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“There is someone waiting to see you, sir. A Mr. Marvin, from Locke, Marvin, and Sons. He says it’s urgent. I have him in the morning room.”

Stuart forwned. Locke, Marvin, & Sons were Bertie’s solicitors. What could Bertie possibly want of him?

“If you’ll excuse me,” he said to his new fiancée.

Stuart’s first reaction upon seeing Mr. Marvin was that the years had not been kind: The solicitor had deteriorated from the rather eminent-looking individual Stuart remembered to this nondescript little old man. Then he realized, no, he’d never met Mr. Marvin. He was thinking of Mr. Locke, with whom he’d conferred twice early in ’82, to see if they could come to some sort of mutually acceptable agreement that would allow Stuart, bankrupt from Bertie’s five years of relentless legal maneuvers, to bring an end to the nightmare and still hold on to a fig leaf of dignity.

“Mr. Marvin, an unexpected pleasure,” he said, offering his hand.

“My apologies, Mr. Somerset, for disturbing you in your hour of leisure,” answered Mr. Marvin.

“I assume it’s a matter of some importance that brought you here today,” Stuart said.

“It is, sir,” said Mr. Marvin. “My condolences. Your brother passed away earlier this evening.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Mr. Bertram Somerset passed away earlier this evening. I called on you as soon as I received the news myself. Your man was kind enough to give me directions to Mr. Bessler’s house.”

Whether Bertie lived or died made little difference to Stuart, except—

“You mean to tell me I’m his heir?”

“Indeed, sir,” affirmed the lawyer. “As he never married and sired no children, all his worldly possessions have devolved to you: Fairleigh Park, land in Manchester, Leeds, and Liverpool, a house in Torquay—”

“Excuse me,” said Stuart. He didn’t need an enumeration of Bertie’s properties. They’d fought over every last rock and brick that hadn’t been part of Fairleigh Park. “How did he die?”

“The doctor believes it to have been a catastrophic failure of the heart.”

“A catastrophic failure of the heart,” echoed Stuart. Frankly he was surprised. He thought Bertie’s heart had withered long ago.

He asked the questions expected of him—Would there be an inquest? Who was responsible for funeral arrangements? Did the staff at Fairleigh Park require immediate directions from him?—and thanked the solicitor for his trouble.

Mr. Marvin showed himself out. Stuart returned to the drawing room. Mr. Bessler had joined his daughter. They must have guessed—both waited solemnly for him to speak.

“My brother is no longer with us,” said Stuart. “He passed away several hours ago.”

“My condolences,” said Mr. Bessler.

“I’m sorry,” said Lizzy.

“We will have to delay the engagement announcement until after his funeral,” Stuart said.

“Of course,” said both the Besslers.

“And you’ll have your hands full after we are married, Lizzy, for I have inherited Fairleigh Park.”

“That is not a problem,” she answered. “You know I like to lord over houses, the bigger the better.”

He smiled briefly. “Shall we toast our engagement, then? I’m afraid I must leave soon, much sooner than I’d like.”

He had a case that would come up before the Master of Rolls in a fortnight. And the necessity of attending Bertie’s funeral and seeing to the estate in the meanwhile meant he must start final preparations for the case right away.

Champagne was brought out and consumed. Stuart took his leave, but Lizzy followed him to the vestibule.

“Are you quite all right?” she asked. “About your brother, that is.”

“I couldn’t be more all right if I tried,” he said in all honesty. “He and I haven’t spoken in twenty years.”

“It’s just that, when I first met you, there were times when you seemed disconsolate. I’d always wondered if it was because of your brother.”

He shook his head. “I wasn’t disconsolate.” Then, more truthfully, “And it wasn’t because of my brother.”

Stuart lived not in his constituency of South Hackney, but in the elegant enclaves of Belgravia. From the Bessler house, he returned directly home and worked ’til quarter past two, when he judged he’d done enough for the night.

He poured himself some whiskey and took an intemperate swallow. The news of Bertie’s death affected him more now than it had earlier—there was a numbness in his head that had nothing to do with fatigue.

It was the shock of it, he supposed. He hadn’t expected Mortality, ever present though it was, to strike Bertie, of all people.

Two shelves up from the whiskey decanter was a framed photograph of Bertie and himself, taken when Bertie had been eighteen and he seventeen, shortly after he’d been legitimized by both an Act of Parliament and the marriage of his parents

What had Bertie said to him that day?

You may be legitimized, but you will never be one of us. You don’t know how Father panicked when it looked as if your mother might live. Your people are laborers and drunks and petty criminals. Don’t flatter yourself otherwise.

For years afterward, whenever he’d remembered Bertie, it was Bertie as he had been at that precise moment in time, impeccably turned out, a cold smile on his face, satisfied to have at last ruined something wonderful for his bastard-born brother.

