An Infamous Marriage by Susanna Fraser Page A

clerical fortune, but had never discussed what would happen if he didn’t live to claim it.
    Jack reached across the table to give her hand a tentative squeeze, then just as quickly drew back. “And so we are.”
    “Yes.” She swallowed and nerved herself to ask the questions that had been troubling her since the morning of the funeral. They were running out of time, and she didn’t want to leave it until he was walking out the door. “Jack?”
    “What it is?”
    “I don’t like to speak of this.” She bit her lip, searching for words.
    “Out with it,” he said, not unkindly. “If there’s anything you must say to me, please do so before I leave. I can hardly imagine a worse way to quarrel than by letters that take months to reach their destination.”
    She nodded. “It’s nothing to do with you, yourself, and after what happened to my father I’m the last person to hold a family scandal against anyone else, but...”
    “Someone said something to you about Mother, and I’ll wager it was Selina Dryden.”
    His voice was hard, and Elizabeth instinctively drew back in her chair. “Yes, it was she. Whatever it is, I swear it doesn’t matter to me. Only, I thought I should hear it from you, and not from gossip.”
    “Well.” He shook his head and raked his hand through his hair. “I agree, but it’s difficult to tell such a tale of one’s own mother. Even when it’s entirely true, and you had it from her own lips. She told me of it, you see, when I was fourteen or so, and all the gossip came back when my brother wanted to marry Clara Dryden—Lady Dryden’s eldest daughter—and her family made her refuse him.”
    “Oh?” Elizabeth nodded sympathy and encouragement.
    “My sister, the one who died years before I was born, came into the world only four months after my parents’ wedding. Which would’ve been occasion enough for gossip even were it not for the fact Mother and Father first met only a month before their wedding.”
    “Oh,” she repeated in an entirely different tone.
    “Mother never told anyone who Caroline’s father was. I have my suspicions, but I can’t prove anything.”
    “I doubt I need to know.” It must have been someone either already married or far above or beneath her, because otherwise her family would’ve forced him to marry her.
    “I suppose my grandparents ought to have sent her away until the child was born—not that it would’ve stemmed all the gossip—but instead they arranged a marriage with my father. He was a youngest son of a younger son, you see, with no fortune or prospect of one, who’d proven himself a failure at every profession my Armstrong grandparents had tried to establish him in. So the idea of marrying him off to a girl who was sole heir to a tidy property had a certain appeal despite her pregnancy.”
    “Your poor parents!” Elizabeth cried.
    Jack smiled and shook his head. “Actually, they soon learned to be happy together. Father, it turned out, did have one talent—breeding and raising horses—so the Grange was perfect for him. And I don’t know what Mother told him about Caroline’s father, but he never reproached her over it.”
    “But that didn’t stop the gossip.”
    “Hardly. Mother and Father kept very much to themselves, and made long visits to his family’s home in Scotland, where no one knows or cares anything for Selyhaugh gossip, and they were happy despite it. But there were stupid rumors that Ned wasn’t Father’s child either, because he and Caroline had the same coloring.”
    “Your mother’s coloring?” Elizabeth guessed. Mrs. Armstrong had gray eyes, and if the miniature in the parlor was correct, her hair had been blond before it turned white.
    “Exactly. Anyone who troubled to look could’ve told you he was our father’s son from the shape of his nose and his eyebrows. You’ll find this,” he said, tapping his rather beaky nose, “in almost every portrait in the gallery in Blainslie