Unmasked by the Marquess

by Cat Sebastian

  “You don’t know the half.”

  “Then tell me.” He’d fix it. Whatever it was, he’d move heaven and earth to make things right for her. Here he was sending her sweets and haberdashery, servants and barnyard fowl. Did she not understand that he would do more, if she would let him?

  “There’s hardly any moon tonight.” Her voice strained with the effort of not crying, her hands in fists at her sides. “You ought to go back before it gets any darker. You’re probably not any good at traipsing about the countryside in the dark.”

  He ignored this. She had to be quite overwrought if that was the best insult she could come up with. “I love you, Robin.”

  “Stop,” she sobbed. On the bed, Miss Selby stirred. “Go,” Robin said. “Go.”

  He kissed her once on her forehead and left.

  When he arrived back at the Duck and Dragon, covered in what had to be half the mud in Bedfordshire, he found his solicitor waiting for him in the inn’s parlor.

  “Good God, Nivins. What possessed you to come all this distance?”

  “I . . . oh dear, what a very troublesome business, always to be the bearer of ill tidings.” The solicitor let out a panicked sort of laugh, and then adjusted his spectacles. “I have the information you requested. When I heard from your staff where you had gone, and in what company, I knew I had to tell you immediately.” He brought himself up to his full height, as if needing to draw on an inner store of fortitude.

  It took Alistair a moment to remember what he had asked Nivins to do for him. He put on his own spectacles and took the sheaf of papers Nivins had placed on the table.

  “I gather that you did not know the gentleman to be married, and especially not to a lady who seems to have vanished off the face of the earth shortly after the ceremony.”

  “If only it were that simple,” Alistair managed, half stunned by what he was reading. “I saw the lady in question this very day.”

  “In Bedfordshire, my lord?”

  “Correct.” Alistair stared at the documents, hardly believing what he read.

  “I had, if you’ll pardon me for saying so, some indication of why you required information about the gentleman,” the solicitor ventured.

  “You did?” Now Alistair was fully stunned, if Nivins had any inclination of his relationship with the person known as Robert Selby.

  “I had called on Mrs. Allenby several days ago to settle the details about a trust she’s setting up for her daughters, and Mr. Selby was there, tête-à-tête with the eldest Allenby girl. I took the liberty of inquiring into the gentleman’s background. It would be a tolerable match for both of them, even though it certainly isn’t my business to say so. But bigamy, my lord. That’s quite another story.”

  “Indeed it is, Nivins. Indeed it is.” Alistair balled up the paper Nivins had given him and threw it angrily into the fire.

  Chapter Seventeen

  As soon as Mrs. Potton woke from her nap, refreshed and ready to sit with Louisa, Charity stealthily dressed herself in the clothes Alistair had brought her that morning, borrowed one of Mr. Trout’s caps, and slipped out of the farmhouse unobserved.

  She didn’t need a lantern; years of rising before dawn to fetch water from the well, or even to sneak back into her rooms at Cambridge after the gates were locked, had taught her how to get by with little light. The lane was muddy but it was straight enough and she arrived at the Duck and Dragon without any mishap.

  There was no sign of Alistair in the taproom, of course. It would take any self-respecting innkeeper only a single glance to know that Alistair needed to be put in the private parlor.

  “I have a message for Lord Pembroke,” she told the barmaid, guessing that he had messengers and parcels coming and going at all hours.

  The girl looked up too quickly, an avaricious gleam in her eyes. “If you give me the letter I’ll bring it to him myself.”

  Charity bet she would. According to the maid Alistair sent to the Trouts, Alistair was giving out shillings like they were farthing pieces. “I have instructions to only give it into his hands.”

  The barmaid shrugged. “Have it your way, then. He’s still in the parlor.” She pointed to a door on the other side of the room.

  She found him sprawled in a wing-backed chair near the fire. The parlor was otherwise empty, it being late and the Duck and Dragon not being so lofty an establishment as to have more than one patron who merited the private parlor. He turned to face her at the sound of the door snicking shut.

