Page 60 of War of the Wedding Wagers
She turned to find Henry looking as shocked as she felt, the afternoon light casting long shadows across the library’s intricate parquet floor.
“Mr. Greene believes he is the rightful claimant to Lady Pendleton’s title and estate?” she whispered, the words barely disturbing the library’s hushed atmosphere. “But why bring this to me?”
“Because you have a wise head on your shoulders,” replied Henry. His voice was low, careful—the voice of a man who understood the delicate nature of the secrets that could destroy reputations. “If I told Sir Frederick, he’d have the man horsewhipped because he’s already feeling such angst towards him with regard to Greene’s blatant courting of his sister, Caroline. As for Lady Pendleton, well, I couldn’t speak to her. I felt I needed to discuss what I’d found first with someone who had, perhaps, less at stake.”
Amelia nodded, still looking at the letter. She’d taken care not to move it, conscious of the potential devastation such a document could unleash. It would be best, she felt, that Mr. Greene remain ignorant that his research had been uncovered.
“You did right not to take it to her or Albert, I think,” she said, her tone measured and calm.
“Do you mean because you also think Mr. Greene is not a worthy inheritor of Pendleton Castle and all the rest of it?” Henry asked. He put his hand to his cravat as if it was too tight, a gesture that betrayed his inner turmoil. Then, in a lowered tone that seemed to invite conspiracy, he added, “Colonel Blackwood said he’s heard whispers that if Greene’s debts were called in tomorrow, the man would have to declare bankruptcy.”
Amelia pressed her lips together as she frowned. Slowly she asked, her voice a mere thread of sound, “Do you think there might be some truth to this supposed connection between our Mr. Greene and Pernilla?”
“Lord, no!” Henry exclaimed, though he kept his voice low. “Pernilla is in the family crypt. Caro and I visited it with Greene only yesterday. Lady Pendleton said she died the night she triedto run away with her lover. I thought it was a story to add drama to her ghostly house party, but now I believe it. She certainly didn’t disappear from her home, get married, and produce children, of which our Mr. Greene is the last in the line!”
But Amelia feared that was exactly the truth of it as her mind raced ahead to all the implications—not just for the Pendleton inheritance, but for Caroline, whose heart might be broken twice over when she discovered both Mr. Greene’s duplicity and his true connection to her godmother’s family history. Even Albert, who showed such promise as the future master of Pendleton Castle…
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“There’s something I’dlike to show you. Please meet me in the rotunda at 4 p.m.”
Sir Frederick let the note flutter from his fingers to his writing desk beneath the window while inwardly he groaned.
He’d been watching Miss Fairchild through the window and had been on the verge of joining her when young Henry had spoiled his plans.
And now this note from Mrs. Perry had turned what could have been a pleasant afternoon into a potential nightmare. The paper felt heavy in his hands, weighted with implications he had no desire to face.
Mrs. Perry thought she had the measure of him and would be confidently reposing shortly in the trysting room within the rotunda, awaiting his arrival.
What a fool he was to have allowed his old, worn-out reputation to linger.
But it was his fault to have walked into temptation and embraced it with open arms in the first place.
Oh, that embarrassment with Lady Eldredge when he’d been only a greenhorn. He knew that those were the rumors that had fueled Miss Fairchild’s distrust of him. She thought him a philanderer. A libertine.
Well, of course he enjoyed the company of beautiful, witty women. What red-blooded male would turn down the overturesof a lush beauty like Lady Eldredge, who had declared her marriage dead and who claimed her loneliness could only be assuaged by an evening with a dashing war hero like Sir Frederick?
Of course, she’d used other language. Sir Frederick was not a war hero. Well, he was in some circles, but it was not as if he’d been lauded for his heroics in the press so that the whole world knew what only a few within military and government circles knew.
But she’d couched her compliments in such a way that they’d gone completely to Sir Frederick’s head, and he’d done what he knew very well at the time was rank stupidity.
Recently returned from war, in pain and licking his wounds—for he’d been unjustly maligned and it would be some months before he’d be exonerated—he’d needed tenderness and understanding.
That’s what he’d mistakenly attributed to Barbara, Lady Eldredge. Tenderness and genuine admiration when, in fact, she wanted only to toy with a man she found, at that particular moment, attractive.
The scandal had been splashed throughout the broadsheets and in all the gossip sheets throughout the country once Lord Eldredge had got wind of his wife’s infidelity.
Apparently, the marriage wasn’t dead, and Lord Eldredge hadn’t sanctioned his extramarital affairs while he dallied with his own mistress.
If Sir Frederick had been a few years older, perhaps he’d have been wise to it. But for a youth of barely twenty-three, with little previous experience of women, Sir Frederick had been ripe for the picking.
So excoriating was the experience that he’d thrown himself carelessly into another couple of liaisons, since nothing could damage his reputation any further, he’d thought at the time.
Now, Mrs. Perry was trading on the fact that he’d succumb to her lures.
She mightn’t have been wrong a few years previously.
But she’d misread him this time.
