“Well?” he demanded as soon as the door was safely closed behind his solicitor. He found he was tense, his heart thudding. No matter how much he told himself he wasn’t cut out to be a viscount, the thought had inarguably taken root in his mind. Or perhaps he just didn’t like to lose. “Is it all a myth?”
Grantham set down the large case he carried. “No. It is not.” He paused. “My lord.”
Good God. Nick’s knees gave out and he sat heavily in his chair. “She’s correct? The claim is sound?”
“It is.” Grantham took his own seat. “Quite impressive, really, that she was able to parse out that much history and detail, given what she had.”
He raised his head from his hands. “What do you mean?”
“Apparently she had only the Sidney family Bible to start, and the recollections of an elderly nursemaid. With that she wrote dozens of letters, and then began visiting vicars and rectors across southern England via the mail coaches.” A dry smile flickered over the solicitor’s face. “I believe she thoroughly charmed them. Most are getting on in years, and to a man they spoke fondly of her concern for Miss Lucinda and her delightful manners. Even the rectors whose registries she stole.”
“Stole?”
“Walked right out with them under her shawl.” Grantham looked mildly impressed. “One fellow, Mr. Fisher, made any number of excuses for her. We returned it, of course, and secured his statement that the relevant pages were exactly as he remembered them when she visited him.”
“Very good.” Nick plowed his hands into his hair. “But what might she have missed?”
“We were able to verify the deaths of several branches of the family tree, rendering them devoid of heirs. She anticipated us there as well. She wrote to every former servant, neighbor, great-aunt, or second cousin thrice removed who might have known any of them. If there’s someone out there, they’re well hidden.”
Nick said nothing. A family Bible and an elderly nursemaid. Stolen parish registers. Letters to former servants. His Miss Greene was a marvel.
No. NothisMiss Greene. Just... Miss Greene, who charmed elderly vicars and stormed gaming hells in pursuit of what she wanted. Clever, bold, indomitable... beautiful and tempting...
Grantham went on speaking. “The only aspect of her information that was thin and lacking was that of your immediate family.”
Nick tensed, all pleasurable thoughts of Miss Greene vanishing. “I suppose you have no choice but to include that in the petition.”
Grantham nodded. “Enough to satisfy the committee.”
That would be bad enough. Nick scrubbed his hands over his face. “I have it.”
He had a good sense of what people would say when his petition was filed. He was accepted now for what he was—the owner of a gambling hell, wealthy as sin and powerful in his own way, but still as common and crass as one might expect such a person to be. When he set his sights on a higher status, it would not be received well. The gossip would be ugly and it would be everywhere: that he ought to slither back into the gutter where he’d come from, and stay there. He was sure every filthy detail of his life would be dragged out and maliciously dissected in the drawing rooms of London.
But in the end, he was going to win. Miss Greene was correct: a title, paired with wealth, would outlast the rumors and open almost any door in the kingdom.
Nick didn’t mind taking risks, but he hated to lose.
He rose and unlocked one of the cabinets behind his desk and took out a green dispatch box, the aged leather worn shiny in spots and cracked in others. It had belonged to his Aunt Heloise, who had kept her correspondence in it. She gave it to him shortly before her death, when she lay wheezing for breath in her austere home. “Do not lose sight of whence thou came,” she’d rasped at him, clutching a handkerchief to her mouth. “I charge thee not to make my efforts in vain.”
Nick had laughed at that. He’d considered burning it all, and had settled for locking it away and never touching it.
Opening the lid released the scent of dust and lavender. Heloise had believed lavender warded off illness, and the smell still made him think of a sickroom. Gingerly Nick sifted through the pile of papers. He remembered the long letters his aunt would write: to her acquaintances, to her father, to her brother, to her husband, who was often away. She herself was kept at home by, she claimed, a weak constitution, although in the end she outlived all of the supposedly heartier men in her family.
His aunt’s handwriting, rigidly precise, covered many of the pages; one letter was prominently addressed to him and still sealed with her crest in crumbling red wax. She’d said he should read it when she was gone, her last exhortation to him. Rebelliously, Nick had stuffed it into the green case and left it there.
He put it aside now. Grantham needed documents establishing his lineage and legitimacy, not Heloise’s dying lament over Nick’s wicked soul.
“My aunt took me in as a boy,” he said for Grantham’s benefit. “She changed my name and made me her heir, as she had no children.” He drew out a thin sheaf of paper, then another. “A copy of her will, and of her husband’s.”
He dug deeper, and produced the legal document when Heloise changed his name. Nick handed it to Grantham with a fresh burst of bitterness in his chest. He hadn’t wanted to live with Heloise or become her son, but she’d ignored him; she always knew better than anyone else and never let anyone change her mind, certainly not a ten-year-old boy.
Of course, Nick’s father was the one who’d allowed it to happen by giving away his son. Well—not quitegiving. After Heloise’s death, Nick discovered that Sam Sidney had sold his firstborn child to his sister for four hundred pounds. That was only one of the reasons why Nick hated his father.
Near the bottom of the box he located the certificate of his baptism and then the most important paper of all: the copy of his parents’ marriage lines.
“Antigua,” read Grantham, his brows twitching upward.
“My father was a sea captain. You’ll see I was baptized in England.” Another of Heloise’s maneuvers, Nick was sure, since he remembered no trace of piety in his father. But it would have been unthinkable to Heloise that her nephew not be properly baptized, and as usual, she’d got her way. He closed the green case. “Will it suffice?”
