The Marriage Act

by Alyssa Everett

  Besides, Ronnie’s tippling had given Welford yet another excuse to turn disapproving and toplofty. It was one of her husband’s particular talents, along with writing a perfect copperplate hand and looking as if his clothes didn’t know how to wrinkle.

  “When we reach Barnet, do you think we might stop for a bite of cheesecake at the Green Man?” Caro asked.

  “We’re not going through Barnet.” John consulted his watch. “We’ll take the Edgware Road to St. Albans, and pick up the Holyhead Road there.”

  “The Edgware Road?” Caro said in surprise. “Why not the St. John Street Turnpike? Papa always goes that way.”

  “I thought you were in a hurry to reach your father.”

  “I am, but a little cheesecake isn’t going to—”

  “The route to St. Albans is shorter and straighter too, heading west from Mayfair. We’ll take the Edgware Road.”

  Never mind that everyone went north through Barnet, and she’d just said she wished to stop at the Green Man. Caro could already see how the journey was going to go. Welford would gainsay her at every turn, not for any compelling reason but simply because he could. That was how he liked to amuse himself, by thwarting her.

  At the approaching click of boots on the marble tile, Welford glanced over his shoulder. “Ah. My valet, Leitner.”

  Caro had to school herself not to stare, for Welford’s man wasn’t at all what she’d expected. The dapper figure in white-tasseled Hessians wore his light brown hair brushed off his forehead and into a lofty wave. Padding filled out the shoulders of his blue velvet coat, and both his shirt points and his high shawl collar reached past his earlobes. His appearance contrasted so markedly with Welford’s—whatever her husband’s faults, he possessed not a whiff of foppishness about him—that for a moment she wondered how an employer and a manservant could be so absurdly mismatched.

  The valet bowed smartly from the hips. “May I bid you good morning, my lady?” he said in a foreign accent. “And you also, Mr. Ronald. I have heard much about you.”

  Did “you” mean Ronnie specifically or her as well? Any picture Welford had painted of her couldn’t possibly be flattering. She smiled at Leitner, hoping to suggest she wasn’t the harpy he’d been led to believe, but he’d already turned to speak to her husband.

  “Hübsch is sie, die gnäd’ge Frau.”

  Welford’s eyes darted to her. “Sei nicht unverschämt. Und sprich Englisch in ihrer Gegenwart.”

  So Welford’s valet was Viennese, and only Welford could understand him. And they were obviously discussing her.

  She quailed at the prospect of facing the next three days. If only Mary hadn’t eaten that pork pie when they’d stopped to rest the horses on the way to London! Caro couldn’t very well expect her abigail to travel when the poor girl had spent the better part of the night racked with nausea and violent stomach pains. Caro had briefly considered postponing their departure, but with her father in dire health and Welford’s continued cooperation chancy, what could she do but leave Mary behind to recover?

  Now she was heading off with the one person who hated her most in all the world, and she would be alone and at his mercy.

  * * *

  Sitting across from Caroline as their carriage left Cumberland Gate behind on its way out of London, John wondered whether his wife had taken lovers in the years since they’d parted.

  No, he didn’t really want to know that. He supposed she must have—a stunningly beautiful young woman, left to her own devices, and one who’d planned to elope with a militia officer at the tender age of seventeen? For that matter, John still wondered whether she’d really been a virgin on their wedding night, despite the faint trace of blood on the sheets. For his first few despairing months in Vienna, he’d lived in vague dread of receiving a letter informing him she was increasing, since he would’ve had no way to tell whether the baby was his.

  Then again...she’d certainly seemed inexperienced that night, fumbling and blushing and regarding him with big wide eyes despite his patient efforts not to hurt or startle her. He’d felt an aching tenderness for her, and at the time he’d never doubted he was her first. But then, that was before he realized what an exceptionally gifted actress she was.

  Besides, if Caroline really had been a virgin when he married her, why on earth would she have waited until after he’d bedded her to run off to her militia officer? She’d had opportunity enough to slip away just after the ceremony and again as they’d prepared to retire, and opportunity enough to demur once he’d joined her in their bedchamber. It all added up to the painful conclusion that she and her Lieutenant Howe must have been lovers, and she’d consummated the marriage purely to supply herself with a convenient explanation in case she fell pregnant.

  What had she said to him last night? I wasn’t sufficiently bowled over by your prodigious lovemaking to decide you were the better man. That certainly sounded as if she’d been in a position to compare.

  John shifted uncomfortably. Gad, it wasn’t worth obsessing over. He’d made a sincere and honorable offer for her hand, had meant every word of the vows he took. He’d truly been in love with her and wanted nothing more than to make her happy. And all along, she’d been playing him for a fool.

  Across from him, Caro peered out the carriage window, her long neck a graceful curve. “What did your valet say about me?”

  “What makes you think he was talking about you?”

  “I can tell when someone is looking at me, Welford, even when I don’t speak the language.”

  John settled back with his arm stretched along the top of the seat cushion. “He said you were pretty.” He was careful to sound detached, as if it meant nothing to him what she looked like, as if he hadn’t lain awake most nights in Vienna picturing the delicacy of her face. “I told him not to be impertinent.” And to speak English in her presence.

