Page 61 of The Mad Baron's Bride
Jack rubbed his eyes. The woman turned. For a moment the face was Anne-Marie’s, the same pale, dark-lashed eyes, the same restless twitch of her hands. Then the face changed.
“That is Nora, the girl from the market,” Leda said. “She lives in Snettisham, with the Waddelows.”
“Yes,” Jack said.
Leda turned to him, finally, and it was as if her face were overlaid on the face of another woman who had so often turned to him with questions, with unspoken longings, with a need in her gaze that he couldn’t identify and could never fulfill.
“And you knew that she is Anne-Marie’s daughter, her first daughter?”
Jack watched another form moving up the beach, several feet below. A metallic gleam winked from the pack on his back, from the threads of gray in his ink-black hair.
“I always wondered,” he said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“It is good of you to take her in.”
Jack stood when Leda entered the dining parlor. The sight of her hit him with a physical impact, as if his vital organs were organizing around a new center.
She glided toward him.
“We could do no less. The peddler walked with her from Snettisham, which is quite a ways, and everything she owns in the world is in that box she brought. I will send word to the Waddelows that she is here, and that we have asked her to stay with us.”
With us, she said. As if they were a unit. Anus.
He gripped the back of her chair to keep from reaching for her as she neared. She had long ago eschewed sitting at the far end of the table for their dinners and instead sat to his right, like an honored guest. She took her seat, and he smelled violets. A small knot of the flowers peeked from a glossy coil of hair and from the neckline of her dress, a simple round gown of innocent white but with a long tunic draped over her shoulders, trimmed with green vines and subtle flowers.
She had dressed for him, for their simple dinner together, and dabbed toilet water behind her ears. He saw directly downher bosom—the reason the custom had been invented, no doubt, for a gentleman to hand a lady into her chair. His groin tightened.
She was learning his secrets, all of them. Peeling away and exposing to air the truths he had tried for years not to look at.
“The peddler said her father is dead, poor soul.” Leda fidgeted with a fork beside her plate, edging it into alignment. “He knew him and his people. They camp over by Bircham for part of the year.”
Jack stared at the cloth covering the table, pressed white and crisp with the industry of Mrs. Leech. Nora’s red-rimmed eyes stared back at him, her cheeks two stabs of bright color in her pale, anguished face. How had she been standing right at the spot where they had discovered Anne-Marie’s body? How had sheknown?
“Nora had been living with the Waddelows all this time hoping he would eventually come to claim her. But now, with no hope…she came to you.”
“She came to you.” Jack’s voice grated his throat. “She trustsyou.”
Nora had not, in all this time, come to Jack, though she knew the truth and he had pretended not to. What was it about Leda Wroth that drew bruised, seeking souls like iron shavings to a lodestone?
“What will you do?” she asked.
“Keep her here, of course. And find a governess for thr—two girls.”
He would not make Anne-Marie’s daughter a housemaid, not as the Waddelows had. For certain, natural children were not always accepted, but they need not be hidden away. Edmund Rolfe, rolling round and well-fed among the brand-new bricks of Heacham Hall, had got a son on a Swiss girl he met during his Grand Tour and brought the boy to England to marry agentleman’s daughter. The bastard was a lieutenant-general in the Army, last Jack heard, and had two children himself, and when Rolfe died the world would say he had left his estate to a fond acquaintance when really it passed to his grandson, because a family that had begun as tradesmen in King’s Lynn did not put an entail on their properties as if name were to be prized above the cunning to take an opportunity that presented itself.
Ellinore would be Jack’s ward. He should have insisted on it in the first place, rather than letting Anne-Marie keep her veil of secrets. He had seen Nora’s chapped hands, her forearms beneath the short sleeves of her gown little more than tendons and skin. That harm lay at his door, another sin piled atop the others.
He should tell Leda the truth, in its entirety, now. The words poised on his tongue. But he did not like what the truth said of him, and once it emerged, he would not see that look of warmth and admiration from her again. He would like her to adore him a little while longer. One more night.
Leda canted her head, studying him. “It will make the task of finding a governess harder, with a cuckoo in the nest.”
Even peers needed to pretend to a certain respectability, though the world watched closely enough to see their dirty laundry as it came out the back door into the yard for airing.
“No one would say a word if you married me,” Jack remarked. “That would be the greater wonder. A fine, clever woman with the world at her feet, choosing to marry a mad widower baron who lives with his bricks at the edge of the world.”
Her eyes glimmered round and sad. “Jack.” She said his name; it dropped like a ripe plum from her lips. “I’ve said I won’t marry again. You or anyone. I—cannot.”
