Blas dug in his heels, the horse moved forward. To the rhythm of the soft squish of his horse’s hooves through the snow and the mud, the last verse of the old ballad echoed through his mind. A mockery of his hopes and dreams.
And if we prove successful,
Pray name it after me.
And keep it neat and kiss it sweet,
And damp it on your knee.
When my three years are ended,
My time it will be out,
And I shall double my indebtedness
By blowing the candles out.
Chapter Twenty-four
Blas slumped in the saddle, allowing the horse to find its own pace. Thin clouds obscured the sun, its pale sickly glow doing nothing to dispel the damp chill of the night. Mist drifted up from the snow, dulling the landscape. Except for the tight knot in his stomach—compounded of despair, guilt, and burgeoning anger—he might as well have been back in the mountains of Spain. Exhaustion, cold, and hunger were old, familiar problems, easily lost in strange new sensations of shock, fury, sickness of heart. He was Alexander Trowbridge. Marquess of Harborough. No one treated him like this. Most certainly, not his wife.
Bloody nonsense!
Then again, she had a right to be angry. He should have told her the whole when they were married. Well and truly married by the Anglican chaplain. At fifteen, Catarina Audley had been a woman grown. Strong. Intelligent. Capable. She would have hugged his secret to her, kept it from Thomas himself. But he had had to be the consummate Englishman. An arrogant, secretive bastard who could lust after her and still insist she was only a child. A child to be protected. A child whose decisions should be made by others.
He should have told her. Admitted that when he discovered he could not do it alone—could not run Thomas’s network, the Casa Audley, scout for Wellington, and whip guerrilleros into line all by himself. When he sent for his brother, he should have told her.
Tell a child of fifteen she had two false husbands? Hell, no!
But later—when they were truly lovers . . . After a night of passion when she was soft and sleepy and satisfied. Too tired to fight. He should have told her.
But tonight, in his eagerness to be home, he had not thought about guilt, the possibility of anger. Nor had she. At least he had thought not. Their passion had been soul shattering, an affirmation of a new beginning. Of love which could burst to full bloom without secrecy or pain of separation. They had immersed themselves in a new, better world. Not an end.
Never an end. He would not accept it.
Blas forced himself to relive the pain of his last few minutes with his wife. She sat beside him in bed—prim as a nun, the covers pulled up to her chin—and told him to go.
Unconcerned, he murmured his lies with practiced ease. “No need to worry about the servants. I’m your husband’s cousin, stopped for the night on my way to London.”
“You will leave now. And not come back.”
Still unalarmed, he had closed his eyes, settled his shoulders further into the soft feather mattress. “I’ve not forgotten my promise to Tomás, but we’ll manage. We always have. And I can’t leave without seeing the boy.”
Cat had had several agonizing weeks to plan this moment. Her arguments were ready. “You do not understand,” she explained patiently. “Whether you wish me to be your mistress or your wife, I am rejecting your suit. You will not share my bed again.”
Blas’s eyes popped open. He stared at her. A smile curved his lips. “Really?” he inquired sweetly.
“Realmente.”
“You and what army are going to keep me out?”
“Your promise to Thomas will keep you out. There is some honor left in you, I think.”
Abruptly, Blas sat up, eyes narrowed in disbelief. She could not possibly mean it. For a moment his agile mind went blank, words of protest dying unborn.
“I shall love you all my life,” Cat declared with stoic calm, “but I cannot be with a man who would allow me to live with such a deception. Forgiveness is not possible. I shall find someone who will be kind, who will take Pierre and myself and demand only a good and faithful wife in return. If I do not find such a man, I shall return to Lisbon, to the life to which I was born. The child from the Casa Audley was never intended to be a duchess.”
“If that’s what’s bothering you . . .”
“No! That is the least of it,” Cat hissed. “You deceived me. Cruelly. And hurt your brother as well. His honor, and possibly his heart. You were thoughtless. Arrogant. Unkind. I can never trust you again. There is no way I can live with you.”
