Chapter 36

“Ican’t believe what I’m seeing,” Lady Reeves said. Her voice was a low growl. “I thought, when I met you, that you were a different kind of lady, Isabella.”

“Refer to the Duchess with respect,” Arthur barked.

But Isabella shook her head. “She doesn’t have to,” she said, dismounting from the horse and coming up to stand alongside her husband. “I don’t care what she calls me, Arthur. It doesn’t make any difference now. It doesn’t change the fact that she sent a man in the night to drag me out of my bed. Why would I care if she referred to me with my title or not? She’s already shown that she has no respect for me or for you either. There’s nothing she can do now to make me believe otherwise.”

“I don’t have any respect for you,” Lady Reeves agreed. “When I met you at the ball, you seemed like a lady who understood the world isn’t fair. You seemed willing to stand up to your father. I thought you might be someone more like myself.”

“You thought I might be like you?” Isabella was shocked. “I could never be anything like you, and it shocks me that you could think it, Lady Reeves. You sent a man to my house to kill me!”

“Oh, do be sensible,” Lady Reeves said. “If that man had been there to kill you, you would be dead! I didn’t send him to kill you, I sent him to take you away. I would have had you brought back to my house.”

“What did you want me there for?”

“A lady after my own mind? I thought perhaps I had finally found someone I could associate with—someone worth knowing,” Lady Reeves said. “I thought perhaps I’d met someone who would understand what I meant when I said that all gentlemen are the same! You seemed as if that was something you understood, based on the way I saw you respond to your father.”

“But all gentlemen aren’t the same,” Isabella replied. “You saw me struggle to respect my father because he has never shown me any kindness. It’s different with my husband. I know that he cares for me and desires my happiness—he has my best interests at heart. That’s why I feel differently about him.”

“You’re fooling yourself,” Lady Reeves said, laughing unkindly. “Do you really think he would take your needs and desires into consideration when push came to shove? Do you think that he would give up anything he wanted in favor of taking care of you?”

“I don’t have to tell you the answer to that question,” Isabella said with a smile. “What I believe about my husband and the kind of man he is—that’s my business. I don’t need to justify my feelings to you.”

“Just look at what he’s done today!” Lady Reeves cried. “This whole situation—he’s set me up, he’s tricked me, and he’s done it easily because that’s what men love best. They love to trick people.”

“You killed his parents.” The smile dropped from Isabella’s face. “I don’t think you can fairly say that he set you up just because he thrives on tricking people. This is a very different situation, and if you have a shred of honesty in you, you’ll admit that. But also, I don’t care whether you admit it or not because I know the truth of the matter. And so does he. We don’t need you to understand.”

“You entrapped my father,” Arthur said. “You ensnared him in a web of deception and led him to his death.”

“No,” Lady Reeves argued. “Your father toyed with me. I told you this already. My feelings for him were genuine. But when I returned to him, after the night we spent together, he treated me like nothing and sent me away. He behaved as though I didn’t matter to him at all. Anyone would have been hurt. Anyone would have wanted to do what I did, but most people wouldn’t have had the courage.”

“Don’t ask me to believe you were only following your heart,” Arthur said. “I know the truth. You’re trying to do the same thing to my wife’s father even now. This is a pattern with you. You entrap men. You lead them astray, and then you force them to pay you money for your silence.”

“But it wasn’t that way with your father,” Lady Reeves responded. “He was someone who truly mattered. I thought that he might feel the same way for me as I did for him, but of course, it was only the alcohol. He regretted our time together, and he made sure I knew that.” She smiled. “Of course, he had no idea how much he would live to regret it. Not until he tasted the poison on his lips.”

Isabella felt Arthur grow tense beside her. She spoke quickly. They needed more answers, and they needed this to be stalled until the constables could arrive. “Why did you continue to do this if it was personal?” she asked. “If it was about seeking revenge on the one man who you felt had wronged you, why do you continue to entrap men now?”

“Why shouldn’t I?” Lady Reeves asked. “Why shouldn’t I do the very same things to men that they do to women? Trick, lie, deceive—get what I want from a situation and then leave their lives in shambles? If men can do it, why can’t I do it?”

“Men shouldn’t do it,” Arthur said quietly. “And you’re wrong when you say that all men do.”

“Well, enough of them do that I don’t care to differentiate,” Lady Reeves snapped. “In my opinion, they deserve whatever they get at my hands. If you were any different, you would have put me from your mind and remained at home with your wife, the way a loving husband should.”

