by Sophia James
‘The sixth Duke of Alderworth.’ Beatrice took up the story now.
‘Alderworth?’ Lucinda knew the name despite not remembering anything at all about the accident.
My God. The Dissolute Duke was infamous across London and it seemed he kept to the company of whores and harpies almost exclusively. Why would she have been there alone with him and so far from home?
‘Does Asher know he was there?’ She looked up at Emerald.
‘Unfortunately he does.’
‘Do other people also know?
‘Unfortunately they do.’
‘How many know?’
‘All of London would not be putting too fine a point on it, I think.’
‘I see. It is a scandal then and I am ruined?’
‘No.’ Beatrice-Maude’s voice was strong. ‘Your brothers would never allow that to happen and neither will we.’
Lucinda swallowed, the whole conundrum more than she could deal with. Eleanor and Emerald watched her with a certain worry in their eyes and even Beatrice, who was seldom flustered, seemed out of sorts.
Intrinsically flawed. The words came from nowhere as she closed her eyes and slept.
Chapter Three
Tay Ellesmere sat in the library of the Carisbrook family town house in Mayfair and looked at the three Wellingham brothers opposite him.
His head ached, his right leg was swollen above the knee and the top of his left arm was encased in a heavy white bandage, as were his ribs, strapped tightly so that breathing was not quite so agonising. Besides this he had myriad other cuts and grazes from the glass and wood splintering as the carriage had overturned.
But these injuries were the very least of his worries. A far more pressing matter lingered in the air between him and his hosts.
‘You were dressed most inappropriately and Lucinda was barely dressed at all, for God’s sake. The scandal is the talk of the town and has been for the past week.’
Asher Wellingham, Duke of Carisbrook, seldom minced words and Tay did not dissemble, either.
‘Our lack of clothing was the result of being thrown over and over down a hill in a somersaulting carriage. One does not generally emerge from such a mishap faultlessly attired,’ he drawled the reply, knowing that it would annoy them, but short of verifying their sister’s presence at his party he could do little else but blame the accident.
‘We thought Lucinda had gone with Lady Posy Tompkins to her aunt’s country home for the weekend. I cannot for the life of me imagine how instead she ended up alone in the middle of the night with the most dissolute Duke in all of London town and dressed as a harpy.’
‘Did you ask her?’
‘She can remember nothing.’ Taris Wellingham broke in now, his stillness as menacing as his older brother’s fury.
‘Nothing?’
‘Nothing before the accident, nothing during the accident and nothing just after the accident.’
Hope flared. Perhaps it might give him an escape after all. If the lady was not baying for his blood, then her brothers might also give up the chase should he play his cards well.
‘Your sister informed me that she was trying to reach the Wellingham town house after being separated somehow from her friend. She merely asked me to give her a lift home and I immediately assented.’
‘Her reticule, hat and cloak were returned to us from your country seat. A coincidence, would you not say, to be left at the very place you swear she was not.’
Cristo Wellingham’s voice sounded as flat as his brothers’.
‘Richard Allenby, the Earl of Halsey, has also told half of London that she was a guest at your weekend soirée. Others verify his story.’
‘He lies. I was the host and your sister was not there.’
‘The problem is, Duke, Lucinda is facing certain ruin and you do not seem to be taking your part in her downfall seriously.’
Taylen had had enough.
‘Ruin is a strong word, Lord Taris.’
‘As strong as retribution.’
Asher Wellingham’s hand hit the table and Tay stood. Even with his arm in a bandage he could give the three of them a good run for their money. The art of gentlemanly fighting had been a lesson missing from his life, the tough school of displacement and abuse honing the rudiments of the craft instead. Hell, he had been beaten enough himself to understand exactly the best places to hit back.
‘We will kill you for this, Alderworth, I swear that we will.’ Cristo spoke now, the sound of each word carefully enunciated.
‘And in doing so you may well crucify your sister. Better to let the matter rest, laugh it off and kick any suggestions of misbehaviour back in the face of those who swear them true.’
‘As you are apt to do?’
‘English society still holds to ridiculously strict rules of conduct, though free speech is finding its way into the minds of men who would do better to believe in it.’
‘Men like you?’ Taris stood. His reported lack of sight was not apparent as he stepped towards the window, though Tay saw the oldest brother watch him carefully.
Care.
The word reverberated inside him. This was what this was all about, after all: care of each other, care of a family name, care in protecting their only sister’s reputation from the ignominy of being linked with his.
Protection was something he himself had never had. Not from his parents. Not from his grandmother. And particularly not from his uncle. It had always been him against a world that hadn’t taken the time to make sure that a small child was cherished. The man he had become was the result of such negligence, though here in the salon of a family that watched each other’s backs the thought was disheartening.
He made his way around a generous sofa. ‘I have an errand to attend to, gentlemen, and I find I have the need of some fresh air. If you will excuse me.’
‘What do you make of him?’
Asher asked the question a few moments later as Cristo crossed to the cabinet to pull out a bottle of fine French brandy.
‘He’s hiding something.’ Taris accepted a drink from his brother. ‘For some reason he is trying to make us believe there was only necessity in our sister’s foolish midnight tryst in the carriage with him and that she was never at Alderworth.’
