An Ideal Duchess (30 page)

             
“Forget the bloody hat,” He muttered, swinging her around to use her feet as a battering ram against the solid backs of the crowd.

             
They reached the side door and Malvern turned with her in his arms, dipping his shoulder to push it open, forcing her to grasp him more tightly for fear of sliding to the ground. The rain had not let up one jot, and seemed to be coming down even harder than before, which was why Bim and the suffragettes had not truly escaped, standing just outside, toeing the dry, abrupt boundary marking the end of the alcove over the door and the onslaught of splattering rainfall. Her release from Malvern’s arms was just as dry and abrupt, and she straightened her long blue coat and the sables fastened around her shoulders to escape his intense gaze.

             
“Bron—” Bim started towards him.

             
Malvern merely gave him a long, cool, measured look before turning up the collar of his greatcoat and stepping out into the rain, his clothes darkening with the water splashing beneath his feet. Bim looked frustrated and then resigned, staring after the diminishing figure of her husband as he disappeared down the road.

             
“He’s still furious with me, don’t you think?” Bim said sadly.

             
“At least you aren’t married to him,” Amanda sighed deeply. “Though, his silences are worse than if he yelled at me a little or forbade me to canvass for you.”

             
Miss Trant looked a trifle discomfited by their private quarrel with Malvern, but turned to Bim with a fierce look in her eyes. “Now that we’re not to be disturbed by that pack of brutes, shall we continue our conversation?”

             
Bim raised a brow. “I wasn’t aware that browbeating and insults constituted a conversation.”

             
“You men don’t listen to us until we start hollering,” Mrs. Dalziel turned a gimlet eye on Bim.

             
“I don’t fancy discussing so serious a topic in the rain,” Bim reached into his coat pocket. “Take my card—”

             
“Oh no you don’t,” Miss Trant pushed his hand back. “Don’t fob us off with your social niceties. We demand an answer and are willing to wait until we receive confirmation of your support or opposition of women’s suffrage.”

             
Bim cocked a brow at her over the suffragettes’ heads with a look of dismay, as though asking her to rescue him. Amanda stifled a laugh, finding it incredibly amusing to witness the charming, silver-tongued Anthony Challoner unable to finesse his way out of this conversation. Miss Trant and Mrs. Dalziel did look prepared to wait for Bim’s answer, and Amanda took pity on him.

             
“The rain is beginning to let up, don’t you think?” The suffragettes looked up at the sky at her volley. “I have my motor waiting just around the corner, and it would be drier and much cozier to chat in there.”

             
“No thank you ma’am,” Miss Trant replied stiffly, looking down her retroussé nose at Amanda.

             
“Your Grace,” Amanda replied, half-challengingly. “I am the Duchess of Malvern.”

             
Miss Trant looked unimpressed, though Mrs. Dalziel, being a local woman, did modify the ferocity of her expression. Amanda grinned sardonically, her respect for the dark-haired suffragette growing by the moment. She quirked a brow at Bim, who stared at Miss Trant with a mix of fascination and alarm—yes, she definitely enjoyed his discomfiture.

             
“You probably do not want to be here when the crowd inside calms and begins to disperse,” She pointed out. “My offer of the motorcar remains…”

             
“Her Grace is right,” Bim said, taking Miss Trant’s arm. “We ought to continue the conversation in her motor…on the way to dropping you and Mrs. Dalziel at your homes?”

             
Miss Trant calmly removed her arm from his grasp, stepping towards her fellow suffragette and linking arms with her. “If you please, Your Grace?”

             
The rain hadn’t let up enough for them to reach Amanda’s motor, a delicious Richelieu blue Packard 24,without issue, though her sables kept her relatively dry. The hard, extension cape cart top stretched over the passenger and front seats kept the leathers seats dry, and Amanda settled behind the wheel, Mrs. Dalziel at her side and Miss Trant just behind, with Bim beside her. The Packard had a jump spark ignition rather than a hand crank, and all she had to do was flick the throttle and the ignition levers to make the motor purr to life.

             
Amanda drove slowly, partially because of the rain sloshing beneath the wheels of her motorcar, and mostly because she wanted to eavesdrop on Bim’s conversation with Miss Trant, growing even more amused by the minute by his reaction to the suffragette. Mrs. Dalziel was too polite, or perhaps too wary of the automobile, based on the way she held to the seat whenever they dipped into a puddle or turned a corner, and—shamelessly eavesdropping as well—nodded or shook her head with the impassioned argument Miss Trant made in favor of women’s suffrage. Amanda found herself nodding in agreement with the expertly-argued suffragette cause. She may be in a position of relative authority as a duchess, but she was just as powerless as every other woman.

             
The rain finally let up, trickling to a light gray drizzle and Mrs. Dalziel directed her to a slightly shabby boarding house on a little road far from Cheltenham’s bustling High Street. Miss Trant was out of the rear seat the moment Amanda stopped the Packard in front of the boarding house’s small blue door. She noticed idly that the curtains over the tall, narrow windows on either side of it parted slightly: the genteel residents were sure to dine out on the suffragettes’ arrival in a gleaming motorcar, and that Miss Trant was in the rear seat with a gentleman!

             
Bim looked impatiently after Miss Trant, who disappeared promptly inside of the boarding house, as he assisted Mrs. Dalziel from her seat (who grudgingly accepted his hand and walked past him with a sniff of disapproval). Amanda snorted, now openly amused by Bim’s interest in Miss Trant. He stood by the front passenger seat, the shoulders of his camel-colored Chesterfield darkening with the drizzle, and shook his head in frustration.

             
“I hope you’ve left your card with her,” Amanda teased, starting Packard’s ignition.

