And Then Comes Marriage (36 page)

She hadn’t realized she’d said it aloud until Cas snorted a laugh and bowed. “At your service,” he said with a small hopeful smile.

Miranda stayed very still and gazed at him. It had not been a jest. She had not intended to make him laugh, a fact he seemed to realize as the hope faded from his expression.

He cleared his throat. “Mira, ah, Mrs. Talbot, I came here to inform you that I have secured proof that Mr. Seymour was the creator of the note that, ah, led you astray.”

She tilted her head. “It did not lead me astray. It led me to you. I shall write to Mr. Seymour at once to thank him for his helpfulness. I might never have known the truth otherwise. Certainly I would not have had it from a Worthington.”

Cas flinched. “Miranda—”

She held up a hand. “Don’t. I saw you in a brothel, in the arms of a whore.”

Cas swore. “Lily is actually a good sort, if you must know. She was only pretending to—an orgy is a lot of work for a girl! If she pretended to be seducing me, she could rest a bit!”

Miranda’s eyebrows rose. “A malingering ladybird. Will wonders never cease?”

He stepped forward. “The point is the note! I can prove that Constance and Seymour conspired to ruin you! You can bring charges against them, for blackmail at the least!”

She shook her head. “You don’t seem to understand, Mr. Worthington.” She stood, clasping the diary before her bosom like a shield. “I. Don’t. Care.”

She couldn’t even look at him without seeing Lily draped across his lap. She closed her eyes and turned away. “Constance and Seymour only ruined my reputation. You ruined
me
.” Her throat threatened to close. She would not weep in front of him!

Tightening her belly against the tremble that threatened her, she went on. “The only thing I ever did to you was to keep a secret. I did not tell you that I loved you.”

Cas’s breath left him.
Loved.
Past tense.

Oh, I thought I hurt before. I was so very wrong.

She turned back to him in a swift motion that spoke of urgent bravery in the face of fear. In a quick gesture, she flipped the book in her hands open. It fell to a page as if it had fallen open to it many times before.

As she read to him, her soft voice had a flat thread of steel in it that he’d never heard before.

“All through my childhood and beyond, I have never truly felt secure. With my father’s imprisonment and my mother’s death, I learned that nothing is permanent, that no one stays. I learned that the world is full of danger and damage and selfishness—and that I could trust no one completely.

“Until now. Until him. For the first time in my memory, I know what it means to trust. When I am with my lover—”
She choked up, then forced the words through her tangled throat.
“—for the first time in my life, I feel safe.”

Cas would not have surprised to look down to find the carpet soaked in his blood. There didn’t seem to be any left in his heart, for each beat was painful and aching and empty.

Oh, Mira. I did this to you.

She was broken, like a lovely young filly turned into a shivering wreck by abusive hands.

My hands.

She closed the diary with a snap and lifted her flat sea green gaze to his. “I will not defend myself. I am a scandal. Unlike you, apparently, I know that scandal never goes away.”

He had to try, just once more. “You can’t quit now! The fight has just begun!”

She turned away again. Her shoulders sagged. “Mr. Worthington, my fight began when I was nine years old. I am too tired to fight anymore. Go away.”

*   *   *

Cas was surprised when the Prince Regent agreed to see him right away. When he was guided to yet another luxurious retiring room padded in velvet and silk, he only paced restlessly, no longer interested in the trappings of royalty.

Shortly, the portly Prinny sailed into the room, clad in yellow silk, trimmed in snowy white. He looked like a large tropical fruit. “Ah, Worthington! How nice of you to come to allow me to gloat!”

Belatedly, Cas recalled the bargain he’d made with the Prince Regent to go thirty days without a scandal, a record now most thoroughly lost. “Gloat away, Your Highness.”

Prinny smirked and ambled across the room to a brilliantly cut crystal decanter. He lifted it in offering to Cas with his brows raised.

Cas bowed. “No, thank you, Your Highness, though I am honored.”

