Yes.
No pause. No hesitation. She had asked him if he would pay her brother’s debts as a test of his sincerity and he had agreed in a heartbeat, even though she knew from Gertie he had spent almost all his savings paying her father. Owen was prepared to bankrupt himself for her.
Purely because he loved her.
Through all the chaos this dire day had thrown at her, only that seemed to matter.
As pivotal moments went, it was probably the most significant moment in her life. She had been lost in the fog, ambushed by secrets and rattling skeletons from the past, feeling betrayed and bereft and so crushingly alone, expecting him to disappoint her, too, and he hadn’t. He had held his hands up, admitted he had been wrong, spoken directly from the heart and handed it all to her without a second thought.
Why on earth would he do that unless she was his entire world?
Then he had given her space to digest it all—not that it had helped—and she had sat for hours next to her fireplace, staring at the flames and wondering what on earth she was supposed to do next. Then another two had passed as she stared at the ceiling.
When she had flung open his bedchamber door in the small hours and fallen on his mouth hungrily, he had sensed she wasn’t ready to talk and simply needed passion. Being Owen, he had given it unreservedly, just as he always gave her everything she wanted. Taking her lead, there had been no preamble, no lazy journey of discovery, no need for explanations. It had been hot and fast and completely uninhibited.
When he repeated his assertion that he loved her, she could see the truth of it in the stormy blue depths of his beautiful eyes, so she told him she loved him, too. And he had thanked her.
Thanked her!
As if she had just given him the most precious gift in the world when she had only been admitting to a truth which had been self-evident for ten long years. She loved him. Needed him. And believed him completely.
Not that that had helped her to sleep either. While Owen slept the blissful sleep of a man who genuinely hadn’t done anything wrong, Lydia’s mind was racing. The past, so long buried, was suddenly coming back in a flood. Events which had seemed insignificant. Details she had forgotten. All of them needed to be examined and dissected and put into their correct order.
All through that summer, and largely ignored by Lydia because she was too busy being head over heels in love, items had been going missing from the house. She remembered that now. Alongside her mother’s treasured pearls had been three jewelled stick pins belonging to her father, a valuable antique ormolu clock which had lived in the morning room and several small pieces of silver—snuff boxes, pill boxes, hip flasks and the like.
At the time, she had thought nothing of it. Servants had a sporadic habit of stealing things in the Barton household for the exact same reasons as they hastily left its employ—because their wages were so bad and they had such little regard for her father. But as she reluctantly recalled it all now, those thefts that fateful summer were different because they weren’t sporadic. In fact, they had become so frequent, her father had decided to get to the root of things himself and unmask the culprit. And like most things he did in self-righteous ill temper, he became obsessed.
They all knew he wouldn’t rest until he caught the perpetrator. The entire household was in uproar because of it. Therefore, it stood to reason, it was entirely plausible the real guilty party might have panicked and implicated Owen to save himself from imminent discovery and her father’s revenge. Her husband wanted to know who might have been capable of such a heartless fraud, yet she was struggling to remember all the servants’ names at that time. There had been so many over the years, she would probably have to resort to the household account books to list them all. Or talk to Maybury, the only retainer who had lasted the course.
One of those many long-forgotten servants had to be the culprit. But who?
Who?
Then, as she dug deep to try to force it all out, her fevered mind suddenly wandered further back still, to the weeks before she had met Owen, and all at once everything slotted into place.
* * *
Her racing heart threatened to beat out of her ribs as she stared at her father’s house.
‘Do you want me to come in with you?’
‘No.’ As dawn was yet to break, and because he knew the still-sleeping Owen would be furious, she had walked through the dark streets all alone except for Slugger, who had accompanied her. ‘But I would be grateful if you waited here for me, Cyril…in case things turn nasty.’
A laughable statement when things were guaranteed to turn nasty.
She took one last calming breath to steel herself, then knocked on the door.
‘My lady?’ Poor Maybury was flustered, not all the buttons on his waistcoat yet done up in his haste to get dressed. ‘What brings you here at this hour?’
‘Urgent business. Inform my brother I am here and tell him I need to speak to him immediately.’ There was no point skirting around the issue. Things needed to be said and the truth needed to be uncovered.
‘He didn’t retire till very late, my lady…’
‘It cannot be helped. Kindly inform him that if he is not downstairs in five minutes, then I shall be coming up.’
