The Secret Love of a Gentleman

They were both flawed.

They’d been scarred as children by their mother’s betrayal and their stepfather’s hatred. But on top of that Drew had the curse of male pride. He would not plead his case and try to persuade Mary to have him back.

~

“We will leave the carriage here and walk,” Drew stated when it jolted to a halt. It was the last stage of their journey.

He opened the door and took her hand. She climbed out, her eyes wide and heartbeat racing. He kept a hold of her, leading her out of the inn’s courtyard.

They turned a corner and walked down another street. Then past a shallow ford across a river and a large, ornate building.

Drew continued walking until they reached a row of terraced, whitewashed, thatched cottages. Most had gardens filled with vegetable plants, but the one in the middle was full of flowers in bloom. When they reached it Drew opened the gate in the stone wall that ran along the edge of the road.

They walked up the path.

The cottage door was small, but it was the entrance to her new life. In that context it was a giant step.

Drew knocked and the door opened. A thin, middle-aged woman, dressed in unrelenting black, stood there. Drew hurried Caro in and shut the door. It was dark inside and the ceilings were low. It felt a little like a prison cell—gloomy, cold and desolate.

She had come from affluence to this, tumbling down the stations of society, simply because she could not bear a child.

Drew stayed with her for a while, as the housekeeper who had opened the door showed her about the small four-roomed cottage, and then he drank tea with Caro. But he could not stay forever.

“Caro, you know I cannot return for a while. Kilbride will have people watching me for weeks. We both know it. Do not write either. It is not worth taking the risk. I will come as soon as I can, but in the meantime, simply live quietly here.”

She nodded as he stood. She rose too. Then she lifted to her toes and hugged him, crying, clinging to him. The one person in her life who had proved themselves constant—who loved her truly.

“You must be brave, Caro, stay calm and stay strong and sit it out here. He will not find you, I promise.”

She nodded again, but Albert would never cease looking. She knew him better than Drew. Albert would take her flight as an insult. He’d wish for revenge. He would continue to live his life without her and yet ensure she never felt able to live hers without fear.

Chapter 3

The knocker struck on the cottage door with four firm raps.

Caro rose from her chair, fear clasping in her chest as she walked into the hall.

This was her haven—no one knocked on the door.

Beth, the housekeeper, had come out from the kitchen. She wiped her hands on the skirt of her white apron.

Caro had lived here alone for days, a prisoner in her new home, communicating with no one except Beth and no one else ought to be here. Drew had said he would not come.

Caro could not look from the window without giving herself away. Instead she stared at the door, willing her eyes to see through wood.

No word had come from town and she had not asked Beth to purchase a paper for fear that local people would wonder why a woman of the class she was now supposed to be would wish to read. She was living humbly, trying not to rouse suspicion.

“Madam, should I open the door?” Beth whispered as Caro merely stood there, her heart pulsing hard.

Foolishly she longed for Albert, for someone to turn to and say, what should I do? She missed none of her finery but she missed her husband. She missed the man who had felt like her protector once, the man who had come to her at night and touched her as though he loved her. A part of her foolish heart longed to be found, but not by the man who beat her.

“Ask who it is.” Caro whispered.

“Who is there?” Beth called as she looked towards the door.

“It is Lady Framlington. Your brother sent me, he could not come himself.” Mary’s soft voice penetrated the wood and pierced Caro’s heart. Drew’s wife should not be here if all was well.

Caro looked at Beth. “Something is wrong. Why would my brother not come himself? They are estranged…” Of course, it was foolish asking her housekeeper. How was Beth to know? But the anxiety skittering through Caro’s nerves stopped her from thinking clearly.

“Ma’am, I cannot say –”

Panic gripped and solidified in Caro’s stomach, and froze her limbs as though ice crept across her skin. She imagined Drew beaten or dead. “Should I trust her, do you think?”

“Ma’am.” The decision must be yours, Caro heard the words Beth did not utter.

Drew’s wife was from a good family, a family renowned for its loyalty and high morals. Surely Mary had not come to entrap her.

“Let her in,” Caro ordered in a broken whisper.

“Very well, my lady?” Beth’s hands reached behind her back to untie her apron as she turned away and went to hang it up in the kitchen.

When Beth returned, her black dress still dusty with flour, she freed the bolts that held the door.

