Marriage Made In Hope

Her nails dug into the skin above her wrists, leaving whitened crescents that stung badly, and she liked the pain. It told her she was alive, but the numbness inside around her heart was spreading and there was nothing at all she could do to stop it.

Chapter Two

After the rescue at the river Francis removed his sodden jacket and lay down on the day bed in his library, closing his eyes against sickness. Everything upon him was wet, but just for this moment he needed to be still.

It always happened like this, suddenly, shockingly, placing him out of kilter with all that was around him and sending him back to other moments, other times, other places that he never wanted to remember.

Even the change of environment did not banish the panic, though it made the waiting easier here amongst his books and his throat stopped feeling quite so blocked and swollen.

‘Have a drink, Francis. Then if you do happen to die on us you will at least have the rancid filthy taste of the Thames gone from your mouth.’ Gabriel handed him a large glass of brandy filled to the rim as he sat up and took two generous sips before placing it down.

‘This has...happened before. It’s not...fatal. It’s...just damn...unpleasant.’ He was still shaking and his voice reflected it, ice in his bones and shards of glass in his head. He was so very tired.

‘Why?’ One word from Lucien, hard and angry. ‘It’s the Hutton’s Landing affair, isn’t it? That damn blunder with Seth Greenwood and somehow his death is your problem forever.’

Francis shook his head.

‘It’s the...mud.’

‘The mud?’

‘The mud that covered us. The memory comes back sometimes...and I can’t fight off the feeling.’

‘God, Francis. You went to America as one man and came back as altogether a different one. Richer, I will agree, but...altered in a way that makes you brittle and you won’t let us in to help you.’

Francis tried to concentrate, to sift through all of the extraneous matter and find out what was important.

‘Who was...she?’

‘The girl you pulled from the Thames? You don’t know?’ Lucien began to smile. ‘That was Lady Sephora Connaught, the uncrowned “angel of the ton”, the woman who every other female aspires to become like...and one who is engaged to Richard Allerly.’

‘The Marquis of Winslow. The duke’s son?’

‘His only son. The golden couple. Both sets of parents are good friends. Bride and groom-to-be have known each other since childhood and the relationship has matured into more. It will be the wedding of the year.’

Gabriel on the other side of the room was less inclined to sugar-coat it. ‘Allerly is an idiot and you know it, too, Luce, as well as being a damned coward.’

For the first time in an hour Francis felt his shivering lessen with this turn of topic. ‘How is he a coward?’

‘Winslow was there, damn it, right behind his would-be bride. He watched as that untrained horse of hers upended her over the balustrade and sent her tumbling down into the river.’

‘And he did...nothing?’

‘Well, he certainly didn’t take a leap from a high bridge into a deep and fast-running river without thinking twice. Cowering against the stonework might be a better description of his reaction. The skin on his knuckles was white from the grip.’

Lucien looked as though he found Gabriel’s description more than amusing. ‘Allerly was there soon enough though when you got her to the bank, Francis, I noticed he tried not to get mud on his new boots as he all but snatched her from you.’

‘Hardly snatched,’ Gabriel countered. ‘It did look as if the girl knew who her saviour was at least and it took the marquis a while to get her to let you go. Her bodice was ripped, too. Her beloved took a good long look at what was on offer beneath before taking off his own jacket to cover her. Sephora Connaught’s mother, Lady Aldford, looked less than pleased with him.’

For the first time in hours Francis relaxed. ‘It seems as if Lady Sephora made quite an impression on you both.’

Gabriel took up the rebuttal. ‘We are happily married men, Francis. It’s you we hope might have noticed her obvious charms.’

‘Well, I didn’t. I was shaking too much.’

He leaned back against the sofa and drew a blanket across himself before finishing the rest of the strong brandy. The name was familiar and he tried to place it.

‘Lady Sephora Connaught. How is it I know of her?’

‘She is Anne-Marie McDowell’s youngest cousin.’

