Page 84 of The Mad Baron's Bride
“I said when I met you I could give you a title. I believe I proposed to you upon our first meeting.”
He kissed her then, deeply, with complete possession, and she opened her mouth to the seek of his tongue, to the heat and the fire and the sweetness.
“Brash. Some might say mad.” All of her opened to him. She was warm syrup in his arms.
“Marry me, Leda. You beautiful, clever, maddening woman. Say you’ll never leave me.”
She gasped as he moved his mouth to her bosom, lavishing her breasts with the attention they were begging for. “Stay and be the mad baron’s bride?”
“You set people on their path, do you not? You save lives. Save mine.”
He moved to kiss her lower, pushing the counterpane and the dressing gown and all the many layers separating them aside, and she bloomed for him like a flower. Like a woman who had been a prisoner for years in her own lies and follies, who had shed one identity after another, who could now be fully herself.
“Yes,” she breathed, threading her fingers through his thick, unruly hair. This man. This love that bound them. She could not see their future together, not clearly, but she felt the strength of this bond, the ebb and flow that would hold them together, as dependable as the tide.
“Yes,” she said. “I believe I will.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“So the owner of Norcott Park is deceased. This is his death certificate?” The magistrate, brow furrowed, perched his bridge spectacles on his nose and regarded the sheet of parchment his clerk had furnished him, which Leda had furnished the clerk.
“Yes, your worship.”
Leda sat in the ladder-back chair that had been set aside as a witness stand, though this was not a courtroom, only a very curious sort of inquest. A private parlor had been requested, and granted, in the King’s Head in Cirencester, and its situation in the Market Place, sandwiched between other inns and public buildings within a main route of a bustling city, suffused the room with the harmonious lull of a continuous stream of traffic. Signs of a busy world of commerce and life taking place outside while Leda sat suspended, waiting to see if she might return to her life, or if she would be condemned, again, to the madhouse.
The magistrate presiding over events was not the one who committed her; his predecessor had become Earl of Bathurst around the same time Leda escaped the madhouse he had put her in, and while she swam south to Bristol, the new earl had jauntered off to London to take his seat in the House ofLords and the family’s elegant London home. Mr. Michael Hicks Beach, son of one baronet and heir to another, had replaced him and held his position through a hotly debated election, so she’d heard.
Leda knew already, from having lived here, that Mr. Hicks Beach had bought the expensive Williamstrip Park a few years before her marriage; had himself married a wealthy heiress who brought him a tidy sum and the adopted surname Beach; and had sired two sons and two daughters to be brought up in the English manner. He was a man who had done all in the usual style and was climbing his way steadily to a position of influence without the dramatics of family deaths, bouts of madness, and questionable heirs popping up unannounced. It was clear he was taking Leda’s case with extreme suspicion.
Eight years earlier, Mrs. Hicks Beach had not called upon the new Mrs. Bertram Toplady, not even a card felicitating their marriage. Leda suspected Bertram had done something untoward, like proposition a married lady, and she had cut him from her acquaintance because of it.
“And the death is due to accidental causes. The coroner at Snettisham confirms this.” The magistrate scanned another piece of parchment, remnant of another inquest, short and brief, conducted under the watchful eyes of all the families of standing the Smithdon Hundred, who were curious about the excitement this foreigner, Leda Wroth, had brought into their quiet lives.
Mr. Hicks Beach peered at Leda over his spectacles. She straightened her back.
She had worn the primmest of her old gowns, a simple robe in the nightgown fashion in a soft dove gray. She would be eager to get rid of the thing as soon as her new gowns arrived. May could wear it marketing and preen like a hawfinch in it.
The maid currently sat in the back of the room with Jack, who had insisted on attending the hearing, and the girls, whohad insisted on coming as well. May was enjoying her turn as traveling nurse and governess, while Grace despite her growing belly had taken the position of lady’s maid, as the rank of a baron’s wife required one. Henry had come as groom, leaving Mrs. Leech to set up her feet and direct the hall boy and little scullery maid to such tasks as needed attending at Holme Hall while the family was away.
Leda’s sister sat in the back of the room as well. Leda had not yet ascertained what Emilia thought of all this, but when she learned of the proceedings that would reinstate Leda’s standing in the neighborhood or condemn her again to the asylum, she insisted on coming from Chippenham.
Her parents, in Cheltenham, had not sent a note.
“And the deceased has no surviving issue. His nearest family would be…”
“My son, your worship. Ives Toplady.”
Emilia flinched.
“Ah, yes, Master Ives.” The magistrate turned his gaze to where Ives sat between Bestey and Mrs. Blake. Ives, too, straightened his back, and Leda bit her lip in fear. He looked so small and brave, his hair flattened with Jack’s pomade, new clothes for his appearance in court. He had Bertram’s hair, Bertram’s heavy jaw, and what threatened to become, in a few years, Bertram’s nose. She would swear, in the month since she’d seen him, he’d grown taller, his face filling out.
“Yet there is no record of the boy’s birth or baptism in the parish registry. This is the boy you were believed to have…” The magistrate shifted his gaze over the women and children assembled. “Erm.”
“My husband’s servants hid the boy after his birth, your worship, a task with which I assisted. I had reason to believe that Eustace meant the boy harm. He admitted as much to me.”
As there was no possibility of questioning Eustace, the magistrate could only take her word for what it was worth. “And Mr. Toplady—Eustace—admitted to causing the death of Mr. Toplady—Bertram. Your husband.”
“Eustace told me he had killed Bertram, yes. He had drugged me with laudanum so I could not interfere, but when I woke too early, he feared I would accuse him and so put the knife in my hand to make it appear that I had—well.”
