Once Upon a Marquess (The Worth Saga 1)

“And when I do?”

His breath sucked in. He’d leaned down and kissed her again. This kiss had been more: more sweetness, more tenderness. More passion, because he knew what she wanted, and she knew it as well. She’d opened her mouth to his. His hands had slipped down her back, down her spine, pulling her up into him.

Just a few months, he had told himself. A few months until he saw her again, and then the entirety of the Season to wait. Back then, it had seemed an impossibly long time.

“And then,” he had said, “after all that, I will offer you the right to drive me mad legally, all the time, in perpetuity, for as long as we both shall live.”

She had never had that Season. They had never had the chance. And when he’d asked that question…

Afterward, when he was feeling selfish and lonely and lustful late at night, he’d sometimes wished that he had broken his promise to greater effect. That he’d done something truly irrevocable that night. That he had coaxed her to his bed—it would hardly have taken any effort; she’d been as curious and delighted as he was—and presented their immediate marriage to her brother as a necessity.

If he had actually been married to Judith Worth, they’d never have asked him to assist in her father’s trial.

God, he wished he had been selfish.

He didn’t know why Anthony had stopped him. He must have known then what he’d done. Hadn’t he wanted his sister protected?

Maybe he hadn’t expected to be caught. Maybe he’d been protecting Christian from entangling himself with the family before he knew all the facts. Maybe, whispered that guilty portion of his conscience, maybe he didn’t…

“Why do you want Anthony’s journals?” Judith said, effectively interrupting his reverie.

It took him a moment to collect his thoughts: the journals. She was asking about the journals.

“I told you already.”

She exhaled. “Spare me that claptrap about your friendship. If it had meant anything at all, you’d have asked years ago. You sent me a note making that request five months back. The truth, Christian.”

He shut his eyes. “How well did you follow your father’s trial?”

“I was there for Anthony’s. All of it.” Her words were tightly controlled. He looked down and detected fists at her side.

“Then you know that Anthony—that your father—had a plan. Britain needed China to legalize the opium trade. Your father had his own ideas. Diplomacy was failing on the question; war was inevitable. And your father did not think that—”

She held up a hand. “Skip my father, please. I have granted you that…there may have been some justice on that score. That doesn’t mean I want to hear about his treachery in detail. Tell me what this has to do with Anthony.”

“The fact that your brother was guilty of treason is—”

She looked away. “You can’t really believe that. Deep in your heart, Christian, you knew him. You can’t believe he would be so evil.”

He had never believed Anthony evil; that was the trouble. “Do you think I’d have released the information if I didn’t know it was true?” He wasn’t going to shout at her on the docks about this. “I believe your brother committed treason—in fact, I believe your brother’s sentence was unrelentingly kind, under the circumstances.”

She glared up at him. “You spent summers in our house.”

“Your father sent the Chinese information about the targets Britain planned to shell,” Christian retorted. “Anthony knew of it and did nothing. What do you want from me? I spent summers in your house. I didn’t realize that required me to be party to betraying my country. The evidence—”

“Damn the evidence.” Judith’s voice shook. “There’s more to evidence than papers in a trial. You had the evidence of years of friendship. You had the evidence of his character.”

Christian held her eyes as she spoke.

“You knew Anthony. That’s what I can never forgive—that you put your stupid evidence in logs and missives and bank transactions above your friendship. You knew Anthony. He was the one who would always tell the truth when something went awry. When he ran in the house and broke the china vase, he confessed. When he got angry and threw me in the river that one time, he apologized and told my father. He accepted his punishment. He was the most annoyingly proper brother in the entire world. How can you look me in the eyes and tell me that you think he could have committed treason?”

“It’s simple,” Christian bit off. “Sweetheart, I knew him better than you did.”

She gasped. “How dare you!”

“Not only do I think your brother was capable of committing treason,” Christian said, “I know why he did it. You are perfectly right; your brother would never do anything he thought was wrong, and if he found himself in the wrong, he would do everything he could to correct it.”

“Precisely!” she crowed. “So—”

“So what would your brother do if he thought that England was committing a grievous harm?” Christian said. “Really, Judith. What would he do?”

