Though she knew she was a fool, a surge of hope and longing consumed her. It seemed as if she had not felt his arms around her in weeks, though it had been only hours. She hoped his touch might heal her, and hers might heal him.
He did not touch her. Instead, he stopped by the marble table and scooped up the necklace she had thrown down.
Caroline’s heart seized. She bit her lip until blood came, so she would not cry out in pain and falter. He would give that pearl to his mistress or to some other lover she had not yet seen, some woman she did not even know about.
Anthony walked away from her without a backward glance. He stopped by the door long enough to open it, and spoke to her over his shoulder, as if he had resolved not to look at her again.
“The man you danced with, the man who brought you home in a closed carriage, the man you’ve seen behind my back for God knows how long, is the most contemptible man I have ever known. His pirates burn my ships on the open sea and sink my cargo into the drink if they cannot steal it. He has done all that and worse, so much worse I cannot name it to you. That is who you danced with, not once, but twice, in front of all your betters.”
Caroline was shocked at his words. Viscount Carlyle, the man who always seemed to appear when she needed him, the man who always offered her a way to circumvent her husband’s strictures. That coincidence no longer seemed an easy one. Might Victor simply have been lying in wait for her all that time, making himself available to her simply to thwart Anthony?
Caroline thought it ridiculous, and she dismissed the idea. Victor was nothing compared to the Countess of Devonshire, no matter how many ships he supposedly had burned. What Angelique had done was sink her marriage, not just for that day, but for all the days to come.
“How was I to know he burns your ships? You never told me that. You never told me anything.”
“If you had obeyed me, you would not have needed to know.”
They stared at each other across the cavern of their bedroom. She saw nothing in his eyes but coldness. Caroline’s sorrow threatened to overwhelm her, her anger feeding her pain until she thought she would lose her breath.
“You will leave for my sister’s home in Richmond tomorrow,” he said.
In spite of the gaping hole in her heart, in spite of her fury, she wanted to ask him to come with her. Caroline was tempted to throw herself at his feet, to beg him to love her, even if only a little. She felt an overwhelming urge to tell him she would accept any humiliation he served her, she would overlook every mistress he tossed in her face, if only he would touch her again.
Caroline did none of those things. She stayed still and silent, listening as the door closed and locked behind him.
***
She did not sleep that night. She could not bring herself to lie down on their bed. She wrapped a cashmere blanket around her shoulders and sat in the center of her window seat. The window looked out over the garden behind their townhouse. There were a few winter flowers blooming, but the trees had lost their leaves, standing as forlorn in the cold as she felt. She stayed at the window until the sun came up. That was where Tabby found her.
“My lady, you will catch your death.”
Caroline tried to smile, and failed. “I am not so fortunate.”
She saw the pity on Tabby’s face, and she remembered her pride. She let her lady’s maid help her up from where she huddled so far from the fire. Tabby wrapped her in flannel, bringing Caroline close to the hearth. She drank the tea Tabby brought, but she could not bring herself to eat the fruit offered on a silver tray.
For once in her life, Tabby said not a word. She simply untangled the strand of diamonds from Caroline’s hair. They glinted in the light of morning, as bright and untarnished as they had been the night before, as if all the horrors at Carlton House and after had never happened.
Tabby helped her dress and packed a portmanteau. Within the hour, she stood by her husband’s traveling chaise. She stood beside the carriage, her hand on the door that bore her husband’s crest. She remembered the same crest drawn in diamonds, catching the light against the darkness of Angelique Beauchamp’s gown.
Caroline breathed deeply and climbed inside without looking back. She would go to his sister’s house until Anthony decided what to do with her. She wondered if Anthony would go to Angelique as soon as his wife was on the road to Richmond, or if he had gone to his mistress already.
Caroline sat quietly in her husband’s lacquered carriage as Tabby fussed over her. Her maid arranged the lap robe around Caroline again and again, as if by finding the right way to warm her, she might actually save her mistress from disgrace. But of course, she could not. The damage had been done.
