An Earl for the Broken-Hearted Duchess

by Lucinda Nelson

  Tessa was close behind her husband. When she stepped out, her eyes were on the ground. But as she passed Nathaniel and Margaret, she looked up at their faces.

  The look in her eye was so dark, so menacing, that Nathaniel’s heart gave a sudden pound.

  “Come along, Tessa,” Lord Butterfield said, in a curt voice. Tessa dropped her eyes again and walked faster.

  They left together, without another word.

  Chapter 33

  Lady Margaret Abigail Baxter, Duchess of Lowe

  They did not go back into the drawing room. It would have felt wrong to do so. Because they weren’t friends. They weren’t lovers. Margaret wasn’t sure what they were anymore.

  But she knew this was goodbye.

  “You don’t have to leave,” Nathaniel said. She wasn’t looking at him. She couldn’t. She watched her hands, which were linked together loosely in front of her. She looked like a shy maid, not the Duchess she was.

  “I do,” she answered.

  “Is it because of me?” There was a lurch in his voice.

  She smiled a little. “No, Nathaniel, it’s not because of you. But our time here has to come to an end. Things are… too complicated.”

  It took him a moment before he managed to nod. She could see that he was emotional, but she couldn’t understand exactly why her leaving mattered.

  “And Ezra?”

  “I think he will do fine in London. He likes it there. He had friends there. Staying at William’s should keep us out of the limelight. No one will expect to find us there. And if they do, then I hope that it has been enough time since Joshua’s death that they are ready to put it to bed.”

  She smiled to herself and went on. “After all, it is London. There must be a great many scandals that have happened since I left. The idle will find something else to gossip about, I’m sure.” At last, she looked up at him. At his stunning eyes. His strong jaw. The look of a gentleman who owned himself.

  Everything she’d ever wanted.

  “Besides,” she added, with a small shrug of her shoulder. “I think my time here with you has taught me something.”

  She saw the Adam’s apple in his neck bob as he swallowed. “What’s that?”

  He looked as if he was about to cry. She wanted to touch him. To hold him. But she daren’t. The trouble with love is that when you’ve given up, it’s hard to make it work. They had been broken one too many times and there was no coming back from that as far as she could see.

  “You taught me not to care what others think of me,” she murmured. “And I will cherish that. Truly.”

  This time it was Nathaniel who looked away. She could see the faint shine of tears on his lashes. She couldn’t be sure if he loved her, but Margaret knew that Nathaniel cared about her a great deal.

  Miss Wilde or not, they had created a connection between them that nothing could shatter. They were bound by pain and scorn, if nothing else.

  “I am pleased to have done something good for you, Your Grace.”

  Margaret reached out and touched his hand. He looked down at her fingers, as if they were ghostly. “You have done many good things for me, Nathaniel. I will always be Margaret to you.”

  He squeezed her hand in return, with a shaky smile.

  Their eyes met.

  “Goodbye then, Margaret. I hope to see you again one day.”

  “Goodbye, Nathaniel.”

  She did not watch him leave. She couldn’t see him ride out of her grounds for the last time. It was a sight that she didn’t want haunting her sleep.

  So she went into the drawing room and looked around. At the walls. The curtains. The chairs. Everything else had been stripped away. Her ornaments. Her paintings.

  It looked peculiar to her. And awfully sad. It looked like a shell and something about that made her cry. Perhaps because it reminded her of herself.

  Margaret felt that she had cried a great deal in these past few months. So much that she’d often wondered if she had any tears left in her.

  They came steady and slow at first, as they usually did. But then they came harder, faster.

  She heard a lurching sound, then a breaking sound and she found herself sinking down onto her knees with her arms around her midriff.

  She did not cry, not as ladies usually do.

  She wept.

  ***

  Lord Nathaniel Sterling, Earl of Comptonshire

  When he arrived home, Clark was waiting on his doorstep.

  Neither of them said anything. Clark took one look at his face and his own fell. When Nathaniel approached him, he did not move aside.

  He embraced him, in a way he’d only done once before. At the end of their time serving in the war. Clark held onto him for many moments and Nathaniel felt his heart come apart.

  In all their time at war, in all of their friendship, neither of them had ever cried in front of the other.

  But now he did. Now, with Margaret’s goodbye on repeat in his head, he sobbed like a damned child.

  “My friend,” Clark murmured and gripped him tighter. “I am so sorry, my friend.”

  Nathaniel lowered his face into his friend’s shoulder and let it all pour out of him. Every feeling. Every ounce of self-pity. The guilt.

  Worst of all, the regret.

