Somewhat Scandalous (Brambridge Novel 1) Page 7

  “And of course he is the direct heir to the Fashington estate. I hear that the current Lord Fashington is childless and very rich. And he likes discussing science with you.”

  “Enough, Victoria.” Henry put down his own spoon with a clatter. Victoria turned to face him, her mouth open in an o.

  “I was just trying to make Aggie feel better. She doesn’t seem happy about what has happened.”

  Aggie could have squeezed her friend then. But she couldn’t very well tell her that Charles had probably just humored her with the discussions of scientific principles in order to take advantage of her. He’d landed her as easily as a hungry flounder.

  Henry’s forbidding countenance remained stony. “If you have finished, Victoria, please leave. I need to speak to Miss Beauregard alone.”

  Victoria glanced quickly at her half full bowl of soup and stood up with a swoosh of her skirts, squeezing Agatha’s shoulder as she passed her chair. Agatha grasped her hand and wished that Victoria would take her with her.

  Henry stood, putting his hands behind his back. He turned and studied a painting of two horses galloping that hung on the back wall of the dining room. All Agatha could see of him were two broad shoulders and the bright blond hair curling at the nape of his neck.

  “As your guardian in your brother’s absence, I have accepted the offer from Charles Fashington on your behalf. You will be married next week in St Martin’s church in a small ceremony.”

  He stopped. Agatha flattened her hands against the table, as she gasped for air.

  “I have even, out of my own pocket, provided you with a dowry.”

  A dowry. Agatha bowed her head, a great weight pressing against her chest. She was sure she detected a sneer in the voice that bounced off the back of the dining room wall towards her seat. He was paying Fashington to take her off his hands.

  “Why do I have to marry him?” Agatha put a hand to her heart, unable to contain herself any longer. “He forced me, you saw that.”

  Henry turned slowly on the heel of his boot and gazed back at her, his eyes on her hands. “I’m sorry, Agatha, but I saw no such thing.” He flicked his gaze up to her face. “What I have seen is a reckless individual who has been leading Fashington around by the nose for the last few balls. She has been caught in a compromising position with no thought for her place in society. I even told you before you left for the ball, no experiments.”

  Agatha gripped at her bodice, her heart hammering against her chest. She couldn’t break his gaze. She hadn’t been experimenting, she’d made every effort not to; in fact she hadn’t breathed a word of physics, chemistry or biology all of that night, the effort almost killing her.

  He raised an eyebrow at her continued silence and put his hands on the back of one of the dining chairs. “Moreover, until the wedding, you are forbidden to leave the house, or go to any more balls, and definitely no more science. Your reputation must remain unimpeachable until you are married.”

  Letting go of her bodice, Agatha put her hands to her face. Heat poured through her cheeks.

  “Did you hear me, Agatha?”

  “Yes, Lord Anglethorpe.”

  Lifting his white knuckles from the back of the dining chair, Henry strode from the dining room without a backward glance, banging the door as he left. The interview had taken ten minutes. To Agatha it seemed like a lifetime. Even the servants had sensed the atmosphere and had not come to clear away the lunch. She pressed her hands more fiercely against her cheeks and let out a sob. There had to be a way to escape this mess; she had endured much worse. Whatever it took, she would be free. She shivered again. Free to do what she wanted again, but still, it seemed, very much alone.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Cheshire Cheese contained only a handful of drinkers, hardened individuals that huddled with their individual pints in the dark corners. Soon the lunch rush would descend on the long thin public house on the Strand, as the workers up and down the road sought out relief from their dark offices.

  Henry took the tankard that Ames offered him and took a slow sip. It was just as potent as he remembered and smelled of fermented cabbages. Thank goodness he didn’t have to drink the disgusting brew—it was only there for show.

  Ames took a large draught from his own drink and set it down on the table with a thump, wiping the foam from his mouth with the back of his stained sleeve.

  “Ah, tis a proper ale the Cheesy Blackfoot and no mistake.”

  “It’s a foul drink, Ames. I don’t know why you like it so much.”

