Chapter 12
The chapel was but a fifteen-minute ride from the estate.
The road took him through a heavily wooded area, and he rode with one arm raised in front of him to keep the branches from slapping him in the face.
Painful memories surfaced as he went because he had ridden this exact path before, with Arabella beside him the first time he had taken her out on horseback.
Her parents had been dead a year, perhaps, and she had still been deep in mourning. How old had she been then? Six? He remembered her riding a pony—that was for sure.
He had thought that teaching her to ride might distract her, and it had worked.
She had laughed for the first time that day, somewhere along this very path.
Five years after that, both their lives had turned upside down again when his father died, leaving him the Marquisate at the tender age of nineteen.
And then they’d lost his mother the following year.
Arabella had only been eleven years old.
Was that when he had lost control of her? Perhaps. He could not think of how else it had happened. He had been so consumed by grief and by the responsibilities of the estate that he had not looked after her as he should have.
He hated the thought of her out there somewhere, hiding. So frightened that she had sent David away with a servant in the hope that he could be delivered to Clara, who would keep him safe. What would Arabella say when she found out that he and Clara were getting married simply to protect the baby?
Why didn’t you just tell me who the man was? Why didn’t you just let me take care of it? He tightened his hands on the reins, shaking his head. Why do you have to be so stubborn?
He knew the answer of course. She was stubborn because she had learned from the best. He was one of the most stubborn people he knew, and his parents had not been much better. It was a wonder Arabella was not even more stubborn than she already was.
The church rose ahead as he made his way into the clearing.
It was a simple stone building, and to the right, the churchyard spread out, row upon row of weathered headstones.
His own parents were not buried there, of course.
They were buried at the family cemetery on the estate, along with Arabella’s parents.
To the left, he spotted the vicar. The old man was bent over the well, hauling up water with an ancient bucket.
A sound was coming from somewhere in the vicinity, and Julian was not entirely certain whether the groaning was from the vicar or from the well.
He tied his horse to the hitching post and made his way over.
“Allow me,” he said and took the rope from the man’s hands. He hauled up the bucket and lifted it clear.
“Your Grace,” the vicar said, and a genuine smile broke across his old face. Time had carved deep lines into it since Julian had first known him, and his white hair had grown rather shaggy, reaching his shoulders at its longest. “What a welcome surprise. When did you return?”
“Only just,” Julian said. “I was wondering if you might have a moment to talk. There is a matter that requires your assistance.”
“That is what I am here for,” the vicar said. “Come into the rectory.”
The rectory sat behind the church—a modest three-room building with a comfortable front room that served also as a kitchen, a bedchamber for the vicar, another for any guest, and a small room off the kitchen for the housekeeper, Mrs. Madison, who was not currently present.
“Tea?” the vicar asked, already transferring water from the bucket into a pot on the small stove, which he then lit. A brief smell of sulphur hung in the air before it vanished. He set two cups on the table. “Or hot chocolate. I am having some myself.”
“Tea will do very well, thank you,” Julian said and sat down.
He had rehearsed this speech many times on the ride over, running through various approaches and slight variations, each one tailored to make the vicar more likely to agree.
Yet now that he was here, sitting in this familiar room with the smell of old stone and woodsmoke and something baking somewhere, none of those versions sounded remotely viable. He could not lie to this man.
The vicar had buried his parents. Had baptized both him and Arabella. Had sat with Julian in this very room after his father died and talked to him for two hours without once saying anything useful but had somehow made everything bearable by the time Julian left.
You did not lie to a man like that.
“Son,” the vicar said, settling into the chair across from him, “what is the matter?” He paused, studying Julian’s face. “Does this have something to do with Arabella?”
Julian’s eyebrows shot up. “You have seen her?”
The vicar sighed. “I was not certain whether she would want me to tell you, but she mentioned that she had been staying with you.” He wrapped both hands around his cup. “She came to me perhaps a fortnight ago. Perhaps three weeks. She asked me to baptize her child. Horatio, she called him.”
Julian took a slow breath. He should have known she would come here. Of course, she had come here.
“How was she?” he said.
“Friday-faced,” the vicar said with the frankness of a man who had known her since she was in leading strings and felt no need to soften it.
“Especially given her usual manner. I told her that if she gave me a little time, I could arrange a small celebration—that we might wait for you to come and join us.” He paused.
“She insisted we do it there and then, just the two of us with my housekeeper as godmother. She stayed in the cottage behind the church for the night. She was gone by the morning.”
Julian closed his eyes briefly. Of course, she was.
