Page 53 of The Soldier's Scoundrel
“I assure you I am not part of her trouble,” Oliver tried to reassure the lady. “She invited me because I’m friendly with Wraxhall. This visit is totally unconnected with my business in Yorkshire.” This was not far from the truth, in that Mrs. Wraxhall hadn’t known Oliver was connected with her blackmail inquiry when she invited him.
Mrs. Durbin seemed to recall the presence of servants and waved her hand to dismiss them from the room. “She was always ambitious. She wanted a Season in London even though the assembly rooms in York were good enough for her cousins. Besides which, she had a good man ready to marry her, a man with a sight more money than her Mr. Wraxhall. But that wasn’t good enough. And if that same ambition has gotten her into a mess with a scapegrace like you, then you’ll be the one who pays the price.”
Jack pushed open the door to Oliver’s room without knocking. “What the devil do you mean by not informing me when you’ve received a direct threat?”
Oliver glanced up from his looking glass, razor in hand and shaving soap still on his chin. He had the nerve to look surprised at Jack’s furor. “Do you mean Mrs. Durbin? She has to be sixty.”
“I don’t care how old she is.” He walked over and took the razor out of Oliver’s hands, crouching before him. “She threatened you. Do you not see how that might be relevant to me, both professionally and personally, Oliver? I’m here, looking for information that might shed some light on this matter, and you learn that the client’s mother is in the practice of issuing threats, but you don’t tell me?”
“And personally?” He turned away from Jack to arrange the objects on the shaving table, as if he suddenly needed the shaving soap to be at right angles to his comb.
“You dimwit,” Jack said with a degree of fondness he should have been ashamed to own. “Here, hold still. You’ve missed a place.” He gently scraped the razor across Oliver’s jaw. “Now tell me what else you learned from the old lady.” As Oliver related the details of his conversation with Mrs. Durbin, Jack felt like this tangle was starting to unknot itself. “So, according to her mother, Mrs. Wraxhall married for status. But according to his valet, Mr. Wraxhall did not marry out of a pressing need for funds.”
“That brings us back to whether they had to marry for other reasons. Charlotte was quite sure the two of them were caught out on a balcony at some gathering in Brighton and married to avoid the scandal.”
“They don’t seem the sort for a grope and tickle behind a potted plant, do they?” Jack asked, tying Oliver’s cravat with mathematical precision.
“Hardly.” Oliver tilted his chin up to give Jack room to work. “But if Lydia Durbin wanted to marry a man with pretensions to gentility, she might well have lured Wraxhall out to a balcony.”
Jack stood back to admire his handiwork. Now that was a well-tied cravat. “She’d have done better to lure someone with a family less inclined to disown him. An ambitious girl would do her research, I would have thought.”
“Do you think they were in love?” Oliver looked impossibly perfect in his evening attire, his long-limbed gracefulness accentuated by the perfect tailoring of his clothes. Whatever fortune he had spent on that getup had been worth it, even if such a shameful expenditure ought to have Jack yearning for the guillotine. “Are you going to answer me or ogle me?” Oliver was blushing and Jack wanted to strip off those perfect clothes bit by bit to see how far the blush spread. But that would have to wait for later, because in a few minutes Oliver would have to go downstairs and be charming to this wretched crew over the dinner table.
Jack didn’t know how to answer him, though. He wanted to disparage the idea of love, but that ship had sailed. He sighed. “A love story was the last thing I expected to find in this matter, but I do think Mr. Wraxhall may have been fond of his wife.” Whether his feelings had altered was another matter. But Jack didn’t want to speak of altered feelings, not tonight.
“Mrs. Durbin would have preferred that her daughter marry Hector Lewis,” Oliver said. “She disapproves of her daughter’s ambition. Sees it as a slap in the face.”
“Which it is,” Jack pointed out.
“But she still gave her daughter a handsome dowry. She could have refused, and I think she wishes she had.”
Jack risked mussing Oliver’s hair and cravat by pulling him in for a kiss. “I love that you feel bad for a person who threatened you with bodily harm.” He needed to stop saying that word, but it kept leaking out of him like water out of an old tea kettle.
Oliver seemed to understand not to make too much of it, though. He only took Jack’s face in his hands and kissed him back, slowly but thoroughly. Jack smoothed Oliver’s hair back into something presentable, and watched him head out the door to mingle with his equals.
Oliver was left alone at the dinner table with his very inebriated host. Wraxhall looked wrung out, used up, a raggedy version of the man Oliver had met at White’s a month or so ago. By the looks of things, all it would take would be another glass or two of brandy and Wraxhall would be insensible. Then Oliver would pack him off to bed, allowing Jack to make a thorough search of the library.
“You were better off in the army, Rivington,” Wraxhall slurred, his eyes bleary. He was slumped in his chair, and as he spoke he didn’t look away from the glass in his hand.
Oliver tamped down the surge of irritation he felt whenever someone presumed to tell him how lucky he had been to be a soldier. “Better off than what?” was all he asked, though. Better off than spending that decade warm and safe, far away from musket fire and typhus and pestilential infestations of body lice? Better off than watching his friends die or suffer or commit acts of sickening depravity simply because they could?
“Better than marrying.” Wraxhall’s voice was thick with drink and disuse. That was not the answer Oliver was expecting. “Maybe the marrying wasn’t the problem,” Wraxhall continued with the exaggerated seriousness of a man very much in his cups, “so much as the . . .” His voice trailed off and he took a long pull of brandy. “So much as the loving,” he concluded, looking embarrassed.
“The loving?” Oliver asked, because he couldn’t think of any other response to make. The loving? What did that even mean? And how drunk did a man have to be to say such a thing out loud in his own dining room?
“I loved her. Nobody believed it, including her, I suppose.” He let out a huff of unamused laughter. “But I loved her.”
Oliver didn’t know which question to ask first: Did she love you in return? Do you love her still? He settled on, “What are you going to do?”
Wraxhall laughed again, bitter and brief. “About this?” He made a sweeping gesture that took in the house, his life, and there was no telling what else. “God knows.” Another long swig of brandy. “I’m going to tell other men not to make the same mistake. Not that it’ll do much good. Everyone told me, after all. My parents, my brother, my friends.”
“What did they tell you?” Oliver was having a hard time following.
“Not to marry a woman on so short an acquaintance.” He ticked the items off on his fingers. “Not to marry someone outside our social sphere.” He said those last words so that Oliver thought he could hear the quotation marks. “And not to marry for love.”
Oliver could imagine his father saying much the same thing. He had heard Charlotte repeat the sentiment, even though she surely knew only too well how badly marriage could work out even when marrying a social equal whose family one has known since the cradle and for whom one harbors no fond feelings whatsoever. Oliver didn’t think he agreed with this wisdom, but he also knew that he’d never have to put that to the test. He would never marry for love, nor for any other reason.
But he would have liked to think that if he were the sort of man who could feel for a woman half of what he felt for Jack Turner, he would marry her in a heartbeat, angry families and social awkwardness be damned. Love was something one ought to cling to with both hands.
