Chapter 31

“Your Grace.” Gibson, Griffith’s butler, knocked on the wide-open study door with hesitation and a wrinkle of confusion on his forehead. He cleared his throat, and his face dropped back into the stoic lines of a duke’s butler. “Your Grace, there is a woman here to see you. A Miss St. Claire.”

Griffith surged from his seat, concern for Isabella sending him to the door before his quill had even finished rolling off the edge of the ledger book he’d dropped it on. Despite his resolve, he hadn’t been able to gain any information about why Isabella had turned away from him. All anyone really knew about Lord Pontebrook was that he was a major proponent of the Apothecary Act, which nearly everyone had chosen to abandon.

Had the loss driven the man to do something unspeakable?

Griffith’s long legs ate up the passageway between his study and the front hall. He was fairly certain now that Isabella had been brought to London for the express purpose of gaining Lord Pontebrook an audience with men he otherwise wouldn’t have been able to convince. Now that the bill was dead, had he sent Isabella home? Had Miss St. Claire come to tell him if he wanted Isabella he was going to have to chase her to Northumberland?

It was a logical enough consideration, and he almost ordered his carriage made ready as he crossed to the drawing room.

On the other hand, he might have simply been another conquest. His steps faltered. What if Isabella was as masterful as Colin, knowing exactly what her target needed to hear in order to do her bidding?

He pushed open the door with a bit more trepidation, but with less concern that something had happened to Isabella. He was more concerned that, in addition to a broken heart, his pride was about to be shattered as well.

“Miss St. Claire.”

She stood, hands clasped tightly in front of her, lips pressed into a thin line. “Your Grace.” She cleared her throat. “Isabella doesn’t know I’m here. In fact she’d be rather furious at me if she knew I’d come. But I’ve had a lot of decisions made for me in the name of protection, and I didn’t like it. I like even less seeing Bella hurting. I’ve come so that you can make your own decision.”

One eyebrow winged upward. Make his own decision? Hadn’t he done that when he asked Isabella to marry him? What other decision did she need him to make?

Miss St. Claire shifted on her feet. “My father is a rather obsessed man.”

“I’m aware.” Griffith crossed his arms over his chest and braced his feet apart. Perhaps Isabella’s cousin was making mountains out of molehills, but her wariness was making Griffith concerned that whatever he was about to hear he wasn’t going to like.

“My mother and brother died of putrid fever. We were out in Somerset. There wasn’t a physician in the area. Just an apothecary whose position had been passed down for several generations. The medicine he gave them made them worse. By the time the physician could be brought in from Glastonbury, it was too late.”

This was information Griffith had already been able to learn. The tragic tale was one of the first things he’d uncovered when he actually started asking around about Lord Pontebrook. Sadly, it wasn’t the only tale of such tragedies—which was why the act had gone as far as it had. Of course, there were equally as many stories of people who would have died waiting for a physician to be brought.

It was easy, however, to see the man’s motivation. But not how it affected Isabella or why it mattered now, ten years after the fact.

He said nothing.

Miss St. Claire swallowed, and her hands gripped together tighter.

“Apothecary reform became my father’s life work. He brought us to London. Stopped letting me spend the summers with my cousin because he couldn’t bear to have me staying in an area so far from a proper doctor. When he started, I think there was actually something noble in his intentions.”

“And then it became about winning?”

She shrugged and cast a glance at her maid, who was sitting quietly in the corner with a lump of knitting in her lap. Miss St. Claire’s voice dropped. “I don’t know if it was winning or simply surviving. If he wasn’t working toward reform, he didn’t have a reason to work for anything.”

“And now?”

“We’re lucky if he eats.”

Griffith’s lips pressed into a thin line, and he fought the urge to pace. Whatever had driven Miss St. Claire to come to him, it wasn’t so he could be overrun by his emotions. There was a problem, and she expected him to fix it.

It was the story of his life.

And he did it very well.

“At what point did he decide that Isabella was the perfect bait to lure the necessary votes in the House of Lords?”

Miss St. Claire’s mouth dropped open in silent question, her eyes widening until he could see traces of white around the brown centers. “You . . . but when . . . ?”

“Only recently, I assure you.” He fought back the bile that threatened to rise in his throat as his suspicions were confirmed. Griffith inclined his head toward the corner a bit farther from the maid, and Miss St. Claire slowly moved in that direction. “More than one man seemed to think your father was holding out for proof that they cared about Isabella’s well-being enough to ensure she had proper medical care no matter where she was.”

