that I do the decent thing, he ended up dead, shot in the back. I was elsewhere at the time and knew nothing of either catastrophe until I returned home. All the evidence pointed to my being guilty of both crimes. My uncle, his son, and another cousin urged me to run in order to avoid arrest and an almost certain hanging. I took fright and ran.”
Jessica’s mother had both hands against her cheeks. “You are the Earl of Lyndale,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “You are not dead after all.”
“No, ma’am,” he said.
Anna had resumed her seat. Her hands were clasped, white knuckled, in her lap. Avery had moved up behind her and set a hand on her shoulder. “But why,” she asked, “did you not return seven years ago, Mr. Thorne? Or as soon as you heard that your uncle and cousin had died?”
“I had no interest in returning,” he said. “I had made a new life and I was both busy and happy. I grew up at Brierley from the age of nine, when my father died. I was never happy there.”
“Why have you returned now?” Jessica’s mother asked.
“There was one particular reason,” he said. “But it has grown into several reasons since I came back and learned more.”
“This will be very disturbing news to Mr. Manley Rochford,” she said. “And to his son, who came here to Archer House not many days ago to ask for Avery’s blessing on a marriage proposal he wished to make to Jessica—and on the expectation that he was about to become heir to an earldom.”
“They will certainly not be happy,” Gabriel agreed.
“Mr. Thorne,” Anna said. “Who was the other cousin who urged you to run away after your friend’s murdered body was discovered?”
“Manley Rochford,” he said.
She frowned.
“My love,” Avery said, “since you did not after all ring for coffee, and the sun is still shining outside despite dire predictions I heard during my morning ride of rain on the way, perhaps we ought to take the children to Hyde Park for an hour or so. Mother, would you care to accompany us?”
“But there is so much to be talked about,” she said. “I . . . feel as though my brain must have frozen.”
“Quite so,” Avery agreed. “Come and thaw it in the park. Jessica and Thorne have a wedding to discuss and might make better headway if they are left alone. My advice, Thorne, is that you wait until we are out of sight, and then instruct my sister to fetch her bonnet before taking her off to the nearest church. But I daresay you have not yet acquired a special license.”
“I have, actually,” Gabriel told him.
“Jessica?” Her mother had set aside her embroidery frame and got to her feet. She sounded alarmed.
“You may relax, Mama,” Jessica told her. “I shall flatly refuse to fetch my bonnet, and no lady can be expected to set foot outdoors without one.”
Avery was holding open the drawing room door. Soon it closed behind the three of them, though her mother had looked very reluctant to go.
Jessica could not remember being alone in a room before with a man who was not a relative—oh, except when someone had come to ask for her hand in marriage. But on those occasions Avery had not gone off to stroll in Hyde Park with Anna and her mother and the children. This whole thing suddenly felt horribly real.
Horribly? It struck her how little she knew this man or of him. She had only his word for almost everything he had told her. One thing struck her as a bit odd, though.
“Why was Avery willing to give his blessing?” she asked. “Did he . . . know? Before you came up to the drawing room, that is?”
“He did,” he said. “But not because I told him. Apparently he is too lazy to find things out for himself, but discovering that Thorne was my mother’s name was well within the capabilities of his secretary.”
“Avery is far from lazy,” she told him.
“Yes,” he said. “I have concluded that for myself. That man of his is at Brierley, finding out what he can while trying unsuccessfully to look inconspicuous.”
“Avery told you he had sent him there?” Jessica asked.
“No,” he said. “But my man at Brierley reported that a stranger has been asking pointed questions. It seemed to me from the description he gave that the stranger was almost certainly the same man who had the charge of you