“Did you now?” The vicar glanced nervously behind him, down the passage.
“You are crushing your hat, sir,” Mary noted.
And so he was. Mr. Archer was wringing his hat as tightly as if it had been soaked all night in a washtub. His face glowed like a beacon, and a sprinkling of sweat dotted his forehead.
A heavy woman, nearly twice the weight of the vicar, shuffled up the passage toward them. “I’m coming. I’m coming, my dear.”
Rogan swept her with a curious gaze.
When the woman reached the vicar, she gave him a nudge. “Thank you for waiting for me.” She gave Rogan an appreciative glance but paid no attention to Mary. “Won’t you introduce me to your friend, Archie?”
The vicar could not quite hide the apprehension in his eyes. “Your Grace, Your Grace,” he nodded his head to both Rogan and Mary, “may I present my sister, Heloise.”
“Oh, that’s rich,” the woman chuckled. “Yes, I am his sister.” The neckline of her frock was fashioned daringly low and barely covered her breasts. Hardly appropriate for a vicar’s sister.
Rogan felt Mary’s hand on his shoulder, and he turned to see her eyes clouded with suspicion. “Sister?” she mouthed.
No, Rogan didn’t believe it either. But Mr. Archer’s true reason for traveling to Scotland was not his concern. “Dear sir, may we join you in the dining room? We urgently need to speak with you.”
The vicar grew visibly more agitated. “Oh, yes, well…we are in a dreadful hurry.”
“Sir, a great wrong has been done.” It was then that Rogan noticed the vicar’s unseemly garb. His coat was rich-blue kerseymere, and the waistcoat beneath, why, he’d be deuced if it wasn’t constructed of fine jonquil yellow silk embroidered with a line of hearts and diamonds.
Hardly the somber attire of a man of the Church of England.
Rogan drew his eyebrows close and studied Mr. Archer.
The vicar managed a tremulous smile. He glanced across at Mary, as if searching for a respite from Rogan’s concentrated notice. “Dear me, Your Grace, have you been injured on the journey?”
“Injured?” Mary repeated.
“He means your chin, Sweeting. It’s all scraped up and hot.” The vicar’s sister tapped her own with the tip of her index finger. Then she grinned and looked at Mr. Archer. “No, she hasn’t been hurt, dear brother.” She turned her notice back to Mary. “Have you, Your Grace?”
Mary looked mortified.
Rogan stepped between her and the offending woman. “Mr. Archer,” he said more sternly than he intended, “I will speak with you.”
The vicar expelled a loud sigh. He dropped his hat to the wood plank floor and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes and began to groan.
“Mr. Archer.”
“Very well, I knew this would happen. I did.” He lowered his hands and scooped his rumpled felt hat from the floor. “Come with me. I have everything in my case.” He turned and started back down the passage.
Rogan looked at the woman, who started off instead in the direction of the staircase.
“Your business doesn’t concern me,” she called back to them. “I am famished and can smell the rashers and buttered toast from here.”
“This way, Your Grace,” the vicar said resignedly as he gestured to the door at the end of the passage. “I know what you’ve come for.”
Rogan slipped his arm protectively around Mary’s waist and led her to the vicar’s chamber.
When they entered through the open door, Mr. Archer was rummaging through a leather case. He withdrew a sheet of paper and handed it to Rogan.
“Here’s the license. I’d burn that if I were you.” He returned to the case and extracted a leather volume from it.
Muttering to himself all the while, Mr. Archer flipped through the lined and numbered pages until he found the one containing their entry. He took a small knife to the book and made to cut the page from the register.
“You can’t do that,” Mary gasped. “Destruction of a register is punishable by death!”
“Ah, learned woman.” Mr. Archer delivered the vellum page to Rogan. “And yes, you are correct. Had this been an actual register of a license of marriage, I could have been hanged.” He snapped the book in his hand closed. “But as it is, it’s only my household accounts register.”
“I-I do not understand.” Mary turned and searched Rogan’s eyes for an answer.
As Rogan fought to retain his composure and tamp down his raging urge to tear Mr. Archer limb from limb, he told Mary the insane truth of the matter. “It seems our Mr. Archer here is not truly a vicar.”
“Then we”-Mary’s voice broke almost painfully-“…we were never married.”
Rogan’s gaze shot to her eyes the moment he heard the regret and pain she had not been able to strain from her words.
She should have been happy, jubilant, joyous that she and Rogan had not been wed after all. But she felt none of these things.
Instead, she felt hollow. Tears trembled on her lashes. “I-I need to sit down.”
Rogan helped her to the plank chair near the doorway. Then he turned on Mr. Archer. “How did this happen? Who arranged for this?”
He grabbed the false vicar by the throat and slammed him against the wall. “Tell me now.”
Mr. Archer’s eyes bulged in their sockets, and a smothered whimper burst from his open mouth.
“Rogan, no!” Mary cried. “Please, let him speak.”
Rogan yanked back his hand as quickly as if he’d been burned.
Hastening his hands to his throat, Mr. Archer slid down the wall and sat on the floor, legs spread. “I-I told Lotharian it was madness. But he was sure it would w-work.” He looked across the room at Mary then. “And, judging by the lady’s pink chin, well, he might have been right.”
Rogan took a step forward. “What do you mean? You’d best explain yourself, Archer.”
The duke was a formidable man, but seething with barely-restrained anger, as he was now, he was clearly terrifying the man trembling on the floor.
“I owed Lotharian a good deal of money. C-couldn’t pay him off. So when he approached me at the fete with a proposition that would wipe my slate, well, I could not refuse.”
“What was his proposition?” Rogan’s face was a scowling mask of rage. “What was it?”
“He needed someone to pose as a vicar. To perform a false wedding…if everything went as planned. He knew I could do it. I had studied at my uncle’s side-he was a clergyman-as a young man, until…well, until my true nature exposed itself. I lost some parish tithings…to my weakness, gambling. Well that was the end of my training, such that it was.”
Mary came to her feet and came to stand beside Rogan. She slipped her hand around his balled fist and caressed it, easing the tension he held there until he relaxed his fingers and interlaced them with hers. “Why did Lotharian wish to arrange this false wedding? What possible reason could he have?”
“You mustn’t know Lotharian well.” Archer exhaled. “He is a gambler of the first rank. He cannot lose. He can read a person so well that he can predict his actions in any given situation. And he predicted yours, Miss Royle, as well as yours, Your Grace.”
“What was his prediction?” Rogan’s hand tightened around Mary’s.
“He knew you wore blinders. You were so damned angry with each other that you could not imagine the possibility that your perceptions of one another were completely wrong. That your passionate dislike of each other masked true passion itself. That you were meant to be together.”
Mary felt heat rising into her cheeks. She could not look up at Rogan, though she was longing to know if he felt as she did.
Lotharian had been right. Wicked man that he evidently was, he’d guessed correctly.
“But why the wedding? By Lotharian’s measure of our natures, Miss Royle and I would have realized our so-called passion eventually.”