Chapter 11
Betsan had already dressed Nell for the evening before she had finished bracing herself for it. Her brown hair was pinned elegantly in a chignon, and it glowed in the candlelight.
Her lavender gown was fastened, the delicate beading in the bodice catching the candlelight as she looked at herself in the mirror. The whole of her turned out as a countess ought to be turned out, as had the preparations. Luckily for Nell, it was only a few neighbors to account for.
Cassandra appeared in the doorway a few minutes later. She was dressed in a pale pink gown that was perfectly fitted to her. She was glowing with an eagerness Nell had not seen on her before. Nell smiled and walked toward her, pulling on her white gloves.
“I cannot believe that I am to come,” Cassandra said before Nell could ask.
“Do you know, I don’t believe he’d have let me go at all, if it were only my asking.
” She tipped her head, considering Nell with a directness that had grown sharper these past weeks.
“You don’t see how he looks at you, do you? ”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“Truly you don’t see how my brother stares at you all hours of the day?”
“Hardly! All I see is a man being courteous to his wife, for the harmony of the household,” Nell said and busied herself with the gloves. “Nothing more. You need to stop reading those novels quite so much, your imagination will run wild if you let it.”
Cassandra only smiled, a small, knowing thing, and they made their way downstairs.
Adrian was at the bottom, dressed elegantly in black.
His gaze was locked on her, and all Nell could do was hold still to the railing and remind herself of what he had told her the night of their wedding. They were wed in name only.
The carriage ride was quick, only a short way down the road, and they arrived.
There is nothing to be afraid of, she told herself, climbing down from the carriage. No one in Cornwall had ever laid eyes on the real Honoria Vane.
That had been the whole of the plan’s soundness from the start. And yet she knew she had never in her life sat at a table like this one, with so many people.
There was enough silver to outfit a hospital. A dozen pairs of eyes that had spent a lifetime learning to catch a false note locked on her, and she went in certain that one wrong move would be the end of her.
“The Earl and Countess of Ashcroft, and the Lady Cassandra,” a footman announced as they took their seats at the table. “And the Captain Tristan Marlowe,” he finished.
All eyes went directly to Adrian. Nell reminded herself that he had not gone into society in four years, and he was clearly the most interesting of the lot.
The neighbors could not entirely master their astonishment at finding him arrived at all, let alone arrived married. Whispers swirled around the table as she caught the sideways looks passed down it. She heard the murmured asides behind fans before the soup had even been served.
“Can you believe he is here, and married?”
“The former Lady Vane I heard!”
“I thought Lady Cassandra was an invalid, but she looks quite well…”
The soup was served, and the actual questions began.
“Where are your people, Lady Ashcroft?” A man who Nell had been introduced to as Sir Reginald Fair. He was a thin gentleman with white hair and a fake smile.
“They have sadly passed, as well as my late husband. I find my family is sitting with us here, and I don’t have anything more interesting to share. How about you, Sir—”
“Well, tell us of your late husband then,” Sir Reginald said as he picked up his goblet and took an inelegant sip. “What family of his then?”
“Regretfully, Lord Vane passed away two years ago after an illness, which I nursed him through. I was never close with his family—”
“Surely, we must have some common thread. I know everyone in London!”
“Oh please, Sir Reginald,” Lord Trevanion said as the next course was served. “Do not pester our guest with so many questions, and you hardly know everyone in London. Why not tell us about your new hunting dogs?”
Nell was grateful to enjoy the pheasant, listening to the conversation around her, when the questions came back once more. She resolved to answer in the half-truths she’d rehearsed and practiced with Cassandra and Adrian. She found they’d nearly become true in her own mouth after a time.
“What do you do for hobbies?” Lady Trevanion asked Nell.
“She is quite interested in science,” Adrian said, raising his eyebrow to her. “She has been very keen on taking walks outside with Lady Cassandra, and has excellent opinions on our grounds.”
