Last Night's Scandal

  “I don’t see what good my shivering in a dank, crumbling old castle does my brothers,” he said. “I can think of no more ridiculous errand than traveling four hundred miles to save a lot of superstitious laborers from hobgoblins. Not that I understand what your villagers are afraid of. Every castle in Scotland is haunted. Every place is haunted. Battlefields. Trees. Rocks. They love their ghosts.”

  “It’s more than ghosts,” his father said. “There have been shocking accidents, bloodcurdling screams in the dead of night.”

  “They say a long-dormant curse was reawakened when your cousin Frederick Dalmay accidentally trod on the grave of Malcom MacFetridge’s great-great-grandmother,” his mother said with a shudder. “Frederick’s health began to fail immediately thereafter. In three years, he was dead!”

  Lisle looked about him, wishing—not for the first time—there was someone he could turn to and say, “Do you believe this?”

  Though his parents were no more capable of seeing reason than Lisle was of seeing unicorns, his own sanity demanded that he introduce facts into the conversation.

  “Frederick Dalmay was ninety-four years old,” he said. “He died in his sleep. In a house in Edinburgh ten miles from the supposedly cursed castle.”

  “That isn’t the point,” said his father. “The point is, Gorewood Castle is Dalmay property and it’s falling to pieces!”

  And you never cared about it until now, Lisle thought. Cousin Frederick had left the castle years ago, and they’d let it be neglected.

  Why, suddenly, had it become so important?

  Why else? He was home and couldn’t ignore them the way he ignored their letters. It was a ploy to keep him in England. Not because they needed him or wanted him. Merely because they thought this was where he ought to be.

  “What does he care?” his mother cried. “When has Peregrine ever cared about us?” She flung herself out of her chair and toward one of the windows, as though she would hurl herself out of it in despair.

  Lisle was not alarmed. His mother never threw herself out of windows or dashed her brains out against the chimneypiece. She only acted as though she’d do it.

  Drama was what his parents did instead of thinking.

  “What monstrous crime did we commit, Jasper, to be punished with this stonyhearted child?” she wailed.

  “Oh, Lisle, oh, Lisle.” Lord Atherton put his hand to his head and assumed his favorite King Lear pose. “Who can a man turn to if not to his eldest son and heir?”

  Before he could launch into the usual speech about ingratitude and marble-hearted fiends and thankless children, Mother took up the cause. “This is our payment for indulging you,” she said, her eyes filling. “This is our reward for putting you into the care of Rupert Carsington, the most irresponsible man in England.”

  “Only the Carsingtons matter to you,” Father said. “How many letters have you written to us, in all the years you’ve spent in Egypt? I can count them on one hand.”

  “But why should he write, when he never thinks of us?” said Mother.

  “I make a simple request, and he answers with mockery!” Father stormed to the fire, and struck his fist upon the mantelpiece. “By God, how am I to bear it? With worry and care, you’ll drive me to an early grave, Lisle, I vow.”

  “Oh, my dearest love, don’t say so!” Mother shrieked. “I could never go on without you. I should swiftly follow you, and the poor boys will be orphaned.” She hurtled away from the window to sink into a chair, and commenced sobbing hysterically.

  His father flung out his hand, indicating his distraught spouse. “Now look what you’ve done to your mother!”

  “She always does that,” said Lisle.

  Father let his hand fall, and turned from him in a huff. He drew out his handkerchief and pressed it into Mother’s hand—in the nick of time, too, because her own would soon need wringing out. She was the most prodigious weeper.

  “For the boy’s sake, we must pray that dreadful day never comes,” Father said, patting her shoulder. His eyes filled, too. “Lisle, naturally, will be off on his jaunts among the heathens, leaving his brothers to uncaring strangers.”

