An Infamous Marriage

by Susanna Fraser

  “Good morning, Sir Richard,” she said, trying not to quail under his unabashed gaze. “I am Elizabeth Armstrong.” Three months into her marriage, the name still felt strange on her lips. “My husband often spoke of you, before he sailed.”

  “Hmph. Then you have the advantage of me, madam, for all he said of you was, hm, how did he put it? I have lately married Elizabeth Hamilton, the widow of my old friend Giles. She is to remain at Westerby Grange with Mother while I am in Canada, and I believe we shall be well-suited.”

  Elizabeth smiled. Jack had been generous in avoiding her scandalous maiden name and in suggesting they might suit. “I suppose there wasn’t time to say more before he sailed. Won’t you sit down, sir?”

  She took a chair opposite him, and with another “hmph” he seated himself. “There wasn’t time? Are you saying this was a sudden courtship? And who was your first husband? I don’t remember any Hamiltons.”

  Elizabeth considered which impertinent question to answer first. “I believe there were formerly a great many Hamiltons in Selyhaugh, but my husband—my first husband—was the last. He was a clergyman.”

  “Was he, now? Where was his living?”

  “He was curate here at Saint Michael’s.”

  “A curate? Hmph.” His dark eyes narrowed. “When did he die?”

  “At the beginning of February, sir,” Elizabeth said simply.

  “Madam, you shock me! Jack’s letter informing me of his marriage was dated the fifteenth of that month.”

  Elizabeth blinked hard. She would not give this horrid man the satisfaction of seeing her weep. “We could not delay any longer, or he would have missed his sailing.”

  “That does not answer the question of why you married again with such indecent haste.”

  “It was my late husband’s dying wish,” she said icily.

  At that his eyebrows flew up. Elizabeth had seen that look of mild surprise or enlightenment on Jack’s face on several occasions. “Ah, now it all becomes clear. Jack has always been persuadable when it comes to his friends. So you gained a settled home, which I daresay you needed, for it isn’t as though a curate would’ve married a woman with a fortune or had one of his own to leave her. And Jack gained both a caretaker for his mother and a comfortable sense of his own heroism and generosity to his friend.”

  It was so accurate Elizabeth wanted to smash something. Possibly the jasperware vase on the mantel, and probably over Sir Richard’s head. “I do not claim it was the most regular of marriages, but, nevertheless, here I am.”

  “Yes, here you are, and as unsuitable a bride for a man like Jack as could be.”

  Elizabeth stood, brushing her hands on her skirts. “I will not stay to be insulted.”

  “I am not here to insult you.”

  “Oh? But you are doing so very effectively.”

  “Peace, ma’am, and sit down. I only came to see what sort of bride my lad had chosen for himself—and now that I’ve seen, I’d be glad to advise you on how you ought to go on.”

  Elizabeth stayed on her feet. “Why should I take your advice, pray tell?”

  “Simple. I am presently the head of your husband’s family. I am an army man, so I know more of his manner of life than you could. Also, I’ve known him since he was a babe in arms. You met him, what? Four months ago?”

  After a long hesitation, Elizabeth sat down. Sir Richard might be a dreadful man, but he was right. Also, it wouldn’t do to alienate her husband’s family at the very beginning of this marriage of convenience, especially not if she ever hoped for it to become something more.

  “Thank you,” Sir Richard said. “Now, tell me, who are your people? Not an army family, I suppose.”

  “No, sir,” she said, debating on how much to tell him. “My father was a banker, but both my parents and all my near relations are dead now. I’m aware I bring no fortune or connections to this marriage.”

  “Hmph. What do you bring, then, if I may ask?”

  She lifted her chin and met his eyes, so like Jack’s when he was in a flinty, military humor. “Loyalty,” she said. “Honesty. And I will not fail to do my duty.”

  At that her inquisitor actually smiled. “Why, you may have the makings of a soldier’s wife after all.”

  Over tea, he questioned her about Mrs. Armstrong’s health and the state of the farm and the stables. Elizabeth answered as best she could, but it wasn’t enough to satisfy Sir Richard.

