Wilde Child EPB

by James, Eloisa

  Thaddeus gave her a wry smile. “I still hope he doesn’t encounter brimstone.”

  “Of course,” Joan said repentantly. “Me too. I mean, so do I. But honestly, Thaddeus, he is not a nice man. I don’t think he’d repent his sins, not even if the Archbishop of Canterbury were to lay hands on him.”

  Thaddeus looked about. “Perhaps we shouldn’t carry on this conversation in the corridor.” He couldn’t hear any sound from the billiard room, but at any moment the family might wash into the corridor, baby in tow.

  “Let’s go to the turret,” Joan said. “I’d invite you to my chamber, but Aunt Knowe gave me a frightful scold earlier about not being scandalous. By which she meant, Don’t be caught in your bedchamber by the maids.”

  She gave him an impish smile.

  “Does your aunt know you’re wandering around the castle at night dressed in breeches?” Thaddeus took in her appearance. “And studded with jewels? If diamonds were raisins, you’d be a tasty cake.” Thaddeus wrapped his arms around her and nipped her earlobe. “Very tasty.” He felt himself harden against her thigh.

  “We need to discuss this.” Joan held up the letter, crumpled after being caught between them.

  Thaddeus allowed himself to be drawn down one corridor and up another, until they ducked under an archway and started up a winding stairway.

  “We used to come here often,” Joan said over her shoulder.

  “Why did you stop?”

  “Aunt Knowe thinks it’s too dangerous with side panniers.”

  Thaddeus agreed with her. The narrow walls turned with the stairs, and he couldn’t even stretch out both his arms.

  “Breeches are so much better than panniers for climbing stairs!” Joan called happily, and skipped up a few steps.

  They finally emerged on the turret that topped the family wing of the castle. Like everything at Lindow, the stones that made up the crenellations were massive, so heavy that it was difficult to imagine how they could have been levered into place. The gaps weren’t there to create a pretty border either. This was a battlement turret, built at just the right width to allow a man to launch a stone or pour some boiling oil over the edge.

  Thaddeus walked to the edge to take a look. Looking out over the moonlit country, the acres that surrounded Lindow, including the dark mire that was Lindow Moss, Thaddeus had a sense of time and continuity. His father wanted to break the rules of primogeniture . . . but there was sense to it, unfair though it seemed. The Lindow duchy represented the achievement of generations marshaling their wealth and power.

  His father, on the other hand, had tried to bankrupt Eversley Court. Perhaps the Duke of Eversley was so enraged at his parents that he wanted to destroy his heritage. It was a strange thought, but it made sense.

  Joan was on the other side of the parapet. “Over here!” she called.

  Thaddeus rounded the parapet and discovered his future wife sitting on a mattress tucked under a covered walkway. The moonlight was full in her face; she’d taken off her hat, and beams struck light from the diamonds around her neck.

  But most of all, from her.

  She shimmered.

  Thaddeus sank to his knees before her. “Joan.” The word was so full of longing and love that he was almost embarrassed, but he pushed the thought away. “I love you.”

  “I love you too,” she said, dimpling. She leaned forward and brushed her lips over his. “Now read this.” She pushed the letter into his hands.

  “I needn’t read it,” Thaddeus said. “The Wilde solicitors will forestall attempts to publish if there are other copies somewhere. How on earth did you get it?”

  “Your father thought I was the ghost of Henry VIII.” She struck a royal posture. “You didn’t know this, but spectral royalty carries out a kind of visiting deathbed service for men who are kingly. He gave the letter to me of his own free will.”

  Thaddeus grinned. Even holding his father’s despicable letter in his hand, he found himself grinning. “My understanding is that Henry was a great deal larger around the middle than you are.”

  “I played Henry as a boy, silly,” Joan said. “That’s when His Majesty visited Lindow. Admittedly, there’s not much sense to his ghost lurking about. I forgot to use the royal ‘we’ a few times. Oh, and by the way, your father knew he was dying when he traveled here.”

  “He said as much,” Thaddeus said.

  “He didn’t want his other family to have to experience the indignities of his death.” Joan nodded at his hands. “Open it.”

