Jilting the Duke (30 page)

“One thing I have to know.” She did not look at him as she spoke, but kept her gaze on the image of her husband. “Tom knew you had chosen not to come back, didn't he?”

Aidan felt more ashamed than he had at any other moment in his life. But she deserved to know the extent to which he had failed her. He owed her that, even if it meant she would hate him.

“I sent Tom a message telling him where I was and offering to give up my commission if he would break the engagement and travel the Continent with me.” He forced himself to speak firmly. But he wished she would turn to him, let him make his confession face-to-face.

She nodded in thought. “That makes sense. The day before the wedding Tom gave me a choice. He told me he believed you were in Dover. He and I could pretend to elope, find you, then—with Tom as our witness—you and I could go to Gretna Green. Or—he even knelt before me and took my hand,” she said, and smiled sadly at the memory, “he and I could marry the next morning in the church surrounded by all my cousins and his sisters, and he would cherish me and our child until the day he died.” Her smile faded, and she grew silent.

In her silence, Aidan heard all his hopes for a life together disappear. Just when Aidan thought Sophia would not speak again, she turned. “And Tom did. He did cherish us. Tom never broke a promise to me or to Ian. And I loved him for it. Not the kind of love I have, had”—she corrected herself—“for you, all passion and emotion. But a rational love as true as my love for you was strong. So you are right: in a way I did choose Tom. I chose his kindness, his dependability, his truth, even his idealism. When he fell in love with Francesca, he realized what possibilities he had given up in marrying me. But he gave me a choice again: I was his wife; he would be faithful. But Francesca loved him, and I told Tom to love her, as I had loved you.”

He heard the slight emphasis on the word
had
. It had all fallen apart, as Malcolm had predicted. Having gained his revenge, Aidan was left only with the knowledge that he was the betrayer, of her, of Tom, of his son. Worse, he had loved her all along. And he'd lost her twice because he was a fool.

* * *

She turned back to face him, the portrait of Tom behind her. Both of them looked at him, disappointment in their eyes. “Ophelia assured me you never reveal your affairs. I hope you will be discreet about ours, if only for the sake of your ward. Ian should not suffer for my sins. Of course I've put myself at your mercy, haven't I? I suppose it was your plan all along. You must have hated me a great deal.”

“Sophia . . .”

She raised her hand to silence him. “It's growing late—or rather early. Your magistrates will be here soon. I would like for you to return to the library to help Walgrave and Dodsley. But by the time I come downstairs, I wish for you to be gone. We can arrange for Ian's care through Aldine from this point forward.”

She held out her hand, and he hoped for a moment she would touch him one last time. “My children's birth certificates, please. I will send them to Aldine. You may, of course, keep Tom's letter. I trust you will keep its contents a secret.”

There was nothing he could do but return them. He held them out, and she took the certificates without touching him. She crossed the dressing room to the door leading to her bedchamber.

She turned back toward him before leaving the room, her eyes sad. “Tom sacrificed a great deal to protect your son. He gave Ian a legitimate name and a title. As Tom's sisters can tell you from their various settlements, Tom went to great lengths to ensure that no one would ever challenge Ian's rights. You can marry and have other sons. Tom had only Ian. For his sake and for Ian's, never reveal the truth.”

She shut the door to her bedchamber, leaving Aidan in her dressing room, the light of the candles still bright. He heard the turn of the key in the lock behind her. He listened, hoping to hear weeping.... Tears would mean he had a chance to make amends. But there was nothing, no sound at all.

Everything he had believed for the past decade had turned out to be a torment he had created for himself. He hadn't told her, but his father's letter had set the stage, in its sneering announcement that his “fool friend” had gotten his “wings clipped” by some “country trollope” who'd likely “turned her heels up for a dozen men” before she found one with a title to marry.

Marrying her would have been difficult, but her uncle had liked him. Why had he not considered whether they could live on her settlement? Why had he left her, expecting her to wait? Why had he not wondered why she and Tom had called him back? Had he really been so young, so inexperienced, that he hadn't considered she could be increasing? What sort of fool had he been? And more significantly, what sort of fool had he remained? Had he not been proud, he could have been married to Sophia and watched his heir grow from infancy. Had he not been intent on revenge, he would have realized Tom had offered him a great gift in the guardianship.