Cristo swore. ‘But why would he do that?’
‘Even a reprobate must have his limits of depravity, I suppose. Lucinda’s innocence may well be his.’ Taris drank deeply of the brandy before continuing. ‘He studies the philosophy of the new consciousness, which is interesting, the tenets of free speech being mooted in the Americas. Unusual reading for a man who purports to be interested in nothing more than sexual mayhem and societal anarchy.’
‘I don’t trust him.’ Asher upended his glass.
‘Well, we can’t hit a man wrapped in bandages.’ Cristo smiled.
‘Then we wait until they are removed.’ There was no humour at all in the voice of Asher Wellingham, Duke of Carisbrook.
Lucinda wheeled herself to the breakfast table, her muscles straining against the task and her heart pounding with the effort. It had been almost two weeks since the accident and the feeling that the doctor had sworn she would recover was finally coming back, though she had been left with a weakness that felt exhausting and a strange and haunting melancholy. Now she could walk for short distances without falling over, the shaking she had been plagued by diminishing as she grew steadily in strength. The wheelchair was, however, still her main mode of getting about.
Posy had spent much of the past week at the town house, her horror at all that had happened to Lucy threading every sentence.
‘I should never have taken you to Alderworth, Luce. It is all my fault this happened to you and now … now I don’t know how to make it better.’ Large tears had fallen down her cheeks before tracing wet runnels on the pink silk of her bodice.
‘You did not force me to go, Posy. I remember that much.’
‘But while I was safely locked away in our bedroom
, you were …’
‘Let’s not allocate any more blame. What is done is done and at least I am regaining movement and energy.’
It had taken Lucinda a good few days to convince her friend that she held no malice or blame, Posy’s numerous tears a wearying and frustrating constant.
Asher was sitting in the dining room, reading The Times just as he usually did each morning, and he folded the paper in half and looked closer as something caught his interest.
‘It says here that the Earl of Halsey has suffered a broken nose, a black eye and twenty stitches in his cheek. The assault happened in broad daylight four days ago in an altercation outside the livery stables in Davies Mews right here in Mayfair. There were no witnesses.’
His glance strayed to Lucinda’s to see how she might react. The whole family had tiptoed around her since the unfortunate happening as though she might break into pieces at any unwanted reminder of scandal and she was tired of it. Consequently she did nothing more than smile back at her oldest brother and shrug her shoulders.
‘Footpads are becoming increasingly confident, then.’ Emerald took up the conversation as she buttered her bread. ‘Though perhaps they do us a favour, for isn’t he the man who has constantly insisted Lucinda was underdressed at the Alderworth fiasco? Without his voice, all of this could have been so much easier to deal with.’
Lucinda knew Richard Allenby, of course. He had always been well mannered and rather sweet, truth be told, so she had no idea why he should be maligning her now and in such a fashion. Yet a shadow lingered there in the very back of her mind, some nebulous and half-formed thing trying to escape from the darkness. Wiping her mouth with the napkin, she sat back, the food suddenly dry in her mouth and difficult to swallow.
‘You look like you have seen a ghost, Lucy.’
‘What exactly was it that the Earl of Halsey said of me?’
‘He has been spreading the rumour that you may have been intimate with Alderworth at his home. He says he saw you in the corridors on the first floor of the place, searching for the host’s bedchamber.’
Her brother’s tone had that streak of exasperation she so often heard when speaking of her escapades, though in this case Lucinda could well understand it.
‘Intimate?’ The shock of such a blatant falsehood was horrifying. ‘Why would he tell such a lie? Surely people could not believe him?’ Wriggling her foot against the metal bar of the wheelchair, she checked for any further movement. Over the past few days the tingling had gone from her knees to her feet as the numbness receded.
‘Unfortunately they are beginning to.’ Asher’s voice no longer held any measure of care.
‘What does Alderworth say?’
‘Nothing and that is the great problem. If he denied everything categorically and strode into society the same way he strode into Wellingham House, people might cease to believe Richard Allenby. But instead the man has disappeared to the country, leaving chaos behind him.’
‘Alderworth came here? To the town house?’ Lucinda frowned. There was something about him that was familiar, some part of him that she remembered from…before. ‘What did he want?’
‘Put bluntly, he wanted to be rid of any blame as far as your reputation was concerned. He made that point very plain.’ Asher put his paper down and watched her closely. ‘The man is a charlatan, but he is also clever. The slight whiff of an alliance with us might be profitable to him.’
‘Alliance?’ Lucinda’s mouth felt suddenly dry.
‘A ruined reputation requires measures that may be stringent and far from temporary.’
‘You mean a betrothal?’ Horror had Lucinda’s words whispered. Low. She had heard all the stories of the wicked Duke. Everybody had. He was a man who lived by his own rules and threw the caution most others followed to the wind.
As her heartbeat quickened, memory fought against haze and won. Dropping the teacup she was holding, she stood, liquid spilling across the pristine whiteness of an antique damask tablecloth, the brown stain widening through the embossed stitching even as she watched.
