Salt Bride (47 page)

“I had hoped to make this as painless as possible, and without an audience,” he said with great forbearance, standing by the fireplace. “Never mind. Perhaps this way is for the best. If one is to humbly atone then it is appropriate that those who matter most should bear witness. But I’m afraid, Arthur, that you must leave us. It is not that I do not trust you. I do, implicitly. It is for the sake of her ladyship and my need to have you run a number of important errands without delay that you cannot remain. I have left instructions on my desk for what I need from you. There are also letters that require immediate delivery: one to Rockingham, one to Bute. A third is addressed to His Majesty. Deliver them yourself and do so at once. There are copies of my correspondence, which you are welcome to read and digest. If you then decide to reconsider your present employment, and what ambitious man would not, I will understand and recommend you with a glowing reference.”

Arthur Ellis gave a start, looked swiftly at his friend Tom, who smiled at him, before composing himself and bowing to his lordship. “Yes, of course, my lord. I will see to matters at once,” he replied obediently and deposited his dish and saucer on the silver tray. He hesitated and crossed to Jane to make her a deep bow. “I am, my lady, your humble and most obedient servant, always.”

“Thank you, Mr. Ellis. Your loyalty means a great deal to me and,” Jane added with a smile at the Earl, “to my husband.”

What her husband said next truly surprised her.

“Oh, and Arthur,” added the Earl, “send her ladyship’s maid to the nursery. Mr. Willis will join her there shortly. I presume Miss Anne Springer is lurking in some nether room?”

“Listening at the keyhole if the truth be told,” Diana St. John grumbled.

As the secretary departed, he left the door ajar, allowing Jane a glimpse into the passageway. To her astonishment and consternation there lingered just outside her sitting room what appeared to be a battalion of liveried footmen kicking their heels in wait, and with them was Mr. Jenkins and Rufus Willis. The butler closing over the door and Lady St. John’s exuberance brought her gaze back into the room, where the woman was holding court.

“So! It’s finally come. You are to be First Lord of the Treasury at last! When do you kiss hands?” Diana St. John asked excitedly, gazing adoringly up at the Earl. “All our hard work has paid off. I knew it would! How could it not? You will make a brilliant first minister. When does Bute resign? Tomorrow? Today? Is it not exciting, Antony? Perhaps Salt will find you a place in his cabinet? What think you, Salt? Is my little brother to have the Foreign Department? Have you decided on the rest of your ministry? Naturally, Rockingham must be given something, Newcastle too. If only those two would cooperate more with one another. No matter. You will keep them both in line. Now, let me see, who else is deserving of your notice—”

“I have declined His Majesty’s offer to form government,” Salt answered matter-of-factly, taking one of the sheets of parchment from the mantle where he had placed them. From his waistcoat pocket he produced his gold-rimmed spectacles. “In fact,” he continued calmly, deftly sitting his eyeglasses on the end of his nose with the paper still in his hand, “I have informed His Majesty that I have decided to rusticate for the foreseeable future. I have also vacated my chair on the Privy Council, effective immediately.”

“
Wh-what
?” Lady St. John demanded, up out of the wingchair. She was so incredulous that it subdued her enough to ask quietly, “How can you throw away the opportunity of a lifetime? We have spent years working towards this goal. You cannot resign your posts! You cannot vacate the Privy Council. You certainly can’t waste your talents rusticating in a Wiltshire backwater! His Majesty won’t allow it. I won’t allow it! I don’t understand.”

“You have never understood and you never will,” Salt replied evenly. “My own house must be in good order before I can possibly contemplate running the kingdom. To do that I must be true to myself; a gentleman and a family man, the Earl of Salt Hendon a paltry third.”

Sir Antony smiled, completely attune to the Earl’s feelings. “Bravo for you, Salt,” he said quietly, all admiration for his friend’s decision. “Bravo.”

“Don’t be an ass, Antony!” Diana St. John said dismissively and peered keenly at the Earl. “You’re not well. It’s the strain of the past few months. The corridor machinations over Bute’s possible resignation and the Peace negotiations have taken their toll. You’re wearing your eyeglasses. You must be suffering megrims. A few days at Strawberry Hill with Walpole to lift your spirits and you will see that you cannot possibly rusticate. You are needed to lead your country.”

