A Game of Scandal (The Agency For Scandal #3)

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE

It seemed to me that weddings were highly overrated.

Don’t misunderstand – the bride was beautiful, the groom was devastating, and the way they were looking at one another would melt the hardest heart. I wasn’t against weddings. However, there was no denying that the ceremony itself was tedious. We’d been sitting in this church for hours, and, as the vicar droned on and on, it appeared there was to be no end in sight.

I looked down at my fingers, holding my gloves in my lap. I thought I’d managed to remove all the ink stains, but there was a long smudge of sapphire blue down the side of my right hand. As the vicar continued his endless pontificating on the subject of marriage, I tried to rub it away.

Surely all this was overdoing things? A brief “Do you? I do” would do the trick just as well. Did the whole congregation really need to hear about how fruitful the vicar hoped the marriage would be? Personally, I thought it bad manners that he was already haranguing the pair of them about procreation (in front of an audience, no less) when they had said their marriage vows only moments ago. After all, Iris Scott-Holland was only a year older than me. I shuddered at the thought.

“Stop. Fidgeting,” my brother, Max, muttered out of the side of his mouth.

“I’m not fidgeting,” I whispered back, poking him hard in the side. “I am shuddering .”

My brother stared straight ahead, utterly unmoved, his expression serene, but on my other side I felt his wife, Izzy, tremble.

“Felicity, please don’t make me laugh in church,” she said in a low voice.

“The vicar seems very interested in flesh , doesn’t he?” I mused, keeping my own voice to a quiet murmur. “You don’t hear people talking about flesh much in company. Strange that it’s acceptable in church.”

Izzy’s shoulders shook harder.

Further along the pew, in a voice that was a touch too loud, Izzy’s best friend Teresa St Clair asked, “What’s the joke?”

Max made a sound like an angry cat.

I huffed and decided to focus my attention away from this dull scene. I turned my mind instead to harmonic progression and its relation to the particularly knotty mathematical problem that Dr Volterra at the University of Rome and I had recently corresponded about. This worked a treat, and by the time Nicholas Wynter exclaimed “Finally!” (echoing the thoughts of the entire congregation) and kissed his bride with an enthusiasm that sent a ripple of scandalized laughter around the church, I had made a pleasing amount of progress. I would have to make some notes as soon as we got home.

A murmur of chatter broke out, and after the bride and groom swept back up the aisle, everyone began to filter out of the small wooden pews.

“Well,” Teresa said, dabbing at her eyes with her handkerchief as she got to her feet. “That was lovely, wasn’t it? I do enjoy a wedding. Such a nice excuse to have a good cry.”

“You don’t need an excuse, you watering pot,” Izzy teased. “You cried this morning as well, over that novel you were reading.”

“I have a lot of feelings,” Teresa said, sniffling. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Nothing at all,” her husband agreed, slipping his arm round her waist. He bent his head and whispered something in Teresa’s ear that had her blushing the same vibrant shade of pink as her gown.

“James! We’re in church !” she hissed, batting at his arm, but the grin on her face told its own story.

I rolled my eyes. The trouble with the St Clairs was that they were constantly mooning over one another. Max and Izzy were just as bad. I never thought I’d see my solid, sensible big brother reduced to the doe-eyed, soft-hearted fool that he was when it came to his wife. Over the last couple of years I had grown used to noisily announcing my arrival before I entered any room in the house, having caught the two of them in each other’s arms far too often. As his sister, I was vaguely horrified. Max was unrepentant. It was enough to put a person off romance altogether.

We made our way out into the thin February sunshine that trickled across the beautiful frosted landscape and joined the crowd of well-dressed guests making their way down the winding path from the church to the big house. The Wynters had decided to get married at Iris’s family estate in Kent, which – from what I had heard – had been the site of many glamorous parties over the years.

I wasn’t the only one to have been surprised by this choice. Nicholas Wynter was one of the most fashionable men in the country, and his dazzling new wife would certainly have been the toast of the coming season had Lord Wynter not stolen a march on every other eligible bachelor (much to their chagrin) and whisked her down the aisle. Typically, one would expect a lavish ceremony in town, plenty of pomp and circumstance, with various dignitaries and the odd royal in attendance, but this was much smaller, more intimate.

Perhaps it was down to the bride’s mysterious history. No one was really sure where Iris Scott-Holland had been for the last few years, though there were plenty of stories. The most commonly accepted rumour was that she’d been educated somewhere in Europe, but I knew better. How scandalized would many of these guests be, I wondered with a smile, to know that Iris Scott-Holland had run away as a child, had been living in London and working as a seamstress, only to return seven years later to reclaim the home that was rightfully hers, the home we were currently standing in?

