Salt Bride

by Lucinda Brant

  “So! It’s finally come. You are to be First Lord of the Treasury at last! When do you kiss hands?” Diana St. John asked excitedly, gazing adoringly up at the Earl. “All our hard work has paid off. I knew it would! How could it not? You will make a brilliant first minister. When does Bute resign? Tomorrow? Today? Is it not exciting, Antony? Perhaps Salt will find you a place in his cabinet? What think you, Salt? Is my little brother to have the Foreign Department? Have you decided on the rest of your ministry? Naturally, Rockingham must be given something, Newcastle too. If only those two would cooperate more with one another. No matter. You will keep them both in line. Now, let me see, who else is deserving of your notice—”

  “I have declined His Majesty’s offer to form government,” Salt answered matter-of-factly, taking one of the sheets of parchment from the mantle where he had placed them. From his waistcoat pocket he produced his gold-rimmed spectacles. “In fact,” he continued calmly, deftly sitting his eyeglasses on the end of his nose with the paper still in his hand, “I have informed His Majesty that I have decided to rusticate for the foreseeable future. I have also vacated my chair on the Privy Council, effective immediately.”

  “Wh-what?” Lady St. John demanded, up out of the wingchair. She was so incredulous that it subdued her enough to ask quietly, “How can you throw away the opportunity of a lifetime? We have spent years working towards this goal. You cannot resign your posts! You cannot vacate the Privy Council. You certainly can’t waste your talents rusticating in a Wiltshire backwater! His Majesty won’t allow it. I won’t allow it! I don’t understand.”

  “You have never understood and you never will,” Salt replied evenly. “My own house must be in good order before I can possibly contemplate running the kingdom. To do that I must be true to myself; a gentleman and a family man, the Earl of Salt Hendon a paltry third.”

  Sir Antony smiled, completely attune to the Earl’s feelings. “Bravo for you, Salt,” he said quietly, all admiration for his friend’s decision. “Bravo.”

  “Don’t be an ass, Antony!” Diana St. John said dismissively and peered keenly at the Earl. “You’re not well. It’s the strain of the past few months. The corridor machinations over Bute’s possible resignation and the Peace negotiations have taken their toll. You’re wearing your eyeglasses. You must be suffering megrims. A few days at Strawberry Hill with Walpole to lift your spirits and you will see that you cannot possibly rusticate. You are needed to lead your country.”

  Salt opened out the letter and turned to Lady St. John to stare at her over the rims of his spectacles. “I have made my decision. Sit down, Diana.”

  But Lady St. John remained standing. She was too disbelieving to do as commanded. She shut her fan with a snap and put up her chin. “You are in jest. This is a cruel joke. You know very well that a few years, one year, playing sheep farmer on your estate is a-a lifetime in the political wilderness. You may never again have the opportunity to form government. You truly can’t be serious!”

  “I have never been more so.” Salt held up the parchment. “This letter bears my seal, but I did not write it. It is a forgery, and not very good copy of my fist. It is a letter you wrote in my name, Diana,” he drawled, an ugly pull to his mouth. “No doubt you were confident that the recipient would presume I had written it in haste and with some emotion, and that this would explain the lack of consistency in the forming of my letters. Or perhaps you rightly predicted that my betrothed would be in such a state of emotional duress upon reading this breach of promise note that she would be unlikely to think beyond the letter’s deplorable content?”

  Jane let out an involuntarily gasp, a shaking hand to her mouth, and looked from her husband to Lady St. John and then to her stepbrother. “How did Salt recover—”

  “From me, Jane. Uncle Jacob left the letter to me in his will,” Tom explained gently. He smiled and kissed the back of her hand. “I thought the time had come to hand it over.”

  “My betrothed would hardly worry about the authenticity of the fist given her deeply distressed state,” the Earl said, gaze remaining on Lady St. John. “Well, Madam. Do you have anything to add?”

