Jilting the Duke (24 page)

“Yes, it is only fair.” Her voice sounded far away, her face turned to the carriage window, looking out in the dark.

“Before you left, we agreed it wasn't necessary to announce our engagement, that I could wait for you because my uncle wouldn't force me to marry against my will. My aunt was furious that you had left without a declaration and even more adamant I should marry soon. Phineas brought a factory owner from Manchester—a Mr. Mortimer—to visit. He was fifty or older, with wooden teeth, and the smell of liquor on his breath. I thought if I avoided him, he would turn his attentions to some more amenable girl, but my aunt encouraged him over my objections. He tried more than once to force a kiss or an embrace. So when I found he would be at the festival ball, I determined to remain home, even though the servants all had permission to attend. My aunt was eager to leave me behind.”

Sophia paused, lost in her memory, and Aidan waited until she picked up the thread of her story once more.

“Tom had planned to leave the next day. When he found I'd stayed at home, he sought out my aunt to send me his farewell. Instead, he overheard my aunt giving Mortimer instructions on how to gain me as a bride that very night. Annabella had left the conservatory doors open and given him directions to my room. She even gave him a key in case I'd locked my door, saying I had been playing coy to win his affections. It would be best, she said, if we were ‘discovered' in my bedroom. She told Mortimer to use whatever encouragement he thought necessary, and Mortimer called for his horse.”

“Tom would have been horrified.”

“He was. He had no time to find my uncle, but his horse had already been called, and he knew the shortcut through the fields. Even so, he had only minutes before Mortimer would arrive. Tom slipped through the open conservatory door and followed my aunt's directions to my room. Tom had already realized that, without servants in the house, he might be able to thwart my aunt's plan only by offering to marry me himself. But he didn't tell me that part. Instead, he told me to run to the mews and take his horse to Annie's; I grabbed a cloak and ran to the front hall. But it was too late; we could hear Mortimer in the conservatory. We had just enough time to slip into the drawing room before he entered the main hall and took the stairs to my room. Unlocking the front hall door was too risky, so we thought to escape through the open conservatory door. But Mortimer had left his footman standing guard on the path. We could hear Mortimer return to the main floor, opening door after door looking for me. And Tom told me I had to marry him, that there was no way I wouldn't be ruined, and I couldn't risk that Mortimer would still want to marry me. Tom promised to find you before the wedding and to help us run away, you and I. He said he wouldn't mind my jilting him for you. We could hear Mortimer drawing closer and closer. I thought of his clammy hands and his putrid breath, then I looked at Tom's kind face, and I agreed.”

“Then your aunt and uncle arrived home.”

“Not quite. Tom saw the door to the conservatory opening and pulled me into an embrace that must have looked convincing. Mortimer pulled us apart, flung his gloves in Tom's face, and challenged him to a duel.
That's
when my aunt and uncle returned home, to Mortimer decrying Tom as a rake and a ruiner of young women.”

“How did Mortimer explain his presence?”

“He had followed Tom, seen him let himself into the house. My aunt, not wishing to be discovered, railed that I was a light-skirt ruined by lust. My uncle looked distressed. But Tom declared that he was the happiest of men because I had agreed to be his bride. Since I was wearing my cloak, we appeared to be eloping.”

“What did your uncle do?”

“He asked me if Tom was telling the truth, and I said yes. Then he embraced us, gave us his blessing. He thanked Mortimer for his concern, told him there was no cause for a duel since Tom was to be his ward's husband, and escorted Mortimer to the door. My uncle told Tom to meet him in the morning to discuss terms and to let himself out the way he had come in. Then he took my aunt's arm and escorted her from the room.”

“What happened then?” Aidan kept his voice softly encouraging, just enough to prompt the story to continue. He'd seen men like this in the war, telling of the loss of a battle or a friend, drifting to a place where they relived the memories as they told them. For years, he'd wanted her confession, and this might be the only time he would hear it.

“Tom and I went to the drawing room to plan. We wrote letters to your father, hoping to find you. The next morning Tom and my uncle agreed on terms; my settlement was more than generous. Tom stayed until the end of the week, convincing people that ours was a love match: he met me after church with flowers; he bought me ribbons in the village; he announced to all that he was the luckiest man alive. It was a fairy tale: the orphan ward beloved by the rich lord of a local estate.”