Now that was a good story.

“Felicity!” a voice called, and I turned towards it, to see the person who had told me the whole tale in the first place: my friend, and Iris’s stepsister, Cassandra Weston.

“Thank goodness you’re here,” Cassie said, looping her arm through mine and dragging me away from my group. I glanced towards Max and saw him mouth the word Behave . The smile I gave him in return was angelic, and his eyes narrowed. He knew me too well.

Max might be my brother, but the man had practically raised me. Our father died when I was four and Max was twelve, and though I loved my mother, she didn’t want much to do with bringing up a child, particularly one who was considered – by society’s standards, at least – peculiar . Max had become my official guardian when he turned eighteen, though in his typical, chivalrous way, he’d been carefully watching out for me for far longer. It wasn’t exactly my fault that I tended to get into scrapes… I was a naturally curious child, constantly poking my nose in where I shouldn’t, fascinated by how things worked, and that hadn’t changed as I reached adulthood.

If you asked me, there was a straight line to be drawn between incidents like the time I got lost in the woods, tracking a family of badgers, or when I almost set the house on fire, taking apart a gas lamp, and my academic interest in solving a mathematical problem. What I enjoyed was the knowing – I wanted to know why things were the way they were. For every problem there was a logical solution. Unfortunately, one area in which I could discover very little in the way of logic was the myriad, confusing, contradictory rules of society.

I did try to behave the way my family wanted, but I never got it quite right. Trouble seemed to follow me around, and Max had always been on hand to fix things.

This had led to the regrettable situation I found myself in now: I was eighteen years old, and whenever my brother looked at me, he still saw a precocious girl in pigtails and knee socks.

“Wasn’t the service interminable ?” Cassie groaned now as we fell back, away from the watchful gaze of my brother.

“Endless,” I agreed.

Cassie darted a glance in the direction of Max’s back as he made his way towards the house, and we hovered, smiling politely at people as they passed. “Well?” Her eyebrows raised. “What did he say?”

Whatever expression passed over my face then must have been enough to communicate my frustration, because Cassie exhaled. “He said no? Again?”

“He doesn’t say no,” I grumbled. “He says ‘not yet’, which is much harder to argue against.” I sighed. “He says that once I’ve had a proper season being out , then we can revisit the idea of university. He says Mother is excited about coming to London, showing me off, attending the parties, that it would make her happy, that perhaps I’ll enjoy myself. He makes it sound so reasonable , as though he’s only giving me more options, but the man is utterly transparent. He thinks I’m going to walk into a ballroom and get moony-eyed over some insipid aristocrat, and then he’ll be able to bundle me off safe and sound into marriage and I’ll forget all about studying mathematics. He acts as though the whole thing is a … a … girlish fancy.”

Cassie gave a rumble of annoyance that made me smile. It was a gift to have a friend who was so ferociously on my side. Like me, Cassie had no desire to find a husband. For her, it was a decision born from an absence of romantic interest. For me … well, I already had one overbearing man in my life. I saw absolutely no reason to add another.

“I thought better of him,” she said, disapproval in her tone. “I thought he’d become so much more progressive over the last couple of years. His speech in Parliament last week was extremely stirring.”

“He has,” I agreed quickly, feeling a need to defend Max, even against my own frustration. “He’ll tell you he’s all for women’s education and he means it. It’s about me . You know he’s always been overprotective. Besides, Mother will hate the idea, and he’s trying to keep the peace for as long as possible.”

Cassie’s head dipped in acknowledgment. “Still…” She trailed off.

“Still, it’s not over yet.” I met her gaze, baring my teeth in a smile. “He might think I’ll give up quietly, but he’s about to find out he’s wrong.”

“So what will you do?”

I shrugged. “I’ll think of something. Perhaps I should talk to Izzy again. I know she’s careful about interfering too much in my relationship with Max, but if anyone can get him to see sense it’s her.” I scuffed the ground with my toe, noticing, as I did, a smudge appear on my silly pink-ribboned slippers. “This would be much simpler if I had access to my trust. What’s the point of having all this money if I have to ask Max’s permission to spend it? I can’t spend my own money, but I also can’t get a job, because ladies don’t work. And,” I added, heated now, “if Max had his way, I’d marry and then my husband would control the purse strings instead. It’s infuriating. I have as much right to my inheritance as he does. For goodness’ sake, I’d spend it better than most of the men of my acquaintance. An education, is it really such an outrageous thing to want?”

