Chapter Twenty-five
“What?”
Julian’s shock was evident. It was so evident, Lily found it mildly annoying. How could he fail to understand what he’d put her through today?
Transferring to the opposite seat, she said, “I can’t go home with you and just pretend that nothing’s happened. Only to wake up to another tragic letter the next time you’ve decided your unstarched cuffs make you unworthy of me, and thus you’ve exiled yourself to the Arctic Circle.” She tried to mimic a gruff, masculine voice. “‘Farewell, Lily. You must be strong.’”
All the pain and betrayal of the early morning caught up with her, smothering her like a wave. She fought through tears to continue speaking. “You abandoned me, Julian. You lied to me, withheld information that I had a right to know. I was so desperately afraid. And now I’m furious at you for making me feel that way. Why does Peter Faraday know more about your life than I do? Why didn’t you tell me about him in the first place, let me know he was in London? If I’d known of his role in Leo’s attack, we might have pieced together the truth months ago.”
“Yes, but … you were keeping secrets, too,” he replied. “You might have told me Leo had a lover.”
“I did. Or at least, I asked you if he had someone special, that night of the play. When you made it clear you knew nothing …” She shrugged. “It wasn’t my secret to divulge. If Leo had wanted you to know, he would have told you.” She paused to calm herself and take a deep breath. “And then this morning, Julian. Really. You left me with a letter.”
“A letter that said how much I love you. How dearly I hoped to fix this madness and come home to you.”
“A letter that tells me I don’t even know the half of your life,” she countered. “A letter that says you’re unworthy of me.”
“Lily …” He threw up his hands in frustration. Then blew out a breath and began again. “The thing of it is, I just am. But I’m determined to make myself worthy. I promise you, I will devote my life to making you happy. You are everything to me.”
“I don’t want to be your everything!”
He actually recoiled, as if she’d shot him. His gaze was wounded, bleeding out hope in rich shades of blue.
“Julian.” She softened her expression and signs, trying to make him understand. If there was one thing she’d learned from losing Leo, it was the danger of depending on another person for everything. “I love you. But I don’t want to be your reason for living. I want to share your life. There’s a difference between the two.”
“There are vast chasms between the two. Worlds between them. Whole galaxies and nebulae.”
“So?”
“So we should stay in your world. Where it’s all bright and rich and dazzling.”
Oh, yes. A bright, rich, dazzling pack of lies. “I thought we already had this conversation. You were going to stop treating me like a child who can’t know her own mind.”
“Of course I know you’re not a child. You’re so clever, Lily. Your mind is one of the things I most admire about you.”
“Well, you certainly don’t trust my judgment. Not enough to tell me the truth. Can you possibly understand how lowering it is—how abjectly humiliating—to beg a bird for information as to your husband’s whereabouts? A bird.”
“That’s how you found us? Did Tartuffe mention the Jericho?” He stared at her with open admiration. “I’m sorry I called you clever just now. It was a profound understatement. Obviously, you’re a genius. A brave, beautiful genius.”
“I’m a perfect simpleton, judging by your treatment of me. Again and again, I’ve told you I love you. I wanted to marry you. I am carrying your child. And you continue to insist you’re unworthy of me. How is that not an insult to my intelligence? Am I so stupid, I can’t even know who’s worthy of my love and who isn’t?”
He clearly had no idea how to respond to that.
“When we married,” she went on, “I was so foolishly full of my own emotion. I thought, if I only held you very, very tight and whispered enough words of love in your ear, you would move past the hurt in your past. But kisses don’t truly heal wounds. It’s just a fiction nursemaids pass along.”
He was still for a long moment. Finally, he signed, “You’re right. If we go on like this, I’m always going to feel a fraud.”
It was what she’d suspected. And his admission was a small victory in itself. Even so, Lily couldn’t help but wither in her skin. He seemed to be telling her they couldn’t be happy together, or apart. That didn’t bode well. “So where do we go from here?”
He turned to the window and was silent. Lily tried not to stare at him. She didn’t want to seem as though she was desperately hanging on the hopes of his reply. Even though she was.
