The Suffragette Scandal (Brothers Sinister #4)(86)
Her husband looked longingly at the slice on his toasting fork, but he didn’t even hesitate. He handed the bread to his wife.
She slid down to sit on the floor beside him. “Want half?”
“God, yes.”
Maybe it was the toast, managed in so perfectly imperfect a fashion. Maybe it was the companionable silence. Maybe it was the fact that she’d expected to be treated like some distant, grasping relation, and now she was sitting on the floor with the duke and duchess, eating burned bread and dripping cheese. Maybe that was what prompted her to finally speak.
“I got married,” she confessed.
Robert’s hands stilled. He looked up at her, his eyes widening.
“It was…it was a whim,” she said, speaking faster. “Or more than a whim. I don’t know what it was. We’ve corresponded for months. Maybe I was feeling reckless.” Maybe she’d thought herself in love. She didn’t say that, though. She shut her eyes. “I got married yesterday night.”
Across from her, the duchess took a genteel bite of toast and looked down. “You married by special license, then?”
“I should have asked how he’d obtained one so quickly.” Her hands were trembling again, so she set down her teacup. “I knew he was a scoundrel, you see. I knew that. But he had always been there for me. I thought I could trust him.”
She felt sick to her stomach.
“And then I went to the demonstration, and was arrested, and he…he…”
Neither the duke nor the duchess spoke. They just watched her intently.
“I was arrested,” she repeated. “As I’d known I would be. We were all crammed into the station. He came to get me out.”
It didn’t sound awful when she told the story. It sounded sweet. Almost romantic.
“But he didn’t forge papers falsifying my release.” And oh, there was a complaint for the ages. There wasn’t a wife in England today complaining about her husband’s failure to commit crimes. “He told me he was Edward Clark.”
The duchess twitched at that name, her eyebrows lifting. She turned to her husband, but he set a quelling hand on her knee.
“He told me he was a scoundrel and a metalworker,” Free said. “He’s a forger. I’ve seen him do it myself. But he didn’t tell me everything. He was…” She gulped.
“Edward Delacey,” Robert said, his voice low.
Beside him, the duchess let out a long, slow breath. “Huh. I was right.”
“No.” Free’s hands balled into fists. “He doesn’t want to be called Delacey.” That much, at least, they agreed upon. “But he’s Viscount Claridge.”
The duchess tilted her head to the side, to contemplate the ceiling, not quite looking at her husband. “There should be a rule somewhere that lords ought to act like lords. When they engage in forgery or, ah, general skulduggery, it can be very confusing to the rest of us.”
Free nodded vigorously.
“You start to think of them as normal people,” the duchess said. “And then the next thing you know, they’re being introduced.”
“Hmph.” Robert snorted beside her.
“And all you can think is, surprise! A lord!” She shook her head and patted Free on the shoulder. “I hate it when that happens.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
EDWARD FOUND THE LITTLE FARM at the end of the road. After he’d looked for Free last night—looked for her everywhere, with no hope and a feeling of sinking dread—he’d purchased a ticket out here. He’d spent the night in a tiny inn, and then come out in search of… Well, he wasn’t sure what he had hoped to find.
Fields of lavender waved purple heads in the wind, wafting a delicious scent around. A kitchen garden closer to the house was coming up cabbages. Daisies planted at the edge of the path lifted their heads into the morning sun as if they had no thought but to rejoice in the moment. Foolish flowers; someone would come along to cut them down before long. Even if they didn’t, winter would freeze them out, leaf and root alike.
But the flowers didn’t care about his dark mood. They rustled softly, swaying in a light breeze, whispering that this was a quiet, peaceful place. That frost could not come here unless Edward brought it himself.
It was a cheery, homey place, not at all the sort of abode where he’d imagined the Wolf, the mighty pugilist of his childhood imagination, retiring.
Edward walked slowly forward. Not reluctantly; he had a damned good idea what was about to happen to him, and quite frankly, he welcomed it. But there was something about the air that sparked his imagination, something that made him think of other possibilities. He might have been treading this path with Free by his side. She’d have interlaced her hand with his, looked up at him with that air of totally unwarranted trust…
Ah, hell. He was tormenting himself. He shook his head at the daisies beside him, rejecting their foolish optimism.
The front door opened. Edward looked up to see a man standing there, his head tilted as he contemplated Edward. Edward felt every muscle in his body tense.
This. This was the Wolf. He’d imagined himself at the side of a ring with this man at the center. When he was a child, he’d pictured this man absorbing blow after crippling blow. He’d painted that long-ago fight in oils.
But the Wolf—Hugo Marshall—didn’t look anything like the mighty fighter of his imagination. He was no Hercules; he wasn’t even handsome. He was much shorter than Edward. There were no patrician lines to his face; he was the sort of man who Edward had passed on the street a thousand times and never given a second glance. He was wearing a loose cravat and a jacket with faded patches over the elbows. His hair was steel gray.