***
Anthony stood at a window on the third floor of Ravensbrook House and watched her go. He did not move from his place for hours, long after her golden head had disappeared beneath the shelter of the traveling coach, long after the sound of her voice speaking low to give instructions to her maid had faded.
Still, Anthony stood at the window as if she might come back to him, as if somehow he might find a way to make it right. Whatever Victor was, whatever he had done, Anthony blamed himself. He should have found a way to guard her better. He should have told her from the first all of who Carlyle was, to him and to his family.
She had betrayed him as no other woman had ever done, and yet he still wanted her. He sent her away because he could not bear the sight of her face. In a few weeks’ time, he might relent and go to her. If not, he might send her back to Shropshire while he stayed in town.
But the fragile peace they had built together, the knowledge they had shared of each other, was gone. He had taken the coward’s road because he could not face her or himself. Even now, at the end, he had not told her the truth of what Carlyle had done to him, what that villain had done to his sister. Once more, he had stood on his pride and held his tongue. His pride would make a cold bedfellow.
Chapter 29
Lovers’ Knot Cottage, Richmond
Caroline arrived at Anthony’s sister’s cottage just after noon. The cold had stopped snapping at her fingers in her fur-lined muff, but when she stepped out of the traveling chaise, her breath rose from her lips in clouds of steam.
The cottage was small and snug, with plaster walls trimmed in oak. The oak beams had darkened with age, but the interior of the cottage was whitewashed and perfectly proportioned.
Anne seemed to fit the house as if it had been built for her. Anthony’s sister waited for Caroline in the entrance hall, dressed in a bright blue gown covered in a long white apron. She had clearly been in the kitchen before Caroline’s arrival and had forgotten to take the apron off. Or perhaps she did not feel the need to stand on formality with family, even family she had not yet met.
Caroline had expected to find some regal Society miss, but Anne was nothing like the creatures Caroline had met the night before at the Prince Regent’s ball. The girl was quiet and so young as to be almost childlike in her slenderness, unlike Anthony in every way save for the black sheen of her hair and the chestnut-brown of her eyes. Those eyes, so fierce and fiery in Anthony, were modest and quiet in the face of his sister. Anne seemed to have a great deal of dignity for a girl of eighteen.
“Good afternoon, Sister.” Anne embraced Caroline gently, not as if she were afraid of startling Caroline, but as if she were afraid of being startled herself.
The elderly housekeeper took Caroline’s thick traveling cloak, and Anne led her into a tiny sitting room. Tabby went to unpack her trunk while Caroline sat down for the first time with her husband’s sister.
“I am sorry I could not come to the wedding,” Anne said, her voice so soft and gentle Caroline actually had to lean close to hear the girl at all.
“Oh, think nothing of that,” Caroline said, pouring tea from the pot when Anne seemed too flustered to do it herself. “It was a sudden thing. I met Anthony, then married him two days later.”
“Indeed,” Anne said, takin
g a meditative sip of her tea. She added neither cream nor sugar but drank it as it was. She seemed fortified by the first taste, for her voice got slightly stronger. “Anthony has always known his own mind.”
Caroline did not trust herself to speak of Anthony with even a hint of civility, so she said nothing to that. Her bruised heart responded to his name with a dull ache, which she tried to ignore.
“We missed you at Christmas,” Caroline said. “I am sorry you were too ill to come to visit us.”
Anne blushed, then turned pale, looking down into her half-empty teacup. “Yes. I was ill. I suppose that is the word for it. My child died in December, you see, December a year ago. I am never able to go anywhere on most occasions, but Christmas is especially difficult for me.”
Caroline almost dropped the teapot. This was the first she had ever heard of a child. She wondered who this slip of a girl might have married at such a young age, and how she had managed to get out from under Anthony’s thumb long enough to marry at all.