* * *

Sophia leaned back against the door, then turned the key in the lock. She would not cry. There would be time for tears later. She would not give him the satisfaction of hearing her weep.

She should not have been surprised at his revelation. She'd known who he was . . . or rather who he had the potential to be. She'd seen it in his brother Aaron. It was the reason she'd stayed in Italy so long.

But somehow with Aidan these last weeks, she'd allowed herself to forget. And now she was in his power. Now that he knew Ian was his son, he would never let her keep him all the year round. No, he would expect Ian to live at his estate . . . and to go away to school sooner.

She'd trusted Aidan again, and he'd again betrayed her. She should have grown wise before she'd grown old.

But even now, feeling the sting of his betrayal, she loved him. She would never admit it, never acknowledge it again, but her heart still pined for the sound of his voice, the touch of his hands, his lips.

But she would survive. She had done so once; she would do so again. She simply could never have any expectations, except that he would—if she allowed him the chance—fail her again.

* * *

Aidan was still with the officers in the library when Sophia was called from her room, suitably dressed in her morning clothes, three hours later. She looked past him as if he meant no more to her than one of the officers themselves. Regardless of what she now thought, he would not abandon her again. . . . Even if she never knew, he would watch over her.

That night the dream came again, but without any trace of Sophia. Tom stood half in darkness, one hand on the top of a gold-handled cane, and the other extended toward a pool where the dark-haired child floated facedown in the waters. There was nothing else, just the floating child, and the sorrow on Tom's face.

Chapter Thirty-Three

The night had a chill, and Aidan pulled the blanket tighter around his body. The crawlspace above the stables provided little room for movement. But it gave a vantage point over the wall of the garden where he could watch to see if anyone approached the house from the back. He had pulled a board loose to improve his range of vision. But having lain flat on his stomach for several hours, he'd begun to feel the position in his neck and shoulders.

He had intended to slip into the house and guard over Sophia as he had in the nights before Seth was injured. But he found the gate at the bottom of the garden repaired with a new and sturdy lock. When he walked through the mews to her stables and tried to get in through the kitchen, he found Cook, holding out what was left of a bag of pistachios. She'd seemed relieved when he refused to take them, but the message was clear: he was no longer welcome. When he'd asked to speak with Dodsley, the butler had appeared immediately, but refused him entrance, stepping into the yard to talk with him and reminding him that his loyalties were with her ladyship.

None of her servants seemed to understand that Aidan only wanted to keep her safe. Dodsley had finally agreed to allow the additional four servants to return under three conditions: that they answered to Dodsley and not to the duke; that the duke continued to pay their wages; and finally that her ladyship didn't object to their presence. As a concession, Dodsley had agreed not to raise the issue of the servants with her ladyship, lest she object. But that was solely because Dodsley cared for her safety.

Dodsley had also agreed, and Aidan was sure it was intended as a punishment, that if his grace insisted on staying on the grounds, he could take the crawlspace above the stable that her ladyship thought not fit for the groom. That was how Aidan had arrived here, cold, flea-bitten, and stiff.

Sophia knew that her blackmailer had not been found, that she needed protection, but she refused Aidan's help, saying she had other relations on whom she could rely. But affable Hal and the twins had no experience with the kind of enemy she faced, and they were more likely to get themselves hurt than do any real good at protecting her. No, she was only making it harder for Aidan to keep her safe. But knowing Sophia, she would tell him she had managed to take care of herself for years without his help. And she had. Still, what else could he do? He owed her too much for his past inconstancy to fail to be faithful now. He wanted somehow to make amends, and he still held a very slender hope that someday—if he were constant and patient enough—she might give him another chance.

During the day, he would return home to sleep, trusting his men and her relatives to guard her in the daylight. Then each evening, he would spend his time in the alleys and mews behind her house and after sunset in his stable loft, waiting and watching.

On returning to town, he'd immediately put Aldine on the task of tracing who had placed the scandalous advertisement. The information Aldine had uncovered was disturbing. The man who had placed the advertisement had paid in advance to insert one advertisement each week for a month; he'd paid for all four weeks in advance in bank notes, not coin. The newspaper had inserted the first week's notice immediately, but when the bank notes had proved to be forgeries, the firm had thrown away the text for the later insertions. It was regrettable; the text might have given some hint to their adversary's plan.

