Page 12 of The Baronet’s Bartered Bride

The little costermonger, Tamara, thrust her head around the doorframe, eyeing them both. “Her as cut sticks, if yer talkin’ of the lascar girl. Saw er high-steppin’ out the door with er bag, I did.”

“Joseph! What have you done?” Amaranthe braced her hands on the arms of her chair and attempted to lever herself out of it. “Why are you always pulling caps with her?”

“I asked a simple question, and she took a bee in her bonnet!” Joseph strode forward to hoist his swollen sister to her feet. “Why’d you have to saddle me with such a termagant?”

Amaranthe frowned. “You must go after her.”

“What the devil?” Joseph stared. “I never have before.”

Amaranthe chewed on her lip, something she did when she didn’t have a quill or the handle of her penknife to nibble on. “It’s not safe for her out there.”

A heat of irritation, and of shame, touched the back of Joseph’s neck. Hadn’t Inez said that she was prone to being accosted, that everywhere she went, men were begging her for sexual favors? The consequence, and the cost, of great beauty.

Or of simply being an unprotected female in the world.

That contrary streak seemed to be taking over his good sense entirely; he was as graceful as a sack of doorknobs today, all his customary aplomb vanished. He could not bear the look of accusation in his sister’s eyes.

“She’ll return. She always does,” he said mulishly.

Were a boy saying such a thing, Joseph would have cuffed him to bring him to a sense of his duty. He guessed Amaranthe was considering the same thing. She wrung her hands around the drawstring closure of her reticule for a moment, then blurted, “Derwa is his daughter.”

“What’s that?” Joseph stopped short in the circle of furious pacing he only now realized he’d taken up again.

“Derwa, who is the daughter of⁠—”

“Your dresser, Eyde. Yes, I know. She was pregnant when you both came to me in Oxford—I’m not such a dolt I don’t remember. And I was witness when she wed Davy a year later, if you’ll recall.”

Davy was the Welshman whom Amaranthe had hired as their manservant once they’d gotten settled in George Court, a few months after Joseph took his degree from St. John’s College and began his first post in London as tutor to an admiral’s sons. Eyde was the maidservant Amaranthe had towed along with her when she suddenly appeared in Joseph’s university lodgings seven years ago, having fled Penwellen and Reuben’s wardship and refusing to say a word to Joseph about what had happened.

Refusing to explain why she was showing up with a maid with a belly as her only chaperone, and why she begged Joseph not to send her back.

Derwa, born a few months later, had the deep-set eyes and nocked chin of an Illingworth, an eerie resemblance to Joseph’s own.

He sagged into a chair. “Explain.”

Amaranthe resumed pacing the circuit Joseph had trod into the Brussels carpet. The carpet he’d called Inez out on just half an hour earlier.

“Eyde was a maid at Penwellen while I lived there.”

“Yes, you said.”

After their parents’ deaths, their cousin had taken them in, housing and clothing them and offering nominal status as gentlemen’s offspring. It later emerged that Reuben was squandering the meager funds their parents had left for Amaranthe’s support on Reuben’s comfort, instead of Amaranthe’s. Joseph at least had been able to escape to university. It was only when Amaranthe showed up three years later, vowing she’d never return, that Joseph had the faintest hint all was not rolling quietly along at Penwellen as he’d assumed.

“Favella, as you know, was…delicate.”

Favella, Reuben’s wife, had died the year before. Amaranthe had gone south with Mal as her escort thinking to attend her cousin’s wife in childbirth and had instead found a black wreath on the door. Reuben had, at the time, proposed Amaranthe marry him so he might occupy himself with begetting an heir as early as possible. Amaranthe, being already inconveniently in love with Mal at the time, had declined.

That, at least, was the story Joseph had been told.

“Reuben…”

A chill cruised down his arms and shoulders. Men in dark corners, coming into the pantry, the scullery. Men believing the maid in their service was their property. That a young woman without family, of the servant class, was another good they could use at their convenience… Hadn’t Inez warned him some men like thought like that? The world was suddenly crueler, and more soiled, than Joseph in his naivete had ever imagined.

“Derwa is Reuben’s daughter,” Joseph said, his voice hoarse as the full weight of it hit him. Eyde, a maid in the employ of a married man, would know she could lose her position and her salary if she displeased the master.

A man who hurt a dog wouldn’t shrink from hurting a woman.

“Does she know?”