Page 1 of A Game of Scandal

PART ONE

February 1900

CHAPTER ONE

It seemed to me that weddings were highly overrated.

Don’t misunderstand – the bride was beautiful, the groom was devastating, and the way they were looking at one another would melt the hardest heart. I wasn’t against weddings. However, there was no denying that the ceremony itself was tedious. We’d been sitting in this church for hours, and, as the vicar droned on and on, it appeared there was to be no end in sight.

I looked down at my fingers, holding my gloves in my lap. I thought I’d managed to remove all the ink stains, but there was a long smudge of sapphire blue down the side of my right hand. As the vicar continued his endless pontificating on the subject of marriage, I tried to rub it away.

Surely all this was overdoing things? A brief “Do you? I do” would do the trick just as well. Did the whole congregation really need to hear about how fruitful the vicar hoped the marriage would be? Personally, I thought it bad manners that he was already haranguing the pair of them about procreation (in front of an audience, no less) when they had said their marriage vows only moments ago. After all, Iris Scott-Holland was only a year older than me. I shuddered at the thought.

“Stop. Fidgeting,” my brother, Max, muttered out of the side of his mouth.

“I’m not fidgeting,” I whispered back, poking him hard in the side. “I am shuddering.”

My brother stared straight ahead, utterly unmoved, his expression serene, but on my other side I felt his wife, Izzy, tremble.

“Felicity, please don’t make me laugh in church,” she said in a low voice.

“The vicar seems very interested in flesh, doesn’t he?” I mused, keeping my own voice to a quiet murmur. “You don’t hear people talking about flesh much in company. Strange that it’s acceptable in church.”

Izzy’s shoulders shook harder.

Further along the pew, in a voice that was a touch too loud, Izzy’s best friend Teresa St Clair asked, “What’s the joke?”

Max made a sound like an angry cat.

I huffed and decided to focus my attention away from this dull scene. I turned my mind instead to harmonic progression and its relation to the particularly knotty mathematical problem that Dr Volterra at the University of Rome and I had recently corresponded about. This worked a treat, and by the time Nicholas Wynter exclaimed “Finally!” (echoing the thoughts of the entire congregation) and kissed his bride with an enthusiasm that sent a ripple of scandalized laughter around the church, I had made a pleasing amount of progress. I would have to make some notes as soon as we got home.

A murmur of chatter broke out, and after the bride and groom swept back up the aisle, everyone began to filter out of the small wooden pews.

“Well,” Teresa said, dabbing at her eyes with her handkerchief as she got to her feet. “That was lovely, wasn’t it? I do enjoy a wedding. Such a nice excuse to have a good cry.”

“You don’t need an excuse, you watering pot,” Izzy teased. “You cried this morning as well, over that novel you were reading.”

“I have a lot of feelings,” Teresa said, sniffling. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Nothing at all,” her husband agreed, slipping his arm round her waist. He bent his head and whispered something in Teresa’s ear that had her blushing the same vibrant shade of pink as her gown.

“James! We’re in church!” she hissed, batting at his arm, but the grin on her face told its own story.

I rolled my eyes. The trouble with the St Clairs was that they were constantly mooning over one another. Max and Izzy were just as bad. I never thought I’d see my solid, sensible big brother reduced to the doe-eyed, soft-hearted fool that he was when it came to his wife. Over the last couple of years I had grown used to noisily announcing my arrival before I entered any room in the house, having caught the two of them in each other’s arms far too often. As his sister, I was vaguely horrified. Max was unrepentant. It was enough to put a person off romance altogether.

We made our way out into the thin February sunshine that trickled across the beautiful frosted landscape and joined the crowd of well-dressed guests making their way down the winding path from the church to the big house. The Wynters had decided to get married at Iris’s family estate in Kent, which – from what I had heard – had been the site of many glamorous parties over the years.

I wasn’t the only one to have been surprised by this choice. Nicholas Wynter was one of the most fashionable men in the country, and his dazzling new wife would certainly have been the toast of the coming season had Lord Wynter not stolen a march on every other eligible bachelor (much to their chagrin) and whisked her down the aisle. Typically, one would expect a lavish ceremony in town, plenty of pomp and circumstance, with various dignitaries and the odd royal in attendance, but this was much smaller, more intimate.

Perhaps it was down to the bride’s mysterious history. No one was really sure where Iris Scott-Holland had been for the last few years, though there were plenty of stories. The most commonly accepted rumour was that she’d been educated somewhere in Europe, but I knew better. How scandalized would many of these guests be, I wondered with a smile, to know that Iris Scott-Holland had run away as a child, had been living in London and working as a seamstress, only to return seven years later to reclaim the home that was rightfully hers, the home we were currently standing in?

Now that was a good story.

“Felicity!” a voice called, and I turned towards it, to see the person who had told me the whole tale in the first place: my friend, and Iris’s stepsister, Cassandra Weston.

“Thank goodness you’re here,” Cassie said, looping her arm through mine and dragging me away from my group. I glanced towards Max and saw him mouth the word Behave. The smile I gave him in return was angelic, and his eyes narrowed. He knew me too well.

Max might be my brother, but the man had practically raised me. Our father died when I was four and Max was twelve, and though I loved my mother, she didn’t want much to do with bringing up a child, particularly one who was considered – by society’s standards, at least – peculiar. Max had become my official guardian when he turned eighteen, though in his typical, chivalrous way, he’d been carefully watching out for me for far longer. It wasn’t exactly my fault that I tended to get into scrapes… I was a naturally curious child, constantly poking my nose in where I shouldn’t, fascinated by how things worked, and that hadn’t changed as I reached adulthood.