Suddenly, he swore. “Fine. Let’s do this.” He rapped smartly on the carriage roof, calling for a halt. Gesturing for her patience, he opened the window to call up to the driver. With his head turned, she couldn’t make out what he was saying.
But he resettled in his seat, and the carriage resumed its journey. Lily watched out her window. Where they normally would have turned on Oxford Street, the coach continued straight. She considered asking him their destination but then decided against it. Wherever he was headed, she was along for the ride.
They rattled on past Mayfair and turned into Bloomsbury. She recognized the street name instantly from addressing so many invitations and notes to Julian over the years.
“We’re going to your house?” she asked.
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “We’re going to Julian Bellamy’s house,” was his cryptic reply.
The carriage rolled to a stop, and Julian opened the door himself, reaching to hand her down. Day was quickly dwindling, giving way to a cold December night. Lily shivered in her traveling cloak as she followed him to the doorstep of a nondescript row house. The home was largish, but not especially grand.
From his breast pocket, he withdrew a pair of keys and fitted one into the lock. She watched with absurd fascination. In all honesty, she could not recall ever locking the front door of her home. There was always a footman standing at attention, waiting to open or close the door for her.
He used the second key to turn another lock, down near the bottom of the door. And then he used his shoulder to push the panel inward.
The entry was cold and dark, and stairs loomed directly before them. They climbed the steep flight, then emerged into a spacious corridor. From what she could see, peering into adjacent rooms, the furniture had all been covered with Holland cloth.
“Wait,” he signed. He ducked through a door and returned a minute later, candelabrum in hand. Two lit tapers burned in the holder, casting flickering light around the room. He offered the candelabrum to her, and she took it, holding it between them to throw warm illumination on his face.
“So,” he said. “This is Julian Bellamy’s house. Here on this floor, we have library, drawing room, dining room, parlor.”
With the exception of a pile of correspondence in the library, there was little evidence of habitation. No half-read books with ribbon markers or unfinished letters lying about. No cozy rug to throw over one’s lap while sitting by the hearth. In fact, the hearth was so absent of ashes and soot, she wondered if it had ever been used.
Perhaps this was Julian Bellamy’s house. But no one lived here.
She followed him up an even narrower staircase, her sense of unease mounting with every step. What with the encroaching darkness and the flickering fingers of candlelight and the eerie desolation of the place, Lily began to feel as though she were living some horrific legend, like Bluebeard. Perhaps he would show her upstairs to his private room of horrors, where on the wall were mounted the severed heads of his first six wives … soon to be joined by her own.
Don’t be ridiculous, her practical nature chided.
Her heart, on the other hand, drummed a repetitive two-beat warning: Beware. Beware.
When she reached the top of the stairs, turned into a small antechamber, and spied a vaguely human shape on the settee, heaped over with newspapers … Lily gasped.
When the heap of newspapers suddenly moved—she screamed.
A man bolted upright, shoving papers to the floor. “What’s all this, then?”
It took all Lily had not to drop the candelabrum. She plastered herself to Julian’s side.
“My valet,” he explained for her, spelling out, “Dillard.” To the man, he said, “What are you still doing here? Didn’t I pension you off with the others when I married?”
The slovenly heap of a manservant shrugged, sending one last sheet of newsprint sliding to the floor. “I like it here. And I reckoned there was an even chance it wouldn’t work out. And here you are, back.” He gave Lily an insolent, appraising leer. “Very nice, guv. A step up from your usual. Whose wife is this one?”
“Mine, you lackwit.” Julian shook his head, obviously disgusted. “Useless clod. Get out.”
Dillard blinked at him, the very embodiment of inertia.
“Oh … just go back to sleep.”
That much the valet could manage. Leaving him to his settee and newspapers, Julian ushered Lily through the antechamber and into the next room.
“So this,” he said, gathering the candlelight and her attention with a tug on her wrist, “is Julian Bellamy’s private suite.” He gestured toward their immediate surroundings. “Dressing room.”
Most of the shelves and racks were bare, their contents having been exported to Harcliffe House some weeks ago. Lily’s eye went to a row of hats on a high shelf. She recognized some of them from years past, though she had not seen them in recent memory. Out of fashion now.
