rubbing his free hand across eyes gone gritty from fatigue. His old feeling of guilt felt tender as a bruise.
Dobhránta
again. He’d been stupid without knowing how. He hadn’t tried hard enough, or he’d tried too hard, or . . .

No. This time something pressed back.

He had tried his best with Jane. His best made other women happy. It didn’t work with Jane: she’d left.

In his old, sad bundle of guilt, he was the one who’d done wrong. Long ago, he had escaped a situation grown so rotten that he could no longer breathe its air. And now Jane had done the same to him, leaving his house, and—

This wasn’t guilt he felt; it was anger. Because what he’d done to her had been
nothing
like what had happened to him.

If being treated with respect and placed in comfortable circumstances was so terrible that she had to escape him, then damn her. There was no pleasing such a woman.

Edmund, I love you
.

A wedding-night memory of her quiet voice—half a sob of passion—rang in his ears, cutting through the clamor of resentment.

I love you.
She had said it once, and never again. He hadn’t wanted her to say it again. He hadn’t even wanted her to feel it because it made his guilt all the worse.

And he knew: that was why she’d left. Because she knew she would never get back as much feeling as she gave, and being faced with the evidence of that—day after day, through endless breakfasts and teatimes and
not right nows
—was, eventually, intolerable.

And in that sense, they were not so very different after all.

His anger vanished, and he poked at the space where it had been, to see what had replaced it. Not guilt; nothing so heavy and familiar as that. This pierced like a rapier, sleek and pointed in its agony.

It was regret.

I love you
. She had only said it once. Now he wished he hadn’t been so vehement in his reaction. He wished he had known how to help that feeling grow in her. He wished he had said it back, even.

But Jane was immune to words. And Edmund tried not to lie, except out of politeness.

Would it be a lie to say he loved her? He didn’t know. He didn’t know how to separate love from protectiveness, or respect from desire. That didn’t make the feelings false, though, did it? It just meant . . . he wanted her to be all right.

Impatient with himself, he turned and left the drawing room without another glance at the vase. He padded up the stairs, candlestick in hand, to ready himself for bed. All too aware that only one day before, he had made the journey with Jane.

Three weeks before Christmas, and he’d misplaced his wife. The wife who he’d hoped would gift his family with a future—a family that wasn’t even his, a future that had lost all its urgency. So Turner had come back; what did it matter now? Edmund had chased Jane away all on his own.

The loss was harder to bear than he had expected. Regret again. But for what? The past he had dwelled on? The future he had laid aside? Or a dream he had never dared to let himself possess?

I love you
, she’d said. But only because she didn’t really know him.

Yet now, with the quiet of the house like a glowering master, he thought: she had left him, and maybe that meant she knew him best of all.

Chapter 18

Concerning Ice

Scandal didn’t wear as well as Jane had expected it to.

If it could be thought of as clothing, she had always imagined scandal as a red silk gown or a pair of gilded slippers—or for a man, a snowy cravat tied in a style entirely new. Something that set one apart, that made even the most beautiful and fascinating people seem more so.

She first suspected she was wrong the day after she left her husband’s home in Berkeley Square. She borrowed Xavier’s carriage for the quick hop to Grosvenor Square, looking forward to a call upon Lady Audrina Bradleigh. Her new friend—unwillingly draped in jewels, ear attuned to all the latest news—would provide much-needed distraction from the tumult of her own thoughts.

Yes, she had hoped Edmund would come for her, but with heart in hand. Instead, he had brought a finite store of cheerful kindness and a list of reasons why she ought to come home with him. As though “ought to” mattered to Jane Tindall.

Jane Kirkpatrick. Whoever the devil she was.

She had taken pleasure in tapping Edmund’s good cheer; letting it run out, wasted, against the insoluble surface of her own stubbornness, until he lost his temper with her. But it was a blank sort of pleasure, less like joy than like the satisfaction of defeating an opponent.

When had Edmund become her opponent?

Jane shook her head, then rapped at the door of Alleyneham House again.

A butler opened the door to Jane, admitted her to the mansion’s entrance hall, and took her card into the drawing room.

“We are not at home to callers,” rang the voice of Audrina’s mother, Lady Alleyneham, even as the Duchess of Penlowe shoved past Jane and marched into the house.

That in itself meant nothing. Duchesses were rather prone to doing whatever they wanted.

But then Mrs. Protheroe—a bawdy, widowed cit who arrived in a crested carriage Jane was fairly certain belonged to the spendthrift Marquess of Lockwood—was also admitted into the house.

“I don’t understand,” Jane began. “Has there been some mistake with my card? I—”

“Pardon me, madam.” The butler cut her off. Before Jane could muster a protest, he caught her by the arm and ushered her over the threshold. With no more of a nod than he’d have given to an underservant, he shut the door in her face.

