“I understand that they are going to use a factotum of some kind to do the pinning and carving, Tom. You won’t get much satisfaction from beating him.” James put his hand on Thomas’ shoulder.
“Revolting,” David said.
The three shook their heads at the decadence of their fellow men.
A gentle wind blew on Guy Fawkes Day. There was a cloudless blue sky from dawn to dusk. The weather heralded no impending catastrophe.
A message came to James at the Middlewich town house at half past eight that evening. His face became grave, and he got up from his chair in the drawing room, kissed Catherine, put on his greatcoat and left.
There were not many bonfires in Mayfair that night but there were plenty elsewhere in London, and so the air was full of the smell of smoke.
James arrived at his club and nodded at the barman Chester who had sent him the note telling him that the manservant of the Marquess of Painswick had come into the club an hour earlier and pinned up the tokens and then carved initials into the paneling.
James walked up to the dartboard wall where several men were clustered.
When they saw the Duke of Middlewich, they moved away hastily, some murmuring, some red-faced, some chortling and sneering.
There was an array of love letters, pieces of jewelry, a few dried flowers, and even a piece of hose held with small nails to the wall. But the place of pride was held by a small kid glove and a scrap of white silk, obviously torn from a gown, and the initials “AL” carved in the wall.
James tore all the tokens down and threw them into the blazing fireplace and took the poker from the hearth and destroyed the paneling of the wall.
By the next day, it was all over theton.
Catherine told James that she thought Arabella had taken it remarkably well.
Maybe she was in shock, he suggested.
But, no, she wasn’t.
“The greatest blow to me was that I gave my heart to a man who was so unworthy,” Arabella said to James and her mother, dry-eyed. “The loss of my innocence was just a part of that. And I can’t bring myself to get upset that other people know. He should be ashamed, not me.”
No one stepped forward to be the winner of the Pluckers’ prize, even though David, trembling with rage, stood in the middle of the club with his dueling pistols at hand and demanded satisfaction from the villain who had done this.
The fellow who had pinned the tokens and carved the initials in the paneling of the club, the manservant of the Marquess of Painswick, disappeared and could not be found so that he could be questioned.
When interrupted in the bed of his favorite whore at Madame Flora’s by James and Thomas, the naked Marquess of Painswick said he had no idea who had gathered which token.
“So how were you going to give the damn prize out? Answer me that!” Thomas rumbled.
The marquess shrugged. “It was all on honor, like the genuineness of the tokens themselves.”
“It is a foolish proposal,” James said, “to trust in the honor of those with none.”
The marquess laughed. “At this point, I would think it an honor for any of the young ladies in question to have any proposals at all.”
James removed Thomas from Madame Flora’s before he committed an act that would lead to a charge of manslaughter.
Arabella was now considered spoiled. Ruined. Publicly.
And that was the rub, Catherine thought.
Her beautiful, thoughtful, generous, playful daughter—her daughter who had been made for love, for caring for a husband and a brood of children, for being cherished and respected—that daughter would now never have any of that. There would be no marriage. No more Seasons and balls and calls from suitors and the hope of a good match.
Her stepdaughters—Mary so strong, Harry so eccentric—would have survived this blow. Would Arabella?
Arabella answered the question herself. She made some arrangements with one of the men at her deceased father’s bank. She packed two trunks. She left London.
She was headed north. To Scotland.