The Prince Regent blinked at his formality. “What has you so stuffed, Worthington? You’re not sore about losing our little wager, are you? You did much better than I imagined, you know. What was that, nearly three weeks?”

“Was that all?” Cas asked faintly. Three weeks, three minutes, three hundred years. Time had turned into a silvery liquid in Miranda’s presence—moments timeless and forever, yet running through his fingers: uncatchable, unabiding, unforgettable.

“Well, it’s over now, at any rate.” The Prince Regent settled into a chair. “You’ll have to perform some other feat of strength, I suppose.” He laughed and pointed skyward. “Go fetch me a golden fleece, Jason!”

Chuckling, he took a healthy sip of the brandy and leaned back with a sigh. “Worthingtons! Always good for a laugh!”

Cas held his temper carefully. “Your Highness, respectfully, I did not come here to amuse you. I came to beg you to address a grave injustice, done to a woman who deserves better!”

Quickly, Cas explained the situation to the Prince Regent, emphasizing his own fault, Constance’s conniving, and Miranda’s extreme innocence. He brought forth the scribbled practice sheets, the newssheets with Constance’s accounting of Miranda’s parents. “It is all so unfair! Please, Your Highness, you must help her!”

Prinny yawned. “Why should I?”

Cas gaped at him. “Because it is an injustice!” He thought quickly. “Because Mrs. Talbot is a loyal subject, a respectable woman—and because the Scandal Clause is a terrible notion. You wouldn’t want that to become a regular practice, would you? Think of all the widows who would be forced to lock their knees!”

“Don’t preach policy to me, whelp.” The Prince Regent gazed at him impatiently. “
You
made this mess.
You
clean it up!”

Cas turned away, thrusting his hands through his hair. “I would if I only knew how!”

Prinny seemed to take pity on him. “I know what it’s like to get it all wrong,” he said quietly. “To do nothing but harm when you meant only the best.”

Cas knew the Prince Regent was thinking of his youthful marriage to his beloved Maria Fitzherbert, which had been declared invalid so that he could make a later state marriage.

The Prince Regent stood and poured himself another brandy. He lifted the hand with the glass and pointed one finger at Cas. “You’re the problem, you know. Not Poll. You’re the worst tomcat in London. The best thing you can do is to leave her alone. Leave her in peace. Hell, leave England!” He waved a hand, carelessly splashing the brandy on his blinding white silk weskit. “With you out of sight, there will then be half as many opportunities for people to be reminded of her notoriety.”

Cas went very still. “Yes. I could travel out to the West Indies for a time. I shall come back, when they forget.”

“Ha!” Prinny tossed the newssheet back at him with the retelling of Miranda’s scandalous parents. “
They
never forget.” He sighed. “Ever.”

“No, I’ll go—if it will save her. If I leave, will you help her?”

The Prince Regent swallowed the brandy he’d been swishing in his mouth. “You’d really leave England?”

Cas didn’t even hesitate—not with the image of broken Miranda locked behind his eyes. “I will board a ship at first light if it means she will regain what I have cost her!”

For a moment, the Prince Regent looked envious. Then he snorted. “Fine,” he agreed, clearly disbelieving. He raised his glass in vow. “When that ship leaves the harbor, I will overturn the will.” He scowled as he lifted his glass to his lips. “Bloody ‘Scandal Clause’! We wouldn’t want that to become a regular practice, would We? There wouldn’t be a willing widow left in all of England!”

The Prince Regent was fond of his widows.

Chapter Thirty-four

Miranda sat blankly, staring at nothing. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. How had she filled her days before the Worthingtons struck?

Then she remembered. She turned to Button and Cabot. “I fear I must go. I am quite late for a meeting with the matron at the orphanage.”

“Of course,” Button added thoughtfully as she stood to leave, “it will do you good.”

Miranda made some garbled reply and left the house as if she’d been shot from a cannon. It was not a visit she looked forward to. She had no choice but to inform the matron that she could no longer assist the efforts of the home financially. Indeed, any further association with her would only taint the very results they wished to achieve.