Salt opened out the letter and turned to Lady St. John to stare at her over the rims of his spectacles. “I have made my decision. Sit down, Diana.”

But Lady St. John remained standing. She was too disbelieving to do as commanded. She shut her fan with a snap and put up her chin. “You are in jest. This is a cruel joke. You know very well that a few years, one year, playing sheep farmer on your estate is a-a lifetime in the political wilderness. You may never again have the opportunity to form government. You truly can’t be serious!”

“I have never been more so.” Salt held up the parchment. “This letter bears my seal, but I did not write it. It is a forgery, and not very good copy of my fist. It is a letter you wrote in my name, Diana,” he drawled, an ugly pull to his mouth. “No doubt you were confident that the recipient would presume I had written it in haste and with some emotion, and that this would explain the lack of consistency in the forming of my letters. Or perhaps you rightly predicted that my betrothed would be in such a state of emotional duress upon reading this breach of promise note that she would be unlikely to think beyond the letter’s deplorable content?”

Jane let out an involuntarily gasp, a shaking hand to her mouth, and looked from her husband to Lady St. John and then to her stepbrother. “How did Salt recover—”

“From me, Jane. Uncle Jacob left the letter to me in his will,” Tom explained gently. He smiled and kissed the back of her hand. “I thought the time had come to hand it over.”

“My betrothed would hardly worry about the authenticity of the fist given her deeply distressed state,” the Earl said, gaze remaining on Lady St. John. “Well, Madam. Do you have anything to add?”

Diana St. John’s response was unemotional, but her confidence had slipped to be so coldly addressed by the Earl. She sensed an impenetrable wall of ice was forming between them and yet years of self-delusion convinced her that she was in the right and that he must see that she was in the right. After all, everything she had done, no matter how unpleasant or demeaning, had been done for his benefit and his alone. She loved him unconditionally but with that love came sacrifices, sacrifices he had to be willing to make if she was to help him become First Lord of the Treasury. She would make him understand. She met the Earl’s brown eyes with an air of confidence.

“I am not about to deny it. Why should I? What I did, my actions in all things, have always been governed by my ambition for you. You are destined for political greatness. Everyone says so, from Holland to Rockingham to Bute. All sides of the political pen agree on that, even if they cannot agree on anything else. You have done so much for your country already, and will do more in the future. Sinclairs have been serving king and country since the Plantagenets. I could not allow you to throw away your future and your happiness on some lust-driven whim taken in the summerhouse. I was merely protecting you from yourself.”

“
Future
?
Happiness
?” The Earl’s self-control unraveled. He ripped off his eyeglasses. “What the bloody hell would you know about my-my
feelings
?” He thrust out his velvet arm in Jane’s direction. “She—Jane is my future.
Jane
is my happiness. Even in her despair, when under the power of a religious lunatic, Jane never gave up hope in me. Jane loves me—
me
, not because one day I will be First Lord of the Treasury or of this or of that or of any-bloody-thing else! Does that penetrate your skull, Madam?
Jane loves me
.”

Diana St. John’s laugh was one of outraged skepticism.

“Good God, Salt! I do despair of you at times,” she said with a sad shake of her perfectly coiffured head as she took a turn from the wingchair by the fireplace to the sofa and back again to stand before the Earl with her chin up. She patted the silver threaded narrow lapel of his frockcoat. “You are a brilliant political strategist, to be sure, but the instant you allow the blood to pool between your tree-trunk thighs your mind is reduced to that of a jellyfish! Ah, such are the minds of warm-blooded vigorous men of intellect when they allow lust to override sense. But that’s what I am here for. To ensure you don’t completely come unstuck.” She turned with a swish of her layered gown to address the Countess. “Lord! You didn’t even have the wit or skill to keep your legs closed until you were up before a parson,” she taunted with a menacing wave of her fan. “You’re so pathetically naïve you even allowed him to impreg—”

The Earl dropped his spectacles and had her by the throat.

“Murderess,” he hissed in her face, fingers under her jaw to keep her mouth shut. It took all his self-control not to squeeze the life out of her. “If not for you, my wife would not have suffered the shame of being banished from her own home; of being shunned by her own father who wrongly accused her of being a whore. If not for you, she would not have been forced to accept Jacob Allenby’s protection and whose obsession with redemption made her life a misery. If not for you, I would not have considered her beneath my contempt for tossing me over so lightly. If not for you, I would not have spent four years wondering what my life could have been.

