After the Wedding (The Worth Saga #2)(92)

“Hush.” He set a finger on her lips. “I asked you to do far more distasteful things for this damned annulment. I can manage silence. And that wasn’t what I was going to say. I was going to say that it would be very useful for us to have all that paperwork we obtained. The affidavits. The accounts. Everything that sets forth the motive in question.” Adrian gave her an easy smile.

“But you gave it all to your uncle, didn’t you?”

“Well.” He shrugged. “The affidavits will be easy enough to have redone. But it wouldn’t be hard for me to get the rest. I could walk into his office and take it.”

She stared at him. “Your uncle—you’d just walk into his office and steal the materials? I can’t ask you do that for me.”

He smiled. “You don’t have to ask.” He reached out and took hold of her hand. “You want us to have a choice, don’t you? Let me go get us one.”



* * *



Theresa was seated on her divan when Judith walked in.

There had been no time to explain what had happened since Camilla’s arrival; Judith had sent for solicitors and seamstresses. It wasn’t until now, with supper almost upon them, that she’d had a spare moment.

Theresa managed a little smile. “Happy birthday, Judith.”

Judith sat next to her. Her expression was… Very hard to read. Her eyes were narrowed; her eyebrows made angry dark lines.

“Camilla mentioned that you knew about Mr. Hunter just now. She seemed to think that we had been expecting her. Theresa, what is going on? How did you get her direction? Why didn’t you tell me you were in contact with her?”

Oh. Theresa’s heart hurt just a little bit. She hadn’t managed to do it right after all. She was going to get scolded again. Everyone was always telling her to think before she did something rash, and she had thought this time. She had thought a great deal.

If by think before you act, people meant think what we want you to think, Theresa wished they would just say so. It would make everything so much easier.

Only now that she knew Judith was going to be angry could she see how she’d misunderstood. It was entirely one thing to obtain a present like gloves in secret. It was another to hunt down a missing sister, to withhold what she had learned when she knew Judith was so desperate for information.

Sisters were not gloves; she ought to have known.

In her defense, at the time it had all made complete sense to her.

“I didn’t have her direction,” Theresa said. “I wasn’t in contact with her. It was Mr. Hunter’s brother who delivered the letter.”

Judith just frowned at this. “But how did you know of Mr. Hunter?”

Theresa looked away. It hurt too much to try and look in Judith’s eyes, and never mind that it made her look guilty not to meet her eyes. She felt guilty.

“Because we found her wedding in the marriage registry?” The we slipped out before she had a chance to think it through, and then she really was in a tearing panic. She really hadn’t meant to get Benedict in trouble, too.

“The marriage registry?”

“The one at the General Register Office,” Theresa admitted. “I…may have lied to you about the whereabouts of…Benedict and myself...for the last handful of weeks?” She scrunched in on herself, feeling like one of her cats. She’d dragged in a mouse and had expected praise for her prowess as a hunter.

“And so you found Mr. Hunter at the General Register Office?” Judith’s voice was shaking. “I don’t understand.”

It was like they spoke two separate languages. No matter how hard Theresa tried to make herself understood, she always failed.

She glanced up. Judith was still staring at her; Theresa looked away.

“Theresa, how…” Judith did not seem to know how to complete her sentence. “When…” Another shake of her head. “What…”

“It was an accident,” Theresa said, on the verge of panic. “Pure accident! Benedict and I happened to be looking at the folio of marriage registries at the exact right time. Had we tried a week before, we’d never have seen the entry, it was that new.”

“I don’t understand why you were looking at marriage registries in the first place.”

“Well, it’s because of the Births and Deaths Registration Act of 1836…”

Judith looked even more baffled at that.

Theresa would never know why people asked questions when they really didn’t to know the answer. She shook her head and tried a different tack. “We utilized the process of elimination. You couldn’t find Lady Camilla Worth anywhere, so either she was dead or she was using a different name. I eliminated the possibility that she was dead because it was inconvenient, and the most likely reason for her to change her name was marriage. So we looked through the registry of marriages. All of them.”

Judith just shook her head. “You didn’t tell me you were doing any of this.”

Now that she’d done it, it was so horrifically obvious that she’d made a mistake. Again.

Theresa knew she was difficult; she’d been told it all her life. She’d been told, over and over, that she was impossible, horrible, awful, unladylike, selfish. And it wasn’t just Judith who was doing the telling. Just about everyone who came into her life told her that.