An Infamous Marriage

by Susanna Fraser

  “Fair enough.” He nodded curtly. “There was no one. No one I could marry, at least.”

  Elizabeth chose not to press for more details on just what sort of women he couldn’t marry. No one expected men to be chaste before marriage. Even gentle, devout Giles hadn’t quite been a virgin.

  But Jack seemed to misinterpret her silence, for he shook his head and blew out a frustrated breath. “Elizabeth,” he said gruffly, “we’ll make do. There have been worse-suited couples.”

  “I hope so.” From their time together so far, she doubted it.

  “Of course there have,” he said bracingly. “Why, look at the Prince of Wales.”

  She smiled. The expression felt rusty from disuse. “Touché.”

  “Or Henry VIII.”

  Now Elizabeth couldn’t hold back a giggle. “And which wife?”

  “All of them, I think. For a man who married six times, he didn’t have much of a knack for the state, did he? Though Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard had the worst of it.”

  She took a sip of her wine, eying him over the glass’s brim. “I do hope you prove a better husband than Henry,” she said. “I should hate to lose my head.”

  He laughed, and she with him. When their merriment had passed, he watched her with greater warmth than she had yet seen from him. Elizabeth felt a stirring of something—not desire, it was too soon for desire—but of affection, of liking. She could see now why Giles had been his friend.

  Since there were only the two of them at dinner, they skipped the ceremony of her withdrawing to the parlor and leaving him to his solitary port. After a light sweet course of cheese and fruits, he suggested they seek their separate beds, since they would have a busy few days of it to show her around the estate and go over its account books before he must leave. Elizabeth gratefully agreed and took Jack’s arm as they climbed the steep staircase together.

  Outside her door he bowed over her hand, just brushing her knuckles with his lips. “Good night, Elizabeth. Sleep well.”

  “You too.”

  They smiled at each other again, tentatively, and she slipped into her room. She had meant to stay awake for a time, perhaps to read, but the exertions of the day had exhausted her so thoroughly she was asleep on the soft feather mattress of her unfamiliar bed within half an hour.

  * * *

  As they worked to prepare for his departure, Elizabeth saw nothing of the playful, laughing husband of their first dinner together. Instead he was cool and practical, much as she imagined he must be when he dealt with regimental affairs. She told herself it was just as well. After he returned from Canada would be time enough to let herself like him, and perhaps even learn to love him. For now, their marriage was something of a business contract, and naturally he was using their short time together to make sure she knew enough to live up to her end of the bargain.

  Still, his nearness had a strange effect on her on the first full day of their marriage, as they sat together reviewing the estate’s accounts. He had such broad, square shoulders. She wished she could lean upon them and weep out her grief and anger against the warm solidity of his body instead of keeping them carefully bottled up. But he didn’t want that, so she held herself stiffly and maintained a careful and correct distance as he pointed out how the accounting had fallen behind since his mother’s apoplexy. “This will be your first task,” he said. “I hope you’ve a good head for figures.”

  “Good enough,” she said. “I kept the household accounts for my great-uncle for years.” She didn’t want to point out that she was a banker’s daughter and had inherited her father’s mathematical talent lest he wonder if she’d inherited his dishonesty, too.

  He smiled a little. “I won’t worry, then. And, bad as this looks, there shouldn’t be many debts. There haven’t been any letters from creditors, nor have any of the locals appeared on my doorstep in the time I’ve been here. Purvis knows how to manage the horses as well as I do. The place should clear at least a little income each year, and you must do as you like with it while I’m gone. I’ll have my pay, and I’ve enough saved to meet my needs beyond that.”

  “What about sheep?” she asked.

  “Sheep?”

  “I’d wondered why there aren’t sheep grazing the hills behind the western fields. They’re too steep to be plowed or to make good pasture for horses, but I believe sheep aren’t so nice in their tastes.”

  “Sheep. I thought you’d ask me about new dresses, or books, or perhaps a pianoforte.”

