A Most Scandalous Wager (The Trouble with the Tollivers #3)
Chapter 1
There were, Charlotte ‘Lottie’ Tolliver reflected, decidedly worse fates in life than being banished to the countryside in disgrace—though at present, she was hard-pressed to name one.
The landscape, at least, offered certain compensations: rolling fields and skies so blue one might almost forgive them for their monotony.
There were brisk mornings of stone fences and cold streams, and of riding astride like a stable boy with not a single soul to scold her—and yet for every moment of pastoral freedom, there existed Aunt Belinda… and Aunt Belinda’s geese.
The woman had taken both religion and poultry to evangelical extremes. Her mornings commenced with prayer and honking in equal measure, and she possessed the unshakable conviction that moral virtue might be accurately assessed by the firmness of one’s egg whites.
“A good goose,” Aunt Belinda was fond of declaring, “is ever faithful, ever constant, and quite incapable of deceit—qualities, my dear Charlotte, which you would do well to imitate.”
The geese, meanwhile, pursued Lottie daily with single-minded ferocity.
She could not so much as cross the yard without being chased at speed, skirts gathered in her fists while wings flailed and beaks snapped in pursuit.
(Readers unfamiliar with rural life may imagine geese to be harmless; experience, however, proves they possess razor-like teeth with a capacity for bruising both flesh and pride alike).
Thus went Lottie’s days: long sermons on repentance from Aunt Belinda and her pious daughter Edwina, punctuated by ambushes from the wretched flock.
All was conducted amid the incessant scent of goose down and boiled turnips, and the choking haze of hair-powder from Aunt Belinda’s wigs, which were dressed each morning in earnest imitation of fashions long since abandoned in London.
As for society, there was none. There were sheep in every direction and neighbours of such dullness that even the cows appeared livelier; and an unending chorus of church bells tolling Lottie’s penance hour by hour.
Worse still were the parsons’ daughters—led, of course, by Cousin Edwina—who regarded Miss Charlotte Tolliver as a cautionary tale and could scarcely pass her without bleating something about repentance and the irreversible nature of female error.
And of course, as though that were not enough of a punishment, there were the letters—dozens of them from her sisters, and each more trying than the last. Hetty’s arrived weekly, written in that insufferably neat hand, full of improving advice and enquiries into the present state of Lottie’s soul.
Georgie’s (now Duchess of Morleigh) were scarcely better: pages of carefully enumerated lists of eligible gentlemen who, she assured Lottie, might be induced to overlook a “momentary lapse in judgement” if presented with sufficient charm and well-chosen millinery.
Still, none could be compared to her mother’s. Lady Tolliver’s letters were masterpieces of maternal suffering—by turns affectionate and exquisitely reproachful, and so artfully composed as to make Lottie laugh aloud one moment and feel wretchedly guilty the next.
My nerves are in tatters, Charlotte, one began, and Doctor Penworthy is of the opinion that they may never fully recover from the shock your conduct has inflicted upon me.
Your poor father has not smiled these many months and has taken to secluding himself in his study, where he admits no callers and spends hours absorbed in his maps and fossils.
When I ventured to press him to dine with the family, he replied only, “Not tonight, my dear. The ruins of Pompeii are less distressing company.”
Lottie read the letter twice and found that what amused her at first could not, upon a second reading, be borne without tears.
Nine months since her brothers-in-law, Lord Langley and the Duke of Morleigh, had thundered to her supposed rescue (or, more accurately, her apprehension), bursting into the bedchamber without so much as the courtesy of a knock.
The duke had dispatched her would-be abductor, Lord Marchmont, with a single blow, while Langley delivered a tirade upon honour and female virtue with such ferocity that it rendered resistance—verbal or otherwise—entirely futile.
In her confusion, Lottie had snatched up the nearest item of clothing, which—to her everlasting mortification—proved to be Marchmont’s embroidered waistcoat, and wrapped it about herself as best she could.
Before she had managed to locate so much as a stocking, the brutes seized her by the elbows and marched her from the room like a felon under guard.
