Once Upon a Marquess (The Worth Saga 1)

He had distracted himself.

He hadn’t stood up and wandered around, poking into business that wasn’t his. He had studiously ignored the roll-top desk he could see in the adjoining room, the papers neatly stacked in order. He hadn’t questioned—much—whether the disturbingly rundown state of this home meant that creditors posed a problem for the Worth family, such as it now was. He hadn’t even looked for Anthony’s journals. He’d sat in one place and minded his business.

His business had been the demolition of pastry into its constituent crumbs. Demolition, then division: He’d separated the bits first by size, and when that seemed unsatisfying on some gut level, by deviation from roundness.

Then, he’d very carefully started eating—from the most irregularly shaped crumb toward the most symmetrical.

He was almost finished with the infuriatingly oblong bits when Judith came in.

She stared at him—and the four plates he’d laid end to end in order to sort the crumbs into place.

“Lord Ashford,” she said. “What are you doing?”

He had been arranging crumbs. After a moment, he gestured at the plates. “Making myself at home. Figuratively speaking. Not literally.”

She waved a dismissive hand in his direction, thank God, instead of saying something like Is there something wrong with you? or Why is there a line of crumbs three-and-a-half plates long on my dining table?

No. This was Judith. She’d never cared about his oddities.

“If you have to do that,” she said, “next time use the big plates. Less washing up.”

“Fewer gaps between crumbs,” Christian agreed. “I didn’t know where the large plates were, though. And it is doubtful there will be a next time.”

Their eyes met, acknowledging the fact that he was unlikely to be in her home again. Not that he was unlikely to arrange crumbs when he was bored. Putting things in order was soothing. Some people found that odd—he’d heard various politely worded iterations of “Oh dear, Christian, what are you doing?” over the years.

But he wasn’t too odd in that regard, he didn’t think. After all, there was the phrase “out of sorts.” Whoever had come up with that must have been something like Christian.

He’d assumed, for much of his young life, that the phrase described the peevishness of mind that one encountered when one had nothing to put in order. He’d always been confused when his compatriots used it to describe a mere lowness of spirits on account of not having had their favorite pudding at dinner. That had nothing to do with sorting at all.

It wasn’t until Judith had walked away from him that he’d understood that out of sorts could also mean that you’d entered a state of mind where no sorting would help.

Judith was here now, but her presence didn’t help. She sat across the table from him and took a biscuit of her own, which she placed on a plate. A single plate. She didn’t meet his eyes. She picked up a knife and very, very deliberately, cut her biscuit in half. It crumbled, rather than slicing smoothly, little biscuit crumbs splattering about in an irregular pattern.

“Christian.” She cut the biscuit in quarters. “I asked for your assistance on a delicate matter. You really ought to have sent a man of business, as I asked.”

There was not an ice sculpture’s chance in Hades’s ballroom that he would have done so. “And as we both know,” he said, “I am not much given to following orders.”

She sniffed. “The matter is beneath you. I need someone to glower and look manly while I ask questions.”

“I glower.” Christian fixed her with his most intense gaze. “Behold this manly glowering.”

She glanced up from her plate almost reluctantly.

He gave her his best glare: eyebrows drawn down, nose flared in distaste. “Answer the lady’s questions,” he growled, “or it will not go well with you.” He glanced around the room and spotted a disappearing white tail. “You, or your cats.”

Her lips pressed together, but she hadn’t managed to hide her smile quite swiftly enough. He awarded himself a tentative point.

“You would ask too many questions yourself,” Judith said. “And this, as I said, is a delicate matter.”

Once, Christian had made the mistake of agreeing to watch over his second cousin at a musicale. Her mother had become ill halfway through, and his aunt—who was supposed to chaperone her—had been nowhere to be found. Lillian had run afoul of a “delicate matter,” by which his cousin meant that she had started to menstruate while wearing a very white gown.

He’d sacrificed two handkerchiefs and a cravat in service of her dignity.

Christian looked over at Judith, who was subdividing her biscuit into indiscriminate crumbs. “Whatever delicate problem you are wrestling with, it is undoubtedly less delicate than some of the ones I have dealt with. I promise I’ll keep anything you tell me in confidence.”

Her chin went up. She looked off over his shoulder, as if seeing that unfortunate event eight years ago in the distance.

