“Scotland it is, then.” Far be it for her to be missish about how they entered this hasty and scandalous union. She and Giles had married by the banns even though the Scottish border was alluringly close, because he had believed a minister ought to set an example for his people of public marriage in his own congregation. If only he hadn’t had such scruples, they could’ve had three more precious weeks together. She couldn’t allow herself to dwell upon that, lest she break down into sobs again.
So she made her voice just as cool and practical as his was, while they settled that in three days’ time he would bring his curricle and they would go to Coldstream, the nearest town in Scotland where they could be wed.
When they saw the vicar’s wife making her way up the path, Colonel Armstrong stood and shook Elizabeth’s hand in leave-taking. It was a cool, impersonal clasp, as if he’d agreed to rent rooms or buy a horse from her. She could hardly believe she’d agreed to be his partner in life, to share his bed and bear his children.
Somehow Elizabeth got through the worthy old lady’s kindly meant call. But as soon as she had the house to herself again, she drew the draperies closed so no one could see and sobbed until she had no tears left in her. She had been so happy in her one good week with Giles before he’d fallen ill. But she should’ve known it couldn’t last. Dreams come true were for other people. Since that day when her father had been caught in his crimes, when the scandal had made all the hopes she’d held as a girl of sixteen impossible, she had been marked for drudgery interspersed with the occasional nightmare.
Chapter Three
After the funeral the next morning, Elizabeth watched from her window as the pallbearers, her future husband among them, carried Giles’s plain wooden casket to the churchyard to bury him beside his parents.
Again several women had come to sit with her, all worthy ladies, two or three decades her senior. This time Elizabeth was grateful for their support. At least at first.
When the solemn procession had disappeared behind the church, Lady Dryden cleared her throat. “I heard the strangest rumor this morning, Mrs. Hamilton.”
Here it came. Her other visitors were eyeing Lady Dryden with some shock—what was she doing, gossiping in a house of mourning? But Elizabeth knew she’d be the wonder of every dinner table in the village that day. Naturally Lady Dryden, an elegant, richly dressed woman who wore her rank as a baronet’s lady as if it were a queen’s crown, felt herself qualified to sit in judgment. Elizabeth lifted her eyebrows and prayed she appeared as steady and calm as she intended. “Yes?”
“The housemaid from the Grange told one of my footmen that Jack Armstrong is to marry you in two days’ time.”
Elizabeth lifted her chin. “It is true.” Off the stunned looks of her guests, her resolve to be cool and distant fled. “I know it seems dreadful, but Giles asked it of us—made us promise—and we cannot delay as we both would wish because Colonel Armstrong must return to Canada straightaway.”
Sweet Miss Rafferty—surely as motherly an old maid as ever lived—was the first to recover. “Oh, my dear Mrs. Hamilton! Why, you must fulfill your word to your dear Giles. No one will think less of you for it.”
Judging by the faces of the other ladies, Elizabeth doubted that was the case. Mrs. Young wouldn’t meet her eyes, and Lady Dryden glared at her with outright hostility. Even before this, Lady Dryden had never been precisely warm to her. Elizabeth suspected she’d recognized the Ellershaw name as surely as Colonel Armstrong had. But even warm-hearted, talkative Mrs. Ilderton, whom Elizabeth had considered her best friend in Selyhaugh, frowned and stared at her hands, folded in her lap.
“You’ll step into a pretty property at the Grange,” Lady Dryden commented acidly, “even if your new mother-in-law isn’t all she should be.”
Elizabeth blinked in surprise. Proud though she was, Lady Dryden had never been other than polite before today, and Elizabeth would not have expected her to speak sneeringly of another’s illness. “I shall do my best to be a good mistress of the Grange,” she said, “and as for Mrs. Armstrong, surely most of us develop infirmities of one form or another, should we live to grow old.”
Lady Dryden sniffed. “Anne Armstrong is only a few years older than I am. I cannot help but wonder if this senility is a judgment upon her for her early life.”
