Chapter 1 #2
“And what happens,” Nell said, her eyebrow raised as she considered the gravity of the proposition, “when the earl discovers his wife is not his wife?”
“By then we shall both be well beyond his finding,” Honoria said confidently.
“I don’t ask you to stay married to him, Miss Frayne.
I ask you to stand up in a church for perhaps a quarter of an hour, sign a name that isn’t yours, and hold the shape of the thing together for a few weeks after. That is all.”
That is all.
Nell almost laughed. She had held a man’s heart in her two hands just that morning, and that had felt a more reasonable request than the one being made by Lady Honoria Vane.
“Again, why me? You barely know me. How can you even trust me with such a thing?”
“From that first meeting, when I came in here…I knew you were a woman who helped others, especially other women.”
“There has to be more to it than this,” Nell said, shaking her head.
“Because no one knows your face either,” Honoria said simply.
“Because you’re clever and steady and you do not talk, which I have good reason to know!
I did not arrive at this plan lightly. I have had two years to watch how you keep a secret, Miss Frayne, and two years to learn what price would and would not buy your silence.
I could not have trusted a stranger with this.
I could only trust someone I had already trusted with worse. ”
“No, I suppose you did not.”
“I have nothing left to offer anyone who is not already desperate, and you, Miss Frayne, forgive me, have the look of a woman who has been desperate a good long while. I know you live here, alone and unprotected, dreaming of a life beyond these bloody docks.”
It should have offended her, but it did not. Her words rang true, and Nell had never had much patience for pretense. She was too pragmatic for anything else, the daughter of a naval surgeon who had been stranded too long in a sea of her own. Honoria was right.
“You will be well compensated,” Lady Vane said, handing her a small piece of paper with the price then. It was not modest, enough to change the course of Nell’s life. To bolster her offer, she drew a small case of jewels from beneath her cloak as collateral.
She opened it just enough for Nell to see the winking weight of what was inside, glittering gems worth enough, if sold with any care at all, to answer the one question that mattered.
The question had sat unanswered, deep in her heart for years, since her father died and left her nothing but his surgical bag and skills no woman should have. How to get to Edinburgh?
Old Mr. Cargill had trained under her father, back when they were both young men with bright eyes and no gray in their beards. Twice now he’d written to say that if she ever found the means to come north, there was a place for her.
There would not be any sign above a door, never that. A woman’s name would ruin them both. But in his rooms, at his table, with her own hands doing the work she’d been made to do. She had read those letters until the folds went soft and worn. She had never once believed she would find the means.
Here it is, sitting in a small case in a stranger’s lap.
She let her eyes drift over to the four pence and the wedge of cheese drying on her table. She thought of the year she had gone without new boots to buy supplies instead.
Every winter she wondered whether it would be the one bad night that finished her, a patient who died and had family willing to make trouble over it, or a magistrate with nothing better to do than ask why an unlicensed woman was cutting into Englishmen in a shabby room behind a chandler’s shop.
I have nothing to lose, because truly I have nothing to my name at all. Honoria is right, I have no protection here in this shabby place. I am only one day away from a bad deal, or worse…I need something stable, something where I can set down roots and let my work help this world.
I’ve never been much of a gambler. This is a long shot, masquerading as a lady when I don’t have the faintest idea of how to be one! My etiquette lessons were given by sailors on ships, not by fine women in elegant dining rooms. This is too good to be true…
She noticed, distantly, how smoothly the whole account had come out. It was too smooth, a monologue polished by repetition, as if this were not the first room in which it had been said, nor perhaps even the truest version of it.
Some old instinct, the same one that told her a wound was infected before the fever ever showed, whispered to her that there was more to this. Yet, the thought of her dream being realized beat louder than the instinct in her heart.
“I’ll do it,” Nell said before she could think better of it, talk herself out of it. She watched relief break across Lady Honoria Vane’s face like weather changing, the sun shining after a squall.
***
Nell was grateful that no more visitors arrived at her door. She cleaned up the space and packed a few modest items for her journey, including those Honoria had the foresight to provide for her.
Surely, she could not arrive in the rags she was wearing. She had the piece of cheese for supper with a small cup of mulled wine. She wondered what kind of meals would await her in Cornwall, and her mouth watered.
She washed up in the basin, put on a fresh sleeping gown, and retired to her small hay cot in the back of the room behind a curtain. She closed her eyes and pulled up her tattered blanket to cover her chest.
Forgery. A hangable offense.
That was the plain word for it, however Honoria explained it. A false name signed in a parish register, in a church and before witnesses and a man of God, was an abomination. Whatever became of Honoria after, whatever became of the marriage itself, that signature would remain in perpetuity.
Black and legal and entirely Nell’s doing.
She knew what the courts did with women who forged their way into other people’s lives.
She had stitched the arm of a woman once who’d tried to hang herself rather than face the executioner.
And even so, Nell was no stranger to masquerading as something she was not. She could do this.
He’ll never know, she told herself, the same way she told frightened patients that the pain would pass, not entirely believing it but needing it said all the same.
A few weeks. A stranger’s house at the far end of the country with hot meals and a warm bed. And then gone, both of us. We will vanish into two separate lives, born of the same lie. Oh, the lengths we women must go to…to surpass the confines of the options available to us.
She shivered and pulled her blanket up to her chin. What unsettled her more, turning it over in her mind as the night went from grey to black, was not the crime of it. She kept thinking of the mysterious man at the center of it.
She knew nothing of the mysterious Earl of Ashcroft, the husband she was to borrow along with the name. Honoria had called him cold and strange. Nell had met many men broken by grief or war or their own natures to know what whispers could mean.
I am traveling three days into the depths of Cornwall to stand up in a church and pledge myself to a man people can scarcely whisper about. And yet, this may be the solution to all my problems. I must be strong.
At dawn she would be on the coach out of Plymouth.
Her father’s surgical bag would be wedged carefully beneath the seat, the small hard case of jewels sewn into the lining of her cloak.
On top would be the parcels Honoria had packed for her, with the trimmings of what would be needed for this farce.
And at the other end of her journey awaited the Earl of Ashcroft.