  Diana St. John’s response was unemotional, but her confidence had slipped to be so coldly addressed by the Earl. She sensed an impenetrable wall of ice was forming between them and yet years of self-delusion convinced her that she was in the right and that he must see that she was in the right. After all, everything she had done, no matter how unpleasant or demeaning, had been done for his benefit and his alone. She loved him unconditionally but with that love came sacrifices, sacrifices he had to be willing to make if she was to help him become First Lord of the Treasury. She would make him understand. She met the Earl’s brown eyes with an air of confidence.

  “I am not about to deny it. Why should I? What I did, my actions in all things, have always been governed by my ambition for you. You are destined for political greatness. Everyone says so, from Holland to Rockingham to Bute. All sides of the political pen agree on that, even if they cannot agree on anything else. You have done so much for your country already, and will do more in the future. Sinclairs have been serving king and country since the Plantagenets. I could not allow you to throw away your future and your happiness on some lust-driven whim taken in the summerhouse. I was merely protecting you from yourself.”

  “Future? Happiness?” The Earl’s self-control unraveled. He ripped off his eyeglasses. “What the bloody hell would you know about my-my feelings?” He thrust out his velvet arm in Jane’s direction. “She—Jane is my future. Jane is my happiness. Even in her despair, when under the power of a religious lunatic, Jane never gave up hope in me. Jane loves me—me, not because one day I will be First Lord of the Treasury or of this or of that or of any-bloody-thing else! Does that penetrate your skull, Madam? Jane loves me.”

  Diana St. John’s laugh was one of outraged skepticism.

  “Good God, Salt! I do despair of you at times,” she said with a sad shake of her perfectly coiffured head as she took a turn from the wingchair by the fireplace to the sofa and back again to stand before the Earl with her chin up. She patted the silver threaded narrow lapel of his frockcoat. “You are a brilliant political strategist, to be sure, but the instant you allow the blood to pool between your tree-trunk thighs your mind is reduced to that of a jellyfish! Ah, such are the minds of warm-blooded vigorous men of intellect when they allow lust to override sense. But that’s what I am here for. To ensure you don’t completely come unstuck.” She turned with a swish of her layered gown to address the Countess. “Lord! You didn’t even have the wit or skill to keep your legs closed until you were up before a parson,” she taunted with a menacing wave of her fan. “You’re so pathetically naïve you even allowed him to impreg—”

  The Earl dropped his spectacles and had her by the throat.

  “Murderess,” he hissed in her face, fingers under her jaw to keep her mouth shut. It took all his self-control not to squeeze the life out of her. “If not for you, my wife would not have suffered the shame of being banished from her own home; of being shunned by her own father who wrongly accused her of being a whore. If not for you, she would not have been forced to accept Jacob Allenby’s protection and whose obsession with redemption made her life a misery. If not for you, I would not have considered her beneath my contempt for tossing me over so lightly. If not for you, I would not have spent four years wondering what my life could have been.

  “You had it within your power to set matters to rights with Sir Felix. You knew the truth and you concealed it. Worse. You willfully fabricated the truth to suit your own selfish ends. I put it to you that you read and destroyed the note concealed in the secret compartment of the Sinclair locket. A note, if it had reached me would have saved Jane and our and our—” He swallowed and dug deep in a frockcoat pocket and drew out a leather pouch. This he held out to Jane. “Take it. Open it. Anne and Rufus found it under her pillow.”

  But Jane could not move. She did not
trust her legs to carry her across the room. Tom retrieved the pouch for her and at her request spilled the contents into his hand. He held up a diamond encrusted gold chain that had at its center a large sapphire. It was the genuine Sinclair locket, and for Jane its recovery was bittersweet. She did not open the secret compartment; she knew she would find only emptiness. She laid the locket on the window seat cushion and blinked away tears.

  “Jane. Tell me what you wrote,” Salt commanded gently.

  She shook her head, hand to her mouth to stop a sob. Tom put a comforting arm around her and she leaned into his shoulder. Sir Antony and Salt waited. Jane finally straightened and looked at her husband and said just three words. They were devastatingly heartbreaking.

  “Enceinte. Please come.”

  The Earl bowed his head, but just for a moment, before lifting his chin to stare hard at Lady St. John, whose jaw he still held closed, fingers cupped menacingly about her throat.

