Henry managed an awkward shrug. “I’m given to understand it involved a sympathetic clergyman—a distant relation of my mother’s—who was willing to issue a common license and change the date of their wedding to make it appear that it hadoccurred earlier than it had.” With just the scrawl of a pen, Henry had become the heir he ought to have been instead of the bastard he had been born.
Just enough to render him legitimate in the eyes of law—unless it could somehow be proved otherwise.
“So you didn’t know?”
“I hadn’t the faintest idea until a few days ago.”Married in the nick of time, they had always said. “Apparently my uncle—my father’s younger brother—paid a call upon Mother recently. Said he’d learned the truth of my birth.” His fingers tapped out a brisk rhythm upon the table, growing more frantic as the seconds drew out. “It was a threat,” he said. “My father has no other legitimate son. If my uncle were to make claim of my illegitimacy—if he were to haveproofof it, as he claims to—then I could be declared illegitimate. Not only would I be ruined, but so too would my mother and sister by association. We would lose…nearly everything, I expect.”
“And this uncle would be the legitimate earl, then?” Grace asked, with a little cant of her head. At his nod, she added, “I suppose this veiled threat was accompanied by some demand of money?
“Five hundred pounds.” The words emerged on a snarl. “For years, my father paid my uncle a healthy allowance, but he found it necessary to cut him off a year or so before he passed. Uncle Nigel had developed the habit of overspending that allowance by a significant sum each quarter, accruing debts that my father then felt honor-bound to pay. They had a terrible row when Father cut him off at last. He was bequeathed a sum of money by my father in his will, but he must have known he wouldn’t get more from me.” So he had gone after Mother instead.
“I see,” Grace said, her voice low, speculative. “It is too late now, of course, but she shouldn’t have paid him. And you must tell her not to do so if he should come asking again.”
“What else ought she have done?” Henry asked, offended on his mother’s behalf. “What wouldyouhave done—”
“I would have let Uncle Chris sort him out,” Grace said, without hesitation. “But I know better than to pay off an extortionist. They always come crawling back, hand outstretched, as soon as the money has run out. The good news is that your uncle almost certainly doesn’t have—or, at least, doesn’tyethave—the proof he claims exists.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because one doesn’t show one’s cards to one’s opponent,” she said. “If he had what he claimed, he’d hardly have needed to extort your mother for funds. He’d simply have taken that proof and petitioned to have your claim to the earldom invalidated. Everything would have become his in one fell swoop, and you would have had no recourse. Much cleaner; much neater that way.”
Christ. Henry dropped his face into his hands and scrubbed his cheeks.
Grace pulled a grimace. “The bad news,” she continued, “is that it’s likely the funds your mother provided to him will be put to use in obtaining that very proof.”
Blast and damnation. “How do you figure?”
“It’s been thirty years,” she said, “and there hasn’t been a whisper of it before now, has there?”
“No, but my father passed only last year. If there had been—”
“If there had been, he would have strenuously denied it, and likely no one would have doubted his word,” Grace said. “But now he is no longer here to defend himself, or your mother. It’s onlynowthat that proof has become valuable. When there are few living who might refute it. When it might be sold to an interested party.”
Uncle Nigel, of course.
“And if your uncle is still a spendthrift, as you said,” she said,“it’s possible he’s run through the amount your father left to him. What better way to ascertain if there were any truth to the claim than to threaten your mother with it? He finagled for himself some extra funds, and what was practically a confession of guilt besides. Which is why she mustn’t pay him again, should he come calling. Once might be written off as a misunderstanding, buttwice…”
“I’ll make certain she knows,” Henry said slowly, as a dull cramping ache settled in his belly. It was going to devastate his mother, he knew, to learn that she had likely contributed more than she had imagined to their present predicament. But if Grace had judged the situation correctly, then what they did going forward would make all the difference.
“It’s not her fault,” Grace said, and Henry had the strangest sense that she meant to be soothing—sympathetic, even. “Good people are rarely in the position where they must consider such things. Those with a conscience are at a distinct disadvantage when dealing with those without. People guided by morals will invariably walk a predictable path and follow a prescribed set of rules. It makes them easy prey for the ruthless.”
An interesting way of framing it, and Henry wondered—on which side did she place herself? He’d watched her steal a pocket watch evening last, and yet he couldn’t quite find it in himself to fault her for it. “May I ask, Miss Seymour, what became of the pocket watch you stole evening last?”
A tiny, suspicious tilt of her head. “Is it somehow germane to this conversation?”
“No,” he said. “And—yes. I suppose I’m asking, if in a roundabout fashion, where it is you would place yourself upon the scale you proposed. Closer to moral—or immoral?”
“Does it matter? You’re not precisely spoiled for choice in thieves. We both know it.”
“It matters to me. You’ve been honest enough with me thusfar”—once she’d had no other choice but to admit to her thievery and after his assurances that her criminal bent would remain secret, at least—“so I have no reason to doubt your word. But I would like to know who it is I’m dealing with.”
“The devil you know, eh?”
“Something like that.” Though he couldn’t imagine Lucifer filling out a day dress quite so nicely as Grace did. “Whatever you have to say, it will remain between us. On my honor.”
Grace pursed her lips. “Had you observed a little longer,” she said. “You might have seen me slip the watch to my Uncle Chris.”
Henry’s brows lifted. “Mr. Moore is aware of your penchant for thievery?”
