Page 50 of To Tame the Wild Rake
“Surely you haven’t been shunned, too?” Charlotte asked, as Uncle James poured a brandy for his eldest son and a port for Sophia.
“Oh dear,” Sophia replied. “Has it come to that?”
Uncle James summarised the situation. “Charlotte, Sarah, and Nate were turned away from the Fentons, and Drew’s membership of his club has been suspended. Do you know what this is about?”
Sophia accepted her port. “We came to tell you that the whole town is buzzing with stories, many of them about the Winshires, others about the Haverfords. People having been dredging up history going back to Aldridge’s childhood, and every scandal he has ever been connected with, plus a few I’ve never before heard. Jessica has gone home in tears.”
“And the same with our family,” Jamie added. “Every incident that can be misinterpreted or cast in a bad light, right back to your duel with Haverford when you were a young man, Kaka.”
Yousef swirled his coffee thoughtfully. “It sounds like Wharton, Yakob,” he suggested. “Were not he and his witch of a sister masters of the nasty rumour?”
“You’re right, Yousef,” Jamie agreed. “Let us track the stories to their source and stamp on the snake’s head.”
“Which will not stop people repeating them,” Sarah pointed out, “and how are we to prove they are not true?”
“We cannot,” Charlotte said, slowly, remembering her conversation with the Duchess of Haverford. “We should not. We simply face the scandalmongers down and refuse to bow our heads. We speak not to petty people with evil minds but to those with real power. The Queen will receive Mama, I am sure, and you could talk to the princesses, Sophia. Kaka, you have influence with the Prince Regent. If they will show their support in public, that will help.”
Sophia nodded approvingly. “Yes, Charlotte is quite right. For every rumour we disprove, another will pop up, even worse. Why, they are saying that you seduced your own brother, Charlotte, and that he killed himself as a result. Yes, and that the reason Sarah ran away with Nate was that you and she were disporting with the rakes at one of Richport’s orgies, and Grandfather was threatening to make you each marry one. Yes, and that Charlotte has been Aldridge’s mistress ever since. How can people swallow such rubbish?”
The room swirled around Charlotte. Someone took her hand in a firm grip and advised her to breathe. Sarah. She took a sip from the brandy glass held to her lips and the burn of the alcohol brought her back.
“A kernel of truth,” she croaked, then took the glass from Sarah and sipped again. Her voice steadier, she said again, “A kernel of truth. Richport had an estate next to Applemorn Hall, where Sarah and I were living when Sarah fell in love with Nate. I met Aldridge that summer.” She smiled as her uncle and cousins, without moving, shifted into warrior mode, alert as hawks sighting the rabbit. “He was a perfect gentleman, and kind to a little girl,” she assured them.
She looked around the room. She knew her family loved her, and Yousef was fiercely loyal. But surely, they would look at her differently if she told them the other morsels of truth in that litany of lies. Her brother Elfingham had raped her. She had spent a night with Aldridge.
Sarah squeezed her hand. “I imagine we shall find other morsels of truth buried in some of the other rumours. Although some seem to be made out of whole cloth. I imagine it unlikely in the extreme that Aldridge killed a circus performer who happened to look like the Rose of Frampton in order to allow his mistress to adopt a new identity and marry his friend Lord Overton.”
Drew, Sophia and Jamie each had a rumour to quote, all of them ridiculous.
The attacks on Uncle James and the rest of the family three years ago had been staged to win public sympathy and disguise the fact that Uncle James was an imposter—an Easterner who had known the real son of the deceased duke when he was in prison in Persia. The attacks were real enough, as Charlotte knew. The rest was nonsense.
Aldridge had sold his brother Jonathan to slavers, along with his brother’s wife, Prudence Wakefield, who was a former lover of his. They would be slaves to the Saracens yet, but Prue whored herself to buy her escape. Or Jonathan did. Charlotte had heard Prue speak of how she and Jonathan had been kidnapped from the London docks, and of how they’d escaped into France. So another farrago of lies.
Uncle James and Aunt Eleanor had been lovers in their youth, and had resumed their affair when Uncle James returned to England.
Charlotte spoke again when the chuckles died down. “We need Aunt Eleanor.” She or Mama, but Mama had gone to Leicester to be with Ruth in her confinement.
Sarah started to protest and Uncle James frowned, but Charlotte held up a hand. “No one is better at the politics of Polite Society. And these rumours concern her and her family, so she will be working to combat them. It is better strategy to work together.”
“Charlotte is right,” Sophia said, oblivious to the undercurrents. “A pity that Aunt Grace and Aunt Georgie are both from town. Still, Aunt Eleanor will be able to marshal Society’s dragons on the side of right.”
“Yes, and the Wakefields will know how to track the rumours back to Wharton, wherever he lairs,” Uncle James agreed. “We have a plan, my children. I suggest we sleep on it, and send for the duchess and the Wakefields tomorrow.”
Wharton was pleased. He could not risk entering the finest of drawing rooms, but at the lower-level entertainments he attended, the campaign of rumours was going well. Aldridge would end up with nothing. Perhaps the authorities would investigate the man’s imprisonment of his father, but even if the old duke really was mad, Wharton had allowed for that. The rumour that the madness was hereditary would do nicely.
The doctor’s story, that he’d been fired because he refused to poison the old man, might even point to Aldridge already beginning to lose his mind.
But that was only a small part of the price Aldridge would pay. The fact that Richport had been driven from England proved that even a duke was not immune to social censure. Once the rumours did their job, Society would cast out Aldridge, his mother, and his sisters—yes, and his lover, too. Her first. It had taken Elspeth a long time to discover the identity of the whore that Elfingham was so upset about, but she’d figured it out, and Wharton had found the doctor who treated the girl for the clap.
Wharton giggled. Saint Charlotte! What a laugh. She’d never be able to hold her head up again. Perhaps she would kill herself? That would be one in the eye for Aldridge.
The man was disgustingly rich, and refused to gamble like any normal man, but he speculated. A few nasty accidents in his canal works. A run on one of his banks. His investors would leave him in droves.
Not that Wharton had time for all of that, as the griping in his belly told him. Never mind. He would live long enough.
Let the rumours run for a week or two, and let the two ducal families feel the full weight of their disgrace. Then would come the grand finale. The infernal device was being made. Mullins, the footman he had in his thrall, had made a copy of the key to Aldridge’s front door. Wharton would go out in a blaze of glory, and he would take his enemy with him.
Aldridge arrived home by nine of the clock, having left Hounslow on a borrowed horse as soon as the sun was high enough to give light to ride by. Despite all his rational rejection of Beauclair’s folderol, the man’s conviction left him with bad dreams, none of which he remembered. But he woke early, with a paradoxical combination of dread and hope. Dread of whatever this storm denoted; hope that Charlotte was not, after all, lost to him.
