Gwendolyn snapped her gaze to her friend’s “What note?”
“A letter. From the Marquess of Preston.”
Gwendolyn’s hands shook, likely vibrated into movement by the rapid beating of her heart. Sweat broke out on her palms, and she rubbed it on her skirts. “The Marquess. Are you sure?”
“Yes. The seal is clear enough. I remember it from the first letters you received from him.”
Gwendolyn was glad she had not eaten that morning. She had nothing to lose as her stomach revolted.
Marianne reached across the table and laid a comforting hand on Gwendolyn’s shoulder. “Are you unwell? I would understand.”
Gwendolyn took great gulps of air and pushed the fear down. “I am fine.” She held her hand out. It trembled. “Give me the letter.”
“I don’t think I should. You almost fainted dead away.” She withdrew her hand. “I knew you had not yet recovered, but I did not know it was so bad.”
Gwendolyn twitched her fingers toward her palm. “The letter.”
“Leave it, Gwendolyn. Don’t let that man have any influence over you. What his son did to you… what the marquess did to you after… They do not deserve your fear.”
“I am not scared.” Not for herself at least. “The last time that man contacted me, he threatened me, my family, you.”
Marianne rolled her eyes. “Bravado. That’s all it was. A child of a man upset he did not get his way.”
“I would like to read it.” Another flick of her fingers inward.
Marianne grimaced then bent low, disappearing beneath the table’s edge. Gwendolyn peered around the table to see her rummaging in a wicker hamper before popping back up, a square of paper in her hands. She laid it on the table and smoothed it flat.
Gwendolyn peered more carefully at the square with a round, red wax seal at its center. “What’s happened to it?” It was warped and crinkled and stained.
Marianne dropped it flat on the tabletop, tried to smooth it flat. “Dropped in a puddle, I’m afraid.” She glared at a woman across the room. “Sally saw the seal and wanted to know why a toff would be writing me. Snatched it out of my hand, and when I went to snatch it back, she dropped it.”
“Into a puddle.” Was it ruined?
Marianne nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“How’d it come to you?”
“A man in a greatcoat with a face like marble brought it. Looked like a runner. Said he worked for the marquess. Was finding ‘all the wives.’”
Gwendolyn sat up straight as a pin, fighting the fear. Her husband’s father was looking for her. Her jaw hardened, and she reached across the table, snapped the letter from Marianne’s hand.
The former governess chuckled, held her hands up, palms flat. “Take it, then. Wouldn’t think someone so intent on forgetting the past would want a letter from a man straight out of it.”
Yes. The letter burned her fingers as if she’d shoved them into flames, as if she held a fiery coal in her hand and not paper. What threats did it hold? What insults?
Marianne’s lips softened, and she reached across the table to cup both of her hands around Gwendolyn’s rock of a fist. “Youdidn’t have two husbands.” Marianne’s lip curled into the type of grin best shared in bed on a rainy day. “Might have been fun if you had, though.” She winked.
“It is behind me. I’m not that girl anymore.” The kind of girl who was bought and sold; the kind so naïve she mistook a scoundrel’s hollow words for love.
She outlined the letters of her old name on the pale paper—Lady Mary Lytemore. The running ink, marred by specks of mud, faded and ruined. Like her. “Do you think it’s legible?” Gwendolyn asked, turning it over in the light.
Marianne shrugged. “I am terribly sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
They both glared at Sally across the room, bent low over her work. The busybody.
She held the letter in both hands, fingers tight against the edges, before her. The script across the letter’s front spelled her name, running and imprecise though the ink was. She turned it over. The wax seal, dark as a wound on the other side, bore the crest of the Marquess of Preston, herhusband’sfather.Nother husband. Not really, though she’d thought she’d married Mr. Daniel Bartlett at the time. Had signed her name Mrs. Mary Bartlett for a little over a year. She could not help but think of him as she’d known him, as her husband, though the law said he was not, had never been. She’d stood before God and man and made her vows.
