He took her embarrassment as a sign he’d hit the nail on the head, though, apparently, because he took her hand in his and gave it a brotherly pat.
‘There, there. No need to take on so. You are here now. And here you may stay.’
‘What?’ Her head flew up, in shock.
‘You don’t think I will leave you in his power, do you?’
She withdrew her hand, and got to her feet. Since she and Clement were of a similar height, she was able to look him straight in the eye.
‘I am not leaving him. How can you even suggest it? He is my husband!’
Clement shook his head.
‘Dear me, he really does have you completely fooled, does he not? Well,’ he added with a shrug, ‘at least I have done my duty. I have warned you how things stand.’
‘I don’t…’ She pressed her hands to her temple as he stalked back to the other side of his desk. She couldn’t understand why Clement kept insisting that the marriage was a fake, that she ought to leave Rawcliffe. Why was it so important to him to separate them?
‘You find it hard to believe in such villainy, even when it is staring you in the face, don’t you, Clare? It is something I have often observed in gently reared females. You simply cannot see what is going on, right under your noses. However,’ he went on, when she took a breath to object to his latest insult, ‘I am still willing to provide you with a sanctuary, when the time comes.’
‘The time?’
‘When he reveals his true colours. What you must do is always keep enough money about your person for you to flee him, at a moment’s notice.’
She let out a wild, strangled laugh. ‘Clement, you cannot be serious.’
‘Oh, I am,’ he said, leaning both hands on the desk and jutting his head forward, as if to demonstrate how serious he was. ‘Deadly serious.’
‘But—’
‘And if you cannot escape him, for any reason, you may write to me and I shall arrange for you to obtain your freedom.’
‘Write to you? You don’t suppose that if he is such an ogre,’ she pointed out, ‘he will permit me to write to you, do you?’
‘He hasn’t done so to date, has he?,’ he pointed out. ‘The only letter you wrote to me was not franked by him, but by some other person.’
Ah, yes. She’d sent her hastily scrawled explanation of why she hadn’t reached her employer’s house from Lady Harriet’s home, the day before her wedding. And Lady Harriet had handed it to her father to frank, along with all the rest of the post.
‘Could you employ the same methods to communicate with me, should you find the need to do so?’
‘I hardly think it will be necessary…’
‘No, I can see you do not. But should it become…of dire importance to get in touch with me, without your husband knowing of it, you can always send letters to Lady Buntingford, in Lesser Peeving. So that nobody will suspect you are communicating with me, rather than a female friend of yours.’
‘Lady Buntingford?’ Why did that name sound familiar?
‘Yes. And you need not be afraid she will read it herself. Her eyes are…not what they used to be,’ he said with a strange smile. ‘Which is why I deal with all her correspondence, these days. As I am her…trusted spiritual advisor.’
She must be all about in the head, then. For nobody with an ounce of sense would trust Clement, with either spiritual or any other sort of matter.
But then he’d just told her that gently reared ladies could rarely see what was under their noses, hadn’t he?
He was just taking a breath to say something else she probably didn’t want to hear when there was a knock at the door and his housekeeper came in.
‘Message from the harbour,’ she said, without waiting for permission to speak. ‘Tide’s turning and that boat needs to leave, else it’ll be stranded here.’
Clement frowned. Glanced at her. At the door.
Through which she suddenly felt the strongest compulsion to run. To run and not stop running until she was on the boat, in Rawcliffe’s arms and sailing safely away.
And yet to do anything of the sort would be to alert him to the fact she now knew he was up to no good.