A Delicate Deception Page 3

  Georgiana had been the Allenbys’ governess until the girls no longer required one. The daughter of an impoverished but respectable family, she was an unobjectionable choice as a lady’s companion. That, however, was not why Amelia had asked her to come to Derbyshire. Georgiana had been a perfectly responsible and respectable governess, but after—well, Georgiana had always been game for what Amelia’s father had once indulgently referred to as her pranks. When Amelia smuggled a kitten into church, Georgiana covered up the animal’s mewls with a feigned coughing fit. When Amelia slipped out of ballrooms to flirt with red-coated officers and moustached fortune hunters and bejeweled widows of ill repute, Georgiana aided and abetted her at every step. When Amelia anonymously published a novel so obscene that it would have sent her to prison if her identity had been discovered, Georgiana demanded an annotated copy. And then when Amelia began publishing much less objectionable novels, Georgiana insisted that all the best villains be named after her.

  So after that final incident, when Amelia decided becoming a hermit in the Peak District was preferable to watching her mind come apart at the seams, of course Georgiana had declared herself delighted to come along. It was not meant to be permanent, only a holiday from the circumstances that were quite literally driving Amelia mad. Amelia had thought a few months would do the trick, and then Georgiana could return to town and get another post as governess or finally accept Amelia’s offer of an annuity. But a year had passed, and still Amelia was no closer to feeling ready to return to London. She couldn’t keep Georgiana here indefinitely, nor could she face a future of total solitude. It was no wonder that she had greeted that day’s painless interaction with the stranger as a good omen.

  “There was a letter for us at the inn,” Georgiana said when she burst into the parlor later that afternoon. Her face was alight with barely checked mischief.

  Amelia glanced up from the book she was reading. Georgiana waved a folded sheet of expensive stationery. At least, Amelia assumed it was expensive. All previous letters from Mr. Marcus Lexington had arrived on paper so fine that Amelia hadn’t been able to resist looking up her correspondent in Debrett’s, but to no avail. “Give it over,” Amelia cried, making a grabbing gesture with her hand.

  Georgiana plopped down beside her on the sofa. “Shall we?” she asked as she broke the seal.

  This bizarre correspondence had begun six months and twelve letters ago, in the middle of a harsh winter. For several days Amelia had been unable to leave the cottage for so much as a stroll around the grounds, and Georgiana hadn’t even been able to call on the vicar’s wife. Huddled around the fire, Amelia had read aloud Mr. Lexington’s defense of Richard III in one of the historical publications she subscribed to. A bottle of wine and some righteous indignation later, they had penned the first letter together. Amelia hadn’t expected the man to write back. She has assumed anyone who could be so devotedly ignorant about history would also be the sort of chauvinist who did not condescend to engage with ladies on the merits of his theses. But he had written, and—wonder of wonders—seemed to enjoy quarreling with them as much as they enjoyed quarreling with him. Now she and Georgiana looked forward to new letters from Mr. Lexington, Georgiana because she thought the letter writer very droll, and Amelia because perhaps she enjoyed getting herself riled up more than she cared to admit.

  “‘My dear Miss Russell,’” Georgiana began to read aloud from over Amelia’s shoulder.

  This letter, as always, was addressed to Miss Georgiana Russell, care of the Swan in Heatherby. This small subterfuge had seemed a reasonable precaution: Allenby was not only a more unusual surname than Russell, but Amelia had achieved some notoriety as the writer of three historical novels. Meanwhile, calling for letters addressed to a totally fictitious name would have created unwanted gossip in the village. Perhaps the wisest course of action would have been simply not to engage with lunatic historians, but that would have required a degree of restraint that Amelia had never possessed.

  “‘My dear Miss Russell,’” Georgiana repeated, elbowing her for attention. “‘Regarding the future queen’s ladies-in-waiting and their possible loyalties to continental powers—’”

  “Ha!” Amelia interjected.

