“It’s complicated,” he said.

“No more than it is for any romance novelist, surely. Most ladies who write novels do so using a pen name. I wouldn’t think it was any different with a gentleman. Certainly not one with your reputation. But that isn’t what I asked.” She held his gaze. “I asked why you didn’t tell me.”

He exhaled a heavy breath. “I was going to tell you.”

She looked doubtful.

“It’s the truth.” This was to have been his concession. The secret he gave up to her in order to make something normal of their marriage. He’d spent most of the railway journey back from York determining how best to explain it to her.

Not that any of that mattered now.

“Why didn’t you?” she asked. “You might have done so the day we married. We were talking about your novels on the train. You could have told me easily.”

“There’s nothing easy about it,” he said. “My writing is personal to me. Something private that’s mine alone.” He moved to his desk, gathering up the rest of his manuscript and returning it to the drawer. He slammed the drawer shut. “I’ve been doing it since I was a lad. It’s not anything I’ve ever wished to share with anyone.”

“I see.”

He turned back to her. “You don’t. I can tell by your face. You’re hurt.”

“Not hurt, no, but . . . I wish you hadn’t let me run on giving my opinions about your books as if we were talking about a stranger. When I think of all I said—”

“I told you. I value your opinions.”

“I would that you’d valued my confidence a little more,” she said. “That you’d trusted me.”

He leaned back against his desk, half sitting on the edge of it. He regarded her with a frown, uncertain of what he could say to make things right. In real life, he was rarely as eloquent as the heroes in his novels. The more deeply he felt something, the less he could articulate it. With Julia, he’d increasingly found himself reduced to grunts and growls.

“Does anyone else know?” she asked.

“No one,” he said.

“Mr. Bloxham must. It’s why you were at his shop that day, wasn’t it? To discuss something about your novels?”

“It was.” He’d managed to get fifty pounds out of the man in unpaid royalties for The Fire Opal. “But you’re wrong. He doesn’t know they’re my books. To him, I’m merely the author’s proxy.”

Julia’s expression of doubt lingered. “He doesn’t know you’re James Marshland?”

Jasper shook his head. “When he bought my first book, we corresponded by post. It was the same with my subsequent novels. I only visited him in person after I returned from the war.”

He’d had no choice. There had been no other way to arrange for payment on his previous works, or to negotiate sales of future ones.

Julia came to stand in front of him. Her full skirts bowed against his legs. “Are you ashamed of the stories you write?”