Love and Scandal, page 4
He shook himself out of his stupor as he paced through the station, catching up with Mockley and elbowing his way through the throng. Angry that his thoughts had returned once again to the elusive young woman, he made a noise of impatience in his throat and strode past his bemused valet. He pushed his way to the entrance, cutting a path through the departing crowds with his height and commanding stride. By tomorrow night he would have forgotten her, he promised himself. Or at least the night after that.
He told himself that, but still he glanced around sharply when he reached the street outside of the station, looking for a slender, quick-moving figure dressed in a drab brown dress.
Collette had luckily caught up with Mr. Stuyvesent. There had been no time to talk as they raced at his frenetic pace from the building and out to the cobbled road where a hansom awaited. Collette wanted to pause, to look around and familiarize herself with the eerie gas-lit miasma that drifted through London at night, but Mr. Stuyvesent was impatient. Grateful to the gentleman for guiding her through the intricacies of hiring a cab, retaining a room and threading through London streets—all things she had expected to have to do for herself—she did not want to keep him too long, and so she allowed herself to be hustled into the cab.
He lit the oil lamp inside the hansom as she took a seat, and then yelled to the driver to go. To the steady clop-clop of hooves on cobbles, he told her she would be staying at the Chapter Coffeehouse on Paternoster Row, near Rosewood Publishing.
“I am grateful, sir, to you and Mr. Bellringer. I would be lost in this great city if I had to find my own way and obtain a room.”
The young man pushed his spectacles up on his nose and stared at her across the gloom. “Indeed, Miss Jardiniere, Mr. Bellringer is more than happy to provide any accommodation you could wish, though he is a little puzzled as to your purpose in coming to London at all. Have you not received your quarterly royalties?”
As answer, Collette bent down, fished through her black valise, which Mr. Stuyvesent had placed on the floor, and pulled out a folded and much-abused newspaper. She glanced over it, and then handed it to the young man opposite her. She pointed at a particular article.
“I have not received yet a satisfactory answer to my repeated queries concerning this infamous article, and why Mr. Bellringer has not vigorously refuted the information within it. I will straighten this absurd confusion out myself if necessary, but I had hoped for the aid of my publisher.”
Mr. Stuyvesent glanced at the offending article. The headline was in half-inch lettering, and stated Author Exposed! Mr. Charles Jameson, Man About Town, Author of The Last Days of a Rake! Well Known Gentleman Will Not Deny His Authorship.
“Now you tell me,” Collette said, her voice steely, “why Mr. Bellringer has not demanded a retraction. After all, I am the author, and though I published using a pseudonym, I will not have it attributed to some vacuous Lothario! If I do not have his help in doing just that, I will track down Mr. Charles Jameson and demand he tell this infamous rag sheet that they are wrong!”
Three
Collette lay awake late into the night considering Mr. Stuyvesent’s answer to her complaint. It seemed that as a woman novelist writing under a man’s name, she was in a peculiar predicament. If Mr. Bellringer would agree to give a statement to the reporter saying that Mr. Jameson was not the author, it would take care of everything, but if he would not do that, she could not just come out and refute the author’s identity without proclaiming herself the authoress, perhaps causing a scandal. This would never have happened if there weren’t such a stigma attached to writing novels, especially for women, she fumed.
She crossed her arms behind her head and stared up at the ceiling in her small attic room at the Chapter Coffeehouse. It was not unheard of for a woman to write and become a published author under her own name. There were many precedents, after all. Late in the last century and earlier in the current one Maria Edgeworth, Mrs. Radcliffe, Fanny Burney, and of course the greatest of them, Miss Jane Austen, had all published, though Austen had merely been published as “a Lady” until after she died.
But the social climate had chilled toward women who dared be something other than wives and mothers. It was ironic that one of the chief progenitors of that change was herself a working woman of ultimate power, Queen Victoria.
How Collette longed to belong to that earlier, more open time! Instead, as the layers of clothing had increased in numbers, so had the restrictions on a woman’s freedom. Not in a real sense, she supposed. After all, a woman’s property still became her husband’s on marriage, as she was considered thereafter to be a part of him; they were one in a very legal sense. That was true of earlier years, too. Young unmarried ladies had never had much freedom to move around as they wished, or take employment other than in a few restrictive professions, and that was still the case.
But it seemed to her that women in a previous age breathed freer, and their opinions were not so ridiculed. Maybe that was just an unhealthy longing for an idealized past, but women now were not taken very seriously as to their ideas or thoughts.
Jamie, or whatever his name really was (for she had no doubt it was not really Jamie), had talked to her about women’s suffrage but with a joking, teasing tone that told her he didn’t consider her opinions in earnest. It was infuriating! And yet, as she lay there sleepless, tossing and turning in her uncomfortable bed, Collette could still feel his thrilling, dangerous, memorable kisses pressed upon her lips like a brand. It was maddening that she was as weak as any woman, and that a man who did not respect her mind could still find his way into her soul. Or at least affect her body.
