No. She could not tell him about her mother.
“Spencer was my mother’s maiden name,” she improvised. “And Halifax the place I was born. In Yorkshire.” That much at least was true.
“AndGeorge?”
“It was the first name I thought of! It’s the king’s name, for heaven’s sake.”
He made a slightly strangled sound.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m terribly sorry to have involved you. But I did not mean to do so. I did not know you existed, and I have no intention of making demands upon you. Far from it. I’mverygrateful to you for securing my release from that godawful cell”—she shuddered—“and I can certainly make restitution for the money you spent doing so.”
Thank heavens for her thread. It had all been worth it—the lying and pretending, the books and sheep and hard lean years at first—because she was independent now. She could pay him back, with interest if he demanded it, from the profits of Mrs. Halifax’s Handmade Thread.
She had for herself the life she had always wanted. She had her sheep, her farm, her snug little cottage. She had a life that was almost without fear.
And she was happy, most of the time. Only… she had not realized how lonely independence would be.
But she’d been alone for a decade now. She’d learned—she’d tried to learn—not to mind it.
The earl shook his head. “It’s not about the money. If you are as innocent as you claim, then why in God’s name did my solicitor turn up a copy of marital banns with my name on them?”
“He foundwhat?”
Lord Warren’s face hardened. His eyes, which had been a rather pleasant summer-ish shade of blue, went icy. “Do you claim not to know of it, then? This record of the banns?”
“I—I—”
Of course she knew about the record of the banns. She’d forged the bloody paper, had she not? Two months after she’d arrived in Llanreithan, when one of the villagers had been unrelenting in his displays of interest.
She licked her lips. “I wrote the banns. I needed some proof to show the rector of my marriage.” She’d needed Archibald Davies’s help, though she could not bring herself to say that, not now, not to this man.
She was independent. She did not need anyone’s help. She’d long ago stopped wishing for it.
“I stole into the rectory one evening and rifled through the blank banns records that Mr. Davies keeps on hand for weddings in the village. And then I went home and drew up my own. I dated it the winter before I came here, and I told Mr. Davies that it was a copy of the real thing.”
“Is that your name on the banns? Your real name?”
“Yes.” She swallowed against a sudden tightness in her throat. She had wanted…
It had been a stupid, nonsensical thing. A brief flare of irrational desire that had burned in her as she’d scribbled her own name on the forged banns.
Llanreithan was her fresh start. Her chance to do things the right way, not the way her mother had done. She had wanted, in that small way, to be honest. Even in the face of all her other deceptions.
“I am Winifred Wallace,” she said. The name felt strange on her tongue—foreign. She had not said it in a decade. “The banns are not real. They never were. I made up your name, and I wrote that you lived in Mayfair because—because I thought it was beautiful there. I smudged the house number so that no one could ever look it up.”
“Jesus,” the earl said. He rubbed his hand on the back of his neck, and a lock of his ginger hair fell across his brow. “Jesus Christ.”
“It’s a forgery,” she said again, more strongly this time. “You have nothing to fear from me.”
“Miss Wallace,” he said, “you have no idea what you’ve gotten us both into.”
“I don’t understand.”
And then, to Winnie’s slowly unfurling horror, Spencer Halifax explained.
He told her about the fire that had destroyed the records—therealrecords—at Bow Church, the location she’d chosen for the banns because it was the closest church to where she and her mother had lived in Cheapside.
He told her that the address was his, more or less, and the second name. He told her that without the ability to confirm the real banns that had been read in 1811—and without a parish registry from that same year to prove no such marriage was recorded—the false banns were all that existed.
