Chapter 1
HOW TO HANDLE A SCANDAL
How to Handle a Scandal
Lady Flora Norwood had been taught from infancy that scandal was rarely as dramatic in its beginnings as novels preferred to pretend.
It did not, generally, arrive with thunder, seduction, or a moonlit elopement over the Scottish border.
It began more quietly than that, more stupidly and more often.
A lady lingered too long on a terrace with the wrong gentleman.
A carriage broke down on a road too empty to provide witnesses.
A glove was found in a conservatory after midnight, and because no one in polite society could resist improving a story once it had entered circulation, by the following afternoon the glove had become proof of an attachment, an indiscretion, or both.
Flora had no intention of furnishing anyone with so much as a misplaced handkerchief.
She arrived at Haleford Park with her composure firmly in place and every expectation of keeping it so.
Haleford, set some twenty miles beyond London in a fold of soft country lined with hedgerows, small lakes, and an irritating number of picturesque groves, belonged to Lady Tilden and had for years enjoyed a reputation as one of those houses where everyone of consequence was received, fed, and tactfully maneuvered into one another’s paths with more efficiency than any hostess would ever admit aloud.
The house itself was broad-fronted and pale stone, softened by ivy and old climbing roses, with long windows opening onto terraces that overlooked a descending sequence of lawns, flower gardens, and an ornamental lake that had apparently never once considered drowning a guest in all its history.
Inside, the place was all polished floors, gilded mirrors, family portraits, and the sort of expensive comfort that made people careless because it suggested the world itself had been arranged to flatter them.
Flora did not become careless in expensive houses. She had spent too many years observing what happened to women who did.
The afternoon of her arrival had passed in the usual agreeable bustle of country hospitality.
Guests had spilled into the drawing room in clusters of silk and summer muslin, servants had drifted through the hall with trays and luggage, and Lady Tilden had greeted everyone with the practiced warmth of a woman who loved company so long as she might direct the shape of it.
By evening the house had settled into that bright hum peculiar to the first night of a gathering, when rivalries had not yet sharpened, flirtations were still at the stage of possibility, and everyone preferred to believe the coming days would offer nothing more dangerous than dancing, card tables, and perhaps a walk beneath obliging trees.
Flora knew better and always did by the second hour.
There was, for instance, Lady Tilden’s married niece, who had already asked whether Flora meant to remain “so wisely difficult” forever, as though marriage were chiefly a matter of learning not to object to one’s own arrangements.
There was Mrs. Pembroke, a widow of artistic tastes and moral flexibility, who had observed over tea that men were often at their most serious in the country because there was so much less to distract them from matrimony.
And there was the guest list itself, which included three unattached gentlemen of acceptable fortune, two mamas with daughters out this season, and one aunt of Flora’s own acquaintance who possessed the unshakable conviction that six-and-twenty was perilously close to spinsterhood if not tackled with energy.
Flora, who considered spinsterhood infinitely preferable to most marriages she had observed, had smiled through all of it with her usual grace and thought privately that English society would improve overnight if women stopped treating one another as unfinished domestic projects.
At present, however, her greatest difficulty did not lie with matchmaking. It lay with Arthur Cavendish.
Or rather, to be more precise, with the fact that Arthur Cavendish had arrived half an hour before dinner, had smiled at her across the length of Lady Tilden’s drawing room as though summer itself had taken human form for the sake of politeness, and had thereby made her remember several things she would rather have forgotten.
Such as the precise timbre of his voice when he grew earnest, the way his laughter softened at the edges when he was genuinely amused, and the dangerous habit he possessed of speaking sincerely in a world that rarely deserved the gift.
This was unfortunate. Flora did not object to Mr. Cavendish in theory.
In theory, he was almost ideal. He was pleasant, intelligent, and well liked.
He danced well, listened better than most men, and had the sort of easy warmth that made older ladies call him charming while younger ones called him impossible and meant the opposite.
