Scandal on Half Moon Street Read online

  Mama winced. But she nodded as she set down her roll and lifted her napkin, dabbing at her lips. “I’m afraid so, my dear. I long to see your father.” The sudden ache in her voice testified to her sincerity, despite the falsity of her forced smile. “When you’re married, you’ll understand that sometimes the only cure for a problem is the presence of one’s husband.”

  It might prove impossible to force even a bite of bread down her closing throat. But with Mama watching, she’d have to try. Anne ripped off a tiny morsel and held it in her fingers. She could eat that bite; she could, no matter her throat’s contrary opinion. But she couldn’t convince her fingers to move toward her mouth, and instead dropped the torn-off bit onto her plate. “We’ve never missed one of the Kringle’s entertainments. And last year you told Papa that doing so would be social suicide.”

  Another wince. This time, the accompanying nod was slower. “This is an unfortunate truth. But I cannot imagine you have any desire to remain in town after last night.” Without warning, her expression hardened, eyes narrowing. “I know that you saw what I saw.”

  The face looking back at Anne from across the breakfast table resembled her mother. But it was a Mama who’d looked into the eyes of a gorgon and something within her had turned to stone. This was not her indulgent parent, the one who could be wheedled into almost anything; it was the reverse of that medal, the parent who refused to permit her marriage to Frederick even though she knew of his many perfections, the parent who'd forbidden them even to speak.

  Defiance would not advance Anne’s cause. Nor would silent surrender; if they left London now and returned to Kent, all her communication with Frederick would be cut off. Mama would monitor her mail, and even a thick missive to or from Alicia, concealing a note with Frederick’s name on it, would seem suspicious. She ripped off another bit of bread and dropped it, too, on her plate.

  “It’s the final social event of the year.” Even her voice sounded cautious, creeping and hesitant, even to her own ears. “It’s the last dance until next season.”

  Anger flared in Mama’s eyes. But her face, while still hardened and unyielding, remained relatively calm in comparison. Mama felt the emotion, as His Grace might point out, but she did not allow its expression to overwhelm her rationality. Not a good sign, and Anne shredded more of her roll. She couldn’t eat it, but she could pretend to.

  “You seem determined to remain in town.”

  Not a good sign at all. “I wish to attend the Kringles’ ball, Mama, not to encourage His Grace’s suit. It pleases me no end that we are in agreement regarding that unpleasant affair.”

  Mama sighed and resumed eating her messy roll. But her eyes retained their suspicion, and it required no deep understanding to discern the anger she barely contained. “Your solicitor will not be attending the ball, will he?”

  Anne sighed. If only. “Of course not, Mama.”

  “And how do you know this?”

  The breakfast room seemed to narrow around her, something within its paneled walls sucking out all the air and open space and threatening her with a suffocating imprisonment. Mama stared at her across the table, suspicion eroding and angry certainty moving in.

  “Have you discussed the invitation list with Lady Kringle or Miss Deborah?”

  Disobedient and determined she had been; headstrong she could be called; but dishonest she would not be. Anne set the roll aside and leaned back in her chair. “No, I have not.”

  And still Mama’s anger did not overflow. In a way, her taut self-control was worse than screaming rage; that, at least, could be shrugged off as a tantrum, but this had to be taken seriously. “You’ve discussed it with him, haven’t you? Even though I’ve forbidden you to speak—”

  “You cannot stop me from marrying Frederick.”

  She didn’t say that. She did NOT say that.

  The scarlet, incandescent rage blooming in Mama’s face said otherwise.

  “You will discuss this with your father.” Mama rose, tossing down her napkin. “Until you have done so, you are not to leave the house unless I am your chaperone. If you disobey me again, we will leave immediately for Kent. Otherwise—” She paused.

  Anne held her breath. She could not expect Mama to surrender after such an unequivocal edict. She’d made a shambles of the situation, of their carefully laid plans, and now she’d have to accept the consequences. “Otherwise?”