“If I have no other choice,” Judith said. She tapped her fingers on the table. “Recently, and anonymously, I sent my sisters money to be held in trust for either their marriage or their majority—some four hundred pounds apiece. This was sent to our family solicitor.”

Christian blinked at her. “Anonymously? You sent them? But—”

Her fingers stilled on the table, and she shook her head. “If I had wanted to explain myself on this matter, I would not have prefaced any of this with the comment that you ask too many questions. The money was not illegally obtained. I sent it. I don’t wish to go into any further particulars. Might we continue?”

“I suppose,” he said, looking up at the ceiling, “that this money was somehow derived from part of your father’s fortune? Something that he managed to somehow hide?”

She sighed. “Those are questions. You are the worst nonquestioner I have ever met.”

“True. But look at my glower.” He demonstrated it for her again.

“Christian.” She folded her hands on the table and looked in his eyes. “Lord Ashford. I know we were once on intimate terms. But you must get this into your head: We are not friends. My father was convicted of treason. My brother was found guilty of abetting him. And the entire foolish investigation surrounding them would have come to nothing had it not been for you.”

It was a good thing he was still glowering.

“We are not friends,” she said. “My brother was transported. My father was sentenced to death, stripped of all the properties that he could be stripped of. The only things we had remaining were those few items that belonged to me and my brothers and sisters, alongside an ancient, moldering estate in the family name—and that’s little more than a pile of rocks in the wilderness.”

He knew all this.

“I need help,” she said. “Because of you, my relations want nothing to do with me. I had nearly a thousand pounds set aside so my sisters might have a chance at a decent marriage. I know they won’t find lords; I had hoped for vicars. Camilla will be coming out in a matter of months. I sent every spare penny I had to our family solicitor anonymously, and now he tells me he can’t speak at all of their situation.”

Christian slowly flattened his hands against the table.

“I need someone with some social clout to send the message that I’m not to be ignored. I have no one else to turn to. I need help. Not a joke. Not a laugh.”

He waited for a moment, just to make sure that she was finished. “I could hardly forget that I figure as the villain in your piece, either. But you asked me for help. Me. Not anyone else.”

“I had noticed.”

He ignored this. “This is not about reminding you that we are familiar. This is who I am. I’m shite at etiquette. I make jokes. And despite everything that has passed between us, I still try to do what is right. That is why, after all these years, after telling me to my face that we are not friends—that is why you knew that if there was one person on this earth you could ask

for help, it was me.”

Her nostrils flared. “I thought I could ask you because you are in my family’s debt.”

Christian found himself smiling. He steepled his fingers. “Why yes, I am.”

She shifted uneasily.

“I spent every summer with your family until I was eighteen years old,” Christian said. “Your brother saved my life. You—” But he wasn’t going to talk of her. He shook his head. “I am in your family’s debt. That time meant more to me than I can ever say. But that isn’t what you meant, was it?”

He didn’t wait for an answer.

“Did I ask to provide counsel to the man who was presiding over your father’s trial in the Lords? No. I did not. He came to me and asked me—me, a twenty-one-year-old boy, one who’d spent summers in the house of the man—to advise. He told me that I could ensure he had a fair trial. Of course, everyone in the House of Lords thought the whole thing was a joke and a farce at the time—something that they had to do to satisfy the public after those first rumors surfaced.”

She shook her head.

“Talk of jokes. It was a great joke. An utterly hilarious joke. That’s what trials in the House of Lords were, they told me. They were just there to meet the form of the law. That it was understood that nothing would happen.”

He picked up another crumb.

“Or do you think I owe your family because the truth came out? They handed me a mess of financial evidence, all of it confusing. I thought, ‘Well, here is something I can do—I can sort this out.’ I thought I could be more than a useless block sitting to the side. I expected that once I cleared away the cobwebs and the tangles, everything would be put to rights.” He looked at her. “What was I supposed to have done, Judith? Should I have realized that your father was guilty, and then hidden that fact? Is that why I owe you—because I assumed that should I find the truth, it would exonerate him completely?”

She leaned forward and practically spat at him. “You spent summers with my family. You should have known it wasn’t true. He wasn’t guilty. Anthony wasn’t guilty.”