  “You mustn’t leave the management of the place entirely in Purvis’s hands, my dear,” he said.

  She supposed she must have risen in his estimation, to have gone from madam to my dear in the course of the morning. “But he knows so much more about it than I do,” she protested. “Jack tells me he’s the third generation of Purvises to work this land.”

  “Of course he does, but you are the mistress of the Grange, not he. It is your son or daughter who will be master or mistress here hereafter, not his. You mustn’t think of yourself as a tenant.”

  Elizabeth blinked. She didn’t think of herself of a tenant, when it came to the house. It was the land that didn’t feel real to her. She had grown up in a town and never imagined herself as mistress not only of a home, but of its lands. “I’ve been thinking of bringing back sheep,” she heard herself saying. “Purvis says they had a great flock in Jack’s grandfather’s time.”

  “Not at the expense of the horses, I hope,” Sir Richard said anxiously. “Westerby Grange breeds the finest hunters in the north of England.”

  Clearly the Armstrong horse madness hadn’t been limited to Jack’s father. “No, not at all. I only thought to make use of the hill fields, since we’ve neither crops nor pasturage there now.”

  “Ah, now that’s well thought of, and exactly as an officer’s wife ought to do when her husband is an ocean away.”

  Elizabeth decided perhaps she liked Sir Richard after all. At her invitation, he spent the night and part of the next morning. He couldn’t tarry longer, he said, because he was on the way to Bath for a long visit with an old friend from his days of active service. Over dinner, they discussed the possibility of another American war, which Sir Richard thought more likely than not, and the prospects for advancement it might offer Jack. Elizabeth forbore from pointing out the prospects for death it might offer, for she sensed that her husband’s uncle would consider such fretting unbecoming in an officer’s wife.

  Instead she turned the subject to the Armstrong family and was treated to a long list of relations, including Jack’s second cousin, the baron, who lived in the family castle near Melrose. Sir Richard promised to see that she was invited there soon. The next morning as his carriage rolled away, she stood in the doorway waving and reflecting how lovely it was to have not only a husband, but a family, big and prosperous.

  Over the next few months, Elizabeth took Sir Richard’s words to heart. She saved her books for late on her solitary evenings, and she added daily sessions with Purvis to the hours she spent caring for her mother-in-law. Under the farmer’s tutelage, she learned of the cultivation of barley and potatoes, and of the care of the small but thriving herd of well-bred hunters in the stables. She even learned to ride, though not on a tall, hot-blooded hunter, but on a gentle, sturdy bay Dales pony she purchased for her particular use. When she wrote to Jack of her riding lessons on Coffee, she said she hoped she hadn’t been too extravagant. After many months, his reply came, saying, Certainly you must have a suitable mount. Buy yourself anything else you want or need—and I need not even say “within reason,” for I trust you too well to believe you could act otherwise.

  As summer turned to autumn, she even began to overcome her wariness of company, her expectation that everyone was judging her in the light of her father’s crimes and finding her wanting. She began with the friendliest of her occasional callers—the Ildertons, Miss Rafferty and Mr. Elting, the apothecary—inviting them to dine at the Grange and visiting them in her turn. Gradually her circle expanded to include almost all the better
sort of families in Selyhaugh and the surrounding countryside, and she even flattered herself she’d been helpful in making a match between the Ildertons’ eldest daughter and the new curate who had replaced Giles.

  She never expected to become friends with Lady Dryden, though they spoke to each other with every appearance of civility when they met at church or when calling at others’ homes. Elizabeth asked how the older woman’s children were—all but the youngest daughter were married, and all but the eldest son had left Selyhaugh to do so—and Lady Dryden asked her how recently she had heard from Jack.

  Jack faithfully wrote once a month—he’d even written twice while at sea, though those letters arrived the same day as the first from Canada—and she did likewise. Their conversations were necessarily disjointed by the long distance and the fact their letters regularly crossed paths somewhere in the Atlantic. She looked forward to each new letter and found herself growing fonder and fonder of her long-absent husband, though she felt her letters must be a sad bore to him, telling as they did of the same place and the same people while he roved across Upper and Lower Canada, dancing at balls in Quebec City and meeting Indian chiefs around council fires at the western edge of the settlement.

