Authors: Adele Ashworth
Tags: #Contemporary, #Fiction, #Romance, #General, #Historical, #Historical Fiction, #Romantic Suspense Fiction, #Cornwall (England : County), #Cornwall (England: County) - Social life and customs - 19th century
Of a rich, masculine flavor, the plate had a plain, cream-colored
foundation surrounded by a border of brown and gold plaid, topped off in the center by a very understated but solid gold letter “R.” It was the first china plate design made from Renn stock, and it symbolized the family and the title. Marcus understood how his father had taken pride in it. What he didn’t understand was what that had to do with this conversation.
“All the china is lovely, Mother,” he maintained, trying not to sound too impatient.
She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the padded cushion of her chair. “You’ll note, however, that it’s not hanging in my bed chamber or withdrawing room.”
He didn’t follow her thoughts, and decided not to comment on them.
After a long moment, she raised her lashes and looked him in the eye. “The one on my bedside table is blue, sky blue, with lilacs in the center.”
Marcus pinched the bridge of his nose. “I can’t see how this is relevant.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
That stung a little, so he brusquely ordered, “Explain it to me, then.”
She breathed in heavily, tipping her forehead to one side as she studied him. “You know, Renn, you’ve got your father’s look.” Gwyneth almost smiled as she lowered her gaze back to her lap to add, “George has the look of his.”
For a slice of a second, Marcus was confused. And then the answers to everything struck him at once—the reason for the marriage of Christine and Baudwin; the way George looked and acted only like their mother; the way she’d always been so very irritated when her oldest son would leave, especially the country, with a reluctance to perform his duties as earl.
George wasn’t his father’s child.
Marcus’s heart began to pound hard in his chest.
But whose?
The china on the bedside table… lilacs on blue…
He shot a look at his mother.
“I fell in love once, too, Renn,” she conveyed softly in acknowledgment of his total understanding. “Your father was a good man, but not the one I loved with every part of me.” She drew a shaky breath and closed her eyes. “I loved the former Viscount Exeter, Baudwin’s father. George is his.”
Marcus felt as if he’d fallen into a tunnel of confusion and
bewilderment, of vanishing sensibilities and a world of illusions. This could not be real.
“How could you?” he murmured, his throat scratchy.
She looked into his eyes, bitterly. “You ask me that? Have you never been in love?”
He thought of Mary, of her beauty and grace and intelligence.
His mother smiled. “She loves you as much. I’ve seen it. And she would do whatever it took to be with you. She just doesn’t realize it yet.”
Marcus was beginning to think they were all going mad, living in a complex nightmare. He stood upright again, agitated, and began to pace the floor between his desk and the wall of plates.
“Does George know?” he murmured, his voice husky with anger.
She shook her head, squeezing her skirt in her fists on her lap.
“Nobody ever knew”—she inhaled sharply—”except Christine.”
He stilled; his head jerked up. “It’s why she died. You know what happened to her…”
Fresh tears filled her eyes but she didn’t look away from him. “I was there.”
At no other time in his life had Marcus felt such a jumble of emotions he didn’t understand. But numbing them all, overpowering everything, was fear.
“What did you do?” he asked very slowly, his body perspiring in the stuffy enclosed room, from an oncoming feeling of dread.
The question seemed to vibrate off the walls, sounding hollow in his study filled with lovely items of display.
Gwyneth sniffed and rubbed her eyes with her fingers. “I did not kill her, Marcus.”
He closed his eyes. “I know that. Tell me what happened.”
For a long minute she didn’t utter a word, just fidgeted with her sleeves, her skirt, rubbed her palms together. Then at last she crumpled into her corset and slumped against the back of the chair. Marcus couldn’t remember a time when his mother looked so disheveled and defeated.
“She had been with Baudwin, and he had… taken her intimately,”
Gwyneth started, her figure crumpled in her chair, her voice small and meek. “She came to me with so much anger, so much guilt. I wanted to help her. I did. But honestly, what was there to do? She was betrothed to him. He had rights.”
Marcus slammed his fist into his desk. “He didn’t have the right to
take what she was unwilling to give.”
Gwyneth gazed at him solemnly. “He had rights to her child, Renn.