Really, the oafs might have at least permitted her the dignity of dressing; but such considerations, it seemed, had been quite eclipsed by masculine outrage.
Since then, she had endured life at Goosecroft Hall (as she had privately christened Aunt Belinda’s domain) as only a Tolliver could: through sheer stubbornness and the occasional bottle of smuggled claret.
It was early spring now, or so the calendar claimed.
It was the season when London began to glitter once more, though in the country, it merely meant more mud.
The air was perpetually damp, the geese were nesting and more aggressive than ever, and Aunt Belinda’s moral vigilance had entered its most relentless phase.
“Miss Tolliver,” Aunt Belinda proclaimed one bleak morning, sweeping into the breakfast parlour with a stray feather sticking from her outrageous powdered wig, “idleness is the mother of sin!”
“I am already an accomplished sinner,” Lottie replied—quite sweetly, she rather thought, and with commendable restraint— “and I assure you, I did not acquire my talents through idleness. Besides, I thought idleness was the father of invention.”
Aunt Belinda tutted so violently her wig quivered upon its pins. “Mockery shall do nothing to improve your soul, Miss Tolliver, and there is much improvement to be had.”
“My soul must, I fear, remain unimproved.”
Aunt Belinda’s eyes narrowed as she seized the teapot with force. “You may think yourself clever, Charlotte Tolliver, but a clever woman is a most dangerous creature. You would do far better to occupy your hands with something useful. Knitting socks for the poor, for instance.”
“As you are perfectly aware, I have already attempted such a thing. I brought them to church, wherein they were promptly returned. Mrs Wilkes said that socks with uneven heels and additional openings are not a charitable blessing, and suggested they might be repurposed as dusting cloths.”
Her aunt scowled and swept from the room in high moral dudgeon, trailed by two geese at her heels.
Lottie released a weary sigh. She gazed out across the bleak fields and wondered—by no means for the first time—whether she was destined to spend the rest of her days in this penitential purgatory.
The London Season would soon commence, full of waltzes, whispers, scandal, and laughter, while she remained in moral exile, far from all that made her wretched life tolerable.
It was—blessedly, and rather conveniently for the narrative—at that very moment that the sound of wheels crunched upon the drive.
Aunt Belinda’s voice rang through the hall once more—“The post! Heaven preserve us!”
Before long, a housemaid appeared, bearing a single letter of most uncommon consequence.
Dearest girl, her mother’s familiar hand began, I have at last prevailed upon your father to consent to your return.
Society, it seems, is blessed with a mercifully short memory, and your eldest sister assures me that the ton’s appetite for scandal has already fixed itself elsewhere (for which we must be profoundly grateful).
If you can but promise to conduct yourself with grace and modesty, you may yet be forgiven.
The carriage will arrive within the week.
Pray do not bring your devoted Mama to regret this decision; my nerves would not survive it.
It was signed, Your loving but deeply unwell mother.
Lottie read the letter twice: once to assure herself she had understood it correctly, and again in sheer disbelief. She was to return. To London. To life!
Aunt Belinda, who had contrived to appear over her shoulder as she read, emitted a small sound of horror. “London? Have they learnt nothing?”
“Oh, on the contrary,” Lottie replied, smiling as she folded the letter. “They have learnt precisely how much they miss me.”
Her aunt swayed as though struck. “This is folly. My brother has always been a weak-minded fool. You will be devoured by temptation!”
“Then it is fortunate that I have developed such a taste for it.”
Outside, the geese hissed furiously at the post horses, as though protesting her deliverance, but Lottie scarcely heard them. London awaited, glittering and wicked as ever, with gossip and laughter, and men who did not smell of poultry!
She was in such a magnanimous mood that she even forgave Aunt Belinda for the slight against her father, for all readers know that Lord Tolliver is a most odd but delightful man, indeed.
Miss Charlotte Tolliver—fallen, feathered, and soon-to-be free—was returning to the ton, and she had no intention whatsoever of behaving.