“Why did Tom leave at the end of the week? Not on business, I assume.”

“No, he went to London for a special license and to search for you. But he could find no news.” Her words if anything sounded more rote. “I realized that though we had loved each other, it wasn't meant to be.”

Aidan felt a pang of conscience. Tom hadn't found him because he hadn't wanted to be found. But he would make it up to her. “It was meant to be. Your aunt interfered where she shouldn't have.”

“Had I realized her intentions, I wouldn't have stayed home that night.... But I didn't know, and then it was too late.” She began to cry, and he pulled her head to his shoulder and held her . . . as he had when they had hidden from his brother.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Back at Tom's manor house, Aidan escorted an emotionally exhausted Sophia to her room, then, with a gentle embrace, took his leave. He had much to consider after Annabella's revelations at the dinner table and Sophia's subsequent confessions. He carried a glass of claret to a chair near a lamp in his room. When he'd returned from the attic, hot with passion and anticipating the beginning of their affair, he'd hidden the packet of Tom's papers. Retrieving them, he laid them on the table next to a folded packet made of well-worn oilcloth.

At first he'd wished to be present when Sophia experienced emotional moments, like going through her husband's things, in order to spark a liaison. He'd intended to use her unspent passion for him and any unresolved feelings for her husband to his advantage. He had cared little how distasteful his plan might be, for he had not planned to build a relationship built on real attachment.

But somehow over the last weeks, his revenge had lost focus. Over the years, having no interaction with Sophia, he had found it easy to write the story of their past as he wished. In it, just as his father had predicted, Sophia was a fortune-hunting orphan, who used her beauty and wit to steal his heart, then abandoned him when another richer lord expressed his interest. Aidan had ignored anything that contradicted the story he'd created.

But now he began to see the holes in his narrative. If she had been a fortune hunter, surely she would have wished to keep her engagement to a poor soldier a secret, leaving her possibilities open for another better match. But he had been the one who wished to keep quiet, postponing the conflict with his father until after he'd received his annuity.

Even more striking, somehow in his anger, Aidan had forgotten the depth of her intelligence and the tenderness of her heart. He'd never imagined love might have played a part in her marriage. Then, to see her still so affected by Tom's loss. To watch her draw herself together and muster the strength to look him in the eye and pretend she was unmoved . . . It had forced Aidan to reconsider their youthful liaison. Perhaps what he had seen as mutual passion had been no more than an indiscretion for her. She had been an innocent, of that he was certain, and he suddenly had to consider she might not have been fully aware of the route their passion would take. But then they had both been innocents.

All these years he had thought himself foolish to have trusted her, to have believed she could be faithful despite his absence. He unfolded the oilcloth. Inside lay the wooden wafer on which Sophia had sketched herself in pen and ink. Her face was little damaged by time, though the wafer's edges had smoothed to a fine finish. He'd carried her portrait with him through the wars, unable to leave it at home, unable to let it go. In the hidden pocket in the lining of his boots, she'd gone everywhere with him. He'd unwrapped her portrait hundreds of times over the years, to remind himself of her faithlessness. But now, he looked at the portrait anew. He saw once more the generosity of her smile, the warmth of her eyes.

Perhaps he had been foolish not to have trusted her more, the woman he believed understood his sense of duty. Even if he hadn't trusted Sophia, why hadn't he trusted Tom, a man he'd known would never betray him?

He knew the answer: Aaron. The eldest son, the bully. Even without being duke, Aaron had almost run the estate into the ground. When Aaron died, as far as Aidan knew, only their father had grieved. Judith and Benjamin had each protected their younger brothers in their own way, but Aidan had been the one who openly stood up to Aaron and the one most frequently punished for it. Aaron had taught Aidan that trust was foolish and that attachment only led to pain. A favorite fishing pole, a bird's nest filled with eggs, an affectionate barn cat, nothing was safe if Aaron wanted it or wanted to destroy it.

