The Secret Pearl(92)

“He told you that I have ordered him to leave?” he asked.

“Do you deny it?” Her voice was sharp.

He looked at her for a long time, at the woman whom he had loved so passionately once upon a time and whom he could now only pity.

“I suppose that is what my words to him amounted to,” he said.

She turned her head away from him again. “I am going with him,” she said. “I am leaving you, Adam.”

“I doubt that he will take you,” he said quietly.

“You know him well,” she said. “You know that he would not hurt me for worlds. But he will take me when I have finally convinced him that I will be far more miserable here with respectability and you.”

“I doubt that he will take you,” he repeated. “I think perhaps this time you will have to face the truth, Sybil. I am sorry. I shall make your excuses to our guests for this evening. I shall come to see how you are later.”

“Don’t,” she said. “I don’t want to see you, Adam, not tonight or ever.”

He pulled the bell rope next to the bed and waited in silence until the duchess’s maid appeared.

“Her grace will need you, Armitage,” he said, and left the room.





FLEUR STEPPED INSIDE THE LIBRARY WHEN A footman opened the doors for her without either knocking or announcing her. The man closed the doors quietly behind her.

His grace was writing at the desk, though he put his pen down immediately after she came in, blotted carefully what he had written, and got to his feet. He looked at her with that piercing dark gaze that she always found so disconcerting.

She stood very still, her chin held high, her shoulders back. And she wondered, as she had wondered all through a disturbed night, if he was merely going to reprimand her for some unknown offense—but then, why the formal summons to the library?—or dismiss her or try to seduce her again. Or perhaps there was nothing momentous about the occasion at all. She waited.

“The Honorable Miss Isabella Fleur Bradshaw,” he said very quietly, “of Heron House in Wiltshire.”

Matthew had taken her seriously two days before after all, then. He had told everything. She raised her chin a notch higher.

“Jewel thief and murderer,” he said, “or so the suspicion goes. Every suspected criminal is innocent, of course, until proved guilty.”

Her eyes did not waver from his.

“Are you?” he asked. “A thief and a murderer, I mean?”

“No, your grace.”

“Neither?”

“No, your grace.”

“And yet your cousin’s most costly jewels were found in the trunk that you were to have taken with you had you succeeded in leaving as planned.”

“Yes, your grace.”

“And there was a death.”

“Yes, your grace.”

“You fled,” he said, “when your cousin caught you in the act of committing the murder—to London, with nothing but the clothes you were wearing. A blue silk evening gown and gray cloak. And in London you hid and survived in any way you could.”

“Yes, your grace.”

“But you did not steal there?” he said. “Or even beg?”

“No.”

“You sold only what was yours to sell.”

“Yes.”

He came around the desk and crossed the room to stand a few feet in front of her.

“Will you tell me your story?” he asked. “We might be here all day if I have to ask questions and have monosyllables for answer.”

She continued to stare at him.

“Why not?” he asked.

“I will not be believed,” she said. “When all this is told in a court of law, Lord Brocklehurst will tell the version he has told you, and he will be believed, as you believe him. He is a man and a baron. I am a woman and a governess—and a whore. It is not worth my while to waste my breath.”

“I have learned nothing from Brocklehurst,” he said. “All I know, I have learned independently. I heard him call you Isabella. You yourself called your former home ‘Her—.’ I sent Houghton to Heron House to find out what he could about an Isabella.”

“Why?” The word was whispered.

He shrugged. “Because your past has always been shrouded in mystery,” he said. “Because I knew, unfortunately too late, that only extreme circumstances could have forced you into becoming what you became in London in my company. Because I saw the terror in your face when you first set eyes on Brocklehurst in my drawing room. Because both of you clearly lied about the degree of your acquaintance. Because I care.”

“Perhaps it is as well,” she said. “You have tried to make a liar and a thief and a murderer into your mistress.”