She was not going to sacrifice herself to the pox.
“I’m not for sale after all.”
“Everyone has their price, Captain Durant.” She knew she did, and it had been shockingly low. For a roof over her head when her father died and the chance to continue to work on the Kelby Collection, Maris had married a man who was old enough to be her grandfather.
And impotent.
But she had always loved him, ever since she was a little girl. Henry had been kind, caring for her in all the ways he was capable, and they had been happy . . . until two years ago when he became so agitated and determined to cut his wretched nephew out of the earldom. His idea on how to do it had seemed the purest folly. Well, impurest. Henry had been impossible to sway, and Maris had never been the sort of woman who could wield her negligible feminine wiles to change a man’s mind.
Like right at the moment, for example. Durant seemed obdurate.
“I-I am begging you, Captain Durant. You know of our difficulties. I understand Henry confided in you completely, so he must have trusted you. I confess I don’t see why,” Maris said, unable to forgive the man his casual effrontery. “My husband’s nephew is the worst sort of villain. He’s sworn to destroy the scholarly work of my husband’s lifetime. All the books in the library—he’ll damage every one. Crumple every paper. And . . . and he’s a libertine. He’ll turn Kelby Hall into a . . . a place just as vile as this one.”
Durant raised a thick black brow as he buttoned a cufflink. Maris was delighted to see that he continued to dress as she stared over his head at a painting that featured several bodies writhing in presumed ecstasy. Or indigestion. It was impossible to tell which from their facial expressions.
“Is this supposed to persuade me? I have no time for reading, Lady Kelby. It doesn’t matter to me what becomes of Kelby Hall’s library.”
Maris wanted to scream, but losing her temper wouldn’t help. “It matters to my husband. By the terms of the entail, every single thing housed at Kelby Hall must remain on the property to be passed on to the next earl, but it doesn’t specify the condition.” The Kelby earls had been an eccentric lot. And hoarders, too. It was dangerous to navigate the attics for the jumbled collection of boxed antiquities amassed by generations of globe-trotting aristocrats. Henry’s dream was to turn part of the house into a museum, with Maris as its curator. His work would be its centerpiece, but many other centuries’ detritus would be on view as well.
“So smuggle out some papers.”
“It’s not just papers. There are priceless artifacts. By law, Henry’s nephew can’t sell them, but he’s threatened to simply drop them into the lake. They’d still be on the property, wouldn’t they?” she asked bitterly. “David knows just how to hurt Henry. My husband spent years in Tuscany at excavation sites. He is the foremost expert on Etruscan civilization in England.”
“A worthy endeavor, I’m sure, Lady Kelby. But the Etruscans, like the Romans and the Greeks, are dead, thank the gods. As a schoolboy, I always found classical studies to be quite gruesome. Rape and swans and swallowing one’s wife. Daughters bursting out of one’s head. Rubbish, really. Why should I—or anyone else living—care?”
The Kelby Collection had been of paramount importance Maris’s whole life. Her father had been the earl’s secretary and general factotum. She’d accompanied the two men on their digs as soon as she was old enough to be useful, and was an expert on Etruria. Since her husband’s eyesight was failing, it was she who did the translating, she who prepared the papers for his lectures and publications.
What she’d been unable to do was provide him with a son.
It was probably too late anyway. She was thirty-four, and had pulled out a wiry white hair from her dull brown curls just that morning.
“Look, it seems to me you can box up whatever’s so valuable and hide it somewhere. How’s this nephew to know? He’s no expert, is he?”
“David knows everything. And it’s more than what I’ve just said.” Maris hadn’t planned on revealing the worst of it . . . and she wouldn’t. Even Henry did not know what she had done five years ago. She had been a fool for all her pride and intelligence, and paid with her guilt every single day