Authors: Mary Balogh
There were a few moments of total silence in the room. Cassandra saw that Alice was standing in the doorway.
“It is what I told you at the time, Cassie,” she said. “I
saw
. You did not. Mr. Belmont was between you and Lord Paget. And Mary had her hands spread over her face. But I saw. Lord Paget shot himself.”
“I suppose,” William said, “there was a great deal of self-loathing in his condition. Perhaps he suddenly realized that he had a gun in his hands. Perhaps he realized he was about to commit murder with
it. Perhaps a small window of sobriety opened in his mind. However it was, Cassie, it was neither murder nor an accident that happened. He shot himself.”
Stephen had the back of her hand pressed against his lips. His eyes were closed.
“I fled,” William said, “because when it became known that I had married Mary, it would have been assumed that I had quarreled with my father and shot him. I might have been charged with murder.
Mary
might have been charged as my accomplice. I fled because I was muddleheaded and thought it would be best to let everything calm down for a while. I thought that without me there and without anyone knowing about my marriage, his death would be ruled an accident—as it was, officially. I told Mary not to tell anyone about our marrying. I told her I would be back for her within a year. I am a bit late on that promise, sorry, love. But I assumed
you
knew about the marriage, Cassie. I assumed he had told you or that Mary had. I had
no idea
anyone would blame you for his death and think you did it.
With an axe
, no less. Has the world gone mad?”
“You thought I was trying to make you feel better, Cassie,” Alice said from the doorway. “You did not want to believe that Mr. Belmont had killed his father, even though you thought he had done it to defend you and to defend Mary. You thought I lied to make you feel better.”
“I did,” Cassandra admitted.
But if it was true, what Alice had told her and what William now confirmed, then Nigel had committed suicide. He would have been denied a proper burial if the truth had been known.
Would she have minded?
Would she mind?
He might have killed someone that night. Instead, he had killed himself.
She was too numb to analyze her thoughts and feelings.
“It was a damn fool thing to run the way I did,” William said. “Pardon my language.”
“It was,” Stephen agreed. “But we all do foolish things, Belmont. I would advise you not to compound the error now, though, by dashing out to tell the world the truth. The truth is ugly and might not be believed anyway. I would suggest that everyone retire for the night and that I go home. Let decisions be made tomorrow or the next day.”
“That is very wise advice,” Alice said, looking at him with approval.
“You were not here, Alice,” Cassandra said, “when I told William that Lord Merton and I are betrothed.”
Alice looked from one to the other of them.
“Yes” was all she said. She nodded her head. “Yes.”
And she withdrew and presumably went back upstairs to her room. William stood and drew Mary to her feet and led her out of the room, his arm about her shoulders.
They were
husband and wife
, Cassandra thought. They had been for longer than a year. Since the day before Nigel died.
By his own hand
.
Alice had not been lying all this time.
“Why did you tell me,” Stephen asked, standing and waiting for her to get to her feet too, “that you had killed your husband?”
She felt almost too weary to stand.
“Everyone believed it anyway,” she said. “And part of me wished it had been me.”
“And you wanted to protect that miserable apology for a man?” he asked her.
“Don’t judge William too harshly,” she said. “He is not a bad man. Mary loves him, and he is Belinda’s father. Besides, he
married her
, a mere maid in his father’s house, because she had borne his child. And he came back for her even though he must have still feared that he might be accused of murdering Nigel. I believe he must be
fond of her. I did not want him charged with murder, Stephen. He is
Belinda’s father
.”
He framed her face with his hands and smiled at her. And what a
ghastly
moment, she thought, in which to realize that she was bone deep in love with him.
“If there is an angel in this room,” he said, “it is certainly not me.”
He bent his head and kissed her softly on the lips.
“Will you stay the night?” she asked him.
He shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I
will
make love to you again, Cass. But it will be on our wedding night and in our marriage bed. And it will be a loving to end all lovings.”