“For bathing and such,” he said, pulling her through another small chamber, equipped with washstand, mirror, and copper tub.
“Bedchamber.”
Well. And so it was.
Lily lifted the candlestick high, taking a good look around. The room was twice as large as Harcliffe House’s largest bedchamber. Surely some hapless, well-meaning walls had been sacrificed for its creation. It was furnished in an eclectic frenzy of Oriental, Egyptian, and Continental décor. An obelisk here; a rounded bowl there. Sensual shapes, all. Rich color saturated the room, and ornate patterns danced on every surface.
In the center lounged a bed. No, not a bed. A monstrosity of velvet draping and sturdy posts and firm pillows and mattresses of no doubt specially-ordered size. Not much sleeping went on in it, she would wager. It looked more like an erotic gymnasium. She cringed, hoping he didn’t wish to make love to her here.
But he skirted the bed entirely, heading for a bookcase in the far corner of the room.
He beckoned her close. “So you’ve seen Julian Bellamy’s house. Now I’m going to show you where I live.”
“What? What do you mean, where you live?”
In lieu of an answer, he put his hand into the bookcase, stretching to reach the hidden recesses of the third shelf. He gave a swift pull on whatever it was he’d grasped, and Lily felt a change in the room, as if the wall had released a gust of breath. When Julian stepped back, the bookcase swung out from the wall, revealing a dark space. She lifted the candelabrum but could make out nothing within.
She blinked and tried again. This time she discerned a few faint curving glimmers in the dark. Perhaps … a row of brass hooks?
Lily swallowed hard. Her Bluebeard fancies returned with a bloody vengeance.
“It’s only a closet,” he said, stepping backward into the newly revealed space and extending her his hand.
“You live in a closet?”
“No,” he said, smiling. “There are more rooms on the other side.” His fingers crooked to beckon her. “You did say you wanted to share my life.”
So Lily accepted his hand, screwed up her courage, and followed him into the dark.
They went through the closet and emerged on the other side, into a modest, humbly furnished apartment. If two small rooms with a closet could be called an apartment. There was a narrow bed, made up for one. It displayed no more signs of actually being slept in than the grandiose Mount Mattress in the other room had done. But the rest of the space showed signs of life. On the desk blotter, a penknife and quill lay yearning for one another, separated by an expanse of blank paper. A discarded cravat was draped over the back of a chair. The grate had some ashes in it, and a scorched rag hanging on a hook by the kettle suggested someone rather inexpert at the task had recently been making tea.
A new light source flickered to life as Julian lit a lamp and placed it on the table. He went to the small mirror on the wall and began pushing his hair flat against his scalp.
“You live here?” she said.
He nodded, shrugging out of his coat.
“You. Live here.” She gestured first at him, then around the place, still not comprehending.
“Until we married, I did.”
“Why?”
“It’s convenient. My offices are just below.” He frowned at his waistcoat, seemingly displeased with it. But evidently he and waistcoat reached some kind of truce, for he let it alone. He reached for a new topcoat, this one from the hidden closet.
“Your … your offices?” She finger-spelled the word to make sure she’d understood him correctly.
“Yes.”
He donned spectacles and a brown felt beaver, and the transformation was complete. Here was her theater escort—the boring, overworked clerk. Mr. James Bell.
“Come downstairs. I’ll show you.”
This time, he carried the lamp. Lily followed him out of the small apartment and down the narrowest staircase yet. This one folded in half on itself on its journey downward. It ended at a nondescript brown door.
Julian seized the handle, paused for a second, and then thrust it open wide to reveal …
Offices. He’d been true to his word.
Though it was growing dark, it was only late afternoon. People were still at work, in shops and factories all over the city.
This establishment was no exception. From two orderly rows of desks, two orderly rows of clerks jumped up, snapping to attention. They made a chorus of greetings, which Julian acknowledged with a nod. The clerks all retook their seats, but they kept stealing glances at Lily. They peered at her as though they’d never seen a woman before. Or at least, not one on their employer’s arm. Comforting, that.
A man in a brown suit hurried toward them. Lily thought he looked vaguely familiar.