  His brothers already lived among uncaring strangers, Lisle thought. If orphaned, they’d go to one of his father’s sisters. Though Lord Atherton had lost one—Lord Rathbourne’s first wife—some years ago, the other six were in fine fettle, and wouldn’t notice a few more added to their own large broods. It wasn’t as though any of them actually cared for their children directly. Servants, tutors, and governesses reared one’s offspring. Parents had little to do but put their noses in when not wanted and find ways to annoy everybody and devise ridiculous and inconvenient schemes to waste one’s time.

  He wouldn’t allow them to manipulate him. If he let himself be drawn into the emotional whirlpool, he’d never get out.

  The way to keep on solid ground was to keep to the facts.

  “The boys have scores of relatives to look after them, and more than sufficient money to live on,” he said. “They won’t end up abused and starved in an orphanage. And I will not go to Scotland on a fool’s errand.”

  “How can you be so heartless?” his mother cried. “A family treasure faces extinction!” She sank back in the chair, letting her husband’s handkerchief drop from her trembling fingers as she prepared to swoon.

  The butler entered. He pretended, as he always did, that an emotional extravaganza was not in progress.

  The carriage, he told them, was waiting.

  The drama didn’t end with their departure, but continued throughout the drive to Hargate House. Thanks to the late start and the press of traffic, they were among the last to arrive.

  Lisle’s parents resumed their reproaches before and after greeting their hosts and the assorted Carsington husbands and wives, and in the interval before they made their way through the crowd to the guest of honor.

  The birthday girl, the Dowager Countess of Hargate, appeared unchanged. Lisle knew, thanks to Olivia’s letters, that the old lady still gossiped, drank, and played whist with her friends—known among the Carsingtons as the Harpies—and still found ample time and energy to terrorize her family.

  At present, garbed in the latest and most expensive mode, a drink in her hand, she sat on a sort of throne, the Harpies clustered about her like ladies in waiting to a queen. Or perhaps like vultures about the queen vulture, depending on one’s point of view.

  “You’re looking sadly peakish, Penelope,” she told Mother. “Some bloom when they’re breeding and some don’t. A pity you’re not one of the blooming ones—except for your nose. That’s red enough, and your eyes, too. I shouldn’t weep so much, was I your age, nor dropping brats, either. If you’d asked me, I’d have advised you to stick with the birthing business when once you’d started, instead of stopping and leaving it until all your looks went and your muscles stretched past mending.”

  Leaving Mother temporarily speechless and red in the face, her ancient ladyship nodded at Lisle. “Ah, the wanderer returns, brown as a berry, as usual. It’ll be a shock to you, I daresay, seeing girls fully clothed, but you’ll have to bear it.”

  Her friends caught the pun and laughed loudly.

  “Bare it, indeed,” said Lady Cooper, one of the younger ones. She was only about seventy. “What will you wager, Eugenia, that the girls wonder if he’s as brown everywhere as his face?”

  Beside him, Mother gave a faint moan.

  The dowager leaned toward him. “Always was a missish little prune,” she said in a stage whisper. “Never mind her. It’s my party, and I want the young people to have their fun. We’re awash in pretty girls, and they’re all panting to meet our great adventurer. Run along now, Lisle. If you find Olivia getting engaged to anybody, tell her not to be ridiculous.”

  She waved him away, and reverted to torturin
g his parents. Lisle abandoned them without the slightest twinge of conscience, and let himself become lost in the throng.

  The ballroom, as the dowager had promised, was overrun with beautiful girls, and Lisle was by no means immune to the species, fully clothed or not. He certainly wasn’t averse to dancing. He found partners easily, and danced happily.

  All the while, though, his gaze roamed the crowd, seeking one head of violently red hair.

  If Olivia wasn’t dancing, she must be playing cards—and fleecing whoever was dim-witted enough to play with her. Or maybe she was in a dark corner, getting engaged again, as the dowager suspected. Olivia’s many broken engagements, which would have ruined a girl of lesser fortune and less powerful family, wouldn’t discourage suitors. They wouldn’t mind her not being a beauty, either. Olivia Carsington was a catch.