“You had it within your power to set matters to rights with Sir Felix. You knew the truth and you concealed it. Worse. You willfully fabricated the truth to suit your own selfish ends. I put it to you that you read and destroyed the note concealed in the secret compartment of the Sinclair locket. A note, if it had reached me would have saved Jane and our and our—” He swallowed and dug deep in a frockcoat pocket and drew out a leather pouch. This he held out to Jane. “Take it. Open it. Anne and Rufus found it under her pillow.”

But Jane could not move. She did not trust her legs to carry her across the room. Tom retrieved the pouch for her and at her request spilled the contents into his hand. He held up a diamond encrusted gold chain that had at its center a large sapphire. It was the genuine Sinclair locket, and for Jane its recovery was bittersweet. She did not open the secret compartment; she knew she would find only emptiness. She laid the locket on the window seat cushion and blinked away tears.

“Jane. Tell me what you wrote,” Salt commanded gently.

She shook her head, hand to her mouth to stop a sob. Tom put a comforting arm around her and she leaned into his shoulder. Sir Antony and Salt waited. Jane finally straightened and looked at her husband and said just three words. They were devastatingly heartbreaking.

“
Enceinte
. Please come.”

The Earl bowed his head, but just for a moment, before lifting his chin to stare hard at Lady St. John, whose jaw he still held closed, fingers cupped menacingly about her throat.

“By destroying that note and forging my fist on a breach of promise document, you made my darling girl believe me to be a licentious monster capable of cruelly using and abusing her for my own wanton satisfaction. Those who sought to cover up what you had turned into a scandal, who conspired to assist Sir Felix to avert the shame of his daughter giving birth to a bastard of indeterminate lineage, were ignorant of the truth, and you kept them in ignorance. They had no idea I was the-the—
father
of her child.

“You could have averted tragedy and yet you promoted it,” he added, rummaging again in his frockcoat pocket to pull free a small blue bottle. This he held up between thumb and forefinger before Diana St. John’s unblinking gaze. “Worse. You procured a medicinal from an unscrupulous apothecary, Syrup of Artemisia—poison—and gave it to Sir Felix to administer to his daughter to kill the child growing in her womb.”

“
What
? No! No! No! Not that! I can’t—I don’t believe it!” The anguished outburst came from Sir Antony, who could no longer listen in silence to the litany of horrendous crimes perpetrated by his sister. “My God, Salt, not that. Not the murder of your child…”

He glanced at Jane, saw the anguish in her face, and then at Tom, whose eyes were full of sadness, and he had his answer. He went numb. When the Earl directed him to take down off the mantelshelf and read the second parchment, he did so, at first without seeing what he was reading. It was a list, a long list of names, names of women known to him and there was an address in the Strand of an apothecary’s place of business. He looked at the Earl and then at his sister and he knew he was crying.

“Consign it to the flames, Tony,” Salt told him gently and turned back to expend his rage on his cousin, fingers tightening about her throat when she dared to move her head. “I gave your brother permission to turn that document to ash because it is a damning piece of evidence that would see you hang. I cannot have your foul deeds made public, your children branded the offspring of a murderess and your brother’s diplomatic career ruined. That document was evidence that you are a terminating midwife and a procuress of murderous substances. Over the course of many years, you have supplied Syrup of Artemisia to noblewomen with unwanted pregnancies; many of these women were my lovers at one time or another. I do not judge them. They have to reconcile their actions with their consciences and with their Maker, but to dispense your evil concoction on the innocent and unsuspecting, to menace and coerce my wife’s maid to administer a known abortifacient in her ladyship’s tea… To then try and do so yourself, just now…

“How will you ever reconcile with
your
conscience what you have done? Ruining our happiness, debasing the woman I love… At every turn, you have done your utmost to cause us heartache and misery. Your wickedness knows no bounds… Stooping so low as to risk the health and wellbeing of your son. Forcing that little boy to suffer—Merry to suffer to see her brother in pain. Putting them through
hell
… Making us live a nightmare of your devising… And to think while I was comforting your children for the tragic loss of their father whom I loved as a brother, you were aiding and abetting the torment of the woman I love and the murder of our child… What shape of-of—
monster
are you?”