  Thaddeus looked down, feeling a pulse of deep rage at his father. Wasn’t it enough that the man had destroyed his legal family, tried to ruin his wife’s life, and left his heir scrambling to please a father who loathed him?

  “I could just rip it into shreds and throw it to the winds,” he suggested.

  “You could,” Joan said.

  Thaddeus turned it over. “I don’t understand. I don’t bloody understand the man. I suppose he wanted to ensure that I’d support his family, but this idiocy makes it equally likely that I’d spurn their claim.”

  “He babbled about revenge,” Joan said. “Even quoted Hamlet on the subject.”

  “One of the most self-destructive emotions a person can have,” Thaddeus said. “This ends here.” Methodically he ripped the letter, unread, into tiny pieces and launched it into the air. The breeze caught the tiny scraps and carried them over the parapets and away.

  Thaddeus leaned forward to brush a kiss on Joan’s lips the way she had on his, but that wasn’t enough. He lifted her into his lap and found himself in that happy place that existed only when they were alone together, whether on an island or a turret.

  His entire body soaked in the happiness of having her in his arms. The world, lying in shards at his feet, knit itself together. She was the glue, the one thing that made his father’s petty cruelty irrelevant.

  Sometime later, he murmured, “My father taught me something about love.”

  Joan blinked up at him, her eyes dark with desire. “What?”

  He could just see the sweep of her lashes and one rosy cheek. “He loved his second family. I told him I’d send my half brother to Eton.”

  “He scorned you for being honorable, yet he depended on that very quality,” Joan pointed out. “He came to you, at the end. He could have sent the letter to London without you knowing it had been written. I think the letter was a pretext. He knew no one would send it on to the newspapers.”

  She turned her head and kissed his chest. “Would you like to take off your coat, perhaps?”

  Thaddeus choked. “No, I would not like to unclothe myself on a mattress that’s been here God knows how long.”

  “Since April,” Joan said helpfully. “New ticking and a cover every spring.”

  Thaddeus could just imagine how many of his soon-to-be brothers-in-law had taken advantage of the mattress since April. “No,” he said firmly. “Picnic with ants, yes. This mattress, no.”

  “Such a duke,” Joan grumbled. She kissed his chin.

  Thaddeus drew her to her feet. “Much though I would love to escort you to your bedchamber, despite Aunt Knowe’s admonishments, there is something I have to do.”

  Which was how the Duke of Eversley—vengeful and embittered as he was—left this mortal coil with one hand firmly held by his son and heir, and the other by a young Henry VIII.

  He sank into that final darkness with a germ of joy in his heart. A king had attended his deathbed. He had breathed his last under an ermine throw.

  Finally, his worth had been recognized.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  At the breakfast table the next morning, Joan carefully spread Aunt Knowe’s marmalade onto her toast, keeping her gaze far from Thaddeus. Every time their eyes met, she found herself trembling like a ninny, pink color rushing into her cheeks.

  Yesterday . . .

  Yesterday had been marvelous.

  Oh, not the death of the Duke of Eversley. But the rest added u
p to the happiest day of her life: Thaddeus’s proposal in Percy’s sty, making love on the island, the birth of little Otis, their conversation on the turret . . .

  Afterward, in her bedchamber, when Thaddeus made love to her so tenderly that she started crying, and then burst into laughter at the dismay on his face.

  She had woken to find Thaddeus propped on one elbow, warm eyes smiling at her. His jaw still had an arrogant slant, but it was part of him, and she adored everything about him.

  Even after an illicit night in which they slept only in snatches, he looked elegantly composed, whereas her hair fell a tangled cloud around her shoulders. The white sheet draped over his flat stomach as if it had been carved from marble by a master sculptor. His hair was rumpled just the right amount to make a woman’s breath catch; his eyes burned with emotion.

  Truth be told, it wasn’t the fact that she’d spent the night in a man’s arms that was making Joan blush over her toast. It was the emotion she saw in that man’s eyes.

  A growl at the other table made her head jerk up. Her father was staring down at the post just delivered by Prism. Joan’s heart sank when she saw what he was holding.

