The Girl with the Make-Believe Husband

Cecilia swallowed, trying to hold back tears of frustration. There it was again. That simple, inescapable truth. When it came to the search for her brother, all that really mattered was that one knew the correct people.

Her unease must have shown on her face, because Edward reached out and gave her hand a reassuring pat. “You should not feel uncomfortable,” he told her. “You are a gentleman’s daughter and now the daughter-in-law of the Earl of Manston. You have every right to attend that ball.”

“It’s not that,” Cecilia said, although it was, a little. She had no experience hobnobbing with high-ranking officials. Then again, she had no experience hobnobbing with sons of earls either, but she seemed to be fake-married to one.

“Can you dance?” Edward asked.

“Of course I can dance,” she practically snapped.

“Then you’ll be fine.”

She stared at him. “You have no clue, do you?”

He sat back in his chair, his left cheek bulging out as he pressed his tongue against the inside of it. He did that a fair bit, she realized. She wasn’t quite sure yet what it meant.

“There are a lot of things about which I have no clue,” he said in a voice that was far too patient to ever be mistaken for benign. “The events of the last three months, for example. How I came to have a lump the size of a robin’s egg on my head. How I came to be married to you.”

Cecilia stopped breathing.

“But what I do know,” he went on, “is that it will give me great pleasure to buy you a pretty gown and attend a frivolous entertainment with you on my arm.” He leaned forward, his eyes glittering with a strange, indecipherable ferocity. “It will be blessedly, inoffensively normal. Do you have any idea how much I crave the blessed, the inoffensive, and the normal?”

Cecilia didn’t say a word.

“I thought not,” he murmured. “So let’s buy you a dress, shall we?”

She nodded. What else could she do?

As it turned out, it was not so easy to have an evening gown made for a woman in three days. One seamstress actually wept when she heard the amount of money Edward was willing to spend. She couldn’t do it, she’d tearfully told him. Not without forty more pairs of hands.

“Will you take her measurements?” Edward asked.

“To what purpose?” an exasperated Cecilia demanded.

“Humor me,” he said, and then he deposited her back at the Devil’s Head while he paid a call upon his godmother. She had always enjoyed pretty things, for both herself and her daughter, and Edward was quite certain that she could be persuaded to share.

The governor and Mrs. Tryon lived with their daughter in a rented home at the edge of the town and had done—with the exception of a visit back to England—since the governor’s mansion had burned to the ground in 1773. Edward had not been in New York at the time, but he’d heard all about it from his mother, who had heard all about it from Margaret Tryon. They’d lost everything they owned, and had very nearly lost their daughter too. Little Margaret—generally called May to differentiate from her mother—had survived only due to the quick thinking of her governess, who had thrown her from a second-story window into a snowbank.

Edward took a deep breath as the butler admitted him into the hall. He would have to keep his wits about him. Margaret Tryon was nobody’s fool, and there was no point even trying to pretend he was in hale and hearty health. Indeed, the first words out of her mouth upon his entry into her sitting room were:

“You look terrible.”

“Candid as always, Aunt Margaret,” he said.

She gave him her signature one-shoulder shrug—a throwback from her days among the French, she’d always told him, although he wasn’t sure when, exactly, she’d been among the French—then presented her cheek for a kiss, which he dutifully gave.

She drew back, assessing him with shrewd eyes. “I would be remiss as your godmother if I did not point out that your pallor is gray, your eyes are hollow, and you’ve lost at least a stone.”

He took a moment to digest this, then said, “You look lovely.”

This made her smile. “You always were a charming boy.”

Edward declined to point out that he was well into his third decade of life. He was fairly certain that godmothers were legally permitted to refer to their charges as boys and girls until they toddled off into the grave.

Margaret rang for tea, then leveled a frank stare in his direction and said, “I am terribly cross with you.”

He quirked a brow as he took a seat across from her.

“I have been waiting for you to visit. You returned to New York over a week ago, did you not?”

“I spent the first eight or so days unconscious,” he said mildly.

“Ah.” Her lips pressed together as she swallowed her emotions. “I had not realized.”

“I would imagine it is responsible for my terrible appearance, as you so termed it.”

She regarded him for a long moment, then said, “When I next write to your mama, I shall not offer a detailed description of your countenance. Or at least not an accurate one.”

“I appreciate that,” Edward said honestly.

“Well,” Margaret said. She tapped her fingers against the arm of her chair, something she often did when she was uncomfortable with her own displays of emotion. “How do you feel?”

“Better than yesterday.” Which he supposed was something for which to be grateful.

His godmother, however, was not satisfied with this answer. “That could mean anything.”

Edward considered the current state of his health. The dull ache in his head had become so constant that he could almost ignore it. Far more troublesome was his lack of stamina. He’d had to pause for what felt like a full minute after climbing the half flight of stairs to his godmother’s front door. It wasn’t even just to catch his breath. He’d needed time just to muster the energy to make his legs work. And the trip to the dressmaker with Cecilia had left him utterly wrecked. He’d paid the carriage driver double to take the (very) long way from the Devil’s Head to the Tryons’ home, just so he could close his eyes and not move a muscle for the duration.

But Aunt Margaret didn’t need to know any of this. He gave her a light smile and said, “I’m walking unassisted, so that’s an improvement.”

Her brows rose.

“I’m still exhausted,” he admitted, “and my head hurts. But I’m improving, and I’m alive, so I’m trying not to complain.”

She nodded slowly. “Very stoic of you. I approve.”

But before he could do so much as nod an acknowledgment, she changed the subject by saying, “You did not tell me you’d got married.”

“I told very few people.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Define very few.”

“Well, about that . . .” Edward exhaled as he tried to figure out how best to explain his current situation to one of the few people in North America who had known him before his arrival on the continent. Also the only person who knew his mother, which was probably a far more pertinent fact.

Margaret Tryon waited with ten seconds of overt patience, then said, “Spit it.”

Edward cracked a smile at that. His godmother was well-known for her frank speech. “I seem to have lost a bit of my memory.”

Her lips parted, and she actually leaned forward. Edward would have congratulated himself on having cracked her unflappable veneer if his own injury weren’t the unfortunate cause of the fissure.

“Fascinating,” she said, eyes shining with what could only be described as academic interest. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. Well, no, I beg your pardon, of course I’ve heard of it. But it’s always been one of those tales—someone knows someone else who thought they heard that another person once said they met someone . . . You know what I mean.”

Edward stared at her for a moment and made the only possible reply: “Indeed.”

“How much have you forgotten?”

“About three or four months, to the best of my calculations. It’s difficult,” he said with a shrug, “because I cannot quite pinpoint the last thing I remember.”