The Officer and the Proper Lady

‘Would you like to go for a drive, Julia?’ Hal asked. ‘It would be a pleasant day for a ride, but, of course, you do not ride, do you?’

‘Not yet,’ she said, compressing her lips. ‘You must teach me.’ Oh but he was wicked, and she did love him.

Everything was perfect now, except for that one small detail, she thought, the desire to smile fading. He had never said he loved her, not even in the extremes of passion or those precious intervals while he had held her in his arms before they slept. But that was too much to hope for, she supposed. After all, this was a marriage of necessity, not a love match. Hal enjoyed her in bed, he desired her, he appeared to like her company—that was all far more than she had ever looked for in marriage. I must not be greedy, she thought.

‘I will see you in the hall in an hour then?’ Hal folded his own news pa per and got up. Julia agreed, managed a smile, and was promptly appealed to for support by Verity whose godfather had promised her a harp if she wanted to learn.

‘Only I don’t know if I do,’ she said. ‘It isn’t like the piano—everyone has a piano and it can be fun as well as something one has to do at parties. The harp always seems such a performance.’

‘It does make the player appear very graceful and feminine. Perhaps Lord Ked din ton thinks it would be a useful accomplishment for the Season,’ Julia suggested.

Verity wrinkled her nose. ‘I suppose you mean it will help attract gentlemen. I don’t want the sort of gentleman who would like me because I can play the harp. I want someone dashing, like Hal or Marcus. Or Gabriel,’ she added, with a wary eye on her mother who pursed her lips slightly at the mention of her son-in-law’s name.

‘Some excitement is good,’ Julia conceded, wondering what well-behaved, sheltered Verity would make of a dashing and dangerous suitor if she found one. He would probably scare her to death. ‘But I do not think you can predict in advance the kind of man you will want to marry. I thought I wanted to find someone very ordinary and stolid.’

‘And instead you fell in love with Hal.’ Verity beamed at her, ignoring Julia’s blushes and her mother’s tut of disapproval.

And thank goodness Hal was not in the room to hear that, Julia told herself. She hoped he believed she had gone to the battlefield out of friend ship, not because her deeper feelings were engaged. If he thought that, he might easily think she had compromised herself deliberately. She was not certain which was worse: that he might think she had set out to entrap him as a husband, or that he guess she loved him and he, not returning that sentiment, pitied her.

‘I am sure Verity will find someone entirely suitable,’ Lady Narborough pronounced, rising grace fully from her place. ‘Unlike dear Honoria, one can always rely upon Verity to do the right thing.’

‘That is a most provocative bonnet,’ Hal observed when Julia came down to the hall for their drive. ‘There is the smallest area of tender skin just between the ribbon and your ear that makes me want to nibble.’

‘Ssh!’ Julia cast a hunted look round for footmen. ‘Oh thank goodness you are leaving your tiger behind,’ she added as the lad let go the horses’ heads and Hal sent them off towards Piccadilly at a smart trot. ‘If you are going to say such shocking things I most certainly do not want an audience.’

‘Neither do I,’ he admitted. ‘But that was not the main reason I wanted to be alone. Green Park or Hyde Park?’

‘Green,?

?? Julia decided. ‘So much quieter.’ She felt slightly apprehensive, his tone was so serious all of a sudden. ‘What is it you want to talk about?’

‘Hebden. Or Beshaley, to give him his Romany name.’ Hal negotiated the gates and guided the horses away from the reservoir with the strolling pedestrians enjoying the summer morning sun on its banks. ‘I realize you were only trying to provoke me last night, but I need you to be careful with that man, Julia.’

‘If he has done all these things, why not have him arrested?’ she asked. ‘Or call him out.’

‘If Marcus or I called him out he would avoid the challenge.’ Hal reined the pair into a walk. ‘He has no concept of honour. He is not a gentleman, even though he was brought up as one as a child—until his father was murdered and the family threw him out. Now he has the talents and the instincts of a gutter rat.’

He drove in silence for a few moments. ‘And the things he has done are not for public consumption; they affect the honour of wives and sisters, young women like Mildenhall’s new wife who is Hebden’s own half-sister. Or they cannot be proved against him—the attempt to give my father heart attacks, for example. He’s as slippery as a snake and as elusive as smoke, damn him.’

‘It all goes back to that murder,’ Julia mused. ‘It seems strange to me: the man was hanged, so why does this still continue?’

‘Unless he was innocent,’ Hal said, reluctantly.

‘Who is the obvious suspect if—Wardale was it not?—was innocent?’

‘My father.’ Hal sounded grim.

‘They suspected no-one else was involved?’ He shook his head. ‘But the man who paid the trooper to try and kill you was not Hebden, yet there was that silken rope, so we know there is someone else connected with this,’ Julia said, trying to work through it logically.

‘But why the devil would they get involved in Hebden’s vendetta now if they are the real murderer?’ The horses, finding the reins slack on their necks, stopped. Hal did not appear to notice.

‘Guilt?’ Julia suggested. ‘After all these years, preying on their minds until they become unhinged? Hebden’s activities are making you all focus on that one event. Perhaps the guilty man thinks you and Marcus have discovered something and are getting close to unmasking him; that might explain an attempt at murder.’

Hal gathered his team and set them off walking again. ‘Well, we haven’t. In truth, we never questioned Wardale’s guilt, because to do so would have been to believe our father sent an innocent man to the gallows. He had no doubts then that his friend was guilty. After all, he came upon him, the knife in his hands, kneeling over Hebden as he lay dying on our terrace. And we have no proof now, just supposition.’

‘Was it in Hertfordshire?’

‘No, here at our London house. And Wardale was having an affair with Hebden’s wife, to make things worse. My father strongly disapproved.’