Chapter 7
Seven
How foolish she had been. How gullible, how rash, how exceedingly stupid. She had behaved as a child when she had longed to be a woman.
Arabella passed her days sitting in a chair in her bedchamber, her embroidery in her lap, but she never threaded a needle.
Yes, how foolish to mistake desire for love. To think the throb of her flower meant she had met her soul-mate. To believe the novels and poetry that said her heart and her desire would align and guide her, unerringly, to her true love.
Why should lust and love be so entangled that she could have mistaken one for the other? Surely, it was a rarity that the two actually went together.
Her mother and Middlewich, her sisters and their husbands—how fortunate they all had been, Arabella saw now. How exceptionally fortunate that their hearts and minds and loins had all agreed on a mate.
But she had not shared their good fortune.
Twice now, she had imagined she had been in love.
One man had not reciprocated. The other had not reciprocated, either, but she had thought he had.
Because of what he had done to her body.
Her wetness, her thrill, her licking flames of desire—she had thought these things meant Giles was her destiny when, in truth, these things were merely mechanical.
Simply friction and pressure.
Meaningless.
Except in a world where female desire made you a whore and male desire was indiscriminate.
Rumors began to circulate. At his club, James heard stories about a coterie of gentlemen. They called themselves the Pluckers.
David, the Viscount Tregaron, was confused. “What does the name mean?”
James exchanged looks with Thomas. David was older than they were and had never been part of a circle of young rakes who roamed from gaming hell to brothel to private club and back again.
David’s brother Rhys was the wild one in the Vaughan family.
In fact, David prided himself on the fact that he had been just this side of priggish, as he put it, before Mary took him in hand.
Six years ago, an idea for a group similar to the Pluckers had been mooted about among James and Thomas’ band of rakes. Thomas had clouted the man who had mentioned it to him.
“It’s not my idea, I just heard the other fellows talking, Drake!” the man had whined, holding his ear. The loathsome proposal had withered on the vine. Or so James had thought, at the time.
But now, like the Hydra, it had reared its head again.
“It’s to do with virgins,” James explained to David. “Plucking, you know? Deflowering?”
“Oh.”
“The villains rape virgins,” Thomas said, scowling. “Or seduce them. They collect tokens of their despoiling. The winner is whoever despoils the most prominent or most virtuous or most noble virgin.”
“Repugnant,” David said.
Thomas grunted in agreement. As far as James knew, Thomas’ only sexual scruple before he married his wife was that he would not bed a virgin. Thomas had strong feelings about virgins.
James cleared his throat. “It is rumored that the tokens of the Pluckers are to be pinned to the wall of our club on Guy Fawkes Day. The wall with the dartboards. The former virgin’s initials are to be carved into the wall next to the token.”
“Reprehensible,” David said.
A growl from Thomas. “I’m of a mind to sit there all day and batter anyone who attempts it.”
“I understand they are going to use a factotum of some kind to do the pinning and carving, Tom. You won’t get much satisfaction from beating him.” James put his hand on Thomas’ shoulder.
“Revolting,” David said.
The three shook their heads at the decadence of their fellow men.
A gentle wind blew on Guy Fawkes Day. There was a cloudless blue sky from dawn to dusk. The weather heralded no impending catastrophe.
A message came to James at the Middlewich town house at half past eight that evening. His face became grave, and he got up from his chair in the drawing room, kissed Catherine, put on his greatcoat, and left.
There were not many bonfires in Mayfair that night, but there were plenty elsewhere in London. The air was full of the smell of smoke.
James arrived at his club and nodded at Chester, the barman who had sent him the note with the news that the manservant of the Marquess of Painswick had come into the club an hour earlier and pinned up the tokens and then carved initials into the paneling.
James walked up to the dartboard wall where several men were gathered. When they saw the Duke of Middlewich, they moved away hastily, some murmuring, some red-faced, some chortling and sneering.
There was an array of love letters, pieces of jewelry, a few dried flowers, and even a stocking held with small nails to the wall. But the place of pride was held by a small kid glove and a scrap of white silk, obviously torn from a gown, and the initials AL carved into the paneling.
James tore down all the tokens and threw them into the blaze in the fireplace. He took the poker from the hearth and methodically destroyed the paneling of the wall.
By the next day, it was all over the ton.
Catherine told James she thought Arabella had taken it remarkably well.
Maybe she was in shock, he suggested.
But, no, she wasn’t.
“The greatest blow to me was that I gave my heart to a man who was so unworthy,” Arabella said to James and her mother, dry-eyed. “The loss of my innocence was just a part of that. And I can’t bring myself to be upset other people know. He should be ashamed, not me.”
No one stepped forward to be the winner of the Pluckers’ prize, which was unsurprising since David, trembling with rage, stood in the middle of the club with his dueling pistols at hand and demanded satisfaction from the villain who had done this.
The manservant of the Marquess of Painswick, the fellow who had pinned the tokens and carved the initials in the paneling of the club, disappeared and could not be found.
When James and Thomas interrupted Painswick in the bed of his favorite whore at Madame Flora’s, the naked marquess said he had no idea who had gathered which token.
“So how were you going to give the damn prize out? Answer me that!” Thomas roared.
The marquess shrugged. “It was all on honor, like the genuineness of the tokens themselves.”
“It is a foolish proposal,” James said, “to trust in the honor of those with none.”
The marquess laughed. “At this point, I would think it an honor for any of the young ladies in question to have any proposals, at all.”
James removed Thomas from Madame Flora’s before he committed an act that would result in the charge of manslaughter.
Arabella was now considered spoiled. Ruined. Publicly.
And that was the rub, Catherine thought.
Her beautiful, thoughtful, generous, playful daughter—her daughter who had been made for love, for caring for a husband and a brood of children, for being cherished and adored—that daughter would now never have any of that.
There would be no marriage. No more Seasons and balls and calls from suitors and the hope of a good match.
Her stepdaughters—Mary so strong, Harry so eccentric—would have survived this blow. Would Arabella?
Arabella answered the question herself. She made some arrangements with one of the men at her deceased father’s bank. She packed two trunks. She left London.
She was headed north. To Scotland.