  “By destroying that note and forging my fist on a breach of promise document, you made my darling girl believe me to be a licentious monster capable of cruelly using and abusing her for my own wanton satisfaction. Those who sought to cover up what you had turned into a scandal, who conspired to assist Sir Felix to avert the shame of his daughter giving birth to a bastard of indeterminate lineage, were ignorant of the truth, and you kept them in ignorance. They had no idea I was the-the—father of her child.

  “You could have averted tragedy and yet you promoted it,” he added, rummaging again in his frockcoat pocket to pull free a small blue bottle. This he held up between thumb and forefinger before Diana St. John’s unblinking gaze. “Worse. You procured a medicinal from an unscrupulous apothecary, Syrup of Artemisia—poison—and gave it to Sir Felix to administer to his daughter to kill the child growing in her womb.”

  “What? No! No! No! Not that! I can’t—I don’t believe it!” The anguished outburst came from Sir Antony, who could no longer listen in silence to the litany of horrendous crimes perpetrated by his sister. “My God, Salt, not that. Not the murder of your child…”

  He glanced at Jane, saw the anguish in her face, and then at Tom, whose eyes were full of sadness, and he had his answer. He went numb. When the Earl directed him to take down off the mantelshelf and read the second parchment, he did so, at first without seeing what he was reading. It was a list, a long list of names, names of women known to him and there was an address in the Strand of an apothecary’s place of business. He looked at the Earl and then at his sister and he knew he was crying.

  “Consign it to the flames, Tony,” Salt told him gently and turned back to expend his rage on his cousin, fingers tightening about her throat when she dared to move her head. “I gave your brother permission to turn that document to ash because it is a damning piece of evidence that would see you hang. I cannot have your foul deeds made public, your children branded the offspring of a murderess and your brother’s diplomatic career ruined. That document was evidence that you are a terminating midwife and a procuress of murderous substances. Over the course of many years, you have supplied Syrup of Artemisia to noblewomen with unwanted pregnancies; many of these women were my lovers at one time or another. I do not judge them. They have to reconcile their actions with their consciences and with their Maker, but to dispense your evil concoction on the innocent and unsuspecting, to menace and coerce my wife’s maid to administer a known abortifacient in her ladyship’s tea… To then try and do so yourself, just now…

  “How will you ever reconcile with your conscience what you have done? Ruining our happiness, debasing the woman I love… At every turn, you have done your utmost to cause us heartache and misery. Your wickedness knows no bounds… Stooping so low as to risk the health and wellbeing of your son. Forcing that little boy to suffer—Merry to suffer to see her brother in pain. Putting them through hell… Making us live a nightmare of your devising… And to think while I was comforting your children for the tragic loss of their father whom I loved as a brother, you were aiding and abetting the torment of the woman I love and the murder of our child… What shape of-of—monster are you?”

  “Magnus. Please. Don’t do this,” Jane said gently but firmly, standing at her husband’s elbow, a hand on his velvet sleeve. She glanced anxiously at Sir Antony, whose desolate face was as white as chalk, and then at Tom, who was wearing a brave face of understanding, and added firmly, looking up at the Earl’s strong profile, “Choking the life out of her will give you temporary satisfaction but I do not want any more unhappiness. Think of Ron and Merry. Think of our future. I love you. Please. She’s ill. Her mind, it isn’t well. She needs help.”

  “When I think of the wanton suffering she inflicted on her small son all to gain my singular attention, it makes me ill,” Salt uttered, throat dry and raw with despair. “What you have endured… I can never—ever—make amends.”

  “Yes. Yes you can,” Jane argued calmly. “When all is said and done, four years is not such a long time to be apart. A seaman’s wife can wait many years for word that her husband is safe. Sons go off wandering the Continent on the Grand Tour for just as many years while their families wait uneasy at home for their return. We have each other and a long future together. Ron and Merry are now out of harm’s way and they will learn to be happy, carefree children again. Please, Magnus. I do not want to dwell in the past. I want to go forward with you and the children into the future, together as a family.”