Anne-Marie. He had courted her once a good many years ago, but she had died of some quick sickness before they could take the relationship to the next stage. He’d got drunk when he’d found out, so blindingly drunk he’d never made it to her funeral. Looking back, he thought his reactions had come not so much from the shock of Anne-Marie’s death but from the reminder that the grim reaper took people randomly, with no thought of age or experience or character.

The family had not been pleased by his absence though and he knew now he should have handled things with more aplomb than he had.

His right cheek ached from where Sephora Connaught had scratched him, three dark lines running from eye to chin caught in the reflection of the glass that he held. He hoped they would not fester like the wound had on the other cheek as he closed his eyes.

When he had thrown himself off the bridge today part of him had hoped he might not again surface and that he would be celebrated as a hero when he failed to reappear. Such a legacy of valour might sweeten the nightly howls of the Douglas ancestors whose portraits lined the steep stairwell as he walked to his bedroom late at night and there was some comfort in imagining it such before the truth of his life was torn apart again by gossip and conjecture.

He was alone and running from a past that kept reaching out, even here in a quiet, warm room and in the company of friends. Lifting the glass of brandy to his lips, he finished the lot.

‘You look like a man who needs to unload his demons, Francis.’ Gabriel said this, his voice close and worried. ‘Adelaide thinks you have the same appearance as I did when I first met her, swathed in secrets and regrets.’

‘How did she cure you, then?’

‘Oh, a good wife has her ways, believe me, and mine was never a woman to give up.’

Lucien joined in the conversation now. ‘It’s what you need, a woman with gumption, spirit and humour.’

‘And where do you think I shall find this paragon that you describe?’ The brandy was loosening his tongue and stilling the shakes and with the blanket about his shoulders he was finally feeling warmer and safe.

‘Perhaps you have just done so, but do not know it yet.’

Francis frowned in sheer disbelief. ‘Lady Sephora Connaught is engaged to be married to the only son of a duke. A slight impediment, would you not say, even given the fact I have not yet shared one word with her.’

‘But you will. She will have to thank you for risking your life and I am certain jumping into a dangerous freezing river must have its compensations.’

‘Is it the brandy that is making you both talk nonsense for I am damned sure that the so-called “angel of the ton” would have enough sense to keep well away from me?’

‘You paint yourself too poorly, Francis. Seth Greenwood’s cousin, Adam Stevenage, said that you had tried to save Seth. He said that you held him up out of the mud for all the hours of the day and it was the cold that killed him come the dusk.’ Lucien said this softly, but with conviction.

‘Stop.’ The word came with an anger Francis could not hide and he turned away from the glances of both his friends. ‘You know nothing of what happened at Hutton’s Landing.’

‘Then tell us. Let us help you understand it instead of beating yourself up with the consequences.’

Francis shook his head, but he could not halt the words that came. ‘Stevenage is wrong. I killed Seth with my own stupidity.’

‘How?’

‘It was greed. He wanted to leave after the first lucky strike, but I persuaded him to stay.’

‘For how long?’

‘A month or more.’

‘Thirty days?’ Lucien stood now and walked to the window. ‘Enough time for him to have changed his mind if he had wanted to. How long did you have to think about jumping into that river today?’

Francis frowned, not quite catching his drift, and Lucien went on.

‘Two seconds, five seconds, ten?’

‘Two, probably.’ He gave the answer quietly.

‘Did you think about changing your mind in those seconds?’

‘No.’

‘Well, Seth Greenwood had millions and millions of those same seconds, Francis, and neither did he. Would it have been our fault if you had jumped today and never resurfaced? Should we have languished in guilt forever because of your decision to try and rescue Lady Sephora Connaught? Are one man’s actions another man’s cross to bear for eternity if things don’t quite turn out as they should?’

Gabriel began to laugh and brought the bottle of brandy over to refill their glasses.

‘You should have taken to the law, Luce, and you to the ministry, Francis. Arguments and guilt have their own ways of tangling a man’s mind and no doubt about it. But here’s to friendship. And to all the life that’s left,’ he added as their glasses clicked together in the fading dimness of the library.