“There is more,” he said. “Rather a great deal more.” He looked at the old man. “I am afraid I am in considerable trouble. Or rather, not so much myself as—” He stopped. “What I mean is, there is a woman, and a child and a situation that is quite—”
He gave up trying to assemble a tidy version of it and simply told him the truth.
When he’d finished, the vicar’s face had gone the color of old parchment.
The water on the stove had meanwhile reached such a vigorous boil that it bubbled over entirely, and the vicar burned his finger removing the pot.
He sat for a moment with a cool cloth wrapped around it, staring at Julian with an expression that suggested he was reconsidering several of his long-held beliefs about the predictability of life.
“So,” the vicar said at last, “Arabella had the child. The child was brought to this Lady Clara. And you—” He paused. “You announced to a ballroom full of people that the child was yours and that Lady Clara was your wife.”
“That is correct,” Julian said.
“In front of all of London society.”
“Yes.”
The vicar set down his cup. “Julian, if I may call you that, I feel that perhaps you have attended one too many farces at the theatre.”
Julian felt the corners of his mouth attempting to do something inappropriate and suppressed them. “I understand how it sounds.”
“I am not certain you do.” The vicar shook his head.
“I will be very glad to marry you to whomever you wish, but I do not see how that solves the difficulty. The marriage would have taken place, at earliest, three months after the child was born. Since the child is barely three months old, that would make him—by anyone’s arithmetic—born outside of wedlock. ”
“Yes,” Julian said. “That is precisely the part that requires your assistance.”
“I see.” The vicar looked at him. “And how exactly do you envision me assisting? I am afraid I have no magical means of transporting you backwards through time, much as I suspect you would welcome the opportunity.”
“There is much I would like to undo,” Julian agreed.
“But no. What I am asking is rather simpler. When you register the marriage—and I would be grateful if you would do so promptly—if you were to record the year 1819 in a somewhat, let us say, generous hand. Loose enough that the nine might, to a careless eye, resemble an eight.”
The vicar stared at him.
He continued to stare.
Julian waited.
“You wish me,” the vicar said finally, “to falsify a parish record.”
“Not falsify as such,” Julian said. “Merely to exercise a certain latitude in penmanship. The record would be entirely genuine in all meaningful respects. It would simply be the sort of document that rewards close examination less than it might.”
The vicar set down his cup with rather more force than was strictly necessary. “I retract my earlier remark about the theatre and replace it with a suggestion that you have been reading the Bow Street reports with rather too much enthusiasm. You are describing a criminal enterprise.”
“I am describing a slightly untidy margin,” Julian said.
“Vicar, I do not know where else to turn. Clara will be entirely ruined if I cannot present her as a married woman by the time the child was born. She is a good woman. Clever and warm-hearted, and she has already suffered more than she deserves.”
“As if you would know,” the vicar said with a look that Julian had been receiving from this man since he was twelve and which had never once failed to find its mark.
“She was all but left at the altar,” Julian said, “by a man who chose family ambition over her. You may have heard something of it.”
“That does remind me of someone else in this room,” the vicar said mildly, “and I do not speak of myself.”
“I was not left at the altar,” Julian said.
“No,” the vicar agreed, “but close enough. It seems that you and Lady Clara have rather more in common than a shared concern for Arabella.” He picked up his cup again. “And you speak very highly of her.”
“She deserves to be spoken highly of.”
“Indeed.” The vicar looked at him over the rim of his cup. “And this marriage is to be a genuine one, is it? Or merely another item on the list of things that are not precisely false but reward close examination rather less than they might?”
Julian was quiet for a moment. “It will be a genuine marriage in every legal sense. What it becomes beyond that will be Clara’s decision.
If she wishes to remain married once all of this is resolved, we will be married.
If she wishes to dissolve the arrangement, I will ensure that she is provided for and that she suffers no further damage to her reputation.
I will take all responsibility for the breakdown of the marriage publicly, but that will be her choice to make, not mine. ”
The vicar studied him for a long moment.
Then he sighed deeply, removed the cloth from his burned finger, and looked at it.
“Very well,” he said. “Obtain a special license. It will allow you to marry without the banns being read, so you may proceed as quickly as possible.” He pointed the injured finger at Julian.
“And you did not hear any of this from me. As far as I am concerned, I am simply marrying a duke and his wife in the usual fashion.”
Julian rose. “Thank you, Vicar.”
“Do not thank me,” the old man said, rising also. “Simply find Arabella and bring her home.”
“That,” Julian said, “I intend to do.”
He collected his hat from the peg by the door, nodded once to the old man, and walked back out into the morning.