At the Duke's Wedding (A romance anthology)

by Caroline Linden

  “Wrong about what?”

  “That you and Angela had eloped to Gretna Green, of course!”

  “Charlotte, Gretna Green is a sennight’s journey away. And what sort of man do you imagine me to be that I would elope with a lady instead of wedding her publicly and honorably?”

  Charlotte’s eyes popped wide. “Then you do wish to marry her!” She grabbed his hands and her face was all smiles. “Oh, I am transported! I hoped you admired her because I am quite certain she admires you, and I like her ever so much.”

  Trent’s heart was beating hard and rather unevenly. “You were justified in your hope.” While his sister spoke of admiration, he feared what he felt for the brazen American that had swept in and out of his life like a migrating monarch butterfly—unique and vibrant and lovely—was considerably stronger.

  “But then where is she?” Charlotte demanded.

  “She departed this morning in Father’s chaise, and I have been—”

  “But Fields returned with the carriage this afternoon.”

  He grasped her arm. “She was not with him?”

  “No. Only a very strange Frenchman who insists on speaking with you. The duchess invited him to take tea in the drawing room, but my maid heard it from the third footman that he spent the afternoon on his knees in the library with a Bible before him. Catholics are alarmingly pious, aren’t they?”

  Trent bolted up the stairs. “Where is he now?” he called back to her.

  “Still in the library. But what about Angela? Where has she gone?”

  In the library, Trent asked the same of the lanky Frenchman who introduced himself as Arnaud Chappelle.

  “I will tell you of her odd departure, monseigneur,” Chappelle said, “but first you must allow me to unburden my soul upon a matter of grave sin.”

  “I am no priest, sir,” Trent said, barely restraining his impatience. “Tell me only where you last spoke with Miss Cowdrey. Then you may confess your sins to a man of the cloth, if you will.”

  “But you see, monseigneur, it is your family that my sins have harmed. Allow me this confession. Allow me this last hope of salvation.” In his eyes was the same defeat Trent had felt when his father told him the news of the blackmail.

  He nodded.

  The tale was wonderful. The documents the Frenchman produced from a leather satchel were more wonderful yet: proof of Sir Richard’s crimes, including letters in which Sir Richard boasted how he had pulled the wool over the Earl of Ware’s eyes, making him sign documents without his knowledge of their true content. He’d hoped to benefit from it in the future, far beyond the immediate gains he and Chappelle would make in collecting insurance on the sunken ships and the payment from Chappelle’s former revolutionary confreres for the information. Howell had been planning his blackmail for over a decade. But now Trent had in his hands all the proof he needed to see his father exonerated and Sir Richard hanged.

  “Thank you, monsieur. In revealing this, you know you will be tried as a criminal of war, do you not?”

  “I wish only to pay for my sins, monseigneur. When Mademoiselle Cowdrey came to me this morning and asked me to aid your family, I knew my period of penance had finally begun.”

  “Where is she now?” Trent’s throat was thick. “Where did she go?”

  Chappelle offered a serene smile. “Where all angels go when their tasks are complete. She returned to heaven, monseigneur.”

  Trent grabbed Chappelle’s cravat and yanked him forward until they were nose-to-nose. “Where is she, God damn it? If you have harmed her, I will tear you apart. The judges will have nothing to hang when I’m through with you.”

  “But, monseigneur,” he gasped, his hands stretching out to his sides in a helpless shrug. “It is true. She disappeared.”

  “Do you mean to say she eluded you?”

  “No. She disappeared before my eyes. Et voila! It is like that with the angels, no?”

  Trent loosed his grip. “You’re insane.”

  “I did believe so at first, monseigneur,” Chappelle said with a shake of his head. “But, you see, your coachman saw it too.”

  o0o

  Trent ran to the carriage house faster than he’d run any footrace in his life, with Chappelle at his heels. He found Fields polishing the panels on the traveling chaise. The sensible Englishman, who had been with the Ascot family for thirty years, told the same story as the delusional Frenchman.

