A Scandalous Publication (3 page)

“I beg your pardon?” Mrs. Wyndham stared at her.

“I ordered the chaise in Sir Maxim’s name. Mr. Rendell promised his very finest vehicle.”

“Charlotte! How
could
you!”

“Without any conscience whatsoever.”

“If Sir Maxim should ever discover your impudence….”

“He can hardly call me out
—even he cannot fight duels with women.” Charlotte was quite unrepentant. “Now, then, I am determined to look over the house again before we leave. Would you like to accompany me?”

Mrs. Wyndham shook her head. “No, my dear, I would prefer to try to remember it as it was before all this happened, but you go if you wish, I shall not mind at all.”

“If you’re sure…?”

“Quite sure.”

But as the door closed behind her daughter, Mrs. Wyndham’s eyes filled with tears again. Remember it as it was? That was all she could do now, for it was her memories that sustained her.

Charlotte’s steps echoed in the dark, deserted rooms, and she pulled her shawl more firmly about her, as if cold. She walked slowly, savoring each well-loved door and passage, each cupboard and corner. The drawing room seemed vast without its furniture and paintings, and the chandeliers were oddly dull without daylight to enhance them. The gods and goddesses still gazed from their painted heaven, but now there was nothing for them to see in the earthly room beneath.

As she reached the shuttered room where the paintings Max Talgarth had purchased were being temporarily stored, she heard the chaise arriving outside. Glancing quickly at her fob watch, she saw that it had come much too early. She had time enough to glance through the paintings. She smiled at the first one, a scene by Mr. Turner of a very stormy sea. The colors were very luminous and yellow, rather like Judith Taynton when seen in a bad dream, she thought uncharitably. She was reminded then of a dinner party some five years earlier, when a waggish guest had likened the painting not to Judith, but to the mulligatawny soup.

The next painting, to her great astonishment, proved to be the portrait of herself on her twenty-first birthday. Sir Thomas Lawrence, that most fashionable of artists, had stayed at Kimber Park while it was painted, and she well remembered wearing the beautiful lilac taffeta gown, her hair dressed up and adorned with the Wyndham diamond tiara. It was strange to see herself in so lovely a color, after two long months of nothing but unbecoming black.

She gazed at the portrait, and suddenly it occurred to her that it was very strange indeed for her likeness to have found its way into Max Talgarth’s purchases. It was inconceivable that he had knowingly acquired it, and so it must be there by error. She picked it up to set aside.

“Please don’t do that, Miss Wyndham, for I think it is very good.” Max himself suddenly spoke from the doorway behind her.

With a startled cry she whirled about, almost dropping the painting.

“Please be careful, I do not wish to see my unexpected acquisition damaged.” He smiled a little. He was leaning against the doorjamb, his cane swinging in his hand. He wore a light-green coat of superb cut and style, and tight gambroon trousers set off his manly figure to perfection. His waistcoat was striped in brown and white, his neckcloth was of fine brown silk, and his starched white shirt was adorned by only the simplest of frills.

He came into the room, flinging open the shutters and placing his hat, gloves, and cane on the narrow sill. The pale daylight brightened the room immediately, and as he leaned back against the sill, his attention was drawn once more to the painting, which she had now replaced with the others. “I cannot imagine how I managed to acquire you, Miss Wyndham, but no doubt you will grace my walls as elegantly as you once graced your own.” He glanced at her, for she had said nothing at all yet. “I seem to have robbed you of your formidable tongue.”

“You startled me.”

“So it seems. However, I didn’t feel the need to announce my approach with a drumroll,” he replied dryly.

“I didn’t expect to see you again before we left.”

“Ah, yes, in
my
hired chaise, it seems. Perhaps I should explain that I rested my horses at the Three Tuns on my way here. You’ve been very free with my name, Miss Wyndham; that was naughty of you.”

Her cheeks reddened a little. “What would you have done in my place, sir?” she countered. “Would you have neglected the wits God gave you by accepting Job Rendell’s most wretched bone-shaker?”

