Betina Krahn (4 page)

It was late in the evening; stale cigar smoke, tension, and the thick redolence of expensive liquors permeated the mahogany-paneled room. In one corner of the bar, under a gaslight, six members had gathered at a table to commiserate the demise of yet another cherished bachelorhood. Bertrand Howard, the dispirited groom, sat with his hands wrapped around a thick crystal tumbler filled with the club’s most venerable Scotch. His face was drawn, his eyes listless, and his shoulders sloped in uncharacteristic resignation. He was the man single-handedly responsible for enforcing the Board of Trade’s standards of weights and measures throughout the rough world of the London docks, yet here he sat, reduced to a despondent lump by the thought of his nuptials on the morrow.

The men who had gathered to give him a proper send-off watched his dread with genuine sympathy. They knew the pain of saying farewell to freedom and the unencumbered pleasures of the single life, for each of the five had
himself been wed within the last three years … each to a widow under the patronage of the infamous Lady Antonia Paxton.

“She’s a menace, pure and simple,” portly Sir Albert Everstone declared, punctuating each word with a jab of his Havana cigar. “A plague upon the future of men everywhere.”

“Just when you’re all set in a nice, cozy nest,” Lord Carter Woolworth said, staring into his glass, but seeing some vividly remembered scene in his mind, “she swoops down on you like the avenging angel of matrimony and —”

He halted; there was no need to say more. They never spoke of it outright. It wouldn’t have been gentlemanly for a man to admit untoward circumstances surrounding something so intimately associated with his honor as his marriage. The words “widow” and “Lady Antonia,” spoken in association with a man’s upcoming nuptials, were all that was necessary to communicate volumes to one who had experienced a similar fate. And in the way of men who suffer together, a bond of brotherhood had developed among her victims at White’s.

They shifted in their seats, blew clouds of smoke, and downed searing bolts of whiskey as the clock above the bar ticked away the moments toward dawn.

“I suppose it’s only fitting that she always wears black,” phlegmatic Basil Trueblood said wearily. He propped an impeccably clad elbow on the scarred tabletop and set his chin on his fist. “I understand it’s the customary color for executioners.”

Grimacelike smiles acknowledged the dark humor, but more than one finger tugged surreptitiously at a starched collar.

“I say, suppose we get our chaps in the Commons to introduce a bill making it a capital offense to conspire
against a man’s bachelorhood,” Lord Richard Searle proposed, gesturing with his glass.

“Wouldn’t help old Howard, here.” Everstone gave the overshot bridegroom a cuff on the shoulder that set him swaying. “He’s already trapped and trussed and ready for the roasting.”

“True. It’s too late for the lot of us,” Peckenpaugh grumbled. “We’ve all had to pay our cursed fines to the Bachelor’s Club already. But we might find a way to salvage our younger brethren who have not yet been caught in the nuptial noose. A man has a duty to posterity, after all.”

“The best thing we could do for posterity would be to put the diabolical Lady Matrimonia out of business … get rid of her,” Woolworth declared.

“Here, here!” Searle raised his glass and the others joined him.

It was as if the burn of the Scotch and cognac somehow seared Woolworth’s words into their sodden minds. By the time they lowered their glasses, the idea had seized their thoughts and sobered their vision.
Get rid of her.
Each of them was suddenly savoring the delicious possibility of revenge in his mind. Was it possible?

“There ought to be some way to put her in her place,” Searle mused.

“Some way to make her suffer as we have,” Trueblood said with a sigh.

“Humph!” Everstone blew a stream of smoke and rocked forward in his chair. “She ought to be leg-shackled like the lot of us. Find a fiend as foul as herself and chain her up with him for life. Some unscrupulous cad … a real blighter.”

“As fitting as that might be,” Lord Woolworth said, his eyes heating, “I cannot help wishing for a more personal bit of satisfaction.”

“Don’t we all,” Peckenpaugh agreed. “Damme if I
wouldn’t give a year’s winnings to catch her with
her
drawers down, in some fellow’s bed.”

Searle hooted a laugh. “The Dragon of Decency in a man’s bed? Perish the thought!”

But the thought didn’t perish, it lingered. And as the clock ticked relentlessly on, it blossomed into an idea.

