“Please do not send me away,” Mrs. Holt said quickly. “I had to abandon my situation in Islington, and if I leave here, there is nowhere for Molly and me to go.”
“We will not send you away,” Julian said. “Of course not. But there can be no more deception. No more half-truths.” He leaned forward. “There is something else you must tell us. Who is the man—the one who fathered the child, who lured her to Italy and kept her there?”
She shook her head. “She never told me his full name. When we were at Dover together, she referred to him only by a sortof nickname. At first, she called him Mr. X, but occasionally she would call him Bash.”
“Bash,” Clara repeated. “That does not sound familiar to me at all. Nor does it sound Italian.”
“No, it does not. And he did not look very Italian to me either when he came to collect her from Dover.” She hesitated. “Although?—”
Julian was on his feet before she could finish. “You saw him?”
Mrs. Holt looked up. “Yes but only once. He had arrived that morning, and they were preparing to leave for the boat. She brought me to the carriage to say farewell as I was to be taken on to London. I saw him only briefly.”
“Do you remember anything about him? Anything at all that was distinct?”
Julian glanced towards the corner of the room where Helena had apparently returned at some point and was sitting so quietly, he had almost entirely forgotten she was there.
“He was a tall man,” Mrs. Holt said, “almost as tall as Your Grace. He had a gingery sort of color to his hair which I thought curious given that he was supposed to be Italian. A large nose that looked as though it had been broken at some point. He was handsome—very handsome. Very well dressed.” She paused. “Horatio does not look much like him.”
Julian felt a wave of relief at that. It would have pained him to know that his sweet little nephew bore any resemblance to the man who had treated his mother so wretchedly.
“You remember nothing else?”
“If I saw him again, I would know him instantly—of that I am certain—but I have not seen him since. And Arabella never spoke of him at great length. At first, she did. She spoke of how cultured he was, how well-read, how widely traveled, that he had undertaken the Grand Tour but nothing that would make him stand out. Nothing particular, except—” she paused, and her cheeks colored.
“What is it?” Clara asked in that gentle tone that always, Julian had noticed, made people want to tell her everything.
“Well—when she left Dover, she already suspected she was with child. She told me she felt dreadfully guilty and did not know how she would ever explain it. I think, in truth, that is partly why she did not wish to involve either of you. She was very ashamed.” Mrs. Holt folded her hands in her lap.
“She told me that one of the reasons they were going to Italy was so that they might be married there quietly and then return to England as though they had already been wed for some time so that nobody would be any the wiser about the child’s arrival.” She glanced between them. “The timeline would be sufficiently blurred, she thought, that nobody would suspect a thing.”
Julian looked at Clara, whose eyebrows had risen considerably. It struck him that this sort of scheme—of quietly arranging things so the world saw only what one wished it to see—came rather naturally to members of their family.
“Thank you, Mrs. Holt,” he said. “Please return to your duties and do not distress yourself. You will be looked after and compensated properly. You need not return to Islington. We will see that you and Molly are properly settled.”
“Thank you, Your Grace,” she said and made her way out.
When it was just the two of them, Clara and Julian sat side by side. His hand was still resting on her arm. She had not moved.
“She was too ashamed to come to me,” he said.
“She was too ashamed to come to me either.” Clara was quiet for a moment. “Who knows what this man put into her head. What thoughts he planted there that were not there before. Because the Arabella I knew would not have been ashamed to tell either of us anything. He must have made her feel wretched and foolish. I can understand what that is like.” Her voice was low. “If she believed that she loved him and trusted that he would marry her, only to discover that he wanted nothing but the child growing inside her, she must have felt such a fool.”
He looked at her and recognized the words for what they were. She had felt that same shame herself—after the man she had trusted had cast her aside for a better prospect.
“I hope you feel no shame on your own account,” he said. “There is nothing shameful in what happened to you nor in what happened to her. You were both deceived by men to whom you gave your trust and your hearts, and there are those of my sex, I am sorry to say, who are a great deal less than gentlemanly.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I am grateful that you are here. That you have been at my side through all of this.” She turned to look at him and placed her hand over his, where it still rested on her arm.
For a moment, they sat there together, and the feeling that surrounded them was almost beyond description. It was warm and safe and quietly devastating. And yet, at the back of Julian’s mind, a warning bell rang with some persistence. For as warm and safe as it felt, he also knew that he could not allow it. He could not allow this feeling to take root—not in his head and certainly not in his heart. She was not his true wife. She was not his future. She was the means by which he was keeping his cousin and her child safe, and he was the same to her.
He had to stop permitting foolish fancies to encroach upon that reality.
Even though, if he were being entirely honest with himself—which he was finding increasingly difficult to be—the illusion of what they might be to one another had already taken root in his heart, long before his head had thought to object.
CHAPTER 20
Clara had not slept well. The events of the previous day had settled over her in the small hours like a weight she couldn’t shift—Mrs. Holt’s confession, Arabella’s precarious situation… It was all too much. She’d stayed up late with Julian, writing notes to Helena and Gideon as well as Evelyn and Nathaniel, letting them know the latest. Then they’d written to Stanhope to update him.
