Scandal on Half Moon Street Page 2

  She hadn’t even been sufficiently aware to glance a goodbye to Frederick before she’d left. And that would hurt him most of all.

  Under cover of their turn, Anne risked a look back toward the coffee house; Mama was too busy talking to notice. The pedestrians opposite the jeweler’s shop parted like a curtain, and Frederick strode across that impromptu stage, his long restless strides clipping across the sidewalk, coattails flapping and his hat catching a brief flash of light from the fickle sun. Then the clouds closed in again, they turned the corner, and he was gone, leaving behind the usual dull, ugly, yearning ache in her heart.

  And Mama continuing to talk.

  “Oh, of course you know the sort of thing I mean, girl, you’re no fool despite your silly ways. You know how to draw a man on without encouraging any nonsense from him.”

  Right. That explained everything. Whatever she was talking about.

  Even without a word in response, Mama rattled on. “It’s a matter of fluttering your eyelashes at him without — without fluttering your eyelashes. Meeting his eyes without your look devolving into a stare. That sort of thing.”

  Oh, well, yes, that sort of thing. She should have expected this topic of conversation to dominate, all the way back to Half Moon Street and probably for the rest of the year. As if Mama were Polonius and she Laertes, and His Grace, the Duke of Cumberland, was the answer to all of life’s mysteries. More to the point, as if Mama were serious but not as much as she could have been.

  And Anne thanked her otherwise sleeping guardian angel for that small mercy.

  Chapter Two

  Tuesday, December 8, 1812 (continued)

  It would be the most marvelous of satisfactions to throw his coffee into that arrogant duke’s face, right in front of Satan and everyone in the coffee house. But that would be the single quickest means of destroying his dreams for the future before they ever began. Even after all his studies, his career in law could still be ruined, and the far more distant dream of Parliament yet hung by a thread. And Anne could never be his until at least the legal career was solidified and safe.

  Meaning he had to show respect, if not deference, to the upper-class scoundrel leering at the woman he loved.

  Instead, Frederick dropped a few coins on the table and hurried past Cumberland without deigning to look at him. It was the best insult he could manufacture on the spur of the moment, and it was humiliatingly inadequate.

  Of course, by the time he reached the street, Anne and her mother had vanished down the crowded sidewalk. He clutched the doorframe and held on as a parasol-wielding matron and her four liveried footmen, their arms piled with packages, buffeted him aside. Even with the Season over, even with all the sportsmen and most of the families gone from town to enjoy the holidays at their home hearths, the City was still far too crowded. A man could barely breathe some days.

  Even when some titled plague wasn’t ogling the only woman he’d ever love.

  Someday — someday he was returning to the country and starting his own practice out in the clean, open air. And he intended to have Anne at his side when he escaped.

  And that titled plague could die of his own swollen head for all Frederick cared.

  Solutions; he needed solutions, for that he needed information, and he knew just where to turn. Frederick waited until a phalanx of strolling ladies, linked arm in arm, sauntered past with their line of open stares, then he darted into the pedestrian stream. He hurried past the iron monger’s, past Clark & Weatherly, goldsmiths, past St. Dunstan-in-the-West, and turned in at the Temple Bar. His chambers, all the way at the back of King’s Bench Walk and practically in the river, had never seemed so far. And with Anne’s absence, the sun refused to shine again; it would be raining before evening. Again.

  He stuck his head into his clerk’s dingy office in passing. “Debenham, can you spare a minute?”

  Debenham glanced up from his ledger, plucking Benjamin Franklin spectacles from his nose, and without their softening effect, his squinting eyes sharpened. “You seem upset.”

  “Really.” Frederick strode down the hall and left open his office door. The elderly clerk moved slowly but, like the mills of the gods, with inexorable surety.

  When they were settled, Frederick with his feet propped on his battered desk — he couldn’t possibly make it worse — he asked, “You’re the font of all gossip within the Inns. What can you tell me about the Duke of Cumberland?”

