The Secret Love of a Gentleman (3 page)

When the door opened, a silhouette of the young woman standing outside was framed by the daylight.

Beth bobbed a curtsy. Mary looked at Caro, her gaze assessing the brown shawl Caro had wrapped around her shoulders to shelter from the chilly draughts in the cottage.

Embarrassment lay over Caro and her skin heated, probably colouring. Where was Drew?

Her fingers gripped her shawl tighter to hide the tremble in her hands.

“May I come in? My brother is with me.”

The Duke of Pembroke…

The thought of a man, a stranger, within any distance of her sent terror racing through Caro. She’d become used to this little four-roomed prison cell—used to there being no risk. He had once been her elder sister’s lover, and then rumour had cast him as rakish and rebellious when he’d followed the route of the grand tour at the same time as Drew, but now the imposing duke was married, and all gossip and talk of him had died in town. He’d absorbed the morals of his family, people said, and Caro had heard his marriage discussed as a love match.

Her gaze reached past Mary as the housekeeper stepped aside, and her heart hit against her ribs like the beat of hooves on hard ground in a canter.

“I have this from Andrew, so you know that what I say is true.” Caro looked at the letter Mary held out. Then looked at her sister-in-law.

Mary was dressed in the fashion of the capital. In the finery Caro had been accustomed to, until she’d fallen out of favour and been forced to run. She was no longer a Marchioness. She no longer had a right to such things.

The letter trembled when Caro took it and unfolded it.

Drew’s familiar bold, assertive letters stretched across the page. She spotted words.
Kilbride. He has accused us. I have to go to London to face the charge.
She stopped and read it in full, her heart pounding harder.

When Caro looked up, Mary had turned to beckon her brother forward.

“He has accused Drew of being my lover. Incest is a crime. I never thought… Oh God.” A dark cloud crowded Caro, and a heavy sensation pulled her down. She’d never imagined this.

“This way Ma’am.” Beth directed them to the parlour.

“Here” Mary held Caro’s arm as the Duke of Pembroke removed his hat to pass beneath the lintel.

His presence robbed the dark cottage of even more light.

Caro’s heart kicked against her ribs, like Albert’s boot had often done and she shivered.

She’d grown too used to her own company, to the safety of her solitude. She wished to run, and yet Drew had been imprisoned. He’d asked her to go with these people.

The letter trembled in Caro’s cold hand.

“You must sit,” Mary said.

They’d been accused of incest…

Caro sat in an armchair and looked up. Drew’s letter crumpled in her fingers. Nausea twisted through her stomach. “Drew will regret helping me.”

“He does not. The last thing he said to me was that he could not regret it.”

The Duke, who could not stand straight beneath the low ceiling, took the other chair in the room. Now he was not looming over her, Caro remembered her manners. “Your Grace.” She moved to rise, but Mary pressed a hand on her shoulder to keep her seated.

“Forgive me, I would stand myself but it is a little awkward,” the Duke said “and I would rather you felt able to be informal in my presence. Besides, it is far easier to converse with us both seated.”

Caro’s fingers clung to Drew’s letter in her lap. She did not understand this. Drew had eloped with Mary and had made an enemy of the Duke. Why would he be here? Why was Mary here? She had been estranged from Drew… She’d left him…

“I have promised to protect you,” The Duke continued, as Caro looked her bewilderment, she could take none of this in. “You will be safer at Pembroke Place. No one can get within miles of the house without being seen, and my wife, Katherine, and Mary and I will be there to keep you company. Of course the house and grounds will be at your disposal. You may mix with the family or avoid us entirely if you wish. But there is a music room and a library to entertain you. It need not be confinement as this must feel, and you need not live in fear, Lady Kilbride?”

“Why would you help me?” Caro looked from the Duke to her sister-in-law.

“Because you are my sister now.” Mary dropped to her haunches and gripped one of Caro’s hands.

“You are together again?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I thought he had been disloyal and betrayed me. He was seen with another woman in a draper’s and I was told and I heard him saying he was setting up a woman in a house. I thought he’d taken a mistress. I was mistaken. The woman he was taking care of was you. He has forgiven me my misjudgement.”

