Somewhat Scandalous (Brambridge Novel 1) (16 page)

“Sit here,” she said as she pointed to the only chair. “I’ll get you some water.”

“Thank you.” Henry sighed as he slid into the old wing backed chair next to the banked fire. He had ridden all the way from London, barely stopping to find food. His thighs burnt from the constant thrust of the saddle and his back ached from the jolting gallop.

Agatha stepped into a small room beyond where he sat. Henry gazed upwards at the only ornament on the mantelpiece, Agatha’s experimental jar of jam,
his
jam.  Standing, he put out a tentative hand and pulled the solid glass jar towards him. Weighing it in his hand, he resumed sitting, tapping at its lid as he waited.

Agatha reappeared and held out a glass of water. “I’m sorry.” She cleared her throat and tried again. “I’m sorry that I left so quickly. I hope Patrick told you what had happened… when I heard my niece was in an orphanage, I…”

“I would have done the same.” Henry turned his gaze to her. The glints of the flames lit her eyes. “Although I might have asked for some help before I left.”

Agatha handed him the water and folded her arms across her chest.

“Do you know how worried Victoria is for you?” Henry took the glass and put it on the floor.

“I did not mean to cause any problems, I just had to get here as quickly as I could.”

“Where is the child now?”

“Upstairs in the bedroom, she’s fine now. She was quiet when I first found her. But she has already made a friend, Lord Stanton’s son.” Agatha coughed. “He’s a little older than her, but you could say they share a taste for the dramatic.”

Henry raised his eyebrows. Stanton’s son. Granwich had mentioned him. “Why didn’t you come straight back to London?”

Agatha hung her head. “We have no money,” she mumbled. “With Peter’s death there is nothing left. I am as I was before, a penniless woman.”

“But if you are as you were before, I repeat, why did not you come back?”

Agatha stared at the floor. “Because with Peter’s death, my links to you and your sister fall only to my friendship with Victoria. I would be living in your house, and with the scandal that has befallen me with Fashington, no man will want to marry me. I would effectively be living on your coin.”

“That would not matter to m… us.”

“And if I came back to London with a small child, what would the ton think? No matter how much I denied it, and despite the ludicrous age difference they would believe that she was illegitimate. Peter never came to town. No one would support me.”

“I would,” Henry said quietly. “I would support you. Nobody would dare contradict me.”

Agatha clenched her fists. “It’s not the case that they wouldn’t contradict you. But they would still discuss us. And we would still be penniless, living at your largesse.”

“You could marry me.”

Agatha stared at him. “And for what reason would you do that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why would you want to marry me, Henry? You’ve never cared for me. Don’t do this, don’t do that. You couldn’t wait to marry me off to Fashington.
What do you really want
?”

The words stuck in his throat. He couldn’t tell her about his need to marry to disguise his activities. His need to marry someone that would never love him.

His desperate realization that perhaps he cared for her more than he cared for himself.

“It seems like a good idea.”

Taking the jar of jam gently from Henry’s hand, Agatha placed it back on the mantelpiece. She stared at it intently. He watched as her eyes flickered over its form.

“No,” she whispered. “Not anymore.”

PART II

CHAPTER 19

5 years later, Brambridge 1813

Where was she? Agatha raced up the stairs to the small bedroom that Harriet slept in. The bed covers lay cleanly pulled over Harriet’s bed. They hadn’t been slept in at all.
Oh dear god
. What had she done now? Cramming a hand in her mouth, Agatha bit back a silent scream.

Outside, Isabelle, their decrepit pony, let out a large neigh. Agatha had left her tied to the cart, in her desperation to find out where Harriet had gone. She had driven the pony hard down the dusty tracks from Ottery St Mary, blearily swearing all the cant phrases she could remember. Harriet was meant to have been visiting Mrs. Denys.

Mrs. Denys hadn’t seen her for several months.

Clattering back down the stairs, Agatha glanced from side to side in the room. Her brother’s paintings hung around the walls, the hearth was dead. Her eyes came to rest on the jam jar on the mantel piece, its insides now completely white.

