The Duchess's Secret (HQR Historical)

by Elizabeth Beacon

  He had allowed temper and distrust to blight eight years of their lives when they should have been together. He had spent nearly a fortnight away from her now and it felt more like a year. If he needed one, he had learnt a lesson about how much he wanted and needed Ros while he was away. He felt dull and only half-alive without her and perhaps he had had to go away to realise how completely his life was entwined with hers. With her here he loved the hard work and challenges of making this rambling old barn a home for their family and combined future. Without her it was empty and pointless. He could see why his grandfather let the old place slip out of his control during the last twenty years of his life he had to spend here without his Duchess.

  All the way here Ash had counted days, then hours and minutes until he could see his wife again. Even an overnight stop along the way had been full of frustration and loneliness as he contrasted his lonely and their heady journey here this spring. At least he had left Peg at Selby on the way down so the last miles flew past with his own horse full of oats and eager for a brisk ride. It wasn’t even midday yet so he could still track Ros and Jenny down and not waste another day without them. It was high time he caught up with his Duchess and begged her to understand why he had left. Then he could try to convince her to write Dear Ash and Love, Rosalind at the beginning and end of every letter she sent him if they ever had to be apart again. Dearest Ash and Your Loving Rosalind would be even better, but he had best learn to walk before he tried to run.

  * * *

  ‘The Duke of Cherwell is driving up the lane,’ Joan said warily after she had run upstairs from getting the washing in to tell Rosalind Ash had arrived and looked as if she almost expected a new outbreak of baked missiles to come flying towards her at the very mention of his name.

  ‘Really?’ Rosalind wasn’t sure whether to be glad or sorry she had let Jenny go out with her governess and maid to watch the fishing fleet come in and scour any shops or stalls for booty along the way.

  ‘No mistaking him and there can’t be two like him.’

  ‘One would hope not.’

  ‘Hmm, we’ll see about that, but let me have a look at you. No time to redo your hair now, so I suppose you’ll have to do.’

  ‘Thank you, they say no man is a hero to his valet, but I shall never be a heroine to you, will I?’

  ‘You’re as close to my child as I ever got,’ her friend and loyal supporter said gruffly and this was no time to dissolve into tears. ‘There now, you blow your nose before his nibs thinks you’ve been crying over him. I should keep my thoughts to myself.’

  ‘No, thank you for everything and thank you for coming with me—despite your new role at Edenhope.’

  ‘I won’t say I don’t like being housekeeper and all the busyness and life of the place now it’s coming awake again, but you and Miss Jenny come first, Miss Rosalind. But that’s enough of that, here’s your husband hammering on the door and that Snigsby is daft enough to let him in.’

  ‘I don’t see how he could keep his employer out,’ Rosalind said absently, since her heart was beating like a drum and the baby was dancing about inside her as if it knew its father was back.

  ‘I’ll slip out the back and go and keep Miss Jenny busy a while longer,’ Joan said as she left the room. ‘Best for you two have some time alone.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Rosalind was staring at the view from the first-floor sitting room as if she had no idea Ash had arrived, despite his impatient footsteps on the stairs as if he was in a tearing hurry to get to her and that had to be a lie. From the open sketchbook beside her with the views she had sketched and painted to distract herself over the last two days she hoped he would see that she was busy and not at all bored or fretful. It was high summer and there had been so much to do, finding shells and rock pools and paddling in the sea with their daughter when nobody was looking, so she had hardly had a moment to miss him. She still felt his intent gaze on her back as if he knew all about the fast beat of her heart and tried to pretend she didn’t care if he was here or not.

  ‘Rosalind,’ he said after a pause to take in her silhouette against the azure sky outside.

  ‘Asher,’ she responded flatly and refused to turn around.

  ‘Don’t you want to know where I’ve been?’

  ‘Why would I? I am always the last to know your whereabouts and intentions. I hear them from the servants, or my daughter. I suppose if I was to ask a passer-by in the street he might know as much about the Duke of Cherwell’s comings and goings as his wife.’

  ‘Are you ever going to look at me again, Ros?’

  ‘Not today, and I would prefer it if you went away again.’

  ‘No. Come home?’

  ‘To be your convenient duchess? No, thank you.’

  ‘Of course not, but my wife certainly and—’

  But his calm tone was too much and she turned on him and snapped; ‘Don’t worry, your heir is safe.’

  ‘I have already told you I don’t care if you bear a tribe of daughters, Ros. Being a duke is not such a wonderful burden I am desperate to leave it to our son.’

  ‘That’s not what you said when you came to Livesey and found out about Jenny. You said you required an heir if I wanted to carry on as her mother.’

  ‘I was a fool back then.’

  ‘You don’t show much sign of improvement now,’ she told him and he shrugged, which sent her temper into the ether. ‘How dare you, Ash? How can you even think it is all right for you to step in and out of my life as if I am a doll you can pick up and put down at will?’