Her body. It was lean, stringy even, she thought, certainly more so than the fashion, which favored bosomy, doll-like blondes with tiny waists and voluptuous hips. And yet she had secretly gazed at it naked in a full length mirror. Scandalously, she had touched her small breasts and run her hands over her flat belly and smooth thighs. Her body did not feel repulsive to her, nor did it look unpleasant, and the sensations her own hands caused were faintly pleasurable. Yet so much of her religion was invested in the sinful nature of physical pleasure. When she was younger she had just accepted the vicar’s admonition that she was wicked by nature. Women, after all, were the cradle of original sin. Responsible for the eviction from the Garden, woman was doomed to suffer in childbirth. It sounded absurd to her. If God behaved in any logical fashion, he would certainly not condemn every woman in the world for the failings of just one. There were theologians who agreed with her that the doctrine of original sin was an example of fallacious reasoning.
And yet, for all of her robust conviction that women were put on earth for a greater purpose than just to be subjugated by a man, she was fascinated by the earthier reality of relations between men and women. She had for years watched, in her little village, the subtle dance of attraction. It was like the magnets she had played with in Professor Stiltson’s laboratory; some were repelled and could not be put together no matter what, while others were irresistibly attracted. What was it that commanded such reactions? Was it purely physical, or was there something deeper, more spiritual, between some men and women?
She remained untouched herself, having spent her youth on books and unsuitable intellectual pursuits which, she had been assured by the ladies of her parish, would never capture a husband. The end result of her protected, insulated life was that at twenty-seven she had never been kissed. She supposed that labeled her as some kind of oddity. Most of the girls she had known at school had given and received kisses in their teen years, but she had been dedicated to reading and writing from such a young age that it seemed as though her whole being was alive only to produce words, that her brain was preternaturally large, stuffed with letters and commas and exclamation marks, and that the pressure on her skull could only be eased by writing copious amounts of prose on paper, spilling words like wine from a brimming glass.
It had left her no time for thinking about boys, or later, men.
The result had been The Last Days of a Rake, and she could not regret her lack of experience in worldly pleasures because having her novel published had given her such an intense wave of gladness and gratification that she would not have foregone the experience for any amount of earthly fulfillment. It was ironic that she wrote of feelings and deeds, desires and wants that she had never experienced, nor been tempted to fulfill in reality. Every scene in the book in which her hero’s amorous activities were recounted had ended before any encounter. Inexperience had forced her to stop outside of the bedroom door, not that she would have been able to write further and have it published, but still—something was lacking, but she wasn’t sure what. She had watched, she had pondered, but she had never experienced any of it, and she would therefore never know if personal knowledge would have changed the book, made it better. That doubt nagged at her, leaving her convinced she had doomed the book to a level of inauthenticity despite its success. She was sure of the themes and the morality, and that it reflected her own sturdy core of beliefs, but in a physical sense she was not sure of her hero’s feelings. In writing The Last Days of a Rake, she had created a man the likes of whom she had never met…until perhaps that very night.
She turned over in her bed and hugged the lumpy pillow. She wistfully recalled every word and every nuance of his voice. The mysterious Jamie had given her a real glimpse of what a rake was like, what a man who attracted women with a magnetism that seemed almost a natural force looked like and sounded like. And now she wished she could go back and rewrite whole sections of Last Days. She now understood much more about such things as a rake’s expressive use of his eyes and his voice, how he exuded an aura of raw virility in the face of which a woman was helpless.
Yet there was still so much she didn’t understand. Did every woman react thus, or only some? Or did different types of men attract different women? She had been fortunate in her writing, she thought, and indeed, it had taken her a long time to create Lankin, her central character. Since finishing she had been plagued by the notion that whatever temporary ability allowed her to create the book had fled. She hadn’t finished a single bit of work since.
She must keep trying. She must write. Maybe now, with the invigorating experiences on the train still fresh in her mind, she would defeat the awful barriers that kept her from writing a new novel. She tossed the musty pillow aside and slid out from under the covers. Settling herself at the small desk by the window on a hard chair, she lit a candle and took out her ink and paper.
She had been trying to start another novel for some time and had made some inroads, but it all felt flat and unnatural. Meeting Jamie had started that inner dialogue she usually maintained—though it had been ominously silent lately—flowing again. She must see where it led her. Perhaps it was not a good idea to write another book about a rake, but at this moment she must write what she could.
She unclipped the pressure closed cork on her ink bottle—another of Professor Stiltson’s revolutionary designs—dipped her pen and wrote:
His kiss was said to induce a languor over the receiver, and more than one young lady had swooned, so overpowering were the sensations he occasioned in the impressionable female breast—
“Carruthers and botheration!”
“I beg your pardon, sir?” Mockley exclaimed, pausing with the clothes brush in mid-swipe.
“Sorry, Mockley,” his employer said, picking a bit of lint from his sleeve. “Novel pattern of swearing I have taken up after hearing a very unusual young lady indulge in it.”
