Claire drew a pained breath. “But—he was going to tell you,” she said. “He said—he said he had to speak with you before he brought me home.Here.”
“My son,” the duke said, “if I know him—and I do—is currently gallivanting around London with his debauched friends. He never had any intention of bringing you here. He’s gotten what he wanted from you, I suspect.”
Claire shivered again, and this time it was not from the cold. “I could be carrying your grandchild,” she whispered.
The duke shook his head in rueful sympathy. “Best pray you are not,” he said, “because any babe born to you will be a bastard.” He reached into his pocket and withdrew a scrap of paper. “I do feel for you, my dear. You seem an estimable young lady, and I’m sorry for the position my son has placed you in. I can no more force my son to do right by you than I could have forced him to do right by any other young lady he’d seduced and abandoned. But I hope you will take this and make yourself a good life with it. Call it recompense for your…situation.”
He offered the paper to her—a bank draft, written out for one hundred pounds. It was nothing at all to a man of the duke’s power and position—but a fortune to a woman of her own.
A woman who had believed she had a grand love, a husband, and a home.
Instead she had only a ruined reputation and a broken heart.
“I’ll have my carriage send you home,” the duke said, tucking the bank draft into her palm. “It would be best, you understand, if you did not come calling again. There is nothing for you here, my dear.”
And there was nothing else she could say around the lump that had risen in her throat, past the sting of tears, of a hurt that went straight to her soul. A bank draft could never compensate her for what she had lost. She could never return to who she had once been, because that girl, that hopeful, optimistic dreamer, had died in the duke’s foyer.
And she didn’t even recognize the woman who had risen in her ashes.
Chapter One
London, England
December, 1817
“What the hell do you mean,I may already be married?” Gabriel Newsom, the Marquess of Leighton, snapped the words at his father, entirely at a loss for any other response.
The duke sighed, running his hands through his grey hair as he bent over his desk. “Son, this isn’t a simple situation,” he said.
“I beg to differ. It’s very simple,” Gabriel said. “Either Iamor Iam notmarried. It’s one or the other, Father.” His voice lowered to a dangerous timbre, he suggested, “Perhaps you tell me which it is.”
“I don’t know!” the duke barked. “I don’t—that is to say, I neversawa license, per se. It’s entirely possible that it does not exist. But if you wed Lady Elaine, and youaremarried, you will be a bigamist.”
Gabriel rubbed his temples to guard against the beginnings of the migraine that had begun to settle in there. It had been months since he’d last had once. They were an unfortunate remnant of an accident he’d suffered some years ago, and for a while afterward they had been nearly constant—but in the intervening years they had waned, and the plague of them had faded until they were just an occasional inconvenience.
“Father,” he said, “whenwas I supposedly married?”
“I couldn’t possibly know the exact date,” the duke said, but a bit of hesitance touched his voice. “But a few days after your accident, a girl came up to Newsom Manor in search of you. She said she was your wife.”
Gabriel stiffened, and his head ached sharply as a thread of memory assailed him. “A girl,” he whispered, and his mind was jolted back to those terrible days after his accident, when time had been a blur of noise and pain. “I told you,” he said. “I told you, didn’t I? When I was…unwell. I told you there was a girl.”
A girl he’d seen in his bizarre waking nightmares, in the faint hints of lucidity he’d claimed as he had hovered between life and death. Weeks he’d lingered there, he had been told later, and months he’d convalesced still thereafter. The memory had faded with time, and he’d been informed that memory was a tricky thing indeed and that any number of wild imaginings would have seemed very real to him then.
“You said a lot of things,” the duke muttered. “None of which made much sense.” He gave a heavy sigh, leaning back in his chair. “But, yes. Youdidspeak of a girl.”
Gabriel struggled to piece together the fractured images in his mind, to paint a picture of the girl who had haunted his dreams for so long. She had seemed so ephemeral, like a fairy—a fever dream, or a wish concocted by a mind that had desperately needed something to cling to in days when his grip on reality, onlife, had been tenuous at best. He’d never seen her face clearly, but he had felt as if he had known her as he would have known the other half of himself.
“You said it was nothing.” His voice was a bare hiss. “You said it was a dream. The doctor—he said it was an invention of a damaged mind.” His head pounded, his blood running thick and heavy through it. “You said she wasn’treal.”
“For God’s sake,” the duke rasped. “How could I have known? You weren’t in your right mind. You haven’t been in your right mind for years.” The duke scrubbed his hands over his face, heaving a sigh. “There’s no solid proof that I’ve ever been able to find,” he said. “If there was a clergyman, I haven’t found him. No license has surfaced. It might all come to naught.”
Gabriel drew in a breath. “Come tonaught?” he echoed in horror. “You mean to tell me I might have awife”—a surge of some nameless longing swept over him, for the phantom lady that his tormented mind had once conjured up for him—“out there somewhere, and it mightcome to naught?” A hoarse laugh escaped him, as if the enormity of the situation could no longer be contained. “This girl who came to the manor—what happened to her?”
His father shifted uncomfortably. “I have no idea,” he said.
“She claimed to be mywife, and you have no idea what happened to her?” Gabriel thundered.
“I didn’t think to keep track of her. Anyone could see she was unsuitable,” the duke snapped. “Just a country nobody, soaked to the skin and covered with mud. Nondescript, provincial…probably a liar besides. Not at all the sort of woman you’d have taken to wife. I certainly didn’t entertain the notion at the time.” He tugged at his cravat with one finger, as if it had grown too tight around his throat. “I thought she was an adventuress,” he said. “That perhaps a servant had been indiscreet, and she’d heard of your…affliction, and thought to take advantage of it. It wouldn’t have been the first time such a thing had occurred, and you certainly had never mentioned any such woman to me before.”