  Ames frowned and fiddled with the handle of his tankard. “Did you have breakfast, my lord?” he asked in a low voice. He looked round the pub as if afraid for its inhabitants.

  Henry nodded.

  Ames sighed in obvious relief. “It’s just that over the last few days you’ve been missing your meals and ahem, it has been rather noticeable.”

  “She was compromised, Ames. She wanted it. I saw her with my own eyes.” How could he forget the prominent bruised rose bud of her lips, the glazed stare of her eyes as she hung wantonly in Charles’ arms? That was how she could have looked in his arms, not with that… individual.

  “You could have done it differently. Poor girl has been moping about the house for days. She doesn’t want to be with Fashington.”

  “Of course she does. I told Agatha in no uncertain terms not to bring my family into disrepute. She was running wild. Anyway, you can hardly call it a house at the moment. That bloody tree’s taken out half the roof.”

  “Hmm. When does the stump come out?”

  “Tomorrow. Jaquard the gardener is removing it.”

  “Jaquard as in ‘organizer of fireworks at Green Park’ Jaquard?”

  “Yes.”

  “That should be explosive.”

  “Hmm.” Henry stared into his tankard. The foam had died away on top of the ale, leaving a greasy soupy mixture behind. Covering his shudder with a straightening of his shoulders, he brought the tankard to his lips and, rasping his tongue against the top of his dry mouth, forced his Adam’s apple to swallow without letting the liquid past his lips. The uncomfortable feeling of déjà vu descended on his shoulders.

  He’d sat in the Cheshire Cheese with his father at the age of sixteen on one of their trips up from Devon, a pint of Cheesy Blackfoot in front of him.

  “You will look after her, won’t you?” his father had said. “Victoria promises to be a beautiful young woman. She will make a fine match for a man one day.”

  He’d nodded, barely paying attention, and gulped at his beer. After all, at that age, you expect your parents to live forever.

  Only his hadn’t; his father was found in St Giles, his face barely recognizable, peppered with gunshot. His mother died a year later of a broken heart, and broken spirit.

  It was whispered that one of his lovers had put the previous Lord Anglethorpe out of his misery. Henry and his mother had been given the cut direct.

  Henry eyed his tankard and took a sip this time. It still tasted disgusting. In truth the real reason why he worked for Granwich wasn’t that he had a natural talent for spying. It was because of what Granwich had told him six years later. That his father had worked for the Crown and had been hunting a special object when he died. He hadn’t had a single mistress in the time that he had been married to his mother.

  But still, he would not have Victoria’s name drawn through the mud because of Agatha. He’d protected Victoria from the furor before. And he would do it again. Perhaps it was good that Charles had compromised Agatha before he had had a chance to speak to her.

  “I took that scrap of paper you gave me to a chap at the German embassy.”

  “Yes?”

  “He agreed that it said ‘ihn’ in German.”

  “We already knew that. Same as the others that Granwich has.”

  “Yes, but he pointed out that it was strange that whilst both the ‘I’ and the ‘H’ were capitalized, the ‘n’ was in lower case. Germans may have a rather
strange sentence structure compared to English, but they are very precise as a nationality. They certainly do not mix up capital and lower case letters.”

  “Yes they do. They use capitals for all their nouns. Bloody strange.”

  “Well he was most vehement that they don’t use two capitals in the middle of one word.”

  Henry sighed. As with the information that Granwich had given him and that he had already gathered, none of it made sense.

  “I’d like it back please.”

  Ames reached into the pocket of his coat and slid his hand face down across the table. Curling his arm round his pint, Henry picked up the scrap of paper that Ames left behind his tankard. The edges of the paper had begun to flake where fire had charred at the edges, frustratingly small parts of words visible around the confusing signature.

  I H Π

  Carefully keeping it steady on the table, Henry flicked open his pocket watch and slid the paper in under the lid.

  “I want you to keep an eye on her.”

  Ames stopped drinking and put down his tankard. “I thought Monsieur Herr was a male spy, sir?”