  Her late father, Jack Wingate, had been the feckless younger son of the recently deceased Earl of Fosbury, who’d left her a fortune. Her stepfather and Lisle’s uncle, the Viscount Rathbourne, had pots of money, too, and he was heir to the Earl of Hargate, who had even more.

  Between and during dances, she was a frequent topic of conversation: the daring gown she’d worn to the coronation last month, her carriage race with Lady Davenport, the duel she’d challenged Lord Bentwhistle to—because he’d whipped a footboy—and so on and so on.

  She’d been “out” in Society for four years, she still wasn’t married, and she was still the talk of London.

  This didn’t surprise him in the least.

  Her mother, Bathsheba, came from the rotten branch of the DeLucey family: a famous lot of swindlers, imposters, and bigamists. Before Bathsheba Wingate married Lord Rathbourne, Olivia had shown clear signs of following in the ancestral footsteps. Since then, an aristocratic education had hidden the signs, but Olivia’s character, clearly, had changed not at all.

  Lisle remembered some lines from a letter she’d written to him in Egypt, shortly after his first brother was born.

  I look forward to the day when I become a Bachelor. I should like to live an unsettled life.

  Judging by the talk, she’d succeeded.

  He was about to start actively searching for her when he noticed the men preening and jockeying for position in one corner of the room—competing for the current reigning beauty, no doubt.

  He went that way.

  The crowd was so thick that at first all he could see was the fashionably absurd coiffure rising above the men’s heads. Two birds of paradise seemed to have their beaks stuck into a great loop of . . . red hair. Very red hair.

  Only one girl in all the world had that hair.

  Well, then, no surprise to find Olivia at the center of a crowd of men. She had rank and a thumping great dowry. That would more than make up for. . .

  The crowd parted then, giving him a full view. She turned his way and he stopped short.

  He’d forgotten.

  Those great blue eyes.

  For a moment he stood, lost in a blue as deep as an Egyptian evening sky.

  Then he blinked, and took in the rest, from the ridiculous birds hanging over the stiff loops of red hair to the pointed slippers peeping out from under the ruffles and furbelows at the hem of her pale green gown.

  Then his gaze went up again, and his brain slowed to a crawl.

  Between coiffure and shoes appeared a graceful arc of neck and smooth shoulders and a creamy bosom more than amply on display . . . and lower down, an armful of waist curving out gracefully into womanly hips. . .

  No, that had to be wrong. Olivia was many things. Beautiful wasn’t one of them. Striking, yes: the fatally blue eyes and the vivid hair. Those were hers and no one else’s. And yes, that was her face under the absurd coiffure . . . but no, it wasn’t.

  He stared, his gaze going up then down, again and again. The room’s heat was suddenly beyond oppressive and his heart was beating strangely and his mind was a thick haze of memories where he was searching to make sense of what his eyes told him.

  He was dimly aware that he was supposed to say something, but he had no idea what. His manners had never been quite so instinctive as they ought to be. He was used to another world, another clime, other kinds of men and women. Though he’d learned to fit in this one, fitting in didn’t come naturally to him. He’d never learned to say what he didn’t mean, and now he didn’t know what he meant to say.

  At the moment, everything anybody had ever done to civilize him was lost. He beheld a vision that stripped away all the rules and meaningless phrases and proper ways to look and move and shredded them to bits and blew them away.

  “Lord Lisle,” she said, with a graceful dip of her head that made the birds’ plumes flutter. “There’s a wager on, as to whether you’d turn up for Great-Grandmama’s party.”

  At the sound of her voice, so familiar, Reason began to slog its way through the muck of confusion.

  This was Olivia, Reason said. Here were the facts: her voice, her eyes, her hair, her face. Yes, her face was different because it had softened into womanliness. Her cheeks were softer, rounder. Her mouth was fuller. . .

  He was aware of people talking, of this one asking that one who he was, and another answering. But all of that seemed to be in another world, irrelevant. He couldn’t see or hear or think anything but Olivia.

