There was to be more than she expected, however. A letter from Viola, Marchioness of Dorchester, came with the morning post. She had written from her home at Redcliffe Court in Northamptonshire primarily to congratulate Elizabeth on her betrothal to Sir Geoffrey Codaire with whom she had a slight acquaintance going back a number of years. She remembered him as a worthy gentleman of steady character and wished Elizabeth well. But the letter continued beyond mere congratulations. It was, in fact, brimming over with exuberant happiness, for not only had Viola heard, as everyone else in Britain had by now, that Napoleon Bonaparte had been captured and exiled to the island of Elba, thus ending the long wars, but she had also discovered just the day before that Harry had survived the last great bloody battle of the wars at Toulouse in southern France. She had given in to Marcel’s persuasions and was coming to London to celebrate the wonderful news by attending Elizabeth’s wedding.
You more than anyone else in the Westcott family deserve happiness, Elizabeth,she had written.How could I not come to celebrate your great day with you as you helped celebrate mine on Christmas Eve?
Oh dear. But it would surely be too late now, even if she wrote without delay, to stop Viola from coming—and presumably Marcel too and Abigail and Marcel’s twins. They would have to find some other way of celebrating.
The morning continued when Alexander joined her and their mother at the breakfast table and asked Elizabeth if she had read the paper.
“The notice about my betrothal?” she said. “Yes. I am glad it is there for all to see, though everyone knew anyway, of course. Now the gossip, which I am sure was rife yesterday, will have a chance to die down.”
“Not the notice,” he said, setting the paper down beside her plate. It was folded to display one column of the social pages. “I believe I am going to have to have another word with Codaire.”
She picked it up and read. A reliable source had reported that Lady Overfield was conspicuously absent from a certain well-attended soiree last evening, too embarrassed no doubt to show her face after humiliating her betrothed and rendering many of the most respectable elements of thetonaghast when she had set her cap quite outrageously at a far younger man, who would remain anonymous out of deference to his good name. Her affianced husband, the reader would be gratified to know, had broken off the engagement without further ado.
Oh. Well, she had known it would not be good. Gossip by its very nature was vicious and not always accurate.
“Please do not confront Geoffrey,” she said. “It will only make things worse, Alex, and prolong this whole ridiculous episode. I will doubtless survive the injustice.”
“Do you wish to change your mind and go to Riddings or Brambledean after all?” he asked. “I will give the order if you want.”
“It might be best, Lizzie,” their mother said. “Viola will understand.”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “I am going to stay. And I must go and get ready. Anna and Jessica will be here soon, and Anna is always on time.”
It was obvious which way the wind was blowing, of course, and would probably continue to blow for a while. As in so many cases of scandal, the woman was at fault and the man blameless. In Colin’s case it was a good thing. In Geoffrey’s it was not. But perhaps he would gain some satisfaction from being painted as some sort of wronged, martyred hero. The only thing she could do was wait it out until the gossip died down, as it inevitably would after a few days.
In the meantime, she had a mission to accomplish. She had to find that one bonnet on Bond Street that she would not be able to resist.
•••
By the following morning more stories about Elizabeth had been dredged up from somewhere in the realm of fancy and embellished with rumors and half-truths and outright untruths as they were bandied about in almost every fashionable drawing room and ballroom and gentlemen’s club in London. Many members of theton, though not by any means all, were quite happy to forget that just a few days earlier they had held Lady Overfield in the highest esteem as a dignified, modest, amiable widow. Some even claimed to recall that they had accepted their invitation to her betrothal ball with a certain misgiving since they remembered her flirtatious ways during her first marriage and feared she would make some sort of unseemly exhibition of herself at the ball. A few professed to have felt a similar unease at accepting their invitation to her wedding, upon the conviction that poor, respectable Sir Geoffrey Codaire was almost certainly going to rue the day before the summer was out.
There were those who were quite happy to recall that Lady Overfield had made herself ridiculous after the marriage of her brother last year by setting her cap at her sister-in-law’s far younger brother in a quite unseemly display of flirtation. It was she, rumor had it, who had insisted that he be invited to spend last Christmas at Brambledean when all the other guests were members of the Westcott family. And it was she who had maneuvered matters this spring so that the amiable and long-suffering—and very handsome—Lord Hodges waltzed with her at every ball. An unidentified source had even claimed to have seen her on the day following the disastrous betrothal ball hurl herself upon him in Hyde Park, where she had persuaded him to walk with her in the rain. It was very fortunate for him that he had not taken a chill. He had repulsed her advances, of course.
Colin heard it all in one way or another during the course of the morning and was appalled. But the trouble with gossip and slander was that it was almost impossible to stop once it had started. He felt all the helplessness of his situation. He thought he should go about everywhere denying everything on her behalf, but knew very well that it would do no good. He would merely add fuel to the flames.
The fact that the whole thing was ridiculous and would soon die down and be virtually forgotten within weeks did nothing to soothe his agitation. He hoped she had gone home to Riddings Park and would not hear the worst of what was being said about her, but it was not so. Alexander told him when they met at the House of Lords that she had decided not to go but was trying to carry on with her life as though nothing had happened to disturb it.
“I find all this hard to believe,” Alexander said. “We are all familiar with gossip. It can be sickening. But I do not remember anything quite as vicious and relentless as this. Where is it coming from?”
“Codaire?” Colin said, tight-lipped. “I am going in search of him. Enough is enough.”
“Save your efforts,” Alexander said. “He left town the very day you confronted him at White’s.”
Colin was left wondering if there was anything hecoulddo. She had refused to marry him. He had no right to offer any sort of protection at all.
Then something else happened.
He arrived back at his rooms in the early afternoon to be informed by his disapproving valet that two visitors awaited him in his sitting room and one of them wasa lady.He gave the impression that he would not have admitted her to what were strictly bachelor rooms had she not had her husband with her and had she not happened to be Lord Hodges’s sister. They had been here for longer than an hour.
Blanche?And Nelson? Here? What the devil?
Colin let himself into the sitting room and closed the door.
His sister was seated straight-backed on the edge of a chair, her hands folded in her lap. Nelson was standing over by the window. He had probably seen Colin returning home.
“Blanche?” Colin said. “Nelson? To what do I owe the honor? Have you been brought no refreshments?”
“We did not want any,” Blanche said, getting to her feet. “And we will not be here more than a minute or two longer. There is something you ought to know, Colin, and I have come to tell you. Mother has sent a notice to appear in tomorrow morning’s papers. It is an announcement of your betrothal to Miss Lydia Dunmore.”
