Chapter 13
The front door had barely clicked shut behind Lottie when her mother’s voice rang out like cannon fire from the upper landing.
“Seven o’clock! Seven o’clock in the morning, and you are dressed like a stable boy, Charlotte Tolliver!
Do you intend to attend tonight’s ball as a young lady or a cavalry officer? ”
Lottie, cheeks still flushed—though she told herself it was from the brisk wind—paused in the act of tugging off one mud-slick boot.
She glanced upward to find her mother framed against the balustrade in a Turkish morning wrapper of improbable paisley, a lace cap atop her head, and a shawl trailing down one elbow.
She looked, in short, like a dowager empress caught in the throes of theatrical ruin.
“You know I ride astride, Mama. It is rather difficult to do so in a ballgown. I will look the perfect lady tonight.”
Her mother pressed a hand to her stomach. “I do not like this, Charlotte. Riding of a morning. What if you had fallen? What if you had died? Worse—what if you had been recognised?”
“I was wearing a hat, Mama,” Lottie offered. “Briefly. I lost it in the wind.”
Lady Tolliver gave a strangled sort of groan and descended the stairs in a flurry.
“I am this close to sending you back to your Aunt Belinda, Charlotte. Do you have any notion how many countesses and dowagers I must flatter to keep your name even marginally palatable? Your sister is a duchess! And yet here you are, covered in mud and smelling of horse sweat!”
Lottie winced as she tugged her second boot free. “It is only a bit of fun, Mama.”
“A bit of fun? A bit of fun! You vanished before dawn! Alone! If word gets out—and it will, Charlotte, it always does—do you know what they will say? That you have been compromised, that you are unmarriageable, that the Tolliver name is a joke!” She clutched at the balustrade for emphasis, as if society itself were about to come crashing through the floorboards.
“I am not asking for sainthood, Charlotte. I do not expect miracles. But you might, at the very least, refrain from ruining your prospects before the Season has even begun. Do you think titles and wealth shield us from scrutiny? That having one sister in a veritable palace somehow makes you immune from ruin?”
Lady Tolliver made a sound like a wounded pheasant.
“If I have to retire to Bath before the week’s end, it shall be on your conscience.
Do you know what happens to young women with tarnished reputations?
They are pitied. They become the eccentric aunt at Christmas dinners and spend their lives knitting under a blanket with no callers but the curate and his dog! ”
“That does sound rather lovely, Mama.”
Lady Tolliver recoiled as if struck. “Lovely? Lovely? My dear girl, you may as well grow a beard and take holy orders!”
Lottie sighed. “I might consider holy orders, if not for my strong attachment to pleasure. I’ve half a mind to become a scandalous hermitess—somewhere warm, with obliging footmen and no corsets.”
“Heaven help me! You will do no such thing! You will go upstairs this instant. You will bathe until you no longer stink of horse sweat, you will allow Millie to curl your hair, and you will attend tonight’s ball wearing the pale green silk that cost me three weeks of my nerves!
And you will smile at any titled gentleman who so much as looks in your direction!
Preferably, Lord Marston—I do not care if he bores you insensible—he has seven thousand a year and no mother to interfere! ”
Lottie widened her eyes innocently. “No mother to interfere? How dreadful. I do enjoy a good maternal interrogation. Nothing says romance like being asked about my dowry and the width of my hips for childrearing.”
Lady Tolliver’s eyes bulged. “You jest now, but you will not be laughing when you are thirty and unmarried, Charlotte Tolliver!”
At that moment, the fourth daughter, Marianne—the rather bookish one who is strategically ignored—strolled in with a novel under one arm and a biscuit in her mouth. “You do realise, Mama,” she said, softly as she chewed, “that if you shout at her too loudly, it only encourages her?”
“I am not shouting,” Lady Tolliver said, absolutely shouting. “I am attempting to instil some sense of duty into a daughter who seems determined to plunge headlong into disgrace! No one listens to me in this home!”
Lottie crossed her arms and leant against the banister with exaggerated patience. “If I were Benedict, I should be applauded for riding at dawn.”
“You are not your brother,” Lady Tolliver snapped, still looking ridiculous in her Turkish morning wrapper. “Benedict is a man. He may be a fool, but at least he knows his place!”
At that precise moment, the door swung open and Benedict Tolliver—first son and heir, who has thus far been largely absent from the Tolliver tales—staggered into the hall with bloodshot eyes.
He reeked of brandy and his boots were covered in mud as if he’d walked the last mile home.
“One of the grooms is crying again,” he announced hoarsely, dropping his coat onto a hapless footman, “I thought we agreed, Lottie—no rides before sunrise unless you are being chased by the French.”
“Jasper Deverell is not French,” Mari replied mildly from her perch on the settee.
Lottie looked between her elder brother and younger sister with narrowed eyes. She would belt them both if they continued.
“Thank God,” said Benedict, sinking into a chair with a groan. “Though I’d say he could seduce an army if given the proper uniform.”
“Or no uniform at all,” Mari murmured without looking up.
“How did you know I was with Mr Deverell?” Lottie hissed.
“I did not know,” Mari returned, “but now you have confirmed it.”
“Must you all conspire against my nerves?” Lady Tolliver wailed, falling upon the settee beside Marianne. “I have not slept a wink. My pulse is irregular, my digestion is in ruins, and I distinctly felt a fluttering in my left eye this morning!”
