were deep in discussion over the all-important gowns for the Carlow ball. Nell was sitting beside them, her expression politely attentive, her eyes unfocused, looking inwards. Just what was going on in that neatly coiffed head?
‘Miss Latham?’
She started. ‘My lord?’
‘Would you care to stroll through the Long Gallery?’
‘I confess some exercise before retiring would be welcome after such a long time in the carriage.’ She rose, then hesitated. Oh, artistically done, Miss Latham, now the excuse… ‘But you should be resting, my lord. Your wound—’
He had thrust his hand between the buttons of his swallow-tailed coat, refusing to attempt his dinner encumbered by a sling, and now his shoulder was aching like the very devil. ‘Hardly a twinge,’ Marcus lied. Nell’s mouth pursed in a moue of disbelief, but she laid her hand on his offered arm and allowed herself to be walked to the door.
‘This is a fascinating house,’ she observed with the air of one determined to make polite conversation. Marcus led her across the Great Hall and up the shallow stairs with their grotesque carvings on every newel post. ‘Is it Tudor?’
‘Mainly. It was built by my ancestor, the first viscount. The land and the title were a gift from Henry VIII in return, so the family legend goes, for marrying an inconvenient mistress of the monarch’s at the time he was courting Jane Seymour. The story is, of course, that she was with child.’
Nell shot him an assessing glance as though measuring him up to fill the monstrous monarch’s shoes. ‘Poor woman. I hope she had some liking for your ancestor.’
Marcus remarked, half jesting, ‘You have no sympathy for an adulterous king then?’ Nell tripped on the top step and he caught her arm to steady her. Far too thin, he thought in an attempt to deny the frisson that touching her produced.
‘I imagine what he wanted, he took,’ she said with a shiver that transmitted itself to his hand, still curled lightly about her upper arm. ‘He had all the power and they had none, those women he ordered to his bed.’
‘And yet you defended an adulterer to my father?’
‘Every case is different, every person is different. To condemn without understanding is harsh.’ Her voice was urgent with an undertone of distress and there was colour in her cheeks.
‘You speak from experience then?’ Marcus asked with every intention of provoking her into lowering her guard.
‘Of adultery? You are suggesting I have been some man’s mistress?’ Nell tugged her arm free of Marcus’s hold, conscious that she had let his fingers linger there too long, just for the illusory comfort they gave, and despising herself for it. ‘You think I am Salterton’s whore? Is that what you are implying? ‘The thought of the dark man with his air of menace and his dancer’s sinister grace touching her, made her shudder.
‘You were not born to the life you are leading,’ he countered, his intelligent face watchful as he probed.
‘And that makes me what, exactly? Other than unfortunate?’ she demanded. ‘I deliver a parcel and now you feel free to question my morals, probe into my life?’ Would she be this angry, or less, if she had not discovered the sinister link between their families? ‘You are no better than Henry VIII—overbearing, arrogant and perfectly prepared to browbeat a woman.’
‘I will do what I have to, to protect my family,’ Marcus said flatly, but there was colour on his cheekbones and his eyes were angry. ‘Sooner or later you will tell me what I want to know.’
‘After you produce the thumbscrews?’ she flashed, flinging open the nearest door and marching through it. ‘Drag me down to the dungeons? No doubt this house has them—to go with the warders who appear every time I walk anywhere alone.’
‘The footmen are there for your protection and I very much regret the house has no dungeons,’ he said with what she could swear was real feeling.
‘I am sure you do—Oh!’ She had found the Long Gallery, yards of windows on her left, their panes black onto the winter night and, on her right, portrait after portrait, ranks of them filling the space between the waist-heigh panelling and the ornately plastered ceiling, interrupted only by candle sconces and the carved stone of the fireplace. Charmed into forgetting their quarrel, she stood and stared.
‘Let us call a truce and look at the pictures,’ Marcus suggested, coming to her side. He made no effort to take her arm, but began to walk slowly, glancing up at the wall as he went. ‘That’s the first earl. A dull man with a genius for toadying to Queen Anne. There’s the wife of the Tudor viscount with her eldest son.’
‘Who looks nothing like Henry VIII,’ Nell pointed out.
‘All babies look like Henry VIII,’ Marcus said. ‘These are the early-eighteenth-century portraits.’ Nell dutifully studied a number of sombre gentlemen in magnificent waistcoats and even more splendid wigs, flanked by their ladies who displayed considerably more bosom than she felt was strictly necessary.
‘My father,’ Marcus said, stopping beneath a fulllength portrait of a young man holding the bridle of a stallion against a background of rolling parkland. The house could be glimpsed in the distance.
Lord Narborough was extremely handsome in those days. ‘You resemble him closely,’ Nell observed, not adding that the man in the painting looked as though he had not a care in the world while the one standing next to her had two sharp lines between his brows when he frowned. And he frowned a lot, mostly at her it seemed.
‘Thank you, but you flatter me. I do have his colouring,’ Marcus conceded. ‘And here, at the end, are all of us together.’ The family group showed a young couple, a baby in the wife’s arms—that must be Verity—a small boy and girl playing with a puppy—Honoria and the absent Hal—and a serious boy leaning against the arm of his mother’s chair. So, Marcus was frowning even at the age of nine or ten.
‘Delightful,’ she said politely. Somewhere, long since lost, there had been a portrait of her own family. She could just recall having to sit very still on Mama’s knee, bribed with sweetmeats. ‘When was this painted?’
‘Ninety-four. I was nine. It was shortly afterwards that my father become…unwell.’
The year before Papa was hanged. Was he unfaithful to Mama even as they posed for their own portrait? Was he the man Lord Narborough began to refer to at dinner? And had Lord Narborough been so judgemental about this sin that he refused to help Papa when he was in danger of his life? Or was there more to all this? She must read all of the letters and the diary, however painful it would be. She had opened Pandora’s box; now she was incapable of keeping the truths and the hurt locked away. A stab of grief lanced through her, almost upsetting her careful poise.
‘What is it, Nell?’ Something must have shown on her face as she turned from that happy family group, sitting in their sunlit garden. Marcus put out his hand to catch hers.
‘You know where you belong, don’t you?’ she demanded, her own misery and confusion spilling out. ‘Where you come from, who you are.’
‘Of course.’ He was puzzled. Naturally. He had always known who he was, no inner uncertainty of identity or purpose ever rocked Marcus Carlow’s world. ‘And you do not?’
Somehow