  A sigh. “I do not wish to snub Lord and Lady Kringle. We will delay our departure until Boxing Day.”

  Two days after the ball. As if she still cared about attending. Dancing would hold no thrill, if her Christmas celebrations would hold no time with Frederick. And if Mama kept her in Kent until her twenty-first birthday, Christmas of 1813 would be just as Frederick-less. Such a long, heartbreaking separation would be intolerable.

  She’d send a message with Gregory at the first opportunity. They had until the Christmas Eve ball to find some way out of this nightmare, before her mother solved it for her, forcefully.

  ****

  Pounding footsteps made Frederick pause and turn before his hand connected with the printer’s door latch. Someone skidded to a stop in front of the window and grabbed the frame in a gesture somewhere between supporting himself and halting a headlong run. The Kirkhoven family’s tan and blue livery. Askew; disheveled. Hat forgotten or blown away.

  “Gregory?” The footman panted — well, as if he’d run all the way from Half Moon Street. At the thought, Frederick’s heart danced a few measures in his suddenly hollow chest. This couldn’t be good. “What’s wrong?”

  Without speaking — perhaps he couldn’t yet — Gregory straightened, tugged down his coat, and handed over a letter. Already too many things occupied Frederick’s hands, including the umbrella necessary for the disgruntled sky and his finished, rolled, and tied manuscript. But the direction’s handwriting could not be mistaken. Frederick snatched the letter between two available fingers, ducked inside beneath Gregory’s arm, and dumped everything on the counter.

  “Good morning, Mr. Shaw.” The proprietor straightened over his ink-smudged ledger and wiped his hands on a rag that wouldn’t absorb much more. “Is it ready, now?” At least he didn’t add, Finally?

  A backhanded swat, and the manuscript rolled across the counter, bumping against the ledger’s cover at the opposite end. While the printer cut the binding string, Frederick broke the letter’s seal. She’d been unhappy when she’d written it; her usually fluid handwriting showed uncharacteristic spikes and a splotch; and reading it, he found himself entirely in agreement. Lady Wotton had the power to force them apart, to make Anne’s life miserable until he could rescue her on her twenty-first birthday. And if Cumberland’s secret intention had been to separate Anne and him by convincing Lady Wotton to retire with her daughter to the country, well, His Nibs had accomplished it with ease.

  He could wait no longer upon Lady Wotton’s approval nor Anne’s majority. Despite Frederick’s fantasies, outwitting or outmaneuvering Cumberland had never been a serious option; the man was simply too powerful, too debauched, and every idea Frederick had conceived for discouraging or shaming him had slammed into the undeniable truth that Cumberland would not care what anyone else thought. The fight was over and any hesitation now could prove fatal. He’d found no means of removing Cumberland from Anne’s presence, and therefore his only logical solution was to remove Anne from Cumberland’s.

  A distant, determined sort of calm settled over Frederick. Simply as that, between taking one breath and the next, he knew what they had to do.

  The printer said something, but Frederick had no clue what words the man asked nor what he said in response. Grabbing a pencil from the countertop, he scribbled a simple note on the bottom of Anne’s foolscap:

  “Gretna Green during the ball?”

  Refolding the note, he returned it to Gregory, whose bulging eyes intimated he’d watched the letters being formed.

  “We’re dependent upon your discretion, Gregor
y.”

  The footman bobbed his head. “And me help, most likely.” He grinned, saluted, and was gone.

  Still stunned, Frederick followed him from the printer’s shop, with the oddest sensation that his clenched fists held not an umbrella, not an arrangement of cloth and whalebone, but their very lives and a dizzying future.

  Chapter Nine

  Sunday, December 13, 1812

  Shallow. Petty. Not worthy of the man she loved. This, and worse, Anne called herself.

  And still she hesitated and agonized over what answer to return.

