Someone to Care (Westcott #4)(56)

“Come along, Bert,” he said. “We will go and see what the taproom has to offer. I daresay your father will not object to your quaffing a glass of ale. Join us, Cunningham.”

“Thank you,” Joel Cunningham said, “but I will remain here.”

So he was to have two interrogators, was he? Marcel leaned back in his chair and played with the handle of his coffee cup as uncle and nephew left the dining room.

He was still feeling savage.

I am going to walk down to the edge of the wet sand, and just like that, with the choice of a singular pronoun—I, when she might have said shall we?—he had felt the chill of an ending. He had let her go alone and had stood watching her for he did not know how long until she turned and came back.

I need to go home, she had said then, and he had known instantly why her words had so upset him. It was the first time—he was almost certain of it—the woman in one of his affairs had been the one to end it. Just as she had ended a budding flirtation fourteen years ago by telling him to go away. Had he not learned his lesson then?

Clearly not. He had behaved badly down there on the beach. He had been hurt, and so he had set out to hurt in return. Oh, only in words and insinuations, of course. He had not laid a finger on her. But had that really been his intention? To return hurt for hurt? He knew it had.

And now they were doomed to spend the rest of their lives together. Or at least to spend the rest of their lives married to each other, which was not necessarily the same thing. He spoke before Riverdale could launch into the speech he had no doubt prepared.

“I have title and fortune,” he said. “The lady’s lack of either does not matter more than the snap of my fingers. The daughter’s lack of fortune will be remedied. And the lady, if any reminder is needed, is of age and needs no permission from anyone to marry whom she chooses.”

“The daughter,” Cunningham said, “has a name.”

“So does the lady,” Riverdale added.

The gloves had come off, it seemed, and he had been cast in the role of villain. Marcel lifted the cup and sipped his coffee, which was too weak and too cool. Why the devil had none of them thought to have wine or port brought in?

“I will be marrying Viola at Christmastime, presumably at Brambledean,” he said. “It will be a valid marriage. I have no secret wife hidden away somewhere. I will care for all her needs for the rest of her life and make provision for her in the event that I predecease her. Miss Abigail Westcott will be welcome in my home and will be more than adequately provided for.”

“All her needs?” Riverdale said. It was a quietly, courteously posed question, but it was pure venom, Marcel decided. He was beginning heartily to dislike this oh-so-correct, oh-so-dutiful earl, who was not a blood relative of Viola’s or even a relative by marriage.

It took effort not to answer as he would have liked to answer. He did not need the goodwill of any of Viola’s relatives. He could live very well without it, in fact. But she could not. She had proved that down on the beach. She was missing them, damn it all. She had chosen them over him.

“All,” he said with quiet emphasis.

“Abigail is illegitimate,” Cunningham said, “just as my wife is. Just as I am. You are willing to taint your children by having her live in your home with them?”

Marcel looked at the man with a new respect. He wanted the answer to a question that delicacy might well have led the lot of them to ignore—until it became a possible problem later.

“And my mother-in-law was in a bigamous marriage for longer than twenty years,” Cunningham added. “Though it was no fault of hers, the ton has been inclined to treat her as they would a leper. You are willing to face what this may mean after your marriage?”

“If the ton should treat my wife with anything less than the full respect due the Marchioness of Dorchester,” Marcel said, “then the ton will have me to reckon with. And I can assure you those are no idle words. And I treat with contempt any idea that Abigail’s illegitimacy somehow disqualifies her from full participation in the sort of life for which she was raised.”

They all looked at one another for a few moments.

“There was no betrothal was there,” Riverdale said at last, “until you saw us outside the cottage from down in the valley this afternoon.”

“Does it matter?” Marcel asked.

“Yes,” Cunningham said. “She is my mother-in-law. My wife and my sister-in-law love her dearly. So do my daughters. I hold her in the deepest affection. If the price of her happiness is some arrangement made among the ten of us to tell a plausible story and never divulge the full truth, then I am prepared to pay it.”

Riverdale said nothing.

It was his way out, Marcel thought. And Viola’s too. A way out of a situation that was intolerable to them both. No one need know of her disgrace, though what a ridiculous way that was of looking at an affair a woman older than forty had entered into quite freely and enjoyed immensely—until she was enjoying it no longer. No one need know except the eight people who had found them at the cottage this afternoon. And—as he had said to Viola earlier—all the people to whom those eight would confide the truth, and all the people in whom they would confide. And the Prewitts and Jimmy Prewitt’s great-niece.

Besides, he was at heart a gentleman, he supposed, and at the heart of every gentleman even partway worthy of the name, there was a core of honor.