But the slim youth in the picture, his fine summer coat faded to rust, resembled no one’s idea of a nemesis. His fair hair, ruthlessly parted and slicked back, would have looked gauche in more fashionable circles. The square placement of his feet and the hand thrust nonchalantly into the coat pocket meant to indicate great assurance. As it was, he looked like any other eighteen-year-old, trying to radiate a manly confidence he didn’t possess.

Stuart frowned. How long had it been since he’d last
looked
at the photograph?

The answer came far more easily than he’d expected. Not since that night. He’d last looked at it with
her,
who’d studied the image with a disturbing concentration.

Do you still hate him?
she’d asked, giving the photograph back to him.

Sometimes,
he’d answered absently, distracted by the nearness of her blush-pink lips. She’d been all eyes and lips, eyes the color of a tropical ocean, lips as full and soft as feather pillows.

Then I don’t like him either,
she’d said, smiling oddly.

Do you know him?
he’d asked—suddenly, and for absolutely no reason.

No.
She’d shaken her head with a grave finality, her beautiful eyes once again sad.
I don’t know him at all.

Chapter Three

June 1882

S
he didn’t know him at all, Verity thought, a ringing dizziness in her head. She didn’t know him at all.

“You lied to me,” Bertie repeated his accusation, his words as heavy and hard as manacles.

“I did not,” she said, trying to keep her voice down to a reasonable volume. “Why would I lie about something like that?”

“Should I even dignify that with an answer?” Bertie was too well-bred to sneer, but the contempt in his voice made her turn her face, as if bracing for a slap.

“I was not trying to trap you into marriage,” she said through clenched teeth.

She wanted to marry him, of course. She loved him. And marrying him would rectify all the missteps of her youth and restore her to Society. But her pride was as great as his, and if he thought any less of her—

“‘I know something that would make you hold your head up high again,’” he mimicked her. “‘You can marry the daughter of a duke.’”

The battle for his inheritance had gone all the way up to the Court of Appeals. And their decision had devastated Bertie. He had not believed that he, the rightful heir, would be evicted from his own town house. Yet he had been, by a horde of constables, and allowed to remove only his clothes.

He could never show his face in London again.

She had been despondent for him, had railed against his brother and the bewigged, berobed old men who wouldn’t know a proper application of Common Law if it robbed them in broad daylight. And then an idea had come to her, a wonderful idea that would solve all their problems and salve both their battered dignities at once.

“I told you—”

“They showed me the Lady Vera Drake’s photographs, and she was not you. They showed me her tombstone. They even offered to summon the physician who attended her on her deathbed.”

“Did you tell them you wanted to marry me?” It would have made all the difference, particularly to the duchess.

He glared at her. “Have you completely lost your mind? It was embarrassing enough for me to go before Their Graces and inquire if this servant of mine could be their late beloved niece. My God, if word ever got around to my brother—”

He took a deep breath. “No, I don’t wish to marry my cook, thank you very much, if that’s all you are.”

For a moment she couldn’t speak. Of course she knew that he wouldn’t marry someone who was only his cook—though there had been gentlemen who’d married their servants, or even stage actresses, and lived and prospered—still, it tore her to hear him say it aloud.
If that’s all you are.

When she found her voice again, the words that emerged were hesitant and beseeching. “The duke and the duchess are not the only ones who know me. We can find my old governess. Or Monsieur David. They won’t lie about me to save their own standing.”

“No, Verity.” It was Bertie who spoke through clenched teeth now. “I have met and broken bread with Their Graces; more God-fearing, upright, and gracious people I’ve never come across. What they have shown me is proof enough. I refuse to go along any further with this circus, subjecting them or myself to duplicitous nobodies who would say anything for a guinea.”

So he did think her a liar, a duplicitous nobody who would say anything to land herself a prize husband. She wanted to lash out at him. Were she still the Lady Vera Drake he would be quite beneath her. He wasn’t even titled. And the manor at Fairleigh Park was a thatched-roof cottage compared to the splendor that was Lyndhurst Hall.

She said nothing. She should have kept her mouth shut all along. She should have known.

Bertie sighed. He moved away from the window, where he’d been stiffly standing, to the embroidered stool next to the bed. “Let this be the end of it,” he said wearily, pulling off his shoes and socks. “Now come to bed.”

“I’m sorry?” Had he lost
his
mind?

“I said, come to bed,” he repeated impatiently.

“I don’t think so.”

He didn’t even look at her. “Don’t be childish.”

“I don’t think it’s childish to not want to sleep with a man who believes me an unscrupulous adventuress.”

He pulled off his cuff links. “If that’s what you are, why should you be offended?”

Until this moment she’d believed that he loved her too. The black sensation in her—was it how a snowman felt on the first day of spring, that the world was ending, that she herself would dissipate into nothingness?