Oh, Caro was glad for Drew. “He deserves to be happy. I knew you would make him so, you are good.” Yet he would not be happy because of Caro, he was in a true prison, locked away for helping her.

“And Drew is a good man.”

“Yes.” Caro’s vision clouded with tears. He was not known for his goodness, but he had always shown it to her. His love had been precious to her as a child, when he’d protected her from the cruel taunting of their siblings and tried to shelter her from their lack of parental love. He’d been her safe harbour when her marriage had turned sour. He deserved happiness. “I owe him much.”

“The two of you are not alone any more. Will you come with us?” the Duke asked, his baritone cutting the stillness in the room and making her jump.

When Caro looked at him a tingle like hackles lifting on her spine rippled across her skin, cat-like. His authority and arrogant stance reminded her of Albert. “I will come.”
Because Drew asked it of me
.

“Then we should go directly.” Mary stood. “John can send a cart back for your possessions.”

A new sensation, a sense of drowning, overwhelmed Caro, stealing her breath, as though the water about her was icy.

To be outdoors again.

To be amongst people again.

She took a deep breath, fighting against panic. Yet Drew would not have asked her to do this if he did not think it right. “I have barely anything… Lady Framlington, I left everything in town.”

“You must call me Mary. You are my sister.”

Yes, and that is what Caro must think. This was not accepting charity from strangers, and this was for Drew.

Chapter 4

“The magistrate wishes to speak with you, Lady Kilbride.”

Was she to be charged now too? Caro’s fingers clasped together at her waist as the nervous discomfort that had claimed a hold over her ever since she’d left her cottage roared through her. Her heart pounded so loud in her ears it was deafening.

The Duke of Arundel, Mary’s uncle, stood before her, in her private sitting room. He’d come to speak with her, in Mary’s company, while downstairs the magistrate who had the say over Drew’s situation waited in the formal drawing room.

“If you wish to help your brother then you must speak. He has told us of the Marquis of Kilbride’s violence and sworn that is the only reason you accepted his protection, yet unless you confirm it I fear Kilbride’s word will be taken over Drew’s.”

Then she must speak. She would not see her brother hang because of her.

But to speak of such private things… Shame touched her skin with warmth. She had lived with the Duke of Pembroke for only two days and yet she had seen love as it ought to be returned here. He loved his wife and Mary loved Drew—Caro still loved Albert too, the Albert of her fairytales, the Albert who for a little while had seemed so similar to the Duke of Pembroke and how the Duke was towards his wife, Kate. Yet Albert had never looked at Caro quite as the Duke looked at Kate. Caro knew what she’d lacked. She had been right to run, but her heart still remembered all the emotions of her first year with Albert, and it clung to the only time she’d known such tenderness and admiration in her life, even if it had been a shallow image of it. It also clung to the moments Albert’s touch had been gentle and tender in her bed. Those had been the most precious moments of her life…

And the times he had hit her the worst. It had been betrayal.

“Do you wish me with you?” Mary asked.

“No. Thank you.” She could not bear to tell the truth of her humiliation before Mary, she wished no one to know. Yet she must speak to save Drew. “If I speak, will the details remain private?”

“I shall ask for the records to be handled discretely.”

Caro took a breath trying to calm her heart and the terror in her blood. “You may take me to him. I will speak.”

The magistrate rose as she entered the room. He was a large, tall man. His gaze studied her as she walked across the room. He knew things about her and she could see in his eyes that he assumed other things. But she doubted Drew had spoken of the children; she hoped he had not. Yet it was the reason she was here. If there had been living children perhaps Albert would have adored her still.

“Please sit.” The magistrate lifted a hand.

She did so, as he sat too. Lord Wiltshire sat beside him.

“Please tell me about your relationship with your brother, Lady Kilbride?”

She took a breath, then began from when they were children, because the isolation and ill-treatment they had suffered then was what had truly brought them together and held them fast.

“And since your marriage?”