Cassie nodded eagerly. “Exactly,” she said. “If it wasn’t for Iris, then I’d still be stuck, waiting to do something with my life.” She reached over and squeezed my hand in hers. “No one has more drive than you,” she said. “Max doesn’t see that yet, but he will. It would be criminal to keep a mind like yours caged. He loves you; he’ll come around. We must remember that sometimes men can be painfully slow on the uptake.”

Hearing her words felt like drinking something warm on a cold day, a pleasant feeling spreading through my body. Cassie’s belief in me was unshakable, and had been since we had met four years ago at one of the few social occasions young, well-bred girls were allowed to attend: a bland tea party at someone’s London home. I’d discovered Cass sneaking outside with pilfered finger sandwiches to feed to the hostess’s fat pug, and we’d been firm friends from that moment on.

Cassie had a keen mind and a disdain for the conventional. Until recently, she – like me – had been denied the opportunity to put that mind to good work, but after her mother and sister had departed for Europe, leaving Cassie to stay with Iris, along with access to the trust left to her by her stepfather, she had wasted no time in enrolling at University College London to study medicine. My feelings were a swirling mixture of pride and envy, and I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t led to me stepping up my own campaign with Max. I had a brain – a brilliant one, as it happened – and I wanted to use it.

My affinity for numbers had outstripped my governess’s when I was eight years old, and – I believe because it amused him – Max had hired a young male tutor from Oxford to help me with my mathematics. By ten, I was running circles round the man. In the intervening years, I’d taught myself, poring over books and journals, striking up correspondence with several eminent mathematicians (always under the name F. Vane , never quite trusting that the gentlemen in question would be so forthcoming had they known I was a woman).

But what I longed for, what I needed now, was instruction: proper instruction and direction. I had a lot of bits of knowledge and a natural gift, but I knew perfectly well that I was capable of much more. I wouldn’t even need to leave the city for the longed-for glory of Cambridge. University College accepted female students; even the London Mathematical Society had elected a handful of female members – they were doing important work, publishing it, and I wanted to be a part of it all so badly that it made my teeth ache. It was the start of a whole new century, and it felt as though anything were possible.

“Let’s not think about it now,” I said, shaking my head as if to dislodge the frustrations that ran in a loop there. “It’s only making me cross, and then Max will tell me off for scowling at everyone. Not appropriate for a wedding.”

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to socialize,” my friend said glumly. “Small talk. The horror.”

“Perhaps we could sneak off?” I suggested. “We could take the bicycles.” I glanced up at the cloudless blue sky. It was cold but the sun shone; I could almost feel the ripple of the breeze that would brush its icy fingers across my face as we pedalled down one of the undulating hills that made up the parkland at Scott-Holland Hall. I spared half a moment’s thought for the gorgeous blue silk gown that Nancy, my maid, had buttoned me into this morning, knowing that this was exactly the sort of trouble Max had been warning against, and smoothly shoved the concern aside. What was the worst that could happen?

Cassie’s expression lit up. “We could slip out of the—”

“Don’t even think about it,” a dry voice came from over my shoulder, and I turned to find the bride herself fixing Cassie with a gimlet stare. “I know exactly what you’re plotting, Cassandra Weston, but you’re the sister of the bride. Stop loitering out here in the cold. Come inside and greet people with me.”

Cassie pouted briefly, but softened when Iris smiled at her.

“You look lovely, Lady Wynter,” I said. And she did. She looked like the fairy on top of the Christmas tree – gleaming gold hair, deep blue eyes, a delicate face. She wore a wedding dress of fine Italian white lace that was so breathtakingly lovely she must have designed it herself. She was dainty, elegant, and my words brought a hint of soft pink to her cheeks. If you didn’t know her, you’d think her a lamb, rather than what she really was – a fox in disguise. There was nothing soft about Iris Wynter: she had an iron will and was a force to be reckoned with. I found her fascinating.

“ Lady Wynter ,” she said, shaking her head. “I suppose I shall get used to that. Anyway…” Iris’s expression turned stern. “I can tell that the pair of you are cooking up mischief, but I already told Cassie she’s to hold off scandalizing the guests at least until after we’ve eaten.”

Cassie sighed and shared a doleful look with me. “She’s a respectable married lady now.”

“Oh, I hope I shall never be that,” Iris replied coolly. “For one thing, my husband would be terribly disappointed.”

“And so would I,” Cassie said.

“And I,” I put in. “If we’re putting the matter to a vote.”

“The motion is carried, then.” Iris slipped a hand through Cassie’s arm and the through mine, guiding us firmly towards the front door. “We solemnly swear to never become respectable.”