Page 159 of The Ladies Least Likely
“It would have broken her heart that she couldn’t remember where she’d put the proof,” Mal considered. “But that meant my grandfather could make my father marry Christine.”
He hadn’t grasped the implications. Not yet.
“Why wouldn’t there have been a record in the parish register?” she asked.
He shrugged. “The duke didn’t want his son married to a haberdasher’s daughter. That might have been enough to keep anyone from looking. My grandfather was as large and terrifying as your cousin, I’ve been told, and he was a duke besides. Not even his son dared defy him.”
“Mal,” Amaranthe asked, trying to keep her voice calm. “When did your mother die?”
“July 12, 1757.”
“And when did your father marry Christine?”
“The fall of 1756, I believe.” He met her eyes as understanding slowly dawned.
“His marriage to Christine was not legal if his first wife yet lived,” Amaranthe whispered. “It would make him a bigamist and invalidate the union. Mal—this document means you are his only legitimate child. You are the heir of the third Duke of Hunsdon.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Iwon’t do it.”
Mal’s voice broke the vaulted silence inside St. Philip and St. James. They stood alone in the tiny church, a square stone heap that was said to be the oldest church in Bristol. It had been the home church of the Grey family, where Mal was baptized and Bea married. It reminded Amaranthe, with a familiar ache, of lovely little St. Cleer where she had grown up in Cornwall. Coming back to her home country had called up old memories with a fierce, aching clarity, as if the two split halves of her life were knitting back together.
She pushed away the sudden odd regret that her parents would never see her married. They had disliked Reuben and would have hated the circumstances that threw their daughter on his less than tender care.
They would have loved Mal, though.
“Won’t do what?” she asked, keeping her voice low.
They’d returned to Bristol to yet another shock. An express from Mal’s barrister friend in London informed him that Sybil, Duchess of Hunsdon, was back in the country and renewing her suit to block Mal’s guardianship of the children. Mal was furious at both her temerity and her timing. He meant to depart thatnight, and Bea awaited them at the Green Man with a farewell dinner and fresh linens for the return trip. But he had kept his promise to let Amaranthe put flowers on his mother’s grave.
Mal stared at the bronze plaque that held Marguerite’s name, her presumed birth date and the all too early date of her death. The husband who had abandoned her in life had ensured her lasting memory in death with a burial vault inside the church, a coveted and protected space, and in a niche above the vault stood a beautiful plaster cast of her face and head.
He didn’t lift his eyes. “I won’t make that document known. The one you found in your book.”
Amaranthe studied the sweetly curving lines of Marguerite’s sculpted cheek and brow. A small smile lingered on the plaster lips, remote, untouchable.
Some part of her had known this was coming. Known by his careful silence on the subject during their travels back to Bristol, when he had asked her interminable questions about Reuben, Favella, Thaker, her parents, her life in Cornwall before he knew her. She’d guessed he was wrestling with something, and she knew him well enough by now to guess what it was.
Any other man would have grabbed the marriage lines from her hand and charged back to London trumpeting about his new station. Malden Grey was the only man alive who would take that evidence and bury it.
“Never?” she asked. The thought of his destroying the evidence compounded the ache in her chest. It was Marguerite’s vindication that the man she loved had not lied to her. It was Bea’s proof that her sister had not been completely betrayed.
“It would take everything away from the children.”
He turned to face her, close enough to touch. She wished she had the right.
“It would take from them everything they’ve been brought up to expect is theirs,” Mal said. “Hugh’s been bred his whole life tobe the duke—you’ve seen his manners, his self-importance. He stakes his life on it. Ned already knows how to play the part of the second son, the hey-go-mad spare. And Camilla—she is too young to care now, perhaps. But she’ll care very much when it is time to be married and no decent man will offer for her.”
Amaranthe’s throat closed as she nodded. She had thought of this, too, what it would mean to the Delaval children if Mal stepped forward. “It means you remain a bastard.”
“I’ve been a bastard my whole life. I know how to deal with it. They don’t.” He shrugged and let loose a short, bitter laugh. “Who would believe me anyway, producing that document after all this time? They’ll accuse me of making it up. It’s too absurd.”
So that was the core of it. Not just the wish to protect the children, but the belief, bred into him from birth, that he wasn’t worth more. Something greater. That luck had always run against him, and always would.
She gave in then to the urge to touch him. It was too much to resist: the solid bulk of him standing so close to her, his strength, the troubled look on his face, his enormous heart. He wouldn’t be the man she loved if he were able to claim his birth and patrimony over the welfare of three innocent children.
She loved Malden Grey, did she?