“We have not been so close. My husband did not wish me to go out alone, but Drew and I have managed to speak.” She’d spoken to Drew mostly about the beatings since her marriage.

“To speak…”

She took a breath. She did not care for the inflection in the magistrate’s tone. If she was to save Drew she must tell him what she spoke to Drew about. Tears welled in her eyes and her fingers shook as nausea spun in her stomach.

“Here.” Lord Wiltshire passed her his handkerchief.

“I spoke to him mostly when my husband beat me. Drew would give me comfort.”

“Comfort…”

She had looked at her hands, but now she looked up and glared at the magistrate, her heart racing wildly. “Not the physical kind. I sought words of comfort. He was someone to speak with when I had no one else. As I said, neither my mother nor my sister will speak with me.”

“And so you turned to a brother.”

“Yes. Because my brother is a good man.” She stared at the magistrate, denying the accusations in his eyes, as fear danced through her nerves, running up her spine.

“It has never gone further? Never become something beyond what it ought to be? You have been accused of incest by your husband.”

“My husband is a liar. He does not like to lose. There has never been anything inappropriate between myself and my brother. My husband is merely angry because I have left him and my brother has enabled it.”
And she had once thought that man cared for her…
She was a fool. Her heart had been deceived. Yet it could not forget the web of emotions his shallow devotion had cast. It wished to believe his devotion continued to lie beneath all else, and guilt had hung over her since she’d fled because, despite everything, her heart told her she’d been disloyal and had disgraced herself—and him.

“And you have left your husband because?”

“I cannot breathe,” she said to Lord Wiltshire as the vice of terror tightened about her chest.

He rose and turned, going to a table across the room, then returned with a glass of amber liquor. “Here.”

She swallowed a mouthful. It burned the back of her throat, but it relaxed the muscles in her chest. “Because he beat me, violently, sometimes daily. If I had stayed with him he would have killed me. Is it a crime to wish to be alive?” Her words echoed through her head. Was it a crime? She felt as though it was, and now she served her sentence. She had spoken the words to her foolish heart as well as to these men.

“It is no crime. But nor is it crime for your husband to reprimand you, yet neither point is the cause of my investigation. Did anyone witness the Marquis strike you? I am not entirely insensitive to the fact that such a thing would justify and explain your brother protecting you.”

Nor is it a crime for your husband to reprimand you…
So the men agreed to her guilt—that she ought to be blamed and chastised for her inability to breed. Hearts should not be involved in marriage—love like that which Drew had found was abnormal. Most couples in society lived without love.

Yet what the magistrate said meant there was hope for Drew, if there was a witness who would dare to stand against Albert.

Caro drank the last of the brandy, then passed the empty glass to Lord Wiltshire. Her fingers curled tighter about the handkerchief in her hand. “My lady’s maid would be able to give you an account of the events which she witnessed, but I cannot say where she will be, she will have been dismissed, and if you find her you will need to promise that her name will not be released.” She looked at the Duke. “She will need to be protected if she is willing to speak.” Albert’s temper may turn against her as it had turned against Drew.

But all would be laid bare if they spoke to her maid. Betsy would tell them the words Albert spoke when he’d beaten Caro and then they would know she was incapable of providing him with a child.

Heat burned in Caro’s cheeks and tears made the Duke shimmer. She looked at the floor, shame lancing through her breast as the tears ran on to her cheeks.

“Thank you, Ma’am. We are finished.” The magistrate and the Duke of Arundel stood.

Caro wiped the tears from her cheeks.

The Duke walked past her and then opened the door to let the magistrate leave.

“I believe Lady Kilbride would appreciate your company, Mary. John, may I stay with you and dine here before I return to town?”

Caro rose and turned as Mary came into the room. She clasped Caro’s hands. “I am sorry you had to endure this.”

Mary was kind and generous in nature. She loved Drew deeply and she never hid those feelings. Caro could see now how Mary had drawn out the best qualities in Drew.

“Better that than for Drew to suffer because of me.” Caro would never forgive herself if her failure destroyed Mary’s and Drew’s chance of happiness.