Nicola Cornick - Deceived

“You will have no difficulty in finding a man if you are not too particular,” he agreed unpleasantly. “There are plenty such hopeless souls in here.”

At last he had driven her to breaking point. He saw the moment when Isabella’s composure snapped.

“I am desperate, too, you know!” The words burst from her and she could not erase a quiver of grief from her voice. “I am very tired of struggling—” She stopped, and Marcus saw her make a huge effort to steady herself. She was turning away, shielding her vulnerability from him. She pressed her hands together tightly. “This is nothing to the purpose.” Her voice was muffled. “I think that I should leave.”

Marcus put his hand on her arm. It was too late. It had been too late from the first moment she had made her outrageous proposition. He was damned if he was going to permit her to offer herself to some other debtor, and exchange a bottle of wine in return for a scrawled signature on a marriage certificate. If anyone were to wed her, it would be him, and then he would take great pleasure in turning the tables and taking settlement for everything that she owed him. She was his—at least until all debts were paid.

He looked at her. She had not moved but, despite her stillness, her heart was in her eyes. Marcus’s world shivered, spun and settled on a different axis.

“I will do it,” he said. “I will marry you.”

WHEN SHE HAD BEEN SEVENTEEN, Isabella had dreamed of marrying Marcus Stockhaven. This marriage, however, was not the stuff that dreams were made of. In deference to the occasion, Marcus had paid two shillings to a fellow prisoner to borrow a clean shirt but there had been no hot water for him to shave. The chapel was gloomy, with no floral decoration to brighten the atmosphere. There were no guests and no one to dance at the wedding. It was, in short, a miserable business.

The priest had to be prized away from his brandy bottle. He glanced at the special license with vague interest and looked with a great deal more energy at the fifty guineas Isabella proffered to encourage his participation.

Marcus was also scrutinizing the special license as they stood before the altar in the Fleet chapel. His brows rose infinitesimally as he scanned the lines.

“Who is Augustus Ambridge?” he asked. “As your future husband, I feel I have the right to know.”

“Oh…” Isabella felt confused. She had forgotten that she had been required to supply the name of a bridegroom in order to purchase the marriage license in the first place. Lacking any inspiration, she had chosen the first name that had come into her head, that of a gentleman who had been an admirer of hers in the two years of her widowhood, but whose intentions had never been either permanent or honorable.

“He is a…friend,” she said.

Marcus’s brows rose farther. “A friend? I see.”

“Not that sort of friend,” Isabella said. She could hear the thread of defensiveness in her tone and wondered why she felt the need to explain herself to him. She owed Marcus no information. He was to be her absentee husband only and, under the circumstances, it mattered nothing to him how she comported herself, since he could do nothing about it. Yet something in that steady dark gaze compelled her honesty.

It always had. The feeling unnerved her.

“He is merely an acquaintance,” she said. “I have a great many such.”

“I see,” Marcus said again, and Isabella had to bite her tongue to prevent herself from pleading her innocence. That was not the way she did things. Never complain, never explain. Those were the tenets of royalty.

Looking at Marcus, at the hard, uncompromising line of his mouth and the forbidding light in his eyes, she wondered how such a man could have ended by being incarcerated in the Fleet. If such a thing had happened to Ernest, it would have been no surprise at all, but Marcus was deep where Ernest had been shallower than a muddy puddle, strong where Ernest had been weak, perceptive where Ernest had been worse than insensitive. Or, more to the point, Marcus had been all of those things when she had known him before. Twelve years could bring many changes in a man. She must remember that she knew nothing of him now.

She fidgeted with her cloak to conceal her nervousness and distract herself from the thought that she was making a very big mistake. She had wanted to meet, marry and part, remaining a stranger to her husband at all stages of the process. Yet already she had broken her own rules. She felt more deeply involved than she had ever intended to be.

“You will see that I have crossed out Augustus’s name,” she observed, pointing to the document and adopting a crisp attitude to mask her feelings of vulnerability.

“So that I may insert mine?” Marcus said, scowling. “I think that probably stretches the legality of the situation.”

Isabella twitched the license from between his fingers and handed it to the priest. “The license is legal enough and with another hundred pounds the wedding will be recorded properly in the register. The marriage certificate will be enough to satisfy my creditors.”

Marcus took the quill from the desk and wrote his name above that of Augustus Ambridge on the license. He scored out the other man’s name with another thick black line, although it was already obliterated. His face was grim and Isabella’s heart sank. This felt terribly wrong and suddenly she was not sure that she could go through with it. She found that she was shivering and shivering, like a dog left out in the cold. She folded her arms tightly to try to comfort herself.

“Do you have any paper?” Marcus asked the priest.

The old man looked startled, as though Marcus had requested some unacceptable privilege. After a moment, he trotted across to the dingy side chapel, returning with a sheet of rough parchment that he handed over with a look that implied another sum of money would now be in order. Isabella sighed and passed across two shillings, which disappeared into the pocket beneath the dirty surplice.

Marcus dipped the quill in the ink pot and scribbled a few lines, dusting the paper with sand to dry it. He handed it to Isabella.

“Take this. I would not wish there to be any ambiguity.”

Isabella frowned as she scanned the paper. He had written a few curt lines to the effect that he was prepared to take complete responsibility for the debts incurred in his wife’s name. If anything was destined to make Isabella feel even more squalid and money-grubbing than she already did, it was these few lines. They emphasized the commercial soul of the agreement in a manner that left no room for sentiment.

“Witnesses?” Marcus said. There was a clear note of impatience in his voice now.

Isabella’s heart sank still further. That was the one thing she had not considered.

“I had not thought—” she began. She looked over her shoulder. The jailer was standing behind them looking hopeful. No doubt he thought there was another few pounds in it for him, both in acting as witness and in keeping quiet about it afterward. Perhaps he could even rustle up one of his colleagues to be the other signatory to the marriage lines. Hysterical laughter bubbled in Isabella’s throat. Married in the Fleet, with a turnkey as witness and the priest half-drunk on the brandy she had supplied as part of the bribe…how ill-fated could a wedding be? She pressed a hand to her lips to suppress her amusement.

The jailer rubbed his palms on his dirty trousers, whistled up one of the other warders and came forward as the priest beckoned. Marcus took her hand. His touch was impersonal and yet a flicker of awareness ran through Isabella like a flame through tinder, catching in an instant and distracting her thoughts from everything but him. She almost snatched her hand away, so acute was her response to him. She knew that he would be able to feel her trembling, and felt as vulnerable as though she had been stripped naked. This was not how it was meant to be, with her emotions at the mercy of this man.