“I promised myself,” she whispered. Shouting, she swept the jar to the floor. “I’ve done everything
properly
.” The jar bounced on the hearth rug but did not shatter. Not even a shard broke from it. She fell to her knees and gathered up the cold glass. “I’ve still ruined everything.”

She knew where Harriet had gone. She was on that blasted smuggling boat the
Rocket
with
him
, the newly returned prodigal Lord Stanton. How many times had she told Harriet that he wasn’t going to come back? That the wanted man could not return whilst his father was alive?

Scrabbling at a box on the hearthside, she unearthed a piece of paper. They needed to leave Brambridge. Nothing good would come of Harriet’s experience.

Dipping her quill in a small well of ink, Agatha paused. Henry or Victoria? She shuddered. The last time she had seen Henry he had been standing outside the Prince of Wales Inn, smugly linked arm in arm with Celine, Celine the courtesan who had helped her escape from Charles Fashington.

Her heart still said Henry. Damn her heart.

Laying her quill on the table, Agatha rested her cheeks on her knuckles. Five years it had been. Five long years of looking after her niece. It had been hard. Hard not to try and clip Harriet’s wings, wanting to keep her safe, unnoticed, away from harm.

For the first year she had held her head high, completing whatever work the vicar’s wife set her, scraping together the money to educate Harriet, to keep the clothes on their backs. Each time that an object or thought reminded her of London she had pushed it back. She had made the right decision; there had been no more trouble. Life was quiet, she didn’t put a foot wrong.

Agatha closed her eyes and grimaced. But then she’d started to really listen to herself as she spoke to Harriet. It had been after James Stanton had dragged Harriet to the cottage and informed Agatha that she had been climbing the apple trees again. Heart in her mouth with fear, she hadn’t been able to contain herself.
No more of this theatre nonsense,
she’d said,
confine it to our home.
And then she’d stopped, a feeling of déjà vu sweeping over her.

She was telling her niece to stop doing everything she liked most in the world, because she feared for her safety. She
cared
for Harriet deeply. 

Henry had said just the same thing.
No more of these experiments, confine it to my home.
She’d hated him for it. Made up names for him. Blamed him when her behavior had finally cost her her freedom, the very thing that she was trying to protect.

Hiccupping, Agatha picked up her quill and grimaced. Look at her now, confined to a dark hovel, her niece all but lost, wanting to run back to the only people that had ever cared for her. Yes. Henry had cared for her, looked out for her. Even made the ultimate offer of marriage to help her.
She hadn’t been as alone as she had thought.

No. She couldn’t go to him. The shame was still too great. She wouldn’t be able to strip the emotion from her words, the desperate need to wind time back. There had been too many times she had picked up the pen to write to Henry, to accept his offer to ask him to look after her, to take her away. Until it was too late, the succession of his mistresses a continued talking point in the village. It was
just too late
.

Gazing at the walls, Agatha inventoried their worldly possessions. Books, sewing basket and paintings. She had boxes for them all. The hunting knife would stay, it was not hers to take. It had been in the cottage when she had taken possession of it, pushed behind the grate in the hearth.

Shuffling her legs, her feet knocked against the jam jar which rolled away from her. Agatha stared at the floor where the cold glass rested on the stone flags. It had done its job admirably well, a stark symbol of everything she had lost through being headstrong. She had only needed to put her hand in her pocket for her small book each time a rainbow reflected through the glass, or steam condensed on a window, and in reflex her eyes would search out the jar on the mantelpiece. She would draw her hand out of her skirts again and turn to another mundane activity—washing the vicar’s smock perhaps, or darning his wife’s table cloths.

And yet still they had come undone. Where was Harriet? She should have come back by now. She’d heard them searching the beach, the shouts that no survivors had yet been found. It was so hard not being able to do anything.

Sniffing, Agatha looked down at the paper. The only thing she could do would be to prepare for the future should Harriet come back. Would Victoria want to see her? Her letters had always been so dark, the melancholy pouring through them in the firmly rounded handwriting. She’d tried so many times to write back, and yet every time she had failed there too. There was nothing that she could say that would make anything any better.