And in only a month or so from the incident, she would be his legally.
He could take her as he pleased.”
Marcus was appalled. He stood staring down at his mother, ashamed for his sister and the family that had failed her. And still, what Gwyneth had said was entirely true. Once the vows were spoken, Baudwin could have taken her against her will at any time. Any man could do so with his wife. Such a vile thought had never really occurred to him, however, and with it he felt severely sickened by the knowledge that his sister could have been subjected to such treatment by her husband. Far worse, though, was knowing that even after Christine had mentioned her fear and misgivings, her resentment and loathing, his mother had still encouraged the marriage.
Reining in his disgust, Marcus crossed his arms over his chest.
“What happened that afternoon, Mother?” he asked tersely.
She shook her head, averse to relive the day her only daughter died in her reach. But he was ever patient now, standing his ground.
At last she revealed, “She came to see me, angry and determined.
She—she’d gone through some of my very personal items and had found a letter I’d written to Baudwin’s father years ago, disclosing my fear that I carried the viscount’s child.” Gwyneth swallowed with difficulty, shaking her head again, as if that small denial would make it disappear.
“She argued with me in the library for a few minutes about that, about how disgusted she was at my indiscretion. I tried to explain how I felt at the time, but she wanted to equate my feelings with her determination never to see Baudwin again after what he’d done to her.
In essence… she tried to blackmail me. If I broke the betrothal agreement, she wouldn’t tell George.”
Gwyneth looked up at her son, her eyes sparkling with tears. “In spite of the fear of my child discovering the stone-cold fact that he was illegitimate, I insisted that she marry Exeter. She was with child. He was the father. I followed her to her withdrawing room that afternoon to reason with her, to get my letter back and calm her irrational notions before she reacted impulsively.”
Gwyneth closed her eyes and wept openly, her palm to her mouth.
Marcus stood where he was, detached.
Finally she whispered, “I tried to take the letter from her, but she wouldn’t release it. It was during that exchange that she stumbled, hitting her head on her dressing table as she fell.”
Marcus felt tears sting his eyes and he closed them to the onslaught
of emotion.
“You must understand,” Gwyneth added fiercely, “we could not afford scandal. And we can’t even now. Baudwin knows nothing. George knows nothing. All this must remain between us, Renn.”
At any cost…
At last Marcus understood. Yet the greatest disgrace of all was a mother forcing her daughter to marry a man who pinned her against a coach door and took her innocence while she denied him verbally. That had to be a far worse sin than a sexual indiscretion twenty-five years ago.
Marcus gritted his teeth. “It doesn’t change a thing, as far as I’m concerned,” he said huskily. “Nobody but the two of us knows George is illegitimate, and I will never tell a soul.” He leaned ever closer to the slumped figure of his mother, whose skin now looked ghostly white, eyes tired and old. “But I am leaving, under my conditions. You will then have to live your life knowing the Earl of Renn is a Fife.”
She cringed, but nodded as if she’d expected this all along.
He straightened, his heart filling with sorrow for the countess who had raised her children with such self-dignity and expectation, only to be just another human being who made mistakes and now must pay for them. But she was also his mother, and that would never change. He would love her always.
“I am leaving tomorrow, and I don’t know when I’ll return. I will miss you, and George, and Baybridge House. But my future is elsewhere, Mother.”
She reached up then and touched his cheek with the palm of her hand. It startled him for a moment, but it felt warm and comforting, an expression of goodwill. But she said nothing. Perhaps she had decided there was nothing more to say.
Marcus stood upright in the bright sunshine of late morning, feeling an immense tension coiling up inside of him as he watched Exeter’s coach meander along the viscount’s private drive toward the house.
Lingering next to his own coach, Marcus had been waiting for the man to return from church service for nearly half an hour, his anger growing at the thought of the pain this one man had caused his sister, the circumstances that had culminated in her death. And he felt that way without question. Baudwin Fife might not have killed Christine with his own hands, but his selfish actions had led to the discovery of the letter that had been the center of her ultimate destruction.
Never in his life had Marcus felt such hate toward another human being.
At last the viscount’s coach pulled to a stop beside his. Two footmen immediately descended the stone steps from the house, intent on helping Exeter alight, but Marcus stopped them with a simple lift of his hand.