  “Gone like that, milord!” He snapped his fingers. “Didn’t trust my own eyes till Mr. Chapel here said he’d seen it too. The boy holding the team nearly swooned dead away, milord.”

  Trent’s lungs flattened. “When?” It could not be. “Where?”

  “Well, she was climbing into the carriage. I lowered the step, offered my hand, and she smiled at me—she’s a taking young lady, milord, if you don’t mind me saying—”

  “Fields.”

  “Then she disappeared.”

  Chappelle was nodding.

  “Never seen an angel before, milord. Didn’t know they still visited us mortal folks,” Fields said a bit queerly. “Didn’t know that I’d really given it a thought as to whether I believed in them. But I’ll say, I do now, or else I’ve gone as loony as this bloke here.”

  o0o

  Trent walked as a man half asleep to the house and his bedchamber, where the night before he’d made love to a woman who had turned his world upside down. He opened his traveling trunk and stared at the garments she had worn when he rescued her from the lake. Atop them was the petticoat she’d left behind after they swam.

  He could not now return them to her. She was gone. But before she’d gone, she had altered the course of his future.

  He found his father in his bedchamber, dressing for dinner.

  “Trenton.” The earl perused his person. “Why are you not dressed?”

  “Father, a Frenchman is here, a man by the name of Chappelle, who worked alongside Sir Richard to make profit from the ships in which you invested. He bears proof that Sir Richard tricked you into signing those documents, and other evidence as well: lading bills, communications from his former Jacobin confreres, and the like. He has gone now to Wessex to make a full confession. I suspect Gareth will have the fellow locked up for the night so as not to disturb the festivities. But no doubt you would like to speak with him as soon as possible.”

  His father stared as though Trent were speaking in a language he did not understand. “How did you—”

  “Miss Cowdrey found him. I don’t know how, exactly.” Because two centuries in the future, she knew everything about Sir Richard Howell? “She wished to help.”

  “You told a stranger of our family’s troubles?” His brow darkened. “Has she designs upon you, son?”

  “She hasn’t.” Or she would not have gone. “But as Sir Richard’s attempted blackmail is now moot, I shouldn’t think that matters.”

  “Of course it does. She is nobody.”

  He fisted his hands at his sides. “She saved our family’s honor, sir. And your life. You ought to be thanking her rather than disparaging her.”

  The earl frowned. “I will do so when I have spoken with this Frenchman and seen the proof for myself.” He adjusted his cravat and slipped a slim silver cigar case into his coat pocket. “Until then, you will continue to consider yourself bound by honor to Sir Richard’s daughter.”

  Trent’s anger gathered at the apex of his ribs. “That won’t be necessary. Yesterday Miss Howell and I came to the mutual conclusion that we would not suit.”

  “Before this Frenchman arrived?”

  “Well before. I cannot wed where I am not inclined.”

  His father squared his shoulders and broadened his stance. “You will wed to suit me and the title you will someday bear.”

  Trent shook his head. “Even now, when matters are entirely out of your control—for both the ill and the good—you’re like a cock in the ring. Father, your business with Sir Richard is finished, and so am I. Consider this f
ont of obedience dry. Whatever demands or expectations you have of me in the future, I will not oblige.”

  He turned to depart. But he had made a vow, after all—a vow she would never know he had fulfilled. Matters of honor, however, required no validation.

  He faced his father again. “And furthermore,” he said evenly, “I despise hunting. I’ve hated it since I can remember. Shooting birds too. And fencing and boxing. And while I’m at it, cricket and tennis as well, although not quite as vehemently as the others, I’ll admit.” He felt a tight tug in his chest. “I do enjoy swimming.” He looked the earl directly in the eye. “And I love to draw. Nature. Birds, animals, plants. I am simply mad about it. And I am very, very good.”

  For a moment his father looked stunned. Then he gripped Trent’s shoulder. “Your mother always said you would someday stand up to me,” he said solemnly. “How does it feel to finally be a real man, son?”

