“Emeline!” Vicar Blair snapped, and she focused her scowl on him.
“What? I have no idea why you brought me here, and I won’t stay to be manhandled or brow beaten.”
“Fine,” the vicar said. “I’ll come straight to the point. You’re being charged with illicit fornication and harlotry. How do you plead?”
“I’m . . . I’m . . . what?”
“You’re charged with fornication and harlotry. Will you admit or deny your crimes?”
“My . . . crimes? You’re being ridiculous, and I’m leaving.”
“Oh, no, you’re not,” the sheriff barked. He shifted in a menacing way, as if he might physically restrain her.
Were they insane?
“What are you talking about?” she asked Vicar Blair. “I am a respectable gentlewoman, from a good family. My father was schoolteacher at this estate for three decades—as you’re well aware.”
“Yes, he was,” the vicar haughtily intoned, “and if he could see you now, what would he think?”
“My father loved me,” she fumed, “and he was proud of me. What would he think if he could see you now?”
Mr. Mason butted in. “You haven’t answered Vicar Blair. Will you admit or deny?”
“I vehemently deny, and I won’t sit here and be slandered by either of you.”
She leapt to her feet, and while Sheriff Pratt reached for her, she was too quick. She raced to the door and rattled the knob, having forgotten that the sheriff locked it. Though she yanked and yanked, it wouldn’t open.
She whipped around.
“Let me out! I insist!”
“You’ll go when I say you can.” The sheriff gestured to her chair. “Return to your seat and behave yourself. I’m not above wrestling with a recalcitrant woman, but I’d just as soon not.”
He grabbed her again, but she jerked away and went to the other side of the room. She stood, glowering.
“You have insulted and offended me,” she furiously said to Vicar Blair, “and I demand to know what this is about.”
“We have ample evidence of your perfidy,” Vicar Blair declared. “We only allowed this meeting as a courtesy. We’re giving you a chance to defend yourself.”
“Against what?” she scoffed. “I haven’t the vaguest notion of what you’re claiming.”
“Don’t you?” The vicar was very smug. “Tell us about your affair with Lord Stafford.”
“Lord . . . Stafford?”
Her pulse pounded with dread.
As they’d tossed out words like harlotry and fornication, it had never occurred to her that they were referring to her trysts with Nicholas Price.
Her relationship with him had been fueled by love and affection. At least on her end. She shouldn’t have dallied with him, but she’d done it with the best of intentions. She’d thought he would marry her. She’d thought her esteem was fully reciprocated.
She’d been dead wrong, but she’d proceeded with high hopes and big dreams.
The vicar’s allegation made their association sound sordid and obscene. He made it sound . . . criminal.
A woman couldn’t blithely consort with a man. There were laws banning it. There were morals to prohibit it. There were community standards of decency and decorum to follow. There were Church teachings as to sin and damnation.
Still, she blustered, “Lord Stafford and I are friends. He helped me financially when my sisters and I were in dire straits. He let us live here at the manor, and he gave me a job as his secretary. I worked for him.”
“Flat on your back, it would seem,” Vicar Blair vulgarly retorted.
His cold certainty rattled her.
“Name one witness who can speak against me! Name one witness who ever observed so much as a glance between us that was inappropriate!”
“Actually,” Benedict Mason said, “I am that witness. I was happy to impart all that I discovered about the two of you.”
“You!” she huffed. “I scarcely know you. What basis could you have to accuse me of anything?”
The vicar picked up a stack of papers and waved them at Emeline.
“Mr. Mason has penned an extensive deposition. Shall I read some of it to you?”
Emeline panicked. She was cornered and couldn’t decide her course of action.
She understood that she had to deny and deny and deny any affair, but at what cost? If she asked him not to read from the deposition, was she implicating herself? If she brazened it out and urged him to go ahead, he might spew embarrassing personal details. She’d likely faint.
She could think of nothing worse than to stand before the three of them, while Oscar Blair recited a list of her transgressions. What could Mr. Mason possibly have told him? It had to be very, very bad.
She thought of Nicholas Price, the man she’d cherished, the man she’d presumed would be her husband. He was in London, leading his rich, indolent bachelor’s life, while she’d been left behind to face disgrace and humiliation all alone.
Was he aware of what they were doing? If he wasn’t, and he ever learned of it, would he even care?
She didn’t suppose he would. He’d be wed soon, and once he was, she’d be a distant memory, just one gullible woman in a long line of gullible women who’d crawled in and out of his bed over the years.
“You don’t have to read it,” she said.
“Why is that?” the vicar asked. “Is it because you know what it contains?”
“No, I just rather you didn’t.”
He started anyway. “‘On Tuesday last, I, Benedict Mason, land agent for Nicholas Price, Lord Stafford, was in the hall outside the earl’s library. The door was ajar, and I could hear him talking to his brother, Lt. Stephen Price. To my extreme surprise, they were discussing the earl’s tenant, Miss Emeline Wilson, a single, unmarried lady whom the earl had brought to reside in the manor with him.’”
The vicar paused. “Shall I continue?”
“There’s no need,” Emeline pleaded.
Vicar Blair kept on. “‘Lt. Stephen Price asked the earl about a sexual liaison he was pursuing with Miss Wilson. The earl boasted about the relationship and shared numerous salacious descriptions of Miss Wilson’s anatomy. He also provided several vivid accounts of the carnal acts in which the pair had regularly engaged.’”
Emeline gasped. She hadn’t meant to; the sound emerged before she could hold it in.
“He was boasting, Miss Wilson,” Mr. Mason said, “and he was
