Page 28 of Bad Luck Bride (Scandal at the Savoy #3)

I n the wake of Devlin’s departure, Kay’s head was in a whirl, her emotions a scrambled, unholy mess.

The revelations they had shared and the conclusions drawn from them had left her baffled, frustrated, and angry.

And yet, as she thought about it, she knew her present feelings, whatever they might be, were of little consequence.

Unless she wanted to toss her sister’s welfare aside, marrying Wilson was her only real choice.

Wilson was also her best chance to escape being a childless spinster for the rest of her life.

And having spent the past year in the agonizing uncertainty of genteel poverty, she knew that a lifetime of that was no better guarantee of happiness than her present course.

No, though her conversation with Devlin may have cleared up a few mysteries from the past, she’d appreciated almost immediately that knowing what had really happened fourteen years ago didn’t change a thing now.

There was, however, one aspect of the past that did have to be addressed, and she tackled it first thing the following morning.

Up before the others, she dressed, went downstairs to the Savoy florist, and booked an appointment.

Upon her return, she found that her mother was awake.

Hearing voices from the older woman’s room, she tapped on the door and entered.

She found her mother in bed, reading the paper and eating her breakfast.

“Ah, there you are,” Magdelene cried, looking at Kay above the pince-nez on her nose. “I’ve been frantic wondering where you’d gone. I sent Foster to go in search of you.”

“I needed a walk.”

“Alone?”

“Of course not,” she said at once. “I took the bellboy with me. I’m sure everyone who’s anyone saw us together and rumors will fly in tomorrow’s Talk of the Town that I’m dallying with a much younger man, but what can I say? He’s a charming fellow.”

Magdelene, of course, did not appreciate the sarcasm. “There’s no need to be snippy, miss.”

Given the revelations she and Devlin had shared, Kay felt more than snippy. “Mama, I need to speak with you about something. It’s rather important.”

Magdelene reluctantly put aside that morning’s edition of Talk of the Town . “Of course. What is it?”

“Kay?” Josephine called from the other room. “Are you back? I need your help.”

“I’m in here, darling,” she called back and turned again to her mother. “I don’t want Jo to overhear our conversation,” she said in a lower voice, “so I’m sending her downstairs on an errand.”

“How mysterious,” Magdelene murmured as Jo entered the bedroom.

“There you are!” Jo said, pausing in the doorway, “I woke up and you were already out and about. Foster’s gone looking for you, you know.”

“I only went for a walk.”

“Well, either way, since Foster’s not here, I need you to button me up.” Jo turned, presenting her back.

“By the way,” Kay went on as she pushed the younger girl’s long auburn tresses over her shoulder and began slipping the carved ivory buttons of Jo’s dress through their corresponding holes, “I’ve made an appointment for you with the Savoy florist to choose the flowers for your debutante ball.”

“You mean I get to pick the flowers?” Jo turned her head in surprise, looking first at Kay, then at their mother, and then at Kay again. “Really?”

“Of course you get to pick,” Kay replied before Mama could do so. “It’s your ball, after all. Why wouldn’t you choose your own flowers?”

“Well…” Josephine paused. “The two of you usually do things like that for me.”

“Do we?” Kay hesitated, remembering her instructions to Jo about wine the other night, and she realized to her dismay that she had been smothering Jo the same way she had always been smothered.

The more things change…

“I suppose we have tended to hover over you too much,” she admitted.

“But you’re out now, and you deserve some freedom to make your own decisions.

And,” she rushed on before her mother could object, “Mama and I have no doubt you’ll choose the perfect arrangements.

But the only appointment Monsieur Lavigne had available this week was for half past nine this morning, so you’ll have to hurry. ”

“I should say so,” Jo said, laughing. “It’s twenty past nine now.”

“I know, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, but I forgot. While you’re downstairs, you might also see the ma?tre d’h?tel to be sure the other decorations coordinate with the flowers you choose. There,” she added, patting her sister’s back. “You’re all done up.”

Jo left the bedroom, and Kay watched from the doorway, waiting until Josephine had left the suite, then she turned around. “What,” she said, wasting no time on preliminaries, “happened to my letters?”