  “‘I advise you to consult the transcript of Sir Reginald Howard’s 1797 address to the Society for the Advancement of—’”

  “Does he think that his Sir Reginald is some kind of seer? A mystic? A man with a unique line of connection with someone in Richard III’s court? Because unless Sir Reginald had access to papers the rest of us don’t, I don’t give a fig what conclusions he draws about anybody, past or present.”

  “I’d bet this plate of biscuits he’s having you on, and that there’s no Reginald Howard and never has been.” This wager might seem inconsequential to anyone who did not know Georgiana. She clutched the biscuits to her bosom like a newborn baby. “He goes on to say that surely you don’t mean to impugn Elizabeth of York’s character—”

  “That’s precisely what I mean to do, and he knows it! He’s being deliberately obtuse. I’m accusing the woman of cold-bloodedly killing her little brothers and framing Richard III for it. Does he think I’m paying her a compliment?”

  “Well, it’s probably the most interesting thing anyone has ever suggested about her. She really is such a bore. The next time we decide to defame a historical figure, let’s pick somebody more interesting.”

  “There’s no challenge in that,” Amelia argued.

  Instead of continuing, Georgiana paused, her brow furrowed. “Amelia,” she began, and pointed at the final paragraph. “He means to visit.”

  “Impossible,” Amelia said. But she looked at the lines beneath her friend’s fingertip. “He says he’ll be at Pelham Hall for the month of August into the autumn. That’s—it’s a ruin, Georgiana. I was there only the other day. He’s having us on.”

  “It gets worse. Look at the postscript.”

  Amelia squinted. “‘Forgive me for deceiving you, madam, but Marcus Lexington is a pseudonym and my true identity is the Duke of Hereford.’” She shook her head and thrust the paper at Georgiana, not wanting to see it again. “This has to be a prank. And not even a very good one. Pretending to be a duke is laying it on a bit thick. A bishop or even an earl would be more plausible.” Still, her heart raced.

  “I don’t think so,” Georgiana said slowly. “I know you don’t really talk to many people, but it’s common knowledge around here that Pelham Hall belonged to the Duke of Hereford’s sister before she died. Do you remember who signed your lease?”

  “Only the land agent and solicitor,” Amelia said.

  “Amelia, what’s the courtesy title of the Duke of Hereford’s eldest son?”

  “Lexington,” Amelia said promptly, this having been one of the many facts drilled into her brain by her mother. “You can’t mean—”

  Georgiana was already at the bookcase, paging through the Debrett’s. “This is an old copy, but it lists the duke’s oldest son as Marcus. And we both know the duke died last year.”

  “You cannot mean to suggest the man we’ve been haranguing in these letters is the Duke of Hereford.” This was too close to what had happened in London—insulting rich and powerful men and drawing more attention than she could handle. “And he’s coming to stay in an abandoned ruin not two leagues from our house?” She did not want to have anything to do with a duke, nor an earl, nor so much as a well-heeled country gentleman. Even on her walks, she took pains to avoid any of the grander homes. This duke would bring his London ways and his judgmental eye and Amelia would turn once again into the frightened and ashamed child hiding behind her mother’s skirts. “We’ll pretend this has nothing to do with us,” she said, feeling the creamy paper crumple in her hands.

  Georgiana was silent for a moment. “That might work, but if he returns to town with tales of how Miss Georgiana Russell of Derbyshire snubbed him, that might not bode well for my future.”

  Amelia buried her face in her han
ds. “We ought to have used an entirely false name rather than borrowed yours.” It probably said no fine things about her character that her remorse was over the insufficiency of her lies rather than the existence of them in the first place. But Portia Allenby had raised her daughters according to the principle that the truth was both useless and inadequate in any situation involving the aristocracy. Amelia felt the walls of the room start to close in on her, combined with the horribly familiar sense that her skin was a size too small. She caught herself worrying at some imaginary mark on her forearm, as if trying to dig out a foreign object.

  “There’s an easy solution,” Georgiana said. “I’ll go to Pelham Hall and meet with the duke, if that’s even what and who he is. You needn’t have anything to do with him.”