  Henry winced and tapped at his ear. “It’s Monsieur Herr, Ames, not Monsewer Hair.”

  “Monser Here,” Ames obligingly repeated.

  “As in, valet is not said valette, but rather valet.”

  “Oh, I know all about valeying, my lord.”

  Henry sighed. Thank goodness Ames had never needed to disguise himself as a French man. He did rather well as a down at heel Londoner, a downtrodden valet. Hmm. He rubbed his chin. In fact Ames did rather well at anything with the word down in.

  Ames gave him a grin and tipped his tankard back one last time.

  “So you want me to look after Miss Aggie.”

  “Not precisely look after Miss Beauregard, rather continue to watch her movements. She has a habit of doing somewhat unpredictable things.”

  “Not unlike you,” Ames muttered. Henry pretended not to hear.

  “She never does what she’s told…”

  “And in fact she’s a bit of a baggage,” Ames broke in. “Yes, I know the refrain.”

  “Ames, you are my valet.”

  Ames tipped his head on one side. “Valet’s don’t drag hungry men out of hovels in Wales and then clean up the mess after them.”

  “That man threatened to kill King George.”

  “Hawk,” Ames sighed. “What you did to him was very different to the others. Normally we put them on the first boat for deportation.”

  “He said he had killed my father too.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes, precisely.”

  Ames looked away at the bar whilst Henry stared down at his still full tankard of ale. “Did he tell you what your father was looking for?”

  “No. He came at me before I could get an answer from him. My finger twitched on the pistol.” Henry could still smell the smoke, the flash in the pan as the small gun had fired. He scratched at his eyelid. “It was quite fitting, though. I got him in the head, just like my father.”

  “Don’t I just know it. I spent ages cleaning up whilst you had yourself a three bird roast.”

  It had been one of the most satisfying lunches Henry had ever had. In complete contrast to the one where he had told Agatha he had accepted Charles’ offer for her hand. He drew a hand tiredly across his face. He hadn’t been sleeping properly. He’d hoped that Agatha would be grateful that he had provided her with a dowry, that he’d secured the offer for her, as much as it had hurt him to do it.

  He hadn’t been able to bear the sobs that followed his exit from the room.

  CHAPTER 11

  There was no way out. Agatha took a sip of tea and dropped her head back against the smooth cotton of her chair. Three torturous days that Agatha couldn’t even remember spent roaming the house in Mount Street contributed nothing to getting her out of the fix that she was in. Every reason she thought of, every action she could implement, only led her further into trouble.

  The only interesting thing to happen was the removal of the hornbeam tree stump. That had been most illuminating. Agatha had spent a good half an hour speaking to the gardener. He seemed most knowledgeable about the disinterment of the tree stump and other matters. She was indeed extremely impressed with the amount of gunpowder he had laid his hands on to remove the old wood.

  It had made quite a bang.

  But that was two days ago and nothing had happened since. Even the rich hues of the third best drawing room that she sat in couldn’t break her melancholy. The room was at the side of the house, masculinely decorated in greens and reds.

  Wishing she had her boots on so that she could kick her chair round, Agatha crouched slightly and, with little shuffle steps, pushed the low chair round with her hips so that she could look out into the small garden outside the window. A patio led down to the garden wall beyond which a large crater marked the old site of the hornbeam. As it was still only March, only a carpet of snowdrops bloomed with a blaze of daffodils in the borders. The grass of the lawn lay flat and uneven, and the terracotta planters bristled with dry straw colored sticks.

  Reaching into her skirts, Agatha drew out her notebook and a pencil, leaving her potato knife in her pocket. If she couldn’t do any experiments, then at least she could write about doing them. Hmm. Jaquard had said that bamboo was what the Chinese had first used to create fire sticks by filling them with gunpowder. And then some ingenious person had stuffed a rag down the bamboo, and turned the momentum and pressure into a rocket. Agatha scribbled at the pages. Of course it was the pressure that really caused the explosive nature of gunpowder, with a metal box one could create a bomb. Mrs. B. went into quite some detail about its percussive nature. Agatha shuddered. How very destructive. But as Jaquard had said, with different colored metals that burnt with the gunpowder one could create some very pretty fireworks.