‘Thank you.’ Francis felt immeasurably better, lightened by a logic he had long since lost a hold of. He’d been mired in his guilt, it was true, stuck in the darkness like a man who had run out of hope and could not go on.

He had to move forward. He had to live again and believe that all he had lost could be found. Happiness. Joy. The energy to be true to himself.

He’d heard a voice, too, before he had jumped, from above or in his head he knew not which. A voice he knew and loved; a voice instructing him to save the girl in order to save himself and to be whole again.

God, was he going mad? Was this insanity the result of excessive introspection and guilt? Raising his glass, he drank of it deeply and thought that he had only told his friends the good half of a long and damn sordid story because the other part was too painful for anyone to ever have to listen to.

Chapter Three

Five days later his butler came into his library with a heavy frown upon his face.

‘There is a gentleman to see you, Lord Douglas. From Hastings, my lord. He has given me this.’

Walsh passed over a card and Francis looked down. Mr Ignatius Wiggins, Lawyer. ‘Show him in, Walsh.’

The man was small and dressed in unfashionable clothes of brown. He looked nervous as he fidgeted with a catch on the leather case that he held before him like a shield.

‘I am the appointed counsel of Mr Clive Sherborne, my lord, and I have come to tell you that he has been murdered, sir, in Hastings a week ago. It was quick by all accounts, a severed throat and a knife to the kidney.

Good Lord, Francis thought. He stood to digest the brutality of such an ending and thought of the deceased. He had met him only once for he’d come to the Douglas town house with his wife, a garish but handsome-looking woman of low character and poor speech. They had come with the express purpose of informing his uncle about the birth of a baby whom they insisted was his by-blow. Wiggins had accompanied them.

Lynton St Cartmail had been furious and wanted nothing to do with such a hoax. Blackmail, he’d called it, Francis remembered, as he had ordered them summarily gone.

Clive Sherborne, however, had taken the child they had brought with them in his arms, a crying-reddened baby with dark lank hair and pale skin, even as he promised that he would instruct a lawyer to call on the fourth Earl of Douglas. His voice had been gentle and sad, a man who had not looked like the type to be murdered so heinously years later and Francis wondered what had happened in the interim to make it thus.

‘Mr Sherborne had asked me to inform you of any significant events in his household, my lord, and so I am—informing you, I mean, about his death. A significant event by anyone’s standards.’

‘Indeed it is, Mr Wiggins.’ Francis wondered briefly whether the mother, Sherborne’s wife, was still alive and what had become of the girl child. He wondered why Wiggins had come back, too, given the amount of years that had passed since last being here.

‘The deceased had given me a letter, sir, in better times, you understand, a missive that was to be delivered into your hands only in the circumstances of his death, for he wanted to make certain that Anna Sherborne was...catered for. He was most adamant that I should give you this last correspondence personally, my lord, and that I should allow no other to take my stead...’

Francis remembered Wiggins distinctly, for his physical countenance looked much the same as it had. Last time he had gesticulated wildly at the screaming bundle of the unwanted newly born baby, but this time his hands were clasped tightly together, dark eyes showing an ill-disguised puzzlement mixed with fear.

‘I shall not be a party to the lies any longer, Lord Douglas. Your uncle, the fourth Earl of Douglas, Lynton St Cartmail, paid me well to keep my silence about his illegitimate daughter and I have regretted it ever since.’

‘He paid you?’

‘From his own private funds, my lord, and they were substantial. The receipts are all here.’

The horror of the lie congealed in Francis’s throat. The thought of a child, who was in effect his cousin, lost under his uncle’s profligate womanising, was so shocking he felt the hair rise along his arms. Lynton had laughed off the charade of her birth as an obscene pretension by a misguided harlot to gain money from the coffers of the Douglas estate and at twenty-two Francis had had no cause to think the old earl was being anything but truthful. He could barely believe the dreadful falsehood and struggled to listen as the lawyer went on.

