Betina Krahn (33 page)

Focusing frantically on what she had to do to get home, she didn’t hear him coming after her until it was too late. As she pulled open the heavy front door, he grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around.

“Antonia, you can’t go out there,” he ordered thickly. “You’re in no state to be out in the streets alone.”

“Take your hands off me.” Anger finally billowed into the emptiness in her savaged heart, giving her the strength she needed to jerk free. “I couldn’t possibly meet with more harm out there than I just did in here.”

Remington stood on the landing, watching the outline of her dark cloak fading into the shadows of the street as she fled him. His chest was heaving, but he couldn’t seem to get enough air. And for a long, harrowing moment afterward, all he saw was the anguish in her face.

When he finally turned back to the house, he did manage to see one more thing: Rupert Fitch, standing at the bottom of the steps with an obscene grin, scribbling on a pad that glowed a vile yellow in the dim light. The little wretch tugged the brim of his bowler mockingly, then turned to swagger down the carriage turn to the street.

It was the final calamity. It took every bit of his self-control to keep from going after the nasty little cockroach and pounding him into the cracks between the paving bricks. After a moment he stormed back into the house and through the drawing room, past the liquor cabinet and then on to his study, with his hand wrapped around a bottle.

He poured a drink and looked up to find Phipps and Manley in the doorway, looking distraught. “If you would be so good as to close the door,” he said with quiet ferocity. “This won’t be a pretty sight.”

They closed the door, and Remington poured and downed a large, fiery draught of brandy. He intended to get roaring, furniture-smashing drunk and make himself forget everything that had happened that night. But as he gulped a second shot of liquor, he found he couldn’t get it past a sudden constriction in his throat. He tried again and again to swallow, but finally had to spit it out. Bloody hell—he couldn’t even drown his guilt and misery in liquor!

Antonia rose in his mind as she had looked sitting in his bed: warmed and stripped of her defenses by his loving —then devoured like a lamb by a pack of wolves. She was hurting, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

Antonia. Fiery, spirited Antonia. Vulnerable, girlish Antonia, whose exploratory touch made him feel a kind of bone-deep pleasure he hadn’t known existed. It had felt so right to hold her, so perfect to be with her, that he had conveniently dismissed the fact that it had all begun as a callous plan for revenge, a favor done by one gentleman for others. It was meant to be a demonstration of male solidarity and cunning, but it had become a demonstration of male cruelty.

He saw again her blue eyes, dark with passion one moment and glazed with pain the next, and realized with sickening clarity that her anguish had only just begun. Originally, the conspirators had agreed to keep their revenge quiet, to savor it privately and use it as leverage to see that she ceased her matchmaking forever. But now, out of spite, they might spread the story from pillar to post. And the bulk of the blame, he knew, would fall on Antonia. The woman always lost more than the man in such a situation; men’s
indiscretions
were allowed to fade, but women’s sins were not. Antonia would be labeled and ostracized by decent society—ruined.

His blood began to roil, his hands clenched, and his
arms tensed with a violently protective impulse toward her. If only there was someone he could challenge or something he could do to see she didn’t get hurt more.

Out of an unguarded chamber of his heart came a thought that both shocked and disturbed him:
he could marry her
.

Every muscle in his body contracted in response, but he made himself face it squarely: marriage was the traditional remedy for such a moral transgression. Once a compromised couple was married and produced a child or two in acceptable order, a layer of respectability generally descended over their past, and the woman was reaccepted into society. He vibrated with tension.
Marriage
.

Then he thought of Antonia’s reaction to such a solution. Right now she would probably rather wear sackcloth and lash herself all the way to Canterbury Cathedral on her knees than even talk to him again. He could just imagine how she would take a proposal of marriage.

In spite of his nobler impulses, his whole body wilted with relief.

Calmer now, he stared off into the shadows of his darkened study, thinking of her and feeling a return of the emptiness he had felt as he watched her run away from him. If she had her way, he would probably never see her again. He lifted his glass and took a small sip, realizing that no amount of brandy could deaden the pain that caused him.

Gaflinger’s
hottest correspondent rushed back to his newspaper office to file a story on the scandal of the month—perhaps the year—and convince the editor to give it space on the front page of the next day’s edition.

Fitch had seen and heard it all: the men crashing through Remington Carr’s front door, their drunken
taunts, and the way they charged up to the earl’s bedchamber. He had made it halfway up the center-hall stairs himself, before the butler and footman found him there and tossed him out on his ear. But he had heard enough, and shortly he saw the drunken crowd retreating—nursing bloodied noses and aching eyes and ribs—before an enraged earl. And if that wasn’t enough to get him a frontpage headline, he had the good fortune to see Lady Antonia fleeing the house in tears and dishabille … pursued by the earl, clad only in a pair of trousers.

It didn’t take much to put two and two together, even for Rupert Fitch. The Ladies’ Man and Lady Antonia … caught in a love nest by a bunch of drunken aristocrats. It was a steamy scandal punctuated by flying fists and seasoned with womanly tears of disgrace. Fitch rubbed his hands together in anticipation. It all sounded like a fat raise in pay to him.

