Chapter 30
The unmaking of this tangle proves slower, and far quieter, than its making had ever been, Adrian thought to himself as he sat across from Coombe.
He had promised Adrian to give his full testimony. Three long days had passed since Greaves was handed over to the magistrate. They sat in the small parlor, a modest room usually reserved for tenants who came to discuss rents. Coombe sat silently, his hands folded tight in his lap.
“You have been carrying a burden for some time,” the solicitor, Mr. Jones, said as he lowered his monocle and set down his quill.
“No one at Ashcroft or beyond wishes to see you punished more than you have been for the fear that has bound him so completely these past years. We have Greaves in custody. Now we just need the truth.”
“I understand that, Mr. Jones,” Coombe said nervously. “I am so very sorry, especially to Lord Ashcroft.”
“Then say it to him,” Mr. Jones said as he set his monocle back in place and began to write.
“I never meant for any of it to grow so large, or to go on so long, my lord,” he said to Adrian, who sat listening across the small table with a patience he would not have found in himself a month earlier. He crossed his arms and looked at him.
“It began small. A few pounds here, a few there, the kind of thing a man tells himself does no real harm to anyone. I was suffering, as was my daughter. It was a way for us to get ahead, and after I did it the once…it became hard to stop.”
“You might have come to me,” Adrian said. “There is always another way.”
“I know, but the shame of it all…having to admit what I had done…even for a good reason.”
“I can empathize, as a man who has not always made the best decisions... but this was years, Coombe.”
“I thought of telling you every single day, my lord! It haunted me, I promise you that. I’d picture myself going up and knocking on your door…” Coombe’s hands tightened on each other, the knuckles going white.
“But my girl has a terrible time with headaches, my lord. Her head aches so much that she cannot speak some days, can hardly eat. I’ve been saving every penny to make sure she has care, that we can take her to the best doctors in London to make sure we have tried everything to rid her of her pains. My child…”
“I see,” Adrian said, waiting to see what else Coombe might offer up as he considered his position.
“I daresay you would have done the same, my lord.”
“Would I?”
“What if it had been your own sister held over your head,” he said just above a whisper.
“Perhaps,” Adrian agreed, quieter now, something in the old steward’s words landing hard in his stony heart, more than he cared to admit even to himself. “Thank you, Coombe. Is there anything else to add?”
A few minutes later, backed by specific dates, encounters, and financials, they had a full statement.
It was laid out plainly in black and white.
They sealed the document, and it was brought by courier to the magistrate.
It hung both the theft and the abduction squarely on the man who had truly earned the punishment.
Coombe was an unwitting accomplice, nothing more.
Adrian thought of Greaves’s own boasts as he walked out of the parlor and toward his study.
In the end, he had spoken with such easy, unguarded confidence inside that carriage on the coast road to Nell.
He had also been heard clearly by three separate men riding close enough behind to catch every word.
They closed whatever narrow gaps Coombe’s own testimony might otherwise have left open for a clever lawyer to work loose.
Greaves went to answer for it before a magistrate who had, by every account that reached Ashcroft afterward, no patience whatsoever left for a clever man’s excuses, however smoothly delivered.
Adrian relished this, only imagining that he had seen enough of men like Greaves in his years on the bench to know precisely how little weight to give their protestations.
That leaves the letter, he thought to himself as he shut the study door behind him.
The one that might once have hung Nell alongside him.
He could see no further need to keep it as insurance.
Any accusation Greaves tried to make now from a cold cell awaiting trial for theft and abduction was only the unsupported word of a convicted felon.
It was worth nothing at all when set against the word of a countess, however irregular her own history might have been.
And the real Honoria Vane, wherever she had finally settled abroad, living whatever new life her borrowed freedom had bought her, was just as guilty as Greaves.
Adrian knew that she could not say a single word against Nell, could not so much as write a letter to any English court, without hanging her own name up beside it for the entire world to examine.
He took the letter out of his desk drawer and tore it up. Then he tossed it in the fire and watched it burn.
***
Later that evening, after a quiet dinner, Nell and Adrian retired to the drawing room.
They had begun doing this to slowly get reacquainted with each other, Adrian had decided.
He thought it odd to be courted in a way by one’s own husband, but his relationship with Nell had been unorthodox from the start.
Adrian was flipping through some contracts for a new venture, and Nell was practicing her stitching on a piece of fabric.
“What is it?” he asked, angling his body to better face her.
“Does it trouble you still? Even though Greaves will see justice…Does it bother you that she is out there somewhere, entirely free, while I sit here in her name, wearing her title as though it were properly mine to wear? You have been kind enough these last few days…but…” Her voice trailed off.
