Page 106 of The English Wife

David’s face was white. “If I had known … I didn’t mean … I knew you never spoke of him, but…”

Bay was more attuned to David’s nuances than she. “But what?”

David looked unhappily at Georgie. He ducked his head over his coffee cup. “He said to send you his most sincere devotion. And that you would be hearing from him.”

TWENTY-ONE

Cold Spring, 1899

February 9

“Mr. Giles Lacey.”

The courtroom woke again. People twisted in their seats, whispered to one another, craned their necks for a sight of the latest sensation, the man who had provided The World with the titillating information that Annabelle Van Duyvil, née Lacey, was really Georgiana Smith, of uncertain parentage and dubious morals, the dubious morals being implied by the uncertain parentage.

Mr. Lacey, in tailoring that proclaimed its own origin as Not From Here, took his time sauntering to the stand, allowing the crowd to look their fill. Even Janie’s mother looked upon him with an auspicious eye, having determined that the enemy of one’s enemy, if not one’s friend, was one’s ally.

Janie wasn’t quite so sure. There was something about him, about his obvious enjoyment of the attention, that put her on her guard.

Turning with the rest to watch Giles Lacey, she caught Mr. Burke’s eye in the back of the room and felt some of the tension in her stomach lighten. Which was ridiculous, she knew. If she had any sense, she would be as wary of Mr. Burke as she was of Mr. Lacey. But, however absurd it was, she trusted that, whatever his other motives, he would be dogged in his pursuit of the truth. There had been something in his face when he spoke of his work, something like the way her father had looked when he had been among his books.

People could be careless about many things, her father had once said to her as he reverently turned the pages of a new acquisition, but not about the ones that mattered most to them.

“Mr. Giles Peregrine Adolphus Lacey?” The coroner spoke the names with a remarkably straight face.

“I am he.” Janie half expected to hear trumpets.

“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

Mr. Lacey’s eyes flickered sideways. “I swear.”

The coroner got right down to the point. “You were cousin to Annabelle Van Duyvil?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Lacey, drawing out the word. He flashed a smile at the press bench. “And no.”

The coroner looked up, his lips pressing together. “That does not answer the question.”

“It does, really.” Mr. Lacey rolled his shoulders, one after the other, like an athlete preparing to enter the ring. The tightly tailored material of his suit moved with him, causing, as the papers would no doubt report later, no little fluttering among the female members of the audience. Personally, Janie wasn’t feeling the least bit fluttery, but she could envision the newsprint already. Some of the reporters might even believe it. “Annabelle Lacey was my cousin. And Mrs. Bayard Van Duyvil was my cousin—across the bar sinister, as it were—but Annabelle Van Duyvil? There was no such woman.”

“That,” said the coroner, “is a very serious allegation.”

“It is a matter I take very seriously indeed,” said Mr. Lacey gravely, but there was a light in his eyes that reminded Janie of a rider taking a difficult fence—serious, perhaps, but exhilarated, pitting himself against the elements. “My cousin Annabelle was very dear to me. We were,” he added confidingly, “to be married.”

An excited murmur ran through the courtroom.

“I still have the license,” said Mr. Lacey, turning to the coroner. He produced it from his pocket, a crumpled piece of paper, on which the ink had run from rough treatment. “I have kept it with me all these years. As a keepsake. And in hope that, against all odds, my Annabelle might be returned to me.”

The coroner took the piece of paper with the tips of his fingers, handing it to the bailiff. “May the record reflect that the witness has produced a marriage license for one Giles Lacey and one Annabelle Lacey, dated the fifth of May, eighteen hundred and ninety-one.”

“It is, of course,” said Mr. Lacey, “more traditional to cry the banns, but neither Annabelle nor I wanted to wait to, er, join our lives together. You understand, I am sure, what it is to be young and in love.”

Half the men in the audience were smirking along with Mr. Lacey. Mr. Burke caught Janie’s eye and grimaced.

People do stupid things at sixteen.

Janie looked away, focusing very closely on the coroner as he handed another piece of paper to the bailiff.

“Here,” said the coroner, sounding very weary, “is a picture of Mrs. Bayard Van Duyvil, hereafter to be referred to as Exhibit Sixteen. Mr. Lacey, can you identify the woman in this picture?”