“I’ve heard the rumours, yes.”
“Well, Iamashamed to admit that we’re carved from the same stone, he and I.”
The three of them were silent for a while.
“You broke my wife’s heart with your insinuations, Marchioness, and Talbot men love fiercely, to the point of insanity.”
“The bell cannot be unrung now, Your Grace,” she said and looked rather upset at that truth.
“It can be tied to another’s neck, though, can it not? All I ask is that you tell anyone who would listen about my family history and remark on how I am, after all, my father’s son.”
“I don’t deal in gossip,” the old woman pursed her lips.
“Please, Marchioness,” Nicholas spoke. “My father has always spoken of your late husband with the utmost respect.”
“Ah, yes, the late duke,” Lady Georgiana turned away from both of them to look at a portrait of a man on the wall.
Talbot guessed it was the late Marquess.
“Did you know that your wife’s people on her mother’s side are relations of my late husband’s?” She asked Talbot.
“I had no idea,” he replied sincerely.
“Yes,” she said absent-mindedly. “When everything happened… with your wife’s mother,” she said delicately, and both men nodded. “My husband broke all contact with his relations, who were in great need of his help. He believed that your wife’s mother had brought shame upon her family. And I supported his decision, as a good wife should.”
She looked away after she said that, as if ashamed.
“Throughout the years, I heard of many similar situations, and it was almost never the woman who was to blame, but my husband, he was… well, a man like most men.”
She smiled weakly, then looked between the two friends, her piercing gaze making them both feel like young boys.
“Just to be clear, neither of you is welcome to Almack’s any longer. I shall help your wife one last time.”
Talbot bowed.
“Thank you. I already got what I wanted from your establishment, so I gladly accept my banishment. Have a good day.”
In the carriage, Talbot thought about what he and Elizabeth would look like at Lady Georgiana’s age. Would one of them outlive the other and simplyexistin an antediluvian manor waiting for eternal slumber?
I don’t want to be the one to outlive her,he thought.
Nicholas interrupted his musings when he said, “I had a note from my lawyer yesterday evening, and then again this morning. He wrote that Lord Grey likes buying horses and placing bets, and he displays rather bad judgment when doing both.”
Talbot felt something in his chest relax. They hadsomeleverage now. He was almost absolutely certain that the young womanwas being kept in the dark about her father’s finances and most likely forbidden to even inquire about such matters. And since he was rational enough to be aware that Lady Grey would resist helping his wife at all costs, he wouldn’t hesitate to use her ignorance to his advantage.
“What is the best way to use this? What do you think?” Nicholas asked.
Talbot sighed. “Part of me feels bad for her. I was the one who instructed her to burst into that cloak room, and she was happy to obey because what I now recognise as my obsession with your sister had prevented me from squashing Lady Helena’s incorrect assumptions about the nature of my intentions towards her in a timely fashion.”
“I can acknowledge that she acted on your instructions when it came to catching youin flagrante delictowith my sister, but what about this latest incident when she approached her and told her about it?”
Colin remembered Elizabeth’s face after Powell’s ball, and a murderous rage welled up inside him.
“That she does need to be punished for,” Talbot agreed, and the two men hatched a plan.
“Your Graces,” Lady Helena curtsied elegantly when they entered her drawing room. The light from the grand window behind her was giving her hair an almost otherworldly glow, but Talbot’s upper lip curled in contempt at the calculated glint in her eyes. “Welcome to my home.”
When they sat down and he observed her from up close, she looked pale, like she’d been unwell.
