Victoria and the Rogue (6 page)

look. As if, after everything Victoria had said upstairs, there was the slightest chance she had designs on

Jacob Carstairs!

If Captain Carstairs noticed Rebecca’s hostile glance in Victoria’s direction, he did not indicate it.

Instead he said to the older girl, “Miss Gardiner, that’s a lovely gown you have on this evening. I don’t

believe I’ve ever seen it on you before.”

Rebecca seemed instantly to forget her antipathy toward Victoria, and simpered in the young captain’s

direction. “Why, thank you, Captain.”

“It’s not hers,” young Jeremiah announced from the floor, where he and his brothers and sisters sat,

sorting through the items they’d found at the bottom of the bag Captain Carstairs had dropped, which

included, if their appreciative cries were to be believed, shrunken heads and monkey’s paws, though

Victoria highly doubted an actual shrunken head would have been allowed through customs. “It’s Cousin

Vicky’s.”

Rebecca instantly turned a deep shade of umber, and Victoria uttered a quick and silent prayer of thanks

to the Lord for taking her parents before they’d had a chance to provide her with siblings.

“Ah,” Captain Carstairs said. “I see. Cousin Vicky’s. And I trust Cousin Vicky is finding London to her

liking?”

Victoria longed to dash her tureen of beef in the handsome young man’s lap. Instead she merely said,

“It’s been tolerable—thus far,” and hoped he took the thus far to mean up until his arrival at the

Gardiners’ dinner table, which was precisely how she’d intended it.

If Captain Carstairs got her meaning, however, he gave no indication. Instead he picked up the glass of

madeira that Perkins had poured for him, and raised it in Victoria’s direction.

“I’d like to declare a toast,” he said. “To the charming Lady Victoria.”

“Hear, hear,” cried Mrs. Gardiner, raising her glass as well. “We are so delighted to have you back in

England at last, my child. It’s been too, too long.”

Mr. Gardiner said nothing but “Harumph,” and lowered his glass again.

But young Captain Carstairs was not finished.

“May she take London society by storm,” he went on, still gazing steadily at Victoria, who, with a

sudden sinking feeling, narrowed her eyes at him in warning. It was a warning, however, that the young

man did not heed. “And not forget us when she is, as I understand she is soon to become, the new Lady

Malfrey.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“You did it on purpose,” Victoria said accusingly.

“I swear I didn’t,” Captain Carstairs said with a careless laugh that infuriated her all the more.

“Don’t swear,” Victoria said with a sniff. “It isn’t polite.”

“Well, then, I promise you I didn’t.”

Jacob Carstairs was looking infuriatingly cool and collected. How dared he look so calm, when Victoria

was simmering over with anger at him?

Well, he wouldn’t look half so cocksure by the time Victoria was through with him. It had been

remarkably stupid of him to ask her to dance, knowing full well that she was still put out with him for

revealing her secret engagement to her aunt and uncle. Perhaps he’d thought because a full week had

gone by since the incident, that her ire might be at its ebb. Foolish man! Victoria had once managed to

stay angry at her uncle Henry for a full a month, and that had been only because he’d used one of her

best shawls to wipe down his pistols after a duel.

Captain Carstairs, on the other hand, had ruined Victoria’s life.

This was not, Victoria felt, an exaggeration, either. Since his thoughtless announcement that night at

dinner, Victoria’s existence had turned into a living nightmare. Her aunt would not leave her alone on the

subject of her engagement. Every time Victoria turned around, it seemed, all she heard was Lord Malfrey

this, and Lord Malfrey that. How Victoria wished Lord Malfrey would hurry up and get home from

Lisbon, so that she might appeal to him to have a word with her relations—or at the very least, convince

him to elope at once, and remove her from their company forever. For they were driving her to

distraction with their petty admonishments and concerns.

What business was it of theirs anyway whom she chose to marry? If she wanted to marry an Indian

fakir, who were they to try to stop her? For heaven’s sake, her uncles had sent her to England with

instructions to find a husband. Well, she’d found one… and a more exemplary groom simply did not

exist. Lord Malfrey was everything that was gentlemanly and admirable—intelligent, polite, attentive, and

very, very handsome.

