After the Wedding (The Worth Saga #2)(18)

Chapter Six





The conversation that followed had played out precisely as Adrian had expected—farcically. He sat in the rector’s office, in a high-backed wooden chair, bracketed between the bishop and the rector, refusing to perform the part they’d assigned to him.

His uncle had taught him how men like this thought. They expected him to be overawed by them.

The fact that he wasn’t? It left them baffled and a little angry.

Of course he had been sacked. Good; hopefully the bishop would have all the joy of his mustard-stained linen without Adrian.

He’d just met the bishop’s eyes. “Just as well.” He had shrugged. “I could not work for you, knowing what you are.”

The man had reacted in surprise. “What am I?”

Information was currency, and talking needlessly would erode any advantage Adrian held. Lassiter no doubt thought him some hired pawn. They had no idea who Adrian really was or what he wanted, and he’d best keep it that way.

“You’re beneath me,” Adrian said. “Both of you—you’re liars and undeserving of your offices.”

He watched the men color at the insult.

“You’ll get no letter of reference from me,” the bishop hissed.

“No harm in that.” Adrian folded his arms. “A reference from a man with no character would be meaningless.”

They gave up trying to make him feel ashamed.

“Of course you’ll marry the girl,” Rector Miles said.

“Of course I would, if I felt honor bound to do so. As I did nothing that requires such an act, I won’t.”

“Have you no thought for her reputation?”

They were trying to appeal to his emotion, to distract him from the logic of the situation. Adrian just gave the two men a scornful look. “Don’t pretend that either of you care about that. If you did, you’d have believed her the moment the door opened. You’d have apologized already. If you had insisted there was no problem from the beginning, she wouldn’t be facing repercussions. My actions haven’t hurt her. Yours have.”

Two hours of resistance on his part, and the men were flummoxed.

They had expected him to bow and scrape and apologize and give in, and his refusal to do so when he should have been begging for mercy was outside their comprehension.

Eventually, they withdrew to a corner of a room and held a whispered conference.

“We’ll leave you to consider the ramifications of your decisions,” they said, before conducting him to a basement cellar. The door was locked behind him; the high window was barred, preventing escape.

Adrian passed the time thinking of the sketches Mr. Alabi had sent from Harvil. Bears, ornate buildings, and bright designs. It was less than a week now until he had said he would be back. He had no time to be locked in basements. He thought of those sketches. He imagined possibilities for the plates that seemed impossibly far away and watched the shadows lengthen across the floor. The room was full dark by the time they came for him.

“Come along.”

“Where are we going?”

“There’s no more argument,” Lassiter said. “We’re going to your wedding.”

Nothing fit together. If they had wanted an excuse to sack him because he was getting close, they could have just used the mustard.

Forcing him to marry served no purpose that he could see…except spite, perhaps?

Spite was a real purpose.

Or maybe…

“There will be no wedding,” he said, because he insisted on being a person even if they didn’t see him as one.

“On the contrary. There will be no more arguments,” the rector replied, lifting a pistol.

Adrian’s mouth went dry and rational thought fled. Looking down the barrel of a gun did something to his logical ability, choking it into nothing but the tarnished glint of moonlight on metal.

For a moment, he floundered.

“We can’t marry,” he finally remembered. “There were no banns read. We’d need a special license.”

“We’ve had one sent up.”

It didn’t make sense. None of it made sense. But Adrian had never had a gun held on him before and it did something to his brain. All that he could think was that he couldn’t die by pistol. Not now. His mother had lost three sons to war and gunshot. Grayson had watched at least one of his brothers die in his arms.

They could not lose Adrian, too. Not this way. He could not do this to his family.

Adrian tried to gather his thoughts on the way to the church. They didn’t know who Adrian really was. They couldn’t; they’d never treat him with such cavalier disregard if they knew his uncle was Bishop Denmore, that he was the grandson of a duke. They thought him a valet, a servant—ignorant of all proper church procedures. They no doubt thought him a hired mercenary.

But he’d served as his uncle’s amanuensis on and off for years. He’d read ecclesiastical texts; he still had some in his library.

Lassiter and Miles didn’t know the truth, but Adrian did. They could hold a pistol to his head and make him say yes, but it wouldn’t be real. With a gun held on him, it wouldn’t count as consent.

He was brought into the nave of the church, then conducted to the front. The way was lit only by flickering candlelight.