Table of Contents

  The Scandal of the Vicar's Wife

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you for reading!

  The Scandal of the Vicar's Wife

  Quenby Olson

  World Tree Publishing

  The Scandal of the Vicar's Wife is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2022 Quenby Olson

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-10: 0-998101xxx

  ISBN-13: 13: 978-0-998101xxx

  Published in the United States of America by World Tree Publishing.

  First Edition: March 2022

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 WTEP B2211

  To my children, for making writing sex scenes in the same room as you extremely awkward.

  Chapter One

  * * *

  Not once in her seven years of marriage had Julia loved her husband. She had married him because she was the oldest of three daughters, because her fortune upon her father’s death had not amounted to more than forty pounds a year. Because she had been twenty-nine years old and desperate to be out and away from her family’s home with the promise of being mistress of her own household.

  It had been a careful, logical decision. Like the choice between throwing oneself onto a piece of flotsam or going below the waves with the rest of the shipwreck. Mr. Frederick Benton had been her flotsam, and she had clung to him with everything she had. Everything but love.

  Perhaps if she had loved him…

  Ah, no. Now was not the time to sink into such a maudlin quagmire. Perhaps if she had loved him more. Perhaps if she had been able to do her duty and bear him children. Perhaps perhaps perhaps. The last five years of her widowhood had been framed by nothing but the possibility that if she had done something different, if she had not rushed into a marriage with a man for whom she felt nothing more than a mild affection, then perhaps…

  Damn. There was that word again.

  She sighed, and she put her hand up to her brow, and she squinted through the winter sunshine at the small crowd gathered outside the church. A small wedding it was, complete with a beaming bride and red-faced groom, the both of them gazing at one another with the sort of blushing looks that made one suspect their time in the marriage bed tonight would not be an inaugural visit.

  Julia dropped her hand back to her side and wished them well, her whispered words caught up by the cold wind and torn from her lips. “May you have a better time of it than I did.” Nothing particularly poetic or worth having penned in fine calligraphy on a card or letter. But any penchant she had ever possessed for pretty sonnets and pretty words had been scrubbed away by too many years of disappointed hopes and harsh realities.

  The marriage celebrations carried on after she turned and walked away. She hadn’t been invited only, only a common bystander happening by at the proper moment. She didn’t know the groom and the bride had never been one of her pupils. Not a remarkable thing, the latter, seeing as how the majority of Barrow-in-Ashton’s inhabitants still looked down on the idea of educated women, as though imbuing half the population with a knack for reading and writing and independent thought was a sin left off the list of Ten Commandments simply because eleven would have made too awkward a number.

  Her mouth twisted at the direction of her thoughts. She sounded bitter to her own ears. Nothing like how a former vicar’s wife should think or feel. An interesting thing, how seven years so closely knit with the church could harden her heart against so many of its tenets. Or rather, how so many inhabitants of the world in which she lived chose to shape those tenets to suit their particular wants and needs.

  She dipped her head down as she walked, away from the church, past the vicarage that had once been her home, through a town that hardly acknowledged her existence now that her husband was dead and buried and they had no use for an aging widow with nothing more than forty pounds a year to her name.

  There was still the teaching, of course, but the town barely paid any notice to that either. Sometimes she suspected they only allowed the school to remain open in order to give her something to do, her few students like offerings of charity to make them feel as if they were doing right by the former vicar’s wife. A vicar who had been well-liked. Tall and handsome, a man who had delivered his sermons with a wit and fervor that spoke of a true calling to his post; instead of the truth of the matter, that Frederick had been a second-born son with few prospects and a remarkably hale older brother who had married young and produced enough heirs to ensure that only a dire catastrophe of historic proportions would see the family estate tossed over to another branch of the tree.

  A few people nodded their heads to her as she passed, but most failed to notice her. She did not take their lack of interest as an offense. She truly believed most people simply didn’t see her now. Before, she’d had the status of her husband to lift her up to the attention of others. But now she was a widow, a widow well past the age of marrying again, and a widow who had failed to produce a single living child while her husband had been alive.

  And she was plain. It would not do to forget that, either.

  She pulled a key from her pocket and let herself into Mrs. Cochran’s house. To tell the truth, Mrs. Cochran only laid a claim on the lower floor, leaving Julia to pay for the use of a small set of rooms above. The stairs were dark and narrow and announced her arrival with numerous creaks that reverberated through the building’s bones. At the top she went through another door, and… there. She was home.

  It wasn’t much to boast about. A small sitting room, a sort of pantry off to the side, and then a single bedroom. Nothing more. Julia did not mind the lack of space. If she needed open air or time to herself, away from the clatterings of Mrs. Cochran down below, she could go for a walk. Mrs. Cochran, on the other hand, rarely went out, preferring to remain at home with her letters and her tea and the occasional visits from the other ladies of the town who paid homage to her and the status she had once held before her own widowhood had rendered her a person of steadily diminishing wealth and importance.

