Page 73 of An Earl Like You
“Where is Lady Hastings?” he asked the butler as he walked through the front door, already peeling off his coat and gloves.
Wilkins bowed. “She retired to her room, my lord.”
Hugh was halfway up the stairs. “Excellent.” Should he send for a doctor to examine her? He ought to have asked his mother. He grinned, taking the final steps two at a time. He ought to ask Eliza.
But she was not in the room. Mary, her maid, was there, arranging a pot of tea and accoutrements on the table near the fireplace. “Lady Hastings?” he asked, a touch impatiently. Surely she should be in bed.
“She said she wanted to fetch a book from your study, my lord,” said the girl.
Hugh paused. His study? “Very good,” he said, but his enthusiasm had suffered a sudden chill. Why would Eliza go there for a book? The library was small but had a fine selection of novels, thanks to his mother and sisters. There was nothing half so entertaining in his study.
But when he pushed open the study door, she was not choosing a book. She sat in the chair behind his desk, her head bowed. Willy popped out from behind the desk at his entrance and loped across the room for a greeting. Hugh rubbed the dog’s ears without looking away from her. “Eliza?”
Her head came up. Her face was ghostly white, and he came forward in sudden alarm, only to stop short as she lurched to her feet. “I am such a fool,” she said thickly, bracing her arms on the desk.
He frowned. “No. What do you mean?”
For answer she opened her hand and scattered a handful of crumpled papers on the desk. Hugh’s stomach dropped as he realized what they were.
“He bought them all, didn’t he?” she said, appearing mesmerized by the debt notes, the wordPaidstanding out on one like the imprint of a cloven hoof.
In spite of himself Hugh’s temper stirred again. He should have burned those notes, true; but to find them she had gone through his desk. Eliza wasn’t the sort to do that on a whim. Someone had told her. Was this what Livingston had done? But no—how could Livingston have known? “Yes,” he said, more harshly than he intended.
She nodded, a stiff, jerky motion. “At least fifty thousand pounds.”
“Close to eighty.”
She flinched. “I never was good at sums.” She raised her eyes to his. They were flat, almost empty. “That’s a lot of money.”
He said nothing. Who the bloody hell had told her? He hadn’t told a soul—not his mother, not his solicitor, not a single friend. The only other person who knew the whole story was her father. Why on earth would Cross tell her, though? Especially now, when they were married until death parted them, when he’d fallen in love with her, and when she might be carrying his heir?
Was that it? Cross had been particularly keen to have contact with his grandchild. He must have noticed Hugh was not eager for that to happen. Perhaps this was a plot to separate them—
Hugh closed his eyes for a moment. That wasn’t it. He’d become so attached to the idea of a child, in just the time it took him to walk home, that he’d begun to believe it was true. But Eliza hadn’t come home because pregnancy made her ill; there probably was no child. She’d left the ball because she wanted to search his desk.
His wife straightened her shoulders. Her mouth pulled down at the sides and she looked miserable for a moment. Then she took a deep breath and faced him, her chin high and her eyes beginning to blaze. “Was it all a lie?”
His mouth twisted cynically. “Ask your father.”
Her chest heaved. “Was there ever ore on your Cornish property?”
Hugh hesitated, but what was the point of lying now? She clearly knew, from the tone of her questions. The only one who could have told her everything was Cross, or someone Cross had told, and if her own father had broken the vow of silence he extorted from Hugh, there was no reason he shouldn’t answer her. “Not that I know of.”
“Did you really mean to allow him to dig it up on the chance there was?”
“No.”
“Was it chance when we met at the theater, and the Thayne ball?”
“No.”
She quivered as if struck. “Did you know my father would be away when you called in Greenwich?”
“Often. Yes.”
Her chin went up and down, nodding faintly as he confirmed everything she probably already knew. “Would you have ever come to Greenwich if my father hadn’t done this?” She waved at the debts.
Unexpectedly frustration and anger rolled over him again, as fresh as the first time he’d gone to Cross’s house, tense with dread and anxiety about why the man had bought every debt he owed. When Cross had let him know that he had Hugh hooked like a trout—no matter how hard he wriggled, the barb was in deep and wouldn’t be dislodged. “No,” he said in a clipped tone.