  “Cumberland, is it?” Debenham pursed his lips. “Ernst Anton Oldenburg, First Duke of Cumberland.” He rolled the name off his tongue as if relishing its foreignness and seemed disappointed at the plain, unadulterated English of the title that followed. “Some say crown prince of the Kingdom of Saxony.”

  “But only the first in the current Cumberland creation?” Not so bad; if he had to take on a duke, at least it wasn’t the fifteenth in an ancient line.

  “A courtesy title, intended for younger members of the royal house. Sons and nephews of kings and princes.” The rickety wooden chair creaked like the old clerk’s bones as Debenham leaned back. “Gives some credence to the rumors of royalty.”

  A chill forced its way up Frederick’s spine, invaded his brain, and froze his thoughts. A first duke, maybe, but semi-hemi-demi royalty, once or twice removed? That brute couldn’t really be a crown prince. No, he couldn’t. Lacking evidence to the contrary, Frederick would dismiss that claim out of hand.

  “King George, bless him, dropped the title of Cumberland on Herr Oldenburg when he arrived in London in December of 1806. Not so very long after Jena and Auerstedt, come to think of it, when Saxony fell beneath Napoleon’s boot. But not only men of the highest rank fled in the aftermath of that fiasco and pretenders aren’t uncommon.” Debenham spread his fingers in front of his waist, turned his hands over and stared at his palms, then turned them back over. With the winter's gloom dimming the room, even the ink stains on his fingertips were less noticeable. “I’ll presume, however, since you specifically requested gossip that your main interest lies not with his past but his present.”

  “Your perspicacity continues to amaze.” Frederick gritted his teeth when Debenham’s glance shot higher, and he forced himself into a teasing smile. Patience; he needed the information and the slow-boat chatterbox before him needed the occasional audience. It was a fair trade.

  And perhaps the smile was sufficiently persuasive, because Debenham returned his attention to his hands and continued. “Cumberland is well known as a ravager of the innocent, and his name has been linked to the ruination of several debutantes, as well as four or five single ladies approaching the danger years of spinsterhood. All of good breeding and spotless backgrounds.” Still he examined his ink-stained fingers, slow, frustrating complacency personified. “To employ an old-fashioned archery term—”

  The urge to sigh out his aggravation almost overwhelmed Frederick. But again, not quite. Giving in would insult his clerk and solve nothing. “The upshot, yes.” It was one of Debenham’s favorite words and one he employed all too often. And that was saying a lot, because Debenham knew a lot of words.

  The bird’s-foot lines around the elderly clerk’s eyes crinkled, deepening until the window’s sunlight no longer penetrated their depths. Frederick winced. Perhaps he hadn’t hidden his frustration quite as well as he’d hoped. Well, Debenham would be allowed his little revenge.

  “Indeed yes. The upshot of all this is that the ton abounds with tales of Cumberland’s indiscretions and liaisons, the names of women he’s ruined and abandoned, or who fled town to avoid his attentions.” Debenham’s sharp eyes glittered; even within his bottomless appetite for salacious gossip, clearly Cumberland's rumors counted amongst his favorites. “Some of these unfortunates reappeared at a later date, married to perfectly respectable tradesmen, merchants, physicians. Attorneys.”

  Debenham glanced up. His drawling tone had butchered the tradesmen’s respectability and left no doubt as to his true meaning.

  The once upper-cru
st ladies had all reappeared on a socially diminished plane of life. His Nibs, the hedonistic Duke of Cumberland, had debauched them, and they’d then accepted whatever husbands they could find.

  If only there were some innocent path to that same end, for Anne and him, some way that wouldn’t risk bruising her vivacious, sensitive, society-loving soul — or worse. But even that diminished level of raw cynicism ripped a cutlass through his guts. Of course Lady Wotton would agree to a marriage between Anne and Frederick, if her daughter had been otherwise ruined for scintillating society, even if only by innuendo. But what would such an event do to Anne?

  He couldn’t ask her to leave her level of society for his without making a concerted effort on her behalf. He had to haul himself up, rather than her down.

