Nicola Cornick - Scandals of an Innocent

“The raven,” Mrs. Lister said, peering into the depths of her cup. “That means bad news or a reversal of fortune.”

“That will be for Lord Vickery then,” Lizzie said. “Nat told me that he was planning to auction off the contents of Drum Castle next week because he is so debt-ridden that he will be clapped in the Fleet before long.”

Alice remembered the bleak look in Miles’s eyes when he had told her he stood to lose everything. No wonder he had pressed her so hard to accept him. He had not lied when he said that he would be ruined by debt. She struggled against a sudden and treacherous feeling of sympathy for Miles having to endure the humiliation of losing his entire birthright in so public a manner. Then she felt angry at her own weakness. Miles deserved no pity from her.

“Truly?” she said. “Lord Vickery’s situation is genuinely that bad?”

“Worse than bad,” Lizzie said cheerfully. “That is why the sale is happening so soon. The lawyers pressed Lord Vickery to it as soon as he inherited as the only way to save himself. They are to sell off the farmland and other parts of the estate, and the entire contents of the castle. The only thing that cannot be sold is the castle itself, for it is entailed.” She turned back to Mrs. Lister. “I thought that we might take the carriage out to Drum next week, ma’am, and see how the sale goes? We could buy ourselves a few souvenirs—”

“Lizzie, no!” Alice said, revolted. “That is like vultures picking over a carcass!”

“Well someone has to buy the goods,” Lizzie said, unmoved, “and it might as well be us! I hear that the late marquis had some delightful porcelain figures—though not all of them are quite respectable—but I know that your mama would like to increase her collection by buying some of the more tasteful ones.”

This decided the matter. Mrs. Lister was most enthusiastic, and Alice found herself overruled. “For, my dear,” Mrs. Lister said reasonably, “our money is as good as anyone else’s and I think we should make a show.”

It went much against the grain with Alice, but then she thought of Miles’s ruthless attempt to blackmail her into marriage and she felt cold and sick. Why was she wasting her sympathy on a man who did not understand the meaning of the word compassion? He deserved nothing from her other than her absolute disdain. Her money was her own to do with as she chose until she wed, provided that her trustees approved. If she embarrassed Miles by making a vulgar show of her fortune only a week after being blackmailed into accepting his hand in marriage, then he had no one to blame but himself.

“By all means let us go to Drum,” she said, “and buy up the marquis’s entire estate if we wish. The more I think about it, the more the idea appeals to me.”

“OH, DARLING, I cannot believe that such an appalling thing could have happened!” Dorothea, the Dowager Lady Vickery, rushed into the drawing room of Drum Castle, enfolded her elder son in a scented embrace, then released him to stand back and dab artistically at her eyes with her inadequate and lacy handkerchief. “I am so sorry for you, Miles, darling! To have inherited the Marquisate of Drum is…Well, it is quite…” Words seemed to fail her and she took refuge once more in wiping the tears from her eyes.

“It’s a damned disaster,” Miles finished for her, “begging your pardon, Mama.” He had been working on the estate finances in preparation for Churchward’s visit, and the grim columns of figures had not improved his mood. Drum had been badly run for years and had brought in very little income. His cousins had suffered from a congenital failure to understand that they had no money to spend. The combination of the two was disastrous and meant that he was more deeply in debt than he had realized. Alice’s eighty thousand pounds would clear most of the debt, and selling off those parts of the estate that were not entailed would ease the situation a little, but once he and Alice were married and her money spent the two of them would have nothing other than his Home Office salary—which was barely enough for one to live on, not two—and this ruined monstrosity of a castle. They would be surviving on credit for the rest of their lives unless he could think of a way to make a fortune.

Under the circumstances the arrival of his mother was about as welcome as one of the plagues of Egypt. He looked at her with ill-concealed impatience. “Might I ask what you are doing here, ma’am?” he said. “I really did not expect this.”

The dowager opened her hazel eyes plaintively wide. “We came to support you in your hour of need, darling,” she said. She gestured airily toward the door. “Celia is here, and Philip, too. When I realized that dear Mr. Churchward was coming to consult with you on matters of business—” she waved a hand at the lawyer, who was struggling into the room weighed down with what looked like a monstrous amount of the dowager’s luggage “—I prevailed upon him to allow us to accompany him. We knew that you would need us by your side at this difficult time.”

“How perceptive of you, Mama,” Miles said grimly. He nodded to the lawyer. “Churchward, you have my sympathies. I wish you had not bothered to come, Mama,” he added brutally, turning back to his mother. “This place is utterly uninhabitable, there are no servants and I will be selling off all the contents next week. There is nowhere for you to stay and you know you hate the north of England.”

The dowager’s expression set into lines that were surprisingly mulish. “Well, we shall all manage somehow,” she said briskly. “And you need not fear that we will have to stay in this ghastly ruin —” she cast the baronial room a look of profound dislike “—for we have arranged to visit your cousin Laura Anstruther at the Old Palace in Fortune’s Folly. I only had the luggage brought in because the carriage is so ancient that it leaks and the weather in the North is so appalling.”

“You are staying with Laura?” Miles asked. That was bad news, he thought, for it meant that Lady Vickery would be established in Fortune’s Folly for at least a month, possibly longer. He groaned inwardly. That would give her ample time to interfere in his courtship of Alice and cause all sorts of problems.

“I am so looking forward to getting to know Laura’s new husband better,” his mother was saying. “The Home Secretary speaks most highly of him. I hear he is one of the Hertfordshire Anstruthers. He is vastly handsome, is he not?”

“Dexter isn’t my type,” Miles said grimly, making a mental note to ask his friend what the hell he was playing at to allow Laura to invite his entire family to stay.

Celia Vickery came up to him and offered a cool cheek for him to kiss. “How are you, Miles?” she said, appraising him with her sharp hazel gaze. “Still alive, I see. The Curse of Drum has not yet carried you off.”

“Give it time,” Miles said. “Could you not have dissuaded Mama from coming, Celia?” he added, scarcely bothering to lower his voice. “You know I don’t want any of you here.”

His sister, the eldest of the family and unmarried at thirty-three, gave him an old-fashioned look. In appearance Celia was like their mother, with the same oval face, dark brown hair and winged eyebrows that had once proclaimed Lady Vickery a beauty. Yet it was odd, Miles thought, that the looks that had made Dorothea Vickery a diamond of the first water were somehow muted in her daughter. Celia could probably be described as well to a pass but she was no incomparable. Nor was she remotely like their mother in temperament but more like Miles himself, cool, cynical and direct.