In Which a Marriage Is Announced
After leaving Lord Dernham’s house, Pickett set out on foot for the Fieldhurst town house in Berkeley Square, and reached that dreaded destination entirely too soon for his liking. He lifted the knocker and let it fall, and was taken aback when the door was opened by a butler whom he had never seen before.
“Yes?” said this worthy, clearly unimpressed with Pickett’s somewhat shabby brown serge coat and unfashionably shallow-crowned hat.
“John Pickett, to see Lady Fieldhurst,” he said, standing a bit taller, the better to look down upon this unwelcoming gatekeeper. “Her ladyship is expecting me.”
The butler gave a sniff as if he rather doubted this, but stepped aside to allow Pickett to enter. He relieved Pickett of his hat and gloves (Pickett suspected the hole in the left thumb was yet another black mark against him) and gestured for him to follow. “If you will wait here, sir, I will notify her ladyship of your arrival.”
Pickett seated himself on the straw-colored sofa in the drawing room. He had sat here beside Lady Fieldhurst many times before during his investigation into the murder of her husband, but the room seemed to have lost its welcoming atmosphere in spite of the warmth of the fire. He supposed the butler had something to do with it, and wondered why she had replaced Rogers.
He got his answer only a few minutes later, when a plump, middle-aged woman entered the room, followed by a glowering George Bertram, seventh Viscount Fieldhurst.
“Good day to you, Mr. Pickett,” said the new Lady Fieldhurst, offering her hand to him as he rose at her entrance. “What brings you here?”
Her husband George was rather less courteous. “I’d like to know what the devil you’re about, calling on my wife!”
Too late, Pickett realized that the Fieldhurst town house was now the property of the new viscount and his wife. Julia, his Lady Fieldhurst, would have removed to—where? She would be expecting him to arrive at any minute, and he had no idea where to find her.
“I—I beg your pardon,” Pickett stammered. “I had forgotten—I wasn’t thinking—I’m looking for your cousin’s widow. Can you tell me where she is living now?”
“And why the devil should I?” demanded George, Lord Fieldhurst. “What can it possibly have to do with you?”
“There is something I must discuss with her ladyship,” Pickett said. “If you will tell me where I might find her, I will trespass no longer on your hospitality.”
“You can have nothing to say to Julia that cannot be said to me, as head of the family.”
“It—it is rather personal in nature,” said Pickett. “It concerns something that took place in Scotland.”
“Hmm, I always suspected there was more to that Scotland business than Julia was telling,” George grumbled. “Whatever you have to say, you may be sure I will pass it along to her—if I deem it necessary.”
“What I have to say to her, sir, is none of your business!”
George bristled, and would no doubt have summoned the butler to throw Pickett out on his ear had his wife not intervened.
“George, your Cousin Julia is a grown woman,” the current viscountess pointed out. “Surely she can decide for herself whether or not to see Mr. Pickett and hear what he has to say.”
“You do have a point, my dear, but I would be remiss in my duty to the family if I did not demand to know what personal matter this fellow could possibly have with my cousin’s widow!”
Pickett would have preferred to cut out his tongue rather than betray Lady Fieldhurst by bearing tales to her husband’s meddlesome family. Still, he knew enough of George from previous experience to recognize that he would get no information from that source any other way.
“Very well,” he said with a sigh, recognizing his last forlorn hope that the irregular marriage might stand would die with the telling. “You know that while in Scotland Lady Fieldhurst and your sons took matters into their own hands, going to the seaside rather than the Fieldhurst estate.”
“Yes, yes, I know that. What of it?”
“You may not realize that they attempted to preserve their anonymity by adopting an assumed name. And the name her ladyship chose—well, it was mine.”
“The devil you say! Are you telling me my cousin’s widow was capering about Scotland calling herself Mrs. John Pickett?”
“In all truthfulness, I do not believe my Christian name ever entered into the discussion, but as to her calling herself Mrs. Pickett, yes sir, she did.”
George heaved a sigh. “Well, I can’t pretend I like it, but I suppose it’s all water under the bridge now. Least said, soonest mended, I daresay.”
“Not exactly. I have it on good authority that under Scottish law such a declaration before witnesses constitutes a valid marriage.”
George’s face grew quite purple with rage. “Are you telling me that you of all people are now married to my cousin’s viscountess? No, Mr. Pickett, I’ll not have it!”
“I’m afraid what you will or will not have has very little to say to the matter,” Pickett said.
“If you’ve so much as laid a hand on her, by God, I’ll have you horsewhipped!”
In fact, Pickett had laid more than a hand on Lady Fieldhurst. He had kissed her at least twice, and with the lady’s full cooperation. Still, he knew himself to be innocent of the charges George was implying. “No horsewhipping will be necessary, your lordship. I had an appointment with her ladyship to inform her of the accidental union so that she might take whatever steps are necessary to secure an annulment.” Some demon of mischief (or perhaps it was mere wishful thinking) compelled him to add, “But if you will not allow me to speak to her, I suppose we will be forced to let the marriage stand.”