  Yes, they had meted out justice to Tessa, but he didn’t feel like the victor. What she’d done, though they’d proven her false in the end, had broken Margaret and Nathaniel apart. Even the truth could not fix them now.

  “What have I done?” He whispered through tears. “I should never have doubted her, Clark.”

  His friend hushed him and moved his hand up and down his back for a long time, until Nathaniel’s chest stopped heaving.

  Then he lifted his face, with tears still on his cheeks. He wiped the despair and hopelessness from his countenance and locked it away inside his heart.

  He stepped out of Clark’s embrace and said, “I have work to do.”

  It was the last they spoke of Margaret.

  ***

  Lady Margaret Abigail Baxter, Duchess of Lowe

  Ezra’s condition improved in London. He saw his friends again, who were so pleased to see him that they seemed to have entirely forgotten the gossip they’d once heard from their parents. They were children. They didn’t care about the social politics of adults.

  When Ezra saw them, he was shy at first, but that soon vanished. The first day they spent together, they played hide and seek. For the entire day.

  When he went sprinting past her in the hallway, she called out to him but he was so caught up in his game that he didn’t even hear her.

  She was glad of it. She smiled to herself and went to read. Yes, Ezra was recovering. It was all she’d wanted.

  But she soon remembered how lonely London could be. What had she done here before Joshua had died? It seemed so long ago that it was hard to remember.

  She’d spent a great deal of time with women of a similar station. They had been dull, but they’d kept her from sitting inside alone all the time.

  But now, the thought of spending time with those ladies was repugnant to her. Having become the victim of gossip herself, she didn’t want to hear them gossip about anyone. And that was all she remembered them doing. Gossiping.

  Ruining lives.

  So Margaret sat inside. From time to time she’d write to William. She missed him. She wished he was here with her.

  Another person she’d lost somewhere along the way.

  A lot changed in the coming months. Ezra became more secure in himself. Happier. But he had an older soul now. Half the time he was playing.

  And the other half of the time, he had this queer adult look on his face. When she asked him if he was alright, he would nod and politely ask for time alone.

  She often wondered what he was thinking about. Margaret asked him once. “What are you thinking about, my darling?”

  He had blinked up at her. “Important things,” he said. “Things I think men sh
ould think of.”

  When she frowned, he only smiled and said, “Do not worry, mother. I am not sad. Only thinking.”

  Then he would resume thinking, leaving Margaret to her own thoughts.

  ‘I am not sad’, he’d said. Which made her wonder if she was sad.

  Sadness wasn’t how she’d describe her current state. It wasn’t like the desolation that had come when Nathaniel had stopped visiting.

  That had been a frantic sort of pain. This was duller. More like a pang that sat in her gut and occasionally gave her grief. It was always there, but it lay dormant most of the time.

  It was bearable. But only because she felt a little like the dead. Impervious.

  Until one morning, when Miss White brought her the paper.

  She flicked through the first few pages, without paying close attention. It was almost entirely scandal. Was there nothing of greater importance to speak about?

  Were the people in her world truly so obsessed with dragging each other through the dirt?

  She was about to put the paper aside, when she saw something she recognized. A word. Just a word that her eyes had picked out, because of all the feelings it carried with it.

  Comptonshire.

  Her grip on the paper tightened and she opened it wider. She read quickly. Too quickly. The information came into her mind in a jumble she couldn’t make sense of.

  Fire.

  She read it again.

  And again.

  She didn’t want the information to sink in. She didn’t want to know this.

  Margaret’s heart was thumping so hard that she thought she could feel it in her ears, in her eyes, in every fiber of her being.

  There had been a fire at the schoolhouse.

  Burnt to the ground.

  Chapter 34

  Lord Nathaniel Sterling, Earl of Comptonshire

  Burnt to the ground.

  It happened in the night, when a storm came and the lightning struck the schoolhouse, setting it ablaze. Someone came to the house at dawn to tell him and when he heard he went immediately.

  The sun had barely risen and there he stood, with orange and yellow starbursts of sunrise behind him, looking at the ashy remains of the school. No part of it had been salvaged.

  He walked towards it and stopped when he felt the crunch of something under his foot. He looked down and lifted his foot, revealing the remaining stem of a crooked carrot. Even the garden had not survived.

  “Oh, Lord Sterling,” came a voice from behind him. Miss Wilde. He stared at her blankly, while she wept. She cupped her hands around her mouth and stared up at the black, dusty carcass of the school.

  “I am sorry,” he whispered.

  She was walking towards the school, faster, as if she meant to throw herself on the ashes. Before she reached it, Nathaniel caught her about her waist.