‘This is the end of it, you understand, and I won’t be held responsible for the consequences. I am elderly, my lord, and trying to make my peace with the Almighty and this deception has played heavily upon my conscience for years.’

Opening his bag, he found a thick wad of documents, which he laid down on the desk. ‘This is the missive Mr Sherborne left in my care. It outlines the Douglas monies accorded to him for seeing to the child’s upbringing and also any extra amounts sent. I should like to also say that although gold can buy certain things, sir, happiness is not one of them. Unfortunately. Miss Anna Sherborne is now largely at the mercy of the borough and one who has no idea of the true circumstances of her family connections and elevation.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘It is all there, my lord, all written down in the letter, but...’

‘But?’

‘The child has been brought up without proper rule of law and although Clive Sherborne was born a gentleman he most certainly did not have the actions of one. His wife, God rest her soul, was even less upstanding than her husband. To put it succinctly, the young girl is a hoyden, unbridled and angry, and she may well need a lot more from you than the promise of some sort of temporary and transitory home.’

Francis’s head reeled, though he made an effort to think logically. ‘Then I thank you for your confidentiality and for your service, Mr Wiggins, and sincerely hope you will bring the girl here to London in the next few days for the Douglas birthright should be her own.’ He said the words quietly, the tremble of his hand the only thing belying complete and utter fury at his uncle as he paid the man off for his troubles and watched him depart.

Lynton St Cartmail’s foolish and ongoing lack of responsibility had now landed firmly on his shoulders and the covering letter the lawyer had given him felt heavy as he ripped open the seal and looked down.

Anna Sherborne was almost twelve years old. He stopped, trying to remember himself at the same age. Arrogant. Cocksure. His parents had died together a few years prior in an accident so that could have been a factor in his belligerence, but Anna Sherborne’s life had not been an easy one either and by the accounts of the lawyer she sounded...damaged.

The Damaged Douglas. That echo made him stand and walk to the window. What the hell was he to do with an almost-twelve-year-old girl? How did one handle a female of that particular age with any degree of success? God, no one had done so thus far in her life by all accounts and he did not wish to impair her further by his ignorance of the issues. His uncle must have known what would happen when he had turned his unsuitable lover and their offspring away with a good deal of financial support and an express intention never to see them again.

Well, she was his responsibility now. He’d need a governess, of course, some female relative with a firm and respectable hand to temper out all the knots and bumps expected in a wayward and abandoned child. He’d need patience, too, and honesty. And luck, he added, catching his reflection in the window.

Sephora Connaught’s nail-marks had settled somewhat on his right cheek, though they were still easily seen in the glass, three reddened lashes running from the corner of his eye.

On the other side the scar from the Peninsular Campaign blazed. He saw others looking at it often, of course he did, this mark that cut his face in half, but he’d made the conscious decision years ago not to let it define him. Still there were times... His finger marched along the pathway of injury and he felt the loss of who he had been and what was left now.

He was supposed to be accompanying Gabriel and Adelaide Hughes to a ball tonight given in honour of a friend’s father. Part of him wished he did not have to go out and be seen after the incident by the river the other day, but the more sensible part of him reasoned that if there was speculation directed at him then so be it.

A small bit of him also hoped that Lady Sephora Connaught might also be attending the ball. He wanted to take a look at her and see if what he remembered matched the truth of her countenance.

Perhaps it was Lucien’s words alluding to her as the ‘angel of the ton’ that had coloured his reminiscences, but he had begun to imagine her in a way that could only be called saintly. She’d had light hair, of that he was sure, but her face in the water had been blurred and indistinct. He did know her lips were full and shapely because he had been focused upon them as he had allowed her his breath.

An intimate thing that, he supposed, and the reason for this ridiculous but abiding interest. He had kissed a hundred woman in his life and bedded a good number, but this was the first time he had felt...what? Connected? Haunted? Aroused with such a speed it felt improper?

All of those things and none of them. Walking to his room, he turned when his valet came in to lay out his clothes for the evening and cursed his mindless and maudlin sentimentality.

