Ten years later
Spencer Halifax, Earl of Warren, looked at the jailer. The man was built like a bull—ashort bull—and appeared to be missing at least three fairly important teeth.
“You are certain?” Spencer asked. He tried to peer again into the dimness of the tiny ring of cells, but it was no use. It was too dark, and the building was too windowless, and the cells were entirely too fetid. “You’re certain she’s in there?”
“Oh, aye, she’s in there.” The jailer spat directly on the floor. “A hellish vixen, she is. She’s been here eighteen hours, and the only moment of peace I’ve had is when I went to piss. Screeching and caterwauling to wake the dead and—”
The jailer paused and looked up at Spencer. It was several inches up, and his loutish form seemed to quail a bit, deflating under Spencer’s gaze. He did not, perhaps, often encounter men who could outmatch him in a fight without breaking a sweat.
“Who did you say she was to you?” the jailer asked.
“I didn’t.”
Spencer thought again of the letter he’d received from his solicitor. Of the hours he’d spent on the coach staring in consternation at the fair copy of the ten-year-old marriage record.
Winifred Halifax.
Mrs. Spencer Halifax.
“I believe,” he said, “that the woman you have incarcerated in this hellhole is my wife.”
The jailer choked. “Ah—begging your pardon, sir, but surely—surely—”
The man looked up into Spencer’s face and appeared to think the better of what he was about to say.
“Take me to her,” Spencer instructed, and the jailer backed nervously away.
As he followed the jailer deeper into the dank interior, Spencer tried to gather his wits.
Two months ago, his best friend and solicitor, Henry Mortimer, had brought to him a newspaper clipping. A woman calling herself Mrs. Spencer Halifax had come to Henry’s attention after the startling commercial success of her naturally dyed woolen embroidery floss.
Mrs. Halifax’s Handmade Thread, the advertisement read.Rich lustrous embroidery for les femmes à la pointe du raffinement—for the first time available on English shores.
The implication that Mrs. Halifax had just sailed in from Paris with boxes of high-grade woolen yarn struck Spencer as rather amusing. He doubted there was a Mrs. Halifax at all—certainly not the seductive golden-haired Aphrodite in heavily embroidered evening wear who graced the advertisements.
Henry had found it all somewhat less funny. “Does it not trouble you that the woman is parlaying your name for attention?”
“She’s not calling herself the Countess of Warren, is she?”
Henry had looked put out. “Of course not—she could be jailed for that. But I suspect she looked you up in Debrett’s and used your name for her own notoriety.”
“We have plenty to go around.” Between their wealth, their connection to one of the royal dukes, and his twin sisters’ flamboyant talent for getting themselves into scrapes, the Halifax name was not precisely what it had been when Spencer’s father—the fourth earl—had been alive.
But that fact gave Spencer a hot, uncomfortable feeling in his chest, so he tried not to think about it.
Henry had compressed his lips. “Be that as it may, I question her motives.”
Spencer had rubbed his temples, wondered briefly if at twenty-eight he could be old enough to need spectacles, and told Henry to look into Mrs. Spencer Halifax and her woolen thread if it pleased him to do so.
Henry, who was both diligent and clever, had tracked down Mrs. Halifax’s advertisement printer, and from there her man of business. Spencer had been startled to discover that she was real and living in a place called Llanreithan, which was decidedly not in France but rather in