  “Robin,” he said, and his voice sounded so much wearier than it had only a few hours earlier.

  “I wanted to see you.” She moved to sit in the chair opposite his, but then thought better of it and sat on the footstool before him. “What’s the trouble?”

  He brushed a lock of hair off her forehead. “Why did you do it, Charity?”

  She knew from the seriousness of his expression—not anger, only a sad sort of gravity—that he wasn’t asking why she came tonight. “It depends on what you mean. I’ve done a lot of things.” And wasn’t that God’s own truth?

  “Why did you conceal Robert Selby’s death?”

  She had a sick sense of foreboding. “I’ve already explained. The estate was entailed. Louisa would have had nothing. It was the best idea I could think of.”

  He reached for her hand and held it on his knee. “I have a copy of Selby’s will.”

  She shook her head quickly. Robbie’s will ought to have been locked up at the solicitor’s office in Alnwick, the only other copy in the study at Fenshawe. But she supposed marquesses could get whatever they wanted. “Then you’ll know he left her nothing.” Her voice sounded high and tense.

  “In the event that he was married at the time of his death, his widow was to have a thousand pounds.” He pressed her hand and looked into her eyes with an expression she could not read. “Why did you give it up?”

  She moved to pull her hand away but he held it fast, stroking the underside of her wrist with his thumb. Now he knew the most serious of her deceptions. There were no secrets left; he knew the entirety of her, and still he held her close. “Because there was nothing for Louisa,” she repeated. How could she have taken that money and left Louisa—a child of sixteen—homeless and penniless, with scarcely a relation in the world or a friend to her name? Few knew better than Charity what that fate was like. Robbie had done badly by his sister, and Charity knew she had to make it right. “It was my duty.” Duty not only to Louisa as her only relation, but also to Robbie, and also to herself. She didn’t know how to put those ideas into words Alistair would understand.

  He was looking at her with something like perplexed wonder.

  “Besides,” she continued, thinking to appeal to his practical side, “what would a thousand pounds do for her? That would give her forty pounds a year, not nearly enough to keep a girl who had been brought up to be a lady.”

  The silence stretched out, the only sound the fire crackling in the hearth. “It would have been more than enough for you.”

  As if that had ever been an option. “Maybe if I had a few more weeks to think about it, I could have come up with a better idea, but it all happened so fast. He died suddenly, and Louisa was still sick, and I didn’t know what to do.”

  “And you were grieving, I think?” He said it so gently. It would have been so much better if he had thrown this in her face, if he had been angry or even disappointed at her deceit and her secrecy.

  “I was,” she whispered. She hadn’t felt entitled to grieve. Who was she but a servant who had the bad sense to land in her master’s bed? The fact that Robbie insisted on marrying her surely said more about his sense of honor than it did about her fitness to be his wife.

  And so she had taken all that grief and turned it into action. She turned off any servants who couldn’t be trusted to keep a secret. She did what needed to be done to save as much as she could from Fenshawe’s income. All to keep Louisa safe.

  “How did you guess?” Only w
hen she spoke did she realize she was crying.

  “Come here.” He hauled her onto his lap, despite her protests. “I don’t care if anyone comes in.” His voice was fierce. Now he was angry? “Do you understand that? It doesn’t matter.”

  Like hell it didn’t, but she had her face buried in his neck and he was stroking her back, and it all felt too good to be sensible about.

  “To answer your question,” he said, “I didn’t guess. I had my solicitor look for any evidence of a marriage between you and Selby. You had mentioned being near Scotland, where it wouldn’t have mattered if you were underage.”

  “I was eighteen and he was nineteen.” Young and rash, but of course they hadn’t thought so at the time. “We had been in and out of one another’s beds for years by that point, you know.” She said that just in case he thought she had ever been a respectable miss. “But he took the notion into his head that if I were his wife, there would be no dishonesty in my going to Cambridge in his stead. No, I know it’s bollocks, but that was his condition. So we rode into Scotland, were married over the anvil, and returned to Fenshawe in time for me to roast a joint for supper.” She found that she was braced for his disapproval, but it never came. “We didn’t tell anyone,” she continued, “because I was to leave Fenshawe on the pretense of going to York as a lady’s maid, but of course I was really going to Cambridge.”

