After the Wedding (The Worth Saga #2)(54)

She stood. She took a step toward him, and his breath froze in his chest. “You tell yourself that a lot, don’t you? That you can take on one more thing?”

“Well.” He swallowed as she took a step forward. “I’ve been very lucky in my life. I’ve been given a lot. It seems only fair that I try to do something with what I have, doesn’t it?”

She took another step toward him. Lit from behind, her expression was impossible to make out.

“One more thing,” Camilla told him softly. “One more thing. One more thing. Of all the men in the world I could have been forced to marry, it ended up being you. I, too, count myself lucky. This time, let me do one more thing for you.”

She was close enough to touch now, and he couldn’t. He couldn’t touch her. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair.

She touched him. She reached out and put her hands on his shoulders. It was only strength of will that kept him from pulling her to him. His hands clenched into fists at his side.

But it wasn’t that sort of touch she gave him. She pushed him, turning him around so he faced the door away from her. He could feel the palms of her hands in the small of his back.

“Go to bed,” she said. “I’m almost done. And I don’t have to be up at seven in the morning.”

She pushed him, and what could he do?

He couldn’t touch her, so he went. He was almost up to his room, half-exhausted with weariness, when the thought came to him.

“Oh,” he said, looking into the darkness, feeling as if he had been struck by lightning. “Tigers. Of course it’s tigers.”





Chapter Fifteen





Camilla had left the draft of the questions she’d written for Mrs. Martin on Adrian’s desk; by the time she came downstairs the next morning, it was gone.

In its place was a note: Thanks. These were excellent; have sent on. See you tonight?

There were no other instructions. That left her with nothing to do all day but think—always a dangerous prospect—or walk or read. It was raining; that didn’t bode well for walking.

Adrian was not much for fiction, she discovered upon perusing his shelves, and he—or rather, his family—had the strangest collection of books. A multi-volume set on the production of pig iron. Seven separate tracts on ecclesiastical law that were well marked. And an entire shelf of books on the chemical composition of various dyes.

One of the ecclesiastical law books turned out to be a collection of accounts of trials in the ecclesiastical courts. She leafed through them, thoroughly confused by a multitude of words she didn’t know. Another book ended up being a legal dictionary. It proved only slightly helpful, as she didn’t know half the words used in the definitions.

There were two accounts of annulment proceedings in the first book. The rain was not letting up; she was supposed to be getting an annulment. Why not read through them?

“How are you getting on?” Adrian asked her that night over dinner.

“By and by. You?”

He shrugged, much the same as she had. “Passably. Things are taking shape, I suppose.”

He didn’t say anything about wanting her input—of course, she realized, they’d need to develop something before she could have an opinion on it—and he seemed sufficiently harried that she did not want to ask.

Well. She had reading and she had crocheting.

The days slipped by. She read through the two annulment proceedings in their entirety, once, and then again, and a third time.

The confusing legalistic language slowly started to feel comprehensible after the fifth read. The outcome of the cases, once she understood them, began to bother her more.

Miss Jane Leland, an heiress, had been drugged with opium before saying “I do” to a man she had before refused; the courts had refused to grant her an annulment on the grounds that she had insufficiently proven that she did not consent to the opium.

By contrast, Sir William Tannsy had agreed to marry Lady Catherine Dubois; he had been so nervous at his wedding (or so he claimed) that he had not noticed that her maid, Miss Laney Tabbott, had taken her place and so (he claimed) a fraud had been done on him.

It didn’t look like fraud to Camilla, not unless Sir William had gravel in place of brains. Sir William was supposed to have married Lady Catherine six weeks later, with the banns already having been read the first time before he left.

Sir William had claimed that Miss Tabbott, purporting to be her mistress, had sent him a letter begging him for an immediate Fleet Marriage to calm her nerves.

There followed pages of text— “legal reasoning,” it was apparently called—that purported to explain that somehow Miss Tabbott had cheated Sir William. Even though her actual real name had been used on the register. Even though he had spent four hours in her company before the ceremony, and not once noticed she was a different person than her mistress. Even though Miss Tabbott stated that Sir William himself had courted her and asked to marry her.

Tabbott claimed the marriage was consummated, which Sir William denied. The medical examiners claimed that the fact of consummation could not be established.

Miss Tabbott’s testimony was deemed unbelievable. She had committed fraud, the court said. Annulment granted.

“What is this utter nonsense?” Camilla found herself demanding at dinner-time, pointing to the book.