  The mantua-maker had come and gone, ducking out into the drizzling rain to her waiting chair; their gowns and accoutrements were prepared and laid aside for the Kringles’ ball. Without that fashionable chore to distract her, and without the luxury of shopping or other outings — Mama adamantly remaining within and refusing to budge from her position — Anne found herself behind the pianoforte, playing every love ballad she knew again and again. And every time she reached the peccant part, where the lovers were separated or finally came together, her throat tightened, closed, refused to sing the words, the splatters against the windowpanes mocking her cowardice.

  Did she dare? Did she have the courage to run away with the man she swore she loved?

  She’d burned Frederick’s brief, challenging note, of course, leaving none but Gregory the wiser. But if she eloped with a barrister — with anyone — the gossip would fly across town, tongues faster than the raciest horse spreading the scandal from Half Moon Street out to the villages beyond the city’s boundary. It would be in every gossip sheet, seethed over in every coffee house. If she eloped with Frederick, she’d never be welcomed in good society again, at least not without a smirk.

  Every time she reached that point in her silent argument with herself, she glanced up into the little gilt-framed mirror across the parlor. Every time, her agonized expression mocked her. And then she bent over the keyboard and wracked her brain for new insults to hurl.

  Cowardly. Dishonorable. Unworthy.

  Always back to that one word.

  Unworthy.

  Scandal. She cringed, inside and outside, at that horrid word. Gossip.

  As much as she wished she could shrug it off and let the cats meow, her lip refused to curl. Instead, rather than dig through her music for yet another love ballad, one which might embolden or entrance her wavering heart — instead she reached blindly for the keys and stroked them without any conscious thought. A chord in B flat major; she must have twisted on her seat, away from that hateful mirror. Her fingers followed through, and suddenly she realized she was playing from memory Mozart’s 12th piano sonata, the second, adagio movement.

  Anne closed her eyes and continued, feeling the music rather than seeing it on a written page, letting its clarity wash over her. Step by gentle, logical step, she worked her way through the sonata, the pianoforte building its argument stave upon stave—

  Her fingers stilled

  Logical. Or, as His Grace liked to say, rational.

  The music might be. But her thoughts most certainly were anything but.

  She’d claimed that all she wanted was to be Frederick’s wife. She wanted to manage her own home, enjoy her own family. At least one daughter was required. Now, when the means of gaining that delight were presented to her, she hesitated. Rationally, then, while she claimed one thing, her actual desires must be quite different. And in a flood of insight, her heart’s silent reasoning became clear.

  She’d always thought she’d be married in the Boughton Malherbe church, with its square tower and half-timbered gable framed by the postern gate. She’d laid by lace for her gown, and now she ached that it lay in her chest in Kent, out of immediate reach. And in her imagination, whenever she’d dreamed of that enchanting day, her mind’s eye had always placed her family and Frederick’s in the closest pews — yes, even Mama, and she was smiling. If they weren’t present when she took her vows, would it even feel like a real wedding?

  Again she bent over the keys. Again the rain taunted her.

  Childish. Ridiculous. Unworthy.

  But if she were to begin her married life disappointed, perhaps there was little reason to begin it at all.

  ****

  Tuesday, December 22, 1812

  With nothing left to play, no insults left to hurl, Anne stroked the keys aimlessly, playing disconnected sounds from her soul rather than notes organized into music. No longer crashing chords nor lovelorn melodies, it sounded like nothing so much as those gentle closing thoughts the best composers tacked onto the ends of their most delicate sonatas.

  If she’d said nothing to Mama about remaining in town, they’d be in Kent now. She’d have left London and Frederick behind, but with patience, she’d have seen them again during the new year of 1813. She’d not have given away their plan and life would have continued as before.

  Instead, now she had to make an unpalatable decision, one her heart seemingly refused to accept. And the shameful possibility that perhaps she did not love Frederick as she’d thought made her misery complete.

  Sounds drifted up the stairs to the parlor: a knock on the front door, its opening click, murmuring voices, a light gliding step in the downstairs hall. She stilled her fingers on the keys.