  “Mrs. Benton, is that you?”

  Julia smiled. Of course it was her. Who else would it have been? And then she winced as she reached up to the ribbons of her bonnet, her fingers stilling over the knot. “Oh, I forgot your letters,” she called down the stairs. “I meant to stop at the post office, but it seemed I was distracted.” The wedding had distracted her, and then the mire of her own thoughts following swiftly upon its heels. “I will go out again directly, if you wish. I do not mind.”

  She went downstairs again and found Mrs. Cochran seated in a chair by the fire, her legs tucked beneath a knitted blanket, the upper half of the blanket still in the midst of production by a pair of clacking needles. “I wish you would not trouble yourself. It is much too cold for you to be constantly going in and out between the cold and the heat. You’ll catch a fever or worse!” She gestured towards another seat — one of only three in the room, apart from a sofa bearing holes in the upholstery and damage to the legs from decades’ worth of brooms knocked against them. “Have some tea, warm yourself up. And if you look on the shelf in the kitchen, there might be a bit of cake leftover from what Mrs. Oakhouse brought to us yesterday.”

  But Julia shook her head. The chair looked too comfortable and the fire too bright and inviting. If she divested herself of her bonnet and gloves and pelisse, if she pushed her feet towards that fire and found a piece of Mrs. Oakhouse’s cake to accompany the tea, she doubted she would be willing to stand up again before bedtime.

  “Save some of the cake for when I return,” she said, and gave her gloves a tug. She went out of the house again, something sharp and bitter pushing her along, like a finger prodding her in the back.

  Because the cake had not been brought for the both of them. It had been a gift for Mrs. Cochran. The tea, as well, all belonged to the older gentlewoman. Julia had little in her budget for tea and cakes and other delicacies. And she did not inhabit the same charitable circle as Mrs. Cochran, visited by the ladies of the town and brought small parcels and baskets of comfort to carry her through the declining years of her life.

  Julia did not blame them. She had not done much during her time as mistress of the vicarage to endear her to the town’s female population. She had been too ill, her attention always fixed inward on her own cares and troubles. And then her husband had died and what was left for her? A set of rooms at the top of a drafty house and one day a week of teaching a handful of young girls to read and to write, to learn their sums and memorize a litany of kings and queens. All so they could grow up and marry and bear children and see themselves existing forever as only a support for
their husband. God help them should they fail in that task. The blink of an eye, and they would cease to exist as living, thinking things. That is, if they ever had ever been allowed to in the first place.

  She walked back along the street, her head down, her cheeks stinging with the cold. The sun had already disappeared, clouds sweeping in across a blue sky that had been brilliantly clear only a quarter of an hour before. A proper English sky, changing its mind faster than a lady could exchange one bonnet for another. Julia stepped into McKinley’s Fine Teas and Other Goods (the ‘Other Goods’ of its title covering everything from fabric to sugar to perfumes) and went up to the counter, asking for Mrs. Cochran’s letters.

  Mrs. Cochran always had letters. She was in possession of a plethora of nieces and cousins who wrote to her regularly, and she wrote back to them with assiduous care. Julia, on the other hand, heard from her sisters about once a year, and it usually took her months to work up the courage to send at least a brief note in reply. What closeness she had shared with them had deteriorated over the course of her marriage. Years of illness and misfortune and misery… How could she share that with others? They had their own lives, their own happiness. Why should she send her anguish to them in little bundles through the post?

  Mrs. McKinley gave her a small packet of letters for Mrs. Cochran, asked after Mrs. Cochran’s health, if she (Mrs. Cochran) was enjoying the cake, and that was all. Julia turned around, tucking the letters into her reticule before she went out again. There had been no inquiries as to her own health and well-being, as though she had been perfectly invisible whilst standing directly in front of the other woman.

  But when had Julia shown a tremendous measure of interest in the people who she had lived near for the last dozen years? As the wife of the Vicar, she’d been expected to make regular calls around the village, to visit the sick and others in need, to organize charitable events and help with the running of various fetes and gatherings throughout the year. Whereas she had spent most of her time sequestered in her own home, tired and ill and in no mood to tolerate the inanities that seemed to fill so much of everyone else’s days. It did not help that she failed to ever acquire the talent of conversing easily with others, to inquire after various family members about their rheumatisms or the state of someone’s kitchen garden after a late freeze.