“It troubled me a great deal, but not anymore.” He reached for her hand, found it, held it, his thumb moving slowly across her knuckles. “I find it troubles me less by the hour. I have everything of hers worth having. She may keep whatever the rest of it amounts to and is welcome to it.”
“That is a very generous way of putting it.”
“I have grown considerably more generous these past months, or so my sister tells me at every opportunity.” He caught her eye, something warm and rueful in his own as he took his hand back.
“I imagine we will not hear of Lady Vane, in any case. She has no more reason to reach toward Ashcroft than we to visit her.”
Adrian did not pretend, even to himself, in the quiet of his own conscience where such pretending would have done him no good at all, that the woman across from him had been entirely blameless in the matter.
She had taken the name freely, albeit in a moment of desperation, to save her own life from poverty that would very likely have led her to a dead end.
Nell had never tried to claim otherwise.
It was, he had come to understand, the whole reason he trusted her now as completely and as thoroughly as he did.
She had stopped lying the very instant lying stopped being the means of her survival.
She had not told him a single untruth since that night, however much each hard truth had plainly cost her to hand over, and he knew that she never would.
As the wronged husband in the matter, any accusation against her was his alone to make. He would not make it. He stood up from his chair and threw a log on the fire, sending embers up into the chimney.
The whole truth of the matter, the forged name, the widow’s desperate bargain, the woman he had first stood beside in that small, hastily arranged chapel ceremony all but went up into smoke with it. He grabbed a poker and began to stoke the fire, losing himself in his swirling thoughts.
To the rest of the county, to the whole damn world beyond Cornwall, really, she is Honoria, Lady Ashcroft. And so she will remain, for as long as she lives. People won’t look any closer than they already have. Why would they?
We barely venture into society even before all this started. No proper London Seasons, no endless rounds of formal dinners, no balls to speak of, just this small, familiar corner of the world where people are used to her face and don’t care to ask questions.
Or so she tries to tell herself. Because the whispering is there. It is always there.
It drifts across county lines, pinned to the pages of letters sent by visiting relatives or spilled by servants over a Saturday morning pint at the pub. Loose tongues trading gossip in the market square.
“A marriage got up far too quickly to be respectable. A bride pulled out of thin air, no family, no connections, nothing a proper matron can trace. And then, of course, the steward. A man caught bleeding the estate dry for years.”
These questions hover in the air like smoke from the fire: Who knows about it? Who doesn’t? Could the new countess herself have a hand in the whole sordid business?
Unlikely, certainly. But it is more than enough to keep the local matrons entertained. He could almost see them now, passing the scandal back and forth over the bloody soup course, savoring every drop of it with that special, malicious relish reserved entirely for a neighbor’s ruin.
He set down the poker in the rack and turned back to Nell.
“I am going to retire for the evening,” he said, his head suddenly pounding. “Will you please go and see that Cassandra is well?”
“Of course,” she said with a smile and rose from her chair.
***
“They will talk of it for months to come,” Cassandra warned her, with the weary practicality of a girl who had grown up inside the machinery of county gossip and knew exactly how slowly its wheels turned.
“Mrs. Pemberton alone could keep a scandal alive through an entire winter on will power and spite alone, and I promise you she means to try.”
“Let them talk,” Nell said, entirely unbothered, continuing to sort through the dried herbs on her worktable without so much as pausing in the task. “I have survived worse than dinner table whispers.”
“You say that very calmly.”
“I have had a great deal of practice at calm these past months.” Nell glanced up, something steady and unshaken in her chest. “It is easier now that there is nothing left underneath it for anyone to find.”
“I can only imagine,” Cassandra said.
“A woman with a secret to guard flinches at every knock on the door. A woman with nothing left to hide has nothing left to fear from a wagging tongue.”
But whispering, in the end, proved the whole extent of it.
Nothing more. No one in the county had the nerve required to carry the question directly to the earl’s own face.
His rank alone shut that door before any bold soul could even properly attempt to open it, and a house that kept so quietly to itself, entertaining rarely and traveling less, gave the county nothing fresh to feed the talk on as the weeks wore into months.
In time, as such things reliably did in a place as small and self-contained as their corner of Cornwall, it would thin.
Nell knew it would fade, and be gently pushed aside by some newer, juicier scandal belonging entirely to some other unfortunate family.
Or some fresh elopement or bankruptcy or unsuitable match to occupy the county’s collective attention in their stead.
Soon enough, we will be old news. The only matter that remains unresolved is the future I have here with Adrian.