Love and Scandal, page 5
It had become tedious and boring, as so much in life was wont to do, but he could find no way to change the course of the gossip. He hoped that by ignoring it, he could make it go away. These things had a tendency to die in the face of obdurate resistance to further comment.
For his own part, though he had no intention of validating Proctor’s absurd claims by any contradiction—he knew enough of public opinion to know that occasionally contradiction only served to cement in people’s mind the truth of a piece of gossip—he had become more vigorous in his search for the real author, even haring off to Kent after careful dissection of the text, certain the author had some unique connection with a part of that seaside county. And still…nothing.
So, to avoid contact with the miserable scribbler who had penned the scurrilous article, he supposed he would have to slip out the back door of his own home like a naughty footman going off to the pub for a pint. His current discomfort was his own damned fault.
Mr. Bellringer steepled his hands and gazed at Collette across the desk. “Miss Jardiniere, there is really nothing I can do. The papers will print what they like, and unless you are willing to expose yourself as the author—which, by the way, I do not advise. The attention you would receive would not all be of the most flattering kind—then… Where was I? Ah, yes, well then, if you are not to identify yourself as the author, we cannot positively refute the paper’s article. In a way, this is very flattering and can only help sales of the book, which had started to drop off before this bit of controversy.”
Collette fumed in silence, but her hands were folded in ladylike submission and she sat very still and upright in the office of her publisher. That was the real reason behind their refusal to act on this outrage, she thought, staring angrily at the papered wall behind the publisher. She was determined to allow no sign of her anger to show, but it was extremely difficult. The rumor that this Mr. Charles Jameson, a notorious rake, was the author was reviving sales. She was happy to sell more books, but she did not want them to sell just for titillation’s sake. She had poured her heart and soul into her novel, and it should sell on its own merits.
“Have you spoken to this…this bounder?” she asked, dropping her gaze from the wall behind the desk to meet the man’s eyes. “Have you asked him to put forth a more positive retraction?” She gripped her reticule on her lap and worried at the string.
Mr. Bellringer looked alarmed, his balding head breaking out in beads of perspiration and his pale, almost colorless eyes widening. “I would not dream of approaching Mr. Jameson and suggesting such a thing. Why, that would be tantamount to calling him a liar.”
Fury bit into Collette and she could no longer restrain her ire. She leaped to her feet and leaned on the desk so that her face was just a foot from Mr. Bellringer’s. “But he is a liar! He could have said he was not the author! He could have put it in such a way that the reporter would have believed him. But instead he smirks and says they may print what they will. Why did he do that, if not to claim responsibility for my novel? I will not have it!”
“Miss Jardiniere,” Mr. Stuyvesent said, breaking onto the conversation for the first time.
Collette whirled around, having forgotten the pale young man was in the room.
“Miss Jardiniere,” he repeated, standing from his chair in the corner, pushing his spectacles up on his nose. “We will not contradict Mr. Jameson. This is for your own good as well as ours. The book has had sales rebound forty-three percent, and this could continue for quite some time now that it is thought that Jameson is the author. Having come from your…village,” he said, making the word sound like an unspeakable horror, “you will have no idea that Mr. Jameson is a very very popular man about town. He is scandalous and reprehensible, and the thought that he might be pouring his own life and feelings out on paper has society all atwitter. And so our advice to you, miss, is to go back to Listerwood-on-Sea and enjoy your royalties.”
“You do not understand at all, do you?” she said, refusing to be defeated. “It is quite clear to me that neither of you is a writer. As long as there was a fictional Colin Jenkins as the author, it was still my name. I was Colin Jenkins, and even if I was the only one who knew that, it was enough. But now my identity as creator of this work has been usurped by that…that rogue! I will not have it, do you hear me? I will not have it.” She stood to her full height, admittedly not very impressive, but still she looked down on the seated publisher and was not so very much shorter than the publisher’s assistant.
“If I have to track the man down myself,” she said in her most forceful tone, “and coerce him to make a definite statement, I will do it. That is my book—my book—and I will not have people reading it and trying to fit it to this lecher’s life. I will not have people tittering behind their hands as they assume it is written from a rake’s experience. It is a work of fiction and meant to be read as such. It loses much of its meaning—the allegorical meaning—if it is seen as mere autobiography.” She picked up her bag and marched to the door. “I shall be staying in London until I sort this out, gentlemen. Thank you for all your generous—or should I say grudging—assistance.”
She left.
Mr. Stuyvesent glanced at Mr. Bellringer behind the desk. “She’s going to create trouble, you know.”
Bellringer nodded, his expression bleak and without hope. “But what can we do? It is her book, and she has a right, I suppose, to do what she will about it.”
“Do you really want her to go to Mr. Jameson? It could ruin everything if that gentleman does come out with a definite retraction. His ambiguous statement was the best thing that happened to the book!”
“I know that.”
“The Last Days of a Rake is the best seller you have, but if it comes out that Miss Jardiniere is the real author, you could lose everything. Men will be appalled. No man is going to read a book by a woman! And the ladies will be scandalized, though not in a manner that will aid sales, as this scandal is doing.” Stuyvesent paused, his mouth set in a grim line. “You could be ruined, you know, if it is decided that by knowingly publishing such a book by a young lady authoress, you have contributed to the moral decay of society.”
