Season for Scandal (33 page)

By the time he was finished speaking, her eyes stung and she had to tuck her legs up so she made a ball. He needed her.
Her.
Need was love’s cousin. A nearer relation than she had ever expected. “You don’t blame me for leaving you?”

“No more than I blame myself.” With a sigh, he laid a hand on the crown of her head. “Jane, Jane. What are we going to do?”

His voice was tired, as though he’d asked himself the same question so many times that he no longer hoped for a reply.

Until she swallowed the catch in her throat and blinked back the tears in her eyes, she let his hand rest atop her coiled braids. Then she looked up at him; his hand slid to cradle her cheek.

“Here’s what we’re going to do.” She pulled the chess queen from her pocket and held it up. “We’re going to work out this plan together. I’ll be the wealthiest, wenchi-est helpmate you could possibly imagine. And when we’re done, you need never worry about Turner again.”

And if—when—that was done, what might the new year hold?

She had thrown away something that could have been lovely. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t retrieve it.

With an ingenious and bloodthirsty plan in place, Edmund almost welcomed the announcement the following evening that “Mr. Bellamy” had called.

“Show him in to my study,” he told Pye.

The stage was set. A half-full tumbler of whisky sat atop Edmund’s desk, along with several coffee cups, a plate with sandwich ends, and Edmund’s cravat, quickly yanked off and crushed into a pile. Before Turner entered, Edmund arranged himself in his chair: haggard, slumped, bitter. The picture of sleeplessness, wifelessness, rootlessness.

In the day since they’d last seen one another, Turner had recovered his oily good cheer. “Well, well, little lordling.” He booted the door shut and dropped into the chair opposite Edmund. “You look as though you’ve had a rough day of it.”

Edmund rubbed a hand along his jawline; stubble scratched at his fingertips. “A day in the House of Lords, arguing about who ought to be allowed to attend public meetings, and why, and how. All this after spending half of last night cooling my heels in Xavier House.”

“Ah. You were trying to win an audience with your fair lady.”

A bitter laugh burst forth. “For a while. But as I waited, and she refused to see me, I realized I’d rather be damned than help you steal again. So home I came.”

“You’ve chosen the—”

“It’s not I who’d suffer the most if our family secrets were told,” Edmund cut him off. “My mother and Mary and Catherine would bear the brunt of the scandal. So keep that in mind when you’re thinking up threats.”

He met Turner’s gaze. Studying the man closely for the first time since he’d entered the room, Edmund realized that he seemed smaller. Older. The ever-present smile hid crow’s-feet and wrinkles, burned into his skin by sunlight and years. The man’s hair was threaded with silver, his end-of-day stubble grizzled. Not even a dressmaker shop’s worth of lace at his throat and the cuffs of his bottle-green coat could hide the spots of age on his skin.

After all, he was just a man. A man of deep and abiding selfishness, yes, and one who must be stopped. But no longer did Edmund have to do that alone.

First he had to play out this scene, though. He must keep his wits about him.

“As for Lady Kay,” Edmund added in a mocking tone, “she has walled herself up tight. She and I are done with one another, Turner. Don’t look so surprised. You know I’ve had a great deal of practice with this sort of thing. Women getting in a rage; me paying their bills and never seeing them.”

Turner’s smile had gone glassy. “So you’ve told me before. Your family in Cornwall, I assume you mean.”

“Indeed. And I still regard my wife as part of my family, and I won’t have you interfering with her.” Again, a bitter laugh. “But why need I tell you this? You can try to speak to her or meet with her all you like. Wasn’t that your threat? She won’t even see you.”

“She will. She’s been seeing me all along. Nearly every day since she left you.”

So smug was the man’s expression that it was easy for Edmund to freeze; bluster his disbelief.

“It’s true, boyo. Haven’t you heard she’s been playing chess? Who d’you think’s been teaching her?”

The chess queen. Jane had held it up, a talisman of her promise to help him. A sick pang clenched Edmund’s stomach, a revulsion that evidently painted itself across his features.

Turner leaned back, satisfied. “Told you the game wasn’t played out yet. Next time I call on Lady Kay, I’ll get what I want from her. One way or another.”