             
“She accepted it,” Bim said, climbing into the passenger seat beside her. “But I can picture her having the satisfaction of ripping it into tiny bits and sprinkling those bits into the rubbish basket.”

             
“Oh Bim, of all the women…her!” Amanda groaned. “Malvern will definitely never think to forgive you if you wed a suffragette!”

             
“Perhaps I don’t need his forgiveness,” Bim said tersely. “He can go to the devil for all I care.”

             
She gave him a brief anxious glance as she turned the motorcar back towards the High Street, her attention firmly on the wet road ahead of them. She realized she was watching for Malvern when she felt her fingers cramp from the tightness of her hands on the steering wheel, and forced herself to relax, though Bim’s words were troubling.

             
“You don’t mean that, do you? Malvern’s reaction to your change in party is irrational, but the two of you have been so close for most of your lives.”

             
“I cannot believe you of all people are defending his wretched behavior,” The look he gave her was dark and intense.

             
Amanda lowered her eyes to the road, wanting to ignore the implications of Bim’s intensity. She said little to him about the state of her marriage, but she supposed, as Malvern’s oldest friend, he knew precisely what she experienced. “Malvern is…difficult—”

             
“Difficult my arse,” Bim interrupted, his voice low and cold. “I never realized before now how utterly controlling and callous he can be. Reminds me of my father…no,
his
father, the old duke.”

             
Amanda opened her mouth, her instinct to defend her husband against Bim’s accusations was strong, but why did she continue to deceive herself? She could not even remember just when and why she stopped calling him by his given name, instead choosing to maintain her distance through the conventional rules of referring to a duke: Malvern. It seemed to suit him now, the controlled, dutiful, dispassionate lord of the manor, whose wife filled the family coffers with her dowry and the nursery with his male progeny, thereby fulfilling her obligations in full. The thought of this empty, meaningless existence stretching on until either she died or he did made her blank with despair, and she narrowly missed ramming her Packard into the tram that slowly made its way around the bend onto the Promenade from the High Street by a hairsbreadth.

             
Her hands were shaking too much, both from her near accident and from her thoughts, and she pulled the motor to the kerb in front of a bookshop.             

             
“Perhaps I ought to have married you when the two of you crashed into my life,” She joked feebly, hoping to leaven the unusual mood, but to her horror a hot, salty tear dropped from her eye to run inelegantly down her cheek.

             
“Oh, I’m such a goose,” She pressed her finger to her eyes to dash away the stinging tears threatening to spill.

             
Bim placed his hand over hers, and she turned, startled by the unexpected intimacy of his touch. His expression was serious, and she distantly realized how extraordinarily handsome he was, a dark lock of hair escaping the brim of his derby to curl over his forehead. She held her breath when his hand moved from her hand and up her shoulder, to the nape of her neck, and she tilted her head up when he lowered his mouth to hers.

             
As his lips moved skillfully and scandalously over hers, she permitted her mind to admit to the furtive curiosity she had held towards him during the weeks of his political campaign. It was not so much that she was wildly attracted to Anthony Challoner, but she was rather lonely, and he was a warm, friendly, welcoming body. However, he was Malvern’s best friend, no matter what their differences and she could never come between them—even if she wanted to hurt Malvern in one of the worst ways she possibly could hurt him. She pulled away with tinge of regret, her hand on his chest to push him back, and returned her hands to the steering wheel to turn the Packard back into traffic.

             
“That was stupid of me,” Anthony said, sitting back in his seat, breathing hard. “Bloody stupid.”             

             
“I shan’t remember it ever happened, if you don’t,” She replied calmly.

             
Anthony closed his eyes with a grimace. “God, I’m sorry Amanda. What a bizarre way to comfort you. Yes, let’s forget about it.”

             
Before she could slide the motor back into the High Street, she saw Sylvia Montague sauntering down the pavement in a swish of frothy red petticoats peeping from beneath the hem of her gray walking dress.

             
“There’s Sylvia,” She said hurriedly, thankful for the distraction of the irrepressible woman, and honked her horn.

             
Sylvia turned slowly in their direction and lifted a slender gloved hand in a languid wave before starting towards them, holding an umbrella held lazily over her stuffed bird hat to shield herself from the rain.

             
“My dear, dear duchess—and Anthony Challoner,” Sylvia raised a neat eyebrow. “Am I interrupting an elopement?”

             
“I hope you aren’t bored enough to spread such a ridiculous bit of gossip,” Anthony said flatly.

             
Sylvia batted her eyes innocently at Anthony. “I’ve never been able to chaff you, Anthony. But where
are
the two of you traveling in such a deevie little automobile?”

             
“Her Grace is conveying me to the railway station so I can return to London.”

             
“And after, Your Grace? Do say you will keep me company. I’ve spent all morning in and out of these dreadfully provincial shops in this dreadful weather in hope of finding something to occupy me while Cutty gads about with the Cotswold Hunt.”

             
Amanda laughed at Sylvia’s pleading, peevish expression and agreed. Bim obligingly moved into the rear seat to allow Sylvia to occupy the one beside her, and she managed to bring Bim to the Central Station on St. James Square in a trice. She felt the momentary return of her earlier troubling, disturbing emotions concerning Malvern as she watched Bim enter the stone railway station, but then Sylvia started up on a voluble stream of naughty gossip, easily distracting her thoughts.

             
“Cutty and I have been invited to the deeviest house party hosted by Lady Rawson of Rawson Manor in Kent —she’s from California, or Pittsburgh, or one of those states in the Americas. Do say you’ll come or I shall tell everyone how much of a deadly bore you are!”