“I am sorry for your loss,” Caroline said, the manners her mother spent years drilling into her head coming to her rescue. “I hope your husband at least was able to attend you.”
Anne’s pallor became even more pronounced. “Did Anthony not tell you?” she asked in a tone so low it was almost a whisper.
Caroline sighed, and after pouring her sister-in-law a second cup, set the teapot aside. “Anthony tells me almost nothing. I am sorry to grieve you by asking foolish questions.”
Anne forced herself to face her. Caroline could see the effort it cost her in the line of her jaw, in the tension in her graceful neck. For a long moment, the girl could not speak at all. Caroline abandoned her own teacup and took Anne’s hand in her own. “Please, you need not speak of it. I will ask Anthony when next I see him.”
If I see him, Caroline thought to herself. But she pushed such thoughts aside, along with the pain lodged above her heart as she held her sister-in-law’s hand.
“No,” Anne said, gathering her strength. “Anthony has sent you here for a reason. He did not tell me what the reason was in his letter, only that you fell in with bad company, as I once did, and were obliged to come here.”
“I fell in with the company he chose for me.” Caroline pushed aside her anger which had come to couple with her pain. She forced herself to focus on Anne’s face. “My husband and I do not agree on many things.”
Anne did not look at her, but she did not grow any paler, either. She took a shaky breath, and all the while Caroline held tight to her hand.
“I was sent here in disgrace,” Caroline said. “I would never judge you. Did your husband run away?”
Anne raised her eyes. “I was never married.”
The room seemed to tilt beneath her before righting itself. She had heard of such things as a child. Her mother had warned her about such folly throughout her girlhood, though Caroline had rarely heeded her. She had never understood how a girl could be foolish enough to give up so much for so little, her entire life and future, for one moment’s pleasure.
Now that she was a woman, now that each night without her husband she woke hungering for his touch, she had a much better idea of how a girl could fall into such a trap and never climb out of it. There were unscrupulous men in the world, and one of them had been Anne’s undoing.
“I am so sorry. Forgive me for pressing you. I never know when to hold my tongue.” Caroline held tight to Anne’s hand when her sister-in-law tried to pull away.
“I tell you I had a child out of wedlock, and you apologize to me?” Anne was so stunned her face went from pale to bright pink in a moment.
“I apologize because I was rude. Forgive me. Let us speak of something else. The state of the roads, perhaps. I found them very dry between here and London. Is that usual for this time of year?”
Anne stared at Caroline for one long moment before covering her face. Caroline leaped to her feet, wringing her hands, though as far as she remembered, she had never wrung her hands in her life. She stood helpless over Anthony’s sister, wondering if she should not call for smelling salts. Never having been a weeper herself, she had no idea of what to do with this woman’s grief.
Then Anne raised her head from her hands, wiping her eyes, and Caroline saw she was not weeping but laughing.
“Oh merciful, gracious Lord, I cannot remember the last time I laughed like that. No wonder Anthony loves you.”
It was Caroline’s turn to be shocked. She sat down on the settle, her mind whirling. She caught herself before hope could vanquish her. “No,” she said. “Anthony does not love me.”
“Of course he does,” Anne said. “He sent you here to keep you safe from foul men. He has kept me safe ever since it happened. I know he will keep me safe for the rest of my life.”
“You live here, alone, by choice?”
Anne met her eyes, and for once she did not look away. “I do. I am not fit for Society. Here I can be alone and search for peace.”
Caroline took her sister-in-law’s hand. “I am sorry for the loss of your child.”
Anne took a breath to steady herself. Her eyes were dry but for the tears of laughter that still stood in them. She blinked them away. “Thank you. I grieve, but so do many others. I am learning not to feel sorry for myself. I am learning to forgive.”
“Forgive whom? The blackguard who abandoned you?”
“Yes,” Anne said. “I must forgive Viscount Carlyle, or I will never find peace.”
