The Enigmatic Rake

‘No—nothing of that nature. She is indeed a widow. Her husband has been dead some five or six years now. A naval captain, killed in action.’

‘Wait a minute!’ Lord Faringdon fixed his sister with a fierce stare. ‘Baxendale. Baxendale, did you say? Edward Baxendale? Surely that was the name of the man who laid a claim against the Faringdon estates in the name of his sister—or his wife, as it turned out. I was in Paris so did not know the full gist of it, but I am aware that it rattled Lady Beatrice. She wrote to inform me of it, without one word of censure in the whole letter of my own errant behaviour, which was a miracle in itself. So—was that the name?’

‘Yes—yes, it was. Sarah is sister to Sir Edward Baxendale.’ Accepting the inevitability of it, she sat back in her chair and prepared to be communicative. Sarah would not approve, but her brother, as she knew, could be like a terrier with a rat. ‘It seems that I must tell you the whole story.’

‘I think you must.’ Joshua pushed to his feet, to limp across to the sideboard to pour two glasses of claret, handing one to Judith. ‘This may take some time.’

‘Yes. It is quite complicated.’ So she took a strengthening sip and told him. How Edward Baxendale had devised and executed a plot to present his own wife Octavia, masquerading as his sister, as the legitimate wife of Henry and Nicholas Faringdon’s eldest brother Thomas, who had died in a tragic accident. Thus Octavia would have a claim on the Faringdon estate and her child, Thomas’s son as she claimed, would be the Marquis of Burford. And how Sarah, under severe pressure from her brother, had allowed her son to be used in the charade as the son of Octavia and Thomas Faringdon and had herself taken on the role of nursemaid to the child. Such detail of which Joshua had been unaware.