He refused to take her seriously. Cat’s fit of temper was his punishment. Well deserved. But he’d suffered enough. Time to end this nonsense. Blas drove his wife down hard, back into the pillows in a tangle of flying hair and arms. He crushed his mouth to hers, stopping her words, demanding she take them back. His body followed the rest of him, flattening her to the bed, ruthlessly pinning her beneath him. Cat bit his lip, startling herself almost as much as he. She tugged a hand out from under his elbow. Grabbing a handful of waving black curls, she yanked with the strength of weeks of pent-up fury. Blas’s head snapped back. His teeth opened on a snarl.
Her hands were suddenly above her head, painfully gripped by his. Eyes glittering, he rose above her like some ominous black cloud. “You can’t do this, Cat.”
“I can. I will.” In that moment he saw the love in her blazing green eyes turn to hate. The line between the two was so thin, so frighteningly, horribly thin.
With an oath he rolled off her, rolled out of bed. Consumed by guilt at his primitive response to his wife’s intransigence and not above a good healthy rage at her idiocy, he hunted for his clothes with the stiff movements of a mechanical toy. Cat did not mean it. She would get over it. He would make sure she got over it. Thomas had said he could court her. Bloody hell! If that’s what she wanted, then he’d court her.
Court her? After what they’d done tonight?
As Blas struggled to pull on his boots, visions—romantic, cynical visions—danced through his head. Flowers, bonbons, rides in the park, waltzing at Almack’s. Jesus, he might be sick. Blas slammed his foot hard into the second boot, glanced at the bed from under lowered lashes. Cat was buried under the covers. Even her flaming hair was invisible. Extinguished from his life.
So here he was on the bloody cold road to Walmsley Oak. Cast out of the house he had bought for her.
No wife. No reunion with a small waiting child who had already had a bitter lesson in abandonment.
When Blas left the inn later that morning, he gave a new direction to the coachman. He would go home. To Marchmont. To Sebastian and Melisande Trowbridge, Duke and Duchess of Marchmont. His parents. It was time.
“You are mad,” said Blanca flatly. “A fool. A woman does not refuse to be a marquesa.”
“How can you say so?” Cat cried. “You know how he used me. I have no choice. Honor demands it!”
Blanca gave a most unladylike snort of derision. “Me, I am practical. A woman of reason. A woman who will one day be a duchess does not throw away her husband, his title, or his wealth. Nor does honor warm your bed.”
“My husband is dead. I have an elegant piece of parchment suitably edged in black, signed with a flourish, and sealed with black wax, stating that Don Alexis Perez de Leon died nobly in the defense of his country on 3 August 1813 during the siege of San Sebastian. I am therefore free to live my life as I please.”
“In the eyes of the law, perhaps,” said Blanca most awfully. “Not in the eyes of God.”
“Then you are as much my father’s wife as I am the wife of Blas the Bastard.”
Cat was sitting on the edge of Blanca’s bed, where she had gone early that morning to tell her friend of Blas’s return. Horrified at what she had just said, Cat clutched Blanca’s hand in hers and fell to her knees beside the bed, her forehead burrowed into the soft comfort of the quilt. “Forgive me, Blanca,” she begged. “Never, never did I
mean to hurt you. I am so miserable, I do not know what I am saying. I want only to run away, to hide from what lies ahead. I think I shall die of this.”
Only a slight quaver tinged Blanca’s voice as she assured Catarina there was nothing to forgive. “No one understands anguish better than I,” said Thomas Audley’s mistress. “There is nothing to forgive. As I have told you, with things as they are, I do not believe Tomás would require you to go through with this Season. We may pack and leave immediately. You have only to say so.”
“No,” Cat declared, “I will not run away. Not yet. There must be someone with whom I can live my life. In Lisbon I already know there is no one.”
“So be it.” Absently, Blanca patted Catarina’s hand. If only there were a church in this benighted country where she could light a candle to the blessed virgin.
Then again, like Blas, she did not really believe Catarina meant it.
She was wrong.
