Page 81 of The Lord Meets His Lady

“Not very well, I’m afraid. Might I ask how you’re related to her?”

Darkness wasn’t kind to Vicar Pemberton. Gaunt cheeks and a sharp-angled nose made him birdlike in all the wrong ways. His piercing eyes reminded her of clergymen who preferred good poor folk to the bad. People like her.

“She was my grandmother.” Genevieve stood. “I never knew her.”

The door of a public house opened down the lane, and a distant din of voices carried.

Lord Bowles rose to full height and placed his hand on the small of her back. “Anything else you can tell us about her? Her character? Things she was known for?”

The vicar winced. “I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, milord.”

“There’s little good you can share?”

“She was not a happy woman, I fear. Even before the fire left her infirm. Most of the village avoided her.”

Glancing around the cemetery, Genevieve could see that her grandmother had been shuffled off to a far corner, avoided even in death.

“She claimed she had no family,” the vicar said, appearing to choose his words with care. “We called herMrs.Turner, because she bade us to, but none believed she’d ever married.”

Genevieve clamped a hand across her mouth. Her grandmother and her mother…two unmarried women who bore the shame of a fatherless child. At least her hood shrouded her from the vicar’s curious eyes. Did he find her lacking? Judge her as the neglectful relative of a lonely old woman of waspish nature? What did it say of her that her sole relative, her grandmother, refused to acknowledge her existence?

The vicar rubbed his hands for warmth. “I wish I could give you more, but there simply isn’t anything to say.”

“Thank you for your kindness,” Lord Bowles said.

“I’ll leave so that you may have a moment alone.”

Relieved of his unpleasant duty, the vicar trotted as fast as his spindly legs would decently allow. Genevieve stared at the blank wooden cross, glad for his hasty exit. She needed to collect her thoughts. The gate squeaked, and the older man cleared his throat.

“There is one thing,” he called across the yard.

Genevieve twisted around. “What?”

“Maude Turner was a tall woman, just like you, my lady.” He paused. “And some judged her a becoming woman in her youth.”

She touched the rough wooden cross. “Thank you, sir.”

Simple facts, small connections helped. Tonight, the vicar had put broken pieces in place, framing an empty spot, not filling it. A little information was better than none.

Wiping dirt off the wooden cross, another void threatened, this one bigger, darker, needier. She had nowhere to hide.

What would she do now?

She leaned against her new husband. “Looks like you still have a housekeeper, milord.”

“Better yet, I gained a wife.”

“For a time,” she mused, trying to match his light humor and failing miserably.

The two of them made their way to the road where Khan was waiting. Lord Bowles climbed into the saddle first.

He positioned Khan beside the mounting stump and extended his hand. “Let’s go home.”

Home. With him.

She stopped, both feet on the mounting block, staring at her hand engulfed in his. This might be a marriage of convenience to save her from the Wolf, but Lord Bowleswasthe only family she had left in this world.

For a time…

Limbs and joints refused to move, like the broken machinery she often fixed. Her cogs and wheels tried to function, but they couldn’t. Loneliness was sand, drying her up from the inside out.

There was only one thing a woman in her shoes could do.