Now at last he would sleep. Thoughts had been routed by sexual satisfaction and the warm, relaxed weight of his wife’s body on his own. He did not try to find words.
He was still inside her.
Eighteen
They spent a large portion of the following morning in the gloomy, wood-paneled chambers of the law firm of Grimes, Hanson, and Digby. Mr. Grimes was a thin man of medium height and silver hair, a pair of spectacles resting halfway down a sharp nose so that he could peer downward through them when reading and over the top of them, with a slight dip of the head, when he was talking to his client. He appeared unassuming and unimpressive, but his eyes, which looked alternately upward and downward, were keen, and his questions proved thorough, his opinions and pronouncements blunt.
He looked Gil over from head to foot as he shook hands with him, his eyes resting rather longer upon his facial scar than on any other part of him.
“I do not know, Lieutenant Colonel,” he said, “if you intend to take my advice and resign your commission or retire from the army. But I would strongly recommend that you wear your dress uniform when you appear before thejudge who will decide your case. Your formidable appearance will be less daunting perhaps when seen in the context of your military background.”
Gil had taken great care over his appearance, since this was his first face-to-face meeting with his lawyer. But apparently he looked sinister nonetheless. It did not help that he towered over the man by a good six inches, and that he probably weighed twice as much.
“I shall think about it,” he said, nodding curtly. “Allow me to present Mrs. Bennington, my wife.”
She had dressed in a rather severely styled moss green walking dress, which nevertheless looked smart and expensive and accentuated the slimness of her figure. She had styled her hair smoothly over the crown of her head and twisted it into a knot at the back of her neck beneath her brown bonnet. There was not a stray curl in sight. There was a certain regality about the way she reached out her right hand toward Grimes and slightly inclined her head. She looked every inch the Lady Abigail Westcott she had once been.
“How do you do?” she said.
“Ma’am?” The lawyer took her hand and bowed over it before returning his gaze to Gil. “I am delighted that you followed this particular piece of advice of mine,” he said. “Will you come into my chambers and be seated, Mrs. Bennington? Lieutenant Colonel?”
A clerk followed them in, bearing three cups of coffee on a tray with a silver jug of milk and bowl of sugar.
“I will also be putting an end to my military career,” Gil said when the clerk had withdrawn and closed the door quietly behind him. “I intend to be a full-time husband and father.”
Grimes nodded his approval and turned his attentionback to Abby. “And who, ma’am, might you be?” he asked, his eyes peering very directly at her over his eyeglasses.
Gil bristled. “I hardly think—” he began, but he was stopped by an imperious hand, which was raised palm out.
“I am sure you do not, Lieutenant Colonel,” he said. “But it is the first thing Sir Edward Pascoe’s lawyer will want to know. Andonlythe first. He will want to know—and hewilldiscover—everything there is to know about your wife in the hope of finding something or several things that would disqualify her from being a suitable mother for Miss Katherine Bennington.”
“If anyone has anything to say in criticism of my wife,” Gil said, on the verge of getting to his feet and taking Abby away from there, “he may say it to me, sir. You can be sure I—”
But again he was interrupted, this time by Abby’s hand coming to rest lightly upon his sleeve.
“Mr. Grimes is not offering me an insult, Gil,” she said. “He is merely doing his job, which is to gather as much information relevant to your case as he possibly can so that he can make a convincing argument in your favor and be ready to counter any argument the other lawyer will make.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Grimes said. “That is exactly correct.”
Gil clenched his hands in his lap.
“I was Abigail Westcott,” Abby told him. “I am the daughter of the late Earl of Riverdale and the present Marchioness of Dorchester. The one negative fact about me that you will need to be prepared to deal with is that, unknown to my mother until after my father’s death six years ago, her marriage to him was not valid. He had a wife still living when he married her.”
“Bigamy?” The lawyer frowned.
Abby inclined her head. “And illegitimacy for my brother and sister and myself,” she said.
“I fail to see—” Gil said, but her hand tightened about his arm and he fell silent again.
There followed seemingly endless and very personal, intrusive questions of his wife. Gil sat through it all in stony, suffering silence as he began to realize just what he had exposed her to by marrying her. Not only this interrogation by a lawyer who was supposedly on his side, but the future indignity of full exposure by a less friendly lawyer in the presence of a judge and surely of General Sir Edward and Lady Pascoe too. He closed his eyes at one point and wondered how he could possibly have slept so comfortably last night and again after waking early and making love to his wife for the third time. He must be a prize idiot. He had had no inkling of the ordeal that was ahead for her this morning.
“I believe your husband’s chances of persuading a judge to award him custody of his daughter are somewhat improved, Mrs. Bennington,” Grimes told her by way of summary when he had seemed to run out of questions. “My learned colleague, the general’s lawyer, will of course make much of the irregularity of your birth, and indeed it is a great pity there is that. However, your mother has since married the Marquess of Dorchester, your brother is a major in an infantry regiment, your sister has made a respectable marriage to a portrait painter of some means and growing renown, and your maternal uncle is a clergyman with a living in Dorsetshire. Your father’s family, which includes the present Earl of Riverdale, your cousin, has not disowned you. Neither has the dowager countess, your grandmother. Or, according to your account, any othermember of the Westcott family. You were raised and educated as a lady. You have a tidy fortune of your own. I think all this may do nicely.”
“But my chances are onlysomewhatimproved?” Gil asked testily.
“There is your appearance,” Grimes told him bluntly. “Unfortunately, Lieutenant Colonel, when one hears the accusation, which you claim to be false, that you were physically abusive to your wife, one is inclined to believe it. And when one hears the story, which you do not contest, of your storming the general’s house when he was not at home to protect his wife and granddaughter, terrifying the servants as well as the lady and the child, then one is even more inclined to give credence to your late wife’s accusations.”
“I am to wear a mask, then, am I?” Gil asked him, frowning. “That of a curly-haired, round-cheeked cherub, perhaps?”