“Mr. Bell.” He bowed. “Sir, how very good to see you. We weren’t expecting you in today.” The man’s gaze slid to Lily. He was visibly squirming with curiosity, but his employer did not indulge it.
“Enough, Thatcher. I’ll call if you’re needed.” Lily’s husband—she wasn’t even certain what to call him anymore—steered her toward a partitioned office at the back of the room. She barely had a chance to read the lettering on the door’s frosted window: Mr. J. Bell. Manager, Aegis Investments.
Once inside, he directed her to sit at the large desk. From here, a large plate window gave her a view of the two rows of clerks seated at their desks. She looked out at them. In unison, they jerked their gazes away and dipped their quills.
Before her, her husband worked to clear away a haystack of papers and envelopes.
“Sorry,” he said, sifting through the papers and piling them in a neat stack. “It’s not usually so disorderly. I haven’t been in much of late, and I’m behind on my correspondence.”
“What is this place?”
“It’s … mine.” His chest rose and fell. “You’re now the only soul alive who knows that. Except Faraday, apparently, and a very discreet solicitor. Thatcher and the clerks—they all believe I’m the manager of Aegis Investments, reporting to wealthy investors. But in truth, the investments are all mine. I own it all.”
“You own what, precisely?”
He began pulling ledgers from the wall and plunking them on the desk before her. “Various properties,” he said, plunking down a black leather-bound volume, “including most of the immediate neighborhood. Several textile mills.” A green ledger joined the first. “Miscellaneous investments.” This one was bound in a reddish brown.
“Have a look at them,” he said. “Better yet, here—” He yanked a folio from a high shelf and opened it, spreading the contents on the blotter before her. “This is last year’s report. Income and expenses.” He pulled one sheet apart from the rest. “Total assets are listed here.”
Lily didn’t look at it. She looked to him, agape.
He took a seat in a straight-backed chair across from her. “Mainly, I produce and sell cloth, wholesale. That’s the reason behind Julian Bellamy’s striking style. I’ve been setting the fashion trends to benefit my trade.” He gestured toward the papers and ledgers. “Go on, have a look.”
Lily couldn’t deny that she was curious. So she did as he suggested. First, she flipped through each of the ledgers. Of all people, she could appreciate a well-kept ledger, and these were meticulous. In every case, the income eclipsed the expenditures. In the Miscellany volume, she found several pages of charitable donations in astounding sums. Then she turned to last year’s summary, where she had to peer at the “total assets” portion for a solid minute, performing calculations in her mind to check the arithmetic before she could completely believe the final balance was correct.
He was worth a fortune. And not a small one. He was worth far more than Leo had been, if one discounted the entailed property that came with the marquessate.
“How did you amass all this?” she asked, lifting her head.
“Investments. I did have some seed money. A thousand guineas.”
“Where did you get a thousand guineas?”
“Blackmail.”
“Blackmail?” He said the word so baldly, with no equivocation.
“Yes. You recall the fixed horse race. I bled the ten conspirators for a hundred guineas each. A small fraction of their ill-gotten gains.”
“And from that, you did all this?” She gestured around at the ledgers.
He gave a modest nod.
Lily marveled at him. To think of all he’d accomplished, entirely on his own. A boy raised in the gutters, orphaned in his youth. All this, and yet he didn’t flash his wealth around for amusement’s sake, and certainly not for pride’s. No one had any idea. She couldn’t even bring herself to be angry with him for the deceit. She was too overwhelmingly proud. If only his mother could see her son now.
She dabbed away a tear. “I always knew you were a remarkable man, and I’ve long suspected there was more to you than the world supposed. But I’m ashamed to say even I could not have imagined this. Julian, I—” She broke off, biting her lip. “Do I still call you Julian?”
“I don’t know.” He shifted in his chair, looking serious. “I have been living two lives, under two different names. Neither one is precisely my own. My mother was Mary Bell, but you already know I’m uncertain of my Christian name.”
“Surely you could find out, if you went to the church.”
“I’m not certain I want to know.” A smile tugged at his lips. “What if it’s something dreadful, like Jedediah or Jehosephat?”
