Page 56 of Wedding the Widow

“Jemmy. Do you know what is going on? The door to my chamber is locked.” She backed up as he strode in, going immediately to the door and rattling the latch.

“Shhh.” Georgie darted forward.

“Yes, my lady?” Another footman’s voice. Damn.

“Nothing, James,” Georgie called through the wood. “I just wanted to keep you on your toes while you guard me.” She beckoned Jemmy toward the window that looked out toward the back of the estate. “I was coming to see you. To tell you that I had been locked in again. What do you think it means?”

“It means our father is a right bastard and about to force me to marry Lady Maude.” The words steeled his resolve. He was not going to marry anyone except Elizabeth.

“I don’t know what, but something happened at breakfast. I had been telling him about Charlotte’s wedding—not that I thought he was interested, mind you, but one must talk of something—and I mentioned that she and Nash were to expect their first child in the spring. I didn’t think he was actually listening to me, Jemmy, but he must have been because he looked up and, oh, Jemmy, he smiled.” She gulped, her eyes widening in horror. “It was the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen. If he’d smiled like that at Waterloo, the French soldiers would have run screaming back to Paris without firing a shot.”

“Huh.” Jemmy snorted, even though the situation was not funny. “I just saw a demonstration of that myself. It does put one’s teeth on edge.”

“But Jemmy, why? Why did he smile like that and then lock me in my room?”

“You gave him an idea, bran face. An idea of how to make me agree to marry Lady Maude.” The man’s mind was fiendish, make no mistake about it.

“What?” Georgie’s hand flew to her mouth, shocked into a large O.

“When you told him about Lady Wrotham increasing, he decided to blackmail me, threatening me with sending a letter to Lady Locke saying Elizabeth was increasing and she was trying to make me marry her when the child wasn’t mine.”

“Oh, Jemmy.” Georgie sank down into a chair, her eyes staring. “Lady Locke.” Her eyes widened impossibly large. “She’ll be ruined. You’ll be ruined. Lady Locke will—”

“I know. I’ve soothed Father with the assurance I will marry Lady Maude to gain time to thwart him.” He gazed about the room. How could he escape?

“But you’re going to marry Elizabeth, Jemmy. You can’t break her heart!” She grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him like a dog does a rat.

“Nothing in heaven or earth will keep me from marrying her, my dear.” He stilled her hand, then cocked his head at the door. “He locked my door, so I had thought to escape through yours, but that way is blocked as well.”

“Father is quite the tyrant, isn’t he?”

“Quite.” He strode to the one window in Georgie’s room. His chamber was inner-facing, without any windows. His sister’s room, however, overlooked the kitchen garden. Looking down at the frostbitten cabbages and straggling rows of wilted lamb’s lettuce, he cursed under his breath. The two-story drop would likely kill him.

“You’re not going to jump, are you?” Clutching his arm, Georgie peered out the window beside him.

“No. I don’t have a death wish.” He shook his head, craning his neck to look down the black face of the wall. “I do wish this blasted wall had something growing on it. I could shimmy down that, I suppose.”

A scraping noise at the door had Jemmy diving under the bed, skinning the heels of his hands on the floorboards. No one knew of their secret passage, and he preferred to keep that secret.

“Do not worry, Jemmy. It is only a letter . . . from Charlotte.” Tedium turned to excitement as Georgie grasped the letter more firmly and popped the blob of red wax off the paper as Jemmy pulled himself out from beneath the bed. She unfolded the sheet of fine white paper with flourished writing across the page. When she did so, a smaller, folded piece of paper fell to the floor.

“What’s this?” Jemmy grabbed the square of paper and rose from the floor. Glancing at the scrap he froze, the handwriting at once familiar.

“It’s a letter from Elizabeth,” they said in unison.

“Charlotte writes that she received this letter for you from Elizabeth yesterday.” Georgie waved her letter under his nose. “She feared neither of us would be allowed to receive letters from her but prayed a message from Charlotte would pass through unsuspected.”

“Clever woman.” Jemmy unfolded the tiny letter as carefully as he could, though his hands shook with the restraint.

“My dearest love . . .” Head reeling at the impact of her endearment, he vowed they would be together always if he had to burn the house down to escape to go to her. He continued to read, frustration and fear mounting with each word on the page.

He glanced up at Georgie. “She begs me to come to her. Christ!” Crumpling the edge of the letter in a convulsive grip, Jemmy stared at his sister, frantic. “How can I escape, Georgie?”

“If only I were Rapunzel, I would let my hair down out the window and you could climb down.” She patted her bright auburn hair, smiling sadly.

“Hair?” No, but what else could support his weight? A glance around the room, and his gaze lit on the bed. He rushed to the window, doing a rough calculation of the height. God, he hoped he was accurate enough. “It could work.”

Georgie backed away from him. “But, Jemmy, my hair is much too short to—”