The silence on the ride in the carriage, at first relatively peaceful, soon made her remember when she’d clung to Cas, wet to the skin and freezing and how he’d warmed her.

How he had kept her safe.

Hot, silent tears dripped onto her folded hands as she stared blindly out the small square window, lost in memory.

When Miranda arrived at the children’s home, her heart still lay so heavy in her chest that it seemed only natural that she would find the matron in tears as well.

Then she shook off her melancholy and peered more closely at Matron Beetles. “Oh, dear, is something wrong? Is it one of the children?”

“Yes! I mean, no, not one of them—oh, Mrs. Talbot, I’ve made such a mess of things! And the children are so hungry!”

That last fact snapped Miranda from her dolor as nothing else would have. “How can they be hungry? I have made sure that everything they need is delivered right to your door!”

Matron Beetles dried her eyes with her handkerchief and returned it to the pocket of her starched pinafore. Then she stood before Miranda with her shoulders slumped in shame.

“I suppose naught will do but to show you.”

She led Miranda down a dark servant stair to the kitchens. On one of the wide, worn tables there, someone had deposited several large baskets covered in cheap burlap.

“This is the bread delivery, missus.”

Miranda drew back. “It doesn’t smell like fresh bread.” Reaching over, she whisked the burlap aside to see rather ordinary looking loaves. They were brown and fairly even. When she looked at Matron Beetles curiously, the woman picked up a loaf with one hand and tapped it on the table. A loud knocking noise resulted.

“Stale!” Miranda frowned. “As hard as rocks! But when was this delivered?”

“This morning, just before noon. Late it was, late it has been, ever since…” Matron Beetles shook her head. “That’s not the worst of it, missus. Stale I can work with. Cook could make a pudding with egg and currants, or we could make a bit of goose stuffing or some such. But…”

She pulled off the top lay of loaves one by one to reveal the next layer of black crusts and loaves edged in round, greenish patches. Miranda gasped. “Burned! And moldy as well!”

Furiously, she turned on Matron Beetles. “Why did you not inform me at once that the baker is cheating you?”

The woman paled and twisted her hands together. “After the first time, I thought I could persuade the baker to make it right. He scoffed at me, he did. He said that he’d found out what sort of children we kept here. He told me that if I dared to tell the authorities that he would tell them he’d caught one of my charges stealing from him and have the child locked away. ‘Who do you think they’ll believe?’ he said. ‘An upstanding tradesman or a bunch of infant thieves?’

“I told him we would take our custom elsewhere and he said he would just tell the world if I did.” The matron looked down at the carpet, her round features miserable. “I was afraid he’d make good his threat, missus. Word could get out, you see. People would take objection to the house, sayin’ the children ought to be put away with their parents, not left free to do mischief.”

Rage burned hot within Miranda. She knew firsthand the prejudice that Matron Beetles spoke of. She’d hoped to keep the primary mission of the home secret, which would hopefully allow some of the children a clean slate when they ventured out into the world. An “orphan” from a blandly respectable school might find honest work where a prisoner’s child would not.

It was a shame to build lives on lies, but how else when the truth would ruin them all?

She flinched from the obvious correlation to her own current difficulty and focused her fury on the perfect target.

“Let us go speak to this baker, shall we?”

*   *   *

The greedy baker’s name was Malden. Miranda recalled it on the walk of more than three blocks, and also recalled how piteously the man had bemoaned the fate of the poor orphans last spring and had professed his desire to help.

“I’ll be sure to throw in a bit extra, just a few cakes now and then, missus. It’ll do me heart good to see them wee ones fattened up a bit. Wouldn’t want them to be getting sickly come winter, would we?”

From the perspective of her greater experience in the foibles of man, Miranda now recalled the gleam of avarice in the fellow’s eyes, which at the time she had taken for a friendly twinkle.