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 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 anymore. 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.

Tears sparkled in Mary’s eyes, then fresh tears spilled from Caro’s. She leant to embrace Mary as Mary embraced her, both offering comfort. Caro broke the embrace, heat burning in her cheeks. “I am sorry.”

Mary wiped away her tears with the sleeve of her dress. “You have no cause to be sorry.”

“I do. This is my fault.”

“It is not… It is no one’s fault, and we are going to remain calm. That is what is best for Andrew, and we are going to feel confident and trust Richard to return him to us.”

“The magistrate did not believe me, not wholly. He is going to speak with one of my lady’s maids to ask her to confirm what I have said. The whole thing is mortifying… and then I think of Drew in a cell, alone. When he has done nothing to deserve it.”

Mary gripped Caro’s hand. “I know. I know you are both innocent. I know you have both been through so much. But that is over now. We will have faith.”

Caro gave her a tentative smile. “Thank you. Thank you for your concern. But most of all, thank you for loving Drew. He needed a woman like you –”

“And I need him –” Mary smiled, but a tear escaped.

Caro wiped it away with the handkerchief she held. “I am glad for you both.”

A light knock struck the door, which had been left ajar. “Come!” Mary called.

“Sorry to interrupt.” It was the Duchess of Pembroke, Mary’s sister-in-law. “It is just, I wished to let you know we are serving dinner. Your uncle is staying with us to dine, Mary, and he sent me to fetch you to ensure you came to the table. “Will you dine with us, Lady Kilbride?” The Duchess looked at Caro and Mary, as they looked at her.

The Duchess had requested Caro’s attendance at the table daily and yet Caro had kept to the rooms she’d been allotted. She felt safe there. Among people, the sense of shame and discomfort was overwhelming.

Caro shook her head.

“I will leave you, then. Come when you are ready, Mary.”

“I’m sorry,” Caro whispered. “I feel as though they must think I am rude and disrespectful of their hospitality, but I… I cannot tell you how I feel. I… Do you think the Duchess would send my dinner to my room?” How could she explain her feelings to Mary? She was beginning to feel as if she were mad.

“Of course she will. You must not feel pressed.”

“Thank you, Mary. I will retire, then.”

“Yes. But send a maid to fetch me if you need me.”

Caro nodded.

They left the room together, but when Mary turned towards the dining room, Caro turned to climb the stairs.

~

Caro waited in the drawing room of the Pembrokes’ giant Palladian mansion, seated in a corner, beside Mary’s mother, her fingers clasped in her lap, struggling to control her breathing and the pounding of her heart.

But Drew was here. Free. She had been told by the Duchess an hour ago that he’d arrived. They’d all hoped today. She’d heard them talking even from upstairs.

The house was full of people. All of Mary’s extended family had come from town to celebrate on Drew’s behalf, and they were all in the room. Caro felt crowded as she waited, smothered by them. Her nerves screamed.

Mary’s mother had said he was with Mary still. Yet he must come down soon. Caro had been waiting nearly half an hour.

When Mary came into the room she was alone. She walked across it and whispered something in her father’s ear, then they left together.

Caro’s gaze hung on the door while Mary’s mother talked of her younger children. Caro was not listening.

The noise of conversation was intense, deafening. A shiver ran up her spine. It was more than simple fear, though. There was annoyance and anger inside her too. She wished to scream as much as run.

She was falling to pieces. At any moment the panic inside would explode and she would shatter like glass.

But Drew was free…

Maybe she ought to retire to her rooms. He would come up to her.

She was about to stand and declare her apology when he came into the room, his hand holding Mary’s.

The room broke into applause and he smiled self-consciously. She had never seen him look humble as he did in that moment, and yet there was pride in his eyes when he looked at Mary. He had won himself a place in this family. He had achieved what Caro never would—a good marriage. He deserved this. She did not begrudge him it and nor would she spoil this moment for him. She would not run.

While the men moved to speak with him, Caro tried to make conversation with Mary’s mother, but all the time her awareness was on the proximity of her brother. She looked up. Drew spoke with Mary’s younger brother, Robert, a tall, slender youth. Mary lifted a hand and pointed Caro out, and then Drew looked and a moment later he turned towards her. But his progress towards her was hindered by well-wishers.