“Letters? What letters?”

“My letters to Devlin Sharpe fourteen years ago, and those he sent to me.”

Magdelene looked away, touching a hand to the side of her neck, adjusting the collar of her nightdress in an obvious attempt to stall. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” she said at last.

“Don’t play the innocent, Mama. I wrote Devlin dozens of letters, but he never got them. He also claims he often wrote to me—”

“And how do you know all this? Have you been talking to That Horrible Man? Oh, Kay, really!” she added on a wail. “What is wrong with you? Have you no sense at all?”

“Don’t make this about me. What happened to those letters? You suppressed them, didn’t you?”

In confronting her mother with this, Kay had thought Magdelene would immediately fall back in a faint or go into hysterics.

Instead, to Kay’s surprise, Magdelene lifted her chin, settled against the brass headboard behind her, and faced her accusation with surprising equanimity.

“Yes,” she admitted. “I did. What of it?”

Kay breathed a humorless laugh at her mother’s unexpected candor. “At least you are honest enough to acknowledge your contemptible deceit when faced with it.”

“Contemptible?” Magdelene tossed her head. “I was trying to save you from making an irrevocable mistake.”

“A task at which you ultimately failed.”

“And whose fault was that, pray? Given his character,” she added as Kay made an impatient sound, “I suppose your father and I ought to have known Sharpe would spread vicious rumors about you upon your engagement. But that thought never occurred to us.”

“They weren’t rumors, Mama,” she reminded uncompromisingly. “They were facts. But Devlin didn’t cause those facts to become known.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“Yes. And I believe him.”

“Oh, Kay! How can you be such a fool? He’s lying.”

“A grievous sin you seem to know a great deal about,” she countered.

“Nonetheless, he says he did not start those rumors, and I believe him. As for who you were trying to save, please don’t pretend you were motivated by any motherly concern for me.

You were trying to save Papa and yourself.

I was merely the means by which you chose to do so. ”

“We were trying to save the estates, which was also saving you, young lady, and your baby sister, and hundreds of other people. Or would you have preferred we let Raleigh Grange fall to pieces and watch our tenants and our servants and the village suffer without trying to save them just so that you could marry for love? Love,” she added with disdain.

“No eighteen-year-old girl even understands what love is. You’d known That Horrible Man less than three months. Love? Don’t tell me.”

“What about Papa? Wasn’t saving the estates, taking care of us, and ensuring everyone’s future supposed to be his office?”

“He tried!” For the first time, a quaver came into Magdelene’s voice.

“You know the income from land rents is dismal nowadays. These beastly agricultural depressions, tenants giving up their farms to work in factories… all that puts a peer in an almost impossible position. When your father realized that mortgaging the estates wasn’t going to be enough to carry us through, he put what money we had left into funds and investments, but then… ”

“But then,” Kay finished for her, “he lost it all.”

Magdelene sniffed. “Your father was an earl, Kay, not a financier.”

“So I became the only card he had left to play. He refused to allow me to consider Devlin as a suitor, but that wasn’t because Devlin didn’t have the money to support me .”

As she spoke, the girlish delusions she’d clung to about her father began breaking apart and falling away, and she was astonished at how liberating that felt. “No,” she continued, “it was because Devlin didn’t have the money to bail him out of the mess. He needed to sell me off.”

“I refuse to allow you to denigrate your father in this ungrateful way!”

“Ungrateful?”

“Yes!” Magdelene cried. “It was not your father’s fault that things happened as they did.

You have no idea how it worried him that he was not able to take care of us.

All the sleepless nights he went over and over the account books, trying to make the money we had stretch a little further.

And none of this was his fault. Most of the money had dried up long before he even became the earl. ”

“So you and Papa transferred the burden of responsibility for our future onto me without even consulting me on the subject.”

“Our fortune was gone. We were practicing every economy possible, paring staff down to the bone, making over clothes season after season, cutting house parties to one a year. You have no idea how hard it was.”

“Only one house party a year?” Kay echoed. “Oh, well, I’m sure I don’t know how you managed to hold your head up in the county.”