The description of the man who had bought the advertisements matched that of Aldine's temporary clerk, Charters, now missing. Charters had disappeared about the time that news began to circulate that the body of the clerk he'd replaced, a country boy who had resigned by way of a note about returning home, had been pulled from the river. Aldine now suspected the clerk's resignation note had simply been a ruse, and he was displeased he had believed it without further investigation. Both Aidan and Aldine had decided to see if Charters could be found, but when they had gone to the address he had provided, they'd found a blacksmith's shop with no lodgings. Another indication that Charters was somehow connected to the man they sought.

Sophia's garden was dark. He watched her movements, or rather the light from the lantern she carried, as it traveled from her library, up the stairs, to her bedroom, then blink out. Across the park, another lantern burned, in a house perpendicular to Sophia's; a figure stood before a window briefly, then moved away from it, and Aidan decided to investigate the house later to see if it might provide him with a better—and more comfortable—vantage point.

He stretched. Cold, hungry, tired, and uncomfortable. If this was his penance, it was well deserved.

* * *

Sophia carried a cold collation into the library, feeling the quiet of the house as an empty grave. Cook and Sally had gone to the market and wouldn't return until late in the evening. Perkins had left that morning, called back to the estate by the housekeeper who had written earlier that week complaining about the size of the rabbits in the kitchen garden. Ian was still in the Lakes with the Hucknalls, and Aidan . . . Well, he knew better than to call.

Her anger had cooled, but not her deep sense of betrayal. Somehow she could forgive his youthful foolishness more than a decade ago, but she could not accept—not yet at least—the cruel intentionality behind his more recent behavior. She could think of nothing he could do to redeem himself. But perhaps over time she would come to feel more generously toward him. Strangely, she realized, he had behaved no worse than she had imagined he would all those years in Italy. But that was cold comfort.

At the same time, Sophia reminded herself, she was not completely alone. Dodsley and the Brunis remained with her, and Aidan's various servants still lurked about in her halls and gardens. As long as he paid their wages, she cared little whether they stayed or went. Perhaps a visit to the nursery later to see how Lily was enjoying her studies would alleviate some of the plaintive loneliness that surprised Sophia at some point each day.

With Aidan gone, she had been able to accomplish the tasks she'd let languish for the last several months. She'd read the corrected proofs for volume two of Tom's book, making sure all the corrections had been made and that no new errors had been created in the process, and she'd ensured that the image of the agave had been replaced by a rose. She'd watercolored a set of the engravings in Tom's book to show the women employed to paint the pictures exactly what each color should be. And she'd finally finished her own book,
A Girl's Botany
, which she had written under the pseudonym, Mrs. Teachwell.

The engravings for her book were not as meticulous as those for Tom's or as large. But in each one she freed herself from the conventions of botanical illustration to show something of the plant's personality, combining groups of flowers into pleasing bouquets by season. She'd even included instructions on how each part of each plant should be colored, allowing her girl readers to learn the characteristics of each plant while coloring them.

But all that work had been completed days ago, leaving her unable to ignore the emptiness that the break with Aidan had left.

* * *

In the early afternoon, having started and discarded a dozen sketches, Sophia was grateful to be interrupted by Dodsley's bringing her a note.

“A note, your ladyship, delivered by special messenger.” Dodsley held out an unmarked envelope with no address and no seal. “The messenger is a boy no older than five or six, but he's been told a guinea will be his reward if he waits for your reply.”

“A guinea? Perhaps you should wait.”

“Yes, your ladyship. Of course.” Dodsley watched as she opened the note cautiously. A lock of dark hair, curled in ringlets and scented with orange bergamot, fell into her hand. Sophia gasped.

“I will check Miss Lily's room.” Dodsley, suddenly pale, left without waiting for her answer.

Sophia's heart pounded hard, until she could hear the rush of blood in her ears. Shaking, she lowered herself slowly into the chair behind her desk, holding the letter still half closed in her hand. The lock was Lily's. She and Dodsley had both known it immediately. Only in the last few days had the child taken to wearing a touch of bergamot oil on her neck in a sweet remembrance of her mother's perfume.

Sophia didn't want to open the letter any further, didn't want to find that the blackmailer had made good on his threat to take away something she loved. She didn't wish to discover that Lily was already dead. But she had no choice.

Refusing to give in to the panic rising in her gut, Sophia placed Lily's curl gently on the table. Then, taking a long deep breath, Sophia began to read.

