Awakening His Duchess (44 page)

Her heart pounded, betraying her with its vigor. It was
still there, perhaps stronger for being tempered in fire, or perhaps weaker.
Did it matter? Beau deserved happiness after all he’d been through. Perhaps
especially because his lungs were unhealthy. Could she risk loving again for
him?

The answer seemed so obvious. She couldn’t not love him.
Whether she wanted to or not, she hurt because cutting herself off from him
hurt not just her but him too.

The gray of the world seemed to disappear as she stared into
the blue of Beau’s eyes.

“I am so scared,” she whispered.

He started to respond, but she caught his motley sun
streaked gold and brown hair and pulled his head down to hers. His mouth met
hers even as she strained upwards to deepen the kiss. He tightened his arms
around her enfolding her in his warm embrace as he kissed her, following her
lead then stoking her passion with his low growl of desire.

After a few minutes he pulled back, his hands going to her
shoulders and separating her from him. He breathed harshly as he stared down into
her face. “Etienne could wake,” he huffed.

“Then we need doors,” she said with a smile.

He blinked, then his jaw flexed.

She feared he had misunderstood. She ran her fingers over
his darkened cheek. “I never stopped loving you. I lived in my memories of you
and in my dreams of how we would have been together. You have always been my
one and only love, even when I thought you were dead.”

“I’m not dead, sugar.” He scooped her up and pushed through
her darkened room and into her dressing room, shutting the door behind him. Ah,
he hadn’t misunderstood at all.

Epilogue

40 years later, 1834

London, England

“We have a letter from Africa,” Yvette said, waving a
travel-stained envelope. She flitted past Beau’s outstretched hand.

He considered wrestling it away from her, but he might shock
the grandchildren playing at his feet. Besides he could make her pay later
behind closed doors. “From Mazi?”

“Of course,” said Yvette. She tore open the envelope and
pulled out the letter with Mazi’s neat script.

Beau took a deep breath of relief. Mazi was at least half a
decade older than he was and one of these days he feared it would be a letter
from one of his sons telling of his passing.

Yvette bent over the letter, her dark hair with its dramatic
white wings at her temples made him sigh. She was still breathtakingly
beautiful.

Beau pulled the crocheted throw over his thighs. The cold
tended to make his bones ache, but he never let that stop him from regularly
laboring alongside workers. He hoped that he’d imparted the lesson to his sons
that they weren’t so highborn they couldn’t sweat with a little honest hard
work on occasion. While a good many of his class regarded him as more eccentric
than radical, he knew he’d changed a few minds about class divisions over the
years. “Well, what does he say?”

“He is sending his grandson Albert in the fall to attend
Oxford. He asks that we will keep an eye on him.”

“Of course. Is Mazi bringing him?”

“He says he can’t get away.” Yvette put the letter on her
lap and looked across at Beau. “We should go visit and bring back Mazi’s
grandson. A boy that age shouldn’t travel alone.”

“The estate—”

“You said yourself that Etienne can handle it, should be
handling more. It will be good for him, good for you. Besides I hear it is
quite warm in Mazi’s town. And you’ve been saying how much you’d like to see
Africa.”

“I am an old man,” Beau complained, but he knew he could
count on Yvette to supply enthusiasm in spades. It had taken a few years, but
once she had rediscovered her spirit, most times he couldn’t keep up with her.
Besides he knew she was interested in learning what herbal remedies might be
found on the Dark Continent.

“Pish, your father lived to be eighty-two even after being
nearly poisoned to death.”

His granddaughter Pearl turned wide eyes in his direction.
“My great grandfather was poisoned?”

Beau patted his lap. He knew the popular thing was to sweep
all bad history under the rug or lock it in the attic. He cast a dark look at
Yvette, but she just smiled sweetly.

Pearl climbed onto his knee and he cuddled her against his
chest.

“A long, long time ago, there was a man who was so in love
with your grandmother—”

“You were in love with grandmama,” said Pearl.

“I still am.” Very much. “But there was another man who
tried to get rid of me and get rid of my father just so he could have her.”

“What happened to him?”

“He danced at the end of a rope.”

“Beau!” Yvette said sharply.

“You started it,” he said. Oh, she was so going to pay when
he got her alone.

“You two sound like children,” scolded their youngest
daughter Evelyn Marie as she entered the room, drawing off her gloves. “I
suppose we should leave you to your squabbles and not stay for dinner.”

Beau had a sneaking suspicion his daughter was aware of how he
and Yvette worked through their battles now that she was married with children
of her own.

“Of course you should stay for dinner,” said Yvette, tossing
a falsely innocent look in his direction.

His daughter turned in his direction.

“By all means. Stay,” he echoed Yvette. After all he wasn’t
so impatient nowadays that he had to resort to drawn drapes in a carriage
leaving some function or a dressing room floor. And time with his children and
grandchildren was to be savored now that they all had lives separate from his
and Yvette’s.

“When do you leave for Haven Castle?” Evelyn Marie sank down
on a sofa.

“We’re thinking of taking a trip overseas,” said Beau,
standing and setting his granddaughter on the ground. “Your mother has a
longing to travel on a newfangled steam ship.”

“They’re not that new,” murmured Evelyn Marie.

