Chapter Ten
For the rest of that day after the croft, Adrian conducted himself like a gentleman.
He kept his distance. He spoke to Ophelia only when company required it, directed his charm impartially at everyone else, and gave her every opportunity not to meet his eyes. She ought to have been relieved.
Instead, his absence trailed her through every room, a silence at her elbow where his voice ought to have been.
The next forenoon he found her in the small library. The household was busy elsewhere, fine snow ticking steadily against the window, and Ophelia was seated at the writing table with the candle accounts before her, the fire burned down to embers, when he entered.
He closed the door softly but did not latch it. Then he remained beside it, leaving the width of the room between them and the way out within her reach.
“Miss Jones,” he said, and he said it in a tone she had not heard him use before, all lightness gone from it.
She set down her pen, sudden fear curdling in her stomach.
“I know that is not your name,” he said. “I will continue to use it if you wish me to.”
The dread she had carried through the last weeks settled at last into certainty. Ophelia rose, one hand braced against the writing table.
“How long have you known?”
“I suspected after the story about Markham. I was nearly certain before Christmas. What happened at the feast removed the last honest possibility of doubt.”
He watched her face without moving nearer.
“I believe you are Ophelia James. If I am wrong, tell me so, and I shall never mention it again.”
“You are not wrong,” she said quietly.
She had expected panic when this moment came. Instead, beneath the fear, something in her chest unclenched, a bone-deep and exhausted relief. The running from him, at least, was finished.
Adrian let out a slow breath.
“You sat across from me while I told your worst moment as a dinner-table joke.” His voice had still not regained its usual ease. “I have thought of little else since I understood. I do not know how you resisted throwing the tureen at my head.”
“I considered it.”
For a moment he stared. Then the corner of his mouth moved.
“I would have deserved it.”
“Yes.”
“I find your forgiveness touching.”
“I have not offered it,” she noted.
Adrian inclined his head, rueful. “No. Quite right.”
He came farther into the room and took the chair opposite the writing table. A careful distance remained between them.
“You owe me no explanation,” he said. “But if you wish to tell me what happened, I will listen.”
Ophelia looked at him.
He did not ask why she had run. He did not tell her that he could help if only she would give him the truth. He simply waited and left the choice to her.
She sat down.
“My mother’s name was Shirin Sethna.”
She had meant to give him only the bones of it: enough to explain Markham, her father, and her flight. Adrian listened, though, in a way even Lady Elise never had, and far more came spilling out than she had ever planned to say.
Shirin had been born into a prominent Parsi family of Bombay shipbuilders.
She had married Josiah James for love and lived with him first in India and then in England.
Ophelia had been baptised and raised in her father’s church, but it was her mother who had taught her prayers, songs, and the conviction that faith without kindness was only pride in a fancy coat.
England had never known what to make of Shirin. She had been slighted in drawing rooms and stared at in the street, always expected to treat the insult as a misunderstanding. Her warmth had gone unanswered, and her gold bangles and soft, accented English were merely tolerated, never welcomed.
Year by year, she had grown quieter.
“The lung fever killed her when I was sixteen,” Ophelia said. “But I have sometimes thought it began when we came to England, five years before.”
Adrian’s face changed, but he did not interrupt.
She told him about her father.
Josiah James had loved his wife. Ophelia had never doubted that. Shirin’s family and their ships had helped make him rich, but affection rather than advantage had brought them together. After her death, however, grief hardened into ambition.
“He decided no one would ever look down upon me as they had looked down upon her. I was to rise so high that society would be forced to honour me. He would buy me a title if he could, so that those who would look down on me would be forced to give me precedence.”
Adrian’s mouth tightened.
“He meant it as love,” Ophelia said. She had found it in her, in the last six weeks, to understand what had driven her father, more than she ever had while living under his roof.
“That was the worst of it. He never understood that in buying me a title, he valued me exactly as the Ton did. I was a fortune with a face, to be given to the best name in need of money.”
“And Markham needed money.”
“Yes.”
Crispin Hale, Viscount Markham, had been charming from the first. Her father had admired his manners, his title, and his willingness to overlook the source of the James fortune.
The articles were drawn. The settlements were signed.
Markham’s debts would be cleared, Josiah’s daughter would become a viscountess, and everyone concerned congratulated themselves upon an excellent bargain.
Everyone except Ophelia.
“I knew he did not love me. I had not expected love. I thought respect might be enough. I would be a viscountess; my father would be happy, and the money would please Markham.”
She folded her hands in her lap.
“A week before the wedding, we came to the Markham house in town one afternoon; I was to meet with his mother, who was taking me to her modiste on Bond Street. I was in the hallway waiting for his mother when I heard his voice through a half-open door. He was with several friends, playing billiards. They were speaking of me.”
