The Counterfeit Vows

For three years I have been the Countess of Ashcombe in a forged parish register, the lady of a house that calls me Miss Hollybrook, the wife of a man who pays my pin-money through his steward and his evenings through his cousin.

I am three months gone with his children. He does not know there are two of them. He does not know the marriage line that bears our signatures was bought from a frightened curate for twenty pounds and his own anxious cowardice. He does not know that I have been counting — the nights I helped him up the back stairs, the quarters my pin-money came marked Miss, the months until a trust his grandfather drew up for my mother becomes mine if I bring two children of his blood into the world.

He thinks today, at the long table beneath his ancestors, I will weep and let him deny the pregnancy to save his Marble Earl reputation.

He has been wrong about me for three years. I have only let him be wrong for two and three quarters.