“I will inform Julia of the matter, and I will notify my solicitor at once! You, sirrah, need not come into it at all!”
Pickett had almost forgotten George’s wife’s presence, until she spoke up softly. “Nonsense, George. Of course Mr. Pickett must tell her himself.” To Pickett, she added, “You may find her in Curzon Street. Number twenty-two, if memory serves.”
“Thank you, your ladyship. You are very kind.”
He turned on his heel and departed, leaving a sputtering George Bertram to stare after him.
“You are late, Mr. Pickett,” Julia chided him when Rogers announced his arrival some twenty minutes later. She had awakened early and spent the long hours of the morning in mingled anticipation and dread of his call. Had he had second thoughts, and decided to take her up on her offer after all? If so, should she give him a second chance? Her pride said no, but seeing him again at Lady Dunnington’s house the previous night had been enough to inform her that her pride was sadly lacking where he was concerned; she very much feared that if he asked to be her lover, she would fall into his arms.
“I beg your pardon, my lady,” he said, bowing over her hand. “I called first in Berkeley Square. I didn’t realize—I forgot you would no longer be living there.”
She rolled her eyes. “Which will probably bring George down on my head!”
“I beg your pardon,” he said again. “I had not meant—”
“Never mind, Mr. Pickett, he probably would have found out in any case. But will you not sit down?”
He sat, and so did she. For a long moment they faced one another in uncomfortable silence, until she said, “I trust you had a pleasant journey home from Scotland?”
He nodded. “The trip was uneventful, which to my mind is the best one can look forward to, travelling on the Mail.” Another long silence. “And the boys? I hope they are well?”
“Quite well, thank you. Harold has joined the Royal Navy, and will soon be taking a berth as a midshipman aboard His Majesty’s frigate Dauntless.”
“Better him than me,” Pickett said, grinning sheepishly at the memory of his own seasickness aboard a small fishing boat while Harold Bertram reveled in the experience. “When you next see him, please give him my best regards.”
“I will,” she promised. “I’m sure he will be gratified to receive them.”
Having exhausted their supply of platitudes, they lapsed into silence once more, until Pickett was forced to conclude there was no excuse for delaying the inevitable. “My lady,” he began, “if you recall, during that time you were registered at the inn under my name—”
“Which made things most uncomfortable for you, I fear,” she acknowledged contritely.
“Not half so uncomfortable as they’re about to be for you,” he predicted grimly.
“I beg your pardon?”
“My lady, it has come to my attention that—Mr. Colquhoun, my magistrate, is a native Scot, and he says—that is, it seems that under Scottish civil law—”
Julia listened to his stammering with growing unease, until she finally interrupted, putting an end to his ramblings. “Mr. Pickett, what is wrong?”
He took a deep breath and looked her squarely in the eye. “My lady, it appears there is a very good chance that we are legally wed.”
Every drop of color drained from her face. “What?”
“Apparently there is such a thing in Scotland as marriage by declaration, which means that all it takes to make a valid marriage is for both parties to declare before witnesses that they are man and wife.”
“Oh, dear,” Julia murmured under her breath. “Oh, dear! I am so very sorry, Mr. Pickett. I should have known!”
He regarded her with a puzzled frown. “Nonsense! How could you?”
“My dear sir, every gently bred female over the age of fourteen is cautioned against the sort of roués and fortune-hunters who might attempt to persuade her to elope over the Border to Gretna Green, where a hasty marriage might be made with no questions asked!”
“Well, there’s one bright side,” Pickett said ruefully. “No one can accuse you of having designs on my fortune when you claimed to be Mrs. Pickett.”
She smiled somewhat mechanically. It was true that she’d had no designs on his fortune (one could, after all, hardly covet what did not exist) but Mr. Pickett possessed other—assets—in which she had certainly expressed more than a passing interest. “Mr. Pickett, is that why you turned down—why you declined to—to—”
He hesitated for a moment before answering. He knew she had been wounded by his apparent rejection of her, and here was his opportunity to save face by claiming to have done so in a noble cause. And yet he could not be less than truthful with her, even at a considerable cost to himself. “No, my lady, it wasn’t. In fact, I wasn’t aware of the marriage myself at the time. There were—other reasons.”
She gave a little laugh utterly devoid of humor, then rose from her chair and crossed the room to gaze unseeing out the window. “So you reject me as a lover only to find yourself tied to me as a wife. Poor Mr. Pickett! It appears you have gone from the frying pan into the fire.”
Pickett grimaced. “I wish you would not dwell so much upon my supposed rejection of you, my lady. Truly, it was not what you think.”
