“I was awakened at my lodgings just past dawn by a distraught Mr. Lawler, who held in his hand a copy ofThe Times.” He paused. “Imagine my delight when the word used to describe my wife was ‘accomplice.’”
Oh, dear God.
“The gossip columns?”
“The front page.”
Worse and worse. She squeezed her eyes closed.
“I understand Ackerman’s is already selling the Rowlandson illustration accompanying the article entitled ‘The Beast Takes a Bride.’”
Oh no.
Oh no oh no.
No wonder he was furious.
Her husband had been found as a baby squalling in a sack on the back garden steps of a Yorkshire manor, next to a delivery of potatoes. His name, Magnus Brightwall, was how the servants who found him had interpreted the barely legible scribble on the scrap of paper pinned to his swaddling clothes. He had triumphed over incomprehensible odds. He was extraordinary by any definition of the word. All of England considered him a hero.
She was one of the few who knew his ambivalence about the word “hero.”
It seemed a cardinal sin to do anything at all to tarnish the name of such a man. The gossip sheets had no such compunction about it, of course. Their fealty was to profits.
She wondered if she’d unwittingly been doing it in increments. Perhaps if she hadn’t gone out to that performance ofArtaxerxesat King’s Theatre that one night a few years ago, for instance, a drunk young man she’d never seen in her life might not have stumbled into her opera box and loudly declared his love for her during the first aria. It transpired her sparkly tiara had transfixed him ten minutes earlier in the lobby, so he’d followed her. The gossip sheets had christened her “the mysterious Juliet” until they’d discovered the opera box belonged to Colonel Brightwall and that “Juliet” was in fact Brightwall’s allegedlyeven more mysterious wife. That was when the fun really began.
She ventured out rarely into public after that. Her social circle remained primarily her extended family. This hadn’t been easy. She was a fundamentally social creature.
After that, from time to time, speculation about the nature of their marriage had sprung up in the gossip sheet like noxious little weeds. But both she and Magnus remained tight-lipped about the reasons they lived apart, and absolutely no one besides the two of them knew the real reason.
She wondered if Mr. Lawler had sent newspaper clippings to him in Spain.
She could not find it in herself to protest her innocence in this latest instance. It would have been an almost macabre echo of their last conversation.
“Magnus, I do not yet know what the newspaper printed,” she said carefully, her voice graveled. “And I expect I shall learn presently. But I should like to tell you that this all was merely misunderstanding which escalated horribly. Thackeray swears he was offered the use of the Duke of Brexford’s phaeton. Brexford was away when Thackeray retrieved it from the duke’s mews, and apparently no one in the stables questioned him about it. He then retrieved me from the town house for our visit to the opera with other friends. But when the duke arrived home and learned his phaeton was missing, he sounded the alarm because he’d forgotten the arrangement... and... and soldiers descended upon us, and...”
She stopped.
“And...” Magnus prompted, with great irony.
Which is when she realized Brightwall had probably, somehow, already heard the whole story.
“And Thackeray may have swung his fist at a soldier who seized him,” she said quietly.
Admittedly, this was a deeply stupid thing to do. Then again, while Thackeray was diverting company, he was hardly known for his sense, which life seldom required him to use. He took after her father’s side of the family. She’d tried to intervene by speaking up on his behalf to the soldiers. She’d scarcely raised her voice. But they were having none of it.
Her husband was one of the most famous military officers in all of English history. She knew exactly how he felt about civilians attacking soldiers doing their jobs.
Which meant she was aware of the futility, even the foolhardiness, of what she was about to say next.
But time was of the essence, and she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t try.
“In light of the circumstances, I am aware that what I am about to ask is presumptuous in the extreme.” Her voice trembled. “Thackeray won’t survive long in Newgate, Magnus. He hasn’t the funds or influence to get himself out. You’ve met him, at our house party five years ago. You have a sense of him, I believe. He means well, even if he is a bit rash on occasion, and this is what will gethim hurt in jail. If you could... that is, he truly didn’t intend to...”
She trailed off when she realized Magnus was studying her as if he’d never seen her before. With a sort of hard, closed curiosity. Wondering, perhaps, what she had become. What on earth he had ever seen in her.
“Lord Thackeray might be your cousin, but he is a feckless idiot who recklessly endangered you, himself, my reputation and yours.” He explained all of this slowly, with great, amazed patience, as if this was something elementary she ought to have learned with her numbers and letters. “Thackeray can rot in prison.”
She stared at him. And as she did, toxic bubbles of fury rose through her exhaustion and unease and layers of grace and control,alwayscontrol, so carefully cultivated.Do noteverspeak to me in that tone. No matter what I’ve done. No matter how angry you might be.She wanted desperately to say it. And she could have.