  And he’d not countenance some brute ruining her life before it truly began.

  No matter what.

  “Others simply haven’t reappeared.”

  Frederick hauled in a deep breath. Numbness travelled up his hands to his wrists, his arms, his heart. But the fearsome question had to be asked. “Has anyone ever called him out?”

  Again Debenham’s gaze jerked up, this time startled. “Courageous, young master, but not well considered. This is a Continental nobleman, you know, not one of our less useful English collection. He served with the King’s German Legion in the Peninsular campaign with General Sir John Moore, and proved himself a capable officer as well as a brilliant swordsman and crack shot.”

  So challenging His Nibs to a duel was tantamount to suicide: gallant but silly. And of absolutely no assistance to Anne. Oh, the memory of her haunted, empty eyes, her porcelain skin gone waxy beneath the weight of that dissipated stare, her clasped hands and taut face and overall air of bewilderment. There had to be some way to rescue her.

  Drumming his fingers on the chair arm wasn’t helping. He needed to remove Cumberland from Anne’s presence. Clearly, physical threats were useless and social ones worse than that. Even if he, Frederick, had the most sordid details of His Nibs’ most sordid affair, the blasted man would tell him to publish and be—

  “Is there anything else?” Debenham half-rose, leaning on the chair arms with stiffened elbows. His eyes continued to glitter, hard and direct.

  He deserved his little revenge. And if Frederick kept telling himself that, he might someday believe it.

  His own appetite for shuffling insurance policies and counter-claims was shot, along with the darkening afternoon sunlight. No meetings scheduled, no client likely to call, and if one did, Debenham would know where to find him. Frederick again shrugged into his coat, grabbed his hat and gloves, and rejoined the Fleet Street crowds, allowing the flow of surrounding shoulders to carry him between the darting carriages and ponderous carts on Bridge Street across to Ludgate. As he climbed the hill, forcing his pace past idling walkers, his temper rose with the sidewalk. By the time he ducked aside through the lamplit archway and into the courtyard of the Bell Savage Inn, he felt like a teakettle, ready to shout.

  Building his career in law came first in his working goals; his silly hobby of writing Gothic romances trailed far, far behind in his priorities, kept there by the very real possibility that if discovered, such a hobby could trivialize his reputation and diminish his practice. But each time one of his trifles hit the booksellers, it sold off more quickly than the one before. And rumors, suspicions, sneaking spies, and attentive eyes swirled rampant in the little legal enclave by the Thames. Careless of him, calling himself An Anonymous Gentleman of the Inner Temple; he should have thrown attention at one of the other Inns of Court, preserving his own position.

  With that opportunity to hide himself past, he’d instead taken a tiny room on the Bell Savage’s topmost floor on a permanent basis. Little more than a broom cupboard, without windows and with the bed removed to make room for another battered desk, the room was a secret shared only with Anne and his clerk.

  Frederick lit a stick of candles, slumped in his chair, and did his best to consider the situation with rationality.

  Now that Debenham had reminded him of the Townshend affair, he remembered reading about it in a multitude of delicious gossip-sheet installments, two seasons ago. His Nibs had stalked poor Lydia Townshend like a predator after prey, finding some miserable way of attending her every rout, dinner party, and ball. He’d walked with her openly along the City’s streets, danced with her, been seen with her so very many times that every cat’s tongue in the ton had wagged.

  Then without warning, the pathetic girl had vanished from London.

  And she hadn’t been seen since. Some spoke of marriage to a civil servant, bound for India in a fast packet. Others refuted the claim, pointing out her parents would never have stood for it. Either way, she was gone.

  And then there was Dorcas Robinson, née Wentworth-Gower, who for some incredible reason had actually seemed to think the blasted man would ask for her. Frederick had heard how she’d smiled at His Nibs with devoted bliss while they’d danced at the Countess of Bath’s ball, her silly face aglow and her steps lighter than her wits. Before her reputation had completely dissipated, a draper had appeared and rescued her from her ridiculous fantasy, married her and taken her to a closet-sized flat above his father’s Fleet Street shop, down the street from the coffee house. Now the entire ton watched her belly swell and laid bets as to whether her humiliation would increase before her earliest possible honest due date.