She swallowed. “He would… He would…” She shook her head. “No, he wouldn’t. He would try something else. He would ask my father to…petition the House of Lords, or he would write a piece for a newspaper or he would…” Her hands made fists again. “He would do anything other than commit treason. He would.”

That was what woke Christian in the middle of the night. Not the fear that Anthony was innocent; the suspicion that Christian—and all the rest of Britain with him—was guilty. If Anthony was right, if there was no solution but what he had taken on.

Everything Christian owned, everything he had, every sheet on his bed, every silk gown his mother owned? They were all stolen. There was nothing to do but either suffocate in that knowledge or…

He couldn’t believe Anthony was right. He couldn’t.

“That’s why I need the journals,” Christian said in a low voice. “Something happened to Anthony in his years in China. He saw something. He observed people doing things they shouldn’t. He thought treason was the only solution.” Christian looked away. “I have to believe there were other options. That justice is not impossible, even after all these years.”

Judith’s hands curled into fists at her side. “You want my brother’s journals so you can prove Anthony not only a traitor, but a stupid, misguided, ineffective traitor at that?”

“No.” It sounded worse when she put it that way.

“I’ve read his journals. There’s nothing in them, nothing like that at all.”

“No, there wouldn’t be. Not that you’d notice. But—”

“It’s not enough for you to take Anthony’s family, his father, or his life. You have to destroy his memory as well?”

“It’s not like that, Judith. I want to do something. I want to know that I didn’t make a mistake. I can hardly sleep. I’m—”

“That’s what you want from me?” She looked him over. “I promised you my brother’s journals because I need your help. But I will never tell you that you made the right choice. Maybe, if you can’t live with yourself, there’s a reason for it.”

“Judith.” He reached out and took her hand. For a moment, he remembered that walk in the orchard. He remembered what trust looked like in her eyes.

It didn’t look like this. She yanked her hand away. “Earn the damned journals,” she hissed. “We’re not friends. We may not hate each other. But when I think of what you did to my brother… Well, you shouldn’t be able to sleep.”

In the days that followed their meeting, Judith wanted nothing to do with Christian. She didn’t want to think about him or his accusation that she didn’t know Anthony. The notion was utterly ridiculous.

How could she not know her own brother?

The Monday after he’d leveled that piece of poppycock at her, as she was reconciling the account books, she only let herself dwell on his words for a few seconds. A few seconds while she tapped her pencil against the sums.

Christian thought he knew Anthony better than she did? Ha. She’d known him since he was three. He’d been telling on her—and on himself—since she could walk. Her brother had been kind, loving, honest, trustworthy… and possessed of the most rigidly annoying morality that she’d ever encountered in her life.

Christian didn’t know a thing about him, and she would simply have to put his wild accusations out of her mind. They were nothing more than an attempt to justify the unjustifiable.

She had, after all, books to reconcile and a scant hundred and fifty pounds remaining to her name—not enough to see Benedict through his schooling, and certainly not enough to start him on the road to the rest of his life. Christian wasn’t worth a shilling on her accounts.

She refused to think about Christian’s claim on Tuesday, but she let herself imagine his face when she punched the bread dough down.

On Wednesday, she wasn’t thinking of him when she received a letter in the mail. She refused to think of their trip to the country, refused to think of him stopping the carriage and letting her sit in the field. If she admitted that he understood her well enough to know she’d needed to enjoy herself, perhaps her brother, who he…

No. She wouldn’t go down that road. She refused to do it.

She opened the letter instead. It was from the Rollins family in the Peak District.

Miss Worth, Mr. Rollins wrote. Not Lady Judith; that was already a slap in her face. I believe you have been misled. Your sister did indeed stay with us, but on a temporary basis only. She left after two weeks, and that was quite a number of years ago.

I hesitate to speak ill of anyone, but Camilla was in need of a stricter hand, someone who would teach her the truth about her new place in life.

“What new place in life?” Judith asked the letter aloud.

It didn’t answer. Instead, it went on in a similarly offensive fashion.

For her own good, we sent her to my aunt Charlene in Redding, whose unbending nature would fashion your sister into a young woman who behaved as one of her station ought. Her direction is enclosed.