  Then he discerned the glint of laughter in her eyes and the slight upturn of her mouth.

  He came back to earth with a thunk that should have been audible on the other side of the great ballroom.

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he said.

  “I’m glad to see you,” she said, “and not merely because I’ve won the wager.” She gave him one slow, assessing look that slid over his skin like fingertips and sent heat arrowing straight to his groin.

  Ye gods, she was more dangerous than ever.

  He wondered whose benefit that look was for. Was she simply exercising her power or was she trying to provoke all her admirers simultaneously by pretending he was the only man in the room?

  Excellent work, either way.

  All the same, enough was enough.

  She wasn’t a little girl anymore—if she’d ever been a little girl—and he wasn’t a little boy. He knew how to play this game. He let his gaze drift down again to her breasts. “You’ve grown,” he said.

  “I knew you’d mock my hair,” she said.

  She knew he wasn’t referring to her hair. One thing Olivia had never been was naïve.

  But he took the hint and dutifully regarded the coiffure. Though it towered over many other men, he was tall enough to look the birds in the eye. Other women wore equally fantastical hair arrangements, he was aware. While men’s fashions had grown increasingly sober in recent decades, women’s had grown increasingly deranged.

  “Some birds have landed on your head,” he said. “And died there.”

  “They must think they’ve gone to heaven,” said a male voice nearby.

  “Looks like rigor mortis,” Lisle said.

  Olivia sent him a fleeting smile. Something curious happened inside his chest. Something else happened lower down, not at all curious and all too familiar.

  He willed the feelings into oblivion.

  She couldn’t help it, he told himself. She was born that way, a Dreadful DeLucey through and through. He mustn’t take it personally. She was his friend and ally, practically his sister. He made himself picture her as she’d been on the day when he first met her: a skinny twelve-year-old who’d tried to brain him with his sketchbook. A provoking, dangerously fascinating girl.

  “I dressed for you,” she said. “In honor of your Noble Quest in Egypt. I ordered the silk for my gown to match the green of the Nile in your watercolors. We had to use birds of paradise because we couldn’t find ibises.”

  Voice drop
ping to a conspiratorial tone, she leaned toward him, offering a nearer and fuller view of alabaster flesh, curved precisely to fit a man’s hands. At these close quarters he was acutely aware of the faint sheen of moisture the ballroom’s heat had brought to her skin. He was aware, too, of the scent of a woman arising therefrom: a dangerous blend of humid flesh and a light, flowery fragrance.

  She should have warned him, drat her.

  Think about the skinny twelve-year-old, he counseled himself.

  “I wanted to dress like one of the ladies in the copies of the tomb paintings you sent,” she went on, “but that was forbidden.”

  The scent and the stress on forbidden were softening his brain.

  Facts, he told himself. Stick to facts, like. . .

  Where were her freckles?

  Perhaps the room’s gentle candlelight made them less obvious. Or maybe she’d powdered her breasts. Or had she bleached them with lemon juice?

  Stop thinking about her breasts. That way madness lies. What’s she saying? Something about tomb paintings.

  He filled his mind with images of flat figures on stone walls.

  “The ladies in the tomb paintings are not, technically speaking, dressed,” he said. “When alive, they seem to be tightly wrapped in an extremely thin piece of linen.”

  The costume left nothing to the imagination, which was probably why even he—who preferred to stick to facts and leave the realm of imagination to his parents—had no trouble at all picturing Olivia’s curvaceous new body wrapped in a thin piece of linen.

  “Then, when they’re dead,” he went on, “they’re overdressed, tightly wrapped in layers of linen from head to foot. Neither form of attire seems practical for an English ball.”

  “You never change,” she said, drawing back. “Always so literal.”

  “Leave it to Lisle to throw away a golden opportunity,” said another male voice. “Instead of complimenting the lady—as any man with eyes must do—and trying to win her favor, he must wander into a boring lecture about pagan customs.”