Prologue
No, ’tis slander, whose edge is sharper than the sword.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,CYMBELINE
Berkshire, England, 1811
“I’m sorry, my dear, but you really have no choice!” Sir Humphrey Westwood’s voice was quiet. Sad. Somehow it made his words cut deeper, shaking her fragile composure more than if he’d shouted and threatened to beat her.-
She grasped his sleeve. “Papa, who told you these things—these terrible lies! Who?”
He shook off her hand, dismissing her with a flick of his arm. “It’s common knowledge. Irwin says everyone—the whole parish, even the vicar—the vicar!—has known for weeks but were too embarrassed to tell me.” His face crumpled in weary anguish. “They say the father is always the last to know.”
He picked up his hat. “I’m going to church. No, my dear, you’re not coming. You’ve made enough of a spectacle of yourself. I can barely hold up my head in public as it is.”
“But, Papa, it isn’t true. None of it!” Shaking, sick with bewilderment—and betrayal—she watched him shrug on his coat and wrap his scarf around his neck. She went to help him tuck it in, as she always did, but he shook her off as if he couldn’t bear her to touch him.
“Don’t try to cozen me, Emmaline! It won’t work this time.”
Her hands dropped. She stepped back, unbearably hurt.
“Despite everything, Irwin is willing to marry you—formy sake and yours. Be grateful for that, and do as you’re told.” The expression on his face near broke her heart. Her father was as hurt, as devastated by this thing as she was.
But she wouldn’t, couldn’t—would rather die than marry her father’s friend, their neighbor, Mr. Irwin.
“Papa, Ipromiseyou I didn’t do what they say I did.”
But her father’s mind was blocked, blinded—shamed—by the lies he’d been told. And because of the mistake she’d made once before.
He shook his head in sorrow. “To be so utterly without shame... I have failed you as a father.” He opened the front door. “I am going to church now and will make arrangements with the vicar to have the banns called. Irwin has invited me to dinner afterward. When I return you will agree to marry him, or I will wash my hands of you forever.”
The cold implacability of his words scalded her to the bone.
She said in a low voice, “I won’t agree, Papa. I wish to marry for love—like you and Mama—”
“Don’t speak to me of your mother!” His voice shook. “For the first time in my life I’m glad—yes, glad!—she’s not alive to hear what has become of her daughter.”
“I’m sorry, Papa,” she half whispered, her eyes filling with tears. “But I have done nothing wrong, not this time. And I won’t be forced to marry a man I don’t care for.”
Her father said bleakly, “Then you are no daughter of mine.” And he closed the door.
Chapter One
We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,HAMLET
London 1818
“Whatdid you call me?” Major Calbourne Rutherford stopped dead, two steps into the Honorable Gil Radcliffe’s discreet government office in the heart of Whitehall.
Radcliffe’s brows rose. “You didn’t know?”
Cal shook his head. “Are you telling me something’s happened to my brother Henry? And that I’m nowLord Ashendon?” Cal’s father had died a year ago, and his older brother Henry had inherited the title and estates.
“I assumed that’s why you’d returned to London, after what is it—ten years?” Radcliffe waved Cal to a seat and ordered his clerk to bring tea and biscuits.
“Damn!” Cal sat down heavily. It wasn’t grief he felt—he and Henry had never been close. “Henry wasn’t even forty. What happened? How did he die?”