“You disgust me.”

“Likewise,” Turner said. “Look at you. Look at the way you live. All walled up. Dragging yourself through each day. You might as well be in prison, boyo. You’ve no idea what to do with your life. You’re wasting it.”

“Wasting it? By holding my seat in Parliament? By taking care of the family you abandoned?” Many wounds had been opened yesterday; Edmund was still too raw to hide the pain of them. “If you want to see someone who’s wasting his freedom, I’ll fetch you a looking glass. For twenty years, you’ve been away from a woman you said you loved. From girls you say are your daughters, now grown up. You act as though you’ve some sort of moral right to your anger. Blaming me for separating you from them.”

“Naturally I blame you. It’s your doing that your family—my family—was destroyed, boyo. You know that as well as I.”

“I couldn’t have caused so much destruction on my own. You and my father laid the fire; all I did was strike the flint. Or declined to stamp out the blaze once started.”

He remembered Jane’s words:
A small betrayal to avoid a larger one.

There was nothing small about it. But it had been the lesser wrong, nevertheless.

“If you gave a damn about your lover or daughters,” Edmund added, “nothing would have kept you from going to their side as soon as you were able. Instead, you’ve frittered away months trying to torture me with the thought of you near them.” He laughed. “There’s no place for you anymore, is there? They’re strangers to you now. All you have left is your anger.”

He didn’t bother looking at Turner. Didn’t want to see what the man’s face showed. Because the words Edmund had spoken sounded uncomfortably like something he could have said of himself.

“If you know so much about love,” Turner said coldly, “why couldn’t you keep your lady wife at heel?”

“I don’t know anything about love. But neither do you.”

The years away had further twisted Turner. Perhaps his mind had dwelled on the wrongs done him, the recompense due him, because the place where his body dwelled was unbearable.

Maybe he had loved Edmund’s mother once. Maybe the separation from her—from Mary and Catherine—had been devastating, long ago. But he had waited so long, now he could do nothing but wait; he had let hate grow until it smothered love.

“If you wanted to go to Cornwall,” Edmund added, “to act as a father, or a husband, there’d be no danger in it at all. Because you wouldn’t hurt them if you loved them, and my feelings about the matter wouldn’t signify in the slightest.” Sifting through the litter on his desk, he found a coffee cup and tossed back its dregs, brewed and poured not long before Turner’s arrival. “You want to play chess? There. I’ve taken your pawns.”

Turner pursed his lips. “Maybe so. But I’ve still got your queen. Don’t be forgetting that.”

“No one takes possession of the queen. She’s the most powerful piece on the chessboard.”

“Without a king in play, though, she’s nothing.”

Edmund made a noise of disgust. “Enough metaphors. Lady Kirkpatrick is not a chess piece. And much as I am loath to have my family scandal become public, I
am
willing to turn a few Bow Street Runners onto your scent should any more jewels go missing in Mayfair.”

He slapped his hands on the desk and stood. “Now. Need I start saying ‘out’ again fifteen times until you listen and leave? Or will you depart without that sort of tedious repetition?”

“I’m already on my way.” Turner rose, the brilliant smile back in place. “Got to prepare a snare for a queen, don’t I?”

Edmund glared at the man until the door closed, until he was once again alone.

Then, second by unraveling second, he permitted himself to relax. Rolling his shoulders; rubbing at the crease between his brows. The scene had played out well, he thought; Turner would have been suspicious if Edmund didn’t fight back. If he didn’t take any action, or threaten any way to stop the man. Instead, he had blended anger and frustration, and Turner had left in a state of uncertain triumph.

Or so Edmund hoped.

He had done all he could; the next move must be Turner’s. Then Jane would play. And then, if all went well . . . checkmate.

He sat again and scrawled a few notes: one to Jane, then a few other necessary missives, and had them all dispatched by messenger. In case Turner was watching the house, Edmund instructed that the messenger take care not to be followed while delivering the notes.

Edmund had learned something new about his opponent today: more than he wanted his lover, his daughters, Turner wanted revenge. He wanted Edmund, broken, more than he wanted a family, whole.

Unfortunate, because it meant Turner had nothing to lose. But there was no way he would win, either.