Their father had been a negligent accomplice in Aaron's terrors. Married twice, he had cared little for the women who bore his children, and more for the wealth or power they brought to the union. In that way he was a man of his generation and class, and the women he married had no expectations he would be otherwise. And perhaps Aidan's upbringing had made it easier to believe that any man of greater fortune or position would just as easily suit Sophia's fancy, that she would jilt him the first chance she got if the money and the title were better.

And yet, save for marrying Tom, Sophia had never deceived him. If he had read her letter, rather than torn it unopened into small bits and watched them sink into the bay, perhaps he would have saved himself the torment of the last decade.

He turned to the packet, ten letters in Italian. Would these prove or disprove Sophia's story or would they be about something else entirely? All he knew was that Tom had hidden them where only he or Aidan could find them.

The letters were in chronological order, the earliest dating back some eleven years. He looked over them as a group first. Only two were in Tom's hand, and both of those late in the correspondence. The others were in the same ornate Italian script. Of those only the first—a brief but effusive thanks for a basket of food, medicines, and money—was addressed to “your lordship.” The next three letters offered no salutation, but they indicated an intimacy between the Italian letter writer—who signed only with the initials
FB
—and the letter's recipient. Aidan skimmed them quickly: sorrow at their separation; despair at the idea of marriage to another; some warm passages in which the writer anticipated a joyful and happy reunion; requests to remember his obligations to her; thanks for various presents, jewels, dresses; her delight at his gift of a small house at the edge of the city with a view of the sea. Aidan stopped reading, stunned. Tom had had a mistress almost from the moment they arrived in Naples. It was no different from the behavior of other men of his class, but Aidan had thought Tom better than other men.

He felt angry on Sophia's behalf. Tom had bought his mistress jewels, but Sophia had none. Tom had bought his mistress dresses, dozens every year, but Aidan had seen Sophia's wardrobe, and unless she had left the majority of her finery in Italy, she owned few gowns suitable to her rank.

Had Tom neglected his wife so obviously—and had Sophia known? He thought of her tearful moment holding Tom's jacket. No, she couldn't have known. Or had she loved her husband only to find he cared little for her? He thought again of Tom's letter instituting the guardianship; his old friend offered more concern for his son than for his widow. Had Tom regretted marrying Sophia? Did he find his unselfish act had come at too great a cost?

Once more Aidan could see Tom's hand reaching out to him from beyond the grave. Yet he still had no idea how to appease his old friend's spirit.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

In the morning, a box arrived by footman from her uncle. Sophia opened it to find a series of almanacs, one for each year from 1774 to 1798, and all filled with her mother's fine, precise hand, along with a small set of books tied in twine. On top was a note, sealed with her uncle's signet. She opened it carefully, not tearing the paper under the wax seal:

It was too much, she thought. All the things that had come to light in the last day: that her uncle hadn't sanctioned Annabella's behavior; that he had valued her mother. Perhaps if Sophia had known, she could have confided in him.

Aidan was completing some tasks Seth had left him, giving her several hours to herself. She took the box and retreated to the depths of a hedged maze where a giant copper merman, green from oxidation, rose in the middle of a sunken pond.

She began at the beginning. The first volumes were more exercise books than diaries, and Constance recorded her responses to and observations of her schoolwork in the margins. Sophia began to trace the development of her mother's mind and ideas. It was strange in some ways to be reading her mother's words from when Constance was not much older than Ian, and Sophia was often moved to offer advice or sympathy. She wished she had received the books as her father had intended, when she was herself the age of her mother.

Quickly however, the content shifted, and Constance came alive. Clever and witty, she was used to being the center of an intellectual if aloof father's attention. Her comments on the local society and on her first visit to London had been incisive, but touchingly naïve. She'd had a brief attraction at sixteen to a soldier bound for the American wars. She was never presented at court, never danced at Almack's; but she stole away to the dark alleys of Vauxhall with a young man and had her first kiss. She deemed it a great disappointment.

Through her father's connections, she became a teacher at a boarding school in Hampstead. Her charges were moneyed: daughters of wealthy merchants, the unacknowledged—but cared for—daughters of various nobles, and American heiresses sent to England for culture. Most of her students were well aware of their precarious positions in society—all knowing they needed good matches to stabilize their fortunes and knowing equally well that their good looks and other charms, more than their education, would ensure their future happiness.

