And thirty minutes later . . . her life fell apart.
Although, in fairness, it wasn’t really her life. This was all pretend. A game of make-believe.
So why, if it was pretend, was she coming apart inside? Why couldn’t she breathe?
Once more, it had all fallen apart because of a newspaper.
When Fairpoint had stolen her words, Verity had imagined there could be no greater affront she could suffer. The rage and indignation had been so staggering that surely nothing could have surpassed it.
How wrong she’d been . . .
“Ahem. Is there anything else you need . . . my lady?” The young maid who’d delivered the newspaper didn’t meet Verity’s eyes. Though in fairness, motionless in the middle of the gold parlor, Verity hadn’t managed to wrench her eyes away from the words inked across the center page in bold, damning letters.
THE LONDONER
SCANDAL . . . AGAIN . . . !
A great ruse has been perpetuated, and Polite Society made to look the fool. Should anyone expect anything else from one raised in the sewers, even if he was born an earl? The Earl of Maxwell, who would live life in the rookeries, would also lie so easily about having a wife . . .
His pretend wife is none other than Verity Lovelace, the bastard-born daughter of the late Earl of Wakefield.
Verity tried to breathe. She desperately tried to suck air into her lungs.
In the end, she failed.
Verity’s legs gave out from under her, and she sank onto her knees in the middle of the parlor.
“Verity!” Livvie’s voice came muffled from the doorway.
Livvie, who, capable of words and sound, proved braver than Verity, who couldn’t sort through the chaos in her mind.
And then there was a stampede of unwanted interlopers.
Bertha hovered at the front of the room, uncertain, while people swarmed around Verity, Malcom’s servants circling, and she was like that fish she and her father had pulled from the lake and she’d kept in a bowl in his absence, to remember him by. She and Bertha and Mama would peer down, and he’d look up, and God help her. Verity shook. It was too much.
“Get out!” Livvie shouted, and as quick as the cluster of maids had come, they left, filing from the room. The moment they’d gone, Livvie fell to the floor beside her and rescued the newspaper. “Who would do this?” she whispered. “Who could have done this?” As she frantically shook those damning pages, she looked hopelessly between Verity and Bertha.
Dimly, Verity noted Bertha lingering at the doorway. Her cheeks splotched red. The old woman stood on the fringe when she’d only ever been in the heart of the family.
Verity froze.
And just like that, she knew.
Oh, God. No.
Vomit churned in her belly.
She didn’t know. Because it would mean that the woman she’d known, the woman she’d trusted and seen as family, all along had been just another person capable of great treachery and deceit. Which was impossible.
And yet . . . not.
Verity managed to push herself to standing. “Livvie, will you leave me and Bertha alone a moment,” she said quietly. How was she so calm? How, when she was breaking apart inside? Nay, when she’d already broken apart? She held a quaking hand out, and Livvie looked at it a long moment before relinquishing The Londoner.
The minute she’d gone, Verity spoke. “How could you do this?”
“I’ll make no apologies for what I’ve done. I’d do it again.”
Verity jerked. The other woman didn’t even deny it. “You’ve hated him from the start.” Not once had the closed-minded nursemaid taken the chance to see who and what Malcom truly was: One who gave of himself. One who lifted up those who most needed support.
“Aye, I have. He’s a selfish, greedy devil.” Bertha’s voice crept up a fraction. “He didn’t need those tunnels. He’d a damned earldom waiting for him. A bloody fortune. But was it enough?” She jumped in, not allowing Verity a word edgewise. “No, it wasn’t.”
Something tickled the back of her memory. A conversation traipsed in, in drips and drabs.
Hush. You think it so shocking that I might have found myself a suitor? . . . He’s a tosher. He’s a sewer hunter. Scavenges. Pans and retrieves tosh . . .
Verity’s eyes flew open. “Your sweetheart . . . ,” she whispered. “That was how you knew Malcom’s identity.” And all along, Verity hadn’t truly given thought to how the older woman had attained the information she had. Even the idea of a “sweetheart” had been secondary. All she’d been focused on was locating her “story.”
“You want to know the manner of man you’ve gone and fallen in love with?” Bertha asked, startling her out of her musings.
“I already know precisely the manner of man he is,” she said quietly. And this spiteful, bitter woman before her was the last who’d ever truly know Malcom North.
“Staked his claim on the entire sewers and threatened my Alders. Your earl had him blubbering himself.”
A sound of disgust escaped her, and Bertha slammed a fist against her open palm. “We were going to have it all: You would get that damned story you were so determined to tell. Alders would replace that bastard in the tunnels.” The glint in her eyes lent her a half-mad look. “And in the end, neither of us got what we deserved. Because of him.”
Verity’s stomach continued to churn, and she forcibly swallowed back the bile elicited by the other woman’s poison. She clutched the curved back of the nearest sofa, keeping herself steady, keeping upright. “You ruined his name. You ruined my name,” she cried. The woman who’d held her and cradled her and been a mentor to her through the years had thought nothing of humiliating her and Malcom before the world.
Bertha shrugged her bony shoulders. “Neither of you truly had a name to ruin,” she said without inflection, stating as fact her opinion on Verity’s and Malcom’s worth.
“He’s a greater man than, with your twisted soul, you can ever know or appreciate.”
Bertha scoffed, “He’s a bounder just like your father.”
Verity snapped. “He is nothing like my father,” she spat, flying across the room, a finger outstretched. “My father left us nothing. He left me, and Livvie, selling our things and me working as a child. And Malcom?” Her heart flipped over in love and sorrow at a dream which had ended too soon. Even as that dream would have never been enough, she’d have greedily stolen all those moments as she could have. “Malcom has cared for those he called family. He’s given a home to them. Provided security—”
“Bah,” Bertha spat, spittle forming at the corners of her tense mouth. “You’d hold him up on a pedestal for what he’s done for others. Tell me this, Verity: What has he done for you? He’s trapped you, that’s what. He’s used you.” Her voice pitched around the room. “He’s bedded you. And in the end, he’d turn you out.”
“They were my decisions,” she cried out, shaking. “All of them. Everything I did was because I wanted to.”
“You’re just like your mother.”
Once that would have struck like the insult it was surely intended as. Verity lifted her chin a notch. “At least she was capable of love. Your heart is only full of hate.”