She cringed. “I see your point there.”
“My solicitor tells me my legal name can be whichever I choose. All I need to do is settle on one identity, and then transfer everything to that name.”
“Which name?”
“That’s for you to decide.”
“I think you should choose James Bell,” she said. “Don’t you? It honors your mother.” Although secretly, she would find it difficult to call him anything other than Julian. And she hated to admit, Lady Lily Bell sounded unbearably precious.
“That may be. However, I married you as Julian Bellamy. Changing to Bell now … I worry it could invalidate our union.”
Secretly relieved, she said, “Well, we can’t have that.”
“Are you absolutely sure?” His brow creased. “You wouldn’t prefer it that way?”
What? She sat back, stunned. How could he even say such a thing?
“Come now, Lily. A noblewoman of royal lineage, married to a man in trade? You know as well as I, it just isn’t done. When I proposed to you, I planned to sell it all. I’ve been making arrangements to do just that, but it takes time.”
“Really? You meant to sell off everything?” The magnitude of the sacrifice pained Lily, even in the abstract. Not the wealth or possessions, but just the sheer accomplishment represented by the documents on this desk. This was his life’s work.
“You deserved a gentleman. So I meant to play at being one for the remainder of my days. But I’ve come to realize—and I think you’ve come to realize—living like that, I will always feel something of a fraud. If I’m to prove myself worthy of you, it must be on my own terms.” His gaze made a slow circuit of the busy office, then came home to hers. “I’m good at this, Lily. It’s what I’m meant to do. I don’t want to give it up.”
She nodded, understanding.
“So it’s come to this. Your choice. Part ways with James Bell, or stay married to Julian Bellamy.” He held her response at bay with an open palm. “Understand, you’ll be a tradesman’s wife. Think about what that means, Lily. Think long and hard. Your social standing and connections will suffer. Our children will not be accepted to the same schools and circles of friends you and Leo enjoyed. People may be cruel. You’ll be spitting in the face of social convention.”
She stared at him.
“That is, if you were the sort to spit.” He shifted uneasily. “I know you’re not.”
“Social convention,” she said musingly. “The same social convention that left you a penniless orphan? The same social convention that made my brother the target of violence and scorn? I’m not keen on social convention of late. If I were the sort to spit, that should be my first target.”
She touched a hand to the stack of papers and folios. “I adore ledgers, Julian. I love sitting in the pit at Drury Lane. And I wasn’t joking that evening. I find spectacles wildly attractive.”
Smiling, she reached across to trace the rim of one lens with her fingertip, then follow the earpiece back to where it plunged into his thick, dark hair. Tenderly, she framed his cheek with her palm.
“I think I was born to be a tradesman’s wife. Or perhaps I was just born to be yours.”
For a long moment, he seemed incapable of reply. “I’m certain I was not born to deserve you,” he finally said. “But I vowed long ago to never accept the limitations of my birth.”
“I’m so glad of it.”
They stayed that way for the longest time, lost in one another’s loving stares. Sitting across a desk crowded with paperwork, in the midst of a busy office, under the curious gaze of several clerks. Elegant ballrooms, nothing. Lily couldn’t imagine a more romantic scene.
“We’re going to be so happy. You told me that, the day we wed.” He pressed his hand over hers. “I confess, I didn’t believe you then.”
“But now you do?”
“I do. Heart, mind, and soul. We are going to be so happy.”
The words alone filled her with joy. Heart, mind, and soul. “We’re going to be unstoppable.”
She reached to slide the spectacles from his face. As she slowly teased them free, his gaze flicked to the window and the curious clerks beyond.
“They’re watching us.”
She folded the spectacles and carefully set them aside. Leaning toward him over the desk, she asked, “Isn’t there a curtain for that window?”
“Yes,” he said, closing the rest of the distance. “There is.”
And then he kissed her, long and slow and deep. In plain view, without drawing any curtains at all. Because they weren’t hiding anything anymore. Not from each other. Not from the world.
Well, and because beneath the clerkish spectacles—her husband remained, at heart, a scoundrel.
She wouldn’t have it any other way.