  He was silent and she recognised his set look from their first go at marriage. He felt justified. She disagreed with him in every bone of her body and wanted to hit him for being such an obstinate great ox.

  ‘All I wanted from you was a future with our family, but you thought you could dash off to wherever you have been and forget you even had one.’

  ‘I had good reason and if I told you what it was you would have argued and fretted all the time I was gone.’

  As if she hadn’t anyway. ‘What was it then, this wonderful reason?’ She turned to watch him instead of the sea, but could see he still felt justified and how she disagreed. ‘I am your wife, Ash. Only a convenient one, but entitled to know when you go who knows where for days on end all the same.’

  ‘I had to clear your way,’ he said as if she would understand and she felt more puzzled than ever.

  ‘My way to what?’

  ‘Back into the world we will have to spend time in now and again for the sake of our daughter, if not to meet friends and enjoy ourselves away from Edenhope on our own account.’

  ‘Oh, you mean the polite world and not the real one, I suppose?’ she said flatly and felt an old apprehension tighten her constricted stomach.

  ‘Yes, but one we have to be real in every once in a while.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we need to exercise the power and influence being a duke and duchess confer. And I want you to enjoy being a society beauty; the world needs to know about my extraordinary luck in meeting and marrying you, then us having the finest imp in the kingdom for our daughter. One day I shall put Jenny’s suitors through hoops and hurdles and everything else I can find until one proves he might be worthy of her, if he tries his damnedest until the end of his days. We need to know how the ton wags if we are to do that for her and the rest of our brood one day, Ros, and for ourselves as well.’

  ‘Why begin now? She is not eight and this one is not even born yet. I could go to town next spring for a week or two if that is what you really want, I suppose.’

  ‘I don’t want it to be a duty.’

  ‘And I have no idea what you mean,’ she said, but he was right, she did shudder at the thought. What if she met the selfish hedonist who had fooled her when she was so young she believed a libertine was only one because he had
not met the right girl yet?

  ‘Then why did you duck out of society when I left, Ros?’ he challenged her.

  He must have been watching more closely than she thought when they were in London this spring. She was horrified at the idea of being blackmailed or mocked by that vile excuse for a man if she re-entered high society as Ash’s surprise Duchess.

  ‘You could have brazened out our elopement and my shameful desertion,’ he went on relentlessly as if he had to get the truth out in the open. ‘Your stepfather would have supported you before and after Jenny was born if you had really wanted him to. He is not a cruel man and society would have sympathised with your plight and pitied our child for having a foolish boy as a father. Even in India I would have learned of my sins after a furious letter from my grandfather and would have had to come home to see the error of my ways. So why didn’t you fight me, Ros? Why choose a hidden life for you and Jenny if you were not afraid that piece of carrion would make a public mockery of you after I had deserted you, too?’

  He was relentless, as if his self-appointed mission was some sort of crusade. ‘I wanted to be the person I truly am, not a pretty face wild young Bond Street Beaux like you toasted in your cups and only ever saw as an objet d’art you wanted to own. I wanted Jenny to grow up loved for who she is, not found fault with because her father thought her mother a liar and a strumpet and left the country to avoid her.’

  ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘No, you are not. You feel insulted by a smug dolt who thought he had a right to break a virgin and chose me. You have proved it by going after my seducer as if I am a possession he rendered imperfect.’

  ‘Don’t put thoughts in my head that don’t exist, Rosalind.’

  ‘And don’t you call me Rosalind in that insufferably patient tone. You are looking for someone to blame for the missing years in our marriage.’

  ‘I don’t blame you.’

  ‘No? Well, I do. I should have made you listen. I ought to have stood in front of you and refused to get out of the way until you heard me out the day I let you walk away.’ Rosalind paced the room in her rage about those years apart. ‘Instead I was so weak I want to go back and kick myself. I cried like a fool until my eyes hurt, until there were no more tears left. I watched you go as if that was all I deserved. You made me so ashamed of what I confessed like a naive idiot, Ash, and I let you.’

  She paused, glared up at him, then looked away again. If she was not careful she could weaken and rush into his arms, tell him she was beside herself with joy because he had come back. But that was too easy. This was not a simple, quickly brushed-under-the-carpet argument. It was a battle for all they were, all they could be if he would put the past behind them and live in the now with what they could have, instead of what might have had once upon a time—if she was stronger and he was better at listening.

  ‘If I had screamed or collapsed or had hysterics that day you would have had to stay and at least make sure I was sane and safe before you went. Instead you left me feeling so stiff and dead inside I sometimes felt as emptied out as if I had been turned to stone. I never loved any other man but you and I never meant to lie. I couldn’t find the words to tell you until you told me nothing I said would ever part us and it turned out you lied that time and not me.’

  ‘Loved me?’ he asked as if the tense mattered more than the words spilling out of her, as if damming them up had only made them stronger.

  ‘Love, then, although goodness knows why. You make me furious and scared and downright confused and so glorious and complete and desperate for your every touch and whisper when you make love with me. Of course I still love you, you great fool. I have never really done anything else but love you from the first moment I laid eyes on you.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘Don’t lie. You hated me when you left, or you would not have been able to do it.’