The letter offered her an easy trade—the child for the papers—on two conditions, written in all caps and underlined twice. COME ALONE and TELL NO ONE. Relief and hope warred with suspicion and reservation. The rest of the letter provided a riddle she had to solve to discover the time and the place of their meeting.

The riddle wasn't hard; Sophia worked it out in a matter of moments. But then it wasn't supposed to be hard; it was supposed to be an assertion of her adversary's power. By giving her a riddle, he made her into a sort of circus animal performing tricks for his amusement. At the same time, the riddle offered a threat. By tying her destination to a place she could see from her bedroom window, the letter intimated that someone had been in her house and in her bedroom. And by extension, it intimated that someone in her household was watching her to see if she followed instructions.

Like a perverse invitation, the blackmailer requested a reply to his letter, giving his name as Nick Mephisto and his address as the Fallen Angel Tavern. She found the allusion more pretentious than frightening. She'd already faced the Devil that week.

Certain that Dodsley would tell her Lily was missing, Sophia began to consider her reply. Laughing to herself darkly, she took a play from Aidan's book. Taking out a piece of her best, largest notepaper, she wrote two words—“I accept”—confidently in the middle of the sheet.

Dodsley came to the doorway, looking ill. “Miss Lily is not in her room or the nursery, nor is Luca. I have set the servants to search from attic to cellar.”

She met him at the door to the library, holding out the letter. “Will you give this to the messenger?”

Dodsley looked a question, but he didn't ask it. He merely took the letter and disappeared.

Requiring an immediate response was a brilliant ploy, she had to acknowledge, as was choosing a child to deliver the message. It had given her no time to set someone to follow the messenger or to intercept the message at its destination. At the same time, she doubted if the Fallen Angel Tavern even existed.

Though she was afraid—for Lily, for herself—she also felt a kind of relief; she no longer had to wonder when the blackmailer would attack. And in that, she found a sort of calm resolve. She would not panic. First, she would save Lily; then, when Sophia was back at home safe with her children and her friends, she would acknowledge how utterly foolish she had been to even attempt the rescue on her own.

Sophia returned to the desk. She had to consider that she might only be able to save the girl, and if that were the case, Sophia needed to make arrangements for Lily's future. She took out four pieces of notepaper.

Her first note was to Aldine, enclosing Ian's and Lily's birth certificates, and instructing him to open a sealed packet sent to him some months before Tom's death, which contained guardianship papers for Lily, bearing all the necessary signatures—hers, Luca's, Tom's, and Francesca's, and those of witnesses. In the event of her death, Sophia appointed Ophelia Mason to act in her place, and in the event of Aidan's refusal, Malcolm. Luca would always have the final word in the rearing of his niece, but she and Tom had given him strong English allies. The second and third notes were to Ophelia and to Malcolm, and Aldine would distribute these last, if the need arose.

She had just finished tying all the materials into a single packet when Dodsley returned.

“Neither of the Brunis are on the grounds, nor can we find Mr. Grange who had been tutoring Lily this morning. I've sent the men out in widening circles to see if somehow any of the three are close by.”

“I need for you to carry some documents to Mr. Aldine at his offices.”

“Now, my lady?” Dodsley looked suspicious and concerned.

“Yes, now.” She pressed money for a hackney into his hand. “Return as quickly as you can.”

Though clearly unhappy with her direction, Dodsley took the package and left. Sophia watched him go with regret and resolve. Certainly she could have kept Dodsley with her, but what good would the aging butler be against an adversary who was already a murderer?

No, however her adversary had managed it, she had been left alone.

With Dodsley gone, she turned to her last note, one to Mr. Murray, including with it a warm dedication to her beloved son, Ian, to be placed at the front of her book. She placed the letter on the mantel, below Tom's portrait, ready to be delivered. Though she'd missed Ian sorely, Sophia was grateful that he was safely ensconced in the Lake District, and that he had a powerful guardian in Aidan who would not abandon him, especially not now that Aidan knew Ian was his son.

Strangely, even after all that had happened, she wished she could call on Aidan. But she couldn't risk disobeying the blackmailer's instructions. But there might be a way. She cleared her desk of all other papers and set the blackmailer's note open, next to the lock of Lily's hair, in the middle of her desk.

She wiped away her tears brusquely. She was left to her own resources, and she prayed, for Lily's sake, they would be sufficient.