  She ducked her head and didn’t return his smile. Couldn’t he see she was trying to show him how practical she was, and reassure him she wouldn’t waste his money? “I’ll get what I need, within our income, except the pianoforte. I fear I’m sadly unmusical. But it seems that land could be put to use. Not that I’m any kind of expert on farming,” she hastened to add. “There may be good reasons why it shouldn’t be attempted.”

  “No, it very well might be worth a try. I think we did have them, in my grandfather’s day. I’m not sure why it was stopped.”

  No, and he wouldn’t have thought to ask. She had married a soldier, not a farmer. He felt responsible for this land because it was his home. Yet when it came to the details of its management, he took—well, he took precisely the same amount of interest that a contented, domestic farmer might take in the command of an army battalion. Elizabeth, however, had never been given the luxury of only taking interest in matters she found inherently intriguing. She had married into a farm, so a farmwife she must become.

  The next day he announced he’d made a new will and showed it to her. It was two pages long, written in the dense prose favored by lawyers, but its purpose was clear: if Jack and his mother both died, Westerby Grange belonged to her.

  “But what about your family?” she asked.

  “What family? As I told you, Mama and I are the last of the Westerbys.”

  “But there are any number of Armstrongs, aren’t there?”

  “Yes, but why should Uncle Richard or one of my cousins have the Grange rather than you? They’re amply provided for, no more Westerbys by blood than you are, and haven’t been living here and caring for the land and my mother. No, if I should die, take the place and be welcome to it.”

  “Thank you,” she said quietly. She wanted to suggest that if he were to lie with her tonight and the next, maybe there would be another generation of Westerbys to live on the land. But he’d made it clear he didn’t want her, and she didn’t need to be told twice. “I hope you come home safe and get the chance to live on it and care for it for many years to come,” she said instead.

  “So do I, but it never hurts to be prepared for any eventuality.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” She sighed, blinking back the tears she had determined to leave unshed until after Jack left. Giles and she had felt so secure in their new marriage, since he had been promised a good living as soon as its aged incumbent died. They had puzzled a little over how to make ends meet until they came into their little clerical fortune, but had never discussed what would happen if he didn’t live to claim it.

  Jack reached across the table to give her hand a tentative squeeze, then just as quickly drew back. “And so we are.”

  “Yes.” She swallowed and nerved herself to ask the questions that had been troubling her since the morning of the funeral. They were running out of time, and she didn’t want to leave it until he was walking out the door. “Jack?”

  “What it is?”

  “I don’t like to speak of this.” She bit her lip, searching for words.

  “Out with it,” he said, not unkindly. “If there’s anything you must say to me, please do so before I leave. I can hardly imagine a worse way to quarrel than by letters that take months to reach their destination.”

  She nodded. “It’s nothing to do with you, yourself, and after what happened to my father I’m the last person to hold a family scandal against anyone else, but...”

  “Someone said something to you about Moth
er, and I’ll wager it was Selina Dryden.”

  His voice was hard, and Elizabeth instinctively drew back in her chair. “Yes, it was she. Whatever it is, I swear it doesn’t matter to me. Only, I thought I should hear it from you, and not from gossip.”

  “Well.” He shook his head and raked his hand through his hair. “I agree, but it’s difficult to tell such a tale of one’s own mother. Even when it’s entirely true, and you had it from her own lips. She told me of it, you see, when I was fourteen or so, and all the gossip came back when my brother wanted to marry Clara Dryden—Lady Dryden’s eldest daughter—and her family made her refuse him.”

  “Oh?” Elizabeth nodded sympathy and encouragement.

  “My sister, the one who died years before I was born, came into the world only four months after my parents’ wedding. Which would’ve been occasion enough for gossip even were it not for the fact Mother and Father first met only a month before their wedding.”

  “Oh,” she repeated in an entirely different tone.

  “Mother never told anyone who Caroline’s father was. I have my suspicions, but I can’t prove anything.”