  Gosh, he had been so knowledgeable. What if one used paper instead of metal? Would that still create as much of a bang?

  The new position of the chair threw more heat from the fire onto her body. As she warmed, Agatha fell unwillingly asleep, waking with a start to a light tapping on the glass. Her notebook and pencil fell to the ground with a whisper.

  If only she had not woken up. Charles pressed against the corner of the window, a daffodil in one hand, urgently waving at her, pointing at the window handle. Gasping, Agatha stood abruptly and took a step away from the window. Charles shook his head and tapped vigorously on the window.

  She needed to leave. Henry would disapprove of a clandestine meeting. God knows what he would do if he discovered her with Charles again. By Morgan’s marbles, even she didn’t want to meet with Charles again.

  But he was the only angle of escape that she hadn’t considered in this terrible ordeal.

  With shaking fingers she opened the terrace door and stepped out, shivering in the cooler air. A grey dampness hung heavy in the sky. Charles looked a little better than when she last saw him, but not much, given that she had only seen the crumpled stockings of his legs as he dived into the carriage in an effort to get away from Mount Street. He stared at her, eyes wide, flicking side to side, a pinched look to his cheeks.

  “Now look here, Agatha,” he started, clutching the daffodil from hand to hand. “I wanted to speak to you.”

  “I’m here.” She’d see what he had to say first.

  “Yes, look. I can’t marry you.”

  Agatha stepped back slightly halfway into the protection of the house. She hadn’t expected that. She breathed out lightly through her nose. Perhaps she was saved.

  “I love somebody else. But I can’t be with her at the moment.”

  There was someone else? Agatha consciously pushed her hands back down to her sides as they rose involuntarily. She wanted to throttle him. There was someone else and he had still got her into this mess?

  The hunted look grew fiercer in Fashington’s eye. “So I thought, how about if you jilted me, and said it was becau
se you found out something, for example, I had another woman, and then waited till next year to come back to society and…”

  “I jilt you?” Agatha’s mouth dropped open. Hastily she shut it again. “But you are the one who put me in this position! If I jilt you then no one will ever want to marry me.” Actually, that sounded like a rather a nice idea. She opened her mouth and closed it again. No. There was no way Henry would allow her to do that anyway.

  “Please Aggie? For me?” Charles raised thin lips into a smile that a crocodile would have been proud of. “My honor is everything. If I break off the engagement I will no longer be accepted in polite circles. It is vital to my work for my err… secret work.”

  Why hadn’t she noticed how yellow his teeth were until now? Swallowing, she wrapped her arms around her body. “I… I’ll think on it.”

  Charles reached out towards her. Horrified at what might happen next, Agatha stumbled back through the terrace door and shut it firmly. The white moon of his face turned menacingly towards her through an imperfection in the window glass. Indistinctly his lips moved. Agatha could not, did not want to hear what he was saying. She thrust her hand into her pocket below her day dress, grasping the potato knife. Immediately it gave her comfort. Speaking to Charles had achieved nothing, but she had to consider what he had said. There was no way she could marry him. Bloody hell, those yellow crocodile teeth, the octopus hands that had roamed everywhere over her body and that that sly smile… he terrified her.

  Hurrying her steps, Agatha darted into the hall. She needed to leave the house before Charles was admitted at the front door to plead his case further. Whilst the day was grey, it was still warmish. If she asked for her coat from the butler then the family would be alerted to her leaving, which was against Henry’s orders. Or at the very least they would ask her to take a maid wherever she went, and then they would still know where she was.

  Shrugging her shoulders further into her wrap, Agatha skirted the hall table and determinedly opened the large black front door. Charles still hadn’t made it to the front of the house. Pulling her pelisse out of the jumble of household belongings on the hall table, she grabbed it by its strings and in one motion was out onto the front doorstep. The road was quiet, the cobbles gleaming in the March wetness. Standing above the pavement, Agatha was able to see down the road; no Charles in sight.