“Diana—I am afraid my decision is made and—”
“Finish that sentence and I guarantee they will be your last words on earth.” Two furious green eyes narrowed inches from his face.
“Like I said, I’ll get the Regises and their lovely daughter out of the way.” Dalton limped to where Dahlia and her family eavesdropped with undisguised interest and ushered them out of the door just as Mrs. Townsend stormed back through it with a face like thunder.
“You have another unannounced guest, Your Grace!” Her lips were so pursed, she looked ready to blow on a bugle. “A Mr. Cribbage. I have lefthimin the hallway as I am running out of places to put them all.”
“My solicitor is here? In Shropshire?” That couldn’t be good. He flicked a worried glance toward Diana as they both set off in his direction with Vee hot on their heels while Mrs. Townsend scurried behind.
“Am I expected to provide him with a room and breakfast also at such short notice? Because Your Grace might have taken the trouble to inform me.” He ignored his housekeeper to rush toward his lawyer.
“What has happened?”
Mr. Cribbage stared pointedly at their audience. “I have news, Your Grace. Information I felt too delicate to entrust to the post.”
Mr. Cribbage stared warily at Diana and Vee as they followed Giles into the drawing room.
“It is all right—the Misses Merriwell know everything. Warts and all.” Giles gestured for the man to sit. “To be honest with you, Mr. Cribbage, I am rather relieved to see you. Events have taken a bit of a dark turn.” Without any preamble, he brought his solicitor up to speed before Dalton arrived with some tea. “So before I and my loyal accomplices are arrested, I have decided to turn myself in this afternoon. Pip Gervais to the post and pray for leniency.”
Mr. Cribbage had silently frowned through most of the convoluted tale, and his bushy gray brows were now entirely knitted into one. “If you do not mind me saying, I feel that might be a tad hasty, Your Grace.”
“That is exactly what I said.” Diana perched on the arm of his chair to wrap a reassuring arm about his shoulders before she realized that that was a rather proprietorial and wifely thing to do. “I suspect there is more to find.”
“And I suspect there is the slimmest chance His Grace might well be legitimate after all.”
“I think I am going to need more biscuits.” Giles slumped back in the chair. Shocked but too overwhelmed by all the twists and turns to allow himself to believe it while the solicitor pulled out a tatty notebook.
“My father had rather a fractious professional relationship with your grandfather in much the same way as I had with yours. His legal advice was often ignored. From what I discovered in our firm’s archive, your grandfather was even more unreasonable than your father. So unreasonable, in fact, that my father took to documenting all their conversations for his own protection, as the duke had a tendency to think he was above the law.”
He pulled his pince-nez out of his pocket and clipped them to his nose. “Most are, as I am sure you can imagine, mundane matters pertaining to the estate, but while hunting for any mention of Gervais, I stumbled across this from March 1784.” Mr. Cribbage cleared his throat to read. “His Grace came to the office quite agitated without an appointment desirous of information regarding the laws of annulment after an elopement. I informed His Grace that such things are never easy to obtain, especially if both parties freely entered the union—no matter how disadvantageous the match. However, if, as His Grace intimated, the marriage was clandestine because it occurred over the border and one of the parties was under the legal age of majority, a petition could be raised citing that the marriage took place without parental consent and request that it be rendered null and void as a result.”
Diana squeezed Giles’s limp hand. “That coincides with the duke’s outraged winter in Wales.” He nodded but still seemed too stunned to speak, so she did. “What happened next, Mr. Cribbage?”
“Nothing. Not another mention in the notes, nor could I find a record of any such petition being raised or an annulment granted to anyone from your grandfather’s close acquaintance. But a few months hence there are a flurry of notes about your father’s upcoming marriage settlement to the woman we all believed was your mother. From what I can make out, it all happened very fast and at your grandfather’s instigation.”
“So if we assume he did marry Ffion in the early part of that same year…”
Mr. Cribbage nodded as he saw the significance dawn in herface. “Then he was still married to Ffion when he married the duchess, and still married to her when they had His Grace eleven years later.”
“The duke was a bigamist?” Giles, bless him, was struggling to take it all in.
Mr. Cribbage threw up his hands. “Hemighthave been a bigamist. We’d need to find evidence of the initial marriage to prove it—but if we can, we also prove you are the legal heir. A clandestine marriage can only be challenged if both parties are alive. It cannot be voided now that they are both dead.”
“A needle in a haystack then!” Giles shot out of his chair to pace.
“At least we know it is over the border.” That was enough of a dangling thread for Diana to tug on. “Most over-the-border marriages occur at Gretna Green, surely?”
“Assuming it’s the Scottish border and not the Welsh one twenty miles away.”
Mr. Cribbage grinned at Vee, impressed. “You are very astute, young lady, and you are quite correct. Simply because a marriage is classed as clandestine doesn’t necessarily mean it happened in Scotland. There are many other ways to get the deed done. If Ffion was born in Wales, was of age, and was known to the parish, the banns could have been read there well away from the Duke of Harpenden’s notice and therefore have been uncontested—even if His Grace’s father was still below the age of majority. At twenty, it was perfectly legal for him to marry.”
“But young enough to have had the marriage contested, and perhaps naive enough to believe it was void if that was what his overbearing father told him.” Mr. Cribbage seemed as excited by it all as Diana.
“Ffion grew up an orphan in Presteigne, so that strikes me as a good starting point as any. If we draw a blank there, we head to Gretna.”
“And hope we find our needle before Gervais gets his slimy hands on it.” Giles was still pacing.
“If you want my opinion—”