  But there was the school, at least. Her paltry collection of students, meeting every Sunday afternoon. A handful of girls learning to read and to write, risking a chance of no one wishing to employ them later on as servants simply because they wanted to scratch at the boundaries of what was traditionally allowed to them and their class. Oh, no. That had not warmed Julia to the hearts of Barrow-in-Ashton’s society, her efforts to blur the lines between the gentlefolk and everyone below them taken as a mild offense at best, and a war on the fundamentals of British society at worst.

  Well, it was too late now. Too late for Julia to ingratiate herself into the town, to feign interest in people who had whispered behind her back about her numerous attempts at motherhood that had never come to fruition, about the frigidity between herself and her husband in a marriage that must have appeared to others to only be in name only. About how scant her public show of grief had been when Frederick had died, only a quiet resignation that her life would no longer be what it had been before.

  She had considered, briefly, returning to her family in Sussex. But it had felt too much like a defeat, dragging herself back to her childhood haunts, her sisters having all gone off and married, raising families, fulfilling all of the duties set out for them. And what had she to show after seven years of marriage? A broken womb and a festering resentment towards a dead husband who had made it crystal clear he had married her because he had wanted a wife and nothing more.

  And then he had died, fool that he was. During a snowstorm, a carriage accident sending him down an icy bank, his neck broken the moment they struck a tree. At least it had been a quick, painless death, she mused. As though means of death could be separated into classes and genuses, and he had been blessed to garner one from a higher level.

  It had begun to rain during the time she’d been inside McKinley’s, a chill drizzle that stung like ice but threatened no danger of freezing the ground beneath her feet. She turned down a side lane, one that would return her to Mrs. Cochran’s with greater speed and also provide a few extra eaves to protect her head and hat from the weather.

  It was not even fully winter yet and she was already tired of it. The cold seeped into her bones more than it had in her younger days, taking up residence in her hips and her knees and the tips of her fingers. And her rooms at Mrs. Cochran’s were not as warm as the vicarage had been, drafts slipping in around the windows and under the doors, the fire in her grate always struggling to burn properly on the windiest days. A sad thought that what she should miss most about marriage was a lack of drafts and a coal scuttle that had always been full.

  Another turn and she was nearly home. She kept her chin tucked down to keep the rain from blowing past the brim of her bonnet, and to prevent her from having to make unnecessary eye contact with anyone she might pass along the way. For how better to avoid the pity in someone’s gaze if she simply failed to meet their eyes at all?

  The unfortunate side to walking with her attention pinned on the ground was that she hardly saw the child before she stumbled over her. Julia bit back a curse and grasped at thin air to stop herself before she fell over the girl completely. Because it was a girl, a slip of a thing, her skirts streaked with mud and her dark hair hanging lank and wet and very hatless around her head.

  “Goodness,” Julia amended, before the first two or three unsuitable declaratives had a chance to fall out of her mouth. “What are you doing there?”

  The girl had been tucked beneath one of the eaves, clearly sheltering from the weather as aside from a lack of millinery she was also devoid of a shawl or coat to help keep out the cold. At first, Julia thought the girl to be an unfortunate, some child stricken by poverty and left to wander the lanes of the town alone without anyone to look after her. But that thought only lasted as long as it took for Julia to take a measure of the girl’s gown. An impeccably made creation, fine blue wool and edged with ribbon and piping and most likely better than anything Julia had ever worn in her life.

  “Are you lost?” It was the second question Julia asked, as the first had yet to receive a reply.

  The girl looked up at her, dark blue eyes that might have been mistaken for gray in a different light. She could not have been older than seven or eight, her figure and face displaying an upbringing that showed she was well fed, even if her natural build gave her an overall appearance of slightness.

  “No,” came the girl’s answer. And that was all.

  Not a talkative sort, this one.

  Julia did not recognize the girl on sight. She had never seen her at school — though that much was not surprising as the child would most likely have a governess or at least a nurse to look after her — nor at church on Sundays. But still… there was something familiar about her face, like a hazy memory prodded back towards recollection. “Don’t you have a cloak or an umbrella?”

  The girl shook her head. Ah, so a step backward on the speaking front.

  “Where is your mother? Does she know where you are?”

  Another shake of the head. “Of course not.”

  As though Julia was a simpleton and of course this child was out on her own in an icy rain without a hat or coat to protect her from catching her death.

  “Where do you live?”

  The girl’s gaze jumped towards the west.

  Julia sighed. Adults tended to frustrate her and make her feel as though she was lacking some innate quality that other women possessed in surfeit. But children did not stymie her the same way, nor did they make her feel lesser for failures of adulthood that still lay so far ahead in their own futures. “My name is Mrs. Benton, though years before that I was known as Miss Cooper. But when I was younger even than that, when I was just about your age, most people called me Julia.”