“Are you quite sure Catherine understands you truly wish her to be your wife?” the Duchess of Marchmont interjected before her son had finished all of his long and complicated tale. With grave intensity, Melisande Trowbridge regarded her eldest son from warm amber eyes which were the exact match to those of her twins. A petite Frenchwoman, she was the high-born daughter of the ancien regime who had been safely in England well before the Terror destroyed the remainder of her family. Her fierce hatred of the Revolution had shaped the lives of the sons whose birth had been so difficult there could be no other young Trowbridges to follow.
Owing to the skill of the duchess’s maid, not a single gray hair showed itself among the waves of dark hair which framed her deceptively fragile face. Not all of the twin’s single-minded determination could be laid at the feet of their father.
“But she is my wife, Maman,” Alex insisted, pronouncing her name in the French manner, as he had from childhood. “How could she think anything else?”
“You must remember that I too came to this country as a foreigner . . .”
“Catherine is as English as I!” Alex interjected. “I beg your pardon, Maman. Pray continue.”
“In truth, it is a great mésalliance,” said the duchess. “If I were a young woman in Catherine’s circumstances and a gentleman gave me a house and an income, I should assume one of two things. That the gift was a most elaborate thank you for services rendered or that you wished to establish me there as your mistress.”
“It was a manor house, not a cottage in St. John’s Woods!” Alex exploded. “Forgive me, Maman,” he apologized once again. “Castle Harborough is entailed on the heir,” he explained. “If anything happened to me, I wanted to make sure Cat had a home and the means to live in comfort. At the time I bought it, the French outnumbered our troops in the Peninsula ten to one. Lisbon could have fallen at any moment. Cat was my wife, I had to provide a safe haven for her.” His eyes pleaded with his mother. “Surely Cat understood my reason?”
Or did she, he wondered, forcing himself away from his own arrogant assumptions. What had Cat said? Whether you wish me to be your mistress or your wife . . .
Hell and the devil! Did Cat think Branwyck Park was . . . No, she couldn’t possibly believe . . . Alexander Trowbridge, Marquess of Harborough, ran agitated fingers through his hair. “Maman, do you think she believes I want her only as a mistress?” he stammered, light reviving in the depths of his amber eyes.
“It would make things much simpler,” she returned thoughtfully, “for such a misunderstanding is easily corrected. But are you completely certain you wish to?” she inquired carefully.
Alex swallowed hot words. His shoulders stiffened into the proud carriage which was so much a part of him, whether he was Alex or Blas the Bastard. “I know what Marchmont will say, but I thought I could count on your understanding, Maman.” His gentle reproach was soft, dignified, his hurt all too apparent. “And, Maman, I am certain. But you have not yet heard the worst of it,” he added on a sigh.
Once again, Alex ran his fingers through his overly long waves of black hair. He stood, took a turn about his mother’s sitting room, before sinking back into the chair he had vacated and telling his mother how Catarina Audley Perez de Leon acquired two husbands. And became a widow. All before the age of twenty-one.
“Ma foi, tu es fou! Et Antoine aussi!” cried the duchess. “It is no wonder the poor child has sent you away. That I should have raised two sons with no more sense than a flea. Bah!” she spat at him. “I am ashamed of you both. That I should live to see the day my sons—both of them—would compromise a poor innocent child. A close connection of Lord Ailesbury’s! You are mad, the pair of you. Quite, quite mad!”
“Yes, Maman,” Alex agreed meekly.
“You will tell this tale to your father,” the duchess decreed, as if her son were eight instead of eight and twenty. “And I hope it may not kill him,” she added ominously.
“Maman?” Alex pleaded, nearly as appalled as if he were still the wild young boy who suffered almost daily chastisement from the austere duke.
She hardened her heart to his look of entreaty. “Now,” she commanded. “You will find him in the library.”
Even as her eyes followed her son, her idiot son, from the room, Melisande Trowbridge was making plans. They were much alike, the Trowbridge men. So sure they knew what was right for the world, they simply failed to see problems from another person’s point of view. Thus had the duke lost his influential position in the government. But now the old king was too far into madness to be aware of the Duke of Marchmont.