Constance, unmarried, had grown discontented. She looked at the idea of marriage anew, wondering if that were the path her heart would take, with its responsibilities for house and home. She saw no other choice she could make as a woman, or as a woman of her class.

Then something happened, something that troubled Constance and transformed her. She'd gone to a market to buy ribbon and paper. There a girl, not older than fifteen, was drawn by a halter into the square, as if she were cattle. The man who led her was in his sixties, apparently her husband. A man from the docks, a sailor, stood to the side. The girl looked at the sailor imploringly, and an old woman spat “adulteress” on the ground. The bidding began, the men in the crowd jostling and calling out slurs. Once the men took her lover's measure, they found it amusing to raise the price. Eventually the sailor stopped bidding, unable to buy her, and turned away, leaving her in the square. One of the drunken men won the day, gaining a “housekeeper for life,” he said, for six shillings.

The story was so real in the journals, Constance's outrage so palpable, that Sophia understood better what experiences had made her mother the woman she was. As a teacher, Constance made little more in a month than the sailor, but she'd pressed seven shillings into the drunk's hand and bought the girl herself. Constance told the girl she was owned by no man. The sailor had been the girl's childhood sweetheart, gone to wars, and returned to find her in a forced marriage. The girl, weeping, begged for help in finding him, so Constance accompanied her to his boarding house and watched as the two embraced.

Sophia followed her mother through the years. Constance's father had been a scientist, and Constance had had the best midwife in the county. But even then the fear of not surviving childbirth or the weeks after was never far from hand. Her joy in her infant daughter Sophia was tempered only by her fears of leaving her without a guide in the emerging new world, a world of potential equalities and great tyrannies.

Constance hadn't at first been a republican. She distrusted the mob, having seen it for herself in the angry faces of her peers when she raised the question of the morality of the slave trade. But she'd become a republican through seeing the daily injustices created by the wealth of the aristocracy and the poverty of the people.

Sophia's mother's voice swept over her, reminding her of all she had forgotten, the way her mother cared for the poor and the sick, the late night knocks on the door, watching her mother dress quickly, kiss her on the cheek and leave . . . sometimes for days at a time, caring for those who needed both her and her knowledge of healing plants. Sophia remembered asking each time if she could go, and her mother had promised every time, “when you are older, Sophie, we will go together.”

At the end, Sophia found a letter from her father.

Sophia realized her memories of her mother had been colored by Phineas's embarrassment, then recast by her step-aunt Annabella's disapproval. The Constance she discovered in the journals was not a virago or a shrew as Phineas and Annabella would have her remembered, but a deeply moral young woman who would not be silent when faced with injustice. Constance's values as expressed in the journal were far closer to Sophia's own than she had ever imagined. Somehow, growing up, Sophia had come to regard her mother as scandalous, but the journals gave Sophia back the passionate clergyman's wife and teacher, who dedicated her own life to caring for others. Perhaps had Sophia been able to read the journals as her father had intended, she would have felt less obligated to try to mollify Phineas or Annabella. Perhaps with the words of her mother embedded in her heart, Sophia would have trusted her own conscience, even when it had set her at odds with those in power over her.

She was so absorbed with her reading that she never heard the footsteps approaching from behind her on the path.

* * *

Aidan finished Seth's responsibilities and went to find Sophia. In the morning room, he found the estate papers she had been reviewing that morning, but the cup of tea beside them was cold. Nor was she in the library. He took the stairs to the family rooms and rapped sharply on her bedroom door before he turned the knob. But the room held only the faintest hint of lavender. His stomach twisted. He opened and closed doors to all the bedrooms down the hall, shutting each one a bit more loudly than the last.

At the servants' staircase to the nursery and attic, he stopped. He could hear soft footsteps descending the stairs. Of course, she had been in the nursery or the attic, going through Tom's trunks. The tightness in his stomach eased. Smiling, he positioned himself to the side. When the door opened, she would walk into his arms, and he would surprise her with a kiss. A penalty, he would tease her, for hiding herself away.

