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He stepped away from the door and Will came out. One eye was half-closed, there was a cut on his right cheekbone and his lip was split. ‘Right, come on.’ He clapped his hat on his head, shrugged into his greatcoat and took Julia’s arm. ‘My thanks to you for your support, Frazer. I owe you a good dinner, but you’ll forgive me if we leave at once.’
‘Will, your face—’
‘Not here.’ He took her arm and went briskly down the stairs and out onto the forecourt.
The major tipped his hat to Julia. ‘Obedient servant, ma’am. Dereham.’
Will hailed a passing cab, bundled Julia into it without ceremony and called up, ‘Grillon’s Hotel’, before climbing in beside her.
The vehicle rattled away down Ludgate Hill and Julia, speechless, simply stared at her husband. He was here, she was safe. She had killed no one. Julia dug her handkerchief out of her reticule and sat with it clenched in her hand, waiting for the tears of sheer relief to come. Strangely, they did not, nor did the rush of relief she experienced when she dreamed that everything was all right.
Will tossed his hat on to the seat beside him and took the handkerchief when she held it out to him. He dabbed at his cheek with some caution. ‘Are you all right, Julia?’
‘Am I all right!’ She found her voice in a flood of anger that encompassed fear, anguish, anxiety and shocked relief all in one muddle of feeling. ‘Yes, of course I am. Will, you might have been seriously injured, even killed.’
He raised one eyebrow, gave a wince at the unwary gesture and grinned, somewhat lopsidedly. ‘That is not very flattering, my dear. Your Mr Dalfield is licking his wounds and contemplating the warning I gave him and your cousins: go back to where they came from and never speak of this or approach you in any manner. If they do not comply, they will have a respected magistrate to vouch for their attempts at extortion.’
‘Then it is really all over.’ It did not seem possible that the nightmare that had haunted her waking and sleeping for over three years had simply dissolved into thin air.
Will nodded. ‘I am hoping this is the last of your deep dark secrets, my love.’ His face was serious, but his eyes smiled at her.
‘I promise.’ Had he really said my love? Most likely it was a careless endearment, or wishful thinking on her part. She was certainly feeling very strange. Light-headed, in fact, although with that came a certain clarity of thought. ‘You were not surprised when you came into the room just now, were you? You said Jonathan’s name without even having to think about it. How did you know?’
‘I realised he was not dead in the early hours of this morning.’ Will got up and changed seats so he could put his arm around her. Julia tried not to lean into him, anxious about cracked ribs, but the warmth of his body was like a balm to her own aching one.
‘It was all about surprise, that was what had been niggling at the back of my mind ever since your cousins came to Grillon’s. Their purpose was to blackmail us, of course. But all they threatened us with at first was scandal about your elopement and the fact that you had struck Dalfield. Violence, they said. Not murder, not killing. No one said anything about death or murder until you blurted out your confession. They mentioned Jonathan’s poor head, not his dead body.
‘They had come all prepared with a shocking tale of a woman who had lost her virtue and assaulted, and probably scarred, a man. They threatened to paint you as a woman who had run away from home, one whom society would be appalled to find as a baroness. They expected me to pay up simply to preserve our good name from unpleasant slurs.
‘And then you said what you did. I was stunned. But so were they and that must have registered with me without my grasping the significance, fool that I am.’
‘You could hardly be expected to notice nuances when you had just been told your wife had killed a man,’ Julia said.
r /> ‘I suppose not,’ Will agreed. ‘But Mrs Prior gasped and Prior was struck silent. It only took him a moment to recover his wits and for her to at least regain some composure, but it obviously registered somewhere in my brain.’
‘I was not looking at them,’ Julia murmured, and turned so she could see his profile. Will was miles away, looking back on that appalling scene, she could tell. ‘I heard them but I was watching you.’ Only you, while my heart broke.
‘They had thought I would pay them a few hundred pounds to shut their mouths and go away, I’ll wager that was the sum of their ambition. And then they found that you believed you had killed your lover. I have to give Arthur Prior credit, the man can think on his feet. With a brain like that he should be a lawyer. It was a gift to him and he knew what to do with it at once: tell the big lie, ask enough money, and it all becomes that much more convincing. And you, my darling, could not but help them because you believed it and I, knowing you were still hiding a secret, had believed the very worst of you.’
‘How could I have been so mistaken?’ Julia felt her mind clearing, her strength returning. Perhaps, like Will, she was having to come to terms with the fact that she had a future. The certainty she had lived with so long like a leech on her conscience had been disproved. It was hard to believe she was free. ‘Jonathan looked so…dead.’
‘All head wounds bleed dreadfully. You saw an unconscious man lying face down, his head laid open by an iron poker. He must have sprawled as still as death amidst scattered fire irons on the hearth. There was blood everywhere. You had experienced betrayal, fear, violence, all within minutes and you had done something utterly alien to you—struck another person. The room was suddenly full of cries of Murder! from an ignorant, excited crowd. I can see it as plainly as if I had been there.’
‘If I had not assumed the worst and fled—’
‘You might have been taken up for assault, for it would have been his word against yours and he was the one with the cut head. And besides, I would never have met you,’ Will said as the carriage came to a halt. ‘Of course, you may well say that all these years of anxiety and guilt were not worth it, but selfishly I hope you will come to think they were.’
Julia looked at him sharply, but Will was already on the pavement handing up money to the driver. ‘Now, to get ourselves back up to our room without setting the entire place on its ear. If the manager gets sight of me, we will find ourselves and our bags out on the pavement, I have no doubt!’ he added as he tried to cover the worst damage on his face with the linen square.
‘I do not think I look much better,’ Julia confessed as a page, trying hard not to stare, came to take her small valise. Mercifully, although there were hotel staff a-plenty to negotiate, they did not encounter the manager or any guests on their way up to the room.
‘Oh, my lady! My lord. I was that worried, I didn’t know what to do!’ Nancy, started to her feet as they entered their sitting room. She had a basket of mending at her feet, but it did not seem she had been doing much to it.
Julia did her best to calm her down, although for the life of her she could not think of a convincing explanation to offer the maid other than a rather garbled story of family emergency and footpads.
Her head spun with suppositions and hopes and fears, but she allowed Nancy to lead her away to bathe and to change, leaving Will to deal with his own toilette in the minuscule dressing room. She suspected they both needed time before the full meaning of these revelations could be faced and she sensed that her husband did not want wifely fussing over what he was trying to dismiss as minor injuries.
*