  The Duke of Lindow was rarely enraged, but the one thing certain to drive him to a fury was the proliferation of prints depicting the “wild Wildes” that continued to circulate throughout England. They were collected by kitchen maids and countesses, and unfortunately, the more outrageous prints sold like hotcakes.

  In the last couple of years, she had often been the subject of the best-selling print in the kingdom, a dubious honor at best. She tilted her head, but from her viewpoint, it didn’t appear to be a sketch of her, thank goodness. The last thing she wanted to do was remind Thaddeus just how much the gossip columns relied on her for material.

  “Look at this!” His Grace said, holding up the print contemptuously by one corner. “Sent to me straight from one of the stationers.”

  “What does it depict, darling?” his wife inquired, looking completely unconcerned. When the third duchess first married, she had disliked being a subject of entertainment for the popular press. Now she was inured to it.

  He crumpled the print and tossed it on the table, where it bounced and ended up beside Jeremy’s glass. “It depicts me buying wedding licenses by the dozen,” he grated.

  Parth was the first to laugh, but everyone in the room followed.

  “There’s more than a grain of truth to it,” North chortled. “You did marry three times.”

  “North, dearest, I believe that the etching refers to the duke’s children, referring to the family’s reluctance to wait for the calling of the banns,” the duchess said serenely. “My husband is depicted as buying licenses for his children.”

  “Should have told me before I paid a fortune for mine,” Jeremy said, laughing.

  “Buying licenses in bulk is actually doing godly work, brother,” Aunt Knowe said gleefully. “The Book of Common Prayer says it all. Marriage is ordained as a remedy against sin and to avoid fornication, if you don’t mind my bluntness at the breakfast table.”

  The duke groaned.

  “An inauspicious moment for this announcement,” Thaddeus said with a distinct thread of humor in his voice. “Joan has agreed to marry me immediately.”

  “She has?” the duchess asked, her brows drawing together.

  “Due to my father’s death,” Thaddeus went on smoothly. “The Duke of Eversley left explicit instructions that his body was to be removed to Eversley Court, there to lie in state until a funeral one week later, at night, with his ermine throw as a pall for the coffin, fourteen torchbearers, and silk crepe scarves given to all mourners.”

  Joan’s stepfather narrowed his eyes at Thaddeus. “You’ll meet me in my study after this meal, Duke.”

  “Certainly,” Thaddeus said, unruffled.

  “Only as his wife could I attend the funeral,” Joan pointed out. “I’m certain that Aunt Knowe wouldn’t want to chaperone me, since baby Otis is here.”

  “Among other reasons to miss that particular funeral,” her aunt said.

  “Would it be crass to say that it sounds like the kind of theatrical event you’ll enjoy?” North asked Joan.

  “Yes, it would,” Aunt Knowe said.

  Joan stuck out her tongue at her older brother, who burst into laughter. “You don’t look like someone deserving of ‘Your Grace’ at the moment, sis!”

  “I, for one, am deeply grateful that Joan has agreed to marry my son straightaway,” Thaddeus’s mother announced. “I feel quite ill.” The Duchess of Eversley was the picture of rosy-cheeked health. “I shall not be able to attend my husband’s funeral. Instead, I shall remain in the company of my dear Lady Knowe, with deep gratitude to all of you for sheltering me in this time of mourning and . . . illness.”

  “Excellent!” Aunt Knowe cried.

  “I gather that the late duke threatened to send a letter to the newspapers announcing that our marriage was illegitimate,” Thaddeus’s mother added, looking remarkably unconcerned.

  “The letter has been destroyed,” Joan told her quickly.

  “If it leaks out, it won’t matter to me,” she said, patting Thaddeus’s hand. “Shortly after my marriage, my father confessed that he knew of Eversley’s love affair. His mistress was still living with her father when we wed.”

  Thaddeus was stunned to hear that.

  “My grandfather married you to a man whose heart was . . . was claimed elsewhere?”

  “My father was confident that their love would prove a triviality. After it became clear that was not the case, he apologized to me repeatedly.” The duchess smiled at her son. “Your grandfather left a thorough account, Thaddeus. No court in the land would overturn my marriage. You are the Duke of Eversley.”