“That is what happens when you squint at the scandal sheets before breakfast, Mama,” said Lottie. “Agree with me, Ben.”
“Keep me out of this, sister,” mumbled Benedict, rubbing a hand over his face. “I have scandals enough of my own.”
“Oh, my heart,” groaned her mother. “A libertine for a son. How many wild oats did you sow last night? No, I have no wish to know! And certainly a libertine with a death wish for a daughter.”
“That seems a touch dramatic,” Lottie said mildly, now peeling off her gloves one finger at a time. “I hardly think a morning ride qualifies as libertinism.”
“It is not the ride, Charlotte,” Lady Tolliver shrieked, “but the company! Mr Deverell! Good heavens above!”
Mari turned a page of her book. “We may be reasonably assured she did not elope this time, Mama. She would have required a change of clothes, at least.”
“And a special licence,” Benedict added, eyes still closed. “Which would necessitate rising even earlier than she did. Frankly, I doubt she possesses the organisation for a second coup.”
Lottie’s smile faltered, but only for the smallest instant. She recovered it almost at once, which was to say she made it sharper.
“Did you imagine we had all forgotten?” her mother demanded, growing more shrill with every word.
“That you absconded with that dreadful man—who sought nothing but your dowry, mark you—and had to be dragged back from the very edge of scandal by the combined force of your sisters’ reputations and the duke’s purse?
Do you think any of that was in the least bit entertaining? ”
“Georgie being the only one not to know was rather amusing,” Mari observed from behind her book.
Lady Tolliver ignored her. “Do you comprehend the coin, the favours, the humiliations endured to see that sordid affair quietly laid to rest? The sleepless nights! The correspondence! The mortification at Almack’s, where Lady Greystone took one look at me and near fainted with the scandal of it all!
If you are quite determined to gamble away your future, Charlotte, I beg you—do not drag the rest of us into the gutter with you! ”
Lottie said nothing, which was so rare an occurrence that even Mari lowered her book.
“I am going upstairs to apply tincture of valerian and lie down with a cold cloth,” Lady Tolliver announced to the hall at large.
“If I should expire before luncheon, you may inform the coroner it was a collapse of the nerves, and a most preventable tragedy.” With a final sniff and a dramatic swish of shawls, she ascended the stairs, pausing only once to add in her sweetest voice, “And do consider Lord Marston this evening, Charlotte.”
Lottie waited until her mother’s slippers had disappeared around the turn of the staircase before she slipped her riding jacket from her shoulders. Damn her for bringing up Marchmont, that fiend. What did any of them know about him, and what had truly occurred that night?
Mari made a noise from behind her book, but Lottie ignored it. She had no intention of remaining in the hall to be stared at, pitied, or instructed, particularly without first being permitted hot water and privacy.
She turned toward the stairs.
“She is right, you know,” Benedict rasped from his chair.
Lottie turned sharply. “I beg your pardon?”
Benedict had the audacity to look as though speaking had pained him physically. “Mama,” he said. “She is right.”
Mari sank beneath her book, as though afraid of Lottie’s wrath.
“Not about Marston or the ball tonight,” Benedict added, lifting one hand. “No one with a functioning soul could be right about Marston. The man makes boiled mutton seem interesting.”
“Then by all means,” Lottie said, her voice dangerously pleasant, “clarify the exact manner in which our mother is right, before I decide whether to murder you with the umbrella stand.”
Benedict glanced at the umbrella stand. “A poor weapon. Too many curved handles.”
“Ben.”
He sighed and dragged a hand over his face. “About Marchmont.”
“Oh, well! How fortunate that I can always count on my family to drag that corpse back into the parlour whenever it suits them.”
“Lottie—”
“No,” she snapped, advancing a pace. “Do not Lottie me, Ben. You may drink your way through half the cellar, stagger home at dawn, gamble away your allowance, and no one so much as lifts an eyebrow! This would not even be a discussion if I were a man!”
He groaned and pressed a hand to his forehead. “Heavens, must we have this argument now?”
“Yes, we must,” she snapped. “Tell me, Ben. How many women have you lain with? Or do you not keep such tallies?”
Benedict winced. “None whose reputations I endangered, if that is your point.”
“Oh, I see,” she said with biting sweetness. “So long as they are not ladies, they do not signify.”
“Even a gentleman must conduct himself with discretion.”
“Discretion! You disappear for nights at a time and return smelling of brandy, tobacco, sweat, and God knows what else… and I am the one paraded about as an object lesson?”
“You are the object lesson, Charlotte!” he snapped. “Good God! Whether you like it or not, that is the world we inhabit. You cannot run away with men just because—”
“I did not run away! I was—”
“You were angry,” he cut in. “You were bored. You were flattered! You wished to prove that no one could command you, and so you placed yourself in the power of a man who would have been delighted to prove the opposite!”
That struck. Lottie stood very still.
Then she lifted her chin, and said with terrifying composure, “I shall go and bathe. I shall have a quiet day of crochet, watercolours, and such other improving feminine occupations as may render me fit for public display. And then I shall don the vile green silk and smile sweetly at Lord Marston tonight until my jaw locks, precisely as Mama ordered.”
She turned and ascended the stairs.
As she reached the landing, she caught Mari’s wide-eyed stare over the top of her book, and heard Benedict mutter low and bitter behind her, “I need another drink.”