“Is that what he was telling them?” She shook her head. “We never knew.”

Griffith couldn’t help but feel a bit betrayed as he faced the fact he’d been trying to ignore—that Lord Pontebrook might have been the creator of the scheme, but Isabella had willingly and actively gone along with it. “What did you know?”

The question came out harsher than Griffith had intended. Perhaps he wasn’t quite able to remove himself from his emotions in this instance. Still, it was a valid question, and one he felt he deserved to know the answer to, even if it had no bearing on the problem Miss St. Claire wanted him to solve. The problem she’d yet to actually state.

Miss St. Claire frowned. “Whatever the outcome, I assure you Isabella’s motives were good, Your Grace. She is the eldest of five, and despite her gender she felt a need to protect them when it seemed her father couldn’t. The offer from my father was too good to refuse—paying off her father’s debts and sending her brothers to school.”

Both things that Griffith could have done for her as well, and would have done without hesitation. The logical thing to do would have been to run from the risk of her uncle’s promise, which hinged on the passing of a bill, to the security of Griffith’s proposal. He understood, even though he didn’t like it, why she’d felt she couldn’t come to him with such a request.

“Why wait? Isabella is four and twenty, not the nineteen your father tried to pass her off as. Why now? He could have used her years ago to convince someone powerful to help push the creation of the bill along.”

“Father hadn’t seen her in nearly ten years. But then we passed through Northumberland on our way to the medical college of Edinburgh to try to build support for some of the new adjustments to the bill. We stopped at their farm again on the way home, and four hours later Isabella left with us. Father bought her clothes, jewelry, everything she’d need to be the Season’s most sought-after debutante.”

It all made a sad sort of sense. Less than four hours for a spirit such as Isabella to make such a monumental decision. Save her family for the price of her reputation. At least her reputation in London, a town she’d never been in and probably never intended to come to again. Even the coldest of people would be enticed by a trade that seemed to cost them so little.

“I appreciate your honesty.” And he did. Just having answers for the questions that had been building in his head seemed to ease the discomfort in his chest a bit. In some ways, though, the pain dug deeper. “I fail to see, however, your intention in coming here. The act is dead. With the stakes gone, Isabella could have come to me. I proposed to her mere days ago. She can’t believe my feelings for her would change so swiftly.”

“Isabella used a lot of men this Season, Your Grace. She regrets it but cannot change what has been done. You, however, are different. She refuses to trade on your feelings for her. And if she came to you, even with the best of intentions, she would. Because she loves me, and my father knows it.”

Griffith waited, knowing that Miss St. Claire would continue, because no one could possibly think that explanation sufficient on its own. The twisted mass unraveling before him boggled the mind. How could a man become so entangled in a single mission that his entire being, his every thought and motive, wrapped itself around it like a tree growing around a hatchet that had been left embedded in its trunk?

“You are a powerful man, Your Grace. If you chose to, you could revive the Apothecary Act. My father knows this. He told Isabella that if she could get you to do so, he would let me marry the man I love when he returns from war, despite the fact that he is an officer.”

Griffith lifted a brow. “Having you become a spinster is preferable to having you marry an officer?”

One shoulder lifted and settled as the lines around Miss St. Claire’s mouth grew deeper. “War is dangerous. Who’s to say I wouldn’t become one of the camp followers if I married an officer of war? Father is terrified I’ll join the wives who travel with the camps and put myself in the line of fire.” She cleared her throat. “I’m not here on my behalf, Your Grace. I intend to marry Arthur with or without my father’s blessing. There isn’t much he can do about it. But Isabella can’t quite understand that I gave up craving my father’s attention long ago and contented myself with the fact that he wanted me to remain safe.”

She stepped away from Griffith and started for the door. “But you deserved to know, Your Grace.”

That was it? Griffith gave in to the frustration churning through him and ran a hand over his face. “How is she?” The question came out rough and broken, ripped from him without permission. Because, while all of the things Miss St. Claire had told him were things he wanted to know, all he really cared about was whether or not Isabella was happy.

Miss St. Claire stopped in the doorway to the room. Her maid stood awkwardly behind her, eyes cast downward for the most part but sneaking occasional glances up at her mistress and then Griffith. “She is trying to rediscover who she is, I suppose. She cried a lot, those first days, but the plants calm her. She goes to the park a lot.”

“Which park?”

Miss St. Claire glanced over her shoulder. “All of them.”