Bellringer began to tremble. “David, what shall we do?”
The assistant, his pale face twisted in a thoughtful grimace, stared at the floor for a minute. His expression, when he again looked up, was one of deviltry mingled with spite. “Leave it up to me. I have an idea that just might work. That is, if you don’t mind a little dirty business.”
Bellringer’s pale eyes narrowed. “David, do not say another word to me,” he said, putting up his hands, palms out. “Do not tell me anything, and do not keep me informed! If you can figure some way to keep the mystery going…well, I will trust you to take care of this little mess so that young lady does not kill the goose laying all those lovely golden eggs.”
Stuyvesent nodded and pushed his spectacles up on his nose. “I will be happy to do you that service, Mr. Bellringer, if you will guarantee me certain compensation.”
Suspiciously, Bellringer gazed at his young assistant. For months he had been thinking there was something more going on in that young man’s mind than being of service to him; perhaps now he would find out what. “What compensation did you have in mind?”
“I’ll tell you when I am successful.”
Bellringer shook his head. “No. Surely you do not think I will acquiesce to anything without first knowing the cost?”
“It will not be out of your reach, sir, I promise you that. You will be happy to give me what I want. It is a very modest request.”
He still wasn’t sure, but Bellringer nodded slowly. A forty-three percent leap in sales, and that was just in the first week after the story broke. Sales had risen even more in the last week. Surely that was worth a lot. Then his eyes narrowed again. “You do not mean to… You wouldn’t hurt the young lady, would you?”
Stuyvesent looked shocked. “Of course not, sir. I will not touch a hair on that young lady’s head, truly!”
“Good. That’s good, then. Go ahead, David.”
He went back to his paperwork and Stuyvesent left the office to set his scheme underway. He very much feared it would be necessary. Miss Collette Jardiniere did not seem the type of young lady to indulge in empty threats.
But David Stuyvesent was a match for her. More than a match. He found Miss Collette Jardiniere nauseatingly self-assured and annoyingly competent. A real lady would not act as she did. But then again a real lady would never have written the scandalous and obscene book The Last Days of a Rake.
His first act must be to follow her and find out her intentions. Despite his assurances to his employer, his plans were only tentative. He had a hazy strategy in mind, but he was willing to improvise if he found out something about her that would help things along.
Stuyvesent spied Miss Jardiniere at some distance marching down the sidewalk and hurried to follow.
Four
She would find the man herself, Collette had determined. She was not entirely without friends in London; she would track down Charles Jameson and confront him with his wicked deed and demand that he enlighten that writer for Wilson’s Gazette. How she was going to convince him to do that without revealing she was the writer she did not know, but something would occur to her.
She was taking the first step now. She paced the length of the stuffy parlor the pretty Dancey household parlor maid had shown her to. Henrietta Pope, now Mrs. Henrietta Dancey, had been one of her two closest friends in school. Collette’s parents had died overseas when she was very young, and for a time she had no home but school. She was a lonely little girl with nowhere to go on school holidays until Henrietta Pope and Philoxia Woodham had befriended her. For a few years her Christmases had been spent at Philoxia’s palatial home near Brighton and summers were spent at Henrietta’s more modest abode in Bristol.
But then her Aunt Nettie had returned from India and life had changed forever for the better. Aunt Nettie was a sweet, dizzy widow of modest means, and she bought a cottage near the Kent shore for the sole purpose of raising her older sister’s only child. She had no children of her own and lavished all the love and care in her ample bosom on her orphaned niece. From the time she was fourteen until she left school at seventeen, Collette spent every holiday with Aunt Nettie.
But she never lost a deep sense of gratitude to Henny and Loxy, as her two friends were called, for the times they had stood in as family to her, and for the friendship that had gone deeper than mere school chums.
They had all been destined for such different paths in life, though. She hadn’t seen or even written to her friends in too long. She was going to change all of that now. Though Collette had a selfish motive for looking them up, it would serve to reunite them, too, and she hoped they would be as happy to see her as she would to see them.
“Colly! Oh, Colly, it has been simply years!”
Collette was engulfed in a smothering embrace. The young lady who had sailed into the parlor and clasped her to her bosom was rotund and swathed in layers of soft, clingy fabric.
“Henny, it is so good to see you,” Collette said, her voice muffled against the larger woman’s bosom. Where Collette was short and slender, Henny was tall and larger framed. Henrietta Dancey—formerly Miss Henny Pope of Miss Grant’s School for Young Ladies—released Collette and held her away from herself and looked her over critically.
“Colly,” she gasped, shaking her, “you have not changed a bit in all these years. Still as slender as a reed. I can’t say the same!” She laughed merrily and gave a rueful glance down at her ample form. Even a corset could not give her a waist. In school she had been tall and big-boned, but angular, too. Now she was decidedly fat.
“Nonsense, Henny. The added pounds do you well.” Collette cocked her head to one side and gazed at her friend. “You look…comfortable.” There was something else different about her, but Collette could not quite put her finger on what it was that had changed.