“Lady Matrimonia caught with a man,” Woolworth said, contemplating it.

“Good God, yes. Perfect bit of revenge. But where would we find a man jack capable of taking her on and then taking her down?” Everstone demanded, rubbing his chin. “He would have to look like an archangel and have the soul of a demon … a bloke who despises women every bit as much as she hates men.”

There was a small commotion at the far end of the bar, and Basil Trueblood lifted his languid gaze above their circle to see what was happening. A new arrival was being greeted in hearty tones. Blinking and squinting through the haze, Trueblood made out the contours of an angular face, a pair of handsome dark eyes, and a fierce, quixotic smile. He sat a bit straighter, drawn to attention by the force of that countenance. He recognized those arrogant features and that elegant frame, which, even in the simple act of walking, communicated a self-possession that caused other men to step aside.

The object of Trueblood’s scrutiny made his way past several fellow club members to the empty end of the bar and answered the barman’s greeting with an order for a fire-breathing brandy from the club’s select stock. Trueblood sat abruptly straighter in his chair and grabbed the forearms of the men seated on either side of him. They followed his directional nod to the gentleman at the bar, then exchanged looks of puzzlement, then speculation. When the others demanded to know what had caught their
attention, they turned and also became riveted on the sight of him.

“Landon,” Everstone said on an indrawn breath. “Good God.”

“Handsome as Lucifer and tough as teakwood,” Peckenpaugh declared.

“A pure devil with the women, when he wants to be,” Woolworth muttered. “Which isn’t too damned often.”

“Not susceptible to muslin madness, that’s for certain,” Searle added, then frowned. “Runs with the radicals in Parliament … hot for that female suffrage business and a lot of other bally-nonsense.”

“For which reason the queen won’t allow him in her sight,” Trueblood whispered with rising excitement. “Says he’s godless and subversive … antimarriage, antimorality, and against the God-given order of things.”

Antimarriage.

They exchanged broadening smiles.

Remington Carr, ninth Earl of Landon, gulped his first brandy without giving it its due, an act that would have been considered barbarous any other hour. But at half past twelve in the evening the members of White’s generally dispensed with the niceties of indulgence in the club’s bar. And it was precisely that promise of license which had brought the well-heeled and controversial earl here this night. He was seeking a uniquely male preserve, a place where men could still exist in all their raw, uncomplicated splendor, a place where the wretched rules of duty, obligation, and above all,
domesticity
, held no sway.

The brandy carried a splendid burn and filled his head with exquisite vapors, which slowly unwound the coil of tension in the middle of him. As he closed his eyes and paid proper respect to a second brandy, the rigid angle of his shoulders softened, and the muscles outlined in his jaw smoothed. The smells of smoke and hard liquor, the drone
of male voices, and the familiar surroundings worked a subtle magic on his senses. He took a deep, liberating breath and felt his internal balance tilting back to equilibrium, unaware that he had collected the stares of a half-dozen men seated just behind him.

“I say—Landon!”

He looked up to find Carter Woolworth, eldest son of the old Duke of Eppingham, approaching with a drink-ruddy face and a hearty smile. Remington straightened and accepted his outstretched hand. “Woolworth. It’s been a while.”

“Too long. But then, when a man goes into the marital harness, he usually finds himself pulling on a very different course from his old school chums,” Woolworth said. “Look who’s here: remember Albert Everstone and Henry Peckenpaugh … ahead of us at Harrow?” He gestured to a group in the corner. “And Richard Searle and Basil Trueblood, they were behind us. And Bertrand Howard there, somewhat younger still. Come join us, Landon. I believe you’ll find the company and the conversation most … intriguing.”

Remington considered it as he glanced at the men who sat poised on the edge of their chairs watching him with undisguised expectation. Something in their urgent desire for his companionship did indeed intrigue him. When Carter Woolworth clapped a hand on his shoulder and steered him toward the group, he allowed himself to be drawn into their company.

One of the group quickly gave up his seat to Remington and went in search of another. From the moment he eased into the leather-clad chair and saw them inching their seats closer, he knew that they wanted something from him. But he was not at all prepared for the subject of their entreaty.

“Bertrand Howard here,” Woolworth announced, “is being married on the morrow.” He gave the groom a sympathetic
clap on the back. “We’re here to give him a final send-off.”