  Clark was not far behind her. He rushed towards them and took her into his arms, where she clung to him and sobbed until her lungs must have ached.

  Clark looked like he’d only just tumbled out of bed. “I came as soon as I heard,” he whispered to Nathaniel over Miss Wilde’s head. “I am so sorry, my dear friend. So sorry that I can’t express it.” Nathaniel didn’t say anything. He felt dead inside.

  But he was glad of his friend, who was able to treat Miss Wilde so tenderly.

  He looked back at the schoolhouse.

  What cruel trick of fate was this? The odds of the schoolhouse being struck were infinitesimal. And the odds of it being burnt to such a state that it was unrecoverable were even smaller.

  And yet it had happened.

  “I think that God does not like me very much, my friend,” Nathaniel murmured, without looking back at Clark. He could still hear Miss Wilde’s soft hiccups.

  “This is not God, Nathaniel. God would not do this.”

  “Then who? I almost wish it were an arsonist. But I cannot blame a person for this. Only a storm. And who brings the storms, Clark?”

  Clark didn’t answer. The three of them stood there as the rest of the villagers gathered around them.

  There was so much crying.

  The sound of it would haunt him forever.

  ***

  Nathaniel expected them to give him time. Expected them to understand, but they didn’t. The village officials came down on him mercilessly. They called on him constantly, suffocatingly so, and he felt at a loss.

  He needed a day. Just a day to get himself back on his feet. Didn’t they see what a hit this was? He’d spent the last six months building that school up from nothing.

  He’d poured his finances into it, because he hadn’t been able to secure a patron. Almost every hour of his every day had been spent on that schoolhouse.

  It had just been finished when the lightning had struck. And suddenly, the children and parents he’d promised a good schoolhouse… had nothing again. Had he raised all their hopes for nothing?

  They didn’t give him a day. Not even a single day. They came two or three at a time to bite his head off. They all wanted answers. Even those who hadn’t seemed to give a damn about the school, and had been entirely open about that fact, came to demand answers.

  What would happen next? Who was to blame? How would they fund it?

  And behind it all, a sort of glee. So few of them had wanted real change. They’d hated it when Nathaniel had taken over and started stirring things up.

  He felt like their questions and demands were their own special breed of revenge. Their way of punishing him.

  He’d got what he deserved, as far as many of them were concerned.

  “What’s the plan?” Clark said. He didn’t know that he was the fiftieth person to ask him that.

  Nathaniel had a pile of books in front of him. His accounts. He did not answer Clark, so he came closer and started picking up the books.

  “These are your personal accounts,” he remarked.

  “Not all of them,” Nathaniel replied, in a dead voice, as he put one of the books aside and picked up another.

  He felt Clark staring at him. “Don’t you think they should be kept separate?”

  Nathaniel smiled, bitterly, and looked up at his friend. “No, I don’t. I’m not at liberty to keep them separate.”

  Clark flicked through the pages of the book he was holding. “How much have you put into this schoolhouse, Nathaniel?”

  “Does it matter at this point?”

  “Of course it does.”

  “Not to me.”

  Clark slammed the book down on the desk loudly. “Are you giving up?”

  “Does it look like I’m giving up?” Nathaniel snapped back at him. “There’s no money, Clark. Do you understand? Not a damn penny. So right now I need to find a patron. And you standing there commentating isn’t helping.”

  Clark blinked. Nathaniel knew this could so easily become another fight. He remembered how that had ended for them last time. He’d been alone, when he’d needed a friend most.

  Nathaniel put his forehead on his hand and expelled a slow breath. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I’m just-”

  “Don’t,” Clark replied, shaking his head. “I am sure you’ve had to explain yourself enough since the fire. Just tell me what I can do.”

  Nathaniel looked up at him, with a breath catching in his throat. “Help me find a patron?”

  Clark smiled, rubbed his hands together and pulled a seat up to the desk. “Where do we start?”

  ***

  They found two potential patrons. One gentleman was in London. The other was in Birmingham. He visited the Birmingham gentleman first.

  A duke with relatives in Comptonshire. He might well have the incentive to invest in the town. And he was known as a wealthy man.

  Or at least, he had been.

  Upon arrival at his estate, Nathaniel soon learned that wasn’t the case anymore. There were other men and women in attendance, which Nathaniel hadn’t been expecting.

  He was let inside but he didn’t see the duke
for a solid hour. And in that time, Nathaniel learned a great deal about him from the whispers about the room.

  “Did you hear how much he lost last time?”

  “His wife was devastated. Devastated, I tell you.”