Page 5 of A Delicate Deception
“There’s no challenge in that,” Amelia argued.
Instead of continuing, Georgiana paused, her brow furrowed. “Amelia,” she began, and pointed at the final paragraph. “He means to visit.”
“Impossible,” Amelia said. But she looked at the lines beneath her friend’s fingertip. “He says he’ll be at Pelham Hall for the month of August into the autumn. That’s—it’s a ruin, Georgiana. I was there only the other day. He’s having us on.”
“It gets worse. Look at the postscript.”
Amelia squinted. “‘Forgive me for deceiving you, madam, but Marcus Lexington is a pseudonym and my true identity is the Duke of Hereford.’” She shook her head and thrust the paper at Georgiana, not wanting to see it again. “This has to be a prank. And not even a very good one. Pretending to be a duke is laying it on a bit thick. A bishop or even an earl would be more plausible.” Still, her heart raced.
“I don’t think so,” Georgiana said slowly. “I know you don’t really talk to many people, but it’s common knowledge around here that Pelham Hall belonged to the Duke of Hereford’s sister before she died. Do you remember who signed your lease?”
“Only the land agent and solicitor,” Amelia said.
“Amelia, what’s the courtesy title of the Duke of Hereford’s eldest son?”
“Lexington,” Amelia said promptly, this having been one of the many facts drilled into her brain by her mother. “You can’t mean—”
Georgiana was already at the bookcase, paging through theDebrett’s. “This is an old copy, but it lists the duke’s oldest son as Marcus. And we both know the duke died last year.”
“You cannot mean to suggest the man we’ve been haranguing in these letters is the Duke of Hereford.” This was too close to what had happened in London—insulting rich and powerful men and drawing more attention than she could handle. “And he’s coming to stay in an abandoned ruin not two leagues from our house?” She did not want to have anything to do with a duke, nor an earl, nor so much as a well-heeled country gentleman. Even on her walks, she took pains to avoid any of the grander homes. This duke would bring his London ways and his judgmental eye and Amelia would turn once again into the frightened and ashamed child hiding behind her mother’s skirts. “We’ll pretend this has nothing to do with us,” she said, feeling the creamy paper crumple in her hands.
Georgiana was silent for a moment. “That might work, but if he returns to town with tales of how Miss Georgiana Russell of Derbyshire snubbed him, that might not bode well for my future.”
Amelia buried her face in her hands. “We ought to have used an entirely false name rather than borrowed yours.” It probably said no fine things about her character that her remorse was over the insufficiency of her lies rather than the existence of them in the first place. But Portia Allenby had raised her daughters according to the principle that the truth was both useless and inadequate in any situation involving the aristocracy. Amelia felt the walls of the room start to close in on her, combined with the horribly familiar sense that her skin was a size too small. She caught herself worrying at some imaginary mark on her forearm, as if trying to dig out a foreign object.
“There’s an easy solution,” Georgiana said. “I’ll go to Pelham Hall and meet with the duke, if that’s even what and who he is. You needn’t have anything to do with him.”
This was wildly optimistic on Georgiana’s part. First, she doubted her friend’s ability to make conversation about Richard III, even with a man whose knowledge of the monarch bordered on hallucinatory wrongness. Second, if a duke truly were to arrive at Pelham Hall, that would mean balls and parties and a steady stream of visitors. Amelia would not be able to set foot outside her cottage without encountering someone. There would be people she knew, people who remembered her and her disgrace. Amelia forbore from mentioning any of this to Georgiana. There was, after all, nothing her friend could do.
Her house felt stifling for the first time ever. It was as if the pressures of the outside world had crept inside. And she did not know how she would ever be rid of them.
It had been over a week now and still Sydney had received no word from Lex. He found himself checking Pelham Hall every day, in case Lex arrived unannounced. As if such a thing were possible. During the year he had been close with Lex, he had never heard of the man doing anything without the maximum amount of fanfare.
But each morning he found the house as desolate and unoccupied as it had been the previous day. And every morning he noticed something else about the structure. The windows of the surviving wing were mainly unbroken. The chimneys seemed sound, from the outside at least. Ivy had crept over doors and windows but cutting it back would be the work of a single day. And while his glimpses through the windows showed the interior of the ground floor to be in bad condition, it was in no way as bad as it might have been if the roof had failed. Finally he could put off his curiosity no longer, and shouldered his way into the house.
There would always be a part of Sydney that saw a structurally unsound pile of stones and greeted it as a welcome challenge. Even seeing the house where his brother had died, even knowing it to be little better than a hulking monument to his own grief, he speculated that the roof probably wasn’t beyond salvation. He heard the wind whistling through the chimneys, felt the floorboards creak and shift under his feet, smelled the pervasive damp, and could not help but calculate the number of hands and the cost of supplies it would take to make the place right, to make it better than it had ever been.
The other part of him remembered what he had lost here, what this place had cost him, and wanted to watch the entire blasted edifice sink into the earth.
He walked the halls with a miner’s lamp, surveying the peeling paper, the warped paneling, the broken glass, but also seeing the beams that remained whole and solid. The newer half of the house—where the parties had been, where Penny had dragged him onto the floor for reels while Lex laughed from the shadows and Andrew played the fiddle—was all but gone, thank the merciful Lord. By the eerie light of his lamp, he saw a curling piece of flowered wallpaper and remembered it like a punch to the gut. He could almost hear the music, smell Lex’s cigarillo. They had all been so reckless and stupid, so foolishly caught up in the moment and so heedless of what could come. Sydney had never been like that before, had never wanted to be. What use was fun when there were bridges to be built, roads to be leveled. But Andrew had been so happy, happy in a way that had made Sydney wonder if he even knew what the word meant. And Penny and Lex had been carefree in a way that Sydney had never dreamed of. He ought to have distrusted it—the recklessness, the joy, all of it.
He shoved aside a broken french door and stepped onto the terrace, filling his lungs with clean summer air. He had to get away. He set off along the first path he came to, not caring which direction it led. He couldn’t get lost in these hills if he tried. Their topography was burnt into his mind no matter how much he’d like to forget it.
A felled tree formed a convenient footbridge over a brook, so he used it, aware that he was no longer on an actual path, but blundering oafishly through the woods. He followed the brook with a half-formed notion of seeing where it met the River Wye.
And then he saw her, sitting against a tree, a book once again open in her lap.
Sydney, who never swore, not in the company of laborers, not even in the company of his mother, who had a mouth like a sailor, ground out a hoarse “bollocks.”
“Well,” the woman said. “This time you’re definitely on my property.” But she didn’t seem cross about it. “You have twigs in your hair. And you seem quite out of breath. Are you running from some danger I ought to be apprised of?”
There was no way, not even the faintest possibility, that his current state of mind wasn’t visible on his face. He looked grim and forbidding in the best of moods. Now he probably looked like an ogre.
“Only my own demons,” he said, opting for honesty over platitudes.
“Those are the worst,” she said promptly, closing her book and looking up at him. “Do you want to tell me about them?”
“God, no.”