  “Oh, good God.” Trent pulled out from under the heavy hand and went to the door. “If you need me, I’ll be at the lake until the wedding. With my sketch pad.”

  o0o

  The Emergency Room folks at U of M Hospital had done an amazing job of preserving the gown that Lady Sophronia lent Angela. Since she’d only been in the water a few minutes and in the car for only a few more until she made it to the ER, she’d just gotten a mild case of hypothermia. She hadn’t even lost a single toe, the nurses informed her cheerily. Thank goodness those joggers had come along when they did and fished her out of the river.

  Yeah. Thank goodness.

  Angela stared blankly out the second-floor window of Tisch Hall at the snow flurries circling the graduate library in swirling gusts, and she doodled the outline of the empire-waist gown on her notes. She gave only half an ear to the president of the Graduate Student Union Organizing Committee droning on. And on. And on. She’d heard it all before: everyone was in an uproar because the university administration wouldn’t pay a living wage to teaching assistants, not when it was subsidizing their tuition too.

  Nothing they ever discussed in these meetings got them anywhere. Nothing they ever did mattered.

  Except that something she’d done had mattered.

  At least, she hoped it had. She wouldn’t know for sure until after graduation. Then she would be able to return to England and do the most difficult thing she’d ever done: visit the estate of the Earl of Ware and get admittance to the family archives.

  She already suspected what she’d find there. The minute she’d gotten home from the hospital, she’d checked all the books and articles that mentioned Sir Richard. They hadn’t changed. Arnaud Chappelle had handed over to the British government every piece of information he had on Sir Richard Howell’s illegal dealings during the war, then spent the rest of his life languishing in an English jail.

  She hadn’t changed history. She’d made it. Ironic, since the only detail of history she really cared about anymore was out of her reach. Until May.

  Unless the call she’d made to a friend at Oxford got her an answer first.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. She was chasing windmills. It hadn’t been a dream. But it was over. She was here. He was there. Rather, he wasn’t even there anymore. No telephone call was going to change that. She had accomplished what she’d gone back in time to do.

  It was over.

  Her chest hurt. Everything hurt. Nothing she did made the hurting stop—tea, countless laps across the indoor pool, attempts at sleep, reading the comic book again and again, hearing his voice in her memory, feeling his touch, and leaving big droplets of tears on his sketches. At night in bed, with her hand on the last page, she couldn’t breathe.

  “—a petition is the only way!” The GSUOC president was now shouting and gesticulating violently. “If we can get two thousand graduate students from all departments and all schools on campus to sign—”

  Angela cracked open her eyes. The gown in the margin of her page looked miserable too. She was a lousy artist, unlike the man she’d left forever with nothing more than a note on the pillow like in some bad soap opera.

  She should have told him she loved him. She should have at least had the courage to do that.

  No. Not the courage. The heart. The heart that for years she’d held in the vise grip of her intellect.

  Not anymore. Now her heart was finally free, and full, and hurt like hell had run over it with a tractor-trailer. Now it was starving for passion and play and companionship and—yes—a man. One man in particular. One man who had rescued her from drowning, kissed her even though he knew he shouldn’t, and made love to her like he never wanted it to end.

  It just couldn’t end. It couldn’t.

  Heartbeats swollen and quick, she fished her phone out of her satchel, scrolled down her contact list to her mom’s number, and texted, “I love you, Mom. I hope you’re happy. Love, Angela.”

  Dropping her phone back in the satchel, she grabbed her coat and went to the door.

  “Where are you going, Angela?” someone whispered beneath the president’s shouting.

  “To go jump in a lake.”

  It took her eleven minutes to run to her car, drive to the river, pull the comic book out of her satchel, and run up the path to the dam. Stripping off coat, gloves, hat, scarf, and boots, she made it to the bank just as a biker zoomed around the corner of the path.

  “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, what are you doing? Don’t do that! Wait!”

