“Mal will stop her.”
He’d left with the evening mail and a whisper in Amaranthe’s ear. “Don’t mention to Bea that you found my mother’s marriage lines. I want to tell her myself, in my own time,” he’d said.
She’d agreed again, as she had agreed with his decision to say nothing to the children. He wouldn’t change his mind, and in truth she couldn’t fault him. Claiming his own legitimacy would disinherit Hugh and make the Delaval children bastards. They’d already been left, orphaned and starving, in their own home. What would it mean to take their birthright away too?
He’d taken the document with him. He’d also given her, despite his new guardedness with her, a swift kiss, a dazzling, searing kind of kiss. A kiss that assured her, in every possible way, that the shadow of Reuben no longer had any hold on her. All she felt when Mal held her—in truth and in her imaginings—was him. His heat, his strength, and her overwhelming desire to belong to him.
“She can’t have a leg to stand on, can she?” Bea fed another sheet into the wringer and turned the crank. “Even if she was the duke’s wife. After all, she’s a woman. And a thief, at that.”
A woman and a thief, at that. Much like Amaranthe herself.
Who would believe me? Mal’s face had been so bleak.
Amaranthe went to the washtub full of linens and plunged her hands into the cold water to lift out another sheet. He hadn’t said anything more, but the words stuck in her head like a burr.
Did he believe the marriage lines were real?
They’ll accuse me of making it up.
He couldn’t think that document had been manufactured somehow. He’d been there when she found where Marguerite had hidden the page, glued to the back cover of her Book of Hours. He’d seen her lifting the parchment. He must know thatno one could conceivably accuse him, Malden Grey, of making so skillful a forgery.
But he’d seen Amaranthe’s work. He knew she could mimic any hand. And if she could do that, it was not such a leap to suppose she could create a document that looked like a set of marriage lines that a betrayed woman had claimed existed but no one had ever found.
He might think she had forged his mother’s marriage lines.
Amaranthe stood as if caught in the stare of a basilisk. That would explain his sudden reserve.
He might very well think that somehow, in the course of an afternoon, she had created an official-looking document and tucked it away in a book that elsewhere bore the signature of Marguerite, Lady Vernay, which would make it appear valid.
To gain what?
Why, to make the bastard, the would-be barrister who’d offered to marry her, into a legitimate duke.
He didn’t believe her.
It was such a shocking discovery that she could barely believe it herself. Yet she was an antiquarian. Her field was full of stories of treasures found in the spines or margins of ancient books, of priceless volumes unearthed in the unlikeliest places. It was perhaps the one field aside from archaeology where spectacular discoveries were almost routine.
But to the outside world, of course it would look like a coincidence too wild to be believed.
Amaranthe fed a heavy, sodden sheet into the wringer. Her heart flopped painfully about her chest. Mal had left to travel alone. Perhaps he meant to withdraw his offer of marriage. Just when she understood what he meant to her, he was trying to extricate himself from what they’d shared.
The knowledge shredded her. Through tears she focused on the task at hand. What could she do to make him believe her?
“What church did you say Marguerite was married in?”
At Bea’s curious glance, Amaranthe smiled. “Prying again, I know. But after getting her book back, I am more curious than ever. And I think you said the church she was married in was not the church where her memorial lies.”
Bea leaned on the crank, squeezing out the last bit of water, and pushed a lock of damp hair away from her face. “St. Mary Redcliffe, that Gothic old church across the river. I think it’s naught but a gloomy old wreck, but Marguerite always loved those ancient, spooky things.
“I was there, you know,” Beatrice said quietly after a long moment had passed. “As her witness. Our parents were so angry about the match, it broke her heart. They knew a tradesman’s daughter could never be a duchess. The high folk wouldn’t allow it; they would hound our poor delicate girl to her grave. But she loved him so much, was so wild to marry him—I couldn’t break her heart further by abandoning her, too.
“Signed the register with my mark, or thought I did, me and one of young Vernay’s friends. I told her to bring a copy away, knowing the old duke would storm and threaten, and right I was, wasn’t I? But when she couldn’t find her copy, and all my searching could turn up no trace—I went to the priest and asked to see the register.” Beatrice dabbed at her eye with her apron. “There was no record in it. I don’t know what I signed, or what happened to that paper, but it was all a charade after all.”
Amaranthe laid a hand on the other woman’s arm, squeezing gently. “What of the priest who married them? Or the other witness?”
Beatrice sniffed and wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. “The priest said perhaps Marguerite was better off where she was. And I had to agree. The duke was so powerful, so outraged—he would have made her life a misery, and Mal’s too. At least here she lived among people who loved her.
“It broke her to bits when he left her, but she had some moments of happiness in her life. I don’t know if she’d have had a minute of that, had she gone with the young lord. He never returned for her while she lived, did he? She was just a lark to him. He couldn’t have loved her true.”