  ‘I loved you as well. That was the real reason I went, so I did not break down and agree to take second-best like my parents did when they made a pact to tolerate one another in a marriage they made because he was the son of a duke and she wanted a title,’ he said clumsily and from his impatient curse he must have known he had made bad worse.

  It felt worse knowing that he had still loved her when he left, instead of never giving her wretchedness a second thought. It made his cruelty deliberate. ‘Don’t you dare say that to me, don’t you ever tell me such a lie again,’ she said in a hard voice even she didn’t recognise. ‘If you loved me, you would never have hurt me like that,’ she told him and wasn’t it a relief to feel fury push her tears back now they had got to the crux of the matter?

  ‘You underestimate my stupidity.’

  ‘Impossible,’ she said scornfully.

  ‘I love you now; I loved you then.’

  ‘But you didn’t love me in between.’

  ‘I can never make up for what I did, Ros. It simply isn’t possible.’

  ‘No,’ she said stonily. ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘Will you let me plead and at least try to believe me?’

  ‘I have said my piece. The Duke of Cherwell knows my opinion of his stupid quest, there is nothing else to say.’

  ‘Revenge...’ he said and Rosalind’s temper boiled over again.

  ‘If you had wanted revenge you should have taken it eight years ago, when I might have been impressed. You let him break our marriage and never mind what you said about me lying by default, he is why you left.’

  ‘No, that’s not it—’ he protested, but she overrode him.

  ‘I was so desperate for you to trust me; to believe in me, Ash. Instead you remade me in your mother’s image and hated me for it. I am not a natural liar, but my whole life was a lie after you left and how do you think that made me feel?’

  ‘I was unforgivably cruel and abysmally stupid.’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘All right, then, I still am.’ Ash stopped, breathed deeply, then shook his head as if fighting to find the right words.

  An itchy sort of silence stretched out between them and she so badly wanted to carry on being furious. ‘You are a fool, Ash,’ she finally said.

  ‘A very sorry one.’

  ‘Not sorry enough not to forget the past,’ she accused with a protective hand on the swell of her unborn child. Her fury was fading to sadness and she felt so tired she wanted to sleep, then open her eyes and pretend none of this had ever happened, except it had.

  ‘Yes, that sorry,’ he argued.

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘For good. I saw sense at last once I managed to track down your stepfather to Cornwall of all the unlikely places for him to be.’

  ‘His cousin and heir lives there, I believe,’ she said, startled that her stepfather had not slammed the door in Ash’s face for reminding him he had ever had a stepchild as troublesome as she was to him.

  ‘He seems to have mellowed and he made it his business to keep track of that rat after he left England.’

  ‘Why?’

  Ash shrugged as if the Earl of Lackbourne was still a mystery to him. ‘Maybe he regretted being so harsh with you when you were his rebellious stepchild and, knowing your daughter as I do, I suspect you were very unruly indeed, my Ros. I think perhaps he realised after you left that he cared a lot more than he wanted to admit as well. For whatever reason he kept a close eye on that excuse for a man and I suspect he would have made his life nigh impossible if the little rat had dared try to return to this country.’

  ‘Would have?’

  ‘The rat is dead, Ros. Killed by the father of an even younger girl he must have been insane to go anywhere near.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Two years after he left the country for that supposedly convenient posting of his.’

  ‘Then he was already dead when I told you?’ she said hollowly.

  ‘Yes, love,�
� he admitted and she flinched.

  ‘Why did he still matter so much to you though, Ash? You have risked all we had for nothing.’

  ‘The night Jenny nearly fell off that roof I realised you two mean everything to me.’

  ‘Really? And this is the way you chose to show it. Forgive me if I doubt it,’ Rosalind said, feeling bewildered by his very odd definition of love, if that was what he was declaring. ‘How could love make you think revenge for old sins against me would do us any good?’

  ‘So you would know he could never blight your life again. I can never take back my own ridiculous conduct when I accused you of breaking up our marriage by lying. I was not man enough to make you feel better about what had happened to you back then, so I used my little sister in the most unforgivable way to load all the blame on you and walk away with my hands in my pockets, as if I had done nothing wrong, just like the rat.’

  ‘So, if I understand you, which seems impossible right now, by the way—he was supposed to make up for your sins and his own, like a scapegoat?’

  ‘I suppose so. When you put it like that it seems absurd. Perhaps every few years a fit of insanity takes over my life, Ros. Maybe you should have me confined to an asylum or hide me in the South Lodge guard tower when I get one of these stupid ideas in my head.’

  ‘Oh, you idiot,’ she said with a great sigh and shook her head at him. ‘You are just a man and it strikes me you all have pockets of madness in you from the day you are born.’

  ‘Thank you, I will be sure to tell our son you believe so one day. But how else was I ever going to prove I truly love you, Ros? After what I did to you when we were little more than children?’