  Although Frederick had to admit, she looked just as happy now as she had during that shameless exhibition. Perhaps Mrs. Robinson hadn’t gathered sufficient wits from her escapade to feel the mortification it deserved.

  Boot heels clumped down the hall and a drought whispered beneath the door, setting the candles flickering. Shadows danced along the walls, close enough to touch, and the rage broiling through him echoed the flames’ agitation.

  He couldn’t let that happen to Anne.

  Not that Anne was anything like Mrs. Robinson. Her delicacy and modesty were bywords among her circle, or if they weren’t, they ought to be. But the man’s smooth, insinuating manners would challenge the propriety of an angel — Lydia Townshend had been neither stupid nor brazen — and no reputable lady should be exposed to such a raw, cynical seduction.

  He had to do something, think of something. Insurance, prevention, and settlements being his specialties, surely he could find a suitable means of heading off the disaster he could smell coming.

  And in the meantime, his lingering dismay and jealousy should not be wasted. Frederick hunted through the drawers of the rickety desk, found some leftover scraps of foolscap, and started organizing his thoughts around the blazing, terrible themes this new experience had burned into him. They’d resuscitate the stale story he’d been too ashamed to hand off to the printer, and perhaps provide him with a solid plan.

  Chapter Three

  Wednesday, December 9, 1812

  Dithering belonged in the province of weak wills and shallow minds; it had no place in one who’d always identified herself with order and logic. But in strict self-honesty, Lady Wotton could find no more accurate word to describe the turmoil aroused in her thoughts by a certain someone who’d paid attention to her youngest daughter yesterday afternoon. And it hadn’t released her, even as she reached inside her carved maple wardrobe for her celestial blue silk gown with the long gathered sleeves… and found herself holding the rose blossom crepe with white satin trim instead.

  An uncomfortable sensation. Unsettling; disturbing. Not anything she should be feeling.

  If she only knew for certain that he was in earnest, she’d risk everything on the throw. But that was the rub: she had no way of knowing his true intentions toward Anne.

  And no, not the pink crepe. There she had no doubts.

  Blue silk properly laid out, sapphire necklace and earrings on the dressing table, and Abigail almost ready to dress her hair; nothing left to distract her. And when confronted by a potential match with such — well, potential, a mother n
eeded a few distractions.

  She’d had no trouble finding a suitable match for her son — of course, he would be the Baron Wotton someday — nor for her first two daughters, whose dowries ensured they were quickly snapped off the bridal market. It was only Anne, with her nonsensical notion of marrying for love, for pity’s sake, who still languished unmarried at the ripe age of nineteen.

  But a duke, and that duke, to boot… The man presented her with the classic razor’s edge. If successful, a glorious situation for the youngest daughter of a country baron, even if the family did spend much of their time in town now; well, Anne did love it so. By far the best match of the four. But one misstep and the girl would be banished from all good society, and she herself would never lift her head again.

  Was the possible match worth the risk?

  Abigail still fussed over her pomades, papers, and combs, the heavy scent of lotion mixing with the wilting flowers, cloying in the post-rain wetness despite the open windows and fluttering sheers. Restless, Lady Wotton crossed the corridor.

  In the opposite bedroom, Anne sat in front of her dressing mirror in shift and stays. Their talented housemaid, lips rolled together, mouth full of hairpins, and eyes narrowed, arranged Anne’s hair in a cascade of flaxen curls. On her bed, the simplest, most classical evening gown of palest pink, white lace trimming the neckline and puce sash coiled into a bright splash of color on top. Pearls gleamed in a box in front of her.

  For once, a concentrated effort on her youngest’s part to look her best, and without a bit of maternal nagging. And something, some sober consciousness in Anne’s expression, testified that she knew how high loomed the stakes. Perhaps she’d forget that upstart solicitor, and sooner rather than later.