He had rehearsed this speech many times on the ride over, running through various approaches and slight variations, each one tailored to make the vicar more likely to agree. Yet now that he was here, sitting in this familiar room with the smell of old stone and woodsmoke and something baking somewhere, none of those versions sounded remotely viable. He could not lie to this man.
The vicar had buried his parents. Had baptized both him and Arabella. Had sat with Julian in this very room after his father died and talked to him for two hours without once saying anything useful but had somehow made everything bearable by the time Julian left.
You did not lie to a man like that.
“Son,” the vicar said, settling into the chair across from him, “what is the matter?” He paused, studying Julian’s face. “Does this have something to do with Arabella?”
Julian’s eyebrows shot up. “You have seen her?”
The vicar sighed. “I was not certain whether she would want me to tell you, but she mentioned that she had been staying with you.” He wrapped both hands around his cup. “She came to me perhaps a fortnight ago. Perhaps three weeks. She asked me to baptize her child. Horatio, she called him.”
Julian took a slow breath. He should have known she would come here. Of course, she had come here.
“How was she?” he said.
“Friday-faced,” the vicar said with the frankness of a man who had known her since she was in leading strings and felt no need to soften it. “Especially given her usual manner. I told her that if she gave me a little time, I could arrange a small celebration—that we might wait for you to come and join us.” He paused. “She insisted we do it there and then, just the two of us with my housekeeper as godmother. She stayed in the cottage behind the church for the night. She was gone by the morning.”
Julian closed his eyes briefly. Of course, she was.
“There is more,” he said. “Rather a great deal more.” He looked at the old man. “I am afraid I am in considerable trouble. Or rather, not so much myself as—” He stopped. “What I mean is, there is a woman, and a child and a situation that is quite?—”
He gave up trying to assemble a tidy version of it and simply told him the truth.
When he’d finished, the vicar’s face had gone the color of old parchment. The water on the stove had meanwhile reached such a vigorous boil that it bubbled over entirely, and the vicar burned his finger removing the pot. He sat for a moment with a cool cloth wrapped around it, staring at Julian with an expression that suggested he was reconsidering several of his long-held beliefs about the predictability of life.
“So,” the vicar said at last, “Arabella had the child. The child was brought to this Lady Clara. And you—” He paused. “Youannounced to a ballroom full of people that the child was yours and that Lady Clara was your wife.”
“That is correct,” Julian said.
“In front of all of London society.”
“Yes.”
The vicar set down his cup. “Julian, if I may call you that, I feel that perhaps you have attended one too many farces at the theatre.”
Julian felt the corners of his mouth attempting to do something inappropriate and suppressed them. “I understand how it sounds.”
“I am not certain you do.” The vicar shook his head. “I will be very glad to marry you to whomever you wish, but I do not see how that solves the difficulty. The marriage would have taken place, at earliest, three months after the child was born. Since the child is barely three months old, that would make him—by anyone’s arithmetic—born outside of wedlock.”
“Yes,” Julian said. “That is precisely the part that requires your assistance.”
“I see.” The vicar looked at him. “And how exactly do you envision me assisting? I am afraid I have no magical means oftransporting you backwards through time, much as I suspect you would welcome the opportunity.”
“There is much I would like to undo,” Julian agreed. “But no. What I am asking is rather simpler. When you register the marriage—and I would be grateful if you would do so promptly—if you were to record the year 1819 in a somewhat, let us say, generous hand. Loose enough that the nine might, to a careless eye, resemble an eight.”
The vicar stared at him.
He continued to stare.
Julian waited.
“You wish me,” the vicar said finally, “to falsify a parish record.”
“Not falsify as such,” Julian said. “Merely to exercise a certain latitude in penmanship. The record would be entirely genuine in all meaningful respects. It would simply be the sort of document that rewards close examination less than it might.”
The vicar set down his cup with rather more force than was strictly necessary. “I retract my earlier remark about the theatre and replace it with a suggestion that you have been reading the Bow Street reports with rather too much enthusiasm. You are describing a criminal enterprise.”
“I am describing a slightly untidy margin,” Julian said. “Vicar, I do not know where else to turn. Clara will be entirely ruined if I cannot present her as a married woman by the time the child was born. She is a good woman. Clever and warm-hearted, and she has already suffered more than she deserves.”