Jane blinked at the glossy wood and brass for an inordinate length of time.

What had happened? Was it because of Edmund? No, surely not. He would never publicly abuse her. And as far as the world knew, if they knew anything about her departure at all, she was simply staying with her cousin. There was nothing wrong with staying with one’s cousin.

Was there?

No, likely Lady Alleyneham was miffed at Jane for some other reason. Her ladyship was a stickler for rank, and she might disapprove of Jane’s friendship with Bellamy. Or maybe she hadn’t forgiven Jane for botching the curtsy at their ball a few weeks earlier.

Yes. That must be it.

Odd how it could come as a relief, the conclusion that one had snubbed and offended a socially powerful countess.

The next time Jane came upon Lady Alleyneham, she would crumple at the countess’s feet. Her curtsy would be a positive debasement. The countess might even find the whole affair amusing.

For now, the door to Alleyneham House was closed to her. All Jane could do was lift her chin and make her way back down the mansion’s wide stone steps.

“Where to, my lady?” Xavier’s coachman touched his cap to her. Pretending dutifully that he hadn’t seen what had just passed.

Jane cast about for some instruction. “Gunter’s.” She didn’t want to return to Xavier House yet, and at the popular sweet shop, she might meet someone she knew. Someone with whom she could talk about the weather, or discuss ideas for Christmas gifts, all while slurping up a peppermint ice.

The carriage arrived at Gunter’s after a short drive. Though it was the custom on fine days for waiters to serve ladies in their carriages, the chilly weather had chased the shop’s customers indoors. All the better for a comfortable chat. Jane took her coachman’s hand and hopped to the pavement, feeling more hopeful.

But when she entered the crisp, chattery little shop, it went silent.

Every person within it looked at Jane, still framed within the doorway, then looked away. Spoons ceased clattering against glass dishes. Tongues stopped their wagging about . . . whatever. It was as though the inhabitants of the shop were ostriches, and their heads had just decisively been buried in the sand.

The scent of sugar and mint stung Jane’s nose; her stomach gave a queasy flip. She had not botched curtsies to
all
these people. Which meant she had botched something else.

She wished for Edmund’s comforting presence at her side; for his cheerful greeting. The light teasing that would coax smiles from every one of the faces . . . well, she presumed the women in the shop had faces. All she saw was the back of bonnet after bonnet.

“Excuse me,” she called to a waiter, determined to brazen her way through the situation. “Might I . . .”

“She
might
do anything,” sniffed an unfamiliar voice. “A woman cast out by a doting husband such as Lord Kirkpatrick
might
do any number of ungodly things.”

“She might. And then she might find out what others would
not
do. And
not
tolerate.” A different voice that time.

Jane’s stomach followed its horrid flip with a heavy flop. She couldn’t even tell from behind which bonnet the voices were issuing. Did it matter? It could be anyone.

And that meant it was probably everyone.

It would be ridiculous to protest her innocence to the back of a bonnet. But she couldn’t keep silent.

She tried to recall the Baroness Walling’s porcelain face and gracious smile, then reconstruct the expression on her own features. The mask felt as though she’d donned it askew; it pinched at the corners of her mouth and made her eyes water.

“A woman
might
have reasons for doing something that the world knows not of,” Jane said, hoping she sounded calm. Best to end her statement there. It wouldn’t be fair to blame Edmund; it wasn’t as though he’d beaten her. He was everything kind. Why, he had even ventured after her and tried to persuade her—first sweetly, then forcefully—into coming home.

No
, she had said. He wanted his wife back so he could keep her safe and sound. Like a bonnet to be rescued, or a book to be bought. Jane was just another good deed to tick off his list.

“Disgraceful,” spoke up another voice. “Admitting it openly like that. The cheek!”

“Is scandal any better if it’s kept a secret?” Jane asked the room as a whole.

She didn’t know. Society thought so, though. Likely many of the women sitting here, spooning up ices and consuming tarts, inhabited the same houses as their husbands, but lived wholly separate lives. Was suffering in silence better than leaving?

Could it be called suffering if those women never loved their husbands to begin with?

She wondered if she had made a terrible blunder.

The bonnets remained facing resolutely away, though chatter broke out again. Chatter in which Kirkpatrick’s name figured prominently. Kirkpatrick, and the women he ought to have married who might have been worthy of him.

Jane’s hands gripped the handle of her reticule. She wanted to shake these women, shout at them.
But he’s just a man
.
He’s not as perfect as you think. And I am not so terrible.

She couldn’t open her mouth again. If she relaxed her jaw the slightest bit, she’d do something for which she would never forgive herself. Cry, probably.

With jaw clamped shut, then, she pushed back through the door. The explosion of talk behind her was as sudden and loud as a rifle shot.