  Elizabeth never regained the blissful, expectant happiness of her bridal week with Giles, but as her second marriage passed its first anniversary, she was content with her lot. She had a home, one where sheep now grazed the upland fields while horses frolicked in the pastures below. The aching fear that had haunted her since her father’s disgrace, of being abandoned and homeless, had at last begun to fade. She had friends to enliven her quiet country life. And she had a husband she prayed every day would return safely so they could make another generation to live at the Grange.

  Chapter Six

  January 1812

  On a dull, gray morning a few weeks before her second anniversary, Elizabeth sat in the parlor before a crackling fire and tried to think of something new to write to her husband.

  She had the last letter she’d received from him, written some three months ago, spread open on the sofa beside her. He must have written at least once since then, a letter even now on a ship crossing the Atlantic or making its way down the St. Lawrence River. She liked to imagine that he might be writing her at this very moment, thousands of miles away, telling her how he’d passed Christmas among his fellow officers and the handful of settlers farming Upper Canada. It was romantic of her, foolishly so, but she’d taken a great fancy to Jack for the sake of his long, amusing and affectionate letters. He had the gift of painting pictures with words, and anything he wrote about could hardly help being of interest to her because it was all about places she could only dream of ever seeing herself.

  She’d even set aside a marquetry keepsake box just for his letters, and in the privacy of her bedchamber she often took them out and read them in order, kissing each missive as she refolded it and put it away. And on those nights she always had trouble falling asleep, but she didn’t mind, because she lay awake imagining Jack’s homecoming, when surely they would finally consummate their marriage.

  More and more, she suspected she’d fallen in love with her husband. That idea filled her with dismay, for she had no reason to believe he returned her sentiments. The affection in his letters was comradely, brotherly, full of gratitude for the care she was taking of his mother and of Westerby Grange, but never passionate.

  It made composing her replies dreadfully difficult. She longed to send him clever, entertaining letters that would make him fall in love with her, too, but she didn’t know how. She’d never been a gifted letter writer.

  His latest spent two pages describing a council with chiefs from half a dozen Indian tribes. He couldn’t tell her what they’d discussed, he said, which led her to conclude it must have been about wooing the tribes as allies in the event tensions with the Americans led to war, but he told her how the Indians had looked and what they had worn, and of the dances the chiefs’ followers had engaged in before and after the council. She could only tell him of her hopes for the spring’s lambing. He told of tasting a strange concoction of dried buffalo meat and berries some of the tribes of the prairie ate as a staple. All Elizabeth could offer in return was that this year’s Christmas pudding had been especially rich and full of raisins. Compared to his life, hers was inexpressibly dull.

  She sighed. If she could not entertain and enrapture, at least she could reassure. She dipped her quill in the inkwell and began by informing him his mother continued in good health and cheer. She had grown a little more confused in Elizabeth’s time at the Grange, but she looked likely to live on indefinitely. A few months ago, Elizabeth had hired a sturdy young woman from the village to help her and Metcalf with the heavy work of taking care of an invalid who could no longer wholly control her bodily functions.

  Not that Elizabeth would share the more unpleasant details with her husband. He need only know that his mother enjoyed having poetry read to her, and that she often asked about him. She rarely remembered that her son would turn thirty-three in April and was a lieutenant-colonel in Canada, but Jack had seen her state for himself before he left. He did not need reminding.

  With that subject exhausted, she added a paragraph about Sir Richard, who planned to stop at Westerby Grange for a few days that spring on the way south for his annual visit with his elderly officer friends in Bath and London. She’d grown quite fond of Jack’s uncle over the past two years—his direct, forthright temperament was a breath of fresh air—but she had already told Jack about Sir Richard’s brief stay last October, and there was only so much that could be said about a visit that hadn’t happened yet.

