The Marriage Act

by Alyssa Everett

  And the astonishing part was, Caro wanted her husband too. She knew every cold, disdainful thing he’d ever said to her—but she also realized she’d been far from blameless, and the more time she spent with him, the more she cared about him. The stubborn sense of right and wrong that had so galled her for the past five years now seemed admirable, the foundation of a reliability that meant she could trust him despite distance and disagreement. He could be kind and funny and playful too, to say nothing of an exciting and enthusiastic lover. Just looking at him made her heart beat faster.

  She’d come to Stanling Priory with every intention of putting on an act. But somewhere along the line, her happy marriage had crossed the line from make-believe into tantalizing possibility.

  * * *

  To John’s relief, Miss Fleetwood was absent when he and the Fleetwood gentlemen joined Ronnie and the ladies in the drawing room.

  “Sophia has the headache and decided to retire early,” Lady Fleetwood explained to the new arrivals.

  Ronnie looked disappointed at first, but he managed to rally despite Miss Fleetwood’s absence. “Perhaps I can persuade her to take a walk with me tomorrow. You enjoyed your walk today, didn’t you, John?”

  “Very much,” John said with a quick glance at Caro. Her lips twitched, and she ducked her head to hide a blush.

  “In that case, I’ll ask her at breakfast tomorrow,” Ronnie said. “With your permission, of course, Sir Geoffrey, and if John and Caro will agree to come along as chaperones.”

  “I’ll go,” Caro said, sparing John from having to commit himself to another outing with her cousin.

  Though John wanted to be sensitive to Miss Fleetwood’s feelings, he hoped she was making herself scarce out of a belated sense of her own impropriety. He wasn’t particularly eager to go to her father about her conduct, and if she’d realized how woefully inappropriate her actions had been and regretted them enough, perhaps he could put off speaking with Sir Geoffrey until he and Caro were ready to take their leave.

  He was trying to reconcile himself, too, to Caro’s mild reaction to her cousin’s improper advances to him. Perhaps Caro didn’t take a jealous interest in him, perhaps she wasn’t even close to falling in love, but did that have to mean she could never develop feelings for him in the future? Now that he’d realized how coldhearted he must have seemed to her before, he’d changed, really changed, and perhaps with time Caro would come to develop an answering attachment to him.

  He didn’t care how long he had to wait. Caro was worth it.

  “How are you faring tonight, Papa?” Caro asked. “You’re not tiring yourself too much, are you?”

  Was it his imagination, or had Sir Geoffrey and Lady Fleetwood just traded a look?

  Bishop Fleetwood set a hand over his heart. “No, not tiring myself at all, my dear. You mustn’t worry so much about me. You and John came here to enjoy yourselves.”

  “We came here to see you, and to visit Uncle Geoffrey and Aunt Ella.”

  “And there’s no way you could possibly enjoy yourselves, doing that,” her father said with a twinkle.

  “Papa.” Caro gave him a chiding look. “You know that wasn’t what I meant.”

  John regarded the bishop with interest. He did seem stronger than he had when they’d first arrived. He wasn’t as short of breath, and he appeared to move with more ease. Only a few minutes ago, he’d walked from the dining room to the drawing room unaided.

  “Don’t forget you have a letter, Lord Welford,” Lady Fleetwood said, nodding toward the pianoforte. A silver salver atop it bore the day’s post.

  “Ah, yes. Would you excuse me for a moment?”

  “Of course.”

  It was from the Foreign Office. Standing by the pianoforte, John broke open the seal and quickly read through the letter.

  Caro appeared at his elbow. “It’s not bad news, I hope?” she asked quietly.

  He looked up, smiling. “On the contrary. I’ve been promised the position of Secretary of Legation or Secretary of Embassy.” At her blank look, he said, “That’s a step up from attaché. The only higher positions are the two ministerial ranks, and then Ambassador.”

  “Congratulations.” She looked genuinely happy for him. Her eyes shone—though was that because she was pleased at his good news, or because it seemed likely he would soon be leaving the country again? “Where do they propose to send you?”

  “Nowhere yet. I’d be posted to wherever the first such opening occurs in one of our German-speaking missions. I could be sent to the legation in Württemberg, Bavaria, Frankfurt, Saxony, Prussia, Switzerland, possibly even back to the embassy in Vienna...”

  “Goodness. As many places as that! In that case, I can’t imagine it will take long before a post opens up.”

  “I should think some time in the next year.”

  “That’s wonderful news.”

  She looked so lovely, her delicate face smiling up into his. He wanted to ask Would you come with me? But it was a weighty question, fraught with myriad considerations of travel, separation from loved ones and familiar surroundings, cultural differences...and the future of their marriage. He would ask her after they retired and they could speak privately and candidly, rather than here under her family’s noses.

  “Is it a secret?” she whispered. “Is it all right to tell everyone?”

  “It’s not a secret.” He hesitated. “But are you sure you want to tell them when it’s not definite yet, at least not in terms of when and where?”

  He hoped she would say Yes, let’s tell them, and not just because it would be gratifying to know she was proud enough of his success to want to share the news. If she told her family, it might mean she had it in mind to join him—or not. After all, she’d pretended to join him in Vienna, despite remaining in England all the while.

