Page 54 of The Soldier's Scoundrel
“An idealist, I see.” Wraxhall turned his unfocused gaze onto Oliver and evidently guessed the turn of his thoughts. “You think my family is cynical. You think I am cynical.”
Oliver’s every instinct was to smooth things over, to steer this conversation away from a topic that was so obviously distressing before the man drunkenly said something he might regret. It would take nothing at all to introduce a safer topic—a remark about grain prices or Parliament and then they’d be back on level ground. But he felt that he had a duty to Jack to see if he could learn something useful about Mrs. Wraxhall and her letters. Wraxhall, after all, was talkative and too drunk to know what he shouldn’t be talking about.
“I don’t think you’re cynical,” Oliver said. “I think there’s something you want to tell me.”
For a moment, Oliver thought he had overplayed his hand. Wraxhall stared at him, something like wariness flitting across his face. But then he spoke. “I found something.” Oliver nodded, trying to encourage the man without interrupting his thoughts. “Letters.” The word was scarcely more than a breath.
“Oh?” Oliver took another sip of brandy, as if the matter was of no consequence to him. As if his heart wasn’t pounding.
“Between my wife and another man.” The word wife was the saddest syllable Oliver had ever heard, seemingly consisting of layers of sorrow and anger and disappointment held together by nothing but brandy. “They dated from before our marriage, but the fact that she kept them is . . . not promising.”
“What was in these letters?”
He laughed mirthlessly. “Exactly what you’d expect. The letters she wrote were typical girlish nonsense. The ones from him, however.” He shook his head, as if trying to shake the memory from his mind. “They were not the sort of thing any gentleman would put to paper. But this man was no gentleman. And it showed.”
Oliver was silent for a moment, trying to make sense of this new information. Finally, he asked, “Why do you think she kept them?”
Wraxhall made a noise between a laugh and a snort. “Presumably to pore over them and . . . reminisce.”
“Surely there could be another reason? After all, she didn’t marry this man.” Oliver couldn’t very well say that he knew Lydia Durbin had thrown over Lewis in order to marry Wraxhall, but surely Wraxhall already knew that fact.
Wraxhall only shook his head. “Perhaps she did love him. My family thought she only wanted to marry me to social climb. I didn’t think they were right, and I wouldn’t have cared even if they were. But to think that all along she harbored a tendre for this revolting fellow . . .” His voice trailed off.
“I suppose you burnt these letters?” Oliver asked, trying not to betray his interest in the fate of the correspondence.
“That’s just the problem, Rivington. I meant to, but I kept thinking I might show the letters to her and she’d have a decent explanation. What that would be, I can’t even imagine. But that last night in London, I went to burn them and they were gone from my desk.”
“What can it all mean?” Oliver asked, after telling Jack everything Wraxhall had said.
“It means we don’t have to search the bloody library, and thank God for that.” The library was two stories high and filled with a thousand places a sheaf of letters could be hidden away.
“You know what I meant. Who took the letters from Wraxhall?”
Oliver was wearing his perfect evening clothes and an adorably confused expression. Jack wanted to kiss him. For a minute, he thought he’d managed to ride out the urge, but the next thing he knew he had pulled Oliver in for a kiss. Oliver came willingly, almost meltingly. He always did.
“Here’s what we know,” Jack said, after a minute. They were on the chaise in Oliver’s bedchamber, Jack reclining against Oliver’s chest. “First, the letters were either explicit or pornographic or contained some other information that disturbed Wraxhall. Therefore, these letters were not something Lewis or his wife would want exposed. Second, it seems unlikely that she was in love with Lewis—she didn’t marry him, after all, and if she was a social climber she ought to have done a better job of it than marry Wraxhall.”
“If—wait—what?” More adorable confusion.
Jack was tempted to drag this out, but he’d much rather find the blasted letters and get back to London as quick as humanly possible. “No, my dear. Miss Lydia Durbin did not marry Wraxhall for status. She had a dowry big enough to buy a house at one of the best addresses in London and this house as well. If she wanted to buy herself a place in society she could have aimed higher than Wraxhall. There are plenty of gents who don’t have a pot to piss in and whose families would have welcomed her and her money with open arms.”
“Wraxhall’s family seems to have dropped him outright. Nobody even presented Mrs. Wraxhall at court.”
“Exactly. So Wraxhall fell in love with rich, rich Lydia Durbin when they were both in Brighton. And the lady either loved him in return or simply liked him better than she liked Hector Lewis. As I can’t imagine anyone liking Lewis in the least bit, that doesn’t much surprise me. The girl had probably gone along her entire life thinking she was to marry Lewis—their fathers were in business together, remember—but he turned out to be a nasty piece of work. So she set her cap at the next person she met who was a better match than Lewis.”
Oliver had been absently stroking his hands up and down Jack’s arms but he stopped abruptly. “How long have you known all that?”
“From when we saw Mrs. Lewis,” Jack admitted.
“So, why did Mrs. Wraxhall keep the letters?”
Jack craned his head around, wanting to see what Oliver’s face looked like when he figured it out.
“Oh, no,” Oliver said slowly, his features collapsing in disappointment.
“Oh, definitely. She wanted to blackmail him.”
Oliver sighed. “You were right all along.”