  She took a huge lungful of frozen air and, clutching Trent’s drawings in her fist, dove.

  o0o

  The pencil rested motionless on the sketch pad nestled in the grass before Trent. Not two feet away, a spectacular specimen of a grizzled skipper larva was methodically spinning the edges of a wild strawberry leaf together in preparation for a meal. Trent watched it and made no move to take up the instruments of his craft. Despite the solitude, the peace, and the glory of nature surrounding him, he could not.

  He wanted to draw only one thing. But if he did, he may as well walk himself to Bedlam hospital.

  And yet ... No one would ever know if he drew it except him. Unless she did.

  He leapt up, hand raking through his hair, and paced through the long grass. The twittering song of goldfinches and the leafy wings of brimstones and the buzzing of honeybees and the scents of wild honeysuckle filled him.

  As swiftly as he’d arisen, he halted before his tools, seized them, and pressed the sketch pad to the trunk of a young oak.

  He worked swiftly, without nuance or precision, the sketches mere outlines in coal. In minutes, he’d covered half-a-dozen pages with images—his baptism at St. Anne’s in Wareford, walking with his mother in the garden, taking a trophy in rowing for the first time, the curricle debacle nine years earlier—before he halted, sucked in a shaky breath, and sank to his knees in the grass.

  “I have gone mad,” he said to the caterpillar. “I have gone mad,” he repeated, because it seemed the sort of thing a madman would do.

  The caterpillar ignored him.

  His gaze caught a cluster of oxeyes nearby. He reversed the page he’d last used and carefully outlined the white daisy petals and its textured yellow center, his breaths coming more slowly now, evenly, as he sank into the familiar task. Then he drew a cornflower beside the daisy because the gown that he had removed from her the night they’d made love was cornflower blue. Then, because the daisy and cornflower looked forlorn as a mere duo, he added a half-bloomed poppy, rather more crimson than her lips, but certainly descriptive of her character. Vibrant. Alive. Passionate. Brazen.

  On the next page, he drew a golden eagle. He drew it in flight like the eagle across her shoulder.

  Then, because he was a madman, he turned the page over and drew the image she had last described to him. His hands shook as he carefully spelled out the caption, then folded the pages together and set them on the summer grass at his side.

  He waited until the sun cast long shadows of every tree and each blade of grass.


  She did not come.

  As dusk gathered, he collected his pencil, coal, paper, and the foolish sketches, and walked to the lake. It was empty of all but a few decorative lily pads, the water still as glass. Of course.

  She would not come. She had not been an angel or anything of the sort. He’d no idea what she had wanted of him, but he would inevitably discover it soon enough. Perhaps his initial notion that she was a lady journalist seeking scandalbroth with which to make her name had been on the mark. Or she was an opportunist hoping to bear a nobleman’s bastard child and be set up for life afterward.

  But he couldn’t believe it. He didn’t believe it. He did not know her identity, but he knew her.

  As he walked along the bank of the lake, he dropped the pages into the water and watched them sink. Then he turned toward the path to the house and—regrettably—sanity.

  o0o

  Angela sputtered, shivered, and popped to the surface of the frigid Grand River.

  “No.” Her teeth chattered as she recognized the dam and the Michigan riverbank. “No. No!”

  She struggled to dive under again.

  She bobbed right back up.

  She couldn’t sink. Her body simply wouldn’t let her. As her skin prickled with ice and her lips and fingers went numb and her lungs compressed, she floated.

  The biker was shouting at her from the shore. She couldn’t make out what he was saying. The pain in her feet was turning to numbness too. If she didn’t swim to the bank and get out now, she really would lose toes this time.

  With lethargic strokes and tears heating her cheeks for an instant before they crystallized to frost, she dragged herself to the bank. Heart shattering like frozen glass, she grabbed hold of the biker’s hands and he hauled her ashore.

  Chapter Eleven

  “There you are!” Charlotte clutched Trent’s elbow and dragged him up the aisle of the church filled with wedding guests. “Where have you been? I simply must tell you the most extraordinary news. I am bursting with it!”