Lilly closed the door again, locking it firmly, as if that did any good. And the chair was once more placed securely beneath the knob to prevent anyone else from entering. Warily, she backed away from it and climbed onto her bed. The blade from the walking stick was placed carefully on the table beside her. But she didn’t recline. Instead, she sat there and watched the door, her heart racing. Every creak and groan of the house made her jump. She wouldn’t be caught unawares. Not by him.
Chapter Fourteen
Lilly entered the church on Val’s arm at five minutes to nine o’clock, the first hour in which any wedding ceremony could be legally performed. She was tired. Her sleep, limited as it was, had been fitful the night before after the encounter with Elsworth. It was something she’d have to share with Val, she knew, but it didn’t seem quite the time.
As she looked toward the altar, a smile spread across her face. He’d said he would take care of the witnesses and when she saw Effie standing there, next to a man with dark good looks and questionable fashion sense, she couldn’t help but smile.
“Thank you for thinking to invite Effie,” she whispered. “With Willa in the country, it’s nice to have someone here that I consider family.”
He nodded but seemed uncomfortable with the praise. “You’re very welcome.”
“Who is that with her?”
“He’s a friend,” Val replied. “Lord Highcliff. He issued the invitation to her on our behalf.”
“Why would he do that?” Lilly asked, eyeing him with curiosity.
“I believe that he and Miss Darrow are well acquainted with one another,” Val answered.
He wasn’t lying. But he wasn’t telling her the entire truth. Lilly was certain of that. If he was as easy to read at the card tables as he was with her, it was a wonder he’d ever managed to fleece anyone. “I don’t know whatever made you think you could be a spy! You’re a terrible liar. Say what you mean, Valentine.”
“I think they have an affection for one another… but one they are both clearly in denial of at present,” he admitted. It was still carefully worded and very cagey, but his meaning was abundantly clear.
Lilly looked at them, once more, her gaze traveling back and forth between them. Surely not. The man was barely respectable from what she had heard. He was not dressed in the standard of the day. He’d eschewed Beau Brummell’s more minimalist and masculine style in favor of something that harkened back to an earlier time—so much so that he appeared rather foppish. The morning coat he wore was not the gray, blue, black or even deep green favored by so many. It was a shocking shade of chartreuse that clashed with his blindingly yellow waistcoat. If that wasn’t enough, his breeches had been tailored so closely to his body that it was surely a wonder they had permitted him in the church.
As they neared the pulpit, the bishop emerged from a doorway to their left. He was dressed in a red cassock and looked terribly important. And terribly disapproving. “This is the couple, Lord Highcliff?”
“Yes, your grace,” Highcliff replied. “Lord Valentine Augustus Somers, Viscount Seaburn and Miss Lillian—forgive me, my dear, but I do not know your middle name?”
“It’s Avon, my lord.”
“Like the river?” he asked.
“Yes.” The name had been a final insult from her father given the manner in which he claimed her mother had died. She should only be thankful he hadn’t named her after the Thames.
“Shall we get started?” Effie asked cheerfully, clearly knowing that it was a sore subject.
“Yes,” the bishop agreed. “You have the license?”
Highcliff produced it from inside his coat pocket, revealing that the lining was a shade of pink she had never seen before. The effect of so many colors was dizzying.
The bishop reviewed the license. He made a sound that could have been assent or denial. Then he immediately opened the small, ornate tome on the altar table and began to read from the Book of Common Prayer.
At first, Lilly wasn’t entirely certain what was happening. Then as she realized that her wedding ceremony had begun so, well, unceremoniously, she had to stifle a giggle. Perhaps it was her degree of exhaustion or the turmoil that had led them to that point, but it all seemed rather ridiculous to her. Or it did until she looked up and met Val’s gaze. He didn’t appear amused. In fact, he looked serious and intense, as if what was being said was of life or death importance. In that regard, Lilly supposed he was correct. It sobered her giddiness immediately.
In all, it was quick and efficient and alarmingly anticlimactic. Val slid a ring on her finger, they signed their names in a book, as did Effie and Lord Highcliff, then they were all shuffled out of the church and were standing in the middle of the crowded street before she could even appreciate all that had occurred.
“That was…” She trailed off, uncertain what to say about the very brief ceremony.
“I believe the word you are looking for is perfunctory, my dear Lady Seaburn,” Highcliff offered, ever helpful. “I’m afraid a special license on a Tuesday only gets you perfunctory. Pomp and circumstance are reserved for those who have a planned wedding with the posted banns and orange blossoms. It does not accompany a hastily called in favor, sadly.”
“Well, I suppose it’s efficient, at least,” she said.
“Thank you, Highcliff, for your assistance,” Val said.
“You are more than welcome, my friend. I’ve arranged a carriage for you which is waiting just down the street. It will take you to my house in Richmond… out of the city and away from your grandmother and Elsworth. It’s hardly a wedding trip, but it will at least offer a bit of privacy. I’ll send a note around to the dowager duchess when I’ve returned home,” Highcliff said, his manner breezy and indolent. “The last thing anyone wants is a search party to interrupt their wedding night!”
