Marcus Devlin, Marquis of Carrington, stood in the open doorway of the card room. The buzz of the attentive crowd around the players was so low as to be almost subliminal. He could see across the throng. He could see his wife, the steady, purposeful movement of her fen. He knew what she was doing. She and her brother were defrauding the Earl of Gracemere under the eyes of fashionable London. He couldn't imagine why, he knew only that he could do nothing about it. Only by exposing them could he stop it.
Distantly, in abject cowardice, he wished his evening had not ended when it had, or that he had gone straight home from Horseguard's Parade instead of following temptation and coming to find his wife. Wretchedly he wished he could have been spared this knowledge, because it was a knowledge he didn't know what to do with. It was a knowledge that destroyed love… that made impossible any kind of trust and confidence on which love and marriage could be based.
The moment when the Devereux estate passed back into the hands of its rightful heir, Agnes Barret understood everything. Bernard Melville had been beaten at his own game by the children of the man he had destroyed twenty years earlier. She didn't know how they'd done it, but she knew both brother and sister were partners. The nincompoops, the greenhorns, the simpletons, had been working toward this moment from the day they'd set foot in London.
A sick, impotent rage filled her throat as she saw Bernard's blank incomprehension as he lost the final hand. Agnes's eyes rose again to the race of her daughter standing behind him. Judith's gaze met hers-met and read the wild fury, the depths of a vindictive rage. And Judith's eyes carried a cold triumph that met and matched that vindictive rage. Agnes dropped her wineglass. It fell from suddenly nerveless fingers to smash on the parquet at her feet, splattering ruby red drops.
The low buzz increased in volume. Desperately Gracemere struggled to control his disordered thoughts. There was one chance to salvage everything. Twenty years ago he had placed a marked card in the hand of his opponent. And George Devereux had been dishonored and destroyed. If he could do the same now, at this moment publicly expose his adversary, he would recoup his losses. A cheat would not be permitted to keep his dishonorable winnings.
Hope soared and his confusion died as his thoughts became icily clear. "Well played, Davenport," he said into the tense hush. Lightly he shook down his sleeve, palming a card.
Judith's fan snapped shut.
"You won't mind if I take a look at-"
Before he could finish the sentence, before his hand could reach to caress his opponent's cards on the table- to remove and substitute-Sebastian Davenport suddenly spoke, and the words sent a wave of nausea through the earl, bile filling his mouth.
"Permit me," George Devereux's son said, grasping his adversary's stretched wrist. "Permit me, my lord."
It was at this moment that Marcus moved. He pushed through the crowd, reaching his wife's side. He said nothing, but he grasped her elbow and the knuckles of his other hand punched into the small of her back, compelling her forward, away from the table.
She hadn't known he was there, and when she looked up at him, at the rigid set of his jaw, the fine line of his mouth, the black, adamantine eyes, she knew that he had seen it all. In that moment she fully understood what she was about to lose.
Marcus saw the dazed look in her eyes… the look of someone who has been inhabiting another world, a world of acute, single-minded concentration. He continued to compel her toward the door, oblivious of the scene still at the table.
"No…" Judith said, her voice thick. "Please, wait, just one minute… It must be completed."
The intensity in the low voice caught him off balance, and he stopped. Sebastian's voice was cold and steady in the now totally hushed room.
"May I see the card in your hand, my lord."
Sebastian's long fingers were bloodless as they gripped Gracemere's wrist, forcing his hand over to reveal the card lying snug in the palm.
Marcus turned his head slowly, although he maintained his hold on Judith. He watched in amazement as his brother-in-law slid the card from the earl's now-slack grasp. He heard his brother-in-law say, "Such an interesting pip on the corner, Gracemere. I don't think I've seen its like before. Harry, do you care to look at this card?"
Judith sighed, her entire body seeming to lose its rigidity as Harry Middleton took the card from his friend. Marcus wondered if he would ever understand anything again. And then with cold ferocity he decided that he would understand this if he had to put his wife on the rack to do so.
"March!" he spat out, and the pressure of his knuckles in the small of her back increased.
Judith made no further protest. She had now to face the one thing she'd feared more than anything.
They left Devonshire House without so much as a polite farewell and journeyed home in a silence weighted with dread. When the chaise drew up, Marcus sprang to the pavement, lifted Judith down before she had a chance to put a foot on the step, and swung her in front of him, propelling her up the steps and into the hall with his knuckles still pressed deeply into her back so she began to imagine she would always bear their imprint.
Inside, she glanced bleakly up at him. "Book room?"
"Just so." But he still didn't allow her to make unhindered progress and drove her ahead of him down the passage.
He pushed her into the room and flung the door shut with similar roughness. Judith shivered, afraid not so much of what he would do to her but of what she had done to him. He let her go as the door slammed and went to the fireplace, leaning his shoulders against the mantelshelf, his expression black as he stared at her standing silently in front of him.
"You are now going to tell me the truth," he said flatly. "It's possible you have never told the whole truth in your life before, but now you are going to do so. Everything. You will dot every "i and cross every 't,' because, so help me, if you leave anything out-if you obfuscate in any way whatsoever-I will not answer for the consequences. Now, begin."
It was the only chance to salvage anything out of the ruins. But it was a desperate chance at best. Judith took a deep breath and began at the beginning-twenty years earlier.
Marcus listened, unmoving, unspeaking, until she fell silent and the room seemed to close around them, the weight of her words a leaden pall to smother trust.
"I now understand why your brother was so anxious to make peace between us," he said, speaking slowly and carefully, articulating every word as if formulating the thought as he spoke. "Estranged from your husband, you wouldn't be much use to him, would you?"
"No," Judith agreed bleakly. What defense was there?
"So you were both looking for the perfect gull… that is the right word, isn't it? The perfect gull who would facilitate your long-planned vengeance."
Judith shook her head. "No, that's not true. I can see why you would think that, but it's not true. I didn't plot to marry you. Sebastian told the truth."
Marcus raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Deny if you can that I have been very useful to you."
"I can't deny that," she said miserably. "Any more than I can't fail to understand your anger and hurt. I ask only that you believe there was no deliberate intention to use you."
"But you didn't feel able to confide in me," he stated. "Even after matters were going smoothly between us. What have I done in these last weeks, Judith, that would deny me your trust?"
She shook her head again. "Nothing… nothing… but if I'd told you what we intended to do you would have prevented me, wouldn't you?"
"Oh, yes," he said savagely. "I would have locked you up and thrown away the key if it was the only way to prevent my wife from disgracing my honor in such despicable fashion."