The valet lifted one well-shaped eyebrow, a form of questioning disdain he might have learned from his master. He continued brushing down Jameson, who had not yet regained his equanimity after the unusual experience of having a young lady run away from him. Even a full night’s rest—if one could call tossing, turning and writhing among the scented sheets on his soft feather mattress rest—had not restored him to his usual bored attitude.
Jameson caught his employee’s expression reflected in the mirror. “What are you grinning about, Mockley?” he growled, wondering if his valet would dare tell the truth.
Though haughty and proud of his position, Mockley was not above regaling the rest of the staff in the servant’s hall with stories of his employer’s uncomfortable moments. Jameson, prowling the kitchen the night before, looking for some comforting nourishment to help him sleep, had witnessed his valet’s brilliant mimicry of his expression when Collette ran from him, with just one lingering look thrown over her shoulder.
Every servant, even the stuffy butler and phlegmatic cook, had laughed. Jameson suspected it was the memory of his performance for the below stairs staff that caused Mockley’s unusual display of good humor.
The valet resumed a more serious expression. “Grinning, sir? I don’t believe I was grinning.”
“That was a grin for you, you damned solemn jackanapes.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jameson gave him a fierce look, then broke down and chuckled. Abusing his servants would not bring back that singularly infuriating young lady, Miss Collette Whoever-she-was. His sleepless night had been spent cursing in turns his own determination never to run after a woman, nor run at all—it was ungentlemanly to break into a sweat like a racehorse—and his slowness in thinking of having Mockley run after her. Or of inquiring of the ticket agents if they knew the young lady’s name. Or, simplest of all, of having established her last name when he met her by the simple expedient of giving her his own and asking hers.
Now, the morning after, he was dressing to go out to his club where he would promptly forget her very existence and go on with his life. Surely that would not be so very difficult a task for a man about town, a man with so many varied interests and occupations? To forget about one bookish spinster with gold and green eyes ought to be the work of an hour.
He descended the stairs to find his butler, Greenwell, standing at the bottom with a worried expression.
“What is it?”
“Sir, it is that writer from Wilson’s Gazette. He is waiting on the stoop. He wanted to come in, said you had made an appointment to tell him about the inspiration for your novel, sir, but I wasn’t taken in by such a sham. I told him to take himself off, but he said as how he was a free man and could stand where he wanted, where he wanted to stand was your stoop.”
“Carruthers and botheration! Damned jackass is like a burr.” Jameson turned his hat in his hands and considered whether the man was enough of a bother that he should slip ignominiously out the back servant’s entrance to avoid him.
When the fellow, a Mr. Randall Proctor, had first approached him with the insinuation that he, Charles Jameson, was the true author of the pseudonymously published The Last Days of a Rake, he had thought it a joke. But the fellow enumerated his reasons, being the same initials, a reputation as a rake and a man of letters, and some seemingly autobiographical features of the novel. There was a girl in his past named Susan—in the novel one of the hero’s conquests—and he had lived for a time in France. Such was the slight premise upon which Proctor had constructed his entire argument. It seemed ludicrously slim to Jameson, but Proctor was not joking. He wanted a statement, he said, to confirm or deny that Jameson was the real author, and he would bother him until he got what he wanted.
Jameson had read the book with admiration and envy. So much talent, and so much more promise, was expressed in every line and paragraph of that novel, that he felt it was the finest prose work of the year and perhaps of the decade so far. It was not perfect by any means—there was more that could have been done by an editor with imagination and talent, for the author required some guidance and advice. But there was something about the glowing prose and the authentic morality of it, so far removed from the preachy, false righteousness of most current novels, that he had read the book several times over and found something new to admire each time. He had tried in vain to search out the real identity of the author, only to be met at the publisher’s office by a solemn statement from Mr. Bellringer that, “Mr. Colin Jenkins lives in retirement and has expressed a wish not to be identified to anyone.”
All that might change if he were wrongly identified, Jameson had reasoned. The fellow might be forced out of hiding if his masterwork was attributed to someone else. And so within moments he had composed his response to the reporter’s earnest query: “I suppose if I deny being the author you will not believe me, so you must print what you will.”
Part of that was merely the truth, but part was a desire to flush the real author from his hiding place. He would like to become the fellow’s patron, perhaps, or introduce him into society. But the little joke he had allowed himself had become a feverish flurry of attention. That simple statement led to triumphant headlines that trumpeted the mystery as solved. Jameson had been highly entertained that Proctor had dared to go so far with that simple cagey refusal to commit himself.
Though vaguely bothered by the mistaken attribution of a work he admired, he reasoned that surely such a strongly worded article would bring a stinging rebuttal by the true author and his publisher. No author would stand for such a misidentification.
But that was weeks ago, and so far no letter of refutation had been received or printed in Wilson’s Gazette, nor in any of the more serious journals. Even the publisher had been curiously silent. Jameson was sick to death of the sly winks and nudges he got from all and sundry who believed the damned article. He had carefully and strenuously denied it to his friends, but many of them persisted in the belief that he was just being modest.
