Chapter Seventeen #2
“Oh. Love, I don’t even know what it means anymore,” she said wearily, wishing to goodness that the world would right itself and she could just go on not thinking about him. “Benjamin, I hardly know the man! He came here as a criminal—”
“Yes, I thought that was fairly amusing,” came the brighter response from her kindly cousin.
Lucy threw the scrunched-up letter at him. The idiot caught it.
“I’ve only known him a matter of—well, a month!” she said helplessly. “I didn’t think it could happen this quickly. I didn’t know these feelings… This need for him—”
All too late, she realized she had said the last few words aloud.
Her cousin’s cheeks were beetroot red. “Steady on there, Lucy!”
“My point is,” Lucy said hastily, her own cheeks probably not looking too dissimilar from Benjamin’s, “it is utterly ridiculous that I fell in love with a man I hardly know, and… And dash it all, Benjamin, but I think… I think…”
The words were almost impossible to speak, but if she didn’t tell someone soon, she would burst. Evelyn was on the Continent painting; a letter would take weeks to find her, let alone the time needed for one to return, and somehow, telling her parents or Percy would be impossible because she would have to face them every day.
But Benjamin… Benjamin was no stranger to scandal. From what Lucy had heard, it was a minor miracle he hadn’t been locked up a few times himself.
Benjamin, who had, unlike her parents and Percy, also not condemned her at the idea of loving a criminal, would not judge her.
“Benjamin,” Lucy said quietly, hardly able to look at him as she spoke, so focusing instead on her father’s desk. “I… I think I might be with child.”
A moment of silence. A heartbeat of stillness.
Then Benjamin rose so swiftly from his chair that it fell to the floor. “The bastard—”
“No, no, we both wanted to—”
“And he’s just run off!” hissed Benjamin, staring in evident outrage. “It’s barbarous!”
“He doesn’t know—I’m not even sure myself—”
Her flux had not come, and yesterday morning, she had been so violently ill, Lucy had been unable to come down for breakfast…but had felt perfectly fine after elevenses, which she had kept down with no trouble.
She was no physician, but even she had to wonder…
“And I wouldn’t make him—I mean, I don’t want Bernard to marry me out of obligation or pity,” Lucy said, and suddenly, the tears were back and there was absolutely nothing she could to do stop them.
“Because I wanted him to choose me, Benjamin, choose the truth—but all he could tell me was a pack of lies about spies and viscountcies and all sorts of nonsense!”
Benjamin eyed her carefully, something flickering across his face like a shadow. An emotion she had rarely seen on that particular cousin’s face.
Guilt.
“I just wanted the truth,” Lucy said, hiccupping slightly as she dashed away the wretched tears that would insist on coming, even if she didn’t want them. She pulled a tissue from her sleeve and blew. “I wanted Bernard to tell me the truth. And now he’s gone.”
Benjamin sighed heavily and righted his chair before sitting on it slowly. “You could make things right with him.”
“How?” Lucy shot back, a little angry at the idiotic suggestion but still delighted to have someone to talk to about this. “The idiot took me at my word that I wanted him gone and left, Benjamin. He left! And I have no idea where he’s gone!”
“No idea, eh?”
Perhaps if she had been busy attempting to stop her nose running, Lucy would have noticed the strange tone in Benjamin’s voice. The way he was looking at her as though sizing her up, considering a decision that he found a bit too challenging to make all at once.
Lucy blew her nose again, stuffed the unpleasantly-damp handkerchief into her sleeve, which she immediately regretted, and sighed as she leaned back in the chair.
“I can’t find him, Benjamin. It’s impossible.
The man has vanished. Judge Bonner’s clerk says all the paperwork related to the man’s case has gone missing, which is dashed suspicious if you ask me, and… and…”
It hurt, to admit this. To reveal that in fact the man to whom she had given her heart, her very body, was a man she clearly did not know.
Bernard Dixon. For a time, she had felt closer to him than anyone else in the world.
And now she had to face the truth: that she had never known him at all.
“And?”
Lucy sighed. “And Bernard Dixon was not even his real name, so how can I even put out a search for him? No, he’s gone. He’s gone.”
He’s gone.
Saying the words aloud and to another person made them feel all the more real, and Lucy hated it, hated how he could just depart from her life like he had never been in it, hated how she hurt so much in his absence.
And now she might be carrying his child…
“You can’t blame yourself, Lucy.” Benjamin’s voice was gentle.
Far too gentle.
Lucy looked up, her gaze sharpening as she beheld the man who was, now that she was thinking about it, acting very strangely. “Benjamin.”
“Lucy,” he said gravely, though with a hint of a smile.
“What are you doing here?” she asked directly.
Her cousin shrugged. “I came to see Perce, see if he—”
“You know, I am not sure I believe you,” Lucy said slowly, her focus raking over the man before her and wondering why on earth the man would lie.
But it wasn’t likely that just one of her cousins would come to Brighton all on their own. Chances meandered in packs; everyone knew that. They liked being with each other; they liked their families. It was one of the things that made them so unusual in Society.
And Benjamin was here, in Brighton, on his own. That didn’t make sense. Even if he were escaping some sort of scandal, he would have brought his sister Frank with him.
Something else was nagging at her too. Lucy would not perhaps put money on it, but she was surprised her parents had told Benjamin all about Bernard Dixon, and the trials—quite literally—and tribulations the family had been through on his behalf.
But if her parents hadn’t told Benjamin…and he hadn’t seen Percy yet because her brother was out gallivanting somewhere…
The realization hit Lucy like a meteor strike. She lunged forward, grabbing the desk with both hands as she spoke what had to be the truth.
“You’ve seen Bernard.”
Benjamin smirked. “Perhaps.”
“Benjamin!” gasped Lucy, utterly unable to take in the statement.
No. No, it wasn’t possible!
Benjamin was the bumbling, roguish, seducing charmer of a cousin who’d once had to pay a very large sum of money to cover up a duel. Benjamin was the happy-go-lucky cousin who never had a plan and who meandered from adventure to adventure. Benjamin was—
His index fingers pressed together in front of his lips, Benjamin was examining her with a calculating expression she had never seen before on the man in her life.
“You,” she repeated thickly, unable to take it all in. “You know Bernard.”
“When I first met him, he was the only remaining heir of the Viscount Moray,” Benjamin said quietly. “He’s been Bernard Dixon above three years now.”
“But… But…” Lucy stammered, her mind not quite moving quick enough for her liking. “You can’t know him!”
“I’m afraid I’m the reason he’s here in Brighton at all,” said Benjamin with a sigh. “My mistake. I got held up in London.”
“‘Held up’? You’re the reason?” repeated Lucy, apparently no longer in control of her tongue. “What are you talking about?”
Her cousin sighed again, and this time, it was a deep sound filled with uncertainty. “You must keep this quiet, Lucy. No one else in the family knows.”
“Knows what?”
But she knew the truth half a heartbeat before he said it. It was the only thing that made sense, though it did not make sense at all.
“My alias in the service is Hovell,” said Benjamin quietly. “And I am your lover’s spy handler.”
Lucy stared.
It was a good thing she was sitting down, for there was absolutely no possibility of remaining standing after hearing such a thing.
Benjamin. Benjamin, a spy—more, a spy handler!
Benjamin: unreliable, ridiculously outlandish, Benjamin.
‘Alias’? ‘In the service’?
“And that means,” her cousin continued with a wry smile, “that unlike you… I know how to contact him.”