“Sir?” one of them questioned.
He smiled with a certain furious satisfaction. “I’ll take care of it.”
“As you wish, my lord.”
Marcus lifted the latch and glanced inside. Exeter sat near the opposite wall, in the shade, but the look of surprise on his face was telling.
“What are you doing here, old friend?” Baudwin asked, recovering his composure with a shake of his head. “Where are my footmen?”
“I wanted you alone,” Marcus replied, leaning over to push his large body inside, his voice raw with loathing.
Exeter frowned. “What the devil is going on?”
Marcus couldn’t wait any longer; his rage consumed him. In one thrust, he shot his fist into the viscount’s face with full force, shoving the man’s head back so hard it hit the wooden sidewall, causing the coach to sway.
Baudwin cried out at impact, so utterly startled he couldn’t immediately react in self-defense, or speak. He covered his nose with one hand, and grabbed the seat cushion with the other to regain his balance as blood began to gush down his pristine white shirt and onto his light gray, perfectly pressed morning suit.
Marcus wrapped his thick, hard hand around the man’s neck. “I thought,” he whispered through clenched teeth, “that since you attacked my sister in a coach, it would be fitting to show you exactly how it feels to be trapped at the hands of a madman. I only wish I could leave you with the same sense of disgrace.”
Baudwin blinked quickly several times. “My nose,” he grunted, unable to speak clearly. “Get off of me, you bloody
bastard
!”
Marcus lowered his face to within an inch of the viscount’s. Cheek twitching, he spat in whisper, “I wonder if she said as much to you.”
Baudwin went still, the pain from the punch making his eyes water.
“I’ll have you—”
“Arrested? I don’t think so,” Marcus finished for him. “If you tell a soul that I caused you bodily harm in any way today, I’ll tell all the mothers of Cornwall how you raped my sister.”
Fear replaced anger as Exeter fairly shook with it.
Satisfied, Marcus pushed against the man with full strength one last time, then stepped out of the coach into bright sunshine.
He jerked at the edge of his jacket to straighten it, then nodded once to the astonished footmen, who stood several feet away, gaping.
He was done here. No regrets.
Now to find Mary, the only person who had ever understood him.
« ^ »
M
ary sat beside her sister, Mimi, on a marble bench, in the younger woman’s flower garden behind her London home, listening to water trickle down the center fountain that stood before them. She also noticed the sound of traffic from the streets beyond. Always traffic—and the bustling of the busy community. She hadn’t realized that life at Baybridge House had also been so peaceful and quiet until she’d returned.
It had been a long journey, not so much in distance, but in the mix of emotion that still ran through her. She’d left three weeks ago, with a formal farewell both to the countess and to George, and an awkward departure from the property. She hadn’t seen Marcus that day, or said good-bye as she would have liked. Their last meeting had been in bed the night before, when they’d made love at their own pace, so beautifully, relishing every precious minute in those hours before dawn to make them last in her mind forever. He had intentionally avoided her the following morning, as she’d prepared to leave, and she hadn’t sought him. They had left so many words unsaid, feelings exposed. She couldn’t be with him, and Mary sensed that he had at last accepted the reality of their unconventional relationship and its impending end as well. He hadn’t mentioned it again.
She had cried when her coach meandered down the rocky path toward town for a final time, allowing tears to fall freely down her cheeks as she stared blindly at the calm, serene beauty of St. Austell
Bay. She would miss the ocean, the people, the cry of sea birds, and the sound of crashing waves upon the cliff. Instead of dwelling on it, however, she had looked forward to new and better times. She’d missed her family a great deal in the months she’d been away, especially her father, and life would return to normal in due course. She held much faith in that.
But life, she realized, tended to be singularly amusing, even absurd.
Upon her return, she discovered her father had been quite well taken care of by the Widow Ester Thurston. So well attended, in fact, that they were contemplating marriage. It was, her father had said, a rather spur-of-the-moment thing, and yet Mary could tell that her father was besotted. In a manner, she was thrilled he’d found someone else to take care of his needs, and enjoyed the company of a woman who adored him. They really were quite funny together, giggling and blushing like two in love.