As Lilly watched him, she noted that the movements were not truly natural. It was almost choreographed, like a person executing dance steps with a kind of studied precision. An act. All of it. His clothes, his manner, even the affectation of breathlessness in his speech. It was all an act.
“You and my husband aren’t simply friends, are you, Lord Highcliff?” she asked.
“My dear, what else would we be?” Highcliff asked, staring at her with something akin to shock.
“I think I would classify you as comrades-in-arms. But it isn’t cards for you, is it? It’s something else altogether,” Lilly observed and allowed her gaze to land pointedly on the hideous waistcoat. “You’ve created quite the illusion, my lord. I hope it serves you well.”
Highcliff grinned. It was the first honest expression he’d worn the entire time. It vanished as quickly as it had come. “I think you are a dangerous woman, Lady Seaburn. And my dear friend should be very cautious with you, indeed. Off with you both,” he said dismissively. “Now, Miss Darrow, may I see you home?”
“Thank you, Lord Highcliff. I would be delighted,” Effie said, and placed her hand on his arm as they walked away.
“What’s he really like in private?” Lilly asked.
“Intense, terrifying, impatient, unwilling to tolerate any foolishness or cowardice, and loyal to the very depths of his soul,” Val replied. “Shall we go?”
Lilly glanced down at her hand and the very large emerald that winked on her finger. It was all really happening, she thought. “I suppose we should. It was rather nice of Lord Highcliff to arrange everything just so.”
Val laughed at that. “Highcliff has been called many things, Lilly. I doubt nice has ever been one of them, but I will be certain to tell him so. He will enjoy that tremendously.”
*
The carriage rumbled through the streets of London, its pace often slowed and sometimes even halted by the congestion that was a plague on the city. Highcliff was draped across one seat with practiced indolence and an expression of disaffected ennui. Effie sat on the opposite bench facing him, prim, proper and all the things a lady should be. He watched her for a moment and noted
that she watched him, as well. Some things would never change it seemed. No matter how different they were and no matter the past that lay between them.
“The curtains are closed,” she said, after a long and silent moment. “You need not put on such an act in here for me… not when we both know the truth.”
His lips quirked even as he sat up and assumed what was a more normal posture for him. There were times when the act of addlepated dandy exhausted him. But it had been worth its weight in gold with the information to which he had become privy to as a result. After all, people were willing to say just about anything in front of a person they thought to be both stupid and disinterested.
“All of your charges are getting married off—and to titled gentlemen to boot. Soon, you’ll have a line of matchmaking mamas at your door demanding entry for their desperate daughters,” he observed.
“My charges have no mothers and they have, at best, disinterested fathers. I’m not interested in taking on pupils who have parents to see to their futures,” she replied sharply.
“Always the savior, Effie,” he murmured softly. “Who saves you?”
“I do not need saving,” she replied. “You know that better than anyone.”
Recalling the night they’d met, the terrible moment when she’d been forced to defend herself against something no woman should ever have to endure, his fists clenched. No, he hadn’t saved her. She’d saved herself, leaving the man who would have assaulted her writhing on the ground in agony as she’d dusted off her torn and dusty skirts. It had been a darkened highway in the countryside. Two drunken louts who’d fancied themselves highwaymen had stopped her carriage. One had decided to take more than just her purse. As he’d ridden up onto the scene, one man had fled, leaving the other in the middle of his attempted assault which she had soundly thwarted with a well-aimed warming pan.
“I suppose I do,” he agreed.
“When will you give it all up?” she asked, changing the subject abruptly.
“When there are no more traitors amongst us or when I have drawn my last breath,” he answered honestly. Ferreting out those who profited at the expense of their own countrymen was the only skill he possessed that was of use to anyone. He’d made it his life’s work. But it had taken much more from him than simply time. His entire life was a lie and his soul grew blacker and more bitter from it by the day.
“And at what cost to you? You live a constant charade, Nicholas, hiding behind a mask!” She reached across the distance of the carriage and grasped his hand in hers.
It was a gesture meant to comfort. He knew that. But it burned him like a brand, nonetheless.
She continued imploringly. “If you do not cease this, there will be nothing left of you to save. You lose yourself to it a little more every day.”
Deliberately, he pried her hand from his. “Be careful the filth of me does not rub off on you. I would not have you stain yourself on my account. I’ll not add that to the black marks that already darken my conscience.”
She pulled back, almost as if he’d struck her. “We were friends once.”
They had never been friends. Or rather he had not. He had loved her from the first and, even then, he’d known that he was unworthy of her. But he’d played the part of boon companion for as long as he could because it had given him the chance to bask in her presence. “Friends? Is that what we were? It was a lark, Effie… two young people enjoying the summer in the countryside before the harsh realities of the world intruded.”
Pain flared in the depths of her warm, green eyes. Just as quickly it was gone, masked by her uncanny ability to use etiquette as armor. “Regardless of the circumstances in which our friendship ended, my affection for you was genuine, then as now. You will always have it, whether you wish to or not.”
“Why did you refuse Sutton’s offer, Effie? Surely it wasn’t out of affection for me?” He was twisting the knife, being cruel to be kind. He wanted to stamp out any lingering softness she held in her heart for him.
