Portrait of a Scandal. ANNIE BURROWS
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She couldn’t admit that she had hardly been able to wait for the next time they met, hoping he’d want to do the same. She’d been so thrilled and flattered, and eager to join him when he’d taken her out on to a terrace and kissed her full on the lips. They’d put their arms round each other and it had felt like heaven.
All she’d been able to do was stammer, ‘But he kissed me...’
And her father had thundered she was going to end in hell for such wanton behaviour. He’d whisked her straight back to Stanton Basset where, in order to save her soul, he’d shut her in her room on a diet of bread and water, after administering a sound spanking.
As if she hadn’t already suffered enough. Harcourt had made her fall in love with him, had made her think he loved her, too, had then coldly turned away from her and started going about with Lucasta Delacourt. She’d been convinced he must simply have been making sport of her, seeing how far from the straight and narrow he could tempt the vicar’s daughter to stray.
For a while she’d felt as though her whole world had collapsed around her like a house of cards.
Eventually they’d let her out of her room and told her she could eat meals with the rest of the family again, but she had no appetite. She stumbled through her duties about the house and parish in a fog of misery that nothing could lift. Then her mother, rather than offering her comfort, had rebuked her for setting a bad example to her younger sisters.
Her father might have accused her of being a trollop, but her mother had heaped even more crimes upon her head. She’d accused her of being vain and self-indulgent, of getting ideas above her station...
Which was ironic, because the last thing she had been interested in had been his connections. Others might have simpered and sighed, and tried to capture his attention because his father was an earl, but she’d just liked him for himself. Or the image of himself he’d projected, whenever he’d been with her.
The last straw had been the attitude of her sisters. The sisters she’d cared for as babies, sat up with during illnesses. They’d closed ranks with her parents. Shaken their heads in reproof. Shown not the slightest bit of sympathy.
She understood them doing so when their parents were around. But couldn’t one of them have just...patted her hand as she wept alone in her bed? Offered her a handkerchief even?
Surely what she’d done hadn’t been that bad? Besides, they could see she was sorry, that she’d learned her lesson. Wasn’t anybody, ever, going to forgive her?
She’d begun to sink into real despair. Until the day Aunt Georgie had descended on them. Sat on the edge of her bed and told her, in that brusque way she had, that what she needed was a change of air.
‘I shall tell your parents I mean to take you on a tour of the Lake District, to give your mind a new direction.’ Though she hadn’t, Amethyst recalled with a wry smile, done anything of the sort.
They hadn’t been on the road long before Aunt Georgie had been obliged to come clean.
‘I’ve a mind,’ she’d said brusquely, ‘to buy a couple of factories that some fool of a man ran into bankruptcy.’
Amethyst had been stunned. Women did not go round purchasing failing businesses.
‘He’s claiming the workers are intractable,’ her aunt had continued. ‘Has suffered from riots and outbreaks of plague and God knows what else. We’ll probably find that he’s a drunken incompetent fool. Naturally we cannot let anyone know our true purpose in coming up here.’ Aunt Georgie had smiled at her, patted her hand and said, ‘Your breakdown has come at a most convenient time for me. Perfect excuse to be wandering about that part of the countryside in an apparently aimless manner. I can sound out people in the know and find out what is really going on.’
‘You can’t use me as some kind of a...smokescreen,’ Amethyst had protested. ‘I’m—’
‘Getting angry at last. That’s the ticket. Far healthier to get angry than mope yourself into a decline. That young man,’ she’d said, ‘isn’t worth a single one of the tears you’ve shed over him. And as for your father...’ She’d snorted in contempt. ‘What you ought to do, my girl, is think about getting even with them. If not the specific men who’ve conspired to crush you, then as many of the rest of their sex as you can.’
Get even. She’d never thought a chance would come for her to get even with Harcourt. Though she’d wondered if there wasn’t some divine justice at work on her behalf anyway. It didn’t seem to have done him much good, marrying that woman. In spite of all the connections she had, in spite of all the money her family spent on getting Harcourt elected, his career never went anywhere. His wife died childless. And then he’d created a scandal so serious that he’d had to disappear from public life altogether.
She’d crowed with triumph over every disaster that had befallen him, since it seemed to have served him right for toying with her affections so callously.
But now he’d admitted that he had been seriously thinking about marrying her. That he’d almost thrown caution to the winds.
Thrown caution to the winds? What on earth could he have meant by that?
Oh, only one of half-a-dozen things! There had been the disparity in their stations, for one thing. He was the son of an earl, after all, albeit the very youngest of them, while she was merely the daughter of an insignificant vicar. Nobility very rarely married into the gentry, unless it increased their wealth. And she’d had no dowry to speak of. Not then.
But that Miss Delacourt had. The one he’d become engaged to so swiftly after he’d given her the cut direct.
She shivered as she cast her mind back to the way he’d looked at her that night. As a rule, she tried not to think about it. It hurt too much. Even now, knowing that he hadn’t been simply playing some kind of a game with her, she recoiled from the memory of the coldness in eyes that had once seemed to burn with ardour.
She dragged herself out of the past with an effort to hear Monsieur Le Brun was now telling Sophie a gory tale of an uprising that had been quelled upon the very spot where they stood. He pointed at some marks in the wall, telling the fascinated little girl that they’d been made by bullets.
She shuddered. Not at the goriness of the tale, though she would claim it was that if anyone should question her. But, no—what really sickened her was the thought that Harcourt assumed she was having intimate relations with this stringy, sallow-faced Frenchman.
Why was everyone always ready to assume the worst of her? All she’d done was leave Stanton Bassett to take a little trip. She’d followed all the proprieties by hiring a female companion, yet just because she’d stepped outside the bounds of acceptable female behaviour, just the tiniest bit, suddenly Harcourt assumed she must be a...a woman of easy virtue!
Based on what evidence—that she was with a man to whom she was not married, dressed in clothing that indicated she was relatively poor? And from this he’d deduced Monsieur Le Brun must be her protector?
Didn’t he remember she was a vicar’s daughter? Didn’t he remember how he’d teased her about being so prim and proper when they’d first met?
Although he had soon loosened her moral stance, she reflected on a fresh wave of resentment. Quite considerably.
Perhaps he thought she’d carried on loosening after they’d parted.
Next time she came across Harcourt she would jolly well put him right. How dare he accuse her of having such poor taste as to take up with a man like Monsieur Le Brun?
If anyone had bad taste, it was he. He’d married a woman with a face like a horse, just because her family was wealthy and powerful.
Or so her parents had said. ‘The Delacourts wouldn’t let one of their daughters marry in haste. If they’ve got as far as announcing a betrothal, negotiations must have been going on for some time. His family might even have arranged the thing from the cradle. It is the way things are done,