  She had condensed so many misdeeds into a few sentences, but his hand never faltered in the steady rhythm he stroked on her back.

  “Is that why you won’t marry me? Because you had already been married once and didn’t want to settle for anything less than—”

  “No!” She couldn’t let him think that. “I did love Robbie.” She leaned back so they could see one another’s faces. “But he’s been dead over two years.” She didn’t want to talk about this, didn’t want to put her thoughts into words, to make them any more real than they were. But he had been honest about his feelings and she wanted to give him the same. “I love you.” His eyes flared with satisfaction, which only meant that he hadn’t yet understood. “I wish like hell that I didn’t, though.”

  “Marry me.”

  She was going to have to spell it out for him. “You see, if Robbie had lived, it would have been awkward enough for me to be mistress of Fenshawe. Imagine how much more awkward it would be for me to be Lady Pembroke.”

  “You sell yourself short. You also have an appalling notion of what I require in a wife. Do you think I intend to force you to wait on the queen or preside over tea parties?”

  She ignored this, because of course he’d want a wife to do all those things and more. “And there’s the small matter of my not having a death certificate for my husband. Charity Selby is a married woman, as far as the law is concerned.”

  “Charity Selby,” he repeated, and it sounded strange to her ears as well. He was silent for too long, his hands still on her hips. She knew that he finally understood. “There has to be a way to have Selby declared dead.”

  “Not without exposing Louisa’s participation in a fraud. And I won’t have that.”

  “You’ve already given up your name and a thousand pounds for Louisa’s comfort. Have you asked her whether she wants you to continue sacrificing for her? It’s not clear to me that you owe her a damned thing at this point.”

  She almost pitied him. “It’s not about owing her anything. She’s eighteen. I’ve known her since she was two. We’re family to one another.” She refrained from pointing out his own treatment of his flesh-and-blood family, but let the implication hang in the air.

  He was silent for several moments, long enough that she thought he’d let the subject drop. “That’s right, she is your sister,” he said musingly. “That much was true.”

  “Sister-in-law.”

  He cradled her face in his hands. “Imagine if everyone did by their siblings as well as you’ve done for yours.”

  She wasn’t expecting that, and the kindness and admiration in his voice undid her. Her throat went tight. “Now you think I’m some sort of martyr.”

  “I think nothing of the sort. I think you’re one of the finest people I’ve ever met.”

  That set her off into a fresh round of tears, while Alistair stroked her hair and whispered nonsense to her about how everything would come out all right. Charity wished she could believe it.

  Alistair drove his curricle with painstaking care lest he jostle Gilbert’s healing arm. His brother had only that morning received permission from the doctor to venture forth from the inn, and had promptly and predictably requested to be conveyed to Louisa’s bedside.

  “Your betrothed has taken a great deal of interest in poultry, Miss Church has told me,” Alistair said, trying to casually indicate his acceptance of the marriage.

  “That’s Louisa!” Gilbert said happily, as if interest in barnyard fowl was precisely the thing to be proud of in a future wife. And why shouldn’t it be? Alistair had found stranger things to admire in the woman he wished to marry.

  “I had Nivins draw up some papers to give you the use of the Kent property.” He didn’t turn his head to look at his brother, in case Gilbert thought this an outrageous gift, embarrassingly grand. But with Robin as his example, how could Alistair not be generous? He wanted things to be right between them. He wanted to pledge his support for however Gilbert chose to live his life.

  The next thing he knew, Gilbert was hugging him enthusiastically with his unbroken arm. “Thank you! This is wonderful!”

  “Careful, or we’ll overturn this carriage too.” But he couldn’t help but smile at his brother’s happiness.

  “Louisa says the soil in Kent is perfect for . . .”