“I refused Sutton because I did not wish to marry Sutton. Contrary to your overblown sense of self-worth, people do make decisions in this world that have absolutely nothing to do with you,” she chided.
He grinned, but it was a cold expression, one that hinted at the darkness that had become a part of him over the years. “So my half-brother, then the heir apparent before his unfortunate duel, deigned to offer the role of lady wife to the bastard daughter of a neighbor. The daughter who happened to be the only friend of his own bastard half-brother born of their mother’s infidelity… a girl, I might add, that he’d never even before looked at. Yet, it had nothing to do with me? If you believe his offer was based on anything more than his hatred of me and his desire to take something he thought was mine… well, you are fooling yourself about him as much as you ever have about me.”
“I cannot attest to his motives in making the offer, only to my own in my refusal. I didn’t wish to be his wife,” she said simply.
“And did you ever wish to be mine?” He wanted to call the words back, to have never spoken that secret desire to her. It left him naked and vulnerable in a way that he had never been with another soul in his life.
“No,” she said firmly. “I adored you, Nicholas. I enjoyed your company, your wit… but I knew even then that you were not a man meant to be my husband. Nor any woman’s for that matter. It wasn’t simply that you found yourself in danger, but that you courted it with a recklessness and abandon that told me the truth of it from the outset. You wanted to die. I knew that you’d never make yourself into a husband whether you wed or not, but whatever poor woman was foolish enough to try being a wife to you would quickly be made into a widow.”
He wanted to deny it. He wanted to tell her she was wrong. But he’d never lied to her even if he’d had to lie to others in her presence. She always knew the truth of him, it seemed. “And since you couldn’t save the bastard son who loved you, you saved the bastard daughters of the world that made him.”
“I saved those who reminded me of where I might have been had my father been a different man.”
A man like yours. She didn’t utter those words. They didn’t have to be spoken. But they hung between them just the same. Everything about him that she now detested and feared had been forged as much by the cruelty of the man the world knew as his father as by the violence he’d witnessed and dealt during the war. That boy she’d known, the one who loved her and saw her as so far above him, that boy was no more. He’d been stamped out and eradicated years before.
The carriage halted in front of the elegant Georgian townhouse that functioned as the Darrow School for Girls. It was a reprieve, but not truly a welcome one. “You are home,” he said. “I would help you down, but it’s best by all accounts that we are not seen together.”
She rose and moved toward the door of the carriage. At the last moment, she turned and looked back at him. “I still have your chess board. You are welcome to come for a game anytime. You know where my study is.”
“I do,” he said. But he didn’t offer any commitment to the invitation. They both knew he would accept it however. He couldn’t do anything else. Being in her presence cut him like a dull blade every time—jagged, painful and deep. Despite that, the pain of being forever absent from her life was more than he could bear. So he would accept her olive branch and return some night to play chess with her while he quietly railed against the fact that nothing else could ever exist between them.
Chapter Fifteen
They did not go immediately to Highcliff’s Richmond home, but instructed the driver to take them instead to the small office in Cheapside that housed the offices of the solicitor Lilly’s great-aunt had retained. They needed answers about the bequest and who would benefit if Lilly failed to meet the terms set forth.
As they neared the address, Val surveyed her in the pretty amethyst-colored day dress she wore. His ring winked on her finger and the posy she’d carried during the ceremony was still clutched i
n her hand. “It isn’t exactly how one envisions spending their wedding day, is it?” he asked.
“I’d never envisioned having a wedding day,” she admitted. “As a rule, governesses and companions simply fade slowly into spinsterhood. Marriage and weddings are not supposed to be for us, only for the girls we help to raise.”
“But you don’t like rules,” he said with a smile. “And so you’ve broken another one, shattering expectations of you left and right, as it were.”
She laughed softly at that. “I suppose I have.”
The carriage door opened and the driver lowered the steps. Val climbed out first and then reached back for her, taking her hand. “Let’s go see what we can find out about who may have tried to murder you, shall we?”
She shivered at that, but nodded in agreement.
Together, they entered the building and climbed the stairs to the small office on the second floor. It was dark and dingy, smelling of mold and something else he could not quite name. Knocking softly on the aged wood with its cracked and peeling paint, the door slowly swung inward. The hair on his neck lifted, standing on end as his skin prickled with the sense of looming danger.
“Wait here,” he said.
“In the hall? For anyone to come by? I think not. I may be a bit reckless and dislike rules, but there is one rule that I will not break today. There is safety in numbers,” she said firmly.
It was logic he couldn’t fault. “Stay close to me.”
“Closer than your own shadow,” she said.
Entering the offices slowly, they paused in the small antechamber. There was a deserted desk there and a handful of chairs. Another door opened off the room and it was ajar. The smell from the hall grew stronger the deeper they moved into that space and he knew instantly what it was. Death.
“Nothing good will be found behind that door, Lilly. You don’t have to look,” he said.
“You don’t know what the solicitor looked like, Val. I do. If it is Mr. Littleton… we’ll go together,” she insisted.
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