“You want to make it public.”
“I want to make itvisible. There is a difference.” She stepped closer, driven by the momentum of her own conviction. “Whitcombe operates in shadows. Investigators. Whispered threats. Solicitors who arrive unannounced with documents designed to intimidate. He thrives on privacy because privacy allows him to control the narrative. But if we arrive openly—if we conduct ourselves as a concerned duke and duchess visiting a friend in the country—he cannot refuse us without drawing precisely the kind of attention he is desperate to avoid.”
“And if he does refuse us?”
“Then the refusal itself becomes evidence. What loving grandfather bars a duchess from visiting his daughter?” She tilted her head, and something that was almost a smile pulled at the corner of her mouth. “I may not have your talent for scandal,Alastair. But I understand propriety rather well. And propriety, wielded correctly, can open doors that brute force cannot.”
He stared at her. Then the corner of his mouth twitched—not the practised half-smile, not the rakish grin. Something helpless and involuntary, the kind of expression a man wore when he’d been outflanked.
“You’ve thought this through.”
“I was awake all night. I had time.”
“I can see that.” He was quiet for a moment. The light had shifted again, warmer now, turning the study from grey to amber. “You realise that if this works—if we bring Marianne out and she testifies—the Whitcombes will retaliate. Not with solicitors. With everything. They will spread poison through every drawing room in England. They will claim we corrupted their daughter, stole their grandchild, conspired with a commoner to?—”
“I know.”
“Our names?—”
“Were already dragged through the scandal sheets the moment I set foot in your house at midnight.” She held his gaze without flinching. “My reputation is a currency I spent weeks ago. I cannot lose it again. But Rose can still lose everything—her parents, her safety, her future. And I will not let that happenbecause I was too concerned about what polite society thinks of me.”
He said nothing for a long time.
The pigeon called again outside the window. The fire crackled in the grate. And Penelope stood in the pale morning light of her husband’s study and felt, for the first time since this whole impossible disaster had begun, like a woman who was doing precisely what she was meant to do.
“We cannot protect this child by hiding,” she said. “We have tried. We have hidden behind closed doors and separate rooms and marriage certificates and the hope that if we kept our heads down, the storm would pass. It has not passed. It will not pass. Whitcombe will not stop because we are quiet and careful and proper. He will stop only when Marianne stands before him, with her child in her arms, and tells him that she chose this. That Rose was not taken. That she wasgiven. To us. By a mother who loved her enough to let her go.”
She drew a breath.
“We protect this child by standing together. All of us. Openly.”
The silence that followed lasted long enough for the fire to pop twice and send a scatter of sparks against the grate. Alastair looked at her across the diminishing space between them, and whatever war had been raging behind his eyes seemed to reach its conclusion.
“When?” he asked.
“Today. Before Thomas arrives. I want to be able to tell him that his daughter’s mother is safe before I tell him he has a daughter at all.”
“Christ, Penelope.”
“Too much?”
“No.” He ran a hand through his hair, disordering it completely, and the gesture was so unguarded she felt it in her sternum. “No, it is precisely right. Which is in truth, the problem. You’ve just dismantled every objection I had in roughly ten minutes, and I find myself with nothing left to argue except that you are the most?—”
He stopped himself. Swallowed whatever word had been about to follow with a visible effort that fascinated her.
“The most what?” she asked, and could not quite keep the challenge from her voice.
“Formidable.” He said it like a concession. “The most formidable woman I have ever met. And I say that as someone who has spent a great deal of time in the company of women who terrify me.”
“Good.” She straightened. “Then have the carriage readied. We leave within the hour.”
“Within thehour?”
“Whitcombe has a head start. Every day we delay is a day his solicitors use to build a case. We have speed and surprise and the Blackmere crest on our carriage door. I intend to use all three.”
He shook his head, but the movement carried no refusal. If anything, it looked like wonder.
“You know,” he said, “when I married you, I was under the distinct impression that I was acquiring a quiet, dutiful wife who would manage my household and avoid causing me any trouble whatsoever.”