“No, Verity.” It was Bertie who spoke through clenched teeth now. “I have met and broken bread with Their Graces; more God-fearing, upright, and gracious people I’ve never come across. What they have shown me is proof enough. I refuse to go along any further with this circus, subjecting them or myself to duplicitous nobodies who would say anything for a guinea.”
So he did think her a liar, a duplicitous nobody who would say anything to land herself a prize husband. She wanted to lash out at him. Were she still the Lady Vera Drake he would be quite beneath her. He wasn’t even titled. And the manor at Fairleigh Park was a thatched-roof cottage compared to the splendor that was Lyndhurst Hall.
She said nothing. She should have kept her mouth shut all along. She should have known.
Bertie sighed. He moved away from the window, where he’d been stiffly standing, to the embroidered stool next to the bed. “Let this be the end of it,” he said wearily, pulling off his shoes and socks. “Now come to bed.”
“I’m sorry?” Had he lost his mind?
“I said, come to bed,” he repeated impatiently.
“I don’t think so.”
He didn’t even look at her. “Don’t be childish.”
“I don’t think it’s childish to not want to sleep with a man who believes me an unscrupulous adventuress.”
He pulled off his cuff links. “If that’s what you are, why should you be offended?”
Until this moment she’d believed that he loved her too. The black sensation in her—was it how a snowman felt on the first day of spring, that the world was ending, that she herself would dissipate into nothingness?
“That is not what I am, therefore I am deeply offended.” Her voice rose, as brittle and bitter as burnt caramel. “And I fail to understand why you would still want anything to do with me, as apparently I’m such repellent dross!”
At last their eyes met, but the only emotion she discerned in his was a profound irritation. “Fine. Enjoy your umbrage. But refrain from impugning my character. It was never the beauty of your soul that interested me and you know it.”
Sometimes, when I savor your dinners, it’s more than food. I luxuriate in the beauty of your soul, the sweet mystery and refulgence of it, like an antechamber of Heaven.
Lies. All lies. And she’d believed them.
She forced her tears to remain where they were, welled in her eyes, and bobbed a curtsy—after their first night together, he’d told her she need not curtsy to him anymore. “Good night, Mr. Somerset.”
She would never call him Bertie again as long as he lived.
Chapter Four
November 1892
The day was fading. The carriage, chiming softly, pulled into view. Bumbry, the coachman, had spent the past three days polishing tack, button, and handle. In the wash of lamplight and candlelight through windows freshly scrubbed with ammonia and spirit of wine, the brougham shone as if it were made of jet and onyx. Verity watched from the solarium. Her father had had a carriage like that, a gorgeous brute the size of an omnibus. By the time she arrived at Fairleigh Park, she’d had quite enough of poverty and backbreaking work. She’d wanted to ride in a fancy carriage again, wear beautiful clothes, and sleep on a stack of feather mattresses higher than she was tall.
At times she wondered how much she’d loved Bertie for himself, and how much because he represented everything she’d lost. But it was not a question that troubled her exceedingly. Would the story of Elizabeth Bennet be half so triumphant and beloved had Mr. Darcy been a mere yeoman farmer? She thought not.
Bertie, like Mr. Darcy, had had ten thousand pounds a year. The Somersets had been a distinguished family since the Hundred Years War—the estate had been granted to an ancestor by royal decree in 1398 for valor in battle. Since then, though no Somerset descendant had as of yet been raised to the peerage, numerous sons had been knighted for service to the crown in war and in peace, the latest being Sir Francis, Bertie’s father.
The manor at Fairleigh Park, rebuilt early in the previous century, was one of the finest Robert Adam houses in the land. The gardens, nestled in a crook of the river Ure and nurtured by generations of horticulture enthusiasts, were forty acres of color and idyll, beautiful in every season.
Bumbry reined the team of four to a full stop. Geoffrey and Dickie leapt off their perches at the back of the carriage. Her hand tightened on the curtain that concealed her.
Except for Mrs. Boyce and Mr. Prior, who awaited the new master outside, on the lowest of the wide steps leading up to the front door, most of the other servants had assembled in the entrance hall, under the high blue-and-white ceiling that had always reminded her of exquisite jasperware.
Verity would not join them.