Scorned By Him, Cherished By His Brother novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Kind Widow

Cordelia offers Lydia shelter, and Roland demands a signature. At dawn her father is arrested.

Henry pointed at the narrow door behind his chair, and the steward put out the lamp.

I went out through the chapel and shut the vestry door behind me.

Cordelia stood in the nave with the rain on her grey cloak and her hood pushed back.

She saw me and put both hands to her mouth.

"Oh, Lydia. Thank God. I have looked in six churches."

She crossed the stone floor and took me in her arms.

She smelled of lavender water, the way she always did.

"I could not let you walk the quays alone," she said into my shoulder. "Not tonight, not after what he did."

"How did you know I was here?"

"The boy who found you told a footman, and the footman told my maid." She drew back and wiped her eyes. "Come home with me. I have a fire laid and a bed aired."

I kept my face calm, because Henry had said not to go to her rooms.

"Thank you," I said. "But I would rather go to my father's house. He will be sitting up for me by now."

Cordelia's hand tightened on my arm for a moment.

Then she smiled, and it was a good smile.

"Of course. I will take you there myself. I do not want you in a hired cab at this hour."

She kept hold of my arm all the way to her carriage.

I looked back once at the vestry window, and there was no light in it.

My father's house stood on the south bank, a tall brick house with a ship's lantern over the door.

He had the door open before the carriage stopped.

Josiah Tindall was fifty-eight years old, broad in the shoulder and white at the whiskers, and he had not been to bed.

He looked at my trunk and then at my face.

"Roland?" he said.

"Yes."

He did not ask what Roland had done.

He took my smallest trunk in one hand and my arm in the other and said, "Come in."

Cordelia stayed on the step.

"I will not come in, Mr. Tindall, it is too late," she said. "But please believe me. I will talk sense into him."

"That is kind of you, madam," my father said, and shut the door.

It was past midnight when the knocking started.

My father went to the door himself and I stood behind him at the foot of the stairs.

Roland was on the step with two of his Treasury clerks and a paper in his hand.

His hair was wet and his cravat was crooked, and I thought he had been drinking since the supper.

"I have come for my wife," he said. "To settle this like gentlemen."

"Your wife is in bed, sir," said my father.

"Then she can sign in the morning." Roland held up the paper. "A short statement. She admits she is barren and that she has been unfaithful. The marriage is annulled with no return of dowry and no scandal."

I came down the last stair.

"Unfaithful?" I said.

"A small lie," said Roland. "It costs you nothing. The physician has agreed to witness it."

"I have been faithful to you for four years," I said. "I have sat beside you at every supper where you looked at your brother's wife."

My father went very still.

Roland's mouth opened and shut.

"You are making a scene," he said.

"You made one in front of forty people. I am only repeating it in front of my father."

Roland's face went red.

He stepped forward, and my father moved into the doorway.

"I will not sign it," I said. "Not tomorrow, not ever. If you want this marriage undone, you will do it in front of a court, with my father's note on the table."

Roland looked at me for a long moment.

I saw him decide something, and I did not know what.

"Then I will have to ask your father to answer for something else," he said.

He turned on his heel, and his clerks followed him into the rain.

My father shut the door and leaned his back against it.

"What was that?" he asked quietly.

"I do not know," I said.

I slept in my old bed that night, in the room with the blue curtains, and I did not sleep much.

Just before dawn I heard boots on the gravel, many boots, and a fist on the door that did not stop.

My father was already in his coat when I reached the stairs.

Four constables stood on the step, and a magistrate's clerk was reading from a paper.

"Josiah Tindall, shipowner, you are charged on the oath of Mr. Roland Barrington with using false weights on the Customs Quay."

"That is a lie," I said.

The clerk did not look up.

"You will come with us, sir," he said.

They took my father out into the grey morning in front of the neighbours, and I stood in the doorway and watched them put him in the cart.

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