“That’s what you deem a miracle, Mama?”
“Listen, won’t you?”
“Must I?”
Magdelene ignored that wistful plea, gave a theatrical little cough, and went on, “‘But things may at last be changing for poor Lady Kay. She was spied Tuesday last in the showroom of Lucile. And what, you ask, was she doing? Selecting bolts of satin. White satin, my dears! Can it be that society’s longest-suffering jilted bride has finally found some much-deserved happiness?’”
“I admit, that’s an agreeable change from her usual dreck,” Kay said, working to keep her voice light. “I wonder how long it will last.”
“Permanently, I hope,” Magdelene replied, tapping the newspaper with one decisive finger. “It’s taken years, but all the other society pages have been slowly coming around, especially once dear Wilson began showing his interest in you.”
To her mother, Kay’s fiancé was always “dear Wilson.” The American millionaire was saving her family from the dismal fate ofgenteel poverty, after all. Even if he proved to be the greatest villain since Napoleon, Mama would probably still call him a dear.
“Delilah Dawlish was the last one holding out on you,” Magdelene said, as if Kay needed that particular reminder, “but it appears that even she is finally ready to forgive and forget your great mistake.”
Kay’s disastrous attempted elopement with a stone-broke fortune hunter had been a mistake, no doubt, but given the humiliating way she’d been forced to atone for it, she felt her mother’s hopes about Delilah Dawlish were somewhat premature. Granted, she was finally going to be washed clean by becoming respectably married, but she’d seen her name dragged through the mud of the gutter press too many times in the past to think anything was going to change before she got to the altar.
“You’re so optimistic, Mama,” she said wryly. “Fourteen years ago, if you recall, I was the plain, freckled, chubby girl no man would ever look twice at. Is it any great surprise that I eloped with a fortune hunter? I thought,” she added before her mother could reply, “after I’d come to my senses, that we’d be able to hush it all up. But no. Just as I was on the verge of marrying Cousin Giles, the elopement scandal came out, Giles called things off, and I was ruined, shamed, destined—soTalk of the Townand all the other gossip rags reminded everyone daily—for permanent spinsterhood, forever spurned by the bachelors of good society.”
As she paraphrased bits from the stories that had been written about her over the years, Kay could not quite hide her past pain nor her contempt for both the ravenous journalists and the despicable scoundrel who had given them such rich meat to feed on at her expense. “And we can all thank Devlin Sharpe—”
She stopped, her utterance of his name like a hand around her throat, choking her.
Magdelene sighed, giving her daughter a censorious glance over the rims of her pince-nez. “We do not mention That Horrible Man,” she reminded, giving the devil his due in obvious capital letters. “Not ever.”
“Quite right, Mama,” Kay replied, shoving thoughts of Devlin out of her mind. “But I can’t imagine what on earth has brought about this transformation of me into the—how did the Dawlish woman put it?—the ‘longest-suffering jilted bride’ deserving of happiness.”
“Does it matter? You cannot deny that Mrs. Dawlish speaking in your favor is a splendid turn of events. For both of you,” she added with a glance at her younger daughter.
“Very splendid,” Kay agreed. “Especially with Jo coming out this season. But I’d still dearly love to know what has inspired this change of heart about me.”
“Dear Wilson,” Magdelene murmured with a sigh. “Such a wonderful man. Handsome, successful, and so, so generous.”
It was the final part of that assessment that gave Kay a hint as to what her mother meant. “Are you saying Wilson bribed that sordid scandal sheet to write something nice about me?”
Even as she spoke, Kay knew such an action would not have been out of character for her fiancé. He did tend to think money could solve any problem. That, she supposed, was a luxury of the very rich.
“No, no, darling. That’s not how it came about. Not at all.”
Kay found her mother’s choice of words anything but reassuring. “How then?” she asked, growing uneasy.
Magdelene gave a deprecating shrug. “Wilson and I have been corresponding regularly during his visit home to New York, and in one of my letters, I happened to mention that Sir Adair Sloane ownsTalk of the Town. And,” she added, ignoring her eldest daughter’s aggravated sigh, “I explained that it is London’s most influential society paper, that it has been very cruel to you in the past, and that it still seems inclined to harp on some… ahem… unfounded rumors about your past. Upon his return yesterday from New York, he must have called on Sir Adair and resolved the problem.”
“Unfounded rumors?” Kay echoed and laughed. “I know we’ve had to deny everything and pretend to society that the elopement never happened, but there is no point in whitewashing things to Wilson. When he proposed to me in January, I told him that the rumors about me were true.”
“You did?” Magdelene stared at her in dismay. “But why? That is the same mistake you made with Giles, and look how that turned out. Why would you do such a thing a second time?”
“So I should accept a man’s proposal under false pretenses?” Kay shook her head. “No. Don’t worry, Mama. Wilson, unlike Giles, didn’t care a jot. Like nearly everyone else, he knew our denials were all a hum just to save face.”
Her mother sighed. “Really, my dear. There is such a thing as too much honesty.”
“Since we’ve all been living a futile lie ever since the rumors began circulating eleven years ago, I found being honest a refreshing change.”
“Oh, did you? You might have stopped to consider the risks. What if Wilson had done what Giles did and cried off? What would happen to Josephine’s chances of a good marriage? And whatabout you and me? Where would we live? We’d end up scraping by on Giles’s charity, in a horrid little cottage somewhere. Did you think of that?”
“I’m never allowed to stop thinking about it, with you constantly reminding me,” she countered, and immediately regretted it as her mother’s face took on the appearance of a wounded kitten. “But how,” she said, deciding it was best to divert the conversation, “did telling Wilson about Sir Adair’s dirty little paper impel that rag to have a change of heart about me?”
Thankfully, her ploy succeeded. “Ah, well,” Magdelene said, “I happened to mention to dear Wilson that Sir Adair’s favorite charity is a most worthy one. Widows and orphans. What, I asked him, could be more worthy of a contribution than that?”
