Proof by Seduction (Carhart #1)

Gareth swallowed. “Do tell.”


Mrs. Davenport looked off into the distance. “But she was a tricky little thing. She’d get the other girls talking to her, friendly like, every time she had half the chance. If I hadn’t watched, she’d have wrapped them all ’round her finger. She had them fascinated, she did. I told them over and over, stay away from that Jenny Keeble. They listened, mostly. But…”

But Jenny had done her best to win them over anyway.

“She was four when she came here,” Gareth observed mildly.

“You can’t fight nature, my Lord Blakely. What’s bred in the bone will bear fruit in the character. What do you suppose happens to a girl who never knows her parents?”

A girl who was lied to from the age of four and told she was formed for ill-behavior from birth? Gareth could only imagine. And yet…it hadn’t happened to Jenny.

“I suppose,” Gareth said quietly, “you did your duty by the girl and informed her what to expect from life.”

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Davenport said with relish, leaving little doubt about precisely how she’d performed that responsibility. “And—just in case—” She crossed over to a desk, shuffled around in a drawer. And then she pulled out a yellowing sheaf, the edges of the papers crackling. “There. I recorded all her misdeeds. I saved these, in the event I was ever asked to testify as to her character, and the magistrate was inclined to foolish lenience.”

Gareth held out a hand. “She was damnably silent about her childhood.”

Mrs. Davenport’s eyes narrowed, but she handed over the papers. “Language, Lord Blakely. Watch your language. Tell me, did she become a…”

“A whore?”

Mrs. Davenport sniffed. “Language! A soiled dove.”

“She’s spent the last twelve years pretending to be a mystic with the power to foretell the future.”

Mrs. Davenport raised a hand to her mouth, the proper picture of horror. “Not exactly a life of virtue. How do you know her?”

“My cousin went to see her. I believe that over the course of their acquaintance, he paid her a good bit of money.”

The woman’s face grew gleefully gluttonous. She clutched at her handkerchief. “Fraud! A felony, to be sure. Will she hang? Be pilloried? Transported?”

Gareth glanced down at the paper in his hand.

14 August 1815. JK told two lies and shirked washing behind her ears.

He flipped through more pages, all filled with minor infractions. Some did not even count as that.

12 May 1820. JK, sick with fever, infected three other girls. Likely intentional.

Gareth had suffered his grandfather’s cold and cutting comments. But underneath his grandfather’s chill, there had always been high expectations. He’d always assumed that Gareth would, and could, perform his duties as capably and honorably as every Blakely before him. Money and rank had bought him every privilege.

But Jenny had grown up in this cold place. Instead of a mother, she’d had this frightening woman who whispered lies about her, ostracizing her from the only companions who could bring her comfort. How desperate for affection must she have been, when she ran away at eighteen?

And how devastated when she discovered that first lover, like the rest of the world, valued her at nothing? No wonder she’d turned to fraud.

“Lord Blakely?” Mrs. Davenport intruded on his reverie. “Will there be a prosecution?”

“Silence,” he snapped. “I’m thinking.” Gareth stood up and paced in front of the fire.

There was more to it than mere devastation. For all the coldness of her upbringing, it had been Jenny who’d seen the best in those around her. It had been Jenny who’d seen Ned’s clever loyalty, Laura’s quiet strength. She’d even seen something good in Gareth, for God’s sake.

With no reason to hope ever given her, she’d hoped. And if she’d been unwilling to take that last step—if she’d been unwilling to need him, to love him, when he’d thought to relegate her to the cobwebbed corners of his life—how could he blame her? Nobody had ever valued her as she deserved. Least of all Gareth.

Gareth was a scientist. When the evidence came together, sometimes, it showed truth so clearly that no rationalization could deny it. Now, in this lifeless room, with a horrid harridan watching him think, bloodthirst shining in her oh-so-proper eyes, Gareth realized the truth.

Jenny wasn’t his equal. She was his better.