Sephora Connaught was to be married forthwith to the Marquis of Winslow and he was by all terms a great and worthy catch. Still, he looked forward to seeing the elusive daughter of Lord and Lady Aldford tonight at the ball even if it was just to understand that the power of reminiscence was never as strong as the reality of a cold hard truth.

* * *

Sephora did not wish to go to the Hadleighs’ ball and she told her mother of it firmly.

‘Well, my dear, it is all very well to be nervous and of course after the events of the past week it is only proper that you should be, but you cannot hide forever and five days of being at home is enough. Richard will be there right beside you as will Maria, your father and I and, if anyone has the temerity to comment in any way that is derogatory, I am certain we shall be able to deal with them effectively.’

Her mother’s words made perfect sense, but for the first time in her life Sephora was not certain that anything would ever be all right again. She was either constantly in tears or as tired as she ever had been and the doctor her mother had called had told her ‘it was only by rejoining the heaving mass of humanity and partaking in social intercourse that she would ever get well’.

His words had left her sister in fits of laughter and even she for the first time in days had smiled properly, but when putting on her new lemon gown this evening with its ruched sleeves and silken bodice she felt dislocated and adrift.

Her leg had healed and she hardly noticed the pain of it any more, though the doctor had been adamant that she leave the bandage on for a good few more days yet. Richard had presented her with new earrings and a matching bracelet and she had worn these tonight to try and lift her spirits.

It was not working. She felt heavy and wooden and afraid and the diamonds were like a bribe for his lack of...what?

She could not bear to have him touch her, even gently or inadvertently. She had not caught his eyes properly either lest he see in the depths of them some glint of her own accusations. A coward. An impostor. A man who could not and would not protect her.

So unfair, she knew. He was unable to swim competently, as were a great many men of the ton, and he had done his utmost ever since to make certain that she was healing and happy. Large bunches of roses had arrived each day, and because of it all she would associate their smell with this dreadful time forever and hate the scent of them until her dying day.

Her dying day. That was the crux of it. She had escaped death by the margin of a whisper and could not quite come to terms with the fact. Oh, granted, she was here still, breathing, eating, sleeping, walking.

And yet...she wasn’t.

She was still under that water, trapped in her heavy clothes and in the darkness waiting to die.

Her skin crept with the thought and she shivered. She felt as if she might never truly be warm again even as the maid placed the final touches to her curled hair with a hot iron.

She looked presentable and calm when she glanced at herself in the mirror a few moments later. She looked as she always had done before any ball or social event of note: mannerly, gracious and composed. She had never been criticised for anything at all until this week, until she had clung to Francis St Cartmail in her torn and sodden riding clothes as though her life had depended on it.

Well, indeed it had. She smiled and the flush in her cheeks interested her. She seldom had high colour and just for a moment Sephora thought such vividness actually suited her, made her eyes bluer and her hair more golden. Usually her skin held the sheen of a statue cut from alabaster, like the one of the Three Graces she had seen in an art book at Lackington’s in Finsbury Square. Translucent and composed. Women untouched by high emotion or great duress.

Maria’s noisy entrance into her chamber had her looking away from her reflection.

‘The carriage is here, Mama. Papa and the marquis are waiting downstairs.’

‘Then we shall come immediately. Have you a wrap, Maria? It is cold outside and we do not want a case of the chills. Sephora, make certain you bring your warmest cloak for there is quite a wind tonight and the spring this year has a decided nip to it. After the incident at the bridge we do not wish for you to sicken, for your body’s defences will be lowered by the alarm of your accident.’

And with that they were off, bundled into the carriage full of Maria’s happy chatter and her mother’s answering interjections.

On her side of the conveyance Sephora simply held her breath, squashed as she was between her father and Richard, and wondered how long she could keep doing so before she might faint dead away. She had got to the slow count of fifty in her room before the black spots had begun to dance in front of her eyes. She did not dare to risk the same here. But still she liked the control of it, silent and hidden. A power no one could take away from her, an unbidden and unchallenged authority.

* * *