“Condolences.” Remington lifted his glass, wincing at the snared-rabbit look in the groom’s eyes.

“Indeed. And all the more so because”—Woolworth leaned closer and the others followed suit—“
it was not his idea.
”

“Well, I should hope not,” Remington said, his mouth curling up on one side as he scrutinized the poor wretch who was about to enter a life of matrimonial servitude. “He looks like a fellow with at least a modicum of common sense.” He also looked like a Newgate convict approaching the gallows.

“His dismal fate was engineered by a contriving and unscrupulous woman, you see … one Lady Antonia Paxton of Piccadilly,” Richard Searle announced, watching him for a reaction. When there was none, he added: “The fire-breathing Dragon of Decency.”

“The Medusa of Matrimony,” Albert Everstone put in bitterly. “So called because one glimpse of her face turns a man into a husband.”

“Especially if that man happens to be sitting buck naked in a woman’s bed,” Henry Peckenpaugh put in, and the rest grumbled agreement.

“She’s got a heathen and malicious mind, that woman,” Woolworth said, drawing Remington’s gaze back to him. “Sets her treacherous hooks for well-fixed men, baits them with curvy widows”—he made casting and reeling motions—“and then pulls in her hapless victims, smooth as silk.”

“And there’s naught a bloke can do, once he’s caught in one of her traps, but marry the treacherous little piece she’s saddled him with,” Everstone ground out, his jowls reddening. “I tell you, it’s right crimi-nal the way that woman
operates. Respectable as cottage pie one minute and devious as the devil’s backside the next.…”

Remington looked from Everstone to Woolworth to Searle, then to Peckenpaugh and Trueblood. They were taking young Howard’s demise hard, quite personally, in fact. It occurred to him that only the flare of righteous anger separated the expressions they wore from the haunted look of the despairing bridegroom. Suspicion bloomed in his mind, and as he looked from one to another, it hardened into certainty. He rolled his brandy snifter back and forth in his hands a moment, then leveled a searching look on his old school friend.

“You were married yourself not long ago, eh, Wool-worth?”

The young lord understood the question beneath the question. His face grayed and his jaw set like mortar as he visibly weighed the discomfort of the revelation against a desire for revenge on the cause of the alterations in his life. “I was indeed married some months ago”—he paused and swallowed hard—“after a particularly ugly encounter with the Dragon.” The confession, in this brotherhood of ruined bachelors, seemed somehow to lighten his soul. He sat straighter.

Remington turned to the middle-aged Everstone. “And you, Sir Albert?”

The portly MP huddled back in his chair, looking like a cornered bulldog. He glanced around the circle as he gathered the courage to say it. “We’re all her victims, every man jack of us. And we’re resolved that something must be done about the woman.”

In the silence that followed Remington felt the weight of their accumulating stares and finally caught a glimpse of what it was they wanted with him. “So you’ve some nefarious plot in mind, and you’re looking for someone to work out your bit of revenge for you.” For one brief moment
their eyes lighted with hope. He smiled and let them down as gently as possible. “I wish you luck in finding the right man.”

“But we thought … p-perhaps you …,” Wool-worth stammered.

“S-since you hate women and marriage so …,” Searle tried to finish for him.

Remington’s eyes glinted with amusement. “While it is quite true that I despise the archaic institution of marriage, I must disabuse you of the notion that I also despise all women. I hate only those who insist upon being married and maintained by men.”

“Which means virtually every woman in the world,” Trueblood concluded.

Remington’s shoulders quaked with a quiet laugh. “Very nearly. However, there is a new breed of woman about these days, gentlemen. Women of learning and enlightenment who see the inequity and injustice of the old social order and are ready to embrace new ways. They are fully capable of being educated and employed, and are quite capable of supporting themselves entirely. It is my opinion that we should give them the vote … give them places on school benches and in offices, mills, and factories … and give them some of the wretched headaches of governance, diplomacy, and commerce that we men have grappled with for centuries.”

He had scandalized them; he could see it in their shock-blanked expressions. And it was not altogether unexpected. His radical views on women and conventional morality had earned him a place of infamy among the hidebound upper orders. He made to rise, but Woolworth grasped his sleeve to halt him.