She told Adrian how Markham had named the sum he expected from the settlement and itemised what it would purchase: the payment of his debts, horses, play, and a life free from the vulgar necessity of economy.
“He called me his dusky little Croesus. He said he supposed he must get an heir upon me, but afterward he need scarcely see me again. A man could shut his eyes, he said, for twenty thousand a year, and the rest of my father’s fortune once he died.”
The room became very still.
“His friends laughed,” Ophelia said. “I stood on the stairs with my hand over my mouth and understood that I had never been a person to any of them. My father priced me one way and Markham another. Between them, there was nowhere left for me to exist at all.”
Adrian’s hands closed slowly on the arms of his chair.
“What did you do?”
It was the first question he had asked, and the one answer she no longer minded giving.
“That day, I did nothing. Markham’s mother came down and took me shopping, and I watched from the corner of my eye as she marched the modiste into the back corner of the shop, and ordered her to overlook my skin and dress me as though I were a princess, and send the bills to my father, and ordered herself ten new gowns on the same bill.
And I saw her sneer at me when she thought I was looking at gloves, and knew I would never be more than tolerated in that family.
So I decided I would not marry into it.”
She had tried to tell her father, that same evening, but Josiah had waved off her concerns as wedding nerves and gone out the door, going to dinner with his friends.
Alone in the house, Ophelia came to the realisation that the only person who could save her was herself.
So, on the morning of the wedding, she had put on her plainest gown and taken her jewel case, her mother’s book, and the letter containing Elise’s direction.
Shirin had given her that address years before and told her, if ever you are desperate, this is the door that will open.
“I stepped into the street and did not look back.”
It had taken a fortnight to reach Wales by indirect stages. She had travelled by mail coach, carrier’s cart, and whatever conveyance could take her north and west without requiring too many questions, her coin dwindling with every mile. Every horseman on the road had seemed a pursuer.
Then Elise’s door had opened.
“And I became no one,” Ophelia said. “It was safe, being no one.”
She lifted her chin and looked at him.
“Now you know. You may do as you like with the knowledge, Your Grace, as every man I have ever known has done as he liked with me.”
Adrian lowered his face briefly into his hands.
When he looked up, he was white and plainly furious. There was no charm left in him, and the fury was not directed at her.
“I knew Markham well at Oxford,” he said.
“I drank with him, gamed with him, and called him friend. My mother has always been fond of him. He was often at Daventry House, and I heard him say things of a piece with what you have described. Never so foul, perhaps, but near enough that I knew what manner of cruelty it was.”
His fingers tightened against the chair, knuckles paling against the dark wood.
“And do you know what I did? I laughed. Or I said nothing, which is the same thing. I told myself it was only Crispin’s way, only the world as it was. Objecting would have cost me something, and I have spent my life avoiding any expense that could not be paid in coin.”
“Adrian…”
“No. You must let me say it.”
He had never asked her for that before. Ophelia fell silent.
“I was wrong. Markham’s contempt for you, and for everyone he considers beneath him, is a rotten thing. I should have named it years ago. I will name it now, to his face if need be, whatever it costs me.”
His voice lowered.
“I do not ask you to forgive my silence. I only could not let you tell me what he said and leave you believing I am one more man who will call it harmless because opposing him would be inconvenient.”
Ophelia had thought she had wept all her tears when her mother died.
She discovered she had been mistaken.
They came without warning, slipping silently down her face. She wept not for Markham, nor her father, nor even her mother, but because Adrian had heard the worst and turned his judgment not upon her but upon Markham and himself. He had called the cruelty by its name.
It was worth more than he could know.
“I do not think you are one of them,” she said when she could speak.
He did not move.
“My mother told me that charming men were never to be trusted.” She wiped impatiently at her face. “But I am very much afraid that I am about to trust one now.”
His expression softened, but he did not smile. “Then let me earn it slowly. Do not give me more than you choose. I have spent most of my life treating trust as something easily won and lightly spent. I should like to learn better with you.”
The room seemed suddenly too quiet.
“And Markham?” she asked.
“I will never betray your secret to him, or to any other. Beyond that, I will do nothing unless you want my help.”
“You said at Christmas that I would not face the world alone.”
“I said it badly.” His gaze held hers. “You need not face it alone unless you choose to. That is what I should have said.”
It was a smaller promise than the grand one, and therefore greater.
Adrian rose and bowed to her. A real bow, not a flourish.
“I will leave you now.”
At the door, he paused.
“Which name do you wish me to use?”
The question nearly undid her again.
“In company, I must still be Olivia.”
“And here?”
She looked down at her mother’s book on the table, then back at him.
“Ophelia.”
He said it once, softly, as though he was tasting it on his tongue.
Then he went out.
Ophelia remained beside the dying fire for a long while, wondering if she had made a terrible mistake. She had done the most dangerous thing of her hidden life. She had let one person see the whole of her, plain and unguarded, and he had not turned away.