What on earth? Elizabeth abruptly wondered if Jack was willing to wed her because he knew from personal experience what it meant to have a scandalous parent.
“Lady Dryden,” Mrs. Ilderton said quietly. “Surely such matters should not be talked of in a house of grief.”
“Not for long, it isn’t.”
Elizabeth felt her face heat.
Lady Dryden stood. “I bid you good day, Mrs. Hamilton. For as short a time as you will bear that name, you may as well have never had it.” She stalked out of the house, head held high.
Despite Elizabeth’s most valiant efforts not to cry, a few tears leaked out.
“Oh, dear,” Miss Rafferty said. “What may I do for you? Would you like more tea?”
She blinked hard and swallowed down her grief and shame. “I don’t want any tea. I’ve already had enough for a week. I—I’m sorry. This is all so dreadful.”
Mrs. Ilderton pressed her hand. “You must understand, the Drydens and the Westerbys have never been friends, and Lady Dryden and your mother-in-law-to-be took the family quarrel to new heights.”
“But what does she mean about Mrs. Armstrong’s early life?”
“Nothing but tired old gossip. All from long before Jack was born, so it’s nothing to do with him.”
“I didn’t think it was, but—” She still wanted to know. He knew her scandal, after all.
“Ask Jack. It isn’t my tale to tell, and there are enough gossips in Selyhaugh without my setting up to join their company.”
“I will, though perhaps it won’t be pleasant for him to tell me.”
“Yes, but you may as well grow accustomed to honest speaking between you, if you’re to be husband and wife.”
“I dread it so,” Elizabeth said, her voice hardly more than a whisper. “I don’t want this. I want to mourn Giles properly. And in York, such a hasty marriage would be a nine days’ wonder, until some other scandal eclipsed it. Here, that could take nine years.” Especially if Lady Dryden, the richest and highest-ranking lady of the village, chose to cut her.
“Oh, it won’t be so bad, you’ll see,” Mrs. Young said with false cheer. “Everyone will understand what happened. It isn’t as though anyone could suppose he seduced you.”
“No. But still...” Elizabeth gazed out the window toward the church again.
“I shall call on you as soon as you are settled at the Grange, if I may,” Mrs. Ilderton said, and the other two ladies murmured concurrence.
“I’d be delighted,” Elizabeth assured them. At least she was not entirely friendless.
* * *
Jack had never spent time dreaming of his wedding day, as he’d heard young ladies were wont to do. He’d merely supposed that when he married, the ceremony would take place in a church, after a courtship of weeks and perhaps months, and that he and his bride would be at least tolerably happy at the prospect of their union.
Instead it was the dreariest day of his life. Even the weather complied with a cold, misty drizzle that never quite let up on their drive to Coldstream and back. In the little inn where they were wed, he endured the embarrassment of overhearing the innkeeper’s wife ask Mrs. Hamilton—Elizabeth—if she was being forced into this marriage. When Elizabeth assured her she was not, the woman said, “Are you certain, dearie? You look so sad. You needn’t say ‘I will’ if you don’t wish it. My Geordie and I will look after you until your friends come for you.”
Elizabeth handled the situation creditably from there. She said firmly that she did wish to be married and was only sad because her dear Colonel Armstrong must go back to Canada so soon and she couldn’t go with him.
Still, Jack seethed with
humiliation over the very idea anyone would look at him and think he’d forced his bride to the altar—either that he would or would need to. Though he knew better, it made him feel seventeen again—small for his age, awkward and spotty.
He understood that Elizabeth grieved for Giles, and would for a long time to come. That was natural and fitting. He grieved, too. Yet surely it was possible, for appearances’ sake, to not go to her wedding looking as though it were a second funeral.
They spoke little on the long drive home. Jack studied his bride out of the corner of his eye as they approached the curve in the road just before Westerby Grange came into view and the horses picked up their trot without urging. He had married a mouse. Oh, she wasn’t ill-favored, exactly. She was just so ordinary as to fade from memory almost as soon as she was gone from sight, especially when he imagined her beside Marie-Rose back in Montreal or Bella Liddicott from his earliest years with the Forty-Ninth.
Elizabeth was of medium height and rather thin, but not with a delicate, ethereal slenderness. She was simply bony, lacking any lush curves to tempt a man to caress them. Her hair was straight and brown—and a plain ash brown, not rich and dark, nor burnished with golden or bronze strands. Her features were regular but undistinguished, her skin unblemished but far too pale. Her eyes were her best feature, a light hazel brown flecked with green, but even they simply looked muddy in many lights.
“Here we are,” he said as they rounded the bend in the road. His voice sounded strange and awkward to his own ears.
“Yes,” she agreed.
“The servants are expecting you. I asked them to prepare the yellow bedroom for you. It’s the best of the guest rooms. Ordinarily the master and mistress have the blue room, but it seemed a cruelty to move Mama from what she’s known for the past forty years.”
“The last thing I would want to do is cast her out,” Elizabeth said warmly.
His wife was compassionate. Jack added it to “calm” and “not prone to complaining” on his short list of her good qualities. Naturally she had the sort of Christian virtues that suited a vicar’s wife, or Giles would never have wed her. However, Giles had also praised her as a beauty, penning effusions on Elizabeth’s eyes and Elizabeth’s smile and Elizabeth’s wondrous laugh, and Jack saw nothing of that in her. Of course, he’d yet to hear her laugh, and why should she?
“Where do you sleep?” she asked him, and he thought he detected a hint of nervousness around the edges of her calm.
He supposed he might as well be open about his intentions. “In the same room I’ve had since I was twelve,” he said carelessly. “Don’t worry. I’ve no intentions of consummating this...business—” he almost said farce, “—before I go. Aside from every other consideration, you’ll have cares enough in my absence without the chance of adding a child to the list.” If he wanted an heir of his blood for the Grange, he’d have to lie with her someday, but not yet. He wasn’t ready for this, and neither was she. Far better that they have time, and distance, to mourn Giles and grow accustomed to each other and the idea of their marriage.
She went perfectly still, then let out a long breath—of relief, Jack assumed. She couldn’t want him in her bed, not when she’d argued so strenuously against going through with the marriage at all. “Oh. Very well.”
They didn’t speak again until he led her into the Grange to introduce the servants to their new mistress.
Chapter Four
The yellow bedroom at Westerby Grange was by far the finest Elizabeth had ever had. On the southwest corner of the house, it would get ample light when the sun shone, to make the yellow drapes and bed hangings all the more cheerful. While it didn’t have a separate sitting room adjoining it, it had space enough for a little table and chair, there by the window overlooking the barns and the hilly fields beyond. Once she was more settled in, Elizabeth would have suitable furniture brought up from the parlor and would sit there to read, write her letters and work on the household accounts.
It wouldn’t be a terrible life, she told herself firmly, the better to make herself believe it. Her new husband—he’d asked her to call him Jack from now on—had presented the handful of servants to her and taken her on a tour of the house. The Grange was an in-between sort of place, better than a farm cottage but not grand enough for a squire’s manor.
There was a tenant farmer and his family, the Purvises, who lived in a trim stone cottage she could just see from her window. She’d already met all of them, and Mrs. Purvis had been so very gentle and compassionate at Giles’s deathbed. Mr. Purvis could teach Elizabeth everything she needed to know about farming, Jack had promised.
She studied her reflection in her mirror. She didn’t want to consummate her marriage, not yet, but nonetheless it stung that he’d so coolly and logically dismissed the possibility before she could even raise it. He didn’t want her, and why should he? She was no beauty, while he was a handsome man—yet no more so than Giles had been. Jack was bright and vital, but his brown curls and dark eyes were commonplace compared to Giles’s angelic gold and blue, and Jack’s features were too strong, his eyebrows too heavy, his nose and jaw too emphatic.
But Giles had always made her feel beautiful even though she knew otherwise. Now, staring at her reflection, she didn’t even see passable prettiness. Even her eyes looked pale and weary. She closed them and rested her head in her hands. She missed him so. He’d had such a gift of making all her troubles, every bleak day in her past, seem as nothing. His eyes had seen beauty everywhere, and his vision had created that beauty. Without him, the world around her looked gray and lonely again.
No wonder Jack didn’t want her. She didn’t especially want herself.
Only her duty remained in all its cold comfort. Jack was coming at any moment to take her to present to his mother. Mrs. Armstrong was unlikely to ever really know her, but she wanted to become a calm and capable presence in her mother-in-law’s life nonetheless. She knew Jack had married her half to keep his promise to Giles and half to secure a constant caretaker for his mother. Well, then, she would do her best to show herself worthy of his trust.
A rap sounded at the door, and Elizabeth opened it to see Jack looking grave.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“I am.”
“You mustn’t expect her to be able to welcome you as a daughter,” he said as he offered her his arm and led her down the passage. “She barely recognizes me most days.”
“I understand,” she assured him. “I met her once before with Giles.”
“I wish you could’ve known her as she used to be. She was such a formidable lady.”
They had reached Mrs. Armstrong’s door. An elderly maid answered Jack’s knock and led them into a small sitting room.
“Elizabeth, this is Metcalf. She was Mama’s dresser for forty years, and now she looks after her.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t with the others to meet you when you arrived, ma’am.”
“Naturally you couldn’t leave your charge,” Elizabeth hastened to assure her. “I hope I will be able to take some of your burdens off your shoulders henceforth.”
Metcalf inclined her head and dipped her knees a little. “Thank you, ma’am.”
“Who’s there?” called a querulous voice from within the room.
“Your son Jack, Mama, bringing my new bride to greet you.”
“New bride?”
“Yes. I told you of her, remember? Elizabeth Hamilton.”
His tone was soft and gentle, but Elizabeth still wanted to shake him. Of course his mother didn’t remember, and he would only increase her confusion by trying to make her do so.
Elizabeth stepped forward and made her curtsy, just as she would have done under more ordinary circumstances. “I am happy to be here, ma’am.” Her new mother-in-law indeed looked far older than sixty-six. Though her face was relatively smooth and unlined, all her hair was white and her gray eyes had a faded, vacant quality.
Mrs. Armstrong frowned at her. “H
m. Are you sure? I’ve never seen a bride in black.”
That’s because just a week ago I was someone else’s bride, Elizabeth wanted to say.
“Mama,” Jack said. “Elizabeth is also in mourning.”
“Mourning, hey?” Mrs. Armstrong studied her again, her eyes seeming to come briefly into proper focus. “I hope there’s more to you than there looks to be. Since the day Jack turned up on leave, looking tall and handsome like his father, I expected him to elope to Scotland with some beauty.”
“We did marry there, Mama,” Jack said before Elizabeth could think of a response.
They kept the visit mercifully short. Later, when Jack and Elizabeth sat opposite each other at dinner, Jack apologized for his mother.
“Don’t,” she said. “I had a fair notion what I was getting into.”
“Still. She should not have insulted you. Before all this her courtesy was impeccable.”
“I’m certain it was.” She stabbed at a potato with her fork. “I suppose this is what age does to many of us—makes us as children again, with no better sense of what truths must not be said.”
He didn’t meet her eyes. “Not truths.”
“Truths,” she said firmly. “I know I’m no beauty.”
He sputtered, staring at her. “That’s not—you’re—”
“Don’t lie to me.”
He subsided.
“Was there someone else?” she asked. “Someone you wanted to carry to Scotland?”
“What would be the point of telling you if there was?” he snapped. “It can’t be, now.”
She sighed. None of this was his fault, but she couldn’t help envisioning some perfect, golden-haired young beauty, perhaps a general’s daughter, who had danced with Colonel Armstrong and dreamed of becoming his bride. “No. But if somewhere there is a lady who sees me as an enemy for ruining her hopes, I should like to be forewarned.”
An Infamous Marriage Page 4