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Nell saw Marcus meet his father’s eye and nod. Yes, the time had come. As his father began to explain, she touched Marcus’s arm. ‘I need to speak to you.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes,’ she murmured, drawing him aside. ‘Your father will tell the others what he feels they should know, will he not?’
‘Very well.’ He led her out of the drawing room, across the Great Hall to the small panelled room she remembered. ‘What is it, Nell?’ Marcus shut the door and leaned one shoulder against it. ‘There is no need to be afraid; he cannot get us in here.’
‘I am not afraid. Not of that.’ She found she was standing almost to attention as though she were in the dock of a court. Her hands were trembling. Nell clasped them tightly, raised her chin. ‘My real name is not Nell Latham. I was Lady Helena Wardale.’
He did not speak for a long moment, but he pushed away from the door and stood, quite still, staring at her across the six foot of space that separated them. Finally he said, ‘Younger daughter of the Earl of Leybourne.’
‘Yes.’
‘You knew what that rope signified.’ It was not a question.
‘Yes.’
‘You delivered it. You were in my father’s room when someone broke into it to bring another rope—and yet you said nothing.’ He sounded as coldly calm as a lawyer setting out the case for the prosecution, as though this meant nothing to him but an academic exercise in justice.
‘Yes.’
‘Is Salterton your lover?’
‘No!’
‘Your brother, then?’
‘No. Nathan may be dead, for all I know.’ I will not cry, she told herself fiercely, biting her lower lip in the hope the pain would steady her.
‘You have every reason to hate my father, this family. You were the instrument of his heart attack, you shot me. You have lived under our roof for weeks. My mother and sisters treated you as a friend. And all the while we worried and speculated and you said nothing.’
‘I never lied to you. Latham is the name I have used since I was a child. It is my name now.’
‘And if we had known all along who you were—can’t you see how important that could be?’ His calm cracked suddenly in an explosion of movement that took him across the intervening space to stand before her. When she had first met him, she had thought him too big and too male to be close to. Now she fought the instinct to flinch away and he saw the fear in her eyes.
‘I won’t hit you, Nell. I’m not like your mysterious friend. I don’t make war on women, even treacherous ones.’
‘I am not a traitor!’ she flared back at him. ‘All I knew was that my mother brought me up to hate the name Carlow and now I have read my father’s letters, her diary, I can see why. I did not know Lord Narborough’s family name when I brought the parcel.
‘Yes, I believe he betrayed my father, his friend, but now I have met your father I can see that he only acted out of conscience and he is suffering for it. He was wrong, so wrong, but he acted honestly and I forgive him.’
‘That’s magnanimous of you,’ Marcus said, his eyes narrowed on her face. ‘You can hardly take the moral high ground on this. Your father was a traitor and a murderer and an adulterer into the bargain.’
Nell slapped his face before she even knew she was going to do it. The blow jarred her wrist, the sound shocked her. He grabbed her wrists one-handed, the fragile bones shackled in one big fist. ‘Let me go!’ She kicked out and was jerked hard against his chest, then tried to bite as he took not the slightest notice of her boots cracking against his shins.
With his free hand he took her chin, pushing it up until she had to open her mouth and stop biting. ‘You hell cat! Stop this, Nell. I don’t want you to get hurt.’
‘You are quite safe, I don’t have my pistol,’ she panted, twisting in his grip. But it was futile; he was too strong. Nell stopped struggling.
It took them both a minute to steady their breathing. Nell stood quiescent in Marcus’s hold, wondering why all she could read in his eyes was grief. But that had to be wrong. After all, she had proved over and over that she did not understand him.
‘If you had nothing to do with this, it is stretching coincidence too far to think you were an accidental choice to deliver the rope,’ he said at last, his voice flat. ‘How do yo
u explain that?’
‘I cannot. Who hates both our families? It seems incredible, yet it is happening. But, Marcus, someone who is obsessed enough to be doing all this could have tracked me down, given time and money, if they knew the name we took after my father’s death. I give you my word, I do not know why they are attacking your family. But I knew, once I discovered who you were and read Papa’s letters, that you would never believe me. You wanted me to tell you my secrets, but I knew how it would be—listen to yourself.’
‘Then why tell me now?’ he demanded.