For the second time in less than an hour, Caroline was as dizzy as if she had been caught in a whirlpool. She thought that she might have drowned, if Anne had not caught her hand.
“Viscount Carlyle,” Caroline said. “He was your seducer?”
“I thought you knew,” Anne said. “That is why Anthony sent you here, to keep you safe from him in the only place he would never look for you: my home.”
“Victor is not looking for me,” Caroline said.
The haunted look in Anne’s eyes made Caroline hold her hand tighter. “I fear him still,” she said. “It is good that you are here. Anthony will keep us safe from him. I promise you.”
Caroline spent only one night in her sister-in-law’s house. Though the cottage was cozy, the food good, and the staff well trained, she could not bear to sit in that house and to think of Victor making love to Anne, only to leave her without marriage, and pregnant, too.
Try as she might to reconcile the man she thought she knew to the man Anne had spoken of, she could not do it. Only one of them could be the true Victor. Caroline thought of Anthony’s face when he saw her dancing with that man. She thought of the months Anthony had spent trying in his own clumsy way to keep her safe.
He was a controlling man who wanted power over every aspect of her life. Even a saint like Anne could not have tolerated it. But now that she knew the true reason for it, Caroline felt sick. Why had Anthony never told her? He had treated her as if she were a fool, or worse, his dog that came to heel when he called, a dumb beast that need know nothing.
The worst of it was that he would never forgive her. Whatever Anne said, whatever good intentions Anthony might harbor, the fact remained that she had met secretly with the man he hated most in the world. Now that she knew the depths of Carlyle’s perfidy, she also knew Anthony would never forgive her for her association with him. She could not stay in his sister’s house and wait for a visit from him that would never come. Anthony would cast her off, he would divorce her, and she could not bear it. She would leave first.
She spent a sleepless night. At dawn Caroline took some food from the kitchen and packed it into a leather saddlebag. She dressed in a pair of too-large breeches smuggled out of the stable, along with a large and dirty wool coat, and thick woolen hose. She strapped her knife to her arm and put her throwing dagger in her boot. She bound her hair into a tight knot and covered it with a cap that kept falling into her eyes.
She knew anyone with eyes in their head would see her for the woman she was.
She had grown in the last month, so her breasts were even larger than they once had been. Her hips curved beneath the thick, cheap wool of her stolen breeches. She was not sure she could pass for a boy, but she knew she would try.
When she left the cottage, she snuck away, as she had done once before in her father’s house, the day before the wedding. She wore her boy’s clothes beneath the loosest of her gowns and slipped away from her lady’s maid while Tabby was sitting with Anne, taking her first reading lesson.
Caroline rode away from her sister-in-law’s estate with no groom to follow her. A mile away, she stripped off her gown. She looked back only once, down the road she had come.
In the next moment, she raised herself into the saddle and turned Hercules toward York.
Though she was rash, she was not a fool. Caroline knew that by running from his sister’s house, she was driving Anthony even farther away. If he did not come for her, at best, she would end up living in her father’s house, and then in a cottage on his lands after his death, maintained on a pittance once her father’s estates were entailed away. At worst, after her disgrace, her father might not take her back. She would be dishonored and disowned completely, cast out in the world with nothing and no one.
After the first moment, when she turned Hercules down the road toward Yorkshire, she did not let herself think on these things again. She could not think of Anthony, of how much she loved him, of how much she missed him. She would go and see her father. She would feel her mother’s arms around her, and for a moment she would pretend to be a child again. She would pretend she did not harbor a woman’s pain and a woman’s broken heart.
It was her father she called up before her, as he had looked on her wedding day, vital and full of hope, proud of the son-in-law he had chosen. Caroline did not allow herself to think of her father’s horror when next they met, now that she had been disgraced and had compounded that disgrace by running away. A woman could not run from her fate. By doing so, she had damned herself, and she knew it.
How to Tame a Willful Wife Page 21