  “Alicia, my dear, you are very welcome.” Lady Wotton’s voice drifted up to the parlor, then lowered to a too-loud murmur. “Perhaps you can convince her to play something rational.”

  Hateful word, that.

  More light steps on the stairs. Finally Alicia strode into the parlor, arms piled with a small stack of books which she tumbled onto the end table. “You look awful. And this—” She yanked out the bottom book and thrust it forward. “Well, it might help, and it might not.”

  The forest-hued leather binding sported a tooled, tinted woodland scene with nymphs and shepherds, straight out of Marlowe and Raleigh’s poetic dialogue more than two centuries ago. Despite its seeming irony, all the Kirkhoven books were bound to that design, based upon the standing order Papa had left with their London bookbinder. It could only mean one thing, and the strength of the excitement that surged through Anne stunned her and left her breathless. With a squeal, she grabbed the book.

  And it was, it was indeed a freshly-bound copy of Frederick’s latest, The Solicitor’s Revenge. She turned the half-title page, and there, beneath the title and above the printer’s name, it read—

  “This is wrong,” she whispered. “Oh, dear Frederick, what have you done?”

  —it read Frederick Wm. Shaw, Esquire.

  Not An Anonymous Gentleman of the Inner Temple.

  Someone had made a dreadful mistake.

  And now she knew she was living a Gothic romance rather than reading one.

  Chapter Ten

  Tuesday, December 22, 1812 (continued)

  He’d been so distracted, so upset, so blatheringly addlepated, that he’d put his own name on the manuscript and not his nom de plume. When the printer had requested clarification, he’d paid his attention to Anne’s note, and he still didn’t know what he’d said aloud in response. Now his secret was out, not only within the Inner Temple but all over the ton, soon to be all over England, and that genie wasn’t about to be stuffed back into its bottle.

  For years he’d been cautious, keeping his silly private whim separate from his real legal world, hoping not to attract the wrong sort of attention from any of the Masters of the Bench. He’d kept his little writing room at the Bell Savage a secret from everyone except Anne and Debenham; he’d been careful not to be followed during his travels about town—

  —and now, in one stupid move, he’d thrown all his cautions to naught. If the Benchers decided he was too flighty for the bar, they could strike his name from the Inner Temple’s membership roll. He’d studied so hard, worked to first be accepted and then to consolidate his position, gain clients, earn trust. And now he’d risked it all for a silly story. If disbarred, he would still be a common, garden-variety solicito
r, conducting legal transactions and shuffling documents. But no longer could he appear before any court in the land and argue a case. Any chance he’d had of someday being selected as a Member of Parliament was clearly shot.

  Any realistic hope of earning Lady Wotton’s respect would vanish with his robe and wig.

  Anne withdrawing into the country would have been awkward and uncomfortable, but not a disaster. This was a disaster.

  And it wasn’t himself he’d harmed the most. It was Anne.

  If she refused to marry him now, he’d not need to ask her reason why. It had been ten aching, impossibly long days since he’d sent the note with Gregory, and her silence had stretched more tautly across his miserable nerves as each had crept past. He’d tried to make excuses for her silence — she wasn’t hesitating, merely being cautious about sending another message so soon, it would never do to arouse even more of Lady Wotton’s ire, and such caution was fully justified — but no matter how many sailing schedules and letters of credit he perused, her ongoing silence only grew louder until that was all he could hear.

  Surely it was his overactive imagination. But more people than normal seemed to be stumping past his open door, and everyone who passed by peered in with a quick, fascinated stare, as if determined to memorize his features before he vanished from their midst, the silly little upstart who’d thought he could flaunt the Inns’ sterile, distinguished ethos. If not his imagination, then not something he wanted to see. Frederick lowered his head over his bills of lading and statements of insurance and didn’t raise it again.

  Until a final, heavy set of footsteps paused in the doorway.

  And a throat cleared.

  It was over. It was time. Let the buggers drive him out. If it meant he never had to endure another such humiliating day, the price was now acceptable. Frederick rose behind his desk.