Page 63 of A Hint of Scandal

Chapter Thirty-One

The Common License from the Bishop of Salisbury was waiting for them on the table in the entrance hall, so, having tucked it away in the inside pocket of his coat. Max escorted Serafina upstairs to Julian’s study with the intention of revealing the outcome of their investigation.

They found Julian seated at his desk, surrounded by piles of papers and open textbooks, a tray of untouched food by his side. He looked up as Max ushered Serafina through the door, raising anxious, bloodshot eyes and tossing down his pen. It left a string of inky blots across the page he’d been writing on. “Well? Do you have news?” There was an unmistakable tremor in his voice. The last few days of what must have been terrible worry had wrought changes upon him, and not for the better.

Better put his mind at rest straightaway. “You may rest easy,” Max began with. As a soldier he’d learnt that hedging around a subject never helped. You had to get to the nub of the matter straightaway. “She wasn’t the woman you married, and she’s gone. Crisis averted.” He pulled out the one chair for Serafina, who sat in it, a thoughtful expression on her face.

“She wasn’t?” Julian asked, relief flooding his face. “She wasn’t Abigail?”

Max nodded. “I’m sorry, or perhaps glad, to have to tell you that Abigail Aubrey died not long after you two parted, in giving birth to her… your… child. Who also died. The woman we met in Marlborough today, who was fully intending to hoodwink our entire family, was her sister, to whom she must have confided the whole sordid story before she died. The young man she was going to pass off as your son is that woman’s own son. They are both now in the custody of the constable. For fraud. I had the impression he’s delighted to have made such an arrest.”

Julian’s mouth had fallen open and his chest was heaving for his scanty breath. “She’s dead? You’re sure?”

Max grit his teeth and nodded. This was not the brother he’d looked up to all his life. This was a man who’d lied to the young actress he’d married in order to bed her, then left her, and married a second wife in the full knowledge that the first was probably still alive but thinking herself not legally wed. A glance at Serafina’s face told him she shared his opinion. Would he ever look at Julian the same way again?

“I can’t believe it,” Julian said. “She’s dead? And the child? I just can’t believe it.” He hung his head. Were those tears? “She was so vital, so alive. I would not wish death on her or her child. I would not.”

He rose a fraction in Max’s estimation at these words.

“Nevertheless, whatever you would not wish on her,” Max said, determined to rub in the wrongdoing, “if she were living, you would be in a monumental mess. A scandal that would ruin this family and any prospects your children might have had. And nothing about this result detracts from what you did to that girl, and then went on to do to Maria.”

“I’m sorry for what I did,” Julian said, shaking his head. “Sorry I married her, sorry I lied to her and left her, sorry for what I could have been doing to Maria and our children.” He looked up, his eyes brimming with anguish. “And without you, Max, the scandal would have become real.”

Max dropped a hand onto Serafina’s shoulder. “It’s not me you have to thank, but my betrothed. It was her astuteness which brought about the denouement of the fraudsters. She has a bent for investigation like no other I’ve ever met.” He let his fingers caress her shoulder and she tipped her head to settle her cheek against his hand. This did not go unnoticed.

Julian coughed into his handkerchief, but his eyes appeared to be taking in the rather bedraggled appearance of his two investigators. “Thank you, Miss Gilbert—Serafina—with all my heart. You are undoubtedly the savior of this family’s… no, of my honor.” A faint smile ghosted across his face. “And even I can see that the pursuit of these vagabonds has brought you two closer together than I could have hoped for.”

Max couldn’t help the smile. “It has indeed.”

As it was late in the day, Max put off visiting the vicar in the village to arrange the wedding until the next morning. Their luck held, and the day dawned bright and clear, as only the earliest of spring mornings can, with dew sparkling on every blade of grass and only a few clouds left in the sky when the morning mist had cleared.

Arm in arm, Max and Serafina strolled down to the village, having shunned the idea of taking the landau. As Max said, they’d both had enough of being cooped up in a carriage over the last few days. Fresh air would be much nicer. They passed the busy Home Farm and the estate manager’s house, crossed the wide, tree-dotted parkland, and followed the gravel driveway where it wound through the woods with just the glint of the ornamental lake in the distance.

At the vicarage, a square built house beside the church in the center of the village, they found the vicar, Reverend Bentley, at home. His housekeeper brought them tea in his study, and Max explained the circumstances at Bratton pertaining to Julian’s condition and therefore to the carrying out of the marriage. He brought out the Common License from his coat pocket, and Mr. Bentley, the same bewigged incumbent Max had known since boyhood, happily agreed to perform the marriage service in the estate chapel on the following Saturday. The elderly vicar shook hands with Max and kissed Serafina’s hand, obviously delighted to be able to marry one of the Aubrey family. “It won’t be the first marriage I’ve conducted in that little chapel, as so many of his lordship’s tenants choose to marry there. But I think it will be the first for one of you Aubreys.”

With that sorted, Max and Serafina wandered back through the village and into the park together, neither of them in much of a hurry to return to the castle. This was ground Max had roamed over as a boy and very young man, and he somehow felt more at home out here than he did within the confines of the castle. In the same way he’d felt at home while on campaign in foreign lands.

He unhooked his arm from Serafina’s and instead took her hand in his. “I could walk here with you forever on this idyllic spring morning. It’s as if nature knows of our love and has sent this day as a special gift just for us.”

For a moment, she pulled away, but only to remove her gloves. Once she’d done that, she took his hand again, skin on skin, warm and comforting. “I could too.” The throaty quaver in her voice had the immediate effect of rendering Max’s breeches once more most uncomfortable. Damnit—how did she succeed in doing this to him just with two words?

He stopped, where a chestnut tree overhung the road, and turning, pulled her into his embrace, his one arm holding her close. “It’s no use. I have to do this.” And he bent and kissed her. Her response was immediate. Her mouth opened beneath his, and her body melted into his as though made of putty. If only he had two arms with which to hold her.

Eventually, they had to come up for air, though, both of them gasping. She laughed, the sound music in Max’s ears. So much so that he had to kiss her again. For longer.

When they finally parted this time, somehow, Serafina’s demure bonnet had come undone and fallen to the ground, and Max was thinking longingly of their wedding night in just four days’ time.

She picked up her bonnet, dangling it by its ribbons. “I think we’d better keep walking before someone comes along and catches us like this.” There was no reprimand in her words though. She was not a coy miss out to tease him.

Max seized her hand again, and, not hurrying their steps, they continued. All around, the hint of bluebells to come showed, where their pointy leaves were pushing up out of the ground. No sign of the flowers as yet, of course, but a solemn promise of the color to come. Max lifted his chin and looked upwards at the sweep of the greening branches overhead. “Spring is coming.”

She nodded. “I think it’s already here.”

“When I was a boy, I used to roam all over this estate. I know every corner of it. Sometimes with some of the boys whose fathers worked for mine. Often alone. I wasn’t a boy who had to be part of a group, either here at home or at school.”

“And yet you became part of a group when you joined the army.” Her breasts were rising and falling as if she’d been running. He couldn’t take his eyes off the shape of them beneath her gown. So tantalizing. Did she feel as aroused as he did? The color in her cheeks told him yes. What would it be like to…? No. He mustn’t think of that… not yet, anyway. Time enough in four days’ time. Four days. God, that was a lifetime.

With difficulty, he gathered his wits. “I know. But it didn’t feel the same. The army is one large group of which everyone is a member, yet within that group there’s scope for individuality. I hung onto mine. And it taught me to rely on the friends I had.” He paused, remembering the shades of the men he’d known and lost. “But it inures you to loss, I think.”