Mr. Cavendish, I Presume

Thomas nodded, and they dismounted, tying their horses to a hitching post before making their way to the front of the rectory. They knocked several times before they heard footsteps moving toward them from within.

The door opened, revealing a woman of middling years. Thomas assumed she was the housekeeper.

“Good day, ma’am,” Jack said, offering her a polite bow. “I am Jack Audley, and this is—”

“Thomas Cavendish,” Thomas interrupted, ignoring Jack’s look of surprise. It seemed grasping to introduce himself with his full title during the last few minutes of its legitimacy.

Jack looked as if he wanted to roll his eyes, but instead he turned back to the housekeeper and said, “We would like to see the parish register.”

She stared at them for a moment and then jerked her head toward the rear. “It’s in the back room,” she said.

“The vicar’s office.”

“Er, is the vicar present?” Jack asked.

Thomas elbowed him hard in the ribs. Good God, was he asking for company?

But if the housekeeper found their request the least bit intriguing, she did not show it. “No vicar just now,”

she said, sounding bored. “The position is vacant.”

She walked over to the sofa and sat down, telling them over her shoulder, “We’re supposed to get someone new soon. They send someone from Enniskillen every Sunday to deliver a sermon.”

She then picked up a plate of toast and turned her back on them completely. Thomas took that as permission to enter the office, and walked in, Jack a few paces behind.

There were several shelves against the wall that stood opposite the fireplace, so Thomas started there.

Several Bibles, books of sermons, poetry . . . “Do you know what a parish register looks like?” he asked. He tried to recall if he’d ever seen the register at his parish church, back near Belgrave. He supposed he must have, but it could not have been particularly distinctive, else he would have remembered it.

Jack didn’t answer, and Thomas did not feel like pressing further, so he set to work inspecting the shelves.

Moral Rectitude and the Modern Man. No, thank you.

History of Fermanagh. He’d pass on that as well.

Lovely as the county was, he’d had enough of it.

Account of the Voyages by James Cook. He smiled.

Amelia would like that one.

He closed his eyes and took a breath, allowing himself a moment to think of her. He’d been trying not to.

All through the morning, he’d kept his mind focused on the landscape, his reins, the bit of mud stuck to the back of Jack’s left boot.

But not Amelia.

Certainly not her eyes, which were not at all the color

of the leaves on the trees. The bark, maybe. With the leaves, together. Green and brown. A mix. He liked that.

Nor had he not been thinking of her smile. Or the exact shape of her mouth when she’d stood across from him the night before, breathless in her desire for him.

He wanted her. Dear God, he wanted her.

But he did not love her.

He could not. It was untenable.

He returned to the work at hand with grim purpose, pulling every book without an embossed title off the shelf so he could open it and look inside. Finally he reached a section with nothing but ledgers. He pulled one out, and his heart began to pound when he realized that the words before him were recordings of births.

Deaths. Marriages.

He was looking at one of the church registers. The dates were wrong, though. Jack’s parents would have married in 1790, and these were all far too recent.

Thomas looked over his shoulder to say something to Jack, but he was standing stiffly by the fire, his shoulders drawn up toward his ears. He looked frozen, and Thomas realized why he had not heard him moving about the room, looking for the register.

Jack had not moved since they had entered.

Thomas wanted to say something. He wanted to stride across the room and shake some bloody sense into him because what the devil was he complaining about? He, not Jack, was the one whose life would be ruined at the end of the day. He was losing his name, his home, his fortune.

His fiancée.

Jack would walk out of this room one of the richest and most powerful men in the world. He, on the other hand, would have nothing. His friends, he supposed, but they were few in number. Acquaintances he had in abundance, but friends—there was Grace, Harry Gladdish . . . possibly Amelia. He found it difficult to believe that she would wish to see him after all was said and done. She would find it too awkward. And if she ended up marrying Jack . . .

Then he would find it too awkward.

He closed his eyes, forcing himself to refocus on the matter at hand. He was the one who had told Amelia that she must marry the Duke of Wyndham, whoever that might turn out to be. He couldn’t bloody well complain because she followed his instructions.

Thomas put the parish register back on the shelf and pulled out another, checking the dates that led each entry. This one was a bit older than the first, concluding at the very end of the eighteenth century. He tried another, and then a fourth, and this time, when he looked down at the careful, elegant handwriting, he found the dates he was looking for.

He swallowed and looked at Jack. “This may be it.”

Jack turned. The corners of his mouth were pinched, and his eyes looked haunted.

Thomas looked down at the book and realized that his hands were trembling. He swallowed. He had made

it through the day up to this point with surprising purpose. He’d been a perfect stoic, prepared to do what was right for Wyndham.

But now he was scared.

Still, he pulled from his reserves and managed an ironic smile. Because if he could not behave like a man, then what was left of him? At the end of the day, he had his dignity and his soul. That was all.