Chapter 25
Twenty-Five
If you ever find yourself catapulted into the pages of a novel, try to ensure the plot includes a protective phantom and not a vengeful mistress.
Imanaged not to gape, but it was a close call. My mind was reeling, trying to work out my husband’s marital history.
Was I Burnsby’s fifth wife?
Lance broke the silence. “Only one more wife to go, Burnsby, and you’ll be in competition with King Henry the Eighth. Has anyone run into Susanna Brattle haunting the library?”
“No, because Susanna Brattle would be me,” Sophonisba said, tossing her head so her plumes danced.
“My dearest wife,” Burnsby said, smiling as he reached out and patted her knee.
We all gasped in unison.
I felt as if a great wind blew through me and scoured my brain as I stared at the two of them. My heart was thudding. Only one conclusion filtered through the chaos in my mind:
If Burnsby was married to Sophonisba, he wasn’t married to me.
“Congratulations to the not-so-newly-married couple,” Colette remarked. “When were the two of you espoused, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“In 1774,” Sophonisba said with the toothy grin of a shark. “I would never have returned from France under other circumstances. That would be before he married you,” she hissed at me, in case I hadn’t noticed we were well into the nineteenth century.
“Evie, dear, I believe this is when you burst into applause,” Colette said. “You’re free. Another Lady Burnsby supersedes your reluctant claim to the title.”
“Not just Evie’s claim; 1774 is also before Burnsby supposedly married Hecuba and Alice,” Lance remarked. He wasn’t as languid as he had been a minute earlier. “I do have some curiosity about whether that ceremony superseded my mother’s, since it was performed in the year I was born.”
Burnsby snorted. “You’re legitimate enough. After your mother died in childbirth, I moved abroad. I fell in love with Sophie the first time I saw her singing in Paris and instantly determined to make her my wife.”
“How romantic,” Colette said sarcastically. “Just like a play in which the strumpet with a heart of gold wins the squire’s heart.”
I frowned. Burnsby would scoff if we sat through such a melodrama, decrying the heroine as a shameless hussy. I found it hard to believe that love had led him to suspend the acute distaste he exhibited for fallen women—but his fond looks appeared self-evident.
“Was the ceremony kept secret because your father would not approve?” I asked.
“Bunny’s father was a coldhearted man,” Sophonisba said by way of answer.
“Lance may be legitimate, but I am not,” Ophelia cried, her voice rising as she stared at her father. “Is that why you left me in the abbey, in company with her?”
“With my wife?” her father snapped. “Aye, and what else could I do with you? I told you time and again you were a tainted branch of the family tree. Did you never guess the truth? Every governess I dragged up here did.”
“I loathe you,” Ophelia said, with passion.
“Do you think I care?”
His only daughter raised her chin, a tear shining on her cheek. “I understood the family tree was diseased, but I didn’t know the extent of rot that had taken hold!”
I wrapped my arms around her.
“I don’t want to be a bastard,” she said, her voice cracking as she put her head on my shoulder. “No one will marry me.”
Her father smirked.
“Oh, darling, no one will care,” Colette remarked. “Not in light of your beauty and a dowry as big as Kensington Palace.”
Burnsby cackled. That’s the right word: cackled. “What dowry? Why do you think I kept her at home? I wouldn’t slur the lineage of an honorable man by pretending she is better than she is. There’ll be no dowry.”
“The dowry I’ll give her,” Colette said, her mouth curling into one of the most condescending smiles I’d ever seen. “Surely you haven’t ignored the signs that your son married an heiress? Shoes adorned with emeralds are not in the ordinary style.”
He gaped at her, momentarily silenced.
“It’s so sweet, Burnsby, that you are able to afford a mousehole to hide your wife,” I said, “because you’re too poor to afford a decent house for her and so ashamed of Lady Burnsby that you hid her in the mountains.”
His mouth flapped as he tried to summon a defensible response. “I didn’t— That wasn’t—”
“Why don’t we ask the lady herself?” I turned to Sophonisba. “Why have you spent your married life buried in the Highlands, content with being visited once a year while your husband swanned around England pretending to marry three much younger women in a row?”
She stared me right in the eyes, chin high.
“I’m not good enough to be Lady Burnsby in public, am I?
I’d have held Bunny back amid the rest of them aristocrats, made it so they didn’t respect him in the House of Lords.
He needed a woman of his own stature, or he’d have lost face.
They might have stopped him from making important laws. ”
My heart twinged with sympathy. She loved him.