Agatha’s thumb tensed and the nib of the quill snapped. With a gasp of frustration, she stood and retrieved another.

Dear Victoria,
she wrote.
I am writing to you as my friend, my only friend…

CHAPTER 20

The summer storm that had arisen suddenly calmed as quickly as it had arrived. Henry leaned against the veranda of Berale House and looked out towards the calm sea. If he looked back into the house he would lose all perspective, the ghosts of his mother and father would overwhelm him. Gods, why had Agatha had to choose Brambridge of all places to hide? He had been forced to reopen the family home. Staying anywhere else in Devon would have caused gossip. The villagers still talked of the six months his mother had spent alone in the house with no one to visit her. Henry clenched at the balustrade with tight knuckles. His mother had refused to see anyone before her death.

“Report, Ames,” he said dully.

“The last source I found said that Lord Foxtone might have known something, but he’s dead now.”

“What a waste of time.” Every avenue he explored lead to a dead end. He was never going to find out what his father had been looking for when he died. Seven years he had been searching now, and the nearest he had got was killing his father’s murderer. Closing his eyes, he inhaled slowly. “Any news on
Mister Herr
?”

Ames was silent for a few seconds. “I know you are not going to want to hear this, but all evidence of his activities died a few years ago.”

Pushing his hand into his coat, Henry gripped his pocket watch. “You don’t need to dance around the bush, Ames. At the time when Agatha left London, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“What else?”

“Renard says that Stanton still hasn’t found out what is going on here.”

Blinking, Henry switched gears as Ames continued with his report. “Bloody hell. Brambridge is becoming untenable. If the most formidable scout in the British army can’t work out what the hell is going on, then I’m going to need to move ports.”

“You might need to do that more quickly, sir. The
Rocket
nearly foundered last night with its… ahem… cargo. Stanton was knocked overboard.”

“Bloody hell.” Henry wiped a tired hand across his face.

“Er, on that subject, sir…”

“Yes?”

“Miss Aggie was seen visiting the post office this morning. She sent a letter to your sister.”

“Good god.
Finally
.”

Ames nodded. “There’s more. She’s packing, sir. All of those paintings you like are going into boxes.”

“Where’s Harriet?”

Ames kicked at a veranda post. “Missing.”

Henry stared at his valet. “Missing?
Missing
? Send Bill in. Now!”

Ames disappeared into the house. Henry stared down the pristine lawns to where the weathervane on his stables turned idly in the slight breeze.

“My lord?”

Henry turned. “William Standish,” he said slowly. “Where in the hell is Harriet Beauregard?”

Bill leaned his large form against the veranda post that Ames had kicked so violently only moments before. “We’re searching the beach. Ned’s covering the cliffs. We’ve got to do it quiet like. Some people would like nothing more than to see James hang.”

Henry nodded. Didn’t he just know it.

“Of course first in line would be Miss Aggie.” Bill smirked and then smoothed the smile off is face as Henry glared at him. “She’s a very proper woman of course. Proper boring.”

“She didn’t used to be,” Henry muttered. He folded his arms. “Did you know she can throw knives?”

“Agatha Beauregard?” Bill frowned. “And I thought Harriet was the dramatic one.”

“You don’t know the half of it."

“Sir!” Ames pushed his head through Henry’s study doors onto the veranda. “Jaquard says that Harriet has appeared at Miss Aggie’s. In his words, Jaquard said, ‘Miss Aggie looks fit to boil.’”

“Good grief.”

“What does that mean?” Bill stepped away from the veranda post.

“It means something extraordinary is about to happen.”

Ames popped his head back through the study doors. “The baggage has sent a note, Sir.”

Bill frowned. “Baggage?”

Henry sighed. “Ames’ code word for Miss Agatha. What does it say?”

“Er. Dear Lord Anglethorpe. You might wish to know that Lord Stanton is lying on the beach in a bad way. You may wish to tell your associates. Yours, Miss A. Beauregard.”

“Good God,” Bill breathed.

“It certainly is a relief he’s alive. Your head would have been on the block if he had died.” Henry jerked his head at Ames, who retired back inside.