So what was the problem?

“You’ve only known each other a few months,” was Victoria’s aunt’s lament. But a few months was a

great deal longer than many couples knew each other before taking their vows. Why, in India, more often

than not a bride did not even meet her husband to be until their wedding day! And here Victoria had

spent three whole months at sea getting to know hers! No, “You’ve only known each other a few

months” was no sort of argument.

Her aunt, Victoria knew, was only put out because Victoria had managed to get a husband before

Rebecca had. Which wasn’t entirely fair, because Rebecca had only her pretty face to recommend her,

and no fortune to speak of. Victoria was perfectly aware that a part of Lord Malfrey’s attraction to her

was her inheritance. She did not blame him for it. Men had to eat, too, same as women.

But she also knew that, had she been horse-faced or even, God forbid, redheaded, Lord Malfrey would

not have taken the time to learn of her fortune. He would have dismissed her out of hand. No, her money

made things easier, certainly, but it was her person first, and then her purse, that Hugo Rothschild had

found so attractive.

But what was so very wrong with that? What was a marriage if not a business transaction? Victoria

could not help thinking that the Indian way of courtship and marriage made more sense than the way the

English went about it. In India parents decided, often at birth, whom their children would marry. When

the boy and girl came of age, certain transactions ensued, generally involving goods of some sort. Some

girls were worth many goods, some only a few. After these transactions, the couple was joined in holy

matrimony, and everyone went home with their allotted goods, and that was that.

In England, it was entirely more complicated. No marital arrangements were made on the part of the

children’s parents at all. Instead, mothers and fathers kept their daughters tucked out of sight until their

sixteenth or seventeenth birthdays, at which point they were suddenly pushed into society—something

Victoria had learned was called a girl’s “coming out,” or “first season”—and paraded in front of the

marriageable bachelors who happened to be in town and not back at their country estates, still shooting

grouse, as they’d been doing all winter. The single men then decided which of these many girls they liked,

and then from there, which girl had the largest dowry.

The English style of courtship seemed perfectly barbaric—and unfair to the girls, Victoria felt. For what

if a girl were not attractive, or poor? Who would want to marry her then? Perhaps the worst part of the

English courtship rituals, Victoria learned soon after her arrival on English soil, was something called

Almack’s. It was nothing more than a series of large rooms in which everyone who was anyone in

London society gathered every Wednesday night in order to dance and show off their new spring

wardrobe. Almack’s was, to Victoria, a nightmarish crush of humanity. It made her long for the airy and

open market squares of Jaipur, which held occasional festivals, when it was not monsoon season, at

which everyone from neighboring villages showed up. How she missed the sparkling saris, the fire-eaters,

the highly spiced savories!

There was nothing comparable at Almack’s. Bland punch, stale biscuits, and even staler conversation.

There were no fire-eaters, and not even a single elephant.

The utter lack of other diversion made the presence of Jacob Carstairs surprisingly welcome. He did

not, according to her cousin Rebecca, come often to Almack’s. But upon Victoria’s first visit to the

place, there he was, looking very well in evening dress, though his collar points were still distressingly

low—the lowest in the room, in fact. Victoria had thrown her cousin a significant look upon noticing

them, as if to say, See? What was I telling you? No respect for fashion whatsoever.

Still, unfashionable collar points or not, Captain Carstairs greeted both girls very cordially, and asked

each of them for a dance—to Rebecca’s delight, and Victoria’s disgust. If Jacob Carstairs thought that

she was going to meekly forget the humiliation he’d put her through the week before, he was in for a rude

shock.

“You knew I hadn’t yet told my aunt and uncle about my engagement to Lord Malfrey,” Victoria said as

Jacob Carstairs took her hand for the dance she’d promised him. “Admit it. You were hoping to cause a

scene.”