  “Did he? Thank you for telling me.”

  Why did she sound so surprised? Her beauty had never been in doubt. It was her character that ruined everything.

  He crossed one booted foot over the other. “I’m curious. How is it that your father believes we’ve been living together? Surely you must’ve had some communication with him since I left the country.”

  “Of course I have.”

  “Then is he under the impression I wasn’t really in Vienna, or you weren’t really in England?”

  She gave a slight toss of her head. “That I wasn’t in England. It was easier that way to make my excuses when he pressed us to come and visit.”

  “At least Leitner won’t have to adopt a Basingstoke burr when he speaks,” John said dryly. “Did you never worry your father might discover you were really at Halewick?”

  “It worried me a great deal,” she admitted, a little of the archness going out of her manner, “but I lived very quietly there, and Papa never has cause to travel to Surrey.”

  “Hmm.” He wasn’t sure what lived very quietly meant, but he had to admit he’d never heard a breath of scandal about her. If nothing else, she knew how to be discreet. He was thankful for that small mercy. “Does Ronnie know about this deception?”

  “He knows I’d prefer my father to think I was with you in Vienna, so as not to worry him. He’s been tactful enough not to ask why you left me behind in the first place. I think he believes it was a purely practical arrangement, so I could look after your interests while you were out of the country. But then Ronnie always insists on thinking the best of you.”

  Good old Ronnie. It amazed John that his young half brother had wound up so good-natured and loyal when Ronnie’s mother had done her utmost to sow discord between them. But then, John had always been fond of Ronnie. He could remember leaning over his cradle when Ronnie was only a few months old, making faces until Ronnie laughed. He’d got it down to a science, knowing exactly which faces were sure t
o draw a happy gurgle. One of the worst things about being sent away at the age of thirteen had been knowing that by the time he came back, Ronnie would probably have forgotten him.

  “How did your father write to you if he thought you were in Vienna, and how did you write to him?”

  “I instructed him to send his letters to your solicitor—well, a solicitor, a Mr. Chadwick—and pretended Mr. Chadwick arranged to include them with the diplomatic dispatches. I told Papa the letters would reach me more quickly and more safely that way. And I pretended my letters to him traveled in much the same fashion, entering England with the diplomatic pouch and then passing to your solicitor, who was also your man of business and handled all of your personal correspondence in your absence.”

  John was torn between disapproval and admiration. He’d known she was devious, but engaging a solicitor for the sole purpose of cozening her father? It was hard to credit she was really the daughter of a bishop and not the offspring of a criminal mastermind. He half expected her to pull out a pistol at some point on their journey, clap it to his temple and threaten, Your money or your life.

  “The difficulty was what to do about your frank,” she went on. “It made sense you would’ve franked the letters before adding them to the dispatches, rather than leaving your solicitor to supply the postage—”

  He sat forward in alarm. “Tell me you didn’t forge my frank.”

  “Do give me some credit,” she said with a pinched expression. “I know it’s a crime.”

  “A very serious crime. A capital crime.”

  “I’ve already said I didn’t do it.”

  He sat back and let out a slow breath. “Good.”

  “I wrote that you were a high stickler and didn’t believe in using your frank for anything except government business. I played it off as one of your endearing little quirks, that you should be so strict about such things even with your own wife, but the more I thought about it the more it seemed like something you would do.”

  In other words, he was rigid and uncompromising. “I suppose some of us are more generous with our favors than others.”

  She was silent a moment, then replied frostily, “And some of us are so ungallant as to stoop to insult.”

  She had him there. It had been rather uncalled-for, given that they’d gone a full five minutes in civil conversation. “I’m sorry,” he said with no little reluctance. “I should have kept that thought to myself.”

  They sat in strained silence for the next eight miles, over Maida Hill and through Kilburn Wells, until they reached Edgware and stopped to rest and water the horses.

  Chapter Four

  There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance, as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman.

  —Samuel Johnson

  The yard at The White Hart was busy, with two wagons, a gig and a stagecoach present, and a handful of travelers going in and out of the inn. Welford planned to stop for only a quarter of an hour, so after a brief turn about the inn yard to stretch her legs Caro returned to the carriage. She had to admit, if only to herself, that Welford had been right to prefer the Edgware Road. They were making excellent progress and would likely reach St. Albans before they would need to change horses.

  Two more days, and she should be with her father at her uncle’s house in Kegworth. What would she find waiting for her there? She was afraid to imagine the possibilities—that Papa might be bedridden, gasping for breath, gray-complexioned. She would have to put on a brave face for his sake, but how would she bear seeing him that way? She’d let more than five good years slip by, never visiting him once.

  She could never excuse such a lapse, not when she had the best and dearest papa any girl could ask for, one as good and wise as he was kind. Many children had parents they admired, but her father was beloved by everyone he met. He’d taken on no end of good causes—establishing a visiting society to relieve the poor in Essex, raising money to build the new hospital for the unfortunate inmates of Bedlam, championing the efforts of the Ladies’ Association for the Reformation of the Female Prisoners in Newgate to establish a school for inmates’ children, raising a public subscription for the widows of shipwrecked sailors, opening a shelter for the poor in winter...The list went on and on.

  She’d always been proud and a little awed to see him dressed in his imposing clerical robes—the rochet with its voluminous white lawn sleeves, and over it the black silk chimere and white Geneva bands. At the time of his consecration, he’d been the youngest bishop in the Church. He might even have become Archbishop of Canterbury by now, if he hadn’t divided his time so carefully between his devotion to his calling and his devotion to his family. How many times as a little girl had she sat in his lap, playing with his pocket watch or falling asleep in his arms as he worked on a sermon or wrote a letter to one of his clergy? He’d been both mother and father to her after her mother died.

  Papa had never openly played favorites, but Caro knew just the same that she held that place in his heart—the youngest of four children, and the only girl. He sometimes called her “cara mia,” a play on her name that meant my beloved in Italian. He’d liked to take her with him when he traveled, pride shining in his eyes whenever he introduced her to his friends and colleagues.

  “Have you met my lovely daughter?” he would say. “That I should be the father of such a beauty is surely proof that miracles are possible.”

  She would blush and protest “Oh, Papa!” but she loved every word.

  And he’d never once forgotten her birthday—even in the years since her wedding, he’d sent her a gift every June, always something personal like a piece of jewelry or a book selected just for her. The first wretched year of her marriage, only two weeks after Welford had left her for Vienna, one of the first things the solicitor had intercepted had been her birthday present—a brilliant green parrot that hopped gaily about its cage and whistled “Au Clair de la Lune,” almost as if her father had guessed how desperately she craved company.

  He’d done so much for her and loved her so faithfully. She wanted to be the kind of daughter he deserved, but she hadn’t tried nearly hard enough.

  Not that it was easy, measuring up to the affection of the beloved Bishop of Essex. He’d sometimes chided her for being too impulsive, but if he only knew all the many ways she’d fallen short, all her failings great and small—the fibs, the times she’d nodded off in church, the irritability, the occasional rudeness—how disappointed in her he would be. And if he knew the worst of it, that she’d conceived a grand passion for a fickle young militia officer and ruined her marriage over it...She shuddered.

  As much as she hated to admit it, she owed Welford her thanks for the way he’d caught up to her on their wedding night, stopping her before she could board the stagecoach that would have taken her to Lawrence Howe. There were days when she hated him for having dragged her out of that inn, but then there were days like today, when she was grateful she hadn’t entirely burned her bridges. As unhappy as her marriage was, at least she hadn’t made herself into a social pariah. She could still see her father and, as long as Welford kept his word, pretend that all was well.

  The horses must be almost ready, reinvigorated with water and a wisp of hay. Caro peered out the carriage window, checking on the gentlemen. Welford was talking with his valet, who’d actually made him laugh about something. Strange how he looked almost like a different man when he laughed—quite a handsome man, really, and one who’d definitely caught the eye of the young lady who’d arrived in the gig, though Welford didn’t appear to have noticed.

  At loose ends, Ronnie had picked up three horse chestnuts from beneath a tree and was attempting to juggle them. He dropped them more often than he caught them, but at last he succeeded in keeping all three in the air for several protracted seconds. His eyes on his task, he moved backward with his effort
s to keep the chestnuts aloft. One step, two, three—

  Not looking where he was going, Ronnie backed into the path of a middle-aged woman as she emerged from the inn, bumping into her and causing her to drop the basket she was carrying.

  “Young sir!” she cried angrily. “Watch where you’re going. You’ve made me lose my pie and cider!”

  “Have I?” Ronnie said with a look of dismay, tossing the horse chestnuts to the ground. “Oh, dash it, I’m sorry. I didn’t see you—”

  Welford moved in, picking up the woman’s basket for her. “Go back to Argos, Ronnie,” he said firmly. “And if you plan on attempting to juggle again, do keep away from axes and flaming torches.” He turned his attention to the outraged woman. “Allow me to make recompense for my half brother’s carelessness. Would half a crown suffice?”

  “Half a crown?” At the sum, the two spots of angry color on the woman’s cheeks faded. “Bless you, sir, it didn’t cost half that much.”

  Welford reached into his waistcoat pocket. “Please. I insist.”

  Her round face splitting into a smile, she accepted the silver coin with a deep curtsy. “Thank you, sir. I’m sure your brother didn’t mean any harm.”

  “Half brother,” he corrected her. “And I’m grateful for your kind forbearance.” He touched his beaver hat to her before turning back to the carriage.

  “I’m sorry,” Ronnie said, dogging Welford’s steps in an attempt to issue an apology. “I didn’t mean to crash into her that way.”

  “You never mean to do anything,” Welford said evenly. “I thought I told you to go back to Argos. You’ve caused quite enough damage for one day, and we’re only on our first stop.”

  “Yes, but I—”

  “That’s enough, Ronnie. You’re not a child anymore. Try to remember that.”

  Caro watched, angry for Ronnie’s sake. Welford might have been more patient with him, and more careful not to embarrass him in public.