Page 24 of Scandal’s Daughter

“No, Lionel,” Aunt Jane replied, with unusual force. “That is the outside of enough. I will not allow you to come here, to my house, and speak in such an abominable manner. If you cannot keep a civil tongue in your head, you can leave now.”

“I will do no such thing, madam,” her brother replied with froideur. “I have come here, to your house,” he said, announcing the word with derision as though he stood in a hovel. “To speak to Georgiana Dalton and make things clear to her. You may leave while I do so.”

“I will do no such thing as to leave her alone with you!”

Georgiana, quite stunned by this, went and sat beside Aunt Jane who was clearly on the edge of hysteria. Taking her hand, she held it in hers and squeezed to try to comfort her. Aunt Jane covered her hand with her own and clung on tight.

“Aunt Jane, what on earth is this about?” Georgiana asked, turning her back on a man she had quickly decided forced her emotions well past mere dislike into the uncharted territories of revulsion and abhorrence. “Why does this ill-mannered creature refer to me as Dalton? I have been and will always be Georgiana Bomford.”

“You will keep a civil tongue in your head, young woman!” the man purporting to be her uncle raged at her.

Georgiana turned and stared at him with disgust. “Sir, you have been in my company for barely a few minutes, reduced my aunt to tears, called my mother a whore and generally behaved in a crass and loutish manner ill befitting a gentleman. Therefore, I can only deduce that you are not a gentleman.”

Her uncle seemed torn between his obvious desire to cross the room and deliver her a blow to the head and whatever his purpose had been in coming here in the first place. In the end his objective seemed to win out as he reined in his temper but looked at her with undisguised hostility.

“What do you know of your parents?” he asked, his voice harsh.

“Very little,” she replied, meeting his eyes and refusing to be cowed by his high-handed manner. “Only that they both died when I was but less than a year old.”

“And do you know how they died?” he demanded, and from the obvious relish he took from asking, Georgiana knew that here, at last was the shadow that covered her name.

“I do not.” She spoke with dignity and clung to her aunt's hand as she began to sob, leaning against Georgiana’s shoulder.

He gave her a cold, serpentine smile that made unease slither over her flesh.

“Your mother was conducting an affair with another man, a duke of all people, though how she managed that is beyond me,” he added with a sneer. “Your father, the previous Baron Dalton discovered the two of them together and challenged the duke to a duel.”

Georgiana drew in a breath as her aunt began to cry harder beside her. She had constructed many stories about her parents when she was very small, inventing tales of lost princesses and bad fairies.

As she had grown older, she had come to believe that something had happened that would not cast her in a good light and had instinctively shied away from asking too many questions. But never, in her wildest imaginings, had she considered anything so dreadful as this.

“Your father was killed outright by the duke,” her uncle continued, unheeding of his sister’s misery or of the obvious hurt he was inflicting upon his niece. “The duke in turn was forced to flee, taking your mother with him.” He paused to give her such a callous smile that real fear bloomed in her chest. “Of course, she abandoned you and left you without a second glance to run off with her lover.”

“No, Lionel!” her aunt pleaded, sobbing. “You cannot be so cruel as that. She had no time to fetch Georgiana. She would have I’m sure!” She turned to Georgiana, her eyes full of compassion as she clung to her hand. “Your mother loved you, sweet child. I’m sure she did. She would never have left you if she’d had a choice. I’m certain she intended to send for you once she was settled.”

“You know nothing of the sort.” The baron strode across the room to look out the window at the pretty garden that lay behind the house, though his eyes seemed to find nothing to please him. “The whore ran away and left her child and it was the only favour she ever did you, as she drowned with the duke when their ship went down in a storm.”

Georgiana clutched at her aunt’s hand and tried to keep calm. They couldn’t both succumb to hysterics and she determined that this vile man would not see he’d hurt her or discomforted her in any way.

“I see,” she said, with the strangest feeling she was living in some kind of bizarre nightmare. Her emotions were already so raw and close to the surface with Beau leaving, that to add this melodrama to the misery of the past weeks was almost more than she could bear.

She could only be glad that the shock of it had numbed her for the moment so that her voice did not tremble when she spoke. “I thank you for taking the time to come and divulge such unpleasant tidings to me, sir. I hope you have taken enough satisfaction from the delivery of them and pray we do not keep you a moment longer from your affairs.”

He laughed, a cold and unaffected sound that quite chilled her.

“Oh, but that isn’t why I’m here, child,” he said and when she looked up, she discovered that her uncle had taken on the persona of every villain she had ever read of in all the Gothic novels she loved most. All she needed to complete the picture was that it be night time in a castle instead of afternoon in their cramped drawing room, that the candles should be guttering in their sockets and a thunderstorm raging outside.

To her relief this ridiculous notion made her smile as it cast her as the heroine who must outwit her wicked relative, no doubt bent on murdering her or something equally nefarious. She thought perhaps her sensibilities must have suffered enough for one day and she was overwrought, as she began to laugh.

Her uncle looked at her in astonishment.

“What the devil is wrong with you now?”

He paced back across the room to stand beside the fireplace, and with such a furious look on his face she was put strongly in mind of the wicked Marchese de Montferra, in The Orphan of the Rhine. The idea quite overset her, and she had to bite her lip rather hard to restore her equilibrium. It did however remove some of her fear of both the situation and her uncle and gave him a rather ridiculous character in the light of all his airs and graces.

“Why nothing, Sir. Pray do continue,” she said, staring at him in quite a new light.

He stared at her with a cool expression for a moment before he spoke again. “I will speak with you alone.”

“That you will not!” her aunt shrieked, though she trembled visibly now, and Georgiana was alarmed by the high colour on her cheeks.

“There, there, Aunt Jane, please don’t worry. You go and have a lay down. I will speak with my uncle and show him out as soon as he has said his piece. I’m sure it won’t take but a moment,” she added, glaring at the man.

With difficulty Georgiana calmed her a little and sent for Mrs Gurney who took one look at Baron Dalton, gave a sniff of outrage as she summed the man up with one disparaging glance and went to her mistress. Supported by Gurney, Aunt Jane was persuaded out of the room, leaving Georgiana alone with her uncle.