“Boaster,” she said.
It would be never, then, she thought with some regret. She would never make love with him again.
“I will ask you on the morning after our wedding night,” he said, “if it was a boast.”
And his smile caused his eyes to twinkle.
He set one arm about her waist and led her toward the front door.
“Good night, Cass,” he said, kissing her again before opening the door. “You are going to have to marry me, you know. You are going to be horribly lonely otherwise. You are about to lose all your family to matrimony.”
“Except Wesley,” she said.
He nodded.
“And except Roger,” she said.
“And except Roger,” he agreed, grinning as he stepped outside and pulled the door closed behind him.
Cassandra set her forehead against the door and closed her eyes. She tried to remember why she could not marry him.
19
“I
AM
going out for a walk,” Cassandra said, though she made no move to put words into action. She was standing at the sitting room window, looking out on a day that had not quite made up its mind whether to rain or to shine, though it seemed more inclined to decide upon the former.
She had not slept well—hardly surprisingly.
Now this morning everyone had become insubordinate.
Mary had refused to stop working in the kitchen or to stop addressing Cassandra as
my lady
.
“You are my stepdaughter-in-law, Mary,” Cassandra had tried to explain, but to no avail.
“
Someone
has to cook our breakfast and make our tea and wash the dishes and all the rest of it, my lady,” Mary had said, “and it had better be me since I daresay neither you nor Miss Haytor nor Billy knows one end of a frying pan from the other. And I am no different today than what I was yesterday and last week and last month, am I?”
William had been working on the sitting room door when Cassandra came downstairs, and now the door shut tight without having to be given an extra yank. Since then he had mended the clothesline outside so that it was no longer in danger of falling to
the ground, taking a load of clean washing with it. And he was in the process of cleaning every window in the house, inside and out.
William always had been energetic and restless, of course, and far happier being busy with some manual labor than idling away his time at more gentlemanly pursuits. Nigel had intended him for the church, but William had openly rebelled after finishing his studies at Cambridge.
Alice was the worst of all this morning. She was attacking the sheets with her needle, and she was downright prunish. She had an annoying I-told-you-so look on her face, an expression to which she was entitled as she had indeed told Cassandra that William had not shot his father but that Nigel had shot himself.
And Alice had given Cassandra an ultimatum, or what amounted to one.
Either Cassandra agreed to honor the betrothal that had been announced verbally last night at Lady Compton-Haig’s ball and would be announced in writing in tomorrow’s papers, or Alice would have nothing more to do with Mr. Golding.
It was ridiculous and it was a non sequitur. But Alice was adamant.
“I daresay,” she had said a few minutes ago, “Mr. Golding means no more than friendship by inviting me to accompany him to his family’s home to celebrate his father’s birthday. I daresay that after we return I will not see him again except by chance. But I will not even
think
of seeing him again, Cassie, if you are going to insist on continuing with this silly and wholly unrealistic plan of settling in a small country cottage somewhere in the country.”
“It is my idea of heaven,” Cassandra had protested.
“Nonsense,” Alice had told her. “You would be bored and miserable within a fortnight, Cassie. You would be far better off marrying the Earl of Merton, since despite everything the two of you seem fond of each other and I believe that after all he is a harmless, even decent, young man. Besides which, there will be a new scandal if you break off the engagement now, and you really do not need another.
You ought to have thought of all this before allowing him to kiss you in the middle of a ball. If you insist upon going to live in the country, I am going with you. And there is no point whatsoever in giving me that look. Looks do not kill. Mary will not be going with you, after all, will she? And though you will doubtless soon be able to hire half a dozen servants to take her place, you will not know any of them. Or any of your neighbors. And what will they think if a strange widow comes to take up residence in their village without even as much as a companion to lend her respectability? No, Cassie, if you go, I go too.”
She had seemed to know the main power point of her argument.