“Which I did,” Captain Carstairs said, not even attempting to hide his happy smile at the memory of

Victoria’s aunt falling into a swoon and her daughters’ attempts to revive her. Victoria’s uncle’s reaction

had not been nearly as satisfying. He had merely called for Perkins to bring him a whiskey.

“Well, I don’t think it’s anything to be proud of,” Victoria said severely. “You put the entire house into

an uproar.”

“I didn’t,” Jacob said. “You’re the one who wanted to marry a man your family doesn’t approve of, not

me. I just informed them of the fact. It doesn’t do any good to kill the messenger.”

“My family doesn’t disapprove of Lord Malfrey,” Victoria informed him. “It’s my marrying so soon after

my arrival that they don’t like. Not that there’s anything they can do about it.”

Jacob lifted a single dark brow. “Isn’t there?”

Victoria gave a haughty toss of her head. “Hardly! What can they do? They don’t hold my purse strings;

I do. I can do as I like.”

“And what you like,” Jacob said, “is to marry Hugo Rothschild. A man you hardly know.”

“Why does everyone keep saying that?” Victoria shook her head in wonder. “I know him very well

indeed. I was with him for a month longer than I was with you on the Harmony, you’ll remember.”

“As if I could forget,” Jacob said obliquely. Then he demanded, “And just what was Lord Malfrey, a

gentleman whom I understand is in some financial straits, doing in Bombay, anyway? Did you ever bother

asking him that?”

“Of course I did,” Victoria said. “Lord Malfrey was seeing to the sale of some property left to him by a

distant relation.”

“In India?”

“That’s correct.” Victoria wondered why she was bothering to explain her fiancé’s business affairs to

this man, who was not even a relation, but seemed to harbor some sort of absurd proprietary feelings

toward her just the same. “And now he’s off to Lisbon to spend the proceeds buying back some family

portraits that he was forced to part with a few years ago, when he was in somewhat different financial

straits.”

Jacob Carstairs looked disgusted. “Good Lord,” he said. “And you really want to marry this fellow? It

seems he can barely manage to keep his personal affairs in order.”

“Of course he can’t,” Victoria said. “That’s why he needs me.”

“To pay his bills, you mean,” Jacob said, rudely.

“To help him organize his life,” Victoria corrected him.

But she instantly regretted her unguarded words when Jacob Carstairs let out a bark of laughter, and

cried, “Good Lord, I’d almost forgotten. Of course a fellow like that would appeal to a busy bee like

you. Why, he needs no end of improving.”

Victoria leveled a very meaningful gaze at Jacob Carstairs’s collar points and said, “I can think of a few

things I’d like to improve about you.”

“It all makes sense now.” Jacob did not seem to have noticed the direction of her gaze, nor heard her

remark. “The Hugo Rothschilds of the world are irresistible to all little Miss Bees like you. Tell me, where

did you intend to start with him? His finances, of course, are in lamentable condition. But if I were you,

I’d begin with his mother. I understand she’s quite a gorgon.”

“I’ll tell you where I’d start with you,” Victoria piped up. “You need to learn to keep your—”

“Ah, no,” Jacob said, lifting a warning finger. “You and I are not engaged. I have not paid for the

privilege of one of your improving speeches—elucidating as I am sure they must be. You will have to

save your lectures for me until such time as you are unattached again.”

“Well,” Victoria said, feeling more vexed with him than ever, “then you will have to wait forever, for I

plan never to be unattached again.”

Jacob, though the dance abruptly finished, forgot to bow in response to Victoria’s curtsy. Instead he just

stood there looking down at her with a very astonished expression on his face.

“What?” he said, seemingly quite unaware that all the other couples save themselves were moving from

the dance floor. “You still intend to go through with it?”

“With what?” Victoria thought that, for all he was in charge of a shipping line worth many thousands of

pounds, Jacob Carstairs was rather dim. “My wedding to Lord Malfrey? Why, certainly. I think I already

informed you of that.”

“But… but your aunt and uncle,” Jacob stammered. “I saw the way they reacted to the news. Surely