  Alistair let Gilbert prattle on. He was not interested in Miss Selby’s thoughts on Kentish agriculture, but was pleased to notice that Gilbert was. For how many months had Alistair been troubled by his brother’s lack of direction, worried about his aimlessness? Perhaps Miss Selby was the influence he needed.

  While Gilbert and Louisa were fussing over one another’s bruises and bandages, Alistair caught Robin’s eye. “Perhaps you’ll take some air with me, Miss Church,” he suggested, offering his arm. He didn’t know what else to call her even though Gilbert and Miss Selby were perfectly aware that Alistair had met her as Robert Selby, and Charity Church hadn’t been her name for some years.

  No sooner had they stepped outside than they were besieged by chickens. “What the devil do they mean by this?” Alistair asked while fending off a winged attacker.

  She shot him a look that was pure mischief. “They’re paying you a compliment. I’ve been feeding them, so they likely think anyone I keep company with can be relied on.” From the pocket of her gown, she produced a handful of seeds and scattered them on the ground before her.

  “You’ve been feeding chickens. Deplorable.” That would explain the new profusion of freckles on her cheeks, if she had been hatless in the barnyard this past week.

  “Well, you keep sending more of them. Mrs. Trout has her hands full. And if you’re thinking of sending her any more tokens of your esteem, consider a sack of chicken feed.”

  “I’ll send her twenty guineas worth of chicken feed, if only you’ll leave menial labor to the domestics.”

  Now she looked at him with a curious expression. “What am I if not a domestic, my lord?”

  “You’re a thorn in my side and a great many other things besides, but I wish you’d chiefly think of yourself as the future Lady Pembroke.”

  She snorted, tossing another handful of seeds. “I thought we had been through this already. There’s no way for me to marry you or anyone else without Louisa’s name being dragged through the mud.”

  “I’ve thought of a way.” He had turned the matter over in his mind for days now and kept arriving at only one solution. “A way that won’t harm Miss Selby. We go sailing. Gilbert, Miss Selby, you, and me. You’d be dressed as Robert Selby at the outset of the trip. But when we come back, you’d be dressed as Ch
arity Church. We would explain that there was an accident and Robert Selby fell overboard, and in due course we could have him proclaimed dead even without a body.”

  She was silent for a moment, tracing an arc in the dirt with the toe of her boot. “I’m to fake my own death, then.”

  “I know it’s not ideal, but I can think of no better way for you to end the role.”

  “The role,” she repeated. “Right.” She turned back to the chickens, and this time threw seeds so hard that the birds scattered nervously and let out a chorus of squawks. “And we’re simply to hope that nobody ever picks up on the resemblance between the late Robert Selby and Charity Church—pardon me, I mean the Marchioness of Pembroke.” Her voice was dripping with sarcasm.

  “We would have to live a retired life in the country, only coming to town when strictly necessary. Besides, I don’t think you realize how different you look in a gown. Even I didn’t recognize you at first.”

  She narrowed her eyes and he saw that her fists were clenched at her sides. “You don’t think I realize the difference attire makes? As far as living in the country, you would hate that. You dine out and attend dances and balls and plays six nights out of seven. I can’t imagine you cooped up in the country.”

  “You have it all wrong.” He had no need for those entertainments. He had thrown himself into that social whirlwind only to see more of her. And—oh. Understanding hit him like a brick in the head. He might not miss London life, but she would. He had seen with his own eyes how happy she was to be gadding about town; with clever company and entertainment she had flourished. He couldn’t give her that. It was humbling, knowing that there was something he could not give her. “Perhaps we could travel,” he offered, knowing it to be a paltry substitute.

  “We could,” she said with a smile that was so false it was terrifying. “With the result that it would only take longer for anyone to notice the resemblance. Besides, how long would it take for you to notice the jeers and jests at our expense? I’m not a lady. You can put me in a gown far finer than this one and I still won’t be a lady. And I don’t want to be. I’m much happier in breeches and boots anyway.”