“And I will never see Mr. Golding again,” she had added once more for good measure, snapping off her thread with her fingers.
And so Cassandra had threatened to go out for a walk.
“I’ll take Roger with me,” she said now, drumming her fingers on the windowsill.
Though Roger, the traitor, had been shadowing William about the house all morning. So had Belinda, her doll clutched to her bosom, her eyes as wide as saucers.
“You do that, Cassie,” Alice said without looking up from her work. “And take an umbrella.”
But it was too late. A carriage was approaching along the street, and it looked far too grand a conveyance to be on Portman Street even before Cassandra saw that there was a ducal coat of arms emblazoned on the door.
It drew to a halt outside her house, and she felt curiously resigned when the liveried coachman opened the door and set down the steps and handed the Duchess of Moreland down onto the pavement. She was not even surprised when he then proceeded to hand out the Countess of Sheringford and Lady Montford.
But of course. The whole triumvirate.
Their brother had announced his betrothal to her last evening.
“We have visitors, Alice,” Cassandra said.
Alice set aside her work.
“I will leave you to them,” she said. “I still have some packing to do.”
And off she went before Mary could tap on the door and announce the three ladies.
And so it began, Cassandra thought. The grand charade.
“Lady Paget,” the Duchess of Moreland said, sweeping toward her across the room and drawing her into a hug. “But you are going to be our sister. I am going to exercise a sister’s right and call you Cassandra. May I? And you must call me Vanessa. We simply refused to wait until a more decent hour to call upon you, and so you must forgive us. Or not, I suppose. Anyway, here we are.”
She smiled sunnily.
The Countess of Sheringford hugged Cassandra too.
“Last evening,” she said, “we were inhibited by a rather large audience and so could not greet you quite as we wished. It was wretched of Stephen to kiss you like that out on the balcony when I certainly brought him up to know better, but we were delighted nevertheless to discover that he was so deeply in love that he had grown reckless. Stephen is almost never reckless. And we are very pleased that it has happened with
you
. Our only wish for him has always been that he find love and happiness, Cassandra. I am Margaret.”
“And I am Katherine, Cassandra,” Baroness Montford said, third in line to hug her. “Stephen engaged and planning a wedding! My mind has still not fully comprehended the reality of it. But there is so much to do we scarcely know where to begin. We know that you have no mother and no sisters, though it was a pleasant surprise to discover that Sir Wesley Young is your brother and that you are not all alone in the world. Meg, Nessie, and I are going to be your sisters after you marry Stephen, but we have no intention of waiting until that happens. We are going to help you celebrate your betrothal and plan your wedding.”
“It is really quite wicked of us to be almost glad that you have no female relatives of your own,” Vanessa said. “But we are glad, nevertheless. We are going to have
enormous
fun for the rest of the Season—unless you plan to marry before it ends, of course. Where do you—”
“Nessie!” Margaret laughed and linked an arm through Cassandra’s. “Poor Cassandra’s head will be spinning on her shoulders if we do not soon curb our enthusiasm and stop jabbering. We have come to take you out for coffee and cakes, Cassandra—provided you do not have other plans for the rest of the morning, that is. And when we are sitting down and are relaxing, we are going to discuss your betrothal ball at Merton House. We are going to see to it that it is the grandest squeeze of the Season.”
Cassandra looked from one to the other of them—beautiful, fashionable, elegant ladies, all well married—and wondered if they could possibly be as delighted by her betrothal to their brother as they claimed to be. It did not take much power of observation to understand that they adored him.
Of course
they were not delighted. They must be dismayed, alarmed, worried … They were, she guessed, making the best of a bad situation, of what they thought was a fait accompli.
She made an impulsive decision. Putting on an act for the
ton
during what remained of the Season was one thing. Deceiving Stephen’s sisters was another.
“Thank you,” she said. “I would be delighted to go out for coffee in your company. And I will be pleased to help with the ball. There will be no wedding to plan, though.”