“Drumming up mischief,” Harry said. “But what a storm in a teacup, Tom. What he saw was one innocent peck on the forehead, for the love of God. With the door open. In full sight of my coachman if he had cared to watch. A grand seduction scene indeed. Was ever anything more ridiculous?” He laughed, but his laughter somehow fell flat on its face.
Tom’s discomfort seemed to have grown. He rubbed a finger along the side of his nose. “That is not the whole of it, Harry,” he said. “Mrs. Piper has spent the day pulling a whole lot of other dirty laundry out of her bag and strewing it everywhere. That kiss last night was the mere culmination of other things she has been keeping to herself because she hates to gossip.”
“What the devil?” Harry glared at his friend as thoughhewere the one with the upturned laundry bag.
“In Mrs. Piper’s mind,” Tom explained, “the Reverend Tavernor is a saint and a martyr and an angel and perhaps even a little bit of the deity himself all rolled into one. She believes that in order to do justice to his memory, Mrs. Tavernor ought to be the Virgin Mary and all the female saints combined. You walked her home from our house one evening and from Solway’s a week or so after that. You apparently spent a whole morning at her house chopping wood—you just admitted it to me—before going insideandshutting the door for what must have been considerably more than a glass of water since you remained there for a whole hour. You went back the same evening and stayed there for an indeterminate amount of time—I’ll wager Jeremy cannot count high enough, more shame to his teacher. The Lord only knows what you were up to while you were there, but I daresay there is no shortage of speculation, especially as the curtains must have been drawn so Jeremy could not see inside.”
“Damn their eyes,” Harry said. “The whole lot of them.”
“You danced with her last night when she had already told several other men that she would not dance at all,” Tom continued. “You got her laughing and sparkling. And you gave her and Mrs. Bailey a ride home but dropped Mrs. Bailey off at the vicarage first before taking Mrs. Tavernor home and kissing her most scandalously. She has no one living at the cottage with her, not even a maid. That in itself is a shocking thing to someone like Mrs. Piper. She can have chosen to live quite alone—Mrs. Tavernor, I mean— for only one possible reason, and a lot of people are quite certain they know very well what that reason is. This is not me talking, Harry. It is not Hannah talking either or any number of other people with some sense between their ears. But it is what large segments of the village are buzzing about. It does not take determined gossips very long to weave a growing and pretty damning narrative out of the most threadbare of facts.”
“It is all pure nonsense,” Harry protested.Except for one thing.But that was no one’s damned business except his and Lydia’s. “Good God, Tom.”
Tom looked up at him and shrugged. “Youknow it is all nonsense, Harry,” he said. “Iknow. Hannah is getting together with Denise Franks. She was merely waiting for me to come home from school first. The two of them are going to the vicarage to talk with Mrs. Bailey and the vicar to discuss what they can do.Theyall know it is nonsense. But wildfire is pretty difficult to put out once it has got a hold. So is scandal.”
“Scandal,”Harry said, pushing the fingers of one hand impatiently through his hair. “That is a bit extreme, surely. But I do know gossip. And one can be sure it will focus almost exclusively upon Lydia. Very little of it, I suppose, will land upon me. Devil take it, Tom, I could commit murder. But throttling young Piper would be a bit like slamming the stable door shut after the horse has bolted—or some such nonsense. I had better go and have a word with Mrs. Piper. If she is at home, that is, and not still gallivanting about from house to house, spreading her laundry and her poison.”
What he was also going to find himself doing, he thought, ridiculous as it seemed, was persuading Lydia Tavernor to marry him.
He jerked open the door of the summerhouse and strode out onto the path through the trees back to the house without waiting for Tom. Good God, he might have known something like this would happen. Hehadknown, in fact. They hadbothknown. It was why they had ended what was between them, even the possibility of a friendship that had shown some promise.
Harry had worked himself into a towering fury by the time he reached the terrace and approached the house. He was about to bark an order to his butler, who was conveniently standing just outside the open front doors, dressed indeed and rather bizarrely in what looked like his best uniform, to have his horse saddled and brought up to the door within the next ten minutes. But sound penetrated his consciousness and brought him to an abrupt halt as he swiveled about to look along the drive to see what it was.
Two carriages were approaching. Grand traveling carriages that did not belong to anyone local. The first one was already turning onto the terrace and rocking to a stop a few feet from Harry. He could see bonnets and feathers inside.