The butler must have seen the slightly manic and determined expression on her face because he nodded and practically ran up the stairs. Left alone, she decided to take the opportunity to search her father’s study herself, just in case she might find something which might prove her unthinkable new theory incorrect.
Less than five minutes later, that was where Justin found her. He was wrapped in a robe, his hair on end and his eyes dull and bleary. Probably, she realised dispassionately, from drink. Justin liked to drink. It was one of his many vices, apparently. Looking at him now, she realised she had given him too much leeway in recent years and made too many excuses for the way he behaved. He was a weak-willed, pathetic specimen of manhood. Spoiled, arrogant, self-absorbed and ultimately spineless.
‘What the blazes is going on, Lydia?’
She had trusted him. Thought him on her side. Yet all along he had been in cahoots with their sire. He had never been a decent brother at all—merely a liar. A cowardly wolf in sheep’s clothing.
‘Where to start? That is the more pertinent question.’ From her reticule, she pulled out the folded letter she had hidden when she had first found it in Owen’s office and handed it to her brother, then watched him warily scan it.
‘Where did you get this?’
‘The smelly Marquess of Kelvedon gave it to a Bow Street Runner.’ She wanted to slap him for his deceit and his greed and his treacherous duplicity.
‘What are Bow Street doing talking to Kelvedon? Did you put them up to it?’
How dared he be outraged! ‘Surely your first response should have been to drop to your knees and beg my forgiveness for your treachery, Brother! All the while I believed you were trying to save me from marrying that lecher, but I now realise it was you who brokered the deal in the first place. You suggested Kelvedon to Father, didn’t you? That is your handwriting, isn’t it, Justin? Your seal on the front?’
‘Father needed a certain amount of money and the field of potential candidates was slim.’
How typical of him to pass the blame elsewhere rather than apologise.
‘And why did he need that money, Justin?’
‘You know full well why! Papa put us up to our eyeballs in debt!’
‘Which brings me neatly on to your debts.’ She retrieved the second pilfered sheet from her bag and watched his face pale as he read the damning list.
‘It’s funny what you remember sometimes.’ And since she had been dredging up and trawling through her memories, things she had once believed almost without question no longer held up to scrutiny. ‘But I now see how a passing comment, something I had no reason to think was significant, suddenly becomes incredibly significant. Like Papa’s comment on the night he informed me I was to marry Owen when you argued against it. He said, “You’ve done quite enough already, boy…” He was referring to this, wasn’t he? Your gambling debts. Your loans. Harlots. Hedonism. Avarice. The money you paid your mistress to leave the country with your illegitimate son. Your mess, Justin. On top of his. And you both sold me down the river to pay for it all.’
She had rendered him speechless clearly, because he gaped like a fish. Although what she expected him to say, when there really was nothing he could say which would justify his actions, she had no clue. ‘We’ve had three poor harvests in a row, Lydia! I was desperate!’
Lord, he was pathetic. A lily-livered, selfish liar to the end.
‘Those debts go back to Cambridge, Justin.’ And the root cause of some of them disgusted her. Her beloved brother really was just the mirror image of their horrible father. She’d had her suspicions over the years, but quashed them. Felt guilty for her disloyalty for even thinking them, but had refused to believe what was right in front to her eyes.
Not believing what she was seeing—but seeing what she wanted to believe. Exactly as Owen had cautioned.
Justin and their sire were two peas in a pod. He was just as callous. Just as pompous and unfeeling. Just as entitled and heavy-handed in getting exactly what he wanted and to hell with everyone else.
Now she knew the truth, she did not have to see the proof in black and white—she felt it in her heart. Almost as deeply as she felt the dagger in her back.
‘I have been doing a great amount of thinking since yesterday, reminiscing on the past, and in so doing I have had to re-evaluate many of the things I believed to be true. Especially around the time of Mama’s death. And all those thefts.’ Warily, he took a step back, his lying eyes darting everywhere while Lydia felt sick to her stomach.
‘Then about an hour ago I remembered something I should never have forgotten. Concerning the morning Mama and I left for Bath…’ She walked towards him, her facial muscles hurting from the force of her scowl. ‘The carriage had been loaded and I was sat in it, waiting for her. I waited for twenty minutes, Justin…because she couldn’t find her pearls.’ She paused then, because of all the hideously pivotal moments in her life, this one deserved some gravitas. She lifted her finger and pointed at him.
‘They had been stolen before we left, hadn’t they?’ He shook his head in immediate denial, but his eyes were wide. ‘We were gone a whole month…don’t you remember, Justin? And Owen didn’t start working for our father until the day before we arrived back home.’
