Page 51 of Lady Like

When Harry sees Alexander Bolton striding toward them across the Regent’s Park riding ground, his hair slick with sweat and a towel draped around his neck, she wonders how she had ever thought she wanted to marry him.

“Harry!” he calls in greeting, raising a hand to them. “And Miss Sergeant. Still the unlikeliest couple of the Season, I see.”

“We know what happened at the Derby,” Harry says.

Alexander’s smile falters. “What?”

“The Duke of Edgewood interfered with the race,” Emily explains as Harry tosses Alexander the girth. “He tampered with the strap on Harry’s saddle. That’s why she fell when Matthew jumped.”

“Edgewood?” Alexander frowns. “I hardly know him. What grievance has he against me?”

“His quarrel is with me,” Harry says. “We fought a duel and he lost an eye.”

“Ah, well!” Alexander claps a hand to his chest and laughs. “What a relief. I knew it was no fault of Matthew’s. Nor yours, obviously.”

He flashes them his broad, boyish grin. Neither Harry nor Emily smiles in return. Emily stares at Alexander with her mouth slightly open, and before Harry can work out what to say, she barks, “He tried to kill Harry, and that’s a relief to you?”

“To be fair,” Alexander says, “it does sound as though she tried to kill him first.”

“We dueled,” Harry interupts. “It was a mutual attempt! I did nothing wrong unless you would blame me for being the more competent with swords.”

“You always find a way to boast, don’t you?

” Alexander hops up onto the fence and pulls off one of his boots, tipping it upside down until fine dust streams out.

“Why does it matter? The race was lost. They won’t call for an amateur race to be run again because you claim to have proof that a man with a grudge against you intervened. ”

“It’s not a claim,” Emily says. “He sent the proof.”

Alexander holds up his hand. “Miss Sergeant, with all due respect, I’m not sure what this has to do with you.”

“Harry could have died,” Emily snaps, voice rising. “And you’re acting as though this was all some sort of harmless misunderstanding.”

Alexander laughs, then says to Harry, “She is altogether different than I first thought. I can see why you like her.” Harry hates the way he’s talking as though Emily isn’t here, instead addressing Harry in that chummy, laddish way simply because she’s got the shortest hair here.

Alexander tugs his boot back on, hops down from the fence, and dusts his hands on his britches.

“What would you have me do, Miss Sergeant?”

“Alert the authorities,” Emily says. “Have the results contested.”

“It’s hardly worth the trouble.”

“Weren’t you collecting bets?” Harry asks. “I suspect it might be worth the trouble to those whose coin you took.”

“Bit late for that, I should think. And it’s not my debt anymore. Your brother took care of that for me.”

Cold dread trickles through Harry like the first drops of rain dotting the pavement in a storm, a harbinger of bad weather on its way. “What has Collin got to do with this?”

“Didn’t he write you?”

“He doesn’t have to write me, I’m staying with him and he hasn’t been home in days. Where is he? Come back here, you prick,” she calls, for Alexander had begun to slink away, “and tell me where my brother is!”

Alexander stops, staring at Harry as though trying to work out if she’s having him on. Then he says, “He’s been taken to the Marshalsea.”

“The debtors prison?”

“No, the spa—of course the prison.”

“On what charges?”

“On what charges? Are you daft?” Alexander looks to Emily, as though she might join him in amazement over Harry’s stupidity, but she folds her arms and glares at him. He turns back to Harry. “Don’t you know what your brother does?”

Harry can feel her teeth vibrating with how hard she’s clenching them. Has Alexander always been this infuriating and petty, or has she simply never been on the receiving end of it?

“Collin’s a bookmaker,” Alexander says when Harry doesn’t respond.

“He takes bets on everything from the passage of laws in Parliament to card games. He came to me at the Majorbanks’s party and asked if he might be the intermediary for the bets I was taking at the Milton Derby, in exchange for a cut of the winnings. ”

All the blood leaves Harry’s head with a whoosh that she feels in her eardrums, and she almost staggers.

She can hardly make sense of the words in relation to her virtuous, captious brother.

He had sneered at everything from her career to her rooms to her drinking glasses, while all this time he’s been making his name as an illegal intermediary for the ton’s underbelly, not just encouraging vice but profiting from it.

What a patheticly short high horse from which he had looked down at her.

“Gambling isn’t illegal,” Emily says. “On what charges was he arrested?”

“My race didn’t quite play out the way I hoped it would, thanks to your duke’s vendetta,” Alexander says. “And I couldn’t pay my vowels. Collin’s creditors took him to court, and since he’s been operating without a license to avoid tax, he’s been put away.”

“But it’s your fault,” Harry says. “It’s your debt, he’s just the intermediary.”

Alexander shrugs. “I can’t be arrested, I’m a duke. And Collin’s name is on all the forms.”