The door opened. A mob-hatted maid backed into the hallway, holding a basket of linens. Dropping his arms, Aidan fell back, almost tripping over his own feet.

“Your mistress. Have you seen her?” Even to his ears, his voice sounded abrupt.

Startled, the maid turned to face him, then dropped to a curtsy. “No, your grace. Not in the nursery or the boys' rooms.”

He pushed past her, past the upper floor to the attic, taking the stairs two at a time. The attic. He would find her there, as he had the day before. He flung the door open. But the air was still, and the trunks unopened.

Not in the morning room, the library, her bedroom, or the attic. His list gave him no comfort. She had agreed not to leave the house without being accompanied by him or one of his men. Did she forget—or had she been taken? Malcolm's words about not being able to protect Audrey rang in Aidan's memory.

The muscles tightened in his jaw and neck. He'd been in the ballroom the night Audrey had been stabbed, seen Malcolm holding her to his chest, blood down the front of his waistcoat, calling for help, and begging her not to die. What if Sophia were hurt, bleeding, dying, and Aidan didn't find her in time? He pushed the thought away.

Beyond the trunks, the attic windows looked out over the front lawn. He shoved the trunks aside and surveyed the area. Four of his men had arrived that morning. Two stood talking, positioned to see both the house and the entrance from the road. Their stances were alert, but not anxious. So, she hadn't gone out the front of the house.

He took the narrow attic stairs too fast, almost falling midway down. Catching himself against the walls, he chastened himself to be calm. No old army officer who had lived through the barrage of a hundred cannon should be reacting to a misplaced woman with such haste. Deliberate and thorough—that was the way to find her. Yet his heart still pulsed hard in his chest. He hurried down the remaining stairs, opening doors to the rooms he had not checked before, and calling her name. Nothing.

By the time he reached the main floor, the housekeeper stood waiting at the base of the stairs, hands folded before her body. “Her ladyship was last seen in her garden, your grace.”

He began to turn to the back of the house, but stopped. “When? And by whom?”

“Several hours ago, your grace. Cook and I saw her pass by the kitchen window.”

“Alone?” He cursed himself for not having fully informed her staff of the danger. He'd thought his men would be sufficient.

The housekeeper's face grew concerned. “We did not notice, your grace. Should we . . .”

But he didn't hear the end of her sentence; he was already moving to the back of the house. From the raised terrace along the house's back, he watched for any hint of movement or flash of color, for birds taking flight in surprise, for noise turning to silence. For anything that might reveal her location.

He bit off a curse. This was not the time for panic. She was likely in the garden, unaware that no one knew where she was. He had to be deliberate. He looked at the face of his pocket watch; if he didn't find her in ten minutes' time, he would call for his men, inform the house, and make a broader search. But he could already feel his body tensed as if for battle.

He crisscrossed the garden, but he did not call for her. If there were an intruder, he did not wish to offer an alert. But she was nowhere. Not in the kitchen garden, not in the knot garden farther from the house, not in the wilderness at the bottom of the lawn.

Panic tightened at the back of his throat. How would he explain to Ian that he had failed to protect his mother? How would Ian ever forgive him? How could he forgive himself? He pushed the thoughts away and turned back to the house, prepared to call a search.

Then he remembered. There was a maze built of stone and hedges, past the wilderness, created by Tom's grandfather for his bride. Tom had taught Aidan its secret rhythm of turns, and he had long ago taught them to Sophia. He stood for a moment, torn. His weight balanced on the balls of his feet, and his arms taut, he considered his choice.

If she had been taken, then the time spent searching the maze would be time lost. He should return to the house, call his men, begin a widening search. But with hours since she had been seen, it would be almost impossible to find her. Once more, he saw the line of blood across her back when she removed her shawl. No, she was simply . . . misplaced.

He ran.

Down the path that led through tall trees to the maze. At its entrance, he realized, he would have to be cautious. It would do no good if he lost his way in the maze. In the decade since he had last visited Tom, the hedges had grown tall enough that once inside, he would have no way to gain his bearings. He would be able to see nothing but hedge and sky.