“You are sweet to say so, dear,” Henrietta said, shaking her head. “Five children, you know. It does things to a woman’s body.”
“Five children!” Collette shook her head in awe. While she had been busy, head bent over paper, pen in ink-stained hand, Henny had certainly proceeded with real life. The life men from their pulpits and women from their parlors ordained was correct and suitable for proper ladies. Five children! She glanced around the comfortable home: overstuffed sofa, bric-a-brac shelves, ornate fireplace with just a dried floral arrangement in it on a late-August afternoon, and adorning it on the mantle a pair of large, handsome photographs of Henrietta and Herbert Dancey. They gazed solemnly out at the world from their marital portraits while Henny prattled about her husband, at his “very important” job at the bank, and her children, the pride of her life.
In school, Henrietta had been a romantic, silly, but entertaining girl, dismally bad at spelling and even worse at science and arithmetic. They had not kept track of each other in the years after school, despite earnest vows to the contrary. Henny had been a poor correspondent, and had married Herbert only a year after leaving Miss Grant’s academy. She was very soon with child, and Collette had had nothing to say in reply to her infrequent letters, not being able to sympathize with dastardly nursemaids, swollen feet and morning sickness.
“Come, sit down,” Henrietta commanded, taking Collette’s hand. “I have been on my feet for an hour supervising the turning out of Herbert’s library. Such a difficult task. He will be most put out if anything is the slightest bit disarranged. If I don’t watch every move my girls make, they will crumple his papers and he will be completely discommoded.”
Collette sat on the overstuffed horsehair sofa and folded her hands on her lap, watching her friend, who twitched the curtain into the perfect folds and fussed with the dry arrangement of flowers. Henny seemed happy and Collette smiled, glad everything had worked out well for the sweetest of girls. After all, Henny had not been the brightest student at Miss Grant’s. It was fortunate she had found a husband who, like most men, preferred a woman with few pretensions to intelligence. Collette stopped that train of thinking, uncomfortably aware of how smug she sounded even to herself. Henny had always made up for any lack of intelligence with an overabundance of sweetness and she must not forget that.
“Our lives have changed so since school,” Collette said, shaking her head in wonder.
“My, yes.” Henrietta eased herself down into a chair and surreptitiously slipped her shoes off under the skirts of her morning gown. “I was going to marry a pirate, if I recall, and live on the high seas!” She emitted a high peel of laughter. “A life of adventure and romance. How uncomfortable that would have been, now when I think about it. Children and ships do not mix well, I think. Instead I married a banker.”
Collette chuckled, remembering their late night whispered conversations and ambitious future plans. “I was going to go to Canada and chronicle the lives of the Indians, if I remember correctly. Instead I live with my aunt in Listerwood-on-Sea.”
Henny gazed at her. “Did you never do anything about your writing, then?”
Shifting uncomfortably under a gaze she did not remember to be so perspicacious, Collette shrugged and said, “Oh, of course I still write.”
“But you always said there was no point in writing if you were never published. Have you been published?”
“Have you seen my name on any book cover?” Collette asked, equivocating.
“No, but what is that to anything?” With a weary chuckle, Henrietta confessed, “I rarely pick up a book, dear. I am so busy with the children and the house.” She waved a hand at the room. “One would think with a houseful of serving staff one would have a few minutes to oneself during the day, but if I don’t supervise, nothing is done correctly. Herbert is most particular.”
Herbert sounded a perfect prig, Collette thought, eyeing her friend’s tired face. Henny had the beginning of lines creasing her mouth, even though she was still just in her twenties. Collette did not envy her the necessity of keeping such a man happy. It was time to change the subject, and that meant getting down to the purpose of her visit.
“Henny, do you still see Loxy?” Collette asked, of their mutual friend Philoxia Bertrand. She sat forward on the sofa and clasped her hands together, feeling a nervousness build, a twist of anxiety deep in her stomach as she finally got down to the business at hand. “I saw her name in a journal one day as holding a literary tea, so I know she lives in London. I thought to look her up while I was here.” For some reason Henny had seemed easier to approach, which was the reason behind Collette’s plan to approach her first. Henrietta never looked to discover a person’s deepest feelings, nor did she question anyone’s motives. She simply accepted one without asking any awkward questions.
Henny gazed at her steadily. “So now we get to the real reason for this sudden fit to see London? You never would accept my invitations in past years, dear.”
Reddening, Collette looked down at her folded hands, trying to hide the ink stain on the thumb of one of her gloves. Just as she had been ready to dash out the door to come to Henny’s, a thought had occurred to her and she simply had to write it down so it would not disappear, and of course the ink had stained her glove. She pulled at the thumb, doubling it over and pushing it into her palm.
She had not counted on Henny questioning her sudden interest in London and her old friends. It was true that many years before, when Henrietta was a young wife with just one child, she had issued many invitations to Collette; her husband was indulgent, she said, and wanted his wife to feel free to invite friends. But Collette had said no repeatedly. She had thought the hustle and bustle of London would fatigue her brain, leaving no room or energy for the outpourings of her heart and mind onto paper.