“So pay your creditors and get my brother out of the Marshalsea,” Harry says. “You’re letting him take your flogging for you.”

“I haven’t any money.”

“You’re a duke,” Emily says, parroting his cadence.

“Yes, and if you were better at fortune hunting, Miss Sergeant,” Alexander replies, “you’d know those two things don’t always go hand in hand.”

Emily looks as though she’d like to leap across the paddock and tackle him to the ground. “How dare you.”

But Harry has already worked it out. The words fortune hunting had sent the cogs of her mind spinning. Why else would the penniless duke have changed course so abruptly after his Derby loss and abruptly decide to accept her proposal of marriage unless he knew?

“When did Collin tell you?” she asks Alexander.

His grin doesn’t falter. “Tell me what?”

Harry pauses. She has only just regained Emily’s trust, and cannot bear the idea of risking it by exposing the full truth of her peculiar social position and how it relates to the duke. “You know.”

But Rochester, like Mariah, can read Harry too easily.

He looks positively giddy as he points to Emily.

“Oh does she not know? Go on, Harry, do share. It’s not your patrilineal line you should be ashamed of.

Can you imagine proudly telling people you’re the daughter of a whore, then you find out your father’s—”

“Stop,” Harry says.

Emily looks at her, confusion in her eyes and something else too—the tiniest hint of retreat, a protective withdrawal into herself—and Harry knows this carriage cannot be uncrashed.

And Emily must hear it from her, not Rochester.

“It was recently revealed to Collin and me,” Harry says, “that our father is the Prince of Wales, about to be crowned king of England. He offered us both a house, title, and land so long as we behave, and I am married by his coronation. And when this profligate weasel”—she kicks the toe of her boot in Alexander’s direction—“found out his sure-bet racehorse didn’t win, he suddenly became very interested in my stale marriage proposal.

Now why might that be?” She pivots back to Alexander, who doesn’t even have the decency to look ashamed.

“Your father finally cut you off, did he?”

“He’d been threatening for so many years, but I never thought he actually would,” Alexander replies. “But apparently coming to London and buying a racehorse was the straw that broke his back.”

“I should have told you,” Harry says to Emily.

She wants to take her hand, but in the presence of Alexander, the gesture feels far too intimate.

Emily is staring at Harry with wide eyes, her full lips parted.

“I didn’t want you to know that’s why I was pursuing Alexander.

And then I didn’t want it to ruin everything between us. ”

“But it has anyway, hasn’t it?” Emily says quietly.

Harry can’t bear to look at her, so she rounds on Alexander again. “Did you turn Collin in yourself?” she demands. “Or did you let nature take its course as you waited for me to come running to you?”

Alex lifts a shoulder. “I had to make one last trip to see my father. Make absolutely certain I wouldn’t be forgiven before I tied myself to you. Besides, the longer I wait, the more desperate for matrimony you become.”

Harry bites her tongue, then changes course, softening her voice in an attempt to appeal to whatever friendship had once existed between them.

“Alex, please. After everything we’ve done for each other for so many years.

I know you’re…” She pauses, struggling to find the truth in the words good man and afraid the lie will be so obvious on her face it will undercut her appeal to his decency.

“…Not a bad man. Please, do what is right. The debts unpaid are yours. Turn yourself in so Collin can be set free.”

“Or, instead,” Alexander says, “you marry me. It’s the best either of us can hope for.”

Harry wants to hit him. She almost does—but she can’t risk two Lockharts in prison, and Harry wouldn’t put it past Alexander to call the constabulary if she bloodied his nose.

And more than that, she wants to travel backward in time, to the moment she received the letter from Alexander— back in London, thought I might see you —and remember him as he always was: vain and brash and selfish. She’d throw that letter into the fire. She’d tear it to pieces and eat it.

“You need to get Collin out of prison,” Harry says. “Beg your father. Sell your goddamn horse. This is your fault—you can’t let Collin take the blame.”

“I cannot help you, Harry,” Alexander says. “Unless…” He makes a show of starting to bend the knee in proposal.

But he’s barely touched grass when Emily shoves him by the shoulders, pushing him off balance so he falls backward into the dirt. “Go to hell, Rochester.”

Alexander laughs, humorless, as he examines his skinned palms. “Harry, you always know how to pick the best bitches, don’t you?”

“I’d rather be a bitch than a mongrel like you,” Emily retorts. She turns for the paddock gate, and Harry follows, feeling dizzy with anger and shock and also wishing the moment were not so fraught, because if Emily had agreed, she certainly could have done with a quick snog behind the stables.

“I’ll see you soon, Harry,” Rochester calls to their retreating backs. “Next time you throw yourself into my bed.”

“I’d rather go down on an unstuffed sofa,” Harry shouts back at him. “At least it would be harder than your cock!”