nothing at all like the Crossed Daggers. It was a respectable inn run by respectable people—people who were slavishly deferential to the earl and his grandson.
Indeed, when Maggie and St. Clare had arrived, the husband and wife proprietors hadn’t been at all cross about being rudely awakened from their beds in the early hours before dawn. Instead, they’d averted their eyes from St. Clare’s battered face, from his torn shirt and blood-stained waistcoat, and all but bowed him and Maggie into a private parlor.
After seeing her settled there, St. Clare had withdrawn almost immediately to speak to his grandfather. Ten minutes passed before he returned to her, washed, groomed, and wearing a fresh suit of clothes.
Her pulse gave a little leap, just as it always did whenever she first laid eyes on him.
But he wasn’t alone.
Lord Allendale entered the private parlor after him. “Miss Honeywell.”
“My lord.” She curtsied. The room was lit by the fire, and by a branch of candles. The flames flickered and snapped, casting patterns over the earl’s face, making his already unwelcoming expression look almost sinister.
“This is a fine mess the pair of you have got us into,” he said. A wooden table graced the center of the parlor, four straight-backed wooden chairs arrayed around it. Allendale drew one out and sat down. “A public declaration of my grandson’s former identity? In a hedge tavern, no less?”
St. Clare pulled out a chair for Maggie. As she passed him to sit down, their bare hands brushed, fingers tangling for the briefest instant. It sent a rush of warmth through her belly, making her knees go weak.
She didn’t dare meet his eyes for fear of blushing. “No one of importance was there,” she said to the earl. “No one save Mr. Burton-Smythe and Mr. Beresford.”
“Burton-Smythe might be persuaded to keep silent. He has your reputation to think of. But Beresford? That duplicitous jackanapes and his mother will have the tale in all the papers by morning.”
St. Clare sat down in the chair next to her. “It is morning.”
Allendale’s frown deepened. “You must have taken leave of your senses. To be out all hours brawling, and with a lady in tow. Is this the outlandish behavior you inspire in my grandson, ma’am? And you. Look at yourself, sir. Cut and bruised. Your lip split and your eye blackened like a criminal of the lower orders. Haven’t I told you that nothing can be learned from digging up the past?”
“But we did learn something.” Maggie looked at St. Clare in confusion. “Didn’t you tell him?”
Allendale’s gaze narrowed. “Tell me what?”
St. Clare ran a hand over his face. “It’s nothing. Old rumors about my father and mother.”
“What rumors?” Allendale asked.
St. Clare was silent.
Maggie understood why he might be reluctant to share the results of their investigation. She, however, felt no such inhibitions. “I believe there’s a chance that Lord St. Clare’s parents may have been married.”
“What?” Blood surged in Allendale’s face. He turned on St. Clare.
The innkeeper chose that inauspicious moment to enter with a tray. “Beg pardon, my lords. I’ve brought tea and some seed cake for you.” He set the tray on the table. “The wife can make you breakfast if you’d rather. Some eggs and sausage, or porridge if—”
“That will be all,” St. Clare said.
“Yes, your lordship.” The innkeeper bowed. “Apologies for interrupting.” He bowed again, backing himself out of the room. The door clicked shut behind him.
There was a second of silence as the man’s footsteps receded down the hall. And then, once again assured of their privacy, Allendale asked, “What do you mean my son may have been married?”
“It’s nothing,” St. Clare said. “Just something Miss Honeywell has surmised from a remark made by my late mother.”
“A deathbed remark,” Maggie said, on her dignity. “And that isn’t all. There’s more.”
With that, she proceeded to tell the earl everything Jenny had said when she was in the final hours of her illness, and everything they’d since discovered about Father Tuck, including the latest bits of information gleaned from Mr. Mullens.
After she’d finished, Allendale was quiet for a long moment. When at last he spoke, it was to utter a single word: “Devonshire.”
Maggie nodded. “That’s what Mr. Mullens said. He could be no more specific.”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” St. Clare said. “Nothing but the ramblings of a dying woman and an aged former tavern keeper. It’s a false hope, at best.”
“You disagree, Miss Honeywell?” Allendale looked at her steadily, as if her opinion mattered as much to him