  As Elizabeth twirled her quill between her fingers and pondered how to make life on a farm anything other than dull to a man who sat at Indian council fires and ate dried buffalo meat, she heard a knock at the door.

  She set her pen down with a happy sigh. Likely it was only Purvis, come from the farm with some problem or question requiring her attention. She hoped it would be nothing serious, but something interesting enough to add meat to her letter. Even better would be Eugenia Ilderton or Augusta Rafferty come to call, but she doubted they would venture out of Selyhaugh on such a cold day.

  Molly, the housemaid, appeared in the parlor doorway. “Lady Dryden, ma’am,” she announced.

  Elizabeth concealed a frown. Why had Selina Dryden finally condescended to call on today of all days? She wished it wasn’t too late to have the servants announce she wasn’t at home to visitors, but she’d never had an unwelcome caller before, not unless she counted Sir Richard Armstrong for the first quarter hour of his first visit.

  “Show her in, please, and ask Cook to send tea,” she said.

  Moments later, Lady Dryden sailed into the parlor, red-cheeked from the cold and wearing an unmistakably triumphant air.

  “Good morning, ma’am.” Elizabeth concealed her wariness as best she could. “Please come and warm yourself by the fire. I hope Sir Henry and your family are all well.”

  Lady Dryden settled herself on the other end of the sofa, stretching her feet toward the hearth. “Is that Colonel Armstrong’s latest letter, my dear Mrs. Armstrong?”

  She managed to make the innocuous question sound sinister, and Elizabeth fought the urge to snatch the paper away like a schoolgirl caught with a love letter. Instead she folded it and set it on the table beside her and out of her visitor’s line of sight. “Yes. Jack is in York—the one in Upper Canada, not ours—and he has been hunting buffalo with the prairie Indians.”

  Her visitor favored her with a malicious smile. “That is not all he has been doing, or so my informant tells me.”

  What on earth? “Your informant?”

  “Oh, did I never tell you I have a cousin married to a merchant in Montreal?” Lady Dryden asked with a little laugh. “I suppose it must have slipped my mind. Dear Kitty and I aren’t always the best of correspondents, but when she heard this particular on-dit she said she could not wait to take up her
pen, since she was sure I would want to hear anything concerning a certain military gentleman belonging to Selyhaugh.” She opened her reticule and drew out a letter, closely written in a feminine hand.

  Good God, what had Jack done? He hadn’t even mentioned Montreal in his last two letters. For all Elizabeth knew he had spent the entire time in the comparative wilderness of Upper Canada. Whatever had happened, she didn’t want to hear it from Selina Dryden. “I hope you have not come all this way only to pass along gossip,” Elizabeth said, “for I never listen to it.” She got to her feet, hoping her guest would take the hint. “I beg your pardon, but Mrs. Armstrong will be expecting me to read to her.”

  Lady Dryden kept her seat. “Surely she hasn’t enough of her faculties left to know if you are a quarter of an hour late. If I were you, I would want to know. No wife should remain in ignorance.”

  Elizabeth knew she ought to walk away, but she stood arrested in place.

  “Shall I read you the significant portion?” Without waiting for a response, Lady Dryden smoothed the paper and began. “‘I never would have supposed from Colonel Armstrong’s behavior in this town that he is a married man. He certainly never speaks of his wife. Indeed, he has made many an inroad in the hearts of the fair, but until yesterday he showed no partiality to any English lady, though he is said to have a half-breed Indian woman in his keeping as so many of our gentlemen do.’”

  Elizabeth took a slow, deep breath. She did not expect Jack to be perfectly faithful to their unconsummated marriage over an absence spanning years, and she could hardly accuse him of flaunting his affairs under her nose when he was an ocean away. But neither had she expected him to act in Montreal society as though he were a single man, and to never even speak of her existence. She thought of him every day, after all, and spoke of him all the time. Her heart pounded. Why did Lady Dryden have a cousin in Montreal, and why must she be such a dreadful gossip? Yet Elizabeth stayed still even as her visitor’s laughing eyes seemed to cut her like a knife.