  “I doubt I need to know.” It must have been someone either already married or far above or beneath her, because otherwise her family would’ve forced him to marry her.

  “I suppose my grandparents ought to have sent her away until the child was born—not that it would’ve stemmed all the gossip—but instead they arranged a marriage with my father. He was a youngest son of a younger son, you see, with no fortune or prospect of one, who’d proven himself a failure at every profession my Armstrong grandparents had tried to establish him in. So the idea of marrying him off to a girl who was sole heir to a tidy property had a certain appeal despite her pregnancy.”

  “Your poor parents!” Elizabeth cried.

  Jack smiled and shook his head. “Actually, they soon learned to be happy together. Father, it turned out, did have one talent—breeding and raising horses—so the Grange was perfect for him. And I don’t know what Mother told him about Caroline’s father, but he never reproached her over it.”

  “But that didn’t stop the gossip.”

  “Hardly. Mother and Father kept very much to themselves, and made long visits to his family’s home in Scotland, where no one knows or cares anything for Selyhaugh gossip, and they were happy despite it. But there were stupid rumors that Ned wasn’t Father’s child either, because he and Caroline had the same coloring.”

  “Your mother’s coloring?” Elizabeth guessed. Mrs. Armstrong had gray eyes, and if the miniature in the parlor was correct, her hair had been blond before it turned white.

  “Exactly. Anyone who troubled to look could’ve told you he was our father’s son from the shape of his nose and his eyebrows. You’ll find this,” he said, tapping his rather beaky nose, “in almost every portrait in the gallery in Blainslie Keep.”

  “People are dreadful, and I’m sorry your mother had to endure all that.”

  “You don’t judge her, then, for having got with child before she married?”

  “Judge her, for something that happened forty years ago or more? Why? We don’t truly even know what happened, and it was all so long ago.” No matter what Mrs. Armstrong had done before her marriage, she’d been faithful to and happy with Jack’s father. If she’d been in the wrong, she’d showed her repentance in her deeds for the rest of her life.

  “Still. You’re very generous.”

  His eyes, so dark and intent, made her feel warm and fidgety. She shrugged, trying to dismiss both his praise and the effect it had on her. “She’s family now.”

  Jack reached across the table to seize her hand in his. “Yes, and so are you.”

  Elizabeth couldn’t think of anything to say, and she had to fight to keep her breathing steady while time stood still. He showed no sign of noticing her agitation, and soon he gave her hand a brisk squeeze and released it.

  * * *

  Elizabeth hadn’t lied to Jack. Knowing what lay in her mother-in-law’s past made no difference to her. Each day she spent an hour with Mrs. Armstrong, talking to her, encouraging her to eat more and reading to her from poetry, prayers and psalms—anything that sounded lovely and soothing without requiring her to follow a narrative or remember a story’s plot from one day to the next. She would spend more time with her once Jack had gone, but she reckoned it could only help Mrs. Armstrong to become accustomed to her before her son left and took away his somewhat familiar face.

  Elizabeth and Jack ate a final breakfast together just after daylight on the morning he was to depart for London and the ship that would carry him across the Atlantic.

  “You’re good with Mama,” he said.

  “Thank you. I like her.” She truly did. Though in her confusion Mrs. Armstrong could be short-tempered and difficult, Elizabeth could still glimpse the humor and good sense that had helped her overcome the difficulties in her past and build a happy life.

  He took a meditative sip of coffee. “I wish you could’ve known her before. She could have told you everything there was to know about this place and our family for, oh, at least a hundred years.”

  “I expect she’ll still tell me,” Elizabeth said. “Only, I’ll have to consult Metcalf privately, or perhaps write to you, to know which stories are from ten years ago versus fifty.”

  “Do write often,” he said. “You’ll have long waits for replies, but I want to hear how she does and how you go on.”

  “I shall,” she assured him.

  When they had finished eating, Jack hurried upstairs for a last visit with his mother. Elizabeth didn’t attempt to follow. He would likely be away several more years, and he must know full well this might be the last time he saw his mother in life. Elizabeth wouldn’t dream of intruding on such a moment.

  Instead, she said her farewells to her new husband in the stable yard, just before he mounted the bay gelding he meant to take to Canada with him. He took her right hand in both of his. He had big hands, and she could feel their warmth and strength through his thin riding gloves.

  “I leave all this in your hands,” he said. “And I believe they’re capable ones.”

  “I’ll do my best,” she promised. “And I’ll pray for you for a safe journey and a safe return.”

  He glanced to his left. Elizabeth followed his gaze and saw that they had an intent audience of servants. He bent to kiss her. It started as a quick brush of the lips, but then his arm slid around her waist, pulling her against him. Elizabeth’s breath escaped in a gasp, and she slid her hands up to his shoulders, square and strong under his plain gray greatcoat. He kissed her again, harder this time, and ran a gloved hand over her chilled cheek.

  Her heart beat faster, and she couldn’t take her eyes off his lips as he pulled away and swung into the saddle. He had a lovely mouth, and such nice, full lips. One might enjoy more kisses from them, and one might even spend the next few years remembering this farewell and dreaming of their reunion.

  Chapter Five

  In the first three months after Elizabeth’s hasty second marriage, she received only one letter from Jack, a hurriedly written epistle sent from London just before he sailed. It granted her the right to draw from his funds under the care of his regimental agent there and suggested a stallion for breeding to his dapple gray mare, Penelope, closing with a simple, Yours most affectionately, John Armstrong. She didn’t expect anything more from him for a few months, given the distance letters from Canada must travel, but she faithfully wrote him every month, assuring him his mother was as well as could be expected, and reporting everything Farmer Purvis told her about the management of his horses and the planting of the south fields.

  She enjoyed her new life more than she’d expected. Her raw grief at Giles’s loss settled into a quieter regret as spring came to Westerby Grange. Care for her mother-in-law and learning the management of the household kept her occupied. There was security, too, in knowing she had at last, for the first time in the ten yea
rs since her father’s disgrace, come to a home where no one could cast her out.

  She lived quietly, since despite her new marriage she considered herself still in mourning for Giles. But with the exception of Lady Dryden, all of Selyhaugh’s small society paid her calls and spoke to her civilly each Sunday at church. She wasn’t friendless and alone as she’d feared, and she had this home, warm and sturdy and safe.

  Within a week of her arrival, she had a table and a comfortable chair brought up to her bedroom. As she learned the ways of the Grange, she had more idle hours, and she spent most of them curled up with a novel or a book of travels, occasionally gazing out the window with immense satisfaction at the placidly grazing horses in the west pasture.

  One afternoon when she was so occupied, a carriage rolled into the stable yard and a white-haired gentleman she didn’t recognize climbed out, leaning heavily on a cane. He wore a red coat of somewhat antique cut and spoke with familiarity to Purvis’s older son, a stout lad of nineteen who’d come to see to the horses. She frowned. Who could it possibly be? With a sigh of regret, she set her book down—The Hungarian Brothers was such a thrilling tale—and went to the looking glass to prepare herself to receive a caller.

  By the time she’d tucked up the loose strands of her hair, which was forever falling out of its pins, the housemaid Jane was knocking on her door. “Sir Richard Armstrong is here, ma’am.”

  Ah, yes. Jack had written his paternal relations in Scotland to inform them of his marriage, and Sir Richard was the military uncle, the one who’d commanded brigades during the American war, just before Elizabeth had been born. What must they think of her, this unknown, unconnected English wife? “Tell him I’ll be down directly, and have tea made ready.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  After the maid left, Elizabeth counted to twenty to settle her nerves and made her way to the parlor. Sir Richard stood as she entered, and Elizabeth studied him. Surely this was a foretaste of how her husband would look in thirty or forty years, the thick, curly hair and strongly marked eyebrows gone entirely white, making the fierce, dark eyes stand out all the more, the nose grown even more emphatic with time and gravity.