“Oh, but I must dwell on it! Lady Dunnington has pointed out to me—quite rightly!—that had you made such an offer to me, it would have been considered an indecent proposal. I am most sincerely sorry, Mr. Pickett. I had no thought of giving offense.”
He had to smile at that. “My lady, the man who could be offended to know that you were interested in him in such a capacity must be above being pleased by anything.”
Her answering smile was singularly bleak. “And yet I failed to tempt you, Mr. Pickett. I assure you, I would have said nothing had I not believed that you felt—that is, I imagined that you—”
He let out a long sigh, then rose and joined her at the window, where she stood looking down out onto the street. “You have been frank with me, and you deserve no less from me. In all honesty, my lady, your assumptions were quite correct: I yearn for you body and soul. But I will not be your lap dog, to be summoned for your amusement and then dismissed when you grow weary of the game.”
“It wouldn’t have been like that!” she cried, whirling away from the window to face him.
He gave a humorless laugh. “It would have been exactly like that.” He kept to himself the lowering conviction that, due to his own lack of experience, the end would very likely have come sooner rather than later. “You should be glad I didn’t take you up on the offer—you might have found yourself bound to me for life! As things stand now, we should at least be able to obtain an annulment—unless you want to be a thief-taker’s wife and live on twenty-five shillings a week,” he added grimly.
She was silent for such a long moment that Pickett indulged a wild hope that she might turn to him and say, Yes, Mr. Pickett, as a matter of fact, I do.
But no. “Well, Mr. Pickett, you are certainly full of surprises,” she said briskly, offering her hand. “I thank you for stopping by to tell me privately, and in person. I suppose the next step must be consulting a solicitor to discover exactly where we stand and what must be done. If you will excuse me, I shall send a note to Mr. Crumpton, the Fieldhursts’ solicitor, requesting that he meet with the both of us. Unless you have a solicitor of your own with whom you should rather confer?”
Pickett, having no connections of his own in that regard, agreed with Lady Fieldhurst’s suggestion, albeit with a marked lack of enthusiasm.
“Very well, then,” said her ladyship. “I trust a note sent to Bow Street will find you?”
“Yes, my lady, thank you.”
He wasn’t quite sure what he was thanking her for. He bowed over her hand and left the room, stopping only long enough to collect his hat and gloves from Rogers.
And just that simply, the “marriage” was over.
Lady Fieldhurst stayed by the window long after he had gone, watching as he strode up the street heading east. Married! Married to Mr. Pickett! She had thought her deception innocent enough at the time, giving a false name at the inn so that she might escape for a time the scandal that still surrounded her six months after her husband’s death. She had never dreamed that she, by claiming to be his wife, or that he, by going along with the ruse, might actually be bound by it.
Even more disturbing than the irregular marriage itself, however, was her reaction to it. There was a time not so long ago—in Scotland, perhaps, or in Yorkshire this past summer, while he was playing the part of her footman—that she and Mr. Pickett would have shared a hearty laugh at the suggestion that he might be her husband. But neither one of them was laughing now; in fact, she found nothing at all of humor in the situation, and Mr. Pickett seemed to share her lack of amusement. Still, there was no need to make a Cheltenham tragedy of the thing: it was an inconvenience, certainly, but surely nothing that Crumpton and Crumpton, solicitors to the Fieldhursts for generations, could not overcome. There was nothing in the news, nothing at all, to leave her trembling and weak in the knees. What had changed?
Even as she wondered, she knew the answer. She had been grateful to Mr. Pickett for saving her from the gallows, and she had come to respect him as a trusted friend, but now—now the genie that was physical desire had escaped from the bottle, and there was no stuffing it back inside again.
It occurred to her that if his birth had been higher, or hers lower, marriage to Mr. Pickett might have been a very pleasant prospect indeed. But he was who he was, and she was who she was, and there could be no common ground on which to build a marriage, or indeed any sort of permanent association. Even a lasting friendship between them was unlikely in the extreme, depending as it did upon the event of various members of her circle getting themselves murdered at regular intervals.
In retrospect, she feared Mr. Pickett had been correct when he had said there could be only one ending to any liaison between them. Eventually he would meet a female of his own class whom he would wish to marry, and of course he must be set free before the issue arose; to be rejected as a matter of principle, as she had been in Scotland, was surely less humiliating than being abandoned in favor of another woman. She should be grateful, as he had said, that he had turned her down, so that the marriage (such as it was) might be annulled. And yet gratitude was not the thought uppermost in her mind when she considered the opportunity she had lost. Was it possible to miss what one had never had?
As his tall figure disappeared in the distance, she pushed aside her melancholy reflections, then sat down at her rosewood writing desk and penned a note to Walter Crumpton, Esquire, of Crumpton and Crumpton, Solicitors, Lincoln’s Inn Fields.