"Say so to whom? With what?" Her voice was low and fierce. "He has the lines. He kept them; I never saw them again after the first week. I have no witness but a blacksmith's wife at Gretna who will be dead or drunk or bought by now. I have no family that will own me. I have a school full of grocers' daughters whose mothers trust me because I am a respectable widow called Esmond. If I stand up and say I am Lady Imogen Tremayne who ran off with a fortune-hunter at eighteen, and that he is still alive and I am still his wife — what do you suppose happens to my school? To me? He will call me a liar. Or a madwoman. Or a cast-off mistress with a grudge. And he will do it beautifully, and they will believe him, because he is a gentleman of property and I am a woman who sews veils for money." She took a breath. "And then he will marry you anyway, in some other church, and I will have nothing left at all."
"Then I'll refuse him."
"Can you?"
Morwenna had thought of her uncle at the breakfast table. Of her aunt's cough. Of lodgings by Lady Day.
She had said nothing.
"Please," Lady Imogen Tremayne had said, very quietly. "Please. I am asking you, as a friend. Do not tell anyone who I am."
And Morwenna had promised. She had gone down the narrow stair with the finished veil wrapped in silver paper, and got up into the gig beside Rupert Saltash, and let him talk to her about books all the way back to Bristol. And that night she had sat up in her bedroom in Queen Square with a candle and a sheet of paper and thought about it until her eyes ached.
She could not stop the wedding herself. She had no proof, and her uncle would have locked her in her room sooner than see the notes called in. She could not betray Imogen to a magistrate, who would only send for Saltash and ask him, and Saltash would smile. But Imogen had a brother. The brother had sent her letter back unopened — and he was a duke now, Morwenna knew, because she had read of the old duke's death in the *Bristol Mirror* two years since — and dukes did not need proof. Dukes needed only to stand up.
It was a gamble. If he came, Imogen would never forgive her. If he didn't come, she would be married by noon on the seventeenth to a man who already had a wife, and it would not matter whether anyone forgave her or not.
She had disguised her hand and left the letter unsigned, and posted it from Bath so the mark would tell him nothing, and for five weeks she had heard nothing back. On the morning of the wedding she had dressed in the grey silk and put on the veil Imogen had made, and walked up the aisle of St. Giles on her uncle's arm without once looking behind her, because she had decided the night before that she would not look, and that if he was not there she would simply go through with it and never speak of the letter to anyone as long as she lived.
And then she had heard the church door, and the footsteps, and the whispering, and a tired, hoarse, educated voice saying *I can*, and her heart had very nearly stopped.
And then he had asked his question, and Saltash had smiled and lied, and the duke had stood there in the aisle with mud to his shoulders and his face gone grey, and said *I beg your pardon*, and turned to go.
He had believed it. He had believed Saltash. He had come all that way and he was going to walk out of the church and leave her there, because nobody had told him anything he could use, because she had been too much of a coward to put her own name to the letter—