“Yes, but the last time either of us crossed an ocean it was
on an old-fashioned sailing ship,” said Beau. Sometimes the world seemed to be
changing too fast. Then again there were changes he was proud to have been a
part of, too: working with Wilberforce to abolish the slave trade and then
slavery, working to get Yvette’s knowledge of herbal remedies presented to the
Royal Society, and, less tangibly measured, working to change a few minds about
the division of classes. And, more personally, placing plaques commemorating
the short lives of Yvette’s son and daughter in the church near Haven Castle.

When Yvette broke down when he showed her, he’d thought he’d
made a mistake reminding her of the tragedy of the Haitian revolution, but
she’d been more amazed that he’d given them his name as if the children had
been his. As he told her, he was her legal husband during that time, and while
his stint as a slave was a not closely guarded secret, by acknowledging the
children it seemed to both answer questions for the curious and stifle their
curiosity out of respect.

The dark memories hardly ever intruded on their lives
anymore, although they both still mourned lost loved ones. But they’d had many
good years since, and their own children were all hale and hearty. His lungs
had seemingly healed and the attacks became less frequent although any time he
was ill it seemed to settle in his lungs, which frightened Yvette more than he
liked.

Still he and Yvette had enjoyed a good life together. God
willing they still had a decade or more left in them. Besides he had a yearning
to see more of the world, a yearning he’d had to ignore as he took on more and
more of the responsibilities of the duchy. Now it was time to let go and let
Etienne take on the management of the estate.

“Do you mean like a puppet?” asked Pearl, a concentrated
frown on her face.

“W-What?”

“The man who danced on the end of a rope?”

“Exactly like a puppet, my little sugarplum,” said Beau,
tugging one of his granddaughter’s braids. “He tried to make everyone else
dance to his tune, but in the end he was the one who had to dance.”

“What was his name?” asked the inquisitive little poppet.

“Oh, no one remembers,” said Beau. “Now who wants to see if those
bananas have been delivered?”

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Author’s note

Yes, if you haven’t figured it out by now, Beau was a
zombie—not a brain eating, rotting flesh, Hollywood-style zombie, but a
poisoned-to-appear-dead, buried, and then dug up Haitian-style zombie. He was
conceived—in my brain at least—when an editor jokingly said something about
zombies being the next romance heroes.

The real zombie powder is made largely from a neurotoxin
extracted from puffer fish and other ingredients. In non-lethal doses it can
reduce respiration and a heart rate so low as to be virtually undetectable. In
Haiti Vodou bokers (witch doctors) could use it to take care of troublesome
people. By making a victim appear dead, allowing him to be buried, and digging
him up later, a bokor can create a zombie or a soulless drone.

Zombie powder has been investigated as a possible anesthetic
that could be used during surgery without success. While it would minimize
bleeding, the recipient is aware, awake, and can feel pain. The poison appears
to have little side effects after it has worn off. However, victims who were
buried alive and dug up later often have extensive brain damage from the lack
of oxygen available to them in a casket. People who have undergone testing
under laboratory conditions suffer no lasting effects.

That left me with a dilemma. Of course, I didn’t want my
hero to be brain damaged, but I didn’t want him to be able to wake up and walk
away. So when the poison took effect, Beau fell and hit his chin and neck hard
enough to knock him out. The blow caused a blood clot to form in his neck, then
break free leading to a stroke and partial paralysis. He couldn’t stay buried
too long or be too deep, so I made use of the weather to chase away his
gravediggers. (And yes there really was a hurricane in the Caribbean the day he
was buried.)

But even partially paralyzed, he still would have figured
out how to get away. So while investigating how bokers controlled their
not-always mindless zombies, I found those victims who were still capable of
rational thought were often given another drug derived from zombie weed also
known as jimson weed. This is a not so nice hallucinogen that can provoke
docile behavior and is often accompanied by amnesia. People have been known to
reveal things while under its influence, as Beau did.

All of that led me to investigate slave conditions in
Saint-Domingue (modern day Haiti.) Not surprisingly the conditions were
inhumane. By the time of my story, 40,000 new slaves were imported every year,
enough to keep the slave population stable around half a million. The white
population was between 20,000 to 32,000. Slaves working the sugar cane lasted
on average seven years. The work was backbreaking. Coming into contact with
sugar cane fibers often damaged workers’ lungs, and they contracted a lung
disease known as bagassosis. It can lead to an asthma like reaction to
irritants and untreated can lead to scarring in the lungs and death. Imagine my
surprise when I found that some modern day asthma medicines are derived from
the very same plant that is used to control zombies.

The massacre on the night of August 21 lead to the death of
1000 to 4000 whites, mostly plantation owners and their families. Hundreds of
plantations were burned. Unfortunately the revolution did little to change the
conditions of the slaves.

Other books by Katy Madison

Gothic Romances

Tainted by Temptation (Avon books)

All About Seduction (Avon books)

Regency Romances

The Wedding Duel (The Dueling Pistols #1)

The Second Shot (The Dueling Pistols #2)

The Wedding Runaway (The Dueling Pistols #3)

Stealing Sterling (novella)

Secret Valentine (novella)

Compromised by Christmas

Romantic Suspense as K.T. Madison

Presumed Guilty until proven innocent

Western Romances as Kate Madison

Bride by Mail (2014 from Harlequin Historicals)

Promised by Post (tba Harlequin Historicals)