“Grandmama,” he muttered. The Dowager Countess of Riverdale was on the seat facing the horses with Great-aunt Edith Monteith, her sister, beside her. Opposite them sat a young man and woman Harry could not immediately identify.
He turned his head sharply to look, aghast, at the second carriage. A familiar ducal crest was emblazoned upon the door. Within it he could see his half sister, Anna, and Aunt Louise seated facing the horses, with Cousin Jessica squeezed between them. Opposite them sat Avery, Duke of Netherby, and Gabriel, Earl of Lyndale.
Brown,whose best butler’s uniform was now explained, was opening the door of the first carriage and setting down the steps when Harry turned his attention back to it.
What a damnable time to discover that the whole of the Westcott family was in the process of descending upon him. For Harry did not doubt they were all coming. Already a third carriage was rolling into sight.
And a fourth.
Of coursethey were coming to him.
He had refused to go to them, after all.
Fourteen
Lydia closed all the curtains in her house, washed up Snowball’s paw prints as well as Snowball herself, cleaned the house from top to bottom, and baked a batch of biscuits for which she had no appetite whatsoever.
She cast on stitches for her pink shawl, knitted two rows, and then lost all her stitches after they had stuck on the needle and she jerked them toward the tip and they all came rushing off. She had been knitting too tightly. She picked up the stitches, knitted a row to make sure everything was as it ought to be, and stuffed the work into her bag. She got to her feet to poke the fire, saw there was no fire because she had not lit one, and sat down on the sofa with a book. She read a whole paragraph before slamming the book shut and tossing it aside. She let Snowball out into the back garden and stood just inside the doorway, glancing furtively around to check for heads popping up above the fence and listening for rustlings in the copse. She shut the door firmly after Snowball came trotting back inside.
Perhaps after all Mrs. Piper had taken her indignation home with her to nurse in private. Perhaps she was even feeling remorseful about her hasty rush to judgment. Perhaps … Well, perhaps pigs would fly one of these days.
Confirmation of her worst fears came when she answered a knock upon her front door late in the afternoon and found Mrs. Bailey, Denise Franks, and Hannah Corning standing ranged across her doorstep, all wearing identical smiles while Snowball bounced along in front of them yapping until Hannah bent and scooped her up.
“Oh,” Lydia said without returning the smile. “It is as bad as that, is it?” And she turned to walk back into the house, leaving the door open behind her. They could follow her in if they wished or go back home if they did not. It was up to them.
They followed her in.
“I do blame myself,” Mrs. Bailey cried, “for not insisting that Major Westcott bring you home first before taking me to the vicarage. I ought to have taken upon myself the role of chaperon. But it is all absolute nonsense anyway, and the vicar agreed with me when he came out of his study to find out what all the fuss was about when Mrs. Franks and Mrs. Corning came to see me. The major is being maligned for being the perfect gentleman and seeing both of us to our doors beneath his umbrella. The vicar is blaming himself for going off with our carriage and leaving you and me to someone else’s care. And Mrs. Wickend did not even die. One sometimes wonders if she ever will. But you, my dear Lydia, have taken the worst of it all.”
“Lydia.” Denise spread her arms, but Lydia did not step forward to be hugged. “If hedidembrace you, even if it was a passionate, full-on-the-lips kiss, all I can say is good for him. And good for you for allowing it. I totally fail to see what is so scandalous about a man kissing a woman on her doorstep after he has escorted her home from an evening party. Mrs. Piper is a silly, hysterical, overly pious gossip. She seems to believe that you ought to have devoted the rest of your life to mourning your husband’s passing. Eternal widowhood and celibacy. The woman is mad.”
“It is like a tomb in here, Lydia.” Hannah set Snowball down and threw the curtains back from the living room window. “My next-door neighbor, though she does not condemn you, has given it as her opinion that it was indiscreet of you to entertain Harry inside your own house, when you do not have even a servant living here with you. But really, where else could you be private in order to get to know each other properly? It is not as though you are a green young girl, after all, or he a notorious womanizer. Unfortunately, however, gossip does not thrive upon sound reason or common sense. People have too little to talk about that is of any real interest to them, and so they will grab at any gossip, the more salacious the better. But you are not going to have to face all this rubbish alone. We have decided that.”