He gave a brief laugh. “If I was a proper, well-behaved, meek young lady, then no doubt I would submit to having my bones shaken. But since the question implies that I would be you, Miss Wyndham, then I must admit that I would then be unpredictable, and so I would probably sink to such regrettable deceit.”

“I don’t think it regrettable if it means traveling to London in some degree of comfort.”

“No doubt.”

“Why have you come here today?”

“I do own the place, or had you forgotten?”

“Sir, forgetting such a fact would be quite impossible.”

“Even for the redoubtable Miss Wyndham?”

“I have a great many things to try to forget, sir, and I cannot be expected to succeed with them all.”

He smiled a little. “Miss Wyndham, believe me, I’m not the monster I’m reputed to be, and my reason for coming here today is simply that I wish to say in person to you and your mother that if you should ever wish to visit Kimber Park, you will both be quite welcome to do so.” She stared at him, quite taken aback at such an unexpected invitation. She wondered wryly if Judith knew anything about it. Accepting was quite out of the question, for even if Judith
did
know and was in agreement, which seemed highly unlikely, the thought of being a visitor in the house that had once been their home, and seeing as its mistress a woman who had always been an enemy, was disagreeable in the extreme. “I, er, I thank you, Sir Maxim, but I do not think we can accept.” She tried to word her reply as tactfully as possible, but it still came out in a stilted, cold manner that left him with little option but to interpret her thoughts correctly.

A quiet anger stole into his piercing blue eyes. “I confess to being overwhelmed by the graciousness and charm of your answer, madam.”

She was a little startled by the sharpness of his reaction. “Sir Maxim, I
—”

“Are you always so damned rude?” he interrupted. “I’ve tried to make allowances for your conduct, but try as I will, I cannot accept that grief can be constantly trotted out as an excuse for downright ignorance. My conduct toward you has at all times been correct
—”

“At
all
times?” She was suddenly angry as well. “Oh, come now, sir, aren’t you conveniently forgetting your own sad lack of manners and sensitivity?”

“Whatever I’ve said or done, madam, has been the direct results of
your
behavior.”

“And that excuses you for bringing your mistress to this house at a time when even the devil might have shown more tact?”

His eyes were cold. “Have a care, Miss Wyndham.”

She turned away. “I refuse to cross swords anymore with you, sir, least of all today.”

“That is a great pity, for I’m in just the mood to take you on. I’ve heard it said that Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portraits do not lie, but by God the one in this room does!”

“Are you presuming to form a judgment?”

“Oh, yes.”

“But you know nothing about the subject of that portrait.”

“Well, there you are wrong, madam, for I know sufficient to hold an accurate opinion. Until this minute I would have said that black doesn’t suit you, that it does you no justice whatsoever, but now I’ve reconsidered, for it becomes your sour, disagreeable temperament very well indeed. The creature I see smiling on that canvas no longer exists, her quite delightful smile is a figment of my imagination, and her excellent taste in clothes and the style with which she wears them is no more than a dream. Your father would be turning in his grave if he could see what has happened to his only daughter, for the Charlotte Wyndham he spoke of bears no resemblance whatsoever to the one it’s been my misfortune to know.”

“Have you quite finished?” she breathed furiously.

“I could go on, believe me.”

“Spare yourself the breath, sir, for I could not care less what you think about me.”

“That doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. No wonder you have the reputation you have, for taking an interest in you is a singularly unrewarding exercise.”

“Then pray let me relieve you of any further tedium, sir, by relieving you of my presence.” She gathered her skirts and hurried to the door, where she paused to look back. “Good-bye, Sir Maxim, I cannot say that making your acquaintance has been a pleasure.”

He sketched a mocking bow.

She turned on her heel and walked quickly away down the echoing passage, and when her footsteps had died away, he glanced down from the window at the drive in front of the great portico. His carriage had now been joined by the hired chaise, which two footmen were busily loading with the trunks that had been carried out of the house. When they had finished, Mrs. Wyndham’s little maid hurried down the wide steps, dashing through the rain to be helped in by one of the footmen. A moment later Charlotte and her mother emerged from the house. The final moment had proved too much for Mrs. Wyndham, who was in tears again and needed much gentle assistance from her daughter.

