Page 50 of The Baronet’s Bartered Bride

Jock laughed again, full-throated. “Coves like thee have been swiving women under their protection since Adam in the garden. Afeared she’s going to spring the shackle on ye?”

“I’m not— I can’t marry her,” Joseph exclaimed. She had made it emphatically clear she did not wish another husband. The scorn on her face was more biting than the teeth of vermin. He wanted nothing but to marry, and she wanted nothing less.

Jock’s face hardened around the nose and mouth. “Aye, marry her ye cannot. Because yer sound Saxon stock and she’s born of a lascar, if I’m not mistaken.”

Joseph glared at him. “That is the least of my concerns. My mother’s family was Portuguese. And converted Jews. I’m no stickler for purity of blood.”

Jock’s expression turned curious. “Jews, you say?”

“Conversos. So, to put a fine point upon it, not practicing Jews for around two hundred years.”

That was not to say his grandmother had not held her secrets. Joseph recalled nights she lit candles when it was not a holy day he knew of, no Christian saint’s fast. He heard the prayers she would sometimes mutter that were not in Portuguese, and he’d seen the silver amulet engraved with a five-sided star that she kept tucked in a wooden box in her wardrobe.

But his mother had stood in full view of the Anglican church swearing her vows to love and obey and honor Jonas Illingworth her whole life long, and if she ever regretted departing from her family’s heritage to follow the man who held her heart, Joseph had never seen sign of it.

Jock tilted his head to the side. His eyes were an uncanny blue. “Then it’s as yer a swell and she’s a blowen, and there’s no mixing of kind.”

“It’s not because she’s a servant,” Joseph snapped. “Well, in part it is, because she works in my house and I can’t—I won’t be that man.”

The kind of man who thought a woman was prey, or the lower classes were his to command. Joseph had grown up elbow to elbow with the sons of miners and carters and butchers and grooms, and he knew those boys were built of the same matter as he or Walter Robings of Rosecraddoc Manor, all of them made of blood and guts and bone.

It wasn’t the common opinion of his class—he’d learned that at Oxford—but it was ingrained into him. One more reason Susannah Pettigrew and her Quaker beliefs had held such appeal for him.

Susannah Pettigrew, his last failure and warning.

“She fancies ye, and ye fancy ’er,” Jock mused. “So the only reason to keep from making the beast w’ two backs is ye can’t provide for her after.”

A thread of bitterness in the man’s tone made Joseph look closely at him. They sat undisturbed in their corner of the bar as guests came and went, travelers from the passing coaches stepping in for a moment of warmth and ease, locals gathering for rest and gossip. The two sat slightly apart, and suddenly the well of quiet around them became a kind of confession.

“I can provide for her,” Joseph said, prickling. “I’m a bloody baronet now, didn’t you know? I don’t intend to saddle her with a babe, but I can look after her well enough.”

“Then have yer fun without leaving her a babe.” Jock said this with the confidence of a man who knew well the pathways of pleasure, and indulged in them regularly. But there was that edge of bitterness again.

“That’s why you’re not shackled yourself,” Joseph guessed. “You couldn’t provide for her.”

Jock winced. His pain was raw, and recent. “She swore she could live on the little I could offer. But I knew she wouldn’t be happy, not once all her fine friends’d cut ’er. And her family’ud feel the strain too. ’Twas asking too much.”

Perhaps he ought to have let the woman decide that, Joseph thought, but didn’t say.

Amaranthe had been prepared to take Malden Grey when she thought he was the bastard son of a duke, doubted he would ever be called to the bar, and might very well have to support him on her work as a copyist, the way she’d supported Joseph. Only the stupendous surprise of discovering the marriage lines Mal’s dead mother had always sworn existed had turned Amaranthe’s straw to spun gold, making the bastard the Duke of Hunsdon. Not quite the same leap as lowly tutor Joseph Illingworth becoming Sir Joseph of Penwellen, but in the same vein.

“I thought you had a position with the Earl of Renwick,” Joseph said.

“It’s the Countess of Calenberg pays my salary. But I’ve spent a deal of time at Renwick House after her ladyship’s niece wed the earl.”

Joseph tried to remember. All the titles he’d encountered since Amaranthe skipped her way to the highest echelons of British society had frankly gotten muddled in his head. Renwick was an odd one—seemed a very deliberate, reserved man. Joseph had thought him an arrogant ass until Amaranthe whispered, at a breakfast she’d hosted one afternoon, that the man’s stiff demeanor was compensation for a clubfoot and he didn’t speak much because of his stammer.

The Countess of Calenberg was odder still. Her husband had been the count of some tiny Germanic principality that no longer existed, given the near-constant wars on the Continent. She lived like an eccentric in a big house in London, merry as the day was long, sharing her house with outcast women who had artistic sensibilities and collecting servants who wouldn’t be hired anywhere else. Witness Henry Jock, who without the patronage of an eccentric countess would be on the street with his beggar’s bowl like so many other poor souls of London who had lost their legs or their eyes or their wits.

“The girl was a maid in Renwick’s household,” Joseph guessed.

Jock’s mouth twisted. “The earl’s sister.”

Joseph blinked. “The devil you say. So his lordship threatened to kill you?”

“He doesn’t know of it. No one does, saving her and I. And she won’t speak of it.”

“Cut you off when she was finished? That’s a cold end.”