The naked form of Taylen Ellesmere came through the fog, unfolding from a rumpled bed, each long and graceful line etched in candlelight, the red wine in a decanter beside him almost gone. She knew the feel of his skin, undeniably, for they had been joined together pressed in lust, his velvet-green eyes close as he had leaned down and kissed her. No simple chaste kiss, either, but one with a smouldering and virtue-taking force.
Shock kept her still, as she looked directly at her oldest brother.
‘What is wrong? You look … ill.’ Real concern crossed his face.
‘I am remembering things and I th-th-think everything Richard Halsey is saying of m-me might indeed be tr-true.’
Her weakened legs folded beneath her just as Asher caught her, the hard arm of the chair slamming into her side.
‘You are saying you lay with Alderworth. Unmarried.’
‘He was naked in his bedchamber. He touched me everywhere. The door was locked and I could not leave. I tried to, but I could not. He took the key. He was not safe.’ A torrent of small truths, each one worse than the last.
‘My God.’ She had never heard the note in her brother’s voice that she did now, not once in all her many escapades and follies. His fractured tone brought tears to her eyes as she felt Emerald’s hand slip into her own and squeeze.
‘You will marry my sister as soon as I can procure a special licence and then you will disappear from England altogether, you swine.’
Asher Wellingham had already laid a good few punches across Tay’s face and Cristo Wellingham was still holding him down. Not the refined manners he had imagined them to have, after all, each blow given with a deliberate and clinical precision. His nose streamed with blood and he could barely see out of his left eye. The two front teeth at the bottom of his mouth were loosened.
‘If you kill me…a betrothal might be…difficult.’
Another blow caught him in the kidneys and, despite meaning not to, he winced.
‘You will tell Lucinda that it was completely your fault she was at Alderworth in the first place and that your heinous, iniquitous and pernicious sense of social virtue was lost years before you met her. In effect, you will say that she never had the chance of escaping such corruption.’
‘C-comprehensive.’
‘Very. But as long as you understand us we will allow you to at least take breath into another day whilst we try to mitigate all the wrong you have heaped upon our sister. She is distraught, as you can well imagine, and names you as the most loathsome of all men. A reprobate who took advantage of her when she was drunk.’
‘She told you that?’
‘And worse. But although she might hate you, she also knows that you are the only man who can restore her shattered name in society when you marry her. In that she is most adamant.’
‘A sterling quality in a bride.’ Even to his own ears his voice lacked the sting of irony he usually made an art form of.
‘Well, you can laugh, Alderworth, but if you believe we will let you anywhere near Lucinda after the ceremony is performed then you have another think coming. You have already done your damage. Now you will pay for it.’
Tay coughed once and then again, his breath difficult to catch. When the younger brother allowed him to drop heavily to the floor he felt the arm that had been hurt in the carriage accident crack against hard parquet, pain radiating up into the shoulder socket.
Ignominiously he began to shake and he swore. It had been a long time since he remembered doing that, his uncle’s face screwed up above him in the wrath of some perceived and tiny insult, the summer winds of Alderworth hot against the wounds that lashed his back. Bleeding, everywhere. No mercy in the beating.
Standing uncertainly and holding on to the edge of a chair, he raised himself before them. ‘Your sister’s memory is faulty. I did not touch her.’
‘She says exactly the opposite, and anybody who knows Lucinda knows, to
o, that straightforward honesty is one of her greatest strengths.’ The embossed ducal ring on Carisbrook’s finger caught the light as he moved forwards. ‘Frankly, given the number of your dubious guests who have not ceased gossiping since the accident about what went on at Alderworth, I find your whining and feeble excuses insulting. A man worth his salt would simply own up to his mistakes and take the punishment he deserves.’
From experience Tay knew when to stop baiting a man who would hit him until life was leached from truth. He nodded an end to the dispute and saw the answering relief on Asher Wellingham’s face.
‘We will pay you to leave a week after the wedding. A considerable sum that should see you well on your way to your next destination. After that, you will never again set foot anywhere near London or our family.’
‘Alderworth is almost bankrupt. Your father’s debts were numerous and you will not have enough equity to continue the repayments after the year’s end.’ Taris had taken up the reins now, from a sofa near the fireplace, his voice steady and quiet. ‘You have been trying to trade your way out of the conundrum, but your bills are becoming onerous and a lifestyle of indolence is hardly a profitable one. Accept our offer and you might keep your family inheritance for a few years yet. Decline and you will be in the debtors’ prison by Christmas.’
‘Will your sister know?’
‘Indeed. Lucinda wants it.’ Cristo stepped forwards, disdain in his eyes. ‘She wants you out of her life for ever.’
Marriage as a bribe to keep the Alderworth estate. Tay thought of its roofline under the Bedfordshire sky, the golden stone against the sun and hundreds of acres of fertile and green land at its feet. His father had forsaken the place, but he could not. Not even if the alternative meant selling his soul.
‘Very well.’ His voice was hoarse and he felt his honour breaking, but he swiped the feeling away as a quill was inked and a parchment made ready. He was the only Alderworth who could save four hundred years of history and Lucinda Wellingham hated his very guts.
Chapter Four