“I don’t need advice on how to be a good husband from you,” Arthur said. “I can manage it on my own. What I need from you is for you to confess all the things you just finished saying to me—but this time, in front of the constables. I need you to own up to the things you’ve been doing.”

“As though I would,” Lady Reeves sneered.

“It’s too late,” Arthur said. “They’re already on their way.”

“And why would I confess anything?”

“You haven’t behaved like an innocent person, Lady Reeves. Running from me, always hiding, meeting with me in an abandoned house. And I know that my wife’s father will be more than willing to give testimony against you as well—to explain all the things you did to try to rope him in. And then there is Miss Felicity, who was injured by the man you sent to capture the Duchess. The evidence against you is too powerful now, and it won’t matter that you don’t wish to confess what you’ve done. The constables will believe what I tell them no matter what you say. It’s for your own sake that I ask you to be honest. If you tell the truth about who you are and what you’ve done, there’s a chance you might be shown mercy. But if you resist what’s coming, that won’t happen.”

Lady Reeves was quiet for a moment.

When she spoke again, it was directly to Isabella. “I would expect nothing other than this from a man,” she said, her voice cold. “But how could you go along with it?”

“After what you did to my sister?” Isabella felt a spike of anger at the thought of Felicity lying on the floor. “Your man could have killed her, and you expect me to take your side?”

“I expect you to take your own side. Of course, I should know better by now. No lady ever takes her own side. Just look at your duke’s mother! Look what she did to herself.”

“What does that mean?” Arthur demanded. Feeling his sudden burst of wild rage, Felicity put a hand on his arm in an attempt to calm him, but he shook her off. “Why would you speak of my mother? She never did anything to you, and you killed her anyway. You killed her for nothing at all. Don’t speak of her to me after having done that.”

“I killed her because she was a traitor,” Lady Reeves corrected. “Because she took your father’s side. Even when she knew what he had done—I sent her a letter when your father refused me—even then, she was loyal to him, and she stayed with him. She could have punished him. But men never face any consequences, and the women who stand beside them are just as guilty. They must be opposed; they must be taken down.”

“Some men are wicked,” Isabella said. “Some men deserve to pay a price. My father was never good to me, and I never could respect the way my half-sister supported everything he did. I wouldn’t have killed him for it—or her—but I did remove myself from their lives for that reason. That’s a suitable consequence for those actions.”

“And yet here you are, cozied up to another man, having learned nothing.”

“Because my husband is nothing like my father,” Isabella explained. “He’s kind, and he cares for me. He may be a man, but he’s a good one, and I reward kindness with kindness. I’m not going to avoid all men forever because some of them are bad. I’m certainly not going to get in the habit of punishing all of them.”

“I can’t believe I thought you were like me,” Lady Reeves growled.

“I can’t believe you did either,” Isabella said frankly. “I could never be like you. I would never want to be.”

Arthur’s arm settled around her shoulders as they heard the sound of approaching horses. A moment later, two constables appeared.

“What’s the meaning of all this?” one of them asked. “Your Grace—what’s happened here?”

Isabella allowed herself to step back as Arthur told the constables the whole story. Lady Reeves would be taken away. She wouldn’t be permitted to harm anyone else. This moment should feel nothing but good.

But Isabella couldn’t help feeling a little bit of sympathy for the lady in front of her.

There was no excusing the things she had done, of course. Isabella wouldn’t even try to make excuses for her. But at the same time, she recognized someone who had been hurt by the world, just as she herself had. Lady Reeves had learned by experience that men could not be trusted. Isabella had learned the same lesson at the hands of her father. He had taught her that gentlemen would not necessarily protect her—that they might even go out of their way to make her life harder.

And yet, she had been able to overcome that lesson. She had been able to trust Arthur—against all odds, even when Arthur had made it difficult for her to trust him. The fact that the two of them were together now, as closely bonded as they were, had a lot to do with the fact that he had worked hard to move beyond his personal struggles and open himself up to her. But Isabella knew that she deserved to give herself credit as well for what she had been able to achieve. She had managed to let go of the mistrust that had defined her when she had lived with her father. She had become a different person—someone she was proud to be.

And she was lucky. If she had gotten stuck in Lady Reeves’ mindset, her life might have gone much more unfortunately. She knew she could never have murdered anyone—she didn’t have that in her—but looking at the sad, angry woman before her made her wonder how much of this could have been her fate.

She leaned close to Arthur, grateful that the two of them had found a way to bring out the best in one another.