The Pretender by Jaclyn Reding Page B

partake?”
    “Oh, only two or three . . .” Elizabeth answered.
    “Seven,” Isabella corrected.
    “Seven . . . seven what? Sips?”
    “Drams,” answered Isabella.
    “Drams! Good God in heaven, Elizabeth, ’tis enough to lay a grown man flat . . . which is, obviously, precisely what it did to you, as well, it would seem, as the bloody Scot.”
    He said those words—“bloody Scot”—as if they tasted unpleasant.
    “So you now see, Father,” Isabella said, “why having Elizabeth and Mr. MacKinnon wed was the only solution.”
    The duke sighed. “In the face of those circumstances, Isabella, I believe you did the only thing you could have thought to do. I myself would have had the man strung up from the nearest gibbet, but you’re a lady and such thoughts do not occur to you. There you have it. The question now is what to do about it.”
    “I’ve thought about that, Father,” Elizabeth said. “And I think I have come up with a sensible resolution, one that will solve all the problems at once.”
    “Oh, you have, have you?”
    “Indeed. We can have the marriage annulled.”
    “Annulled?” The duke was yelling again. “Have you lost your mind?”
    “Why is that so unthinkable? Marriages have beenannulled before. I’m not even certain we actually are married. That ‘parson’ was the inn’s groomsman.”
    “You were in Scotland?” asked the duke.
    “Yes.”
    “There were witnesses to this agreement?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then you are indeed as married as if the Archbishop of Canterbury had performed the ceremony himself.”
    She knew it wasn’t possible, but Caroline would have sworn she could hear Elizabeth frown.
    “Well, if it is that effortless for someone to get married, then it must be just as effortless to get unmarried. So we’ll do just that, agree not to be married and be done with it. You all can stand as witnesses. Then Mr. MacKinnon can return to his island and I can stay here and we can forget any of this ever happened.” She paused, then added, “Of course, under the circumstances, Lord Purfoyle wouldn’t likely wish to continue his suit.”
    “Oh, and that would just devastate you, wouldn’t it?” The duke chuckled, but it was far from a happy sound. “I always knew you were a shrewd one, but even I couldn’t have thought you’d come up with such an elaborate plan to ensure you’d never have to get married. At least to a proper husband, that is.”
    “You think I planned this?” Her outrage sounded genuine.
    “But Father,” said Isabella, “I am the one who insisted they get married.”
    “Then you were in on it, too.”
    “Alaric!”
    “I wouldn’t doubt it, Margaret. I wouldn’t doubt that all my daughters are scheming against me. Isabellaprobably knew all along about those ridiculous articles she was writing for that damnable magazine, too.”
    “It wasn’t my place to tell you, Father.”
    “Ha! You see?”
    “Bella,” Elizabeth cut in, “you mean it wasn’t you? I thought you had to be the one who told Father . . .”
    “It was Mrs. Burnaby who told me.”
    “The housekeeper?” Elizabeth and Isabella answered in unison.
    “Yes, only after one of the maids found a sheet of foolscap with one of those articles written on it when she was cleaning. You should have been a little more careful in disposing of your early drafts. They brought it to me and I recognized your handwriting, Elizabeth.”
    As they continued talking, Caroline, still hunched inside the urn, tried desperately to make sense of all she’d just heard so she could be sure to have the details right when she repeated it all for Mattie and Katie later on.
    First, Father had sent Bess off with Bella to marry some man named Lord Purfoyle, but Bess and Bella had returned home with that handsome Scotsman, Douglas Dubh MacKinnon, whom Bess had married instead after she drank some terrible thing called whisky or uisge-beatha and woke up with him in her bed. But what was wrong with