Like the mythical Janus, he had two faces. The one which might leak the truth was hidden now by his deceiver’s mask. A disguise she had fallen for time and time again. ‘I have no idea what you are talking about, poppet. I was at Cambridge then. Don’t you remember?’ That he could look both amused and worried about her at the same time was testament to his skill. ‘Surely you aren’t trying to suggest I had a hand in it?’
Why had she never noticed her brother was dead behind the eyes before? They were as soulless and selfish as her father’s. ‘I am not suggesting it, Justin. I know it. Without a shadow of a doubt. You needed money and because Papa was so stingy with it you took it in other ways. After all, who would expect the heir to steal? What do you say to that…poppet?’
‘And what proof do you have for this egregious falsehood?’
‘None—bar what I feel in here.’ She thumped her chest. ‘But I will have! I know you put a witness on the stand to condemn Owen. You told me so yourself. I will find Mr Argent and I will pay him twice what you did to tell the truth than you did to have him lie.’
He smiled. Smiled! And shook his head. ‘Argent is dead, Lydia. He died of a stroke some years ago.’ Like a chameleon, he went from relieved to concerned. ‘You are clearly overwrought to be inventing such nonsense. Or has Wolfe planted these poisonous seeds in your head?’
‘It makes no difference. Because I remember! I remember you being there next to me when they arrested Owen. I remember you wrapping your arms around me, telling me you always suspected he was a bad lot. From the outset you were the one putting poison in my head, making me doubt what I knew inside… You probably fed the same poison to Papa and he would have lapped it up. He loved to look down on people. Loved to feel superior.’
He reached out to take her hand and she stared at it like a snake. ‘Wolfe has always been able to control you and now that Papa is dead he wants this house and he is using your good nature to get it.’
The deed seemed to pulse inside her reticule, but she did not need the reminder. ‘You sent an innocent boy to the other side of the world to pay for your crimes, Justin, tried to get him hanged.’ She went for him then, couldn’t stop the rage from turning violent, pushing him and slapping him as tears streamed down her face. ‘How could you, Justin? When you knew I loved him?’ He scrambled away and put the desk between them. ‘I am going to Bow Street… I am going to tell them exactly what you did and let them investigate your crimes!’
‘No!’ Panic made his voice high-pitched. ‘You cannot do that! I am innocent!’
‘You are as innocent as Owen is guilty.’ She snatched his letter to Kelvedon from the desk and shook it at him. ‘If it took the Runner less than two weeks to uncover this, he’ll have found enough evidence to have you arrested and charged within a month!’
‘But I am your brother!’
‘You had a young man transported for a crime he didn’t commit while you committed fraud, theft, perjured yourself in a court of law and broke our dying mother’s heart when you stole her pearls. She never got over the loss of them. We both remember that, don’t we?’
The real Justin appeared as his mask crumbled in panic. ‘It wasn’t like that! I only borrowed them…’
‘Pawned them, more like!’
He grabbed her hands and stared beseechingly. ‘With the intent of getting them back, Lydia, I swear it…but I was led astray by bad people and in danger… I had no choice…’
Even looking at him, watching him squirm, made her sick to her stomach. She tugged her hands away because his true character made her skin crawl. ‘Is nothing ever your fault, Justin? Since when is theft borrowing? Since when is it acceptable to pawn somebody else’s possessions without their consent?’
‘I was going to get them back! Things just got out of hand. Papa wanted someone’s head on a pole…’
‘And you gave him Owen’s rather than admit it was you!’
‘I gave him a servant, someone I assumed was of no consequence…’ His head reeled sideways at the force of her slap, and he whimpered, clutching his cheek as blood dripped out of his nose.
‘He was of consequence to me! You knew that and used it to your advantage.’ Just as she knew he would have happily told her father of their romance if she’d had the courage to speak out, then used that, too, as further proof of Owen’s guilt. ‘You callously thought it all through and with malicious calculation, you planted evidence. Paid a witness…’
‘You cannot prove that. Nobody but you heard me say it and if you betray me—your own kin—and go to Bow Street, I will deny it all till my dying breath. It will be your word against mine. A peer versus a scoundrel’s wife! Nobody will believe you!’ His face had contorted into a mask of hatred now. Selfish, self-serving, desperate hatred.
‘While I might not be able to prove it yet, that makes no difference, because I know without a shadow of a doubt that whatever happens next, you will already go to hell for it!’