Page 42 of A Baron's Scandalous Quill
“You think not? Pah!” he laughed at the idea. “My father clearly didn’t abide by the laws of the land when it came to fraud. I highly doubt he would have bothered to keep to the laws of his marriage.” He snatched up the letter bundle, which he had keptin the pocket of his tailcoat ever since, and dropped them on the table, searching through them.
“I read through them all last night. Look, there’s a pattern.” He pointed at certain letters. “Sometimes they address each other ‘Love’, other times, the woman is addressed as ‘My Songbird’, and my father is called ‘My Stars.’” He actually made a sickening sound, and Becca snickered, trying to hide her laugh as she picked up her tea.
“You cannot imagine your father taking on such a romantic role?”
“He was hardly the hero of a great Shakespearean play. He was no Benedict or Romeo. Far from it! I think you would find more in common between him and the manipulative Iago than you would either of them. It just doesn’t sound like him.” He waved a hand at the letters, sighing heavily. “In fact, there had been a point last night where I wondered if it was him at all in these letters.”
“We found them in his room.”
“That we did.”
“Is it your father’s handwriting?” she asked.
“Ah, therein lies a problem, to be sure.” He sighed deeply, tucking into the cake that she had served for him. “You must have seen in the papers you’ve looked over that my father changed his handwriting often. Sometimes, there are similarities, other times none at all. If I were to think the worst, I’d say he was doing it to avoid being recognized between dodgy contracts and business deals through his writing alone.”
“He could have just enjoyed changing how he wrote?” Becca offered, and he playfully frowned at her. She offered an innocent smile. “I rather like you pretending to be mad with me,” she confessed in a giggle.
“Don’t say things like that.” He laughed suddenly. “I’ll be abandoning the tea entirely and taking you back to that bedchamber otherwise.”
“Would that be a bad thing?”
“Becca…” he warned, playfully still. How he longed to take her back to that bedchamber, for them to explore each other again, indulge in their pleasures, but there was also a part of him that now feared how far they would go. The day before, he had dreamed most strongly of making love to her completely, of what it would be like to have her wrapped around him, what sounds she would make as he pleasured her, and how she might cling to him.
“I’ll be good, I promise.” She offered that innocent smile once again, then shifted her focus to the letters. “It still doesn’t suggest in these letters that the love was ever acted upon. These two people, if it is your father and another, knew they were separated.”
“You see, as you have been thinking, so have I. And I have had a different thought.” He reached into his other pocket and pulled out the very thing that had been bothering him most in all their research of his father. He retrieved the marriage certificate of his father and Miss Sarah Brackley. He unfurled the paper and placed it down on the table on top of all the letters.
“Oh.” Slowly, Becca put down her cake fork and peered at the certificate. “I had just assumed that the poor lady must have passed, and your father then married your mother. You think…” She didn’t say a word and looked up at William.
“Afraid to say the words?” he asked, feeling his stomach knot hard. She nodded, still speechless. “I am not so afraid of it,” he said with sudden determination. “My father preached to me for years about how he wanted me to act, the view of the world he had, and now I find these.” He gestured to the certificate and the letters. “I cannot bear it. What if his first wife did not pass at all? What if she is this ‘songbird’ in these letters? What if…he had an affair?”
Becca said nothing but stared at him, her lips parted a little.
Silence hung in the air between them, and neither of them said anything as they considered the idea.
It is a possibility. I know it.
The thought had kept William up for most of the night. Once he had alighted on the idea, he was finding it impossible to think of anything else.
“But then she would be complicit in him being a bigamist,” Becca said suddenly, snatching up the certificate and looking at it in more detail. “She would have had to accept her husband going away and marrying your mother. That is too awful to bear!” She dropped the certificate and covered her mouth, clearly horrified.
William was distracted for a second, staring at Becca and thinking only of her. She seemed to be suffering a breaking heart, but not for herself, for him! Her benevolence of spirit, her kindness struck him in one moment, and he reached for her hand, taking it away from where she clutched at her face. They ended up leaning toward one another across the table, their heads bent toward one another and their fingers entwined tightly.
“Let us not jump to conclusions,” she pleaded, her forehead resting on his. He took strength in that touch, as he always seemed to these days. “Let us find out as much as we can, but letus not condemn a woman we do not know, nor condemn your father of crimes he may not be guilty of.”
“He’s already guilty of plenty enough to fill a book,” William pointed out. The sudden lightness made them both laugh, and they lifted their heads, looking at one another. “You have a habit of doing that.”
“Doing what?” she asked.
“Making me want to reach for a jest or the lightness in a room when all seems dark.”
She smiled in such a way that he couldn’t help leaning toward her, quite forgetting about their tea and cake as he kissed her. The touch was warm, her lips soft against his own, and they stared there for a minute or more, kissing as the thrill consumed his body. In the end, he had to pull back, fearing they would get carried away with their touches once again.
“Well,” she said, her face flushed red as they sat back from one another. “Shall we try our best to talk about some work?”
“Well, we can certainly try,” he said with a chuckle and gestured for her to bring out the papers from her satchel.
He focused as much as he could on what she had written so far and the way they were going to reveal the true extent of hisfather’s deceptions, but try as he might to forget those letters, he could not. Every few minutes, William’s eyes drew back to the marriage certificate and the love letters that rested on the other side of the table.
