“I do.” He blinked his intense green eyes. “For I have seen it done. The fools. Pft!”

“Where is Barris?” Ravenna said, abruptly eager. “We will go there and—”

“Barris is a speck of an island in a far off northern sea, mon chou.”

“Does he usually live in London, then?”

“When I was a child, he had a house near Richmond. We lived there, my brother and I, for some years.”

“He still has this house,” Arabella said. “Adina mentioned it.”

“You could pay a call on him,” Ravenna said, “and when he is in the other room you can search his desk. I read a lending library novel in which the hero did that.”

“Ah, oui. And the art, it always reflects the reality, non, mon chou?” he said with a lift of a brow.

“I think you should stop calling me your cabbage, or our siblinghood will swiftly become uncomfortable for you.”

“But it is too far to go to Richmond,” Arabella said, “and then to sit and wait to enter his house after he has gone out.”

Ravenna’s lips screwed up. “With all his servants, presumably.”

“Then she must go while he disports himself in London.”

“How would she know when he’d be doing that?”

“Is he not doing that at this very moment, above our heads, mon—”

Ravenna glared. He laughed.

“Perhaps . . .” Arabella’s heart raced. She wanted to help Luc. She needed to help him. This was the trouble that he was hiding from her. She did not have all the pieces: why he would not share it all with her, nor why Christos’s arrival today had transformed his distress into ease.

Her fists bunched. “He refuses to allow me to help him protect the people of Combe.”

“Ah, ma belle,” Christos said. “My brother seeks always to protect. To share that burden is a foreign thing to him.”

She stood up. “I could go to the bishop’s house now, while he is here. I might not have this opportunity again. My footman Joseph could go with me. You two would remain here and make excuses for my absence.”

“From your own wedding?” Ravenna hopped out of her seat.

“Immediately after it. I must go, Venna. When I arrive, the servants will ask me to await his return, then they will forget about me, and I can look around at my leisure.” She bit the inside of her lip. “I hope.”

“This seems far-fetched.”

“Non. It is not. The house, it is plain and empty. The places to search are few. The servants are aged, their interest in guests poor.”

“In a bishop’s household?”

“In his household.” Christos rose to his feet like a cat, slender and graceful. “I know this, you see. For it takes a madman to recognize a madman.”

CHAMPAGNE HAD FLOWED freely during Arabella’s sojourn below, and conversation was lively atop. Just like her imagination. It was pure foolishness to consider running off to Richmond to search a bishop’s house for documents that probably didn’t even exist. The same sort of foolishness that had taken her to a dark alley in a port town she did not know and began the series of events that led her here.

There remained but half an hour until a small party of guests and family were to leave the ship with her and Luc to go to the church nearby for the ceremony. They would return to the Victory afterward for supper, dancing, and fireworks. Adina had spared nothing in her plans.

Arabella could not wait half an hour. She needed to see Luc. She searched between clusters of guests. Her nerves were twisted to rawness, and as much as she feared his distance, she wanted only to be alone with him now.

At first she thought those strained nerves were the cause of the peculiar glances some of the guests were throwing her way—ladies, especially, ducking behind parasols to avoid her gaze while the gentlemen turned their heads away when she passed. She was imagining it, of course. No one would cut a bride at her wedding.

Wending her way between people under the main canopy spread across the front of the ship, she found Eleanor.

“Bella?” Her sister’s brow creased. “I have something to say to you that I think will be difficult for you to hear. But you should know it.”

Luc?

“What is it, Ellie?”

“I have just heard an unsavory rumor—for rumor I know it to be—told to me by a woman because I think she did not know that I am your sister.”

“Tell me, please, quickly.”

“It seems that it is being said that you have been unfaithful to the comte, that you have taken a lover or perhaps several already, and are eager to make him the father of a bastard.”

The air flattened out of Arabella’s lungs and heat flushed through her body and into her cheeks.

“It is a rumor.”

“Of course it is. It is perfectly obvious to me that you adore him, and even if you did not, you have too much integrity to do such a thing.” Eleanor looked about. “But someone is telling this tale here today. Just look at that pair of women over there, staring at us like we are a curiosity at an exhibition.”

She must not allow gossip to hurt her. She had held strong against unkindnesses and cruelties her entire life. That this unkindness hurt Luc was the only source of her misery.

“The woman who told me said the news was to be believed because its source was within the family,” Eleanor said. “But not the duchess; her brother, the bishop. Isn’t it the most astounding thing you’ve heard?”

“No.” Her heart racketed. “He hates Luc. I think he would do this to hurt him.” As he would extort money from Luc’s tenants. But only to hurt him, or to ruin him entirely? Or for some other purpose?

It was all too much. Desperation snatched at her reason again, the plan that Christos and Ravenna had laid out seeming less like foolishness and more like her only hope.

As she lifted her head to search the crowd again for Luc, a hush descended over them. Oh, good heavens. Were they to go in solemn procession to the church now? With her head awhirl and nerves frayed, she doubted she could bear it.

But no one was looking at her. They had all turned to another. At the head of the gangway in a ray of sunlight cut with shadow lines from the rigging above, the Bishop of Barris stood with his hands folded over his enormous gold pectoral cross. His amethyst ring glittered.

“It is with great solemnity that I share news now that affects my family deeply,” he said with the measured confidence of a man accustomed to the pulpit. The guests went silent, all mouths closed. Even the ladies’ tiny parasols stilled. Sick heat crept from Arabella’s womb into her throat and to the tips of her fingers. He would declare her to be a Jezebel before everyone. He would shame Luc irreparably.

“My sister, the Duchess of Lycombe, has just now given birth.” He paused and Arabella’s eyes closed. “To a healthy boy.”

Chapter 17

The Strength of a Man

“My only regret is that Theodore,” Fletcher continued, “whom we all admired, and whom his wife loved deeply”—he offered a rare, rueful grin—“though it was of course shockingly unfashionable for her to do so”—titters of amusement from the crowd—“I regret that my dear friend Theodore cannot see with his living eyes his son and heir. But I have faith that his spirit rests happy knowing his wife and child are well. If you will, raise a toast with me to the new Duke of Lycombe. And to Lucien, whose wedding we honor today, who will so ably remain heir until we all attend another wedding two decades or so from now.” More laughter. The clinking of crystal.