  Slowly, Salt’s grip about Diana St. John’s throat slackened and with her release came unbridled relief. He tossed the small blue bottle amongst the clutter on the tea trolley and turned to gather Jane into his embrace. He buried his face in the abundance of her shiny black hair and when she put her arms up about his neck and went on tiptoe to murmur soothing words of comfort, a deep breath escaped him and he shuddered with a mixture of a dozen emotions.

  And as the couple found relief and tenderness in their embraces, Sir Antony stepped forward and caught his sister as she staggered back, coughing, and spluttering, a hand to her burning throat that wore the imprints of the Earl’s fingers. But for all her distress, she would not have the touch of her brother and kept her gaze firmly fixed on the Earl and Countess. Her mouth twisted up with loathing to see him so happy and his life full of promise when all she had ever done, all she had ever strived for was to make the Sinclair name synonymous with power and this handsome nobleman the most influential politician in the kingdom. She would show him. She would make them both pay. He would live to regret this day for the rest of his life.

  She snatched up the blue bottle he had tossed amongst the tea things, uncorked it and in one last defiant act threw the contents down her dry throat and swallowed. It was done. She had poisoned herself and when she was dead, he would realize just how much she had meant to him.

  “No! Di! Don’t!” Sir Antony shouted and grabbed for the blue bottle. But he was too late and all he managed to do was wrest the empty vessel from her fingers and fling it away from him.

  “My little apothecary on the Strand tells me that if too much is administered, death will follow quite quickly. That’s good to know. But it will be painful, agonizing in fact. You will appreciate that,” she said with a sneering smile at Jane. “And you,” she added, blinking up at the Earl, who frowned down at her, his arm about his wife’s waist and holding her close, “you shall have my death on your conscience for the rest of your long illustrious life. You’ll regret the loss of me once I’m gone. Only then will you realize my true worth.”

  “Leave her to me,” Sir Antony demanded, a hand on the back of the wingchair where his sister sat in state. Tearfully, he stared at Tom and then at the Earl and Countess, who bravely met his gaze with a sad smile. “I’ll take care of her. She’s still my sister whatever mad demons possess her. It’s the least I can do for Ron and Merry, and for you, Salt. Now go. This isn’t the place for your wife, or you. Take her up to the nursery. Caroline and the children are waiting.”

  “Your loyalty is to
be admired, Tony, and one day it will be duly rewarded,” the Earl responded calmly, a nod to Tom to open the door that led out onto the passageway. Four burly footmen, the butler and Willis, followed by two dour faced gentlemen in plain frockcoats silently filled the room. “Your sister doesn’t deserve you, nor does she deserve to have a melodramatic exit.”

  Jane looked from Sir Antony to her stepbrother and then up at her husband. They were all unbelievably calm given Diana St. John had just downed a vial of poison. “Please. Magnus, call a physician. She must be given something to bring up the poison.” She glanced at the two men in plain frockcoats who now stepped forward. “Are these men physicians? Are they here to help her?”

  “Yes. They are here to help, but not in the way you think,” Salt answered and kissed Jane’s forehead. “My darling, do you honestly believe I’d have left poison in that bottle? It was flushed out long ago. Nothing more harmful than a lemon cordial went down her throat.”

  “What?” Diana St. John demanded, half out of the wingchair. Sir Antony held her in check, a firm hand to her shoulder. “How dare you! How dare you deprive me!” she snarled, defeated. “Why is that sniveling servant here? Who are these men? Unhand me at once, Antony! Do they have any idea who I am?”

  “They know precisely who you are and what you have done and they will be amply compensated for taking on the care of you,” the Earl advised, a nod to the two plainly dressed gentlemen who stepped forward either side of Diana St. John’s chair and bowed to him. “I suggest you do as you are told. If you do not… These gentlemen are well versed in the care of lunatics. Tony, you may wish to accompany her to the courtyard to say your farewells. The coach is leaving at once.”

  When the sitting room was again tranquil and deserted of attending physicians and the Lady St. John, who did not go quietly but screaming and kicking and heaping curses upon all and sundry as the butler closed over the door, Tom asked what Jane wanted to know. “Where are you sending the Lady St. John, my lord?”