“Is that so? Well, then we simply must show you our gardens, Lady Ashcroft. We have the loveliest fountain that offsets the back lawn and hedgerows.
“I would very much like that, Lady Trevanion,” Nell said, and for a moment she felt lighter, more free, as if she really could be Lady Ashcroft.
“Lady Ashcroft,” a stout matron began as she leaned across the table. “Who were your parents again?”
The question was too pointed to deflect politely. Nell began to sweat. She reached for her napkin, for something to do, to buy her some time, when Adrian laid his hand on top of hers. He gave a squeeze and held her hand.
“Lady Ashcroft comes from humble beginnings in the country, in Northumberland. Her parents were tenant farmers, and she passed her days helping with husbandry and reading books. She married Lord Vane and is now my wife. Is that enough of an account for you, or shall we have a librarian fetch a biography?”
The table laughed, albeit at the matron’s expense, but the mood was suddenly light. The topic of conversation shifted once more, and all Nell could focus on was the fact that he was still holding her hand.
It was done for the table, she told herself. A husband’s hand over a wife’s…It was nothing more than the performance demands of us both.
But, even when he lifted his hand back to his lap, she felt the warmth of it extend throughout her body. When she looked up to glance at him, he was already looking at her, which said more than any words could.
What unsettled her more, as the evening wore on, was the talk that circled him. Between courses, in voices lowered just enough to seem discreet and not nearly enough to be truly private, she caught fragments.
“Four years, and never a word of it!”
“The parents died so sadly—”
“I heard the girl remembers nothing at all, which some find very convenient”
“I didn’t think she could walk!”
None of what she heard matched the plain account of a carriage accident she had been given. She left the table that night with a full belly, a fluttering stomach, and certain of one thing. She knew that the county suspected something the house itself would not speak of for four long years.
Across the room at the other end of the table, Nell noticed that Tristan did not leave Cassandra’s side the whole evening. Even when the after-dinner music began, and they were all seated in the drawing room, he did not go seeking out the two acknowledged beauties of the county in attendance.
Nell half expected a newly returned soldier would be incapable of anything else. Yet his attention was solely on Cassandra, and Nell could not help but smile. She turned to Adrian across the room and saw him watching it too. He raised an eyebrow and a small, thin smile almost crossed his face.
***
Nell came home that night almost believing she had belonged at that table.
Such a successful event led to a dangerous kind of forgetting, she knew even as she indulged it, but a sweet one all the same.
Betsan was waiting in her room when she returned home, and the girl’s face had none of its usual easy cheer.
“What is the matter, Betsan?”
“My lady, I don’t like to trouble you.”
“You are never a trouble!”
“I’m certain of it. Someone was in here while the house was at dinner. Nothing has been taken, nor broken. I’ve looked twice over to be sure. But that little box on your dressing table’s been moved. I know just where I set it this morning, and it isn’t where I left it.”
Nell crossed to the table with her heart already sinking. Beneath the box, tucked where it could not be seen unless the box were lifted deliberately and set aside, lay a folded paper that had not been there that morning.
“I haven’t touched it since I found it like that, just so you could see for yourself, my Lady.”
“Thank you for telling me. Do not fret. It is late, please go to bed, and I will see you in the morning,” Nell said with a calm she did not feel. “Truly, I would like to undress myself, if you could only loosen the laces here.”
“Of course,” the girl replied and dutifully loosened the back fastenings of the gown. “Are you sure you do not want help with your hair?”
“I would like to do it, thank you.”
Nell waited until the girl’s footsteps had faded down the hall into silence before she let herself open it. She undid the fold. Two words, written in a careful, unhurried hand.
Nell Frayne.
There was no message beneath it, which only made it worse. It was easier to face a problem when one knew what it was. Instead, there was no demand, no threat spelled out in so many words. Only her own name, the true one, the one not a single soul in all of Cornwall was meant to know.