Sins and Scandals Collection: Whisper of Scandal / One Wicked Sin / Mistress by Midnight / Notorious / Desired / Forbidden. Nicola Cornick
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carriage in the bright cold morning, this one considerably inferior in comfort to the mail coach. Finally she and Mrs. and Miss Morton rolled into the tiny seaside village of Kilve in Somerset, in the early afternoon and Merryn bespoke dinner and a bedchamber and arranged for a pony and trap to take her the final few miles to the village of Shipham.
It was a cold afternoon with a bitter winter wind off the sea that was edged with snow. Merryn huddled in the trap and shivered deep inside her winter pelisse. Now that she was here, she had no notion what she was going to say to Lord Scott. She thought she should have sent a note first. She should not have succumbed to this impatient desire to learn the truth. Except that it felt as though the whole of her future hung on understanding the past and now she was so close she could not wait.
The carter set her down at the entrance to Shipham Hall. Merryn put her hand on the metal gate that fenced the carriage sweep. The house stood back a little from the road, an Elizabethan manor, half-timbered, a modest family home. Merryn could hear children’s voices somewhere in the garden, the shrill calls and cries as they played, wrapped up in hats and scarves and muffs, running through the little box tree maze that was surrounded by lawns to the west of the house. A nursemaid in a crisp white apron, cap and coat who looked little older than a girl herself was running after them, laughing, throwing herself down on the snowy lawn and holding her side where she evidently had a stitch. Merryn could see an older child—seven or eight, with brown hair in a long plait, holding the hand of a toddler. There was another small child, a boy of about five, and another older girl who was fair. She had lost her bonnet and the cold winter sun shone on her hair and it was the exact silver gilt color of Merryn’s.
The nurse held her arms out to the baby girl, who toppled forward into them, laughing. The older girls were walking together now, up the icy steps that led to the terrace. Their heads were bent as they talked, solemn and preoccupied. Merryn could hear a woman’s voice from within the house, calling to them.
“Susan! Anne! Come inside and wash your hands before tea!”
Merryn’s heart stuttered a little. She peered closer at the girl with the silver gilt hair.
To Lord Scott of Shipham Hall … A miniature of my son Stephen …
“Susan! Anne!” The woman’s voice was louder. She came out onto the terrace, a tall woman in an old flowered gown, her hair beneath the lace cap a rich brown with just the faintest hint of gray. She was smiling. She took each child by the hand. And as they turned back toward the door, Merryn saw her face and the world stood still.
For a moment it felt as though she was looking at Kitty Farne, Kitty grown older and grayer and more lined but still with that pretty rounded face and smiling demeanor. Merryn knew that she must have made some involuntary movement because the little group on the terrace saw her and stopped. The child called Susan was looking straight at Merryn now. Her eyes were a clear, vivid blue, the blue of Merryn’s eyes, the blue of Joanna’s. She smiled hesitantly and Merryn saw that she had dimples in her cheeks just like Tess’s. Merryn’s fingers were tight about the iron fence now. The hard metal bit into her hands through her gloves. She could hear a strange roaring sound in her ears, as though she was about to faint. Down on the lawn the nursemaid was still playing with the babies. Merryn could hear their calls and their laughter but they seemed to come from a very long way away indeed.
Panic possessed her. She wanted to run, away from the sunlit garden and the child with the same blue eyes and golden hair that she possessed. Suddenly the images in her memory started to unreel like a spool of cotton. It was odd, she thought, how the tiniest details that one forgot in time could come back at any moment. For now she was remembering how very rounded Kitty had looked on the last afternoon she had seen her. Kitty, the thirteen-year-old Merryn had thought, had looked fat. She had even wondered if Kitty, unhappy in love, had been eating too many sweetmeats.
Kitty, Merryn thought now, had looked pregnant.
She willed her legs to move but they felt heavy, leaden. She found that she was trembling deep inside her pelisse, racked with shivers. She felt cold all over, cold all the way through. This, then, was Stephen’s legacy, a child whose existence none of them had guessed, a child whom Garrick must surely have known about but whom he had gone to great lengths to keep from her. She felt a vast desolation seep through her, as bleak as the winter night. She thought of how much she loved Shuna, Joanna’s daughter, and how much love she would have lavished on this other niece she had never known and she thought that her heart would break in two.
And then she heard the crunch of carriage wheels on the road behind her and felt a frisson of premonition touch her neck. She turned very slowly. She knew it would be Garrick. She knew that he had come, as he must, to protect Kitty’s family and Kitty’s child, just as he had done for the past twelve years.
Garrick jumped down from the curricle and took several steps toward her. The snow was starting to fall all about them now in huge white flakes. Garrick looked tired, his eyes strained, the stubble once again shadowing his cheek. Merryn realized that he must have driven through the night.
“Merryn,” he started to say. He put a hand out to her but Merryn stumbled back. She was aware of nothing but the most excruciating pain.
“You knew,” she said. “You knew how desperately I missed Stephen. I had nothing of him left, not one thing.” Her voice broke. “And all the time you knew that Stephen had a child. You were going to marry me and you were never going to tell me.” The snow was swirling about her now and she brushed it angrily from her face, brushed away, too, the hot tears of fury and despair. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the woman who looked like Kitty coming down the steps now toward them. She saw Garrick’s gaze flick toward her and then back to Merryn’s face.
“If we could talk,” he began but he fell silent as Merryn shook her head in a tiny gesture of repudiation.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said. “I never want to see you again.”
The woman had reached the gate now. “Garrick!” she called. She was smiling. “We did not know you were coming,” she said. “You should have sent word.” She looked at Merryn. Her smile started to fade.
Merryn turned and walked away. She felt numb and cold. All she could think of was Stephen, and the child that was his, and of Garrick’s silence. It made perfect sense, she thought. Garrick had told her that there had been an argument. He had discovered that Kitty was pregnant with Stephen’s child. Perhaps Kitty and Stephen had told him they were to elope together and so Garrick had shot Stephen through jealousy and revenge. And then he and Kitty’s family had formed a conspiracy of silence to keep Kitty’s child a secret from her father’s relatives forever.
Misery twisted in Merryn again, as violent as a knife. She had not known she could feel like this. It hurt so much, the anger and the raw pain. And yet there was something else there, too, a tiny voice that in the face of all the evidence whispered that she was wrong, that the man who had protected her and stood between her and death could not behave in such a way. It whispered to her to think again, to keep faith, because she had loved Garrick for a reason and although her faith was battered that love had not completely died.
There had been three shots, she remembered. There had been two bullets in Stephen’s body, but what had happened to the third? Garrick had told her that Stephen had tried to kill Kitty and she had wanted to disbelieve him because she had been so sure that Stephen and Kitty had loved one another. But if she had been wrong then Garrick had defended Kitty. He had tried to save her from Stephen. And if Kitty had been pregnant then perhaps Garrick had taken her abroad to shield her from the scandal as later he had tried to shelter and protect her child …
The hot tears scalded Merryn’s throat. The instinct that had prompted her to trust Garrick with her life, with her heart, started to unfold within her again, tentatively and a little fearfully. She knew she would have to go back, be brave, confront Garrick and hear the truth at last. And if that truth meant that all she had believed about Stephen and Kitty had been based on a lie then she would have to finally confront that, too.
THE TRACK ALONG THE CLIFFS was wild and lonely on a winter