First, however, there was the no small matter of persuading Sebastian Trowbridge he wished to aid his son in the battle to regain his wife. For a young woman who had enough character to reject the lofty position of Marchioness of Harborough was to be cherished. Possibly, at long last, there would be a daughter worthy of the Trowbridge name.
Sebastian Trowbridge was not at his desk. He sat before the fire toying with a snifter of brandy, as he had been since his eldest son followed his brief greeting with an urgent request to speak with his mother in private, neatly bypassing his father who was waiting to greet the son he had not seen in three years. Only a few strands of charcoal black remained among the long gray hair the duke wore caught back and banded by a black velvet ribbon in the style of an earlier age. Though his next birthday would be his sixtieth, the duke’s thin face was still handsome, as blatantly patrician as his son’s was not.
The Duke of Marchmont never doubted the amount of mischief his son had got up to in the past seven years. There had scarcely been a peaceful moment since the day Alex preceded his brother into the world. The only thing which had changed in seven years was the duke himself. He had mellowed with age. He already knew most of what Alexander was telling his mother, for Anthony had thrown discretion to the winds and done his best to smooth his brother’s homecoming. Nor had the duke failed to read his younger son’s role between the lines of praise for Alex. His sons were heroes. There was almost nothing they could have done at that point to make him angry.
The matter with Ailesbury’s young cousin was unfortunate but, knowing Alexander, the boy might well have come home with some Spanish whore. Best to swallow his tongue and leave well enough alone. Marchmont was aware he had no talent for reconciliation. His own or his son’s. But family pride demanded that he try. It was time for the Trowbridges—all of them—to return to London. No doubt Melisande would be pleased. It had been a long exile. And it seemed someone must keep an eye on their dashing, headstrong sons.
A knock on the library door was followed by the entrance of his heir, for once looking suitably contrite instead of defiant. The duke waved a negligent hand toward the wing chair opposite his own. “Sit, Harborough,” he commanded. “Pour yourself a brandy, I presume you will need it. Even the highlights of your past seven years will undoubtedly be demanding. Should I, perhaps, order the killing of a fatted calf?”
The war ended almost quietly, without the Trowbridge twins or Arthur Wellesley, Marqu
ess of Wellington, who had shown them all the way. On the last day of March the combined troops of Austria, Prussia and Russia marched into Paris. Ten days later, on Easter Sunday, a captive Napoleon attempted suicide. The Duke of Wellington, unaware twenty years of war had come to an end, took Toulouse in the last, and bloodiest, battle of the Peninsular War. Within two weeks Napoleon sailed into exile on the Island of Elba. As word spread, all Europe breathed a sigh of relief.
Too soon.
As the Season of 1814 opened in London, word had not yet come of the eight thousand casualties at Toulouse. There was only mass rejoicing and eager anticipation of the most glittering Season in the memory of even the most elderly aristocrats.
Catherine’s first action upon her return to London was to send for Monsieur Claude.
“For the love of God, he will kill you!” Blanca exclaimed as the golden-red tresses fell, one by one, like splashes of blood onto the white sheet spread over the floor. “In Portugal it would be considered he had just cause,” she added ominously.
“C’est merveilleux,” an insouciant and unrepentant Cat assured the stricken Monsieur Claude. “Continue, please. I know I shall enjoy the freedom immensely.”
“Freedom to be a fool,” Blanca muttered and quit the room, leaving the frightened haircutter to do his worst.
“O–oh, Catherine!” Amabel sighed on a long drawn-out breath. “I do not know if I love it or if I shall cry.” She had arrived, brimming over with news an hour after Monsieur Claude’s departure. Amabel stood, gaping, just inside the drawing room door as she took in the immensity of Cat’s short cap of curls bound with a bandeau in the Grecian manner, a few artfully arranged longer curls tumbling over her ears and onto the nape of her neck.
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