  Thaddeus had no doubt about his legal claim to the dukedom, but his mother’s affirmation was still welcome.

  “I believe that the late duke knew perfectly well that his letter wouldn’t be dispatched to London,” Joan said. “After all, he waved it in the air last night, so that all of us would know it existed. And he didn’t give it to the household staff; the letter had no address.”

  “That’s true,” her stepfather said, nodding.

  “The late duke knew that his elder son would take care of his other family, take care of the funeral, take care of the letter too.” Joan smiled at Thaddeus. “That’s what honor is, after all. The duke scorned it, but in the end, he relied on it.”

  “Hear, hear,” Aunt Knowe said, putting down her fork to clap.

  The family picked up her cue, and “hear, hear” resounded around the breakfast room.

  Thaddeus forced his mouth to ease into a smile. His heart clenched, but it was a good feeling. Joan’s fingers curled around his.

  At the head of the table, the Duke of Lindow nodded to Prism, and footmen stepped forward to put glasses of champagne before each person.

  Thaddeus looked around the room, at the faces—from the duke’s to the butler’s—all of them smiling at him with admiration, his mother among them. He turned his head and there was Joan, his beloved Joan, beaming at him.

  The Duke of Lindow rose, holding his glass of champagne. “We welcomed two new members to the Wilde family last night: Otis and Thaddeus. I am blessed to call both my relatives. And Thaddeus, since Otis is upstairs in his mother’s arms, I’ll address this to you: I hope that we, your family, will in time fill the space left by your father’s passing.”

  Thaddeus nodded. Words spilled into his head regarding his father. But that didn’t matter.

  He stood up, letting go of Joan’s hand, looking from face to face. “My future wife has already filled the space left by my father’s disregard. Becoming one of this vast tribe makes me very happy, but my true joy is that you are giving me Joan. Her love is the greatest gift I’ve ever been offered, and I promise you, her family, that I will treasure her for all the days of my life.”

  He nodded to Joan’s father, sipped his champagne, and loo
ked down at his future duchess.

  She was laughing, of course. And the table was laughing with her. Then she sprang to her feet next to him, glass in hand.

  “I think we should all toast the new Duke of Eversley,” Joan cried. “Not because he is devilishly handsome and brilliant, but because he has showed himself a Wilde in three ways. Number one!” She raised a finger.

  Her eyes were sparkling with mischief. “He brought us Percy the piglet. Who has raised the tone of the cattle shed with his very fine pleated collar and is beloved by the Lindow nursery.”

  This point was met by much clapping. Thaddeus wrapped his arm around Joan, and she leaned against his shoulder.

  “Number two: He just announced that we’re marrying by special license, as did most of my brothers, not to mention my dearest sister Viola!”

  Roars of laughter and more applause.

  Joan paused and waited for silence. “And number three. I say this with great love, dear ones, but I will say it: I longed my entire life to be an actress, to walk across a public stage, to hear applause from strangers, to test my acting skills. Father, you allowed me to perform here at Lindow Castle. But Thaddeus—”

  He frowned at her, and she put a fleeting finger on his lips before she turned back to the table.

  “Thaddeus no sooner heard my wishes than he arranged for me to act on the Wilmslow stage, which I did. Two nights ago, Otis and I recouped our roles as Hamlet and Ophelia.”

  “What?” the duke roared.

  “Oh, darling.” The duchess sighed.

  Thaddeus was interested to see that the other Wildes were not only unsurprised; they mostly seemed cross to have missed the performance.

  “I wasn’t good,” Joan said flatly.

  The duke’s face darkened even more. “Of course you were!”

  “You were undoubtedly the best actress ever to appear in Wilmslow!” Lavinia cried.

  “No, I wasn’t,” Joan said. She smiled around the table, still leaning on Thaddeus, who wound both arms around her. “I was funny in a part that is supposed to be serious. The audience roared with laughter as Hamlet died. My point is that Thaddeus heard me. And he did something about it. He gave me my dream.”