Because Jane had been right about Edmund: he didn’t have an empty heart. When he thought himself in danger, his first impulse was to protect not himself, but the women who depended on him. To marry, to father an heir that would secure the barony so his mother and sisters would never be homeless. Not knowing what else to do, he sent them hats and books, but he also gave them much more: every day, they were in his thoughts; every day, he managed his affairs from afar so their lives would run smoothly.

He hadn’t thought he loved them. After so many years apart, he didn’t even know them. But he certainly loved the idea of a family. And for now, that was enough.

It had been enough to drop him to one knee before a woman who couldn’t refuse his proposal. Through great good fortune, she happened to love him at the time. Because if she hadn’t loved him, she’d never have become dissatisfied with a marriage of convenience. She would never have left him.

And she would never have led him to think about what he was missing.

There was no sense in wishing his life had played out differently. No sense in it, and yet he ached for what he had never had. Loving parents. Sisters who looked up to him.

A daughter, bold as her mother, or a son and heir with merry hazel eyes.

A wife who knew his every secret and still loved him.

Quite a Christmas wish list, was it not? Too much; far too much to ask.

Time for a distraction. Rising from his desk, he hunted the bookshelves of his study for something to read. Something light and hopeful to help him pass the long, quiet hours of night.

His hand seized upon a slim volume and pulled it out.

The title page smirked at him.
The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
.

“Excellent,” he muttered, turning the page. Melancholy. Depression. Fighting and death. The guards were skulking around the battlements of Elsinore Castle, looking for the ghost of their king, who had been killed when his brother poured poison in his ear—an apt description of gossip if Edmund had ever heard one. “Not exactly what I was looking for.”

He flipped another page; then a passage caught his eye. A speech by the guard Marcellus:

Some says, that ever ’gainst that Season comes;
Wherein our Saviour’s Birth is celebrated—

It was about Christmas. And during that season,

The Bird of Dawning singeth all night long:
And then (they say) no Spirit dares stir abroad,
The nights are wholesome, then no Planets strike,
No Fairy takes, nor Witch hath power to Charme:
So hallow’d, and so gracious is the time.

Hmm. That was rather nice.

More than nice, actually. Edmund read it again, subsiding into the chair behind his desk. Marcellus was a minor character in the play. He turned up near its beginning to offer information, but also good cheer. When his countrymen became afraid, Marcellus remained optimistic. Christmas, he said, was the time for things to return to their rightful place. Ghosts slept peacefully, and would-be charmers lost their power.

If Christmas was the season for the supernatural to wane, then might the natural go on the wax? With fairies and witches hobbled, could people accomplish miraculous feats?

Like reconciliation with one’s family, and the past’s ghosts laid to rest? Peace in one’s heart? Goodwill toward men? The very idea seemed miraculous, after all these years.

He let
The Tragedie
fall shut.

How odd that he should end in a marriage of convenience when his mother had done the same and been so unhappy. But she had already given her heart away. Edmund kept his locked up tight.

Or if Jane was to be believed, he had given it everywhere. But he’d reserved little for her, though she deserved it more than anyone.

Not merely because he was obligated to her, or bound to her by law. No, it was because he realized that Jane would be satisfied with nothing less than the best of him. Not the best bonnets or horses or pastimes. Him.

And so if he could find a way to please her—well.

Well.

That would really be worthwhile.

Chapter 25

Concerning the Queen’s Gambit

The days before Christmas fled in a tearing hurry. Edmund’s body spent one more day in the House of Lords, but his attention was entirely elsewhere. Scribbling a storm of notes, sent around London in servants’ baskets and tucked in with the post. Arranging the pieces on the chessboard, to use an analogy Turner might appreciate.

As the sun began to set on Christmas Eve, Edmund covered himself in an old, battered cloak and hat, then slipped through the back exit of the house. Striding quickly, he cut across the corner of Berkeley Square and joined the throngs of tardy shoppers and servants clutching stacks of parcels and carrying just-plucked geese for tomorrow’s dinner, scolding the ever-present urchins whose grubby hands darted into pockets and tugged at reticules. The air smelled of roast meat and carried the tang of cool weather before rain rolls in.