A Christmas Scandal. Jane Goodger

I was hoping she was something special. You are getting rather old. One never knows when one will meet one’s maker. It’s almost as if you want Frederick to inherit the title.” It was something Amelia often talked about, or threatened, depending on their conversation. His cousin Frederick was, politely put, an idiot, a dandy who spent more money a year on the proper buttons than most gentlemen spent on a good port. Edward had never liked him, something Amelia was well aware of, and so the threat that Frederick would inherit the title should he die prematurely always hit its intended mark—even when Edward pretended it did not.

      “Unless you are planning to do me in yourself, I fear I will live a long and healthy life. Certainly long enough to marry and guarantee an heir.”

      “As Uncle did?” she asked, suddenly serious.

      “Please do not worry about me and my heart, Amelia. We are both doing famously well.”

      “I do worry. And I don’t care what you say, you’ve changed since returning from America. If it wasn’t this Miss Pierce, who was it, then?”

      “The duties of the earldom weigh heavily,” he said, and nearly chuckled aloud when his sister rolled her eyes. But she accepted his answer, content to wait until he was honest with her, which he would never be. The tragic truth was, he’d very nearly succumbed to Miss Pierce’s charms, finding himself so ridiculously enraptured it was unmanning. He could only congratulate himself that no one, not even Miss Pierce, had ever known quite how far he’d fallen. It would have been a damned embarrassing thing to admit given that their entire relationship had been based on mutual pretense. He had been trying to avoid all those American mamas looking for a title, and she had been trying to avoid marrying a particular someone. Last he’d heard, though, she’d been expecting a proposal any day from the very man she’d said she’d been trying to avoid. Odd, that. Maybe the entire time she’d been pretending to like him merely to make the other gentleman jealous. That thought rankled and he frowned, something Amelia immediately picked up on.

      “I am trying to work,” he said, pointedly looking down at a pile of estate papers laid out in front of him.

      “You should hire someone to worry about the estate,” she said, becoming bored with him.

      “Perhaps I should hire someone to keep you entertained and out of my hair. If you care to stay, I could use someone to look over these rents for me—”

      “I’m off,” she said immediately. “I have to help Aunt Matilda get ready for our visit. We are going, are we not?”

      Edward let out a sigh. “We are.”

      Amelia beamed him a smile, leaving him alone to dread his visit to Bellewood, where he would certainly see Maggie. Perhaps she was traveling to England to gather her trousseau together. Well, good for her. She should find a good man to marry her, someone from her own country. Someone who didn’t find everything she did so completely charming he turned into an absolute fool.

      Eyeing the door to make certain his sister was truly gone, he slowly opened the middle drawer of his desk, reaching back so that his fingers touched a small bundle of papers. Usually, it was enough simply to reach inside and touch them. He chose not to think about why he felt the need for this concrete evidence of her. But he didn’t have a photograph or a lock of hair, and for some reason, thinking about the letters, touching them, made her real again. Slowly, he pulled them out, opening one and smiling. Maggie was suddenly there before him, grinning, lively, her brown eyes alight with some secret, probably nonsense.

      It is dreadfully boring in New York right now. Poor Elizabeth has been locked in her house since we returned from Newport. Please do not tell the duke, as I believe his tender feelings would be greatly damaged by the knowledge that even at this moment Elizabeth is bound and gagged in their Fifth Avenue home in fear she will somehow escape matrimony.

      He chuckled softly, hearing her lilting voice in his head. Without reading further, he refolded the letter and placed it with the others, tying the well-worn ribbon as he had done perhaps a dozen times. With an impatient inward breath, he put them back in the drawer, telling himself he was an idiot.

      Chapter 4

      London, late October

      “Mother, I am ready to go,” Maggie said, tugging on her kidskin gloves. Not two minutes before, an excited girl had knocked on their hotel door and gushed about a fine coach that was waiting for them. At least they would ride in style, she thought, frowning at the fray marks on the tips of the fingers, a sure sign she came from a family of former means. They had been expensive gloves and now they were simply old gloves, but, she supposed, they were better than no gloves at all.

      “How long a drive is it?” Harriet asked, giving her hair one final inspection, then shrugging. The two women could have taken a train, for it would have brought them to Bellingham far faster, but were grateful the duke had sent his coach. In truth, their funds were so far depleted from hotels in New York and passage to England, they’d hardly been able to pay for a respectable hotel. As it was, they had only the fare to return home in their pockets. The two women had become exceedingly thrifty in the past weeks, counting their coins and carefully devising a budget.

      They could not afford to bring a lady’s maid with them, so the two of them had muddled through the best they could in the past few weeks. Maggie, especially, had become quite proficient at her own grooming, but not so successful with her mother’s dandelion fluff hair. Her own springing black curls were quite forgiving and Maggie could gain a rather charming affect by pulling them back loosely in a single ribbon.

      “It’s a two-to three-hour trip if we do not stop,” Maggie said pointedly, as her mother almost always found it necessary to stop.

      “And they are expecting us.”

      Watching her mother tuck a wayward strand of hair behind her ear gave Maggie a sudden jolt of tenderness for the woman who could drive her quite mad sometimes. She realized Harriet was nervous, more nervous than she herself was. No matter how many times her mother had told her she actually preferred traveling to England with her rather than going immediately to live with her sister in Savannah, Maggie still did not quite believe her.

      “They are expecting us,” she said with an indulgent smile, and held up a missive she’d received just yesterday from Elizabeth gushing about how she couldn’t wait to see her friend.

      “Oh, don’t look at me as if I’m daft,” her mother said with good humor.

      Maggie came up behind her mother and helped her with her hat. “There,” she said, pushing it forward a bit. “You look quite dashing with it cocked this way.” The ostrich feather was looking a bit battered, but there was nothing to do for it. She kissed her mother’s cheek.

      “It’s not the latest style,” Harriet said, eying herself critically.

      “Oh, what do they know about style so far out in the country? And really, Mama, you know Elizabeth won’t care.”

      Maggie beamed a smile at her mother hoping to ease her worry. She’d decided the day she received that invitation from the duke that this was the chance of a lifetime, a chance to begin a new life, a life that did not include a father in prison and one that certainly did not include all the horrible sordid things that she had done. She was Maggie Pierce, the indomitably happy, buoyantly joyful woman she always was. Fooling people was remarkably easy, including her own mother.

      Maggie had not told Elizabeth of their woes in her letter accepting the duke’s invitation, though she had attempted several times. Somehow, writing it down made it all seem so sordid, and what her father had done to his friends was so absolutely unforgivable. Which, of course, it had been.

      Her mother walked toward the door, then stopped and clutched her hands to her middle. “We had a maid, but she became violently ill before we departed and so refused to go aboard the ship.”

      That was the story Harriet insisted on telling when the two women showed up without a personal maid.

      “You know I do not feel comfortable lying to Elizabeth.