When her mother was in the chaise, Charlotte paused for a moment in the rain, her black traveling cloak billowing in a sudden gust of wind as she gazed for a last time at the great white house that had been her home all her life. A stray curl of dark-red hair fluttered across her pale face, and then she turned away to climb quickly into the waiting carriage, which a second later pulled swiftly away toward the valley and the wind-rippled grayness of the lake.

The house in Henrietta Street was three narrow stories high, and was built of red-and-gray brick, with a pale, distinctive band of stonework above the sash windows of the ground floor. There was a wrought-iron fence separating it from the broad pavement, and beside the front door there was a brass plate proclaiming it to still be the residence of the Reverend James Conway-Lewis, the unfortunate gentleman whose demise beneath the wheels of the Bath mail had brought the property so unexpectedly onto the market. The windows, with their small, rectangular panes, had an excellent view of the mansions and railed garden of nearby Cavendish Square, while to the rear of the house there was a narrow, secluded garden backing onto a disused alley and the buildings of Oxford Street, which ran parallel to the south and which, as Judith had taken such pains to point out, completely separated the new Wyndham residence from the elegance and grandeur of fashionable Mayfair.

After the magnificence of Kimber Park, the new house was at first almost claustrophobic, for the drawing room and dining room together were only half the size of the library at the country estate. The three bedrooms on the floor above were equally small, lacking the dressing rooms and immense wardrobes of those to which Charlotte and her mother had hitherto been used.

Apart from Mrs. Wyndham’s maid, Muriel, the only servants were the cook, Mrs. White, who had previously been in the employ of the Reverend Conway-Lewis, and the timid housemaid, Polly, who burst into tears at the slightest rebuke, of which there were many from the rather particular Mrs. White.

Henrietta Street itself was fairly quiet, but there was a constant noise from Oxford Street, where carriages, wagons, carts, and riders seemed to clatter past all the time. Throughout the night the watch called the hour, and the dawn was greeted by a chorus of street cries, each one seeming louder and more persistent than the one before. Charlotte lay in her bed at night, wishing with all her heart that instead of the sounds of the city she could hear the murmur of the breeze through the trees at Kimber Park and the cooing of the doves stirring at daybreak.

* * * *

The wet summer gradually gave way to an equally wet winter, and Charlotte and her mother did their best to settle in, but it was very difficult because everything was so different now. From Richard Pagett in America there was still no word, although Charlotte wrote several times more. Each time the letter carrier’s bell was heard in the street, Mrs. Wyndham hurried hopefully to the window, but each time he walked on by.

Their new life was dull and restricted; at least Mrs. Wyndham found it so, because she had always enjoyed a full social calendar. Charlotte found it less disagreeable, since a full social calendar was something she had always striven to avoid. She felt for her mother, however, especially as they had soon discovered the mettle of the so-called friends who in the past had sought their company. Now Devonshire House, Melbourne House, and so on ignored them. At first the lack of invitations had been put down to people’s respect for their mourning period, but it soon became apparent that it wasn’t this but their reduced financial and social circumstances that were uppermost in the thoughts of others. In the early weeks there were some callers, and a number of cards were left, but gradually even this contact dwindled to nothing. It seemed that no one wished to be encumbered with acquaintances whose low situation might prove embarrassing. Mrs. Wyndham affected not to be concerned at the way they’d been excluded, but Charlotte knew, how deeply her mother had been hurt by the concerted snub dealt so unfeelingly by those they had formerly regarded as friends.

Charlotte was determined to make the best of things, and as Judith had predicted so acidly, the first thing she had done on arriving in town had been to take out a subscription at Wyman’s Circulating Library in nearby Wigmore Street, for books were one luxury she had no intention of relinquishing without a struggle. Losing herself in a book was a happy escape, but sometimes it had the very opposite effect, for it brought back a yearning for all that had gone. It was while she was curled up in a chair reading that her daydreams took her back to the library at Kimber Park, and it seemed that at any moment she would hear her father’s tread at the door…
.