but himself to ignore them and heaped on strawberry jam and cream.
‘I employed Gregory Farnsworth as my secretary eighteen months ago. He was just down from university, the third son of our rector. He proved intelligent, hard-working, personable. I began to include him in dinner parties and so on when I needed an extra man and before long he was part of the household. I trusted him implicitly.’ He took a bite of scone, savoured the delicious combination of cream and jam and made himself go on with the story.
Whatever your doubts, whatever errors you make, you keep to yourself, his father had told him. Remember who you are, what you are. And here he was, spilling out every detail of his failure to a woman he hardly knew.
‘Marguerite was just turned seventeen. Not yet out, but free of her governess and in the hands of my cousin Mary to acquire some polish before she made her come-out next Season. Mary apparently noticed nothing between them and I certainly didn’t, fool that I was. Not until, that is, the young puppy comes in one morning and announces that he is in love with Marguerite, that his affections are returned and that he wants my permission for them to be formally betrothed with the intention of marrying when she was eighteen.’
‘How old was he?’
‘Twenty-one.’
‘Not such an age gap and not at all unusual, if he waited until she was eighteen.’
‘But he didn’t, did he? He lured the girl into believing herself in love with him instead of doing the honourable thing and waiting, keeping his distance, until she was out. I should add that he is probably the most beautiful young man I have ever seen—blond hair, blue eyes, Classical profile and so on and so forth. Even Mary admitted it gave her palpitations just to look at him. When I get my hands on him he is not going to look so pretty, believe me.’
‘You refused him permission, I assume.’
‘Of course I did. She was far too young, he had no prospects and no money beyond the salary I paid him. How did he think he was going to support the daughter of a marquess in the manner she was accustomed to? By sponging off me, I suppose.’
‘Perhaps she would have been happy to live more modestly?’ Sara ventured. ‘And if he is a good private secretary he might have hoped for a career in a government office or the Bank of England.’
‘That is academic. I refused him and warned him that if I ever discovered him alone with my sister, or writing to her, I would break his neck. I should have booted him out there and then, but his father the Rector was an old friend of my father’s, a decent man, and I hoped to keep this from him. Then I had to deal with Marguerite. I was an unfeeling brute, I had ruined her life, cast dishonourable aspersions on the motives of the man she loved, et cetera, et cetera... She threw an inkwell at my head and refused to talk to me.’
‘Go on.’ Sara poured more tea and Lucian realised he had drained his cup.
‘I had no idea that he had gone behind my back, but Farnsworth must have set out to seduce her almost immediately, if he hadn’t already. I worked it out when I eventually found her and talked to the doctor who told me how far along the pregnancy was. Two months after I forbade the match Mary came to me in strong hysterics, waving a note from Marguerite. I had forced her to take desperate measures, she said, so they had eloped and would be halfway to Scotland before I read the note.’
Sara’s gaze was fixed on his face. ‘Did they make it to Scotland?’
‘It was a bluff.’ Lucian blanked out that nightmare journey to the Border and back from his mind with the same concentration that he had applied to stay sane, to keep thinking and find their trail. ‘He took her to Belgium, to Brussels, thinking that they would find an English cleric there to marry them. They did find one. When I finally got on their track and found him he told me he had refused point blank, guessing that she was so much underage. It seems they then decided to try in Paris. Since Waterloo the Continent is full of English visitors and it was a reasonable assumption that they’d find someone, if not at one of the Anglican churches in the cities, then a private chaplain or tutor accompanying tourists.
‘They finally located a cleric, in Lyons. Their money was running out and Marguerite was six months pregnant. Farnsworth left her in a lodging house, telling her that he was going to interview the clergyman. He never came back. You may imagine the state she was in when I found her three days later.’
‘I can guess at it.’ He was so lost in the black misery of that time that he almost jumped when Sara put her hand over his. ‘And you must have been beside yourself with worry and exhaustion if you’d been chasing them the length of England and back and then across Belgium and France.’
‘Me? What I felt did not matter. I found my sister, my little sister, having a miscarriage in a run-down French lodging house with a landlady threatening to throw her out if she didn’t get paid. There was no hope of saving the child and for days I thought we would lose Marguerite as well. Even when the doctor said she was out of danger she simply turned her face to the wall. All she would say was, “He must be dead. They are both dead. I want to die, too.”’
Marguerite was all the family he had and he loved her and he had failed her.
‘And you have been looking after her ever since. How long?’
‘Three months.’
‘Is your mother alive? Are there no female relatives to help? Your cousin Mary?’ Sara’s warm hand was still over his, her fingers firm and comforting.
I do not need comforting. I am a man, I should be able to cope with this. It was surely a sign of weakness that he couldn’t bring himself to draw his hand away.
‘My mother is dead and I do not trust our aunts to know how to help her—they would be shocked and disapproving. Mary was in hysterics, it was all I could do to get her to be silent about it. Of course, I should have married as soon as I inherited. If I had found the right wife then she would have seen what I did not, but I had put that off, believing I had ample time.’ Another failure on his part, the selfish reluctance to plunge into the Marriage Mart, try and sift through the seemingly identical mass of pastel-clad, simpering misses to find the perfect Marchioness.
‘I thought it best to take Marguerite where no one would know her and gossip about her looks and her low spirits. Then, when she’s stronger, she can come out next Season, find a husband. If there is someone she takes to, then I will make certain her dowry will be large enough to ensure he doesn’t think about her past.’
‘But she will still be mourning Gregory,’ Sara protested. ‘She will not be ready to think about another man by then.’
‘He seduced, deceived and deserted her. Once she recovers from the miscarriage she will realise what a fortunate escape she has had.’
‘Idiot!’ Sara pushed away his hand abruptly and got to her feet. ‘I hardly know your sister, but I can tell she is no fool. And she is loyal. She has had to keep her feelings entirely to herself with no one to talk things through with, so how do you expect her to realise if she was mistaken? Or how could she convince you, for that matter, if she was not wrong about him? If she truly does love him, then you will have to find out what happened to him so she can begin to heal.’
‘If I thought he was still alive I’d be on his heels with a pistol,