The sun came up at the usual time that next morning. The tea was hot, the scones were buttery, and the marmalade was sweet and golden, as always. But the ladies of Paxton House glanced up at the sky in confusion and stared forlornly at each other around the breakfast table, knowing that all was far from normal in their world.

Last night Antonia had come rushing through the front doors just before midnight and had gone straight to her rooms and slammed the door. She wouldn’t admit anyone or talk to anyone, not even Hermione. And as they collected in the hall outside her rooms, they heard her weeping as if her heart was breaking. It had been a long night indeed, and they knew without being told that it had to do with Remington Carr.

Then a copy of
Gaflinger’s
had been delivered to the doorstep, proving their conjectures and confirming their deepest fears. A front-page header proclaimed:

The writer of the piece, Rupert Fitch, declined to supply the names of the unhappy couple, but provided enough details about their adversarial relationship, including the mention that the lady and gentleman were prone to “public
wagering,” that it took little effort to deduce the identities of the lovers. The pair had been discovered in a compromising situation by a number of “leading gentlemen” paying a late call on the nobleman. And the details of the encounter were recounted with prurient accuracy: bare chest, unpinned hair, and all.

With heavy hearts the ladies realized that Antonia and his lordship had finally succumbed to the attraction growing between them. And instead of the start of a deep and enduring love, it had proved to be the disaster of a lifetime!

It was well on toward noon when Antonia emerged from her bedroom with puffy eyes and a pale, drawn face. She was dressed in unrelieved black, buttoned all the way from chin to waist, and her manner was every bit as grave as her retreat into full mourning colors suggested. Hermione and Eleanor hurried to her side the moment she set foot in the hushed drawing room.

“Are you all right, my dear?” Hermione asked, putting an arm through hers and directing her into their midst. The others gathered around, and she looked at their concerned faces and felt the dread that gripped her stomach loosen.

“You probably already know that … that for days now … that last night …” She paused and lowered her eyes, feeling her courage wane.

“We know all about it, Toni dear.” When she looked up, Aunt Hermione was holding a newspaper. “And by this evening I’m afraid the rest of London will, too,” she said gently, placing the paper in Antonia’s hands.

Antonia glimpsed the headline, swayed, and stumbled to the closest chair. In deepening shock she read the article that recounted in ghastly detail the humiliation she had suffered only hours before. The links to her and Remington Carr were unmistakable; what other nobleman and widow were involved in an ongoing and notorious wager? There
was her humiliation, in pitiless black and white, for all to read.

“It was that Rupert Fitch,” Eleanor said, watching her distress. “He has been snooping around the house for days—”

“Th’ miserable little sod,” Gertrude added with a fierce expression.

Antonia looked up and found them gathered around her chair, some scowling, others smiling sadly, but all clearly offering her their love and support. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I knew it was wrong to go, but I believed him when he said he had changed his mind about women, about us. And I believed he really cared—” Her voice caught on a ragged emotion and she had to pause to free it. “I don’t care what people say of me. But I know that my indiscretion will reflect upon Sir Geoffrey’s memory and on you. I only hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive.…”

“There ain’t no need to apolly-gize, Lady Toni,” Molly said, patting her shoulder and looking to the others to support her words. “You ain’t never held a single wrong against one o’ us. How could we blame ye fer falling into th’ same sin all women been caught in, one time or other … havin’ too soft a heart?” As the others nodded and gave her warm hugs, the few remaining worried expressions melted into rueful smiles.

Antonia didn’t think she had enough water or salt left in her to make two good tears, but she did. Then as she absorbed their touches and reassurances, the warmth of their affection transformed those tears into a grateful smile. In that moment she felt a bond with them that went far beyond good works or friendship or even ties of blood. It was an attachment made of love. She had once given help and comfort to them, and now found it returning to her, twelvefold.

“Poor Lady Toni,” Prudence said mistily, breaking the sweet, emotion-filled silence. “Just when you and his lordship were coming to an understanding. No doubt he is fit to be tied.”

Antonia froze as the shock of his betrayal descended with unexpected violence on her again. Remington. As she sat in his bed, savaged and humiliated by their taunts, they had congratulated him on doing a fine job of helping them with their revenge.

How could he have done such a thing to her?

How could she have trusted him?

“Fit to be tied?” she said, struggling to contain the pain inside her. “Fit to be
hanged
is more like it.” She met their confusion and dismay with anger that had fermented in the heat of the long night just past. “He knew all about it. In point of fact, he
planned
it.”

Paxton House was not the only place where the article was having an impact. Over the last two weeks
Gaflinger’s Gazette
had found its way into Buckingham Palace on a regular basis and had been circulated both below stairs and above—out of the queen’s sight, but not entirely out of her hearing.

When Victoria entered her private sitting room that same morning and glimpsed Beatrice and her daughter-in-law Alexandra whispering animatedly over a newspaper, she called them to account. They jerked the paper beneath the sewing table, stalling until she demanded to see what they were reading. As they produced the publication, she took note of the florid masthead and chastised them.