“Is that what he told you?” Godric asked, disgusted. “Burnsby has never had a drop of influence in the House of Lords. He’s a buffoon, and every man with a brain in his head knows it.”
“Your father didn’t agree,” Burnsby snarled, eyes squinty, oozing rage. “I am highly regarded in society. As a man who works for his wage, you wouldn’t understand.”
Lance laughed. “Don’t you ever read the newspapers, Burnsby? Godric is his uncle’s sole heir and will inherit his title and a fortune equal to my wife’s. He works because he chooses to, because he thinks a man’s life should have meaning and value.”
“I also inherited my father’s estates,” Godric said. “Had he been alive when you scarred me, you would have met him on a field of honor—and died there, I hardly need add.”
Burnsby’s mouth rounded open and closed, fishlike, unable to counter Godric’s calm assertion.
I intervened. “When I asked you, Burnsby, why you married me rather than Sophonisba Ainsworth, you told me that you couldn’t marry a woman like her. I remember your precise words. ‘Adoration is not an emotion experienced by gentlemen, and never for a woman of that type.’”
I glanced at Sophonisba. “Sorry.”
She glared at me, jaw set.
“But the fact is that you couldn’t legally marry Hecuba, or Alice, or me, no matter what you think your name deserved.
Yet you allowed a minister to marry us. I’m not remembering the ceremony precisely, but he charged us both ‘as ye shall answer at the dreadful day of judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed’ to reveal any impediments to our union.
What in God’s name were you thinking?” I shouted, losing all semblance of calm.
Burnsby’s face was flushed. “Why shouldn’t I have you? You weren’t forced to marry me. Like my other wives, you chose me. In fact, you were the worst of them. You were slavering for it. For God’s sake, you sent me a message and demanded I buy a special license.”
“After you bribed me by offering my sister a dowry,” I said hotly.
“It’s not my fault that you’re a gold-digging harlot. I treated you better than you deserved!”
“He’s a hollow man,” Colette said, contempt dripping from her voice. “The sort who thinks a young, beautiful woman on his arm will make him attractive, because he has no allure of his own.”
Godric kept his gaze on Burnsby. “Perhaps you believed that as a peer, you could do whatever you wished with impunity. After all, you’d stowed your real wife so far up in Scotland that no one knew she existed.
Moreover, it appears that you bullied the lady into thinking that she wasn’t truly a wife. ”
“I always knew I was his wife. I have his heart, and that is all that matters,” Sophonisba said stoutly.
(Absurdly.)
“I never cease to be amazed by the forgiving nature of the female sex,” Godric said. “You didn’t mind that your husband was sharking around England, sleeping with nubile young women, giving them diamonds, and regularly escorting them to the opera?”
Her right eye began twitching.
“I suspect Lady Burnsby wasn’t given a choice in the matter,” I said, surprising myself.
“Undoubtedly not. Her husband had been taught from the cradle that everything he wanted could and should be awarded to him,” Godric said. His voice reverberated with anger. We were witnessing the outraged prosecutor whom Mima described seeing in court.
“Why not marry again, if he felt like it?” Godric demanded. “Why not take advantage of innocence and desperation, selecting younger and younger women to marry? His wife knew the truth but felt unable to demand her rights.”
“I never imagined I’d feel sorry for you,” Ophelia said to Sophonisba.
Sophonisba rebutted that pity with fury.
“I am Lady Burnsby! Why should I care about fools deluded enough to imagine they could catch my husband’s heart?
” She twitched the puddle of ermine at her feet.
“I disregarded the hussies he entertained. He and I have always understood that I am the most important person in the world to him.”
“You poor woman,” Colette said. “If you hadn’t been responsible for scarring my husband, I would feel compassion for you.” She nestled back against Lance’s shoulder. “As it is, I don’t.”
Sophonisba’s expression left no doubt that she didn’t give a damn.
Godric cleared his throat. “Thankfully, this development means that Genevieve won’t have to give evidence in the House of Lords regarding Burnsby’s impotency.”
“Oh, good,” I said.
(Yes, I was thinking that I could marry Godric without endangering his career.)
“The felony known as bigamy is much easier to prove.”
I gasped. His words cut across the room like a gunshot.
Felony?
Sophonisba squinted, as if legalities had never occurred to her.
Burnsby’s face sagged. He had known precisely what laws he had broken.
(And . . . there went my hope of an unblemished reputation. The press would be fascinated by a bigamous wife.)