Lord Stephen seemed genuinely distressed, and Abigail was genuinely ashamed. “If I had a husband, would you put aside our sham engagement before it’s announced?”
“No, but I’d keep my lips and hands to myself. The occasional determinedly straying wife has overcome my gentlemanly scruples—I’ve admitted as much—but your vows would be genuine and sincere. You would not stray. You might deal severely with a husband who disappointed you, but you would not stray.”
“I am not married, but neither do I deserve your good opinion of me.”
“I will be the judge of that. Whatever frolic or wrong turn you’ve kept to yourself, you’d best out with it. Quinn, Duncan, and the duchesses are doubtless conferring, and they will have questions for us. We need some leverage over Stapleton, and if he has leverage over you…Well, forewarned and all that.”
Why can’t we be just a couple in love enjoying a pretty autumn day? Why must we be two people with complicated pasts and no future?
“The letters Stapleton wants,” Abigail said, “I’ve read every one. I have nearly memorized them.”
“I admire your thoroughness.”
“Thoroughness has nothing to do with it. I was a fool.”
Lord Stephen picked up the reins and stared off into the trees. “Did you steal the letters? Steal them for a client, perhaps?”
“I had no need to steal them. They were sent to me, and they belong to me. Stapleton has no right to them.” No right to cut up her peace and wreak havoc in her life.
His lordship propped his boot on the fender. The breeze stirred again and a shower of freshly fallen leaves twirled to the grass. He said nothing for a long moment, then sent Abigail a faintly puzzled glance.
“Champlain was your lover. That sniffing hound charmed his way under your skirts, put his false promises to you in writing, and now Stapleton thinks to destroy the evidence of his son’s rutting. Was there a child, Abigail?”
She shook her head.
“Abigail?” Stephen spoke her name gently as he tucked an embroidered handkerchief into her hand. “The damned bounder is dead. I can’t call him out, and I no longer duel. Talk to me.”
He slipped an arm around her shoulders, a shocking presumption in public, no matter how secluded the path, and Abigail leaned into him.
“I was so happy. Champlain had promised to have a very important discussion with me as soon as he returned from his latest trip to the Continent—a discussion of highly personal matters, he said. Champlain called himself Mr. Richard Champion when I knew him, the man of business for a great lord whom discretion forbade him to name. I was too overjoyed to question anything he did or said. Everything I’d ever wished for—a devoted husband, a family, a home of my own—I was to have it all, at last. I was about five months along when he returned from Paris. He wrote to me, but I wasn’t to write to him, so I told him in person. I expected him to share my joy and have the banns cried.”
“I take it back. I will kill him even if he’s already dead. I knew Champlain, I know his widow. He could have plundered any number of willing citadels. He should not have trifled with you.”
“Oh, he loved me. Said so himself, wrote the words many times. I only learned he had a wife after I’d conceived. He loved his wife too, and would never give her cause to regret their marriage. But what did it matter that he was married when he would cheerfully set me up in my own establishment and make sure the child wanted for nothing?”
“I hope you hit him, Abigail. I hope you kicked him right in his courtesy title.”
So fierce, for a man who couldn’t kick anybody. “I almost burned his letters. Mon petit agneau chéri and Mein liebstes Häschen…As if I could be anybody’s dearest little lamb or favorite bunny rabbit. I should have burned them. I lost the baby a month later. A stillborn boy.”
The words were simple, the emotions complicated. She had eventually been relieved not to face endless scandal, not to visit illegitimacy on her firstborn. But the relief had been tiny, belated, and guilty—also vastly outweighed by sorrow.
“You kept the letters to punish yourself, didn’t you?” Stephen stroked her shoulder, as if they had all the time and privacy in the world. “You kept them as a reproach, and you became an inquiry agent because you wanted to preserve other young women from having to pay for trusting the wrong man.”
Perhaps she had. Abigail had never considered her motivations, beyond keeping a roof over her head and maintaining her independence.
“Champlain died within two years,” she said, “and destroying the letters seemed overly dramatic. They are mostly travelogues of his gallivanting on the Continent. Fine beer here, excellent wine there, an impressive violinist at some comtesse’s chateau. That should have told me something.”
Stephen hugged her, a quick squeeze about the shoulders, then took up the reins. “He was a shallow, vain, overly indulged heir. They are thick on the ground and a disgrace to the peerage. I am sorry about the child, Abigail. You grieved that loss irrespective of Champlain’s stupidity.”
Nobody had consoled her for the loss of the child, nobody had even known of it until this moment—nobody except Champlain and a grim-faced, taciturn midwife.
“I grieve,” Abigail said, as the horse toddled on. “I grieve, but I don’t rage as much as I used to.”
“That’s like my knee,” Lord Stephen said. “The damned thing won’t get any better, and it probably will get worse. Bloody unfair, pardon my language, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I sulk and rage, then get on with the next experiment, not that a bad knee and a lost child are of the same magnitude. Did you name the baby?”
“A stillborn child cannot be baptized.”
The gig tooled along through the