He had, too, the reputation of a romantic nature, though society used that phrase in a variety of dubious ways depending on whether it wished to praise or dismiss a man.
In Arthur’s case, it generally meant that he said lovely things, wrote occasional verses no one was meant to have seen and everyone had somehow seen anyway, and looked at the world as though its beauty had not yet become commonplace.
Flora considered this very nearly a character flaw.
Not because beauty ought not be noticed—she noticed it herself often enough—but because people who saw beauty too readily were forever at risk of overlooking consequence, and consequence, in Flora’s experience, was what remained after everyone else had finished admiring a moment and gone home to sleep.
It did not help that Arthur had once told her, at a musicale six months earlier, that she had “the exact sort of face poets ruin by trying to describe it.”
He had said it without flirtatious flourish. Indeed, he had said it as though he were mildly annoyed with the entire poetic profession for failing her adequately.
Flora had laughed, because what else was one to do with a man like Arthur Cavendish? Yet the line had remained in her memory with wholly unreasonable persistence, which was proof enough that he ought to be treated as a social danger and never as a possibility.
She had come to Haleford fully resolved to enjoy the company, ignore the more obvious domestic campaigns around her, and keep Arthur at a distance broad enough to preserve both comfort and sense.
For several hours this plan had gone admirably well.
Dinner had been lively without descending into absurdity.
Arthur had been seated halfway down the table on Lady Tilden’s right and Flora safely removed at the other end between a bishop’s son with a deep admiration for Roman drainage and Lady Tilden’s niece, who spent the fish course explaining why love matches were all very well if one had at least first verified the annual income.
After dinner the ladies had retired, the gentlemen had joined them after a tolerably short interval, and conversation had drifted through the drawing room in a series of mild, civil eddies.
Flora had avoided Arthur without obvious design, which, she flattered herself, took skill.
It required one to see where he was before he saw where one was and to alter direction by degrees so slight no one but the most malicious observer could call them deliberate.
It required accepting Lady Tilden’s invitation to inspect a portfolio of watercolors at the exact moment Arthur crossed toward the pianoforte.
It required being drawn into a discussion of novels with Mrs. Pembroke when he joined a knot of gentlemen near the fireplace.
It required, in short, the kind of cheerful social warfare at which Flora excelled when she was determined.
Strategy had one great weakness, however: houses had their own plans.
By half past ten the drawing room had grown close with lamps, conversation, and the accumulated warmth of too many people behaving agreeably in upholstered spaces.
Lady Tilden proposed cards. Someone else suggested music.
The bishop’s son had begun another matter regarding Roman aqueducts, and Flora, who would rather have faced an actual flood, accepted a maid’s offer to fetch her shawl and quietly slipped from the room under cover of movement and noise.
The corridor beyond the drawing room felt blessedly cool after the crush within.
Moonlight filtered through the long hall windows in silver bands, mingling with the softer gold of the wall sconces and throwing the floor into alternating strips of shadow and light.
From farther down the passage came the faint scent of wax, linen, and summer air drifting in from an open stair window.
Flora moved past the library, the morning room, and the little blue salon with no greater plan than to be alone for five minutes in any direction not occupied by county drainage.
At the end of the hall she found the small conservatory standing partly open.
Every country house seemed to believe itself improved by such a room: tiled floor, painted iron chairs, a little fountain in the center, and enough potted orange trees and trailing jasmine to create the impression that England had briefly forgotten its weather.
In daylight it was charming. At night, lit only by moonlight and the distant glow from the hall, it became unexpectedly intimate.
The glass roof held the late summer sky in long dim panes.
White blossoms breathed perfume into the room with almost indecent generosity.
Somewhere within the foliage water trickled softly from the fountain basin.
Flora stepped inside with a sigh of relief. At last.
No mamas. No eligible gentlemen. No careful smiles concealing domestic arithmetic. Only warm air, pale moonlight, and the suspiciously persuasive fragrance of jasmine.