  This was wildly optimistic on Georgiana’s part. First, she doubted her friend’s ability to make conversation about Richard III, even with a man whose knowledge of the monarch bordered on hallucinatory wrongness. Second, if a duke truly were to arrive at Pelham Hall, that would mean balls and parties and a steady stream of visitors. Amelia would not be able to set foot outside her cottage without encountering someone. There would be people she knew, people who remembered her and her disgrace. Amelia forbore from mentioning any of this to Georgiana. There was, after all, nothing her friend could do.

  Her house felt stifling for the first time ever. It was as if the pressures of the outside world had crept inside. And she did not know how she would ever be rid of them.

  It had been over a week now and still Sydney had received no word from Lex. He found himself checking Pelham Hall every day, in case Lex arrived unannounced. As if such a thing were possible. During the year he had been close with Lex, he had never heard of the man doing anything without the maximum amount of fanfare.

  But each morning he found the house as desolate and unoccupied as it had been the previous day. And every morning he noticed something else about the structure. The windows of the surviving wing were mainly unbroken. The chimneys seemed sound, from the outside at least. Ivy had crept over doors and windows but cutting it back would be the work of a single day. And while his glimpses through the windows showed the interior of the ground floor to be in bad condition, it was in no way as bad as it might have been if the roof had failed. Finally he could put off his curiosity no longer, and shouldered his way into the house.

  There would always be a part of Sydney that saw a structurally unsound pile of stones and greeted it as a welcome challenge. Even seeing the house where his brother had died, even knowing it to be little better than a hulking monument to his own grief, he speculated that the roof probably wasn’t beyond salvation. He heard the wind whistling through the chimneys, felt the floorboards creak and shift under his feet, smelled the pervasive damp, and could not help but calculate the number of hands and the cost of supplies it would take to make the place right, to make it better than it had ever been.

  The other part of him remembered what he had lost here, what this place had cost him, and wanted to watch the entire blasted edifice sink into the earth.

  He walked the halls with a miner’s lamp, surveying the peeling paper, the warped paneling, the broken glass, but also seeing the beams that remained whole and solid. The newer half of the house—where the parties had been, where Penny had dragged him onto the floor for reels while Lex laughed from the shadows and Andrew played the fiddle—was all but gone, thank the merciful Lord. By the eerie light of his lamp, he saw a curling piece of flowered wallpaper and remembered it like a punch to the gut. He could almost hear the music, smell Lex’s cigarillo. They had all been so reckless and stupid, so foolishly caught up in the moment and so heedless of what could come. Sydney had never been like that before, had never wanted to be. What use was fun when there were bridges to be built, roads to be leveled. But Andrew had been so happy, happy in a way that had made Sydney wonder if he even knew what the word meant. And Penny and Lex had been carefree in a way that Sydney had never dreamed of. He ought to have distrusted it—the recklessness, the joy, all of it.

  He shoved aside a broken french door and stepped onto the terrace, filling his lungs with clean summer air. He had to get away. He set off along the first path he came to, not caring which direction it led. He couldn’t get lost in these hills if he tried. Their topography was burnt into his mind no matter how much he’d like to forget it.

  A felled tree formed a convenient footbridge over a brook, so he used it, aware that he was no longer on an actual path, but blundering oafishly through the woods. He followed the brook with a half-formed notion of seeing where it met the River Wye.

  And then he saw her, sitting against a tree, a book once again open in her lap.

  Sydney, who never swore, not in the company of laborers, not even in the company of his mother, who had a mouth like a sailor, ground out a hoarse “bollocks.”

  “Well,” the woman said. “This time you’re definitely on my property.” But she didn’t seem cross about it. “You have twigs in your hair. And you seem quite out of breath. Are you running from some danger I ought to be apprised of?”

  There was no way, not even the faintest possibility, that his current state of mind wasn’t visible on his face. He looked grim and forbidding in the best of moods. Now he probably looked like an ogre.

  “Only my own demons,” he said, opting for honesty over platitudes.

  “Those are the worst,” she said promptly, closing her book and looking up at him. “Do you want to tell me about them?”

  “God, no.”

  “Then have some cake.” Out of seemingly thin air, she produced a square of what looked like plum cake.

  “Do you always carry cake around and offer it to injured or weary travelers?”

  “That sounds very high-minded of me. No, I carry it in case I get hungry. Now, are you going to take it?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t eat sweets.”

  “What?” she asked, as if he had confessed to cannibalism. “Why ever not?”

  Not wanting to get into the issue of sugar boycotts and Quakerism and his parents, he waved his hand dismissively and she tucked the cake away into a tea towel. He shoved his hands in his pockets and continued to loom over her. Now was when he ought to take his leave, to retreat to the forest like some kind of feral creature.

  “You can sit and rest for a moment before outrunning your demons again,” she said, and patted the ground beside her.

  He sat down, letting his head knock again the tree trunk behind him. She smelled like lemons, and he didn’t know if it was from the cake or her soap, or if it was something else that rich ladies used and he had never heard of. It didn’t matter. He breathed the scent in and let his head fill with it.

  “What are you reading?” he asked, because her book remained closed in her lap.

  “Oh, haunted castles and imprisoned heirs, the usual.”

  Of course she was reading a novel. What had he expected? A treatise on steam engines?

  “You probably think it’s very frivolous,” she said. And before he could figure out how to respond, because the truth was that he indeed thought novels were terribly frivolous, but also that it was none of his business what she read nor her business what his opinion was—she continued. “And it is,” she said gleefully. “It’s appalling. It came in the morning post and I absconded with it so Georgiana couldn’t get it first.”

  “Very cunning,” he said, not entirely sure whether he meant it as condemnation, praise, or—a jest? Was he joking? He distantly remembered doing such a thing ages ago, in another lifetime, when his heart had been stupidly unguarded.

  She leaned forward and turned towards him, glancing at him from around the trunk of the tree. “You can borrow it afterwards.”

  “I, er, don’t think Georgiana would thank you for that.” Whoever Georgiana was.

  “I meant after Georgiana, of course. I’m not a monster. And you look like you could use a diverting book to read, if you’ll pardon my saying so.”
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  “That’s just what my eyebrows do,” he said.

  She rose onto her knees and peered at him, and he blushed under her scrutiny. “No, it has nothing to do with your eyebrows. It’s the way you carry yourself. As if you’re dragging a great weight.” With that, she resumed her position against the trunk, just out of his sight. On the grass beside him, he could see the folds of her faded muslin gown, and out of the corner of his eye he could make out a glint of red hair.

  “It’s not actual demons,” he said, before he could think too much about it.

  She let out a puff of air that might have been the beginning of a laugh. “I didn’t think you were actually being chased by demons onto my property. I would not have offered you cake. I’m not certain what I would have done, but cake would not have been my first recourse.”

  He could hear the smile in her voice, but he couldn’t see her face, didn’t even know her name, and maybe that was why he continued to speak. “It’s my brother. He died.”

  “Oh, I’m so—”

  “It was two years ago. Condolences are unnecessary at this point.”

  She fell silent for long enough that he wondered if she had resumed reading. Then she cleared her throat. “Naturally, I’m not going to force unwanted sympathies on you. But I have two sisters, and if I lost either of them I might well grieve to some extent for the rest of my life. My mother wore mourning for my father for years after his death.” She paused, and he could see one bare hand smooth the fabric of her skirts. “Then again, it really did suit her. The grays and blacks, I mean.”

  And then—oh no, he laughed. It was so inappropriate, and that knowledge only made him laugh harder. He dug his fingers into his thighs and bit the inside of his cheek in a futile attempt at composure. She was talking about the death of one parent and the grief of another, and was appallingly unserious enough to jest about it, and he laughed. “I beg your pardon,” he choked out. “I didn’t mean to—” Didn’t mean to what?