  But the possible meanings were a moot point, for instead of saying Yes, let’s tell them, she merely nodded and said, “You’re right. Perhaps it would be better to wait”—a response that enlightened him not one whit.

  * * *

  It was apparently his night to receive letters. He’d no sooner retired, Caro continuing to their bedroom while he went to his dressing room to file the offer from the Foreign Office with his papers, than he discovered someone had slipped a folded note under his dressing room door. It lay waiting for him to discover it, John written in a feminine script across the back.

  He held it up to the candle to read it.

  Dearest, darling, most admired John,

  Since you will not let me tell you how I feel, I must write what it is in my heart, in the hope—the belief—that it is in your heart too, and that you are simply too honorable to speak without real proof of my devotion.

  When you speak of Caro with such loyalty, it is most commendable of you. But I have discovered the truth, and it has left me struggling to no avail to overcome my sentiments. I know that you and Caro have only been pretending to be happily married. Never mind how I know, but I do, and it pains me to think of you unloved and neglected when you are so kind and handsome and honorable, and everything that is good.

  I love you, deeply and utterly. From the moment we first met, I knew that Fate had brought you here, and that we were destined to be together. I long to be with you, to feel your arms around me and to make you happy as you deserve. There is nothing that I would not do for you, and you have only to ask.

  You told me today—and very sternly, too!—that you are married, and older, but such things can be no barrier to true love. Others may think me rash, but I know that you are too noble to condemn me for following my heart. I pray that you will do likewise.

  Your loving and ever faithful,

  Sophia

  He groaned inwardly. The letter was a mixture of sentiment and hyperbole, every bit as extravagant but not nearly as we
ll written as The Sorrows of Young Werther. It was also so wildly indiscreet that if it fell into the wrong hands, Miss Fleetwood would be irretrievably ruined.

  Someone scratched on his dressing room door.

  He hadn’t rung for Leitner. Letter in hand, John stalked to the door. He was virtually certain he knew who it would be.

  “Miss Fleetwood,” he said when he opened the door. He brandished the letter. “Did you really write this?”

  She gazed at him with adoring eyes. “Of course I did. You must know I did!”

  She said it with all the melodramatic passion of an actress on the stage—or an eighteen-year-old girl who fancied herself in love.

  John frowned and stepped out into the corridor to talk with her. “Good God,” he said in a low, urgent voice, “what were you thinking? Promise me you’ll never write anything so imprudent to a gentleman again, least of all a married man, unless he’s your own husband.”

  Her face fell. “But John—”

  “You should call me Lord Welford.”

  She made a petulant face. “Caro doesn’t.”

  “Caro is my wife.” Even then, he’d been Welford through most of their marriage, though he kept that to himself. “I was under the impression you felt at least a cousinly affection for her.”

  “I do, but—”

  “Then show her the respect she’s owed, and give up this attachment you think you feel for me. Caro and I have been married since before you were out of the schoolroom.”

  Her chin came up. “Lots of men discover grandes amours after they’ve shackled themselves to the wrong woman.”

  “That’s their misfortune. I happen to love my wife.” Whatever pretending he’d done that week, he meant what he said. He hadn’t wanted to admit as much during the five angry years he’d spent licking his wounds in Vienna, but it had been true from the first moment he’d set eyes on Caro. “Don’t you realize that any man prepared to cast aside his wife to be with you would be just as prepared to cast you aside to be with someone else?”

  “But I love you.”

  “You scarcely know me.” It dawned on him that Miss Fleetwood had probably spent more time with him than he’d spent with Caro before he proposed marriage. If that wasn’t reason enough to forgive Caro for running away on their wedding night, nothing was.

  “I know how I feel,” Miss Fleetwood said. “I know I’ll never be happy without you.”

  “You’re only eighteen. Believe me, ‘never’ is a very long time.”

  “I’m not a child. I know what I want. I also know that even if you think you love Caro, she doesn’t love you.”

  His eyes narrowed. “What makes you so sure?”

  “She told me so herself.”

  John studied her in silence. “Excuse me a moment, would you?” He went to the door of the bedroom he shared with Caro and knocked.

  The door opened a moment later, and Caro looked out. “John,” she said in surprise. Her eyes moved past him to her cousin. “And...Sophia?”

  “Would you mind joining us out here for a moment?” John asked.

  Caro stepped through the door, looking confused. “Yes?”

  “You cousin has written me a letter,” he said, holding the sheet of paper up for her to see. “Would you like to read it?”

  “No!” Miss Fleetwood cried. “I wrote that to you. It’s personal.”

  “Caro is my wife,” he said firmly. “This isn’t the kind of thing I’m likely to keep from her. I’ll leave it up to her whether she wants to read your letter or not, but either way, she’s going to know about it.”

  “Well, Caro?” Miss Fleetwood asked, giving her an oddly challenging look. “What do you have to say about that? Do you want to read my letter?”

  Caro threw a nervous glance at her cousin before her gaze returned to him. “Thank you, John, but I don’t need to read it.”

  Baffled, John looked from Caro to Miss Fleetwood and back again. “What’s going on here?”

  “Nothing,” Caro said quickly. “I simply don’t wish to read anything Sophia intended to remain confidential.”

  “Confidential? At the very least, I’m going to have to go to her father about this.” He turned to Miss Fleetwood. “And for God’s sake, don’t ever write such things in a letter again. It’s bad enough to think them and even worse to say them, but to commit them to paper? That has to be the very definition of ‘indiscreet.’ Anyone might see this if it fell into the wrong hands, from your future husband to the patronesses of Almack’s.”

  Her chin came up. “I don’t care.”

  John stuffed the letter in his coat pocket. “You should care. If by some stretch of the imagination I were willing to cast aside my wife, do you really suppose society would turn a blind eye to your taking up with a married lover? For that matter, do you imagine your father and mother would welcome us with open arms once I’d ruined you? Try to think like an adult for a moment.”

  Miss Fleetwood’s brows pinched together in an expression of distress. “You don’t have to be so horrid.”

  “Yes, I do—and what’s more, someday you’ll thank me for it. It won’t be long before everything you’ve said and done today will make you want to sink with embarrassment. When it does, at least you’ll have the consolation of reminding yourself you were too young to know better, and what’s more, everyone around you could see it.”

  Tears pooled in Miss Fleetwood’s eyes. “This isn’t fair! Caro told me herself she doesn’t love you.”

  Caro’s face went pale. “I never—”

  John cut her off with an imperious gesture. “That’s the second time you’ve said that,” he said to Miss Fleetwood. “When did Caro tell you this?”

  Miss Fleetwood’s chin assumed a determined angle. “The first night you were here. I overheard the two of you talking, and Caro caught me listening outside the drawing room door. She admitted the two of you hadn’t been living together in Vienna, and that she was finding it an effort just to be nice to you.”

  “I never said that!” Caro said, looking desperately at John. “I might have been on edge at first because I wasn’t used to our rubbing along well together, but I never said anything of the kind to Sophia.”

  “She made me promise not to tell her father your secret,” Miss Fleetwood insisted, “or to let on to you that I knew.”

  John rounded on Caro. “Is any of what she just said true?”

  Caro had the frantic look of a cornered animal. “That last part...I—I did ask her not to tell my father.”

  “And to make sure I didn’t know?”

  Caro clearly didn’t want to answer him. He refused to look away.

  Finally she gulped and replied in a defeated whisper. “Yes.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I deny the lawfulness of telling a lie to a sick man for fear of alarming him. You have no business with consequences; you are to tell the truth.

  —Samuel Johnson

  John’s voice was devoid of emotion. “I see.”

  Caro’s heart sank. The clipped sentences and coldness were back. “I was going to tell you, truly I was. I was about to confess everything earlier today, but we were interrupted.”

  “Is that so?” John said in a tone that really meant How dare you lie to me even now.

  Caro wheeled on her cousin with a feeling of betrayal. “Why, Sophia? Why are you so determined to make trouble?”

  Sophia flashed out, “If John means to go to my father with my letter, I don’t see why I should have to help you get away with painting yourself the perfect wife and daughter.”

  “Are you that jealous of me?”

  “I’m not jealous. I just don’t think it’s fair for you to pretend to be so wonderful when you’re anything but. Uncle Matthew should know what’s r
eally going on here.”

  At the threatening note in her voice, panic gripped Caro. “But you promised you wouldn’t tell him, remember? You know how ill he is—”

  “I also know you’re not nearly as worried about him as you are about your own perfect reputation. The bishop’s daughter—everyone loves her! When they find out how many lies you’ve been telling, I wager they’ll change their minds about you.” She spun and charged for the stairs.

  Caro started after her. “Sophia, wait! Please—”

  John caught her by the arm. “Stay here.”

  She tried to pull away. “But she’s going to my father. She’ll tell him everything!”

  “Probably, but our marriage comes first,” John said in a voice that brooked no argument. “Before you go running to your father, you owe me an explanation.”

  Her heart was pounding desperately, but she turned back to him with her best attempt at calm. “Fine.”

  John released her. “Let me see if I have this right. Sophia knew our happy marriage was a charade, and you knew that she knew. The only one of us still in the dark, apparently, was me.”

  “I was going to tell you about Sophia, but we were interrupted when Ronnie fell down the stairs, and after that I was just waiting for the right moment.”

  “Did you or did you not promise me you were done keeping secrets?”

  Oh, why must he keep her here talking, when her cousin was even now tearing all her careful defenses to shreds? “I did, and I haven’t kept any secrets from you, at least not since I made that promise. Sophia found out about us before then, on our first night here.”

  “So any secrets you were already keeping don’t count, and it’s my fault for not suspecting there’s more you haven’t told me?” He shook his head, a bleak, defeated look on his face. “Good God. You’re the most fundamentally dishonest person I’ve ever met in my life, and I had the misfortune to marry you.”

  At the word misfortune, a different